NWDA News

NWDA Website Will be Easier to Use With Update

The website is getting an overhaul, to make it more-user friendly for member groups and for visitors to the site. The development of the site has been an intensive multi-year project, which has required substantial investments of time and money. We are very excited about the revised version. Perhaps the most important changes is that Member Groups will be directly entering and upgrading their own information, including calendar items and group member listings. This new capability will be easier for members, and also for the association’s very limited volunteer and paid staff resources. The upgrade will have several additional components:…

Compassionate Action

Dharma Thrives in Seattle’s Urban Jungle:
Downtown sit groups, Oases for Solo Practice

Diane Hetrick and Carolyn McManus’ Wednesday sit in the Frye Museum, on the edge of downtown Seattle, offers an oasis of mindfulness

Even in the midst of downtown Seattle’s rushing noise and congestion, people are increasingly finding ways to engage in deep spiritual practice and meditation. On Mondays and Wednesdays at 12:30 p.m., two different practice groups regularly sit together. In addition, individuals have found some very creative places to practice, creating open space in very dense work days. Below several of us share our urban practice secrets, with an invitation to join us anytime, or create your own. All of these offer relief from Seattle’s urban cacophony, a contemplative pause with others or alone, not necessarily in a particular spiritual tradition….

Dharma in Canada

Dalai Lama to Teach in Vancouver Oct. 21 to 23
Online Ticket Sites Have Opened Up

Tickets are now available for the Oct. 21 to 23 teaching visit by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, to Vancouver, B.C. Two sets of tickets will be available for two sets of events over the three days. On Oct. 21 and 22, His Holiness will lead programs offered by the Vancouver-based Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education, and some other education-related activities. On the morning of Oct. 23, His Holiness will confer an empowerment of Avalokiteshvara, the Tibetan meditational deity of compassion. That afternoon he will give an introductory Buddhist teaching based on Geshe Langri Thangpa’s Eight Verses of Training…

Dharma Education

Seattle U Invites Buddhists to Interfaith Council

Taijo Imanaka, one of two Buddhist delegates to the council, and head priest at the Seattle Koyasan Buddhist Temple

Seattle University has included Buddhists in its newly expanded interfaith council, part of widening the council to include people from non-Abrahamic traditions. Expanding the Ecumenical and Interreligious Advisory Council to include people who practice Buddhism as a non-theistic spiritual tradition, will add a new dimension to the discussion, said Dr. Michael Trice, assistant dean for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry, and assistant professor of theological ethics and constructive theology. Some topics that are natural to theists, such as the oneness of God, might launch discussions with non-theists into totally unforeseen directions, said…

Dharma Healing, Arts

Urban Contemplatives and Renunciation:
The Practice of Freedom in Lay Life

(Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series by Tuere Sala about Northwest people and others who have made Buddhist practice the center of their lives, so much so that they live almost like monastics. In this second installment Sala explores renunciation, what these people have let go of and what they’ve gained; and compassion, how this renunciation has opened their hearts to what Sala calls a “seamless integration with the difficulty of life,” an alignment with the suffering of others.) Part one of this article discussed the lives and practices of five individuals, including myself, who live…

Sangha News

Snohomish Burmese Monastery Poised to Grow

Ven. Pannobhasa sitting before the altar in the Dhamma Gone Yee Snohomish monastery

With a new and highly educated abbot from Myanmar (Burma), the monastery Dhamma Gone Yee Snohomish is moving into a new era of growth. The Snohomish County monastery, one of just two Burmese monasteries in Western Washington, is modest now. Ven. Pannobhasa lives alone and teaches the dhamma in a small blue house, its living room converted into the shrine room. The house is just off the county road south of Snohomish, on a five-acre plot that’s a combination of forest and wetlands. The setting is rustic and very Northwest. But for Pannobhasa, a slightly-built man with an open smile,…