Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexually as

The impulse to believe the absurd when presented with the unknowable is called religion. Whether this is wise or unwise is the domain of doctrine. Once you understand someone's doctrine, you understand their rationale for believing the absurd. At that point, it may no longer seem absurd. You can get to both sides of this conondrum from here.

Re: Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexuall

Postby admin » Sat Jun 29, 2019 10:27 pm

Shambhala Training Retreat: The Four Dignities: Meek, Perky, Outrageous and Incrutable with Sangyum Valerie Lorig
February 24 - March 3, 2012
by Karme Choling, Shambhala Meditation Center
Accessed: 6/29/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


The Four Dignities are introduced as a path and a process. They describe a warrior's maturing and his or her widening sphere of benevolent engagement in the world. Training in the dignities allows one to maintain awareness and delight at each stage.

This program is offered as one continuous retreat, but each part can be taken separately. Each part is a prerequisite for the next one.

Meek:

Meek is a study of the grounded, humble and gentle beginning stages of a warrior's journey. Here one trains to overcome arrogance, the primary obstacle to learning. There is a $22 material fee for this level. Meek begins February 24 at 7:30 pm and ends on February 26 at 5 pm.

Perky:

The second of the Four Dignities focuses on cultivating sharp, vibrant and uplifted energy through natural discipline. Overcoming the trap of doubt, the warrior of perky is able to accomplish his or her activities with a sense of nobility and ease. Perky begins on February 26 at 7:30 pm and ends on February 28 at 5 pm.

Outrageous and Inscrutable:

These fruitional dignities refer to the extraordinary skill of a practiced warrior. No longer afraid of making mistakes, the unconventional and visionary perspective of the outrageous warrior combines with the skill of spontaneous inscrutability to create benefit for others on a large scale. Outrageous and Inscrutable begins on February 28 at 7:30pm and ends after dinner on March 2. March 3 is a travel day.

Prerequisites:

Completion of Shambhala Training: Drala

Pricing

Karmê Chöling values its commitment to making programs affordable and available to all who wish to study with us. To support this commitment we provide two program price options.

FULL PRICE: $972
This is the actual price of the program.

DISCOUNT PRICE: $720
We offer this discounted price to those who cannot afford the full price of the program. This price is made possible through the generosity of Karmê Chöling and our donors

Materials Fee: $22

Payment Policies: Karmê Chöling has updated its payment policies. The new policies apply to all programs that start after January 1, 2019. Please read the payment policies before proceeding with registration.

Financial Aid: Karmê Chöling offers full-time student discounts, scholarships and other financial aid.

Program Credit: If using existing program credit to pay for a program, you must pre-register for this program at least two weeks prior to the program start date by calling the front desk (802-633-2384 x-101 or x-103). Program credit may not be used to pay for housing or practice materials and may not be used on or after arrival day.

Please Note: Price includes meals but not accommodations.

Online registration is not currently open.

Teachers

About Sangyum Valerie Lorig

Image

Valerie Lorig, M.Ed, is a practitioner and teacher of Shambhala and Tibetan Buddhism. A student of the Vidyadhara, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, she was empowered as Sangyum in 1985. She is adjunct faculty at Naropa University in the Contemplative Psychology Department and a psychotherapist in private practice. Trained in Hakomi Experiential Psychotherapy, her work unites meditative approaches with mindfulness-based therapy. She has an MA in Counseling from CSU and BA in Transpersonal Psychology from Burlington College in Vermont.
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Re: Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexuall

Postby admin » Sat Jun 29, 2019 10:37 pm

The Drala Principle
by Bill Scheffel
westernmountain.org
Accessed: 6/29/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


We may have been interested in our world when we were little children, but then we were taught how to handle it by our parents who had already developed a system to deal with the world and to shield themselves from it at the same time. As we accepted that system, we lost contact with the freshness and curiosity of experience.

-- Chögyam Trungpa.


Introduction to the Drala Principle

The “drala principle” refers to a body of teachings the Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Chögyam Trungpa presented in the last decade of his life, from 1978 to 1986. The roots of the drala principle precede the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet and are found in the indigenous traditions of that country -- as they are in all countries. The drala principle is applicable, not to Buddhist practitioners alone, but to anyone. These teachings speak to the heart, whether one is, so to speak, religiously, artistically or politically motivated.

Drala is the elemental presence of the world that is available to us through sense perceptions. When we open to trees, flowers, a creek or clouds we encounter an actual wisdom, though one that is not separate from our own. Beholding a river is much more than merely looking at a river; potentially, we are meeting the dralas. A friend of mine was once with her family in upstate New York. It was winter and they had hiked into a forest. The landscape was one of cold and snow, whiteness and silence, birch trees. Astonished by the pristine beauty, my friend realized it was her duty -- not just to notice this beauty -- but to stop and linger with it. To let it penetrate her. To listen. We have failed to see our first responsibility to the world is an aesthetic one.

In the drala teachings, each of the senses is considered an “unlimited field of perception” in which there are sights, sounds and feelings “we have never experienced before” –- no one has ever experienced! Each sense moment, if we are present for it, is a gate into the elemental wisdom of the world, even a cold sip of coffee could ignite the experience of Yeats: “While on the shop and street I gazed / My body of a sudden blazed.” Every perception is a pure perception; from the feel of a meager pebble stuck in our shoe to the meow of a house cat. Through this kind of perception we discover that we live in a vast, singular and unexplored world.

To make a stone stonier, that is the purpose of art.

-- Viktor Shklovski


Sometimes a stone, a tree, a teacup or a violin processes an intangible presence, a numinousity, that cannot be explained.

Ever since man first painted animals in the dark of caves he has been responding to the holy, to the numinous, to the mystery of being and becoming, to what Goethe very aptly called "the weird portentous." Something inexpressible was felt to lie behind nature. The bear cult, circumpolar in distribution and known archaeologically to extend into Neanderthal times, is a further and most ancient example. The widespread beliefs in descent from a totemic animal, guardian helpers in the shapes of animals, the concept of the game lords who released or held back game to man are all part of a variety of a sanctified, reverent experience that extends from the beautiful rock paintings of South Africa to the men of the Labradorean forests or the Plains Indian seeking by starvation and isolation to bring the sacred spirits to his assistance. All this is part of the human inheritance, the wonder of the world, and nowhere does that wonder press closer to us than in the guise of animals which, whether supernaturally as in the caves of our origins or, as in Darwin's sudden illumination, perceived to be, at heart, one form, one awe-inspiring mystery, seemingly diverse and apart but derived from the same genetic source. Thus the mysterium arose not by primitive campfires alone.

-- The Star Thrower, by Loren Eiseley


George Dorn was listening to a different kind of chorus. It was, Mavis had explained to him in advance, the weekly Agape Ludens, or Love Feast Game, of the Discordians, and the dining hall was newly bedecked with pornographic and psychedelic posters, Christian and Buddhist and Amerindian mystic designs, balloons and lollypops dangling from the ceiling on Day-Glo-dabbed strings, numinous paintings of Discordian saints (including Norton I, Sigismundo Malatesta, Guillaume of Aquitaine, Chuang Chou, Judge Roy Bean, various historical figures even more obscure, and numerous gorillas and dolphins), bouquets of roses and forsythia and gladiolas and orchids, clusters of acorns and gourds, and the inevitable proliferation of golden apples, pentagons and octopi.

-- The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson


As well as being a symbol of mystical union, the Rose is particularly associated with the numinous beauty of the goddess and the love her presence evokes within the human heart. It was the most revered flower in ancient Egypt, sacred to Isis herself.

-- The Mystic Rose, Excerpt from the Avalon Mystery School, Course III


One thing, anyway, cannot be doubted: Christ is a highly numinous figure. The interpretation of him as God and the son of God is in full accord with this.

-- Answer to Job, by C.G. Jung


[T]here is every likelihood that the numinous qualities which make the mother-imago so dangerously powerful derive from the collective archetype of the anima, which is incarnated anew in every male child.

-- Aion, by C.G. Jung


In this volume I have pulled out the stops and taken a plunge beyond the Reality Barrier. What I have found is the core of the Ultraterrestrial Secret, too numinous to be other than ineffable.

-- Secret Rituals of the Men in Black, by Allen Greenfield


In all the rituals of the Highest Tantra initiations a symbolic female sacrifice is set in scene. From numerous case studies in cultural and religious history we are aware that an “archaic first event”, an “inaugural sacred murder” may be hiding behind such symbolic stagings. This “original event”, in which a real wisdom consort was ritually killed, need in no sense be consciously acknowledged by the following generations and cult participants who only perform the sacrifice in their imaginations or as holy theater. As the French anthropologist René Girard convincingly argues in his essay on Violence and the Sacred, the original murderous deed is normally no longer fully recalled during later symbolic performances. But it can also not become totally forgotten. It is important that the violent origin of their sacrificial rite be shrouded in mystery for the cult participant. “To maintain its structural force, the inaugural violence must not make an appearance”, claims Girard (Girard, 1987, p. 458). Only thus can the participants experience that particular emotionally laden and ambivalent mixture of crime and mercy, guilt and atonement, violence and satisfaction, shuddering and repression which first lends the numinous aura of holiness to the cult events.

-- The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism, by Victor and Victoria Trimondi


The presence might not always be there, or only be there for a short period of time, but that presence may refer to another dimension of the drala principle. Just as our tangible world is populated -- and sometimes densely populated -- with people and other sentient creatures, the intangible or "invisible world" (invisible to most of us) is densely populated as well, and among these beings, entities, or spirits are classes of beings, or qualities of being, called dralas. Katumblies, kachinas, kami, gnomes, elves, angels, gods. Any being who acts on behalf of the non-dualistic and compassionate nature of existence could be considered a drala. The dralas are not really part of some other world, but latent everywhere. The dralas, as Chögyam Trungpa so often said, want very much to meet us.

Image
HA HA HA HO

WILLIAM JAMES SAID:

OUR NORMAL WAKING CONSCIOUSNESS
IS BUT ONE SPECIAL TYPE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
WHILST ALL ABOUT IT
PARTED FROM IT BY THE FILMIEST OF SCREENS
THERE LIE
POTENTIAL FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS ENTIRELY DIFFERENT
WE MAY GO THROUGH LIFE
WITHOUT SUSPECTING THEIR EXISTENCE
BUT APPLY THE REQUISITE STIMULUS AND AT A TOUCH
THEY ARE THERE IN ALL THEIR COMPLETENESS
DEFINITE TYPES OF MENTALITY WHICH PROBABLY SOMEWHERE
HAVE THEIR FIELD OF APPLICATION AND ADAPTATION
NO ACCOUNT OF THE UNIVERSE IN ITS TOTALITY
CAN BE FINAL WHICH LEAVES THESE OTHER FORMS
OF CONSCIOUSNESS QUITE DISREGARDED.
HOW TO REGARD THEM IS THE QUESTION
FOR THEY ARE SO DISCONTINUOUS WITH ORDINARY
CONSCIOUSNESS. THEY MAY DETERMINE
ATTITUDES, THOUGH THEY CANNOT FURNISH FORMULAS
AND OPEN A REGION THOUGH THEY FAIL TO GIVE A MAP.
AT ANY RATE, CONCLUDES JAMES,
THEY FORBID OUR PREMATURE CLOSING OF ACCOUNTS
WITH REALITY
IN SPITE OF WHAT HE SAID
WE'VE CLOSED OUR ACCOUNTS WITH REALITY
(MOST OF US)

-- Be Here Now, by "Ram Dass," aka The Lama Foundation


We find, in the next place, the doctrine of Elemental spirits. "When you shall be numbered among the Children of the philosophers," says the "Comte de Gabalis," "and when your eyes shall have been strengthened by the use of the most sacred medecine, you will learn that the Elements are inhabited by creatures of a singular perfection, from the knowledge of, and communication with, whom the sin of Adam has deprived his most wretched posterity. Yon vast space stretching between earth and Heaven has far nobler dwellers than the birds and the gnats; these wide seas hold other guests than the whales and the dolphins; the depths of the earth are not reserved for the moles alone; and that element of fire which is nobler than all the rest was not created to remain void and useless." According to Paracelsus, "the Elementals are not spirits, because they have flesh, blood, and bones; they live and propagate offspring; they eat and talk, act and sleep, &c.... They are beings occupying a place between men and spirits, resembling men and women in their organisation and form, and resembling spirits in the rapidity of their locomotion." They must not be confounded with the Elementaries which are the astral bodies of the dead. [2] They are divided into four classes. "The air is replete with an innumerable multitude of creatures, having human shapes, somewhat fierce in appearance, but docile in reality; great lovers of the sciences, subtle, serviceable to the Sages, and enemies of the foolish and ignorant. Their wives and daughters are beauties of the masculine type.... The seas and streams are inhabited even as the air; the ancient Sages gave the names of Undines or Nymphs to these Elementals. There are few males among them, and the women are very numerous, and of extreme beauty; the daughters of men cannot compare with them. The earth is filled by gnomes even to its centre, creatures of diminutive size, guardians of mines, treasures, and precious stones. They furnish the Children of the Sages with all the money they desire, and ask little for their services but the distinction of being commanded. The gnomides, their wives, are tiny, but very pleasing, and their apparel is exceedingly curious. As to the Salamanders, those fiery dwellers in the realm of flame, they serve the Philosophers, but do not eagerly seek their company, and their wives and daughters are seldom visible. They transcend all the others in beauty, for they are natives of a purer element."

-- The Real History of the Rosicrucians, by Arthur Edward Waite


Hermetists called into being, out of the elements, the shapes of salamanders, gnomes, undines, and sylphs, which they did not pretend to create, but simply to make visible by holding open the door of nature, so that, under favoring conditions, they might step into view. For instance, if man has a preponderance of the Earthly, gnomic element, the gnomes will lead him towards assimilating metals — money and wealth, and so on.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


The Cabiri are, in fact, the mysterious creative powers, the gnomes who work under the earth, i.e., below the threshold of consciousness, in order to supply us with lucky ideas. As imps and hobgoblins, however, they also lay all sorts of nasty tricks, keeping back names and dates that were 'on the tip of the tongue,' making us say the wrong thing, etc. They give an eye to everything that has not already been anticipated by consciousness and the functions at its disposal ... deeper insight will show that the primitive and archaic qualities of the inferior function conceal all sorts of significant relationships and symbolic meanings, and instead of laughing off the Cabiri as ridiculous Tom Thumbs he may begin to suspect that they are a treasure-house of hidden wisdom.

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


Using metaphors in the form of words, names and especially mantras or seed-syllables traditionally plays a central part in calling to the dralas, announcing our interest in meeting them, our availability. One example of the fertility of the drala principle is the Ganges River, perhaps historically home to the world's largest population of dralas! Itself a drala. This river, so long adored (and now like most rivers, so under siege by pollution and human disregard of its essential sacredness) traditionally has one-hundred and eight names, each of them a form of praise and, in that it speaks of a specific quality, the name of a drala(s) as well:

Visnu-padabja-sambhuta : Born from the lotus like foot of Visnu
Himancalendra-tanaya : Daughter of the Lord of Himalaya
Ksira-subhra : White as milk
Nataibhiti-hrt : Carrying away fear
Ramya : Delightful
Atula : Peerless
Japa Muttering : Whispering
Jagan-matr : Mother of what lives or moves


Discovering the Dralas

On the most simple and immediate level, the moment-to-moment path of discovering the drala principle might follow these steps, which will be elaborated on in subsequent text.

• Each moment of perception can potentially be experienced as a moment of pure perception - experience not yet mediated through discursive thought and conceptual process. These moments are not yet conditioned by hope and fear, by our opinions, desires and beliefs. This immediate awareness of pure perception is “without choice, without demand, without anxiety”.

• Moments of pure perception are experiences of beauty expressed though specific details. It is our duty to notice the details that call to us –- any taste, any sight, any sound. This is the call of the dralas.

If we quiet our mind by opening to these details, and if we listen to the response of our heart, we may discover our moment-to-moment, day-to-day direction. Thus we begin to follow our heart, to live beyond conditioning – and to be led by the dralas. Not only is our heart the source of our direction in life, it is the source of our confidence.

A Course of Study

Below is a partial outline of some of the topics of study of the drala principle. Each topic is introduced and briefly described, often simply with a quote. (In teaching, I've shared these themes - and quotes - with hundreds of people. These words are old friends who I have shared with people who have become friends and who I am now sharing with new friends...)

Simply relax

The experience of drala is as close as our own eyes, ears and tongue. We don't have to try to taste, say, an orange, we simply need to relax into the presence of the flavor on our tongue and the orange naturally begins to communicate with us. We are generally too active and our own business drowns out the messages of the world around us. To access the dralas we must do less and be more.

Give yourself a break. That doesn’t mean to say that you should drive to the closest bar and have lots to drink or go to a movie. Just enjoy the day, your normal existence. Allow yourself to sit in your home or take a drive into the mountains. Park your car somewhere; just sit; just be. It sounds very simplistic, but it has a lot of magic. You begin to pick up on clouds, sunshine and weather, the mountains, your past, your chatter with your grand-mother and your grandfather, your own mother, your own father. You begin to pick up on a lot of things. Just let them pass like the chatter of a brook as it hits the rocks. We have to give ourselves some time to be.

We’ve been clouded by going to school, looking for a job—our lives are cluttered by all sorts of things. Your friends want you to come have a drink with them, which you don’t want to do. Life is crowded with all sorts of garbage. In themselves, those things aren’t garbage, but they’re cumbersome when they get in the way of how to relax, how to be, how to trust, how to be a warrior. We’ve missed so many possibilities for that, but there are so many more possibilities that we can catch. We have to learn to be kinder to ourselves, much more kind. Smile a lot, although nobody is watching you smile. Listen to your own brook, echoing yourself. You can do a good job.

In the sitting practice of meditation, when you begin to be still, hundreds of thousands, millions, and billions of thoughts will go through your mind. But they just pass through, and only the worthy ones leave their fish eggs behind. We have to leave ourselves some time to be. You’re not going to see the Shambhala vision, you’re not even going to survive, by not leaving yourself a minute to be, a minute to smile. If you don’t grant yourself a good time, you’re not going to get any Shambhala wisdom, even if you’re at the top of your class technically speaking. Please, I beg you, please, give yourself a good time.

-- Chögyam Trungpa, from The Great Eastern Sun


Allow Limitation

Limitation is the practice or discipline that supports being. Becoming receptive or open is a natural byproduct of limitation. Meditation is a quintessential act of limitation (though one shouldn't be hemmed in by preconceived ideas of what meditation is, or where or how it can occur!). Even watching a movie requires the limitation of remaining quiet and sitting still. There is, obviously, no better way possible to receive the experience of a movie (though the drala principle is a more interesting movie that costs nothing to see). Accepting limitation is a conscious choice in which we have begun to realize the world becomes a far more interesting and abundant place if we limit ourselves.

One tires of living in the country, and moves to the city; one tires of one's native land, and travels abroad; one tires of Europe and goes to America, and so on; finally one indulges in the sentimental hope of endless journeyings from star to star. Or the movement is different but still extensive. One tires of porcelain dishes and eats on silver; one tires of silver and turns to gold; one burns half of Rome to get an idea of the burning of Troy. But this method defeats itself, it is plain endlessness.

My own method does not consist in such a change of field, but rather resembles the true rotation method in changing the crop and the mode of cultivation, rather than the field. Here we have the principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in imagination.

-- Soren Kiekegard


I embarked on two years of painting those paintings, two lines on each canvas, and at the end of two years there were ten of them. So I painted a total of twenty lines over a period of two years of very, very intense activity. I mean, I essentially spent twelve and fifteen hours a day in the studio, seven days a week. In fact I had no separation between by studio life and my outside life. There was no separation between me and those paintings...

I put myself in that disciplined position, and one of the tools I used was boredom. Boredom is a very good tool. Because whenever you play creative games, what you normally do is you bring to the situation all your aspirations, all your assumptions, all your ambitions - all your stuff. And then you pile it up on your painting, reading into the painting all the things you want it to be. I'm sure it's the same with writing; you load it up with all your illusions about what it is. Boredom's a great way to break that. You do the same thing over and over again until you're bored stiff with it. Then all your illusions, aspirations, everything just drains off. And now what you see is what you get.

-- Robert Irwin, from Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.


Become part of a Lineage

A lineage, as the word is used here, means any tradition that evokes and propagates drala. A painting, say, of Cezanne is loaded with drala. A man like Cezanne does not simply happen, but is someone who received the training and inspiration of countless ancestors before him and then put what he received into practice. That Cezanne apocryphally painted until his eyes bled is a measure of the work and sacrifice required to become a great lineage holder. Spiritual or religious lineages have no doubt produced our greatest lineage figures, but the path of drala cannot be defined as strictly sacred or secular. It could occur wherever genuine goodness and devotion are manifested. We might not even realize the lineages we are already part of; anyone who has ever read a poem has made contact with one of humanity's most universal, primordial and wonderful lineages.

I found no grail. But I did discover the modern tradition. Because modernity is not a poetic school but a lineage, a family dispersed over several continents and which for two centuries has survived many sudden changes and misfortunes: public indifference, isolation, and tribunals in the name of religious, political, academic and sexual orthodoxy. Being a tradition and not a doctrine, it has been able to persist and to change at the same time. This is also why it is so diverse. Each poetic adventure is distinct, and each poet has sown a different plant in the miraculous forest of speaking trees. Yet if the poems are different and each path distinct, what is it that unites these poets? Not an aesthetic but a search.

-- Octavio Paz, 20th Century Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate.


Seek Victory over War

Chögyam Trungpa initially translated Tibetan drala into an English compound word, wargod. He termed this "not the best translation," but its provisional use was to establish dralas as "gods who conquer war rather than propagate it." We can think of dralas as expressions of the fundamental, non-dualistic nature of the world; they potentially come to our support when we express the courage to be non-aggressive. Chögyam Trungpa coined the term, "victory over war" to express a goal of the drala principle.

Just as murder is an extreme expression of aggression, war is collective aggression at its utmost, but the seeds of war are in each of us. Aggression alienates us from the drala principle. Aggression divides people from one another, but it also divides us from the world we are in. War is no longer simply a military exercise; we are so at war with our environment that our very survival is imperiled. So great is this threat that our various regional wars -- or even nuclear war -- are overshadowed by our environmental crisis. The drala principle requires an honest study and constant unmasking of our own aggression and an allegiance to non-aggression. Non-aggression is not necessarily pacifism, but is an intelligent, firm and awake state of being.

War has an alluring simplicity. It reduces the ambiguities of life to blacks and whites. It fills our mundane days with passion. It promises to rid us of our problems. When it is over many miss it. I have sat in Sarajevo cafés and heard that although no one wished back the suffering, they all yearned for the lost spirit of self-sacrifice and collective struggle.

War’s cost is exacting. It destroys families. It leaves behind a wasteland, irreconcilable grief. It is a disease, and in the night air I smell its contagion.. Justice is not at issue here: war consumes the good along with the wicked. There will be no stopping it. Pity will be banished. Fear will rule. It is the old lie again, told to children desperate for glory: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

-- Chris Hedges, author, former New York Times war correspondent.


Discover that, "Luxury is experiencing reality"

The intriguing quote, "Luxury is experiencing reality" is another phrase Chögyam Trungpa used which goes to the heart of the drala principle. In our modern world of technology and consumerism we live tremendously and unnecessarily shielded from the elements; as Trungpa taught,

"so many devices are presented to us...ten thousand types of gloves and a hundred thousand types of shoes and millions of masks to ward off animals in the real world... Just in case you smell a cow, you have an aerosol.


Chögyam Trungpa counseled his students that the life envisioned in Nova Scotia must be highly connected to the earth.

We are talking about a farming situation in some sense: how we are going to experience the land properly, the real land, the land that grows crops and the land on which animals are raised. It is very, very important for us as students of Shambhala that when we first wake up in our bedrooms, the first incense we smell is either cow manure or horse manure or the smell of plants.... We have to back and experience how the earth works rather than purely smelling our neighbor's bacon cooking as soon as we wake up... We all have to work on the earth, literally and properly.


Chögyam Trungpa's vision was of course not the forced "reeducation" of Mao's Cultural Revolution, but a call for devotion and sacrifice in the spirit of sanity and as an alternative to the dark future facing humanity if the excesses of our age continue unchecked. Quite simply, when we live with awareness of the elements, we live in luxury. Conversely, nearly everything we have come to call luxury is an excess, a distraction, a prison. The experience of rain is one of life's great luxuries, the source of life falling from the sky! To experience the reality of rain does not mean to go out without an umbrella or a jacket if it is cold, to give up common sense comforts. But the luxuries of the "setting sun" world of modern mass culture is mere endless consumerism based on hungering for ever greater and mindless comforts and entertainments.

In the following Taoist passage, one doesn't need to understand its esoteric implications to be moved by its dramatically devastating conclusion:

The fading away of the Tao is when openness turns into spirit, spirit turns into energy, and energy turns into form. When form is born, everything is thereby stultified. The functioning of the Tao is when form turns into energy, energy turns into spirit, and spirit turns into openness. When openness is clear, everything thereby flows freely.

Therefore ancient sages investigated the beginnings of free flow and stultification, found the source of evolution, forgot form to cultivate energy, forgot energy to cultivate spirit, and forgot spirit to cultivate openness.

When openness turns into spirit, spirit turns into energy, energy turns into form, and form turns into vitality, then vitality turns into attention. Attention turns into social gesturing, social gesturing turns into elevation and humbling. Elevation and humbling turn into high and low positioning, high and low positioning turns into discrimination.

Discrimination turns into official status, status turns into cars. Cars turn into mansions, mansions turn into palaces. Palaces turn into banquet halls, banquet halls turn into extravagance. Extravagance turns into acquisitiveness, acquisitiveness turns into fraud. Fraud turns into punishment, punishment turns into rebellion. Rebellion turns into armament, armament turns into strife and plunder, strife and plunder turn into defeat and destruction.


-- From The Immortal Sisters: Secret Teachings of Taoist Women, translated and edited by Thomas Cleary.


This section was written in the 10th century by Tan Jingsheng. It’s called Transformational Writings, and it sums up the Taoist view of the evolution and involution of both individuals and collective processes:

Invoke astonishment

[The following is from the text of a "Shambhala Day" (Tibetan new year) address I gave at Naropa University in 1998.

The word I have chosen is: ASTONISH. It is a very beautiful word. It comes from the Latin extonare which means "to thunder." It means to strike with sudden wonder, or even sudden fear. John Lennon said, "Because the world is round it turns me on." That's the idea. Since I thought of this word a week ago -- almost immediately after I was asked to give this address -- I really have been noticing how astonishing the world is. Every perception that comes to us. A person's face is astonishing. The way my dog tries to smile at me in the morning by baring his fangs is astonishing. The dentist's drill is astonishing.

A term in the Shambhala Tradition called The Great Eastern Sun means the world is always presenting itself to us for the first time. Chögyam Trungpa used to begin his talks by saying "Good Morning" because the sun rises in the east. The east is where things are always new. I think he saw his students this way, because when he looked at you he always seemed astonished (even appalled!). Some things are so astonishing they seem uncalled for, gratuitous or almost absurd. A flower!

Moments of perceived astonishment can transform depression and give us real vision. There is a poem by the Greek poet Odysseas Elytis in which smelling the branch of a bush transforms his mind.

One day when I was feeling abandoned by everything and a great sorrow fell slowly on my soul, walking across fields without salvation, I pulled a branch of some unknown bush. I broke it and brought it to my upper lip. I understood immediately that man is innocent. I read it in the truth-acerbic scent so vividly, I took its road with light step and a missionary heart. Until my deepest conscience was that all religions lie.

Yes, Paradise isn't nostalgia. Nor, much less, a reward. It is a right.


Take one's seat

The ultimate purpose or expression of the drala principle is to take genuine responsibility for one's life. Although this requires sacrifice, it is not a burden but a joy. Becoming responsible means taking one's seat, but this seat -- or throne! -- is found in the chamber of one's own heart. Quite the contrary to what we're taught in school, where we are often "slowly reduced to disbelieving in ourselves," (Elytis. Eros, Eros, Eros, pg105), responsibility is the fulfillment of our true or fundamental desire, what we irreducibly believe in (even if long forgotten).

Two Shambhala terms are helpful in understanding this responsibility. The first is the sakyong principle. When my son was seven years old, I showed him a photograph of a clear-cut forest and he burst into tears. He cried immediately, inconsolably and seemingly out of any proportion. The sakyong principle entered him, or emerged from him. From his heart. Sakyong means "earth protector," a term for the highest seat we could claim, one that is devoted to protecting the earth itself, and, or course, all the beings that live here. The sight of the destroyed forest -- a sight of grotesque un-sustainability -- evoked from my son an archetypal response of the deepest kind.

The tears of my son demonstrated not only sadness but a kind of tremendous potential energy -- so much energy that I've never forgotten that moment! We must use the energy-awakeness of the unbidden heart to have the courage to journey toward taking our most deeply human seat as earth protector, Sakyong. It is seemingly only this kind of collective awakening that will save our planet from continued degradations and possible catastrophic collapse.

The unbidden energy we sometimes feel (perhaps only once in a lifetime) in or from our heart is something more than the constituents of our personality or the type of person we are trying to be. This energy is connected to the second pertinent Shambhala term, the ridgen principle. You could say that, although this primordial energy is not "elsewhere," it nevertheless originates from a kind of ultimate or unconditioned space (which all spiritual traditions attempt to evoke, understand or at least speak of). In the Shambhala tradition, it is not spoken of, or conceived of, as God, but as "The Rigdens," the highest form of non-dual intelligence or being. The Rigdens are not exactly separate from us, yet we can say -- and experience! -- that they want to help us.

Rigden means "possessing family heritage." Our heritage goes back through our mothers and fathers and every ancestral predecessor to the dawn of humanity. But even that is an arbitrary designator, because our genetic heritage not only continues back through apes, but to the the original creatures of our earth's oceans, back to single cells, to carbon, to stardust.
It is impossible not to possess this heritage, but our minds have acquired endless ideas and conditioning that ultimately makes us feel alone and alienated from any heritage at all. Existence, in the form of The Rigdens, and in every cell of life, does have an allegiance to helping us reunite with our true family heritage. The ultimate and highest dralas are the Rigdens themselves.

How exactly will the Rigdens help us? There is a simple process we must undertake and in the undertaking help arrives inseparable from the process and perhaps, for a long time, unnoticed. There are steps to the process, though not necessarily in this order:

I. We must recognize our response-ability (to separate the word into its obvious halves). Each of us has a unique ability to respond to our life experience and thus effect the world around us. Not everyone is equal, precisely because there is not a single "ability" to measure us all by. In hitting a tennis ball, some have more ability than others, but this is only one of infinite abilities to possess. Just as we are not all equal, none of us are particularly special, only unique. If each snowflake that has fallen since the beginning of snow is unique, how could each human (dog, cat, tree) not be?

The great Zen teacher Dogen said, "Everyone has all the provisions they need for their lifetime." Amidst injustice, deformity, starvation, war and poverty it hardly seems believable that we each have the provisions we need. The provisions Dogen spoke were the ones needed to wake up and waking up can never occur from material other than what we have, however awful. To recognize the material of our response-ability is a life-time process that is too infrequently tried.

As we do try to recognize and commit to our response-ability, the world offers a response -- you could say the rigdens respond. Small forms of acknowledgment occur; accidents, synchronicities, threads of new possibility. The sense of "moving in the right direction" is palpable though not always tangible; it is a kind of real support that comes to our aid.

II. We must realize our privilege. Most of us living in the so-called first-world have tremendous privileges over the greater majority of human beings who live in the so-called third world. A hundred dollars does not necessarily mean a great deal in, say, middle-class United States, but in terms of the overall world economy where the majority of human beings make only a dollar or two a day -- one-hundred dollars is a tremendous amount of money.

Strangely, we in the first-world often live far more in the grip of economic fear than our brothers and sisters making two-dollars a day. The mortgages, credit-card debt, home and automobile insurance policies (not to mention the homes and automobiles), the warranties, deeds of trust, legal contracts, iPod rebates, parking tickets, security clearances, credit ratings, golf course memberships and orange juice coupons become a heaping pile of overhead we feel duty-bound and scared to death to do anything other than support. And thus our life force goes into supporting primarily these things, making us quite irresponsibly responsible.

That we could leverage our life in an entirely different way -- and for very different purposes -- is the point of realizing our privilege. Recognizing and acknowledging our privilege take courage because it begins to dissolve that sense that we are "special," that we are entitled to what we have and that it will always be there.

Quite simply put, the dralas do not prefer cowards, whereas any expression of the courage to become more vulnerable will potentially attract the dralas. Acknowledging our privilege means to become more vulnerable. The rigden principle -- as the ultimate drala principle -- is the self-existing sense of fearlessness we find in ourselves. As we become courageous we become anointed -- or self-anointed -- with courage -- and the process of courage grows on itself.

III. We must begin to simplify and to risk. When we realize "luxury is experiencing reality," simplifying is not a hardship but something natural -- and natural things tend to do very well if they are allowed to. Simplifying provides the ground to risk. Most of us in the first world have far more resources available to us than the vast majority of humanity. We not only have the possibility but the responsibility to risk some of our so-called security for benefit of finding and taking our seat and in turn, helping others.

IV. Supplicate for vision and support. If we are unwilling to simplify, risk, renounce our privileges and assume responsibility it is unlikely it would occur to us to supplicate for a vision, much less receive one. Conversely, if we do have this willingness, we already have a vision; vision is surrender to what our heart desires. This is not the vision of ego, which are always "wants" that which will make us more comfortable. A vision will have its way with us, but it will also come with a curious way of providing the necessary provisions. Simply to supplicate into the unknown is a act of courage and a link with vision.

What is vision? It is the truth of the human heart, which exists in nowness outside of time and can never be discovered through hope and fear.
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Re: Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexuall

Postby admin » Sun Jun 30, 2019 5:06 am

The Hakomi Method
by hakomiinstitute.com
Accessed: 6/29/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


“Therapy is first about discovering. It’s about who you are and about what your deepest emotional attitudes are. It’s not just about who you think you are. It’s not opinion. It’s not something you can know with the intellect. It’s about who you are in the very heart of yourself. That’s the flavor of psychotherapy, discovering yourself, discovering your real attitudes toward the most important pieces of your life.”

—Ron Kurtz, Hakomi Founder.


Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychotherapy was first created in the late 1970’s by the internationally renowned therapist and author, Ron Kurtz. In 1981, to fully develop the method and promote the teaching of Hakomi, Ron and a core group of therapists and educators founded the Hakomi Institute. Today, Hakomi Trainings and workshops are presented throughout the world, in North America, Europe, Japan, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand.

Integrating scientific, psychological, and spiritual sources, Hakomi has evolved into a complex and elegant form of psychotherapy that is highly effective with a wide range of populations. The method draws from general systems theory and modern body-centered therapies including Gestalt, Psychomotor, Feldenkrais, Focusing, Ericksonian Hypnosis, Neurolinguistic Programming, and the work of Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Lowen. Core concepts of gentleness, nonviolence, compassion, and mindfulness evolved from Buddhism and Taoism.

At its most basic level, Hakomi is the therapeutic expression of a specific set of Principles: Mindfulness, Nonviolence, Unity, Organicity and Mind-Body Integration; these tenets inform every aspect of the work. The first concern of Hakomi Trainings is that our students embody these Principles as a deep and consistent part of who they are and how they work. This means a heartfelt, long-term commitment to their own growth, both personal and professional. Our goal is to foster high quality, caring therapists who are as dedicated to their own self-awareness as they are to the understanding of others. We further support students in discovering their own style, creativity and unique application of the Hakomi Method.

“The most powerful thing the therapist does for us is provide a setting, a nourishing womb, in which our lives can unfold. Through the physical setting and, most important, the setting of his own being, he creates a place of safety; a trustworthy place where all life is befriended through an affirmation of faith in our wisdom and creativity.”

—Gregory Johanson, Ph.D., Hakomi Institute Co-Founder and Senior Trainer.


The Method

Hakomi helps people change “core material.”

Core material is composed of memories, images, beliefs, neural patterns and deeply held emotional dispositions. It shapes the styles, habits, behaviors, perceptions and attitudes that define us as individuals. Typically, it exerts its influence unconsciously, by organizing our responses to the major themes of life: safety, belonging, support, power, freedom, control, responsibility, love, appreciation, sexuality, spirituality, etc. Some of this material supports our being who we wish to be, while some of it, learned in response to acute and chronic stress, continues to limit us. Hakomi allows the client to distinguish between the two, and to willingly change material that restricts his or her wholeness.

Hakomi is an experiential psychotherapy:

Present, felt experience is used as an access route to core material; this unconscious material is elicited and surfaces experientially; and changes are integrated into the client’s immediate experience.

Hakomi is a body-centered, somatic psychotherapy:

the body serves as a resource that reflects and stores formative memories and the core beliefs they have generated, and also provides significant access routes to core material.

The Hakomi Method follows a general outline: First, we establish an ever-present, attitude of gentle acceptance and care known as loving presence. This maximizes safety, respect and the cooperation of the unconscious. With a good working relationship established, we then help the client focus on and learn how core material shapes his or her experience. To permit this study, we establish and use a distinct state of consciousness called Mindfulness. Mindfulness is characterized by relaxed volition, a gentle and sustained inward focus of attention, heightened sensitivity, and the ability to notice and name the contents of consciousness. Its roots derive from Eastern meditation practice. Hakomi has pioneered the use of active, or dynamic mindfulness in psychotherapy: instead of using mindfulness meditation as simply an adjunct to therapy, virtually the entire Hakomi process in conducted in mindfulness. This facilitates Hakomi techniques in accessing unconscious material quite rapidly, but safely.

The heart of the Method works with the client’s present, felt experience, as it is presented spontaneously, or deliberately and gently evoked by having them experiment with habitual tension or movement patterns known as “indicators.” These emotional/cognitive patterns automatically keep deeper experience out of present awareness. The results are processed through different state-specific methods, including:

We work with strong emotions and bound energy, safely releasing them, and finding nourishment in that release

• We work with the inner child and other specific self-states, often in the context of vividly re-experienced memories, frequently providing the “missing experience” for the child


• We process core beliefs in mindfulness, not as intellectual problem-solving, but as direct dialogue with the unconscious

The basic method, then, is this:

• To establish a relationship in which it is safe for the client to become self-aware

• To use the Hakomi methodology to evoke experiences that lead to the discovery of organizing core material

• To seek healing changes in the core material


All is in support of this primary process. Once discovered in this experiential manner, core material can be examined, processed, and transformed. Transformation begins when awareness is turned mindfully toward felt, present experience; unconscious material unfolds into consciousness; barriers are attended to; and new experiences are integrated that allow for the reorganization of core beliefs. These, in turn, allow for a greater range of mental, physical, and emotional coherence and behavior.

Finally, we help the client to integrate these new beliefs, modes and choices into everyday life. It is here –- in the ability to transform new possibilities discovered in the office into on-going actualities of daily living -– that real change happens.

Hakomi is effective and appropriate in many therapeutic situations, with individuals, couples, families, and groups. It integrates well with a variety of psychotherapeutic, counseling and healing modalities, and is successfully used by counselors, psychotherapists, social workers, pastoral counselors, expressive therapists, bodyworkers, group therapists, crisis counselors, and many other practitioners. It is effective for both brief and long-term therapy.
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Re: Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexuall

Postby admin » Sun Jun 30, 2019 6:12 am

The Golden Dot: The Epic of the Lha
by Druk Sakyong Dorje Dradül (Chogyam Trungpa)
1979

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


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75 pp. [Restricted to Werma Sadhana practitioners]

This text, written in England by the Druk Sakyong Dorje Dradül in the 1960s, describes the creation of the world by the nine cosmic lhas and the primordial lha, Shiwa Ökar (“Peaceful White Light”). It provides rich history and imagery, full of energetic and vivid detail, for practitioners of the Werma Sadhana.

Although The Golden Dot is not considered to be a terma, it is based on a terma that the Dorje Dradül received and then, unfortunately, lost during his escape from Tibet: two volumes on Shambhala, its history, and its teachings. He wrote down the text that we now have as a short version of what he could remember of the original. He said that it was a tagdren, or “pure remembrance”: something that he was able to “remember” in a “pure” vision from previous lives.

In 1972, during his retreat in Charlemont, Massachusetts, the Dorje Dradül dictated an English translation of the first sections of the text to Sherab Chödzin. At the 1979 Vajradhatu Seminary, the Committee translated the Tibetan text with the Dorje Dradül, and it was first distributed at the 1979 Kalapa Assembly.

The first three chapters of The Golden Dot describe the world of the cosmic mirror, the creation and manifestation of the external world, as well as Shiwa Ökar taking his seat at the center of this world, which is Shambhala. Although the Dorje Dradül never wrote more than three chapters, he explained that The Letter of the Black Ashe, a later Shambhala terma, picked up the story where The Golden Dot left off.

This deluxe, hardbound edition has Tibetan and English on facing pages. It contains a significantly revised and improved translation, including a final section not translated in the original publication.
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Re: Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexuall

Postby admin » Sun Jun 30, 2019 6:23 am

Love the Reflections in the Cosmic Mirror
by Catalyst Yogi
Accessed: 6/29/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

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"Human love is for one thing only: to love your soul. The Infinite world around you will be in love with you."

-- Yogi Bhajan


To truly love one other human can be one of the greatest challenges in our lifetime and to love all of humanity can seem like an impossible feat. Yet this is what the Aquarian Age demands of each one of us.

Each soul longs to be a conduit for Universal Love and an excellent barometer is the love we feel towards our brothers and sisters on this planet.

The Universe provides a cosmic mirror and is very generous in showing us ourselves. Each person you meet every day from the grocery clerk to your mother is showing you a reflection of yourself. As we move more into Unity Consciousness these reflections are becoming more magnified only so that we can see ourselves in truth. It is your choice to fight or embrace the reflection that you see.

In the Aquarian Age, these relationship challenges can be reduced to one spiritual lesson: to learn to love ourselves unconditionally. For example, to only love a select group of people in your community and to judge others is not real love. You cannot give something that you do not possess yourself.

Embrace those people who annoy you, who bring out painful emotions, negativity and judgment from deep inside you. The truth is that those people are not the cause of your painful emotions and negativity. This lower frequency energy has been living inside you a long time, waiting to be seen, felt and transmuted into the light.

How do you know when you have reached that state of self-love? It is when you don't get caught up in another's opinion of you; when you don't argue with people; when you don't lose sleep over another person; when you no longer live in the past; when you no longer take things personally; when you are able to extend compassion to each person you meet. When you love yourself, you don't need another person to validate you, to take care of you or to love and accept you.

When you truly love yourself, you love all selves. This makes your relationships and your life flow more smoothly. Human Love teaches us to love our own Soul by accepting all aspects of ourselves that we see in the cosmic mirror. Human love allows us to see the light that lives in all human beings.

Make the commitment to see and relate only to the light in other people. If you find this challenging with some people, extend a small prayer to request to see that person through God's Eyes. You will be amazed at the compassionate energy that moves through your heart. When you do this it only reinforces and strengthens your God Self. Remember, GOD wants to experience itself through you and there is nothing more beautiful and heart opening than to see GOD loving GOD through human beings.

Catalyst Yogi (Haribhajan) helps you to attract healthy, loving relationships and claim your unique, divine gifts through the Shadow Mining online healing programs. These programs are to assist you in your evolution into the new Aquarian Age consciousness. Participants also become a member of a supportive global community called the Catalyst Yogi Synarchy. He also hosts a free monthly online New Moon Meditation for Peace gathering. Check the website for more details. http://catalystyogi.com/
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Re: Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexuall

Postby admin » Sun Jun 30, 2019 6:30 am

Werma Sadhana & Scorpion Seal Practice Intensive
with Benoit Cote
December 26, 2016 - January 1, 2017

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


The Werma Sadhana is a profound key to understanding and manifesting awake society in our lives. By practicing intensively, we can unlock the power and heart of this practice, discovering brilliant awareness on the spot, whatever our circumstance.

This retreat will include intensive practice and study of the sadhana as well as other practices, such as stroke, Shambhala Sadhana, body disciplines, and feast. There will also be periods of exploration of the guided meditations presented in Shambhala Dzokchen book by the Sakyong. The teachings will appeal to new and experienced Werma practitioners, whether having recently received Rigden Abhisheka or being already engaged in the Scorpion Seal Assemblies.

About the Holiday Programs at KCL

This program is a part of an exciting winter holiday family week at Karmê Chöling. The week is arranged so that parents, children, and teenagers can all participate in their own programs and enjoy time together on the beautiful, wintry land of Karmê Chöling. This is a lively week full of laughter, bustle, and the energy of children!

We will come together as a community several times over the course of the week to celebrate and enjoy one another’s company, including an outdoor bonfire with the children and our annual New Year’s Eve Soirée.

This retreat counts as a group practice for SSA-1 requirements [Scorpion Seal Assembly: Year One].

Arrival and Departure

Please plan to arrive between 3-6pm on December 26th. The program concludes with a departure day on Januray 1st; you are free to leave anytime that day.

Prerequisites: Rigden Abhisheka or received Werma Sadhana at Kalapa Assembly and attended Vajrayana Seminary.

Pricing

Karmê Chöling values its commitment to making programs affordable and available to all who wish to study with us. To support this commitment we provide two program price options.

FULL PRICE: $740
This is the actual price of the program.

DISCOUNT PRICE: $560
We offer this discounted price to those who cannot afford the full price of the program. This price is made possible through the generosity of Karmê Chöling and our donors

Daily Fee: $95

Payment Policies: Karmê Chöling has updated its payment policies. The new policies apply to all programs that start after January 1, 2019. Please read the payment policies before proceeding with registration.

Financial Aid: Karmê Chöling offers full-time student discounts, scholarships and other financial aid.

Program Credit: If using existing program credit to pay for a program, you must pre-register for this program at least two weeks prior to the program start date by calling the front desk (802-633-2384 x-101 or x-103). Program credit may not be used to pay for housing or practice materials and may not be used on or after arrival day.

Please Note: Price includes meals but not accommodations.

Online registration is not currently open.

Teachers

About Benoit Cote

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Benoît Côté has been a student of Shambhala Buddhism since 1976. For many years, he was a member and part of the teaching and administrative staff of Centre Shambhala de Montréal. In 2002, he retired from his university professor position in Educational Psychology to be involved fully with Shambhala. He then started being part of the teaching staff of international seminaries and directing programs at the land centers. From 2005 to 2007, he was resident teacher at Karmê Chöling and member of the Mukpo Institute faculty. In 2009, he moved to Halifax, and in 2010, was appointed by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche as one of the shastris for the Halifax Shambhala Center. In 2015, he moved back to Montréal where he also served as shastri until 2018.
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Re: Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexuall

Postby admin » Sun Jun 30, 2019 6:45 am

The Court Vision and Practice
by Kalapa Publications
Accessed: 6/29/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


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Our Price: $52.00

Product Code: BVF275

Description

Available to those who attended Kalapa Assembly or received Rigden Abhisheka and the accompanying transmission.

"Court Vision is a unique blend of classical wisdom combined with the Dorje Dradül’s insight and pure vision. This document is historical because it lays the foundation for a modern enlightened society. It is a template of how heaven, earth, and humanity can be joined. In particular, it firmly establishes the principle and lineage of Sakyongs for the first time in this new era . . . . May all Shambhalians enjoy this nectar of truth and guidance so that our basic goodness may manifest." --The Sakyong, Jampal Trinley Dradül , Foreward to the Fifth Edition
The Kalapa Court
6" x 9", Hardcover
120 pp.
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Re: Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexuall

Postby admin » Sun Jun 30, 2019 6:50 am

The first time I met His Majesty Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
by Leslie Hays
2017

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The first time I met His Majesty Chögyam Trungpa Rincophe was at encampment in the late summer of 1983. I was attending a dathün (month long sitting practice) at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center. This retreat is supposed to be mostly silent, but I was never good at holding my tongue. During the retreat, some of my new friends and I plotted a raid on encampment, which was a military-style program that was simultaneously happening on the land. We decided to raid encampment and attempt to steal the flag. Our plan was simple: we could create a diversion and while the attention was on us, our cohorts would sneak around the perimeter and steal the flag. Three of us drove through the tori gates in a convertible blaring Michael Jackson’s Beat It while the rest tried to sneak around and steal the flag. We were all immediately caught and locked up in the stockade. CTR came by that night to check out the prisoners. I noticed that he flirted shamefully with all the women/girls who were in the lock-up and totally and completely ignored me.

But I really met CTR in the backyard wedding of sangha members in Boulder in late January of 1984. I had been prepped by the family I nannied for for weeks in advance of the wedding. It appeared to work because I caught CTR’s eye and he asked me to marry him the next day. Then there was so much activity! We had our charts read by Larry Laughlin who found the most “auspicious” day for our wedding. Given the tremendous constraints of marrying six women in a five months, there was some wiggle room with the dates. The first wedding I attended was Karen Lavin’s. Next was Valerie Lorig Sanford, which happened on May 10th. Then Lady Cynde Grieves married him on May 13, Wendy Friedman was on May 17th, I was the fifth on June 12th, Ciel followed on her 18th brithday, and then Agness had her wedding in December of 1985.

There was so much to be done -- especially for me as a new student who only completed through level four Shambhala training. I received stroke, lungta and werma transmission. I read Born in Tibet, and studied the Letter of the Golden Key Which fulfills desire, The Golden Dot, The Letter of the Black Ashe, Sacred World, the Practice of Warriorship, and Court Vision and Practice. I was on the fast track to learning and absorbing everything he’d ever created. I studied the texts themselves as well as the commentaries. Our ceremonies required correctly answering a direct question from CTR and the preceptor, who in my case was the regent. (Mine was the only ceremony with him as the preceptor -- people said I should be honored -- but I was not.) We were told to study the Six Ways of Ruling in particular, as it was rumored this would be one of the questions.

When I wasn’t with CTR, I was completing my tasks as a nanny. And I was introduced to the Shambhala lodge with a party in my honor. I attended Karen, Cynde, Wendy and Valerie’s ceremonies prior to mine. These all happened at the court in Boulder. We had dinners together where we were taught elocution by both Ashley Playfair and Carolyn Gimian. We had one dinner with CTR and the five of us Sangyum (Karen, Cynde, Wendy, Val and I), where we were served white fish with bones in it, green peas and white rice, and copious amounts of sake. We were learning how to eat like the British–holding our fork upside down in our left hand and our knife in the right to shovel the food onto the fork, not an easy task with that meal. During meals we usually played the qualities game, a parlor game CTR enjoyed.

One day I arrived at the court for a shift and I was told I was to receive another transmission from Marty Janowitz. I assumed this was to be like the others, perhaps he was giving me TGS transmission early. Marty told me this transmission was extremely sacred and was only known to a few close students. He then pulled out a vial filled with a white powdery substance. Marty told me it was ground up vitamin D or something. (I really can’t remember exactly what he said it was). He put a bit of it on the spoon and told me to rub it on my gums, which I did. It was not cocaine. It was part of our job description to always carry a vial of “Tabi” which was the code name for cocaine. Due to his paralysis, CTR only had the use of one hand, so when he called for tabi it was our job to go into the bathroom with him, keep him steady, help him get his penis out before he wet his pants and put the coke on a spoon for him to inhale. It was also our job to keep his nose clean, and as you can tell from the picture, we were not always successful. Later, when I went to the bathroom alone, I put some on my gums. It was definitely cocaine.

This is another secret I have kept for over 30 years. I can no longer keep it. I believe it is not of benefit to anyone to keep this secret anymore. I believe it’s important for the followers of Shambhala to know what really happened in the “inner circle” of the court. We all -- every one of us -- didn’t know how to say “no” to CTR. We were so busy tripping over each other to do his bidding that we never questioned why an enlightened mediation master would need copious amounts of cocaine and alcohol every day. We never questioned why he spoke of every woman or young girl in sexual terms. It was supposed to be a great honor to sleep with him. No one wondered if his sexual appetite for his female students might be unhealthy.

I started wondering about it shortly after Ciel’s suicide. Could this sexualized idea of women be unhealthy? Could this lack of boundaries eventually result in rage and self-hatred? Why did I think marrying a man with seven other wives, a serious drug addiction, alcoholism and suicidal tendencies shown as severe bulimia would be a good idea? I was 23 and vulnerable. And I said yes. Yes, I will do this strange thing. It was only later when I learned of power differentials and feminism that I truly understood how totally wrong it all was. And now I am triggered by all things Tibetan. I will never enter Karma Dzong again. It’s too painful to see the hero worship and the enshrinement of this deeply disturbed man. And for those of you who might have spent a few nights with him or more and feel they knew all there was to know about him, I ask you to dig deeper. And for those of you who never met him yet still follow his teachings, you might want to ask hard questions of those in the know.

The most shocking thing for me through this whole process of sharing my truth is the sheer number of people who are lying now, and denying that sexualized violence has a negative effect on women. This continued minimization of the real, undeniable scars that are left from sexual assault and harassment is shocking. Shambhala has had choices every step of the way since we have begun talking about the neglect and child rape and abuse that is the legacy CTR left his close students. And this deplorable view of women continues through his sons. Time’s Up Now.

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Re: Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexuall

Postby admin » Sun Jun 30, 2019 7:09 am

The Six Ways of Ruling: A Resource for Leaders
by Kalapa Publications
Accessed: 6/30/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


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Governance as Path Working Group

Our Price: $22.00 USD/CAD

Product Code: BXE279

Description

This book contains commentaries and contemplations on the six ways of ruling, a key principle of Shambhala governance. Included are commentaries on the root texts by

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (Kalapa Assembly, 1978)
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche (Shambhala Mountain Center, 2008)
Richard Reoch (Boulder, 2006; Northern California, 2007)
Martin Janowitz (Dorje Denma Ling, 2006)
Garuda
Softcover, 5" x 7"
80 pp.

Purchase the Set which includes the pocket-size edition of the contemplations.

*********************************************


Bring out the wisdom in others


Deep Unresolved Issues


Making an adjustment in our prejudices


The deep training of working with others


The person you'd like to have in your backpack


The world of email
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Re: Former teacher at Boulder's Shambhala accused of sexuall

Postby admin » Sun Jun 30, 2019 8:25 am

Simplicity Retreats: Weekthun and Dathun
by shambhala.org
Accessed: 6/30/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


“It’s very helpful to realize that being here, sitting in meditation, doing simple everyday things like working, walking outside, talking with people, bathing, using the toilet, and eating, is actually all that we need to be fully awake, fully alive, fully human. While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world’s greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self-deprecation, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight, Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.”

-- Pema Chödrön, teaching on day two of a dathün


After beginning meditation practice, many want to deepen this experience through deeper retreats. A week of meditation, known as weekthün (week session), is offered in some local centres and in all of our rural retreat centres. It is a powerful introduction and deepening of mindfulness-awareness meditation, open to anyone.

The program includes sitting and walking meditation. Dathün (Tibetan for “month session”) is a one-month group meditation retreat led by a senior teacher. Silence and functional talking are observed and meals are served in the shrine room through a contemplative eating practice. The retreat includes talks, study, and a short work period. After attending a dathün, students may choose to do a solitary retreat, and a number of Shambhala practice centres have facilities for individual retreats.

An example of a day in the dathün:

6:30 am Wake up
7:00 am Morning chants
Practice: sitting & walking meditation
8:00 am Breakfast (in the shrine room)
9:00 am Practice: sitting & walking meditation
12:00 pm Lunch (in the shrine room)
1:00 pm Work period
2:30 pm Practice: sitting & walking meditation
4:00 pm Tea
4:30 pm Practice: sitting & walking meditation
5:30 pm Talk
Evening chants
7:00 pm Dinner (in the shrine room)
8:00 pm Practice: sitting & walking meditation
Closing chants
9:00 End of day

In general, the daily schedule is quite full, and there is not much time for personal activities. One day in the middle of the dathün is open with no scheduled practice.

Although there is a shrine with Buddhist and Shambhala symbols as well as chants at certain points of the day, one does not need to be a Buddhist nor even be interested in becoming a Buddhist to take part. All the symbols and chants are oriented toward arousing our natural wakefulness and compassion and are provided as methods for realizing the nature of our minds.

In the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, dathün is one of our most important training programs. There is a real power and depth to practicing with a group for a month, and for many people, it is a big step on their path of meditation. In terms of the teachings, there are different kinds of dathüns, with some of them emphasizing the Buddhist teachings, the Shambhala teachings, the teachings of lojong (“mind training”), or the creative arts. Yet all dathüns are alike in being grounded in intensive sitting practice of mindfulness and awareness.

Anyone is welcome to come to a dathün. If possible, it is good if you have already had meditation instruction and some experience and understanding of meditation beforehand.

Recommended Readings

Pema Chödrön:
The Wisdom of No Escape
Start Where You Are
(These books are teachings she gave during two particular dathüns.)

Chögyam Trungpa:
The Heart of the Buddha
The Path is the Goal

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche:
Turning the Mind Into an Ally

Where to Go, Who to Contact

There are four practice centres in the Shambhala mandala that offer dathüns at different times of the year.

Dechen Chöling, Mas Marvent, France
Dorje Denma Ling, Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia
Karmê Chöling, Barnet, Vermont
Shambhala Mountain Center, Red Feather Lakes, Colorado
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