NWDA News

2022 was a Vibrant Year for NWDA

Northwest Dharma Association continued with a broad array of activities during 2022, benefitting sanghas and people around the Northwest and Western Canada. In December NWDA presented an overview of Buddhism, for a class of 9th grade students at The Northwest School in Seattle. The students explored the story of Siddhartha Gautama, the spread of Buddhism across Asia, and the basics of mindfulness, meditation, and ethics. In October NWDA sponsored a Regional Buddhist Teachers and Leaders gathering hosted by the Portland Insight Meditation Community. This was our first in-person gathering since the Covid pandemic. (We in 2023 returned to Portland for…

Dharma in Canada

Nuns Launch Buddhist Monastery in Alberta Home

Many attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony, which officially launched the Canmore Theravada Buddhist Community and Monastery

A new monastic community, focused on nuns and depth of practice, is blossoming in the Canadian mountain town of Canmore, Alberta. The Canmore Theravada Buddhist Community and Monastery opening ceremony on June 17, was attended by about 100 people in person, 35 on Zoom, including many monastics from different traditions. It was held at the Canmore recreation center, starting with a delicious potluck multi-cultural meal, followed by the ceremony. The Canmore Theravada Buddhist Community became a monastery six months earlier, after 28 years as a meditation center, with the Dec. 11 arrival of Buddhist nun Ayya Ahimsa. Now the monastery…

Compassionate Action

Kagyu Changchub Chuling to Offer Retreat Space
For Individuals and Groups Starting in 2024

The walkway of the main building in the south cloister

Kagyu Changchub Chuling (KCC), based in Portland, is opening our 240-acre retreat center to the greater dharma community beginning in 2024. Individuals and groups are invited to rent one of our 16 cabins for personal retreats, or the entire facility for group retreats. The retreat center is located on the plateau above the Columbia River Gorge, two hours east of Portland. Called Ser Chö Ösel Ling (SCOL), “Land of the Clear Light Golden Dharma,” it is a place of vast skies, wild beauty, and deep quiet. We are opening the facility to a wider array of dharma practitioners now that…

Dharma Healing, Arts

The multi-layered ‘Small Boat, Vast Ocean’:
My Years in Solitary Buddhist Retreat

A favorite meditation spot near Raymond, Washington, overlooking the Willapa River

Diane Berger has published a book – “Small Boat, Vast Ocean” – about her three-year retreat in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which took place from 2011 to 2015. This article focuses on the quality and purpose, of the stages of those three years. Three years, three months, three days. A long time to go away from friends and family, away from society altogether, to dive into the realm of deep psyche, and further, into soul and spirit. It turns out that an initiation of time and solitude is required for such a journey—to enter the nether regions, and to come…

Dharma Education

Sharing the Dharma with Children and Families

Dharma School students dressed as hungry ghosts enter the zendo during the Sejiki Festival

Dharma Rain Zen Center’s program for children and their families is developing new and creative approaches, reflecting people’s changed experience coming out of the Covid pandemic. Coming together in person again after a two-year hiatus, we saw that we needed to meet the needs of our youth, and the needs of families, as they emerge from the challenges and isolation of the pandemic years. Everyone needs to come together, to be seen and heard, and to feel they belong to a community. The two-year separation was hard, but it allowed us to see our program with new eyes, rather than…

Sangha News

Clear Mountain Monastery Seeks Forest Site

Luang Por Passano, Ajahn Kovilo, and Ajahn Nisabho, pray during a 2023 monastery land search excursion near Issaquah’s Cougar Mountain.

The Clear Mountain Monastery sangha is now actively searching for a Seattle-area monastery site, two years after monk Ajahn Nisabho returned to the Northwest from Thailand. Ajahn Nisabho and Ajahn Kovilo, who plans to join the community full-time starting in 2024, are both ordained in the Thai forest tradition, known for its adherence to the Buddha’s ancient monastic code and its focus on meditation and awakening. “These last two years have made it clear there’s a real hunger for teachings and practice rooted in the suttas and monastic ethos,” said Ajahn Nisabho. “So many intuit the power of the Buddha’s…