What Can I Contribute to the Future of the Centre – Interview with HSC Interim Director

What can I contribute to the future of the Centre?

Interview of the Interim Director by Barbara Stewart

What’s next for the Halifax Shambhala Center? A lot has happened, but the centre, the spacious building with its beautifully appointed interior and shrine rooms, is still there on Tower Road, ready to be occupied more fully, used more fully.

But who is it for? Who is invited? What should be happening there?

Shari Vogler, a lifelong Shambhala member, a Nova Scotian for 36 years, and a student of Trungpa Rinpoche as well as his primary chef, or machen, for longer, has plans for that. “I want to open the doors to the mahasangha,” she said. “I’m committed to welcoming the mahasangha.”

Shari stepped out of retirement – she was a psychiatric nurse and a chronic pain nurse at QEII – and is directing the Shambhala Centre again. Again, that is, because she was co-director for seven years in the 90s and into the 2000s. She is now the interim manager at the Shambhala Center until Feb. 21, Shambhala Day. In the months to come, she hopes to begin to rebuild trust, bring back disaffected members, establish a process to address harm, and make the Shambhala Centre a place for people – new to meditation and long-time practitioners doing various practices — to come together to practice and gather. “I want us to have lungta-raising events,” she said. Those would include Shambhala Day, Midsummer’s Day, Children’s Day – the big celebrations Shambhala has been holding for decades — as well as other events. The future is open, basically.

What’s open, really, is the future of the entire Halifax Shambhala Center – the building, yes, but also the community itself. The Buddhists from away who started Halifax some 35, 40 years ago, at Trungpa Rinpoche’s emphatic suggestion, moving by the hundreds into the quiet and relatively remote Maritime province, and settling in, finding jobs, creating businesses, buying homes, raising families, and practicing and teaching Shambhala Training and Buddhist studies, were sundered a few years ago when Shambhala’s problems became local and then even international news. Many people who’d come to be part of Shambhala no longer felt they were welcome or wanted to be.

Those are the people Invited back, to join, hopefully, those who never left, and those who are newer and still coming to learn to meditate and do Shambhala levels – anybody attracted by Shambhala, Shambhala culture, and Buddhism. At this point, Sakyong Mipham has severed his connections with Shambhala Global Service – the international organization – and therefore with the Halifax Shambhala Center. Which leads back to the question: What now? What should the Halifax Shambhala Center, the community, the building itself, become? What is Shambhala, the community and the building, for, and how should it now be shaped? And can it again become a place where young people, and parents, will gather and bring their children.

 A few months ago, a group of students of Tsoknyi Rinpoche , an esteemed  Buddhist who teaches extensively, in fluent English, in the West, held a retreat at the Halifax Shambhala Centre, in which Rinpoche taught on zoom. Now the centre is again open to many more teachers, more events and ideas – a place to arouse drala in all kinds of ways.

Shari came to this job (again), through the interim advisory council, which spent the summer mapping out ways to tap into the now-diffuse Shambhala community’s feelings about the Shambhala Centre and about one another as a group. Was there interest in becoming a cohesive – if more diverse – community again? A community meeting to discuss this, the first for years, was quite well-attended and lots of people hung out afterwards to chat – a sign the advisory committee, to its collective relief, concluded was a definite yes.

 Rebuilding and revitalizing the Shambhala Center will require staff and volunteers, said Shari. First, new permanent leadership, director or otherwise, must be hired – that search is ongoing. Second, the centre can’t run without volunteers. There are only three other staff members, all part-time: Aimee Silver, for finance and administration, Liza Mathews, practice director, and Sam Howard, building caretaker. To hold celebrations, gatherings, feasts, classes, and regular events, volunteers are needed. Which means a quorum of people who care enough, are passionate about the Shambhala vision, however they may express it, to step up.

Meanwhile, various Shambhala branches have moved back into the building, which will help with cost sharing and make good use of now-empty rooms (revenue was down 10 percent this past year). These include Kalapa Publications and Shambhala Global Services.

In the coming months the hope is modest: to lay a foundation for the centre, to aim it towards finding its way to being a vibrant, uplifting place for meditation and Shambhala culture.

 “It’s up to us all,” she said. “I want to change unwelcome to hospitable – young and old, mahasangha and public.”