On November 2, 2009, a group of more than 20 members of the Austin Shambhala Meditation Center met to receive Care Team training from the Care Communities, a local non-profit organization dedicated to providing “practical and compassionate support” for people in the Austin area suffering from HIV/AIDS and cancer.

Typical support tasks provided by a Care Team include practical tasks (housework, errands, shopping, yard work) and emotional support (companionship, conversation). The training provided much useful information about how to offer support to a Care Partner, how to listen with full presence, how to set reasonable boundaries, and how to work with and communicate with one’s Care Team to avoid burnout.

The team’s first assignment will be to care for a fellow ASMC member, but the training received last night enables team members to provide care for any Care Partner identified by the Care Communities.

If you would like to join the Care Team or receive training, please contact either:

Roger Temme
Outreach Coordinator
Care Communities
roger@thecarecommunities.org

or

Melinda Rothouse
Austin Shambhala Center Care Team Coordinator
austinshambhala@gmail.com

by Bob Long

I went on a picnic in Parping, Nepal once with a group of local nuns and a few other Westerners. We were sitting on our blanket noshing when a demented conversation got under way. At one point I blithely chirped, “Things exist because they don’t. If they truly did exist, they couldn’t.” A fellow beside me, yawning, replied, “Well, that’s obvious.” I marveled then at the placid assurance with which we accepted being such oddballs, talking above our own heads.

Lisa Randall is an out-there cosmologist who is tenured at Princeton, MIT and Harvard. She looks like a model, and goes to lecture dressed in Miuccia Prada. When she attends conferences, she is famous for heading out to buy couture in her time off. She also does rock climbing, bicycles around Italy, wanders India, writes opera libretti, and likes to quote Eminen and Bjork. Who said academics are a bunch of old fuddy duddies? Or that they have to look like Bea Arthur?

In “Warped Passages: unraveling the mysteries of the universe’s hidden dimensions”, she leads you on an E-Z tour of modern physics, first re-treading the familiar ground of relativity and quantum mechanics, then brushing you up on your supersymmetry and string theory, and finally heading off into her own further abyss of higher dimensional time-space matrices, a domain once thought fruity but now gaining respectability. She makes it all seem eminently reasonable.

To relieve 500 p. of arduous physical theory, there are copious illustrations. One shows a rabbit doing a dance in front of a light projector to make a shadow of a human hand on a screen. There are Feynman diagrams, and pix showing particle arrays as water drops dispersed in a garden hose. I missed a lot, even with all this help, but I did do some good brain aerobics. Chakrasamvara practice didn’t add up either, but it took me out beyond my usual smallness.

There are a lot of interesting factoids within: that the original size of the universe was 10^-32 centimeters (that’s dinky, and it’s also the size of the Planck constant), that only 30 percent of the energy in the universe is carried by matter, the other 70% existing as a latency in the vacuum, and so on. Hey, are she and her pals making all this up? Well, one could just as well ask such a question about the three kayas or the five buddha famlies. Does conceptual mind call forth a world?

You might worry, “But can you take it to the beach?” Heck yeah, you can. Lisa R. is an egalitarian cut-up who wants everyone to get it through humorous metaphors and similes, helping you to grasp the accumulating force patterns of virtual gluons by comparing their actions to the events in the Trojan War, making funny about how it all could have stopped at a mano a mano between Paris and Menelaus (but then she couldn’t have taken her particles on to their end result).

Rolling Stone calls Lisa Randall “one of the 25 most interesting people in the U.S.” It’s undoubtedly true. Stephen Hawking, asked a few years ago to give the Loeb lectures at Harvard, talked mainly about her theories. She’s one of those exasperating three-dimensional beings who have it all, yet somehow remain humble. It is admittedly hard not to hate people who so effortlessly outclass us. Trungpa Rinpoche said the solution to our jealousy is to admire them openly.

The Austin Shambhala Meditation Center is pleased to announce that in addition to the Children’s Program that occurs regularly on the third Sunday of each month, there will now be a Parent Sit on the first Sunday of each month. During the Parent Sit, parent volunteers will host children from 10:00am to 12:00 noon in the Family Room in the Smith House. The intention is to foster family involvement at the Center and to provide parents with an opportunity to participate in the Public Sit while their children are safely engaged in play, reading, and art activities.

Upcoming Parent Sit Dates:
with Rhonda Sparre and Maya Bernal
Sunday, May 3
Sunday, June 7
Sunday, July 5

Upcoming Children’s Program Dates:
with Roy Buchanan
Sunday, May 17
Sunday, June 21
Sunday, July 26

For more information about the Children’s Program or the Parent Sit, contact the Austin Shambhala Meditation Center at 512-443-3263 or austinshambhala@gmail.com.

Uplifting the Family Room
We continue to upgrade the space in the Smith House for children and their families to share time together at the Center. Below you will find a list of items we could use for the space:

Family Room Wish List

• 2-3 medium sized book shelves
• 2 bean bags
• Oversized throw pillows
• Rocking chair (for new mamas and papas)
• Window coverings with hardware for five 31″x 61″ windows
• 2 child size craft tables and chairs
• Any dharma related books, craft books, etc. geared toward children and teens
• Pencils, colored pencils, and crayons
• Glue & child size scissors
• Multi-colored craft paper
• Kid-friendly craft paint (an easel would be cool too)
• Building blocks/games/stretched canvas for kids to make art for the walls
• Other miscellaneous craft supplies

If you can donate of any of these items, you can either drop them off at the center between 12-2pm on Sunday the 26th, or you can contact Rhonda Sparre to make other arrangements. Monetary donations will also be graciously accepted and all monies will go directly to creating a wonderful family space at the ASMC.

On April 17, the Austin Shambhala Center begins a new program, Yoga for Meditators, designed to help meditators prepare the body for seated meditation by cultivating an awareness of breath and body.

Through a series of physical poses and breathing practices that support opening the body, building strength, and inviting flexibility, these classes will focus on cultivating a quiet mind, supple body, and open heart. Classes are appropriate for practitioners at all levels, including beginners.

There is a suggested donation of $15 per class. Please bring your own yoga mat.

Class schedule

• Monday Evenings 5:00-6:30 p.m. with Trent Schmiedehaus
• Friday Mornings 9:30-11:00 a.m. with Kelly Roadhouse
• Friday Noon 12:00-1:00 p.m. with Kelly Roadhouse

About the Instructors

• Kelly Roadhouse has been practicing yoga and Buddhist meditation for more than 10 years. Her teaching is firmly grounded in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of yoga. She is inspired to help others cultivate mindfulness and awareness through the practices of sitting meditation and yoga.
• Trent Schmiedehaus has been practicing meditation and yoga for close to a decade, and he is a certified Dharma Yoga teacher. The union of Dharma and Yoga are at the very heart of his being and these practices are central to his life. Trent has a genuine gift for connecting with others and infuses his teaching with warmth, humor and the spirit of Shambhala Warriorship.

For more information, contact the Austin Shambhala Meditation Center at austinshambhala@gmail.com or 512-443-3263.

The Austin Shambhala Center has for several years provided meditation training, support, and Shambhala Buddhist instruction in two Texas prisons. This program is seeking additional volunteers to visit and provide support to meditators living in these prisons. This program is offered as part of the Austin Shambhala Center and as part of a larger Austin Buddhist network, Inside Meditation.

If you are interested in volunteering or in learning more about what it means to be a “prison volunteer”, please contact Jake Lorfing (goslow@sbcglobal.net), Brennan McDonald (only1brennan@yahoo.com), or Nell Clowder (Clowder@mail.utexas.edu) for information on upcoming information and training sessions.

On Wednesday, February 25, the Austin Shambhala Center joined the rest of the mandala in celebrating Shambhala Day. Several of our sangha members made offerings to celebrate the new year:

• Patrick Larson offered a series of contemplative photographs posted outside on the center patio. You can view Patrick’s photos of our Shambhala Day celebrations at Shambhala Day 2009.
• Miriam Klotz provided an inspiring and encouraging I ching reading for the coming year.
• JoAnne Trubitt read a poem written by Cindy Huyser:
  

  Year of the Earth Ox
  by Cindy Huyser 
  
  She strides in
  with steady, slow hooves.
  Earth element, the ground of Dharma –
  ready to bring
  great harvests from rich soil. 
  
  Patience yoked,
  pulling forward,
  sunlight playing on hide
  over sinew, clavicle
  and scapula. 
  
  Bull-headed, stubborn.
  Not to be stopped
  by stones in the way
  of the plow’s blade.
  Can we match her diligence? 
  
  Abundant land,
  watered with springs
  of tradition –
  green shoots rise
  again and again. 
  
  Flowers of emptiness
  growing
  for the harvest of Earth Ox –
  fragrant petals shining
  in the Great Eastern Sun. 
  
  © Cindy Huyser 2009

• Melinda Rothouse and Rita Ricardo sang two songs acapella in honor of departed San Antonio sangha member Kevin Finnegan: “In This Heart” by Sinead O’Connor and “MLK” by U2/Bono.
• Wendy Leiva presented a poem inspired by the Female Earth Ox:
  

  2136 Warriors
  by Wendy Leiva
  
  Hitting a snag
  as she toils at the till,
  Ox pauses
  ...
  gathers closer to the ground and
  	p u l l s  through
  		with focused effort and intention.
  
  So shall we too,
  when we hit clods
  and rocks
  and roots of old trees
  all long dead but still looming,
  hard and tricky and rough,
  beneath the soft, loose, easy topstuff.
  
  When we stumble
  and catch
  and the plow refuses to move,
  so shall we pause
  ...
  straighten our shoulders to the warrior's work and
  	p u l l  through
  		with focused effort and intention.
  
  © Wendy Leiva 2009

• Maya Bernal (age 10) presented a poem inspired by a crane:
  

  The Crane
  by Maya Bernal
  
  Oh Crane, with your long and graceful wings,
  will you teach me how to soar
  above the people
  next to the Great Eastern Sun?
  
  Oh Crane,
  will you be my good friend
  forever and for always?
  
  © Maya Bernal 2009

• Lou Faiel-Datillo provided an educational and highly hilarious presentation on the Aspidistra plant (also known as the Cast-Iron Plant). There is no way to faithfully reproduce or describe the elation and joy this performance brought all in attendance. You really just had to be there!

Cheerful Shambhala Day and Happy Year of the Female Earth Ox to all!

Sangha member Craig Thompson will be giving a Kyudo demonstration on Monday, March 2 at 7:00pm, at Casa De Luz (1701 Toomey Rd) in the Japonica Salon, upstairs.

For more details and information about Craig, see the JASGA announcement.

For more information about Kyudo, see http://www.zenko.org

Austin sangha member Brennan McDonald recently spearheaded an effort to gather blankets, coats, and other warm clothing to donate to the estimated 4000 homeless persons who sleep outside on our cold winter streets. Her efforts were extremely successful, with coats and blankets piling up quickly at the Austin Shambhala Center in a matter of days.

On January 12, Brennan delivered 21 blankets, 11 coats/jackets and several stocking caps to ARCH, the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless. ARCH is a downtown facility that provides an overnight shelter, day resource center, and health clinic for homeless persons. ARCH is operated by Front Steps, an Austin organization dedicated to the belief “that all people deserve the dignity of a safe place to call home”. (http://www.frontsteps.org/)