Hello again from the Retreat For Peace webmaster!
Although I've studied at Diamond Mountain for the last six years with the three-year retreatants, I'm not going to be participating directly in the group retreat. Instead, my husband Ted and I are moving to Vermont (near Ted's parents) and building a house where we can serve others and do our own long retreats.
Those plans hit a bit of a speed bump today when we got our estimate for insulation... yowza! Normally insulation is not a huge expense, but we are building a next-generation super-insulated house, plus we are using environmentally-friendly materials, so the estimate was way higher than I was expecting.
My first instinct was to think, "How do we get more money?" It's a reasonable thought, but I was very selfish in my approach. It basically boiled down to "How do I get more money from someone else?", which is not exactly the height of Buddhist worldview!
Fortunately, it was time for yoga class at the DM temple. At the beginning of class I was still thinking solely in terms of my needs (I fool myself that I'm mostly taking care of Ted, but who am I kidding?). But as the class continued, my thoughts shifted nicely. By the end of class I resolved to help my DM classmates pay for their future homes by improving the Retreat For Peace website, and also to help über-volunteer Nicole Davis with her own strawbale house.
So I made a date to help Nicole and Cortney tomorrow and Friday, and I spent the afternoon making changes to this website, including a major change in our overall message. While it's true we are committed to bringing about world peace, our real motivation runs much deeper than that. We want to use the microscope of meditation to examine the nature of reality itself, to see if there is more to life than the way it appears and whether enlightenment—ultimate lasting happiness for all beings—is possible.
Anyway, I'm sure Ted and I will figure out a solution to our rapidly-escalating building costs, and I find the best way to distract myself from obsessive number-crunching is to help my Diamond Mountain comrades glide smoothly into their deep retreat.
