Friday

Rising to the Challenge of our Times

Sakyong Mipham Ripoche, Rising to the Challenge, photo BHH Studios

As the busy summer program season begins, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche will visit the Boulder Shambhala Center to offer a public program for new and experienced meditators called, “The Shambhala Principle: Rising to the Challenge of our Times,” on the weekend of June 13th – 15th.

The Tibetan meditation master and founder of Naropa University, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, offered the modern world the Shambhala vision of enlightened society. The underlying principle of this vision is the inherent basic goodness of humanity. More than simply a hope for the future, Shambhala vision is also a practice or a way of rising to the social and ecological challenges of our time.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche wrote The Shambhala Principle to address this very threshold. As the Sakyong says, “We humans have come to a crossroads in our history: we can either destroy the world or create a good future. The Shambhala Principle offers the principle of basic goodness as a way of addressing the personal and social challenges that we face. Do we, as humans, have confidence in the basic goodness of humanity, as well as of society itself? As a Tibetan lama and spiritual leader, this strikes me as our most compelling global issue.”

The Shambhala principle allows us to summon the innate potential of both personal and collective wisdom. Practicing meditation is both a means of personal transformation, but is also a way to shift deep cultural assumptions about human nature. When we extend our meditative experience, we open ourselves to the possibility to engage in contemplative conversation. In this way, we can practice the three levels of social transformation: personal, interpersonal (relationships), and collective (societal).

The Shambhala principle is a living movement of courage, inspiration, and genuineness that we can experience right now. The Sakyong invites us to join him, saying his book and teachings are, “An invitation to reflect on your own basic goodness and the basic goodness of society, and then contemplate the question, ‘Can we rouse our energy and confidence to create a good world that is founded on this principle?'”

At the program in Boulder, the Sakyong will be joined by two of Shambhala’s senior teachers, Acharya Dale Asrael and Shastri Ethan Nichtern. The program is open to new and experienced meditators alike, and we invite everyone to join us. To learn more and to register, please visit the Boulder Shambhala Center website: www.boulder.shambhala.org, or call 303-444-0190.