Saturday

“Our Future” Tour opens up Important Dialogue

Photo Miksang de Joey Johannsen

The thing about Halifax is that it doesn’t seem as far away as it used to feel.
–Seattle sangha member

In February and March, Josh Silberstein and Lodro Rinzler visited seven major Shambhala Centres along the West Coast and seven along the East Coast. These centres included Boulder, Austin, San Francisco, Berkeley, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Toronto, Halifax, Boston, New York City, Washington D.C., Atlanta and Baltimore. At each centre they met with the local leadership and the community to allow two-way communication to flow.

It was an amazing experience for us to see so many Shambhala Centers, meet wonderful sangha members and hear the heartfelt inspiration that our community has for sharing Shambhala with the world. We feel so grateful to all of you who hosted us and that we met along the way. We didn’t know what to expect when engaging in this sort of listening tour but people everywhere were so genuine with us. We felt such inspiration from seeing how much everyone cares about the Sakyong and their community.

With heartfelt appreciation,
Lodro and Josh

Each community meeting would begin with shamatha and contemplation of the following four questions:

• What has the Shambhala Community given to me in my life?
• What have I given back to the Shambhala community?
• What is the world asking of the Shambhala Community?
• What do we have to fear as a community?

After contemplating each question sangha members broke up into groups of two or three and shared what arose in their contemplation while their partner(s) actively listened. Lodro and Josh would then take their seat and–after some introductory remarks about the Sakyong’s retreat and the reasons for their visit–they would open up the discussion.

There are several common themes that Lodro and Josh discovered throughout the fourteen major Shambhala Centres:

1) People are coming in waves

Over and over again they encountered sanghas that were maxing out their space. Open houses have become packed, and new students are flowing into the Way of Shambhala courses. The one common theme that all centres brought up was that the Way of Shambhala was a success. New students were connecting, finding a path, and feeling a sense of community. While some centres struggled to find staff or teachers for all the courses, the students’ experience has been wonderful.

2) It’s time to raise our gaze

In all but a handful of centres, community members remarked about how they felt the local community was too insular. There was a great longing to expand Shambhala’s presence beyond their centre. People’s curiosity is piqued with the news of the Shambhala household, which was met with support and excitement from most community members with whom they spoke. Many sangha members are carefully considering how best to support their local centre in its ability to reach more people and affect their lives, either through the introduction of meditation practice or through activities like food drives or volunteering at battered youth shelters.

A common observation seemed to be that people were not looking for formal social action committees, but were interested in opening up dialogues at the local level about what sangha members are currently doing to support their community. Through these dialogues they can support one another in social action and open the doors for sangha members who are looking to get involved.

3) We’re getting kinder…

It was heartening to hear that overall the sanghas visited have heard the message from the Sakyong over the last twenty years and have grown kinder. People are feeling more welcomed when they enter Shambhala and the word “sanctuary” came up again and again at many of these Shambhala Centres.

4) …but divides still exist

There still seems to be a good amount of work to be done to support the ability for both older and students to communicate and feel welcomed at the Shambhala Centre. In most cases it was either a board that was mostly older students trying to hold onto the way they saw a Shambhala Centre running from their experience with newer students feeling unsupported, or a board with mostly newer students doing what they felt was supporting the Sakyong’s vision while unintentionally alienating the older students. Where the disconnect occurred was unsurprisingly due to lack of communication.

Josh and Lodro also shared a great deal about the role the Sakyong Ladrang has begun to play in our community and the Our Future campaign. The participants longed to hear about what the Sakyong was doing in retreat and follow up discussion on support for the year of retreat was met with enthusiasm.

Conclusion

Each discussion felt incredibly intimate. Lodro and Josh were heartened to see that sangha members did not hold any punches but brought up tough issues that we as a community have to grapple with. One sangha member in Boston noted that it felt that their situation was like a pipe with built up steam and that the meeting with the community punctured the pipe, letting the steam slowly pour out. Afterward all that was left was space and out of space can come communication and abundance.