Several Southern Dharma teachers and participants have commented on the uniqueness of Southern
Dharma Retreat Center. Some other retreat centers are centered on a single teacher or at
least a single teaching or religion. Many of those retreat centers offer not just meditation
retreats but other kinds of retreats such as family retreats or young adults’ retreats or
retreats not directly related to spiritual practice per se. There are other centers which are
privately owned and rent their facilities to meditation retreats as well as other kinds of
events (such as weddings). And then there are monasteries which are fundamentally communities
and which as adjuncts to their primary purposes offer retreats to outsiders who wish to join,
temporarily, the life of the community.
As far as we know, Southern Dharma is unique in that the integration of its programs is
"horizontal" rather than "vertical." That is, all the programs at Southern Dharma, following
its Mission Statement, have a single theme running through them: "Meditation, contemplation,
and silence are underlying threads." Whatever names we give to spiritual realities,
cultivating silence is a fundamental method for approaching them.
Enlightenment, "working in the vineyard," the "peace that passes understanding," the presence of the One, elimination of suffering, emptiness - all of these are different names for a state of being that emerges out of silence, stillness, and the interior life.
How can one write about silence? The stillness and solitude of Southern Dharma’s isolated forested setting are things to be experienced, not written about.
One retreatant wrote, "The silence takes some getting used to. How rarely have I been in a location with absolutely no sounds except for the occasional bird chirping. At first, I 'heard' the silence as 'deafening.' Then I realized that I was hearing only the background hum in my ears, a 'sound' which is always in the background but I’m almost never aware of it because of low level, ever present noises such as traffic and fluorescent lights. After a few days at Southern Dharma, I got used to even this background hum and it too faded from my awareness and I then had a sense of total silence. Only then was I able to open to the inner sense of my core being."
This past winter, along with other retreat centers in the Asheville area, Southern Dharma was featured on the front page of a March Sunday Asheville Citizen-Times issue. The interesting thing is that of the eleven retreat centers featured, the other ten listed annual numbers of visitors of at least 10,000. Southern Dharma’s was 500. It’s the very smallness of Southern Dharma’s retreats that is one reason for their success.
Natural Awakenings, Charlotte Edition featured Southern Dharma in a two-page spread
complete with photos. The article states, "the habit of mindfulness, or simply being present
to what is happening, requires constant training, However, once an ongoing practice is
established, the results are deeply gratifying and life changing."
Local author Sara Jenkins – a long-time participant at Southern Dharma and a former staff member is quoted: "Southern Dharma felt like a path that opened in the wilderness of my yearning."
Leslie Rawls – a retreat leader who resides in Charlotte – is quoted as saying, "It’s incredibly beautiful and nestled in the mountain tops, so it feels like a good place to look inward."
is now available from the Southern Dharma website. Click on the "2006 Retreat Schedule" link on the left of the homepage www.southerndharma.org and then click on the link "Online Registration" close to the top of the retreat schedule page just above the 2006 retreat schedule.
Two college groups each devoted five full days during their spring vacations performing
volunteer work for Southern Dharma on a work-meditation retreat – six students and an adult
advisor from Warren Wilson College in Asheville and four students – part of the Self
Awareness Group – from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The work accomplished was quite impressive! – road work, rebuilding steps to the Meditation Hall, construction of several rock stairways, carving out a new path along the lower stream, staining of buildings, construction of a compost bin, clearing the brush obscuring the view from the knoll, performing yeoman service clearing and raking the gardens, and many other projects as well.
have been the most popular of all the retreats during the past year. Spring Work Weekend found more than twenty participants working in drizzle and snow, unseasonably harsh even for mid March. Projects included road maintenance, lodge spring cleaning, polyurethaning furniture, outdoor wooden step rebuilding, log splitting, fence constructing, screen door replacing, painting, and recipe transcribing.
And before and after the work each day, silent meditation sessions provided the connection to Southern Dharma’s reason for being. With Work Weekends the most popular of all Southern Dharma’s retreats, perhaps we should be offering more opportunities for combining work with practice during some retreats. Do you have any ideas?
For those interested, Sandy Gentei Stewart’s retreats (June 30 – July 6 in 2006) have a tradition of doing just this.
With all the rain this spring, the bluets, bloodroot, phacelia, trillium, daisies, and other wild flowers have provided colorful counterpoint to the sheer profusion of greenness.
A railing was added to the stairs from the Meditation Hall to the upper road and a fence was constructed to separate, aesthetically, the parking lot from the lawn area. We’re now using "green" cleaning and paper products. Other projects we anticipate completing during work periods include construction of more tent platforms, construction of a new unit to store firewood to replace the ramshackle one below the parking lot, and improved flower beds.
Southern Dharma tries to keep retreat fees as low as it reasonably can. In fact, that’s written into its mission statement. One way to do this is by using volunteers. A description of the volunteer position to help during retreats can be found on our website at http://www. southerndharma.org/VolunteerOpportunities.htm.
In a nutshell, a retreat volunteer should arrive at least a day before the retreat, plan to work about four hours each retreat day – mostly in the kitchen before lunch – and stay through the afternoon on the final day to help clean up. Compensation is room, food, opportunity to attend retreat events during the afternoon and evening, and the knowledge that you’ve devoted time and effort so that others may have a worthwhile retreat experience.
Volunteers are still needed for many retreats – particularly those in late summer and beyond.
Perhaps you would like to come up for just an afternoon and help by working on the road, gardening, mowing the lawn, or some other project. If you would like to volunteer, contact us by email at info@southerndharma.org or call us at 828-622-7112.
This spring the following critters, among others, have been observed: raccoons, moles, mice,
flying squirrels, groundhogs, rabbits, a copperhead snake, a bobcat, opossums (or is the word opossa?), deer,
squirrels, and chipmunks. Bears – though not seen – have been inferred: What else could
have tossed over that fifty pound trash can beside the garage and have strewn garbage for
several hundred feet along the upper road?
The bird feeder outside the dining room attracted more than thirty birds at a time throughout the winter – chickadees, titmice, purple finches, and many others. Each morning a flock of well over a dozen gold finches would arrive, spend twenty minutes, and depart all as a flock. We’ve been watching them turn from a dull brown to bright yellow with the progression of spring. The staff has taken to purchasing forty pound bags of bird food on its periodic trips to Asheville to buy supplies.
As you can well imagine, the Southern Dharma office receives many catalogues and ads for recently published books in spirituality and practice. We’re careful to keep an eye out for promising additions to Southern Dharma’s small library. Among many fine books, two are noteworthy because they are somewhat unusual.
The Gods Drink Whiskey by Stephen T. Asma, Harper San Francisco, 2005 is part travelogue, part autobiography, and part exegesis on Buddhist philosophy. The author labels his style of writing “philosophical journalism.” It is a journal of the author’s adventures, musings, and conversations in Cambodia while on a teaching assignment at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh. After the Khmer Rouge massacres in the 1970s and the destruction of Buddhist culture, this thirties-something western academic was invited to lecture on Buddhist teachings to aid in reestablishing Buddhism in Cambodia.
The author’s refreshing self-deprecating style and wide ranging experience result in a fine series of vignettes on, among other things, the Khmer Rouge debacle, Cambodian cultural mores, impact of globalization on Cambodia, the Four Noble Truths, and the actual mixture of superstitious age-old practices in Cambodia with the austere teachings of the Buddha.
A number of books were on display at the Dixon’s Centering Prayer retreat in May. One such book was Thoughts Matter, by Mary Margaret Funk, O.S.B., Continuum, 2005. The book is an explanation and modern interpretation of writings by John Cassian and the Desert Fathers from the early centuries C.E. That long ago there was already a comprehensive system of teachings about spiritual practice.
Each chapter in this book concerns one area. Chapters are entitled About Thoughts, About Food, About Sex, About Things, About Anger, About Dejection, About Acedia, About Vainglory, and About Pride. The chapter on “things” is particularly relevant to our consumerist, materialist society and has many trenchant insights about how “having” leads to more “wanting” – whether these be material possessions or experiences or accomplishments.
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Each year a few less than 500 come to a Southern Dharma retreat
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65% are women
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44% are new to Southern Dharma
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56% found out about Southern Dharma from a friend or acquaintance
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25% found out about Southern Dharma from a web search
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21% are from greater Asheville
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22% are from greater Charlotte, Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh, . . .
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24% are from greater Columbia, Atlanta, . . .
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4% are from greater Knoxville
- 33% of Southern Dharma’s income comes from contributions
A Mealtime Conversation
- transcribed more or less as overheard
at dinner just before a retreat began
A: I’ve got questions about the three characteristics of existence according to Buddhism. Dukkha (suffering) and aniccca (impermanence) as basic Buddhist ideas about the nature of life are pretty obvious. You realize their truth if you just reflect on your own life. The ideas are both simple and profound and the truth of them becomes deeper with experience. But the third characteristic is anatta (non-self). This seems to me to be so fundamentally wrong that somehow the idea must have been lost in translation.
B: Anatta means that there is no abiding self. The self is an illusion.
A: But that strikes me as rather absurd.
B: Well; if there’s a self, point to it.
A: If I jab this fork into my hand like this, there’s hurting going on.
B: Yes, there’s hurting but no self that feels the hurt. Just hurting pure and simple.
A: For all you know I could be a robot without any awareness – just a machine. This machine could be saying all the things you hear me saying and saying, “Ouch!” when I jab my hand, but maybe, for all you know, there’s no awareness – just a mechanical reaction without any interiority, without any feeling.
B: So?
A: You have to label the difference between a machine without interiority and an aware being – a sentient being – with some word. That’s what the word “self” means. There are different streams of awareness; different selves. When the fork jabs this hand rather than your hand, the awareness that’s associated with this body is aware of hurting. But not the awareness that’s associated with your body. There needs to be a way to designate these different awarenesses and that’s why we have the words “self” and “selves.” There are distinct streams of consciousness and they are the selves.
B: But the self isn’t something that remains the same.
A: No one says it is. There is a stream of consciousness but, like a river, the contents are ever changing. The self isn’t a “thing” but whatever it is, one needs to be able to distinguish different streams of consciousness and in particular the stream of consciousness associated with actual experiencing. That’s what’s meant by the “self.”
B: Interesting. Hey, I think I’ll get some more of this African Peanut Soup. I’ll be back in a minute with something to say about that.
Across
2. At SD most retreatants stay in the _____
15. Generosity
33. Round cushion
43. SD has four _____ platforms
Down
4. Southern _____ Retreat Center
6. The _____ would give SD accolades for its concern about the environment
30. Does a dog have Buddha nature?
31. What you do on answer to 33 across
33. _____ Buddhism
35. An SD teacher lives in this state
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