by Laura Landau

On Friday night, the Los Angeles Shambhala Center was honored with a public talk given by the Venerable Changling Rinpoche. Changling Rinpoche, enthroned by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and a student of the late Penor Rinpoche, has been invited by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche to teach at Shambhala Centers throughout the Mandala.

Changling Rinpoche gave us teachings about the only real wealth we possess: nothing belongs to us except our own self-confidence. When we develop self-confidence, we can work with anything. We develop this confidence and we work with regret in the same way: by working with our minds. It isn’t enough to know that we’ve got a problem; we need to discover the method to work with that problem.
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Click here to check out pictures from this year’s Shambhala Arts Festival.

There are also some videos on YouTube.

For more information on Shambhala Art go to http://www.shambhalaart.org

In January 2009 our film crew returned from six-weeks on location in Bodhgaya, India where we filmed interviews with His Holiness Karmapa, H.E. Gyaltsab Rinpoche, Ven. Thrangu Rinpoche, Ven. Mingyur Rinpoche, Lama Chodrak and several torma artists. We carefully documented monk and nun artists as they created many beautiful butter sculptures for the 26th Kagyu Monlam in Bodhgaya and captured some amazing footage for what will become the first torma documentary ever made.

Enjoy our updated website and forward this announcement to all of your friends.

Click here to view new video clips and photo galleries

www.tormafilm.com

Written by Alexandra Milsom

If you need any incentive to jump through your Shambhala hoops and get to Vajrayana Seminary, perhaps I should tell you about the waffles. That’s right, at our recent Vajrayana Weekthün, Marilyn Moore and “Machen” (Shambhala jargon for sometime-personal chef to the Sakyong) Guy Blume got up early and made waffles and bacon. It was Friday morning of our long week of prostrating and counting repetitions of mantras, and the waffles certainly helped motivate us. They also offered us a legitimate excuse to start late that morning.

The prospect of a city-based, weeklong retreat may seem strange to those of us who think the word “retreat” means isolated asceticism in Guru Rinpoche’s cave and a diet of tsampa and nettle-leaves. Over the past few years, I have personally come to equate intensive-practice with altitude-sickness and coyote-hunts that interrupt my nighttime tent-slumber. The success of the L.A. sangha’s vajrayana weekthün, then, held during the third week of April this year, should come as a relief: the urban setting can actually be conducive to practice, humorous post-meditation interludes, and enjoyable sangha-antics.
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Hi everyone,

We had an amazing day yesterday! We had at least 30 people in the shrine room the whole two hours, roughly half of whom were complete newbies!!! Greg, I believe Claude ended up giving group meditation instruction to everyone at the beginning since there were so many new folks. We actually ran out of cushions and chairs!! (Joel and Melanie, any chance of us holding off selling the remaining red cushions at Eagle Rock so that the Westside can borrow a few of them along with any zafus or support cushions? If we end up back with the Zen Center in June then they should have more cushions we can borrow… Just a thought).

Thanks to everyone for their support and hard work in setting this up (with a special shout-out to Jason for all the publicity, Anne who schlepped all the cushions from ER and set up the beautiful shrine room (see photos), and did umdze duties, Claude for his talk and instruction, Stanley and Tom for their leadership and all the hard work getting us the space) and everyone who supported in ways large and small!
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