Shambhala Mountain Center Blog

It’s the season to give, reflect and plan your next retreat.

Consider bidding on a Learn to Meditate weekend at Shambhala Mountain Center at the Shambhala Sun Foundation’s fifth annual auction. You will be contributing to a wonderful organization and offering yourself or a loved one a weekend of meditation practice.

What is the Shambhala Sun Foundation? It is a nonprofit, independent media company that publishes books and magazines on Buddhism, meditation and contemplative practices.

And what is a Learn to Meditate weekend? It could be the best weekend of your life! You will receive meditation instruction and hear talks on how to bring meditation into your daily life. You will have a chance to discuss your meditation practice with an experienced teacher. And as if that weren’t enough, you will bask in the beauty and powerful energy at Shambhala Mountain Center. If you are the winning bidder, you can select any Learn to Meditate weekend offered during 2012.

You can check out the auction site and bid on the Learn to Meditate weekend here.

We hope to see you soon!

For most Americans, Thanksgiving is a time to participate in traditions. Special travel, seeing old friends, even the plates we eat from tie us to rituals and generations of custom. This is also a time when many of us look inward and contemplate our lives. What are we grateful for? What inspires us? How will we extend ourselves to others in the months ahead?

One annual gathering dear to many Coloradans is the Shambhala Mountain Center Thanksgiving weekend. We celebrate the season in our unparalleled style with a delicious, bountiful meal on Thursday followed by a weekend full of relaxation, community and joy. There are activities for the whole family, including hikes, storytelling, games and snuggling by the fire in the Shambhala Lodge. If practice and solitude are what you’re craving, there’s plenty of that to be had.

We invite you to come and explore Shambhala’s expression of basic goodness within community during this festive holiday gathering. To learn more, click here.

From a Buddhist perspective, we are all addicts. We are addicted to samsara, which is the cycle of habitual patterns and suffering that we find ourselves in. We want to be happy. We hope our schemes will work. Maybe buying a new car will bring happiness. Or starting a new relationship. Or, perhaps, eating one more piece of chocolate will bring us the peace and fulfillment that we’re longing for. The Buddhist path offers training in examining the futility of seeking happiness through conditioned or external means.

For some of us, our habitual patterns lead to addictions that are physically damaging or even life threatening. Can Buddhism help with these? Dharma teacher Kevin Griffin has been working closely with this question for many years. Griffin has written two books about addiction and Buddhism and has taught numerous programs on this topic. He is a teacher in the Insight Meditation community, which draws upon Theravadan Buddhist lineages in its approach to dharma. Griffin will host “The Four Noble Truths of Recovery” at Shambhala Mountain Center, November 18th-20th. His program will blend the Buddhist Four Noble Truths (suffering; the cause of suffering; the possibility to liberate ourselves from suffering; and the path towards that liberation) with the 12 Step program to recovery. What a rich weekend this will be!

The head of the Shambhala community, Sakyong Mipham, published his first book on meditation in 2003. It featured the provocative title Turning the Mind into an Ally. For some of us, the thought never entered our head that our mind would be anything but an ally. For others of us, our minds have felt like a battleground for a long time. The book provides an overview of how we can develop a true alliance with our minds. The trick is that we need to learn to meditate. Through meditation practice, we deeply befriend our mind and all of its faculties. With regular practice, we can see a settling and calming of our scattered, speedy minds.

The material in Turning the Mind into an Ally is the basis for this weekend program with Greg Smith. Greg will guide everyone through a weekend of deep meditation practice. This program is a great way to begin a regular practice or to go further with one that is already established.

Learn to Meditate with Greg Smith

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson. From her hermit’s life in Amherst, Dickinson had strange insight into the nature of hope, the poignant layers and dangerous pockets that comprise our complex relationship with the things we want. These days, everybody invokes “hope” for a myriad of social and cultural place markers. But what is hope? What does it mean to hope? What is our relationship with hope?

The founder of the Shambhala community, Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, offered formal training in closely examining the nature of hope. What we discover in such training is that “hope” is often a barrier to what’s really happening. Hope is often the friendly-faced mask of my desire to manipulate the world around me, to swat those quacking ducks into the row that I know they need to be in. To wish things were different. To fantasize about alternative universes.

The training on hope and her cousin, fear, that Trungpa, Rinpoche offered is available in various formats, but one of the most concentrated and thorough is a program taught by one of his senior students, Frank Berliner. Frank is an associate professor of Contemplative Psychology at Naropa University and a senior teacher in the Shambhala community. This weekend program, while part 3 in a series, does not have pre-requisites and can easily be done as a stand-alone.

Dancing with Hope and Fear (Part 3): Sacred Wisdom with Frank Berliner

Summer is the high season at SMC. From June through August, our 600 acres are at full capacity. Tent villages sprout up in clusters to house participants in the various programs and lunchtime brings hundreds of people together in a kaleidoscope of activity. It’s as if the whole world has come to SMC.

And then summer ends, the tents come down, and the mellow, golden days of autumn arrive. For many of us who have spent years coming to SMC, this is the best time to be on the land. Clear, blue-sky days, crisp nights, the Stupa shining up the hill in that special, transitional autumn light.

During this shift from summer to autumn, it is a good season to sit quietly. It’s also a great time to take a hike in the yellow aspens. Or sit by a pine-wood fire in the Shambhala lodge after some some star-gazing.

As we round the corner towards the year’s end, consider joining us for one of the following programs:

Shambhala Training Level I: The Art of Being Human with Cynthia Drake

Death & Enlightenment: Spiritual Opportunity of a Lifetime with Andrew Holecek

Perseverance: Igniting the Heart in the Midst of Hardship with Meg Wheatley

Dancing with Hope and Fear (Part 3): Sacred Wisdom with Frank Berliner

For 40 years, Shambhala and Shambhala Mountain Center have been explaining the value and place of meditation in everyday life, and during this period the topic of meditation has been noted in the media from time to time. Recently, two articles of significance appeared in major national media about meditation; one in the NY Times focused on the medical and behavioral effects of meditation documented through controlled studies and experiment. The other article, by the Associated Press, explains how a meditation program in an Alabama prison has reduced violence and has had an impact on inmates. Of course, this is no surprise to those of us who have incorporated meditation into our daily life, but it is gratifying to read articles in the mass media that point out how deeply meditation can affect us. You can find out more by reading these articles:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/how-meditation-may-change-the-brain/?hpw

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/02/02/national/a012558S13.DTL

At End-Of-The Line Prison, An Unlikely Escape : NPR

Don’t miss the Colorado premier of this must-see feature documentary about the life and times of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Crazy Wisdom is the first film to explore the life and ‘crazy wisdom’ of Chogyam Trungpa, ‘the bad boy of Buddhism,’ who brought Tibetan Buddhism to the West.

A former monk, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who had renounced his vows, eloped with a 16-year-old and embraced Western life, is recognized as the pivotal person who brought Buddhism to the West. He founded Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, as well as more than 100 Shambhala Meditation Centers. Alan Ginsberg considered Trungpa his guru, Joni Mitchell wrote a song about him, and 22 years after his death, his books continue to sell in the hundreds of thousands each year. So why is he still called ‘the bad boy of Buddhism?’

Director Johanna Demetrakas uses archival footage, animation, interviews and original imagery to build a film that mirrors Trungpa’s challenging energy and invites viewers to go beyond fixed ideas about our teachers and leaders. With unprecedented access to Trungpa’s inner circle and exclusive never-before-seen archival material, Crazy Wisdom looks at the man and the myths about him, and attempts to set the record straight.

Shambhala Mountain Center has touched many hearts and minds  for decades; it has seen countless visitors and extraordinary teachers, all of whom have been graciously served by this beautiful land. We are now entering a vital stage where improving our fundamental infrastructure is key to its health.

In keeping with our core aim for leading a life engendering insight and wisdom, radiating compassion for others, we wish to honor the same aspiration we have for living on this earth, with respect and consideration for our environment. Our current waste water system in place – the lagoon – was created in 1985 to serve two buildings and far fewer people than today. (Guests now use three million gallons of water per year.) Last year we installed a new water processing system which improved the quality and quantity of water we use. Now, we  must  take care of that water after its use by building a treatment plant can return the water to the earth and meet all of the standards that the Environmental Protection Agency has established. Larimer County has also put a moratorium on any new construction until an updated system is in place.

And so, with our expanded capacity and future needs firmly in mind, a new treatment facility is being designed; construction is due to begin in the autumn of 2010, enabling us to treat 33,000 gallons of water each day, allowing us to host 660 people per day.

HOW YOU CAN HELP
Shambhala Mountain Center simultaneously sustains, and relies on, its community of support. As we take these next steps forward, your generosity is more important than ever. The waste water treatment facility will cost 2.1 million dollars to complete, and Shambhala Mountain Center is asking its community of supporters to donate throughout these four pivotal phases:

•    $1 million by October, 2010.
•    $400,000 between October 2010 and March 2011.
•    $300,000 between April and October 2011.
•    $400,000 between November 2011 and September 2012 will complete the facility.

We have raised over $700,000 of the first $1,000,000, but we still need $300,000 by October.

A monthly donation by automatic withdrawal helps create ongoing financial stability.
Donate online: Please go to our website, www.shamhalamountain.org and look for the tab marked “Giving.”
Contact: Jon Barbieri, Executive Director, 970-881-2184 x211.

Following the example of the Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche – who ran nine fundraising marathons to support the rebuilding of Surmang, his father’s monastery in Tibet – you can raise money for Surmang and Shambhala Mountain Center, and contribute towards an extremely worthwhile cause: Surmang is being rebuilt not only to house and train Buddhist monks and nuns, but to serve as a school for local lay people and children.

Known as Surmang Düdtsi-til, the Surmang shedra was part of the complex of monasteries of Surmang until the destruction of much of the site in the 1950s. Today, Surmang Düdtsi-til remains one of the poorest monasteries in Tibet – in one of the poorest regions – and is pivotal to keeping hopes and dreams alive.

This bike fundraising pilgrimage from Boulder, ends at The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya: ride over the Continental Divide, through Vagabond Ranch, to the Stupa, and back to Boulder.

Each rider is asked to raise what they can from pledges for their ride. In addition you are responsible for the cost of meals, lodging, and any bike repairs along the way, in the range of $300-$400. Help will be provided with coordinating lodging reservations, and with gear planning and other logistics in the weeks leading up to the ride. There are no support vehicles and you are responsible to coordinate any shuttle or pick up needs.  For more details or to sign up contact Josh.

For info on how to pledge money, training, routes, and any other info, click on the link: http://www.vagabondranch.org/cycle-of-karma
For Information
Call: 303-242-5338