So you are thinking about the weekthun?

“When stress is the basic state of mind, even good things stress us out. We have to learn to let go.”

  ~ Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Dear Prospective Retreatants,

I would like to give you some more information about our upcoming Retreat in the City, November 19-25. If you aren’t considering it, you can skip the rest of this letter.

Doing a city retreat is convenient because you don’t have to go somewhere else. It’s an extraordinary opportunity to transform your ordinary daily life. On some levels, I think this is potentially more important than having a unique, one-time experience separate from the rest of your life. However, doing a retreat in the context of one’s normal life requires an adjustment to one’s habitual patterns. This is both the opportunity and the challenge.

Some of you would like to do partial attendance, so I would like to clarify how that could look like. In order for it to be a genuine retreat as opposed to a casual drop-in like our Sunday morning public sitting, one needs to establish one’s personal boundaries and priorities. One would do this automatically if you went an isolated place like our retreat cabin, or traveled to a major retreat centre. What this mean for a retreat in the city is, quite simply, that when someone asks you to go to another event, you say “No, I’m on retreat, I have to go to the Shambhala Centre.”

As we know, meditation isn’t always easy, and sometimes obstacles come up. In a retreat, one makes a commitment to stick with the practice and work with the obstacles until you overcome them. Often, obstacles are the harbingers to deeper insight. In this way, they become stepping stones. As this happens, the meditation gets easier. By writing down your schedule and communicating with the retreat staff, you are essentially making a promise to yourself and others. Your experience actually becomes a “retreat” as opposed to just practicing more than usual when mood and circumstances permit. One sets one’s intention in the beginning, and then one doesn’t have to set it again and again. In normal life, this is the toughest part of getting a practice—it involves the hard work of repeatedly pushing aside our habitual patterns. With retreat mentality, it’s different.

From my perspective as the teacher, I know that if everyone is practicing in retreat mode, it becomes possible to give more subtle teachings. Teaching is a living situation, a two-way street. I have found that when the students are settled, open and ready, teacher and student naturally and effortlessly explore the teachings on increasingly penetrating and subtle levels.

The final reason we need clarity is very practical. The cooks are buying the food and prefabbing some of the meals in the weeks ahead of the retreat. We need to know how many people will be eating specific meals. Cooking for 10-22 people is currently a volunteer position, and takes up a serious amount of volunteer time, so please be considerate of the cook’s effort. The meals will be vegetarian, but you have serious food allergies, please let us know.

The first day, Sunday, November 19, will be a “settling in day”. After that, on Monday, I will start to give the transmission for “Shambhala Meditation”. This is a practice that greatly expands the basic meditation instruction that we give at most of our programs.

This transmission will then proceed over the next few days. I am planning to give talks in the mornings during the week, so that people can work with the practice for the rest of the day. The beginning of the retreat will concentrate on introducing the practice. If you did the retreat last year, we will be expanding on what we studied last year.

If you are unable to attend for the all the mornings of the retreat, the material will still be helpful, but to continue the practice after the retreat, you should watch an online transmission by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. My own experience with shambhala meditation is that it is actually very subtle and profound for both beginners and experienced meditaters. Whatever exposure you can get in an intensive retreat situation will be very beneficial.

The basic schedule will be as follows:

8am: arrival, opening chants, sitting.

8:30 contemplative breakfast (provided)

9:15 – 12:00 morning practice and talk.

12:00-2:00  Contemplative lunch (provided), followed by work period

2:00-3:30 Sitting

3:30-3:50 Tea

3:50-6:00 Sitting, followed by closing chants

6:00 – to bedtime. Dinner (not provided) followed by evening study and contemplative practice in your home.

There will be at least two sessions per day of lujong, Tibetan movement exercises.

If you are not able to attend the full retreat, please put your proposed schedule in writing and email it to me. Please be specific with respect to times and meals. If you can’t attend all the days of the retreat, come for the beginning.

The meals will be vegetarian. If you have serious food allergies, please make a note of them when you register at https://nelson.shambhala.org/our-programs/62/week-long-meditation-retreat-in-the-city/.

There will be space for vajrayana students and practitioners of the Shambhala Sadhana to practice in the back of the main shrine room or in the rear shrine room as appropriate. November 25, the last day of the practice event, will end with an evening celebration. Our regular sitting schedule and open house will be suspended during that week to minimize disruption.

The cost will be $350, or $45 per day. There will be an early bird price reduction to $300 if you register before November 1^st. To ensure your place, please pay at the time you register. The retreat will be a fundraiser for our building, which still has siding and other projects to comp  lete. If you wish to make a larger donation, the “patron price” is $400. This enables us to extend discounts to people who need to pay less. Breakfast, lunch and tea snacks will be provided. If price is an issue for you, talk to Margaret at 250 352 6559.

We will give priority to full time attendees, followed by part time participants. We ask that part timers come for a minimum of two full days, preferably on the first weekend.

In order to make this retreat happen, we will need at least 10 and no more than 22 participants and staff, so it is important to register as soon as possible to ensure that the retreat can go on.