To begin: no, there is no guru or charismatic leader directing events from afar (or near),
no group to which we are tied other than our own growing dharma community. ("Dharma",
incidently, has a variety of meanings including: truth, path, teachings of the Buddha.)
Southern Dharma was founded [in 1978] by two ordinary women with a lot of energy, a fair
amount of idealism, and the willingness to take a chance on a dream. The founders were
Melinda Guyol and myself, Elizabeth Kent.
At that time, the late Seventies, we were students at two of the schools in San Francisco that offered curriculums in Eastern studies: the California Institute of Asian Studies, and Holistic Life University. Melinda was in the Master's program at CIAS working towards a degree in counseling and psychotherapy, and I was in a two-year Iyengar yoga course at HLU, where I also helped to put out the fIrst issues of Yoga Journal. We were both very much a part of the spiritual and intellectual climate of that time in California, a time when spiritual truths seemed very real, and the human heart and mind capable of wondrous things.
By June of 1978, however, I found myself increasingly restless with classes and tests and term papers. I was beginning to feel like a well-used sponge, soaking up ideas and instructions and squeezing them all out again, time after time, in papers and tests for classes and articles for Yoga Journal. Rather suddenly I felt compelled to leave California, where I had lived happily for ten years, to return to "someplace in the Southeast" where I had spent the first twenty-four years of my life. I was then forty-one.
I relayed these feelings to my friend Melinda, who was finishing work on her Master's
that June. She had lived in the Bay Area since the age of fifteen (She was then
thirty-seven.), but had been born in Knoxville, and was intrigued with the idea of
returning to and exploring the region of her birth. Apparently, we were both ready to
make changes, without knowing exactly what those changes would be. So, in the summer of
1978, steeped in all the spiritual idealism of the California Seventies, we set out to
find a nitch for ourselves in the South.
The idea of a retreat center had often been tossed around with friends at dinner parties, and the name "Southern Dharma" had popped into my head one day as I was walking down the stairs of the house in which I lived in San Francisco. But Southern Dharma was not by any means a well-defined vision when we embarked upon that exploratory summer trip.
Actually, we had thought we might like to open a bookstore, and our plan was to visit a number of southern cities, figure out which needed a bookstore, then decide whether or not we wanted to live there. Our strategy on reaching a town was to look up and visit all the main bookstores, to gauge the extent to which an alternative culture, if any, had developed, to look up and talk to friends of friends, and to get a sense of the city. We proceeded in that vein from Pensacola through Birmingham, Atlanta, Savannah, Charlotte, Charleston, Columbia, Asheville, Greensboro, Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill . . . and we learned a great deal in the process, the most notable being the fact that the sight of another bookstore (which we had both always loved) was by this time -- twelve cities, two months later -- beginning to make us quite ill. It had also become increasingly clear, as we wound up weary and discouraged in Chapel Hill, that there was no dearth of bookstores in the Southeast: every city we visited seemed to be amply blessed. Most distressing, however, was the heat. It was hot in the Southeast, hot as a furnace everywhere we went -- everywhere, that is, except in the mountains around Asheville, North Carolina.
It was about this time that we began to seriously consider the "other idea", the idea of
a retreat center . . . a small retreat center somewhere in the cool mountains. At this
point I wish I could say that one of us had a vision or heard voices directing us what to
do next, but there was nothing so mystical about SDRC's beginnings. We were simply two
women looking for our destinies and hoping to find them someplace where it didn't get too
hot.
A further note about our motives: they were not, at least consciously, that simple. We both wanted to work at something we believed in, something we felt was worthwhile and needed, and it seemed to us, in our own search for meaning, that few things were more needed than to uncover the intrinsic purity so many of us had come to believe could be found at the center of the human heart. Providing a supportive environment and teachers to encourage such work seemed to us a worthwhile endeavor. In addition, there was for me a more practical consideration: I wanted to use a recently-acquired inheritance in a way I felt good about, rather than turn over a large portion of it to the government and its defense department. All of these thoughts were in mind as we drove back from Chapel Hill into the cool, lofty mountains of Western North Carolina.
By this time it was late August. After a short stay at The Inn of Hot Springs, we went back to California where we spent the better part of the next three months defining the vision, writing down ideas, examining our own motives and resources and goals, talking to more people, and finally enlisting the service of a lawyer with experience in setting up non-profit foundations. On December 7, 1978, Southern Dharma Foundation became a legal entity, a public charity, incorporated under the laws of California.
We spent the winter of 1978/79 at the Inn of Hot Springs in very beautiful, very rural Madison County, riding around with real estate people, looking at the winter landscape, and falling in love with a different piece of property each time we went out. We looked at about twenty places before finding the one that met our increasingly refined criteria, settling on a rugged, remote one hundred, thirty-five acre farm on Hap Mountain in the community of Spring Creek, with a bold rushing creek, a knoll and vistas, huge boulders, fields and forests and ferns -- everything that makes the mountains so alluring.
In late spring of 1979 we began a five-year frenzy of clearing land, building new
buildings, remodeling old buildings, and "dressing up" (as our real estate man called it)
existing roads to the property. It was a wonderful, energetic time of learning hundreds
of new things: how to build from the ground up, how to put in a road and take care of it,
how to capture a spring and build a stone wall. There were new and marvelous tools to
learn about: chainsaws and table saws, planers and sanders, routers and lathes. We
discovered the joy of bib overalls and LL Bean boots, watched our city cats become country
cats, and raised a delightful dog named Emma. There were tears and laughter and arguments
and difficult decisions, and the satisfying feeling of good, hard work. And in the end,
nestled in an upper valley of Hap Mountain, there was a remodeled workshop with a bedroom
loft; a shored-up barn with a new extension; a finished 10'x14' retreat cabin, originally
more of a tree-house, abandoned by "uncle Jake" some fifty years ago; a meditation hall
large enough for forty people; a 3600 square foot "Dharmatory"; and a new retreat cabin
made out of 100-year-old barn beams and other "leftover" materials. Southern Dharma, once
just a thought, then a bunch of words on paper, was now a living, breathing reality.
During this five year building phase, Southern Dharma sponsored a limited number of programs, and word very gradually began to spread about the new retreat center being built. As word spread, interest seemed to grow, and we found more and more people visiting and offering to help -- caring about what was happening.
Many people have given support and encouragement to this vision of a meditation center in the mountains, a place to study and to practice the dharma, to do the inner work that we all must sooner or later do. It is for this purpose that Southern Dharma was created, and it is our hope that programs can continue to be offered that will help us in this journey we have undertaken to explore the workings of our minds and hearts.