The Path of Chod Healing
Chod is a profound Vajrayana practice that meets the complexity of individual, ancestral, and collective suffering with equally sophisticated methods for transformation.
While the full Chod lineage can take years to learn, our Path of Chod Healing offers an accessible entry point. Through a series of retreats, participants can gradually explore the essential elements of Chod—its meditations, visualizations, ceremonies, and psychological insights.
There is no required order, and it’s not necessary to participate in every retreat. In each program our guiding teacher, Sunisa Manning, grounds participants in the core practices needed for that retreat and offers dharma talks tailored to the theme. Those who wish to experience the full arc of Chod Healing, including bringing all elements together in the Chod ceremony, may choose to move through the entire two-year cycle. Once a full cycle is completed, it will begin again, allowing newcomers to join at any point and returning practitioners to deepen their understanding.
Chod Healing Path
Retreat Calendar
2025-2027
To see the upcoming retreats offered on the Chod Healing Path and their registration information, please visit our Retreats page.
What is Chod?
Chod is a Tibetan Buddhist practice that creates a sacred container for deep healing and awakening. It’s a dharma that originated from Machig Lapdron, a woman, mother, and mahasiddha, highly realized person who lived in the 11th century. Chod is rooted in the fierce wisdom of the sacred feminine. It uses ritual, meditation, and visualization to help practitioners turn toward fear, grief, and pain with love and compassion. This radical act transforms suffering at its roots, allowing the energies of contraction to become the ground of liberation.
Often described as one of the crown jewels of Vajrayana Buddhism, Chod has been revered across all four Tibetan schools for centuries. It is traditionally transmitted only after people have completed ngondro, the preliminary practices of the Vajrayana, because it is such a powerful practice. Chod is now being offered publicly as Chod Healing on the instruction of Sunisa’s teacher Anam Thubten Rinpoche. He created Chod Healing as a way for everyone to access the powerful medicine of Chod in this time of instability and fragmentation.
In each retreat, Sunisa will guide participants through Chod Healing meditations and ceremony, providing traditional context and embodied instruction.
Who is Chod Healing for?
This retreat is open to all meditators and spiritual practitioners ready to commit to deep inner work. It is not necessary to have completed ngondro, the preliminary practices of the Vajrayana. Chod Healing is for anyone who feels ready to call up their pain and work with it in the Chod ceremonies that Sunisa will perform.
Chod Healing may be especially supportive for those who feel stagnant in their practice; for survivors of trauma seeking embodied release; and for anyone drawn to ceremonies that transform personal and collective pain into wisdom and compassion. While there are no formal prerequisites, participants should have familiarity with silent sitting and mindfulness practice. The Chod Healing retreats include sustained periods of meditation and visualization.
A Note on Safety, Readiness, and Support
Chod Healing invites us to turn toward what we fear so that it can be met, understood, and transformed.
This work can be powerful and at times intense. The Chod ceremony provides a sacred container in which personal trauma, ancestral patterns, collective karma, and subtle energetic blocks may surface—not to overwhelm us, but to be witnessed with compassion and offered back into awareness.
Heart Sangha recommends that participants have some experience with therapy or other forms of inner work before stepping onto this path. It’s helpful to have familiarity with your own “demons”—the contracted states and wounded parts that Chod brings into the light. Because the practice can stir up strong emotions and energetic shifts, participants should feel they are at a stable and grounded point in life, ready to meet what arises.
Support before and after retreat is an important part of the process. Therapy, bodywork, time in nature, rest, and other forms of self-care can help prepare the mind and body—and, afterward, help integrate the experience. Giving yourself spaciousness when reentering daily life allows the energy of Chod to settle, which can make a profound difference in how deeply the practice works.
In many ways, Chod Healing is similar to your first 10-day silent retreat; a plant-medicine journey; deep work with a therapist. It requires preparation, commitment, courage, trust, and space for integration. When held in this way, the wild wisdom of Chod has the potential to reshape our patterns, soften old fears, and reconnect us with our innate clarity and compassion.