About This is the community blog for Karmê Chöling, a Shambhala Meditation Center in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. Email blog at karmecholing dot org
|
Many people ponder how humanity can continue its proliferation on planet earth with its limited material resources and a rapidly widening ecological footprint.
I am just a small-scale organic gardener who has been cultivating his plot of land, first in Holland for ten years, and then in Barnet, Vermont for the last twenty years.
The question I ask myself is how can we (all humanity) grow our food sustainably so that future generations will still be supported by the elements, the microorganisms and the plants and animals of our embattled planet? How can I help foster an interest and appreciation, also among hardened skeptics, for the magnificent, dazzling interconnectedness of life on earth?
Though the challenges ahead are clearly daunting, there is a growing enthusiasm around the world, from China to Vermont, to eat organically grown food and shrink our carbon footprint. For example, the United Nations just came out with a study, called ‘The Right To Food,’ in strong support for agro-ecology: ‘agriculture should be fundamentally redirected towards modes of production that are environmentally sustainable and socially just.’
The purpose of this blog is twofold:
- To share with you my stories and experiences with cultivating a beautiful bio-diverse one acre organic garden in Vermont,
- And, secondly, how my involvement with the Shambhala and Buddhist wisdom traditions have helped (guided) me to stay positive and inspired.
In this first blog entry I want to take you to our Karmê Chöling garden gate.
I have developed a ritual where before entering the garden I consciously unload all my psychological baggage: preoccupations, expectations and judgements of all kind, so I can enter with an uncluttered mind.
Just as trees drop their leaves every fall, quite elegantly, if I may say, you, too, can let go of your busy, scheming mind (for a moment). You might feel naked and exposed, at first, but it will create a very fresh atmosphere, full of creative possibilities. This way, you step into the garden with your doors of perception (and your senses) wide open.
Instead of being weighed down by feelings of responsibility or fear that a superbug descended on your garden overnight, you allow yourself to be surprised, whether painful or pleasant. (You ‘take it as it comes,’ as Jim Morrison sang.)
Even when an old familiar voice whispers in your ear to speed-up and not loosen your edge of cleverness and productivity, you can train your mind to ‘hold its horses.’ If fact, you might discover that, if you allow yourself to relax for a second in this open space with no agenda, the garden starts to communicate with you in much more intimate and subtle ways.
Not only do the flowers appear more vibrant, you also smell the earth with subtle distinctions, you feel the breeze against your skin, you become more receptive to your co-workers’ needs and you feel ready to relate with whatever challenge pops up.
This easy trick, or method, of ‘stop, drop and meet the world of the senses free from commentary’ can be repeated many times through day. In the middle of harvesting a long bed of spinach, for instance, you remind yourself to stand up for a moment, look at the skyline and feel the richness of the space around you. There are many variations on this theme. See what works for you.
Jan Enthoven, Master Gardener
Slogan of the week: Stop, Drop and Touch the Speechless Sky
p.s. I will happily share this blogspace with with my two garden teammates; Aaron DeLong and Anemone Fresh.
Acharya Arawana Hayashi taught Shambhala Art at Karme Choling this week. Starting from “square one,” participants investigated the nature of true perception and engaged in calligraphy, object arranging and spontaneous poetry. We felt the energy of working with space without aggression radiate from the pavilion. For more information on Shambhala Art visit www.shambhalaart.org
 by Esther Seibold and Nancy Frumer-Styron
When Nancy and I were invited to blog about our upcoming program on mindfulness and parenting, we looked at each other and said ‘blog’? Neither of us has ever blogged, nor do we have time to explore what it means to do so. Not only are we both parents of teenage girls, but we have full time jobs and many other responsibilities.
Sound familiar? If you are a parent you might be in a similar position. Blogging seems like a luxury; parenting is a full time job, a total commitment, a necessity, a huge responsibility. You get our drift. The good news is that there is also tremendous joy and delight in parenting, only we may lose sight of it in the routines and demands of daily life.
So why mindfulness practice? How is it going to make it easier to parent? Mindfulness practice helps us be in the moment, so we can appreciate our life as it is happening. Whether it’s setting limits or delighting in your child’s creativity, you can be right there, not worrying about bedtime last night or what crisis may happen in an hour. It gives rise to trust in ourselves and our children, the ability to listen and deal with each situation as it arises, and be less burned out.
In our upcoming program we will practice mindfulness meditation, particularly as it applies to parenting. We will also take time to share our experiences, our questions, our successes and challenges in parenting, and have an opportunity to see our children in a new light. Meditation instruction will be offered, so if you’re new to meditation, please come.
Please join us in this adventure.
Esther and Nancy will lead a weekend retreat called “Mindfulness and the Art of Parenting” on October 8 – 10, 2010. For details, click here.
By David Rome
The practice of Focusing cultivates sensitivity to what its creator Eugene Gendlin called the “felt sense” — the pre-conceptual, pre-verbal knowing of our situations held by our bodies. Have you ever thought about how strange and wonderful it is that any of us at any time can open our mouths and speak sentences which have never been spoken before? How do we do it? Is there some unconscious script that we are reading from? If that were the case we would have to ask, what is the source of that script? — is there another, deeper script? We would quickly be lost in an infinite regression.
But if we pay careful attention to our moment to moment experience we can notice that the words we utter originate not from a script but rather from a sort of undifferentiated cloud of knowing that we have in us. It is a phenomenon somewhat like lightning: first there is an undifferentiated cloud, then something in the cloud connects with something in the environment, then in a flash lightning strikes. Of course clouds and lightning look and feel entirely different, but lightning only occurs in the presence of clouds. It cannot arise autonomously; it is always a connection made between an invisible potential in the cloud and some environmental stimulus. Words and felt sense work in a similar way.
When we are emotionally aroused it is easier to notice the undifferentiated bodily felt sensations that underlie verbal expression. Indeed when we are very aroused the felt sense can be so strong that we have a hard time finding words adequate to express it, which can be very frustrating. Worse yet, it can cause us to say things we soon have cause to regret. On the other hand, when we are not emotionally aroused we generally don’t notice the subtle but crucial felt sources of our speech. We tend to take it for granted that our words communicate exactly what we mean. This is the source of endless miscommunication.
Sometimes we do realize that our words are inadequate and we are able to reverse our attention, so to speak, and ask ourselves: what am I really trying to say? This question is usually a precursor to a pause, a gap or silence during which we check back with something inside us. After this stopping and waiting, perhaps a fresh and more accurate set of words appear. They seem to come from nowhere, out of the blue. They come from “the unconscious.” The bodily felt sense — subtle, vague, yet precisely textured — is really the borderland between the unconscious and the conscious. It is the cloud-like fringe or aura of the unconscious. It is the domain of the hunch, the inkling, the intuition.
Like lightning, intuition is sudden and spontaneous. It can’t be forced. But when we know how to enter the borderlands of the felt sense, we greatly increase the chances that the lightning of intuition will strike. In this sense, the practice of Focusing is a powerful practice for cultivating intuition about our situations, problems, creative challenges — our lives.
David Rome will conduct a workshop entitled “Focusing for Meditators: Accessing the Wisdom of the Felt Sense” on October 1 – 3, 2010. Details and registration here.
Karme Choling 40th Anniversary from Dave McKeel on Vimeo.
After a brilliant weekend celebrations of 40 Years in the Neighborhood, we would like to share this video. Warm thanks to all of our neighbors for coming to celebrate with us!
Big thanks also to Dave McKeel for bringing this video project to fruition. We miss you Dave!
by Barbara Heffernan
Moving mindfully through one’s day is moving with heart-and-mindfulness, a sense of equanimity, compassion, and presence. It is possible to bring the power of mindfulness to contemplation of specific cases, especially those that present difficulties for the therapist.
When Patton and I offered this workshop in April at Karme Choling, the therapists formed groups of four, with one of them presenting a challenging client/case. The group practiced listening mindfully, taking in the speaker and the speaker’s words, without any immediate feedback, while noticing their own internal reactions. The group then sat in a state of mindful presence, aware in their own bodies and minds of what was coming up for them as they listened to the case. Without speaking, the group then sat briefly in compassion meditation. Following this pause, they began to discuss what came up for them while listening to the case and how their thoughts, insights, and feelings about the case shifted during this process.
The feedback was powerful, all speakers feeling that they had been listened to thoroughly, in a way that did not frequently happen during case conferences and consults. They also felt they had a new way of tapping into a sense of peace and confidence about their work, and felt increased compassion for their clients and themselves. As one of the participants wrote in her review, “[The best thing about this workshop was] I learned to access my own wisdom through the practices.”
Barbara Heffernan, LSCW, LADC, and Patton Hyman will present this workshop, “Mindfulness in Practice: A Program for Psychotherapists,” in Stamford, CT, on November 4 – 5, 2010. The program is accredited by NASW for continuing education credits. For details click here.
By Vicki Tansey
photo by Sol Lang
When it comes to being in one’s body with mindfulness, in some fundamental way, there is little difference between any of us. Dancer, athlete, mover, doer. All that we are – all that defines us – is a conglomeration of how we think, feel and act. It is easy to dismiss the body’s role; after all, we often focus on communication through words, when perhaps simple, embodied presence is better. We try to transcend – to override the signals our bodies are tuned to – convinced that our intellectual and emotional intelligences ‘know’ what’s going on and how to respond. Time after time, we allow this mind over body ‘take-over’ and wonder why we keep feeling overwhelmed, fatigued and off-centre. We misread situations because we are not including the body’s natural and innate ability to inform us.
Try this exercise, standing or sitting still:
Wait. Wait some more. Begin to notice – to pay attention to what you’re feeling and thinking. Relief at the stillness? Agitation? Nothing? This is the very place to start. You are in the process of returning ‘home’, beginning to let your body, breath, mind and heart arrive in the same place at the same time.
When mindfully present in your body – in all its unique quirkiness and beauty – you come back into your own skin. You soften to its reality, trusting the way it can and will guide you through the still and rushing waters of life itself. The hundreds of small and large gestures and movements we do everyday – every moment is one in which we can be present. This quality of consciousness is available to all of us, but requires that we are willing to investigate and take on the kind of practices that will nourish and support it.
Vicki Tansey will lead “Exits & Entrances: Explorations in Presence and Improvisation with Meditation,”
September 3 – 6, 2010.
Click here for more information.
For Karmê Chöling’s 40th anniversary celebration over Memorial Day weekend Jack Niland showered us with creative blessings of various kinds. Not only did he produce and direct two of Trungpa Rinpoche’s plays (more about those in a separate post) but he also created a series of banners that were hung throughout the house, the Pavilion and the dining tent – a brilliant display of the symbols of the Shambhala world.
Jack arrived at Karmê Chöling several days before the weekend celebration began with more than 40 banners that he had produced single-handedly in his apartment in New York. “For the 40th I wanted to create a new visual vision with the banners based on sunshine and I wanted to sum up Shambhala in 21 symbols – like the essence of Shambhala as Trungpa developed it.”
 - Photo by Jeffrey Mann
From the very beginning of the Vidyadhara’s arrival in the U.S. Jack had a part in helping to bring that vision into forms. It was a very young Jack Niland who painted the front door of Karmê Chöling under painstakingly specific directions from Trungpa Rinpoche in 1970. Rinpoche referred to the front door as the gateway to dharma in the west. The door has been repainted by many artists through the years, most recently Peter Fried and Catherine Clark, and in each case they have tried to stay as true as possible to the original design.
Jack told us about an occasion, years ago, when Trungpa came to his banner studio in Boulder. He instructed Jack to print a big yellow sun on white satin, and while the ink was still wet Rinpoche took the garuda seal and silk screened it in red on the sun. When Rinpoche pulled the screen up he said, “Look. The ink has penetrated the yellow sun so it looks as though the seal is inside of the sun instead of on top of the sun. That’s how you should think of it.” ” That blew me away,” Jack said, “because I had never thought of printing wet on wet – it just wasn’t done.”
When the Sakyong appointed Jack an ‘Artist of the Kalapa Court’, he presented him with the image of a black Ashe on top of a gold sun. The image was on a shikishi board. Jack nailed the award very securely to the wall above his bed. As the time drew close to do the project for Karmê Chöling, Jack was having a hard time figuring out what the project should be. At 3 o’clock one morning he was sitting in his bed with a pad of paper, thoroughly stumped and becoming depressed, when suddenly the board popped off the wall, fell, and hit him on the head. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh, I’m a failure as an artist because I can’t think of anything and my award fell down’.” But as he picked it up from the floor he realized, “Oh my God, this is the project!” And that is how Karmê Chöling came to be filled with glorious banners each containing a gold sun and a symbol of Shambhala.
 Photo by Tom Plucinski  Photo by Jeffrey Mann
It’s been more than a year now that I’ve been Retreat Master here at Karmê Chöling, and what a rich experience it’s been. Holding the retreat container, being a protectress, is an honor and a joy, and very humbling. I thank all who’ve done retreat, anywhere, for your practice, courage, curiosity, trepidation, joy, and devotion in doing retreat.
So, what happened in 2009 in the world of Retreats? Alexander ‘t Hart, prior Retreat Master, returned home to Holland in April; major repairs were made to parts of the road to the Purkhang, around the wood pile, and the road to the Scorpion Seal retreat cabin; Nirmanakaya was picked up and moved to a new location; all the fields above the Upper Campground, except for that at Sambhogakaya, were mowed. 2009 also saw the departure of Shaun Nord, Retreats Assistant for two years. Samuel Allison arrived in June this year as the new Assistant.
For those of you who’ve done retreat here, I thought you might be interested to know about your favorite cabin(s), what was done in 2009 and what we aspire to get done in 2010. During 2009 I created a no-holds barred budget for the next two years. This isn’t a wish list. This is the nitty-gritty stuff!
Continue reading June 20, 2010, Summer Solstice, Update From Retreats at Karmê Chöling
|
