Our Path to Now Chapter 2

Maybe it was the room that beckoned us to leap. Large, with beautiful blond hardwood floors and high windows fronting Peachtree Street in Buckhead, it had seen its share of leaps, having served as a practice space for the Atlanta Ballet. Members of the Atlanta Dharmadhatu gathered to check it out. Visions of a shrine against one long windowless wall danced in our heads. 

The main space was big enough to accommodate the largest programs we could then imagine. Discussions about our readiness to take on a place not subsidized by residential rent occurred simultaneously with plans for how to best renovate to suit our needs: spaces for meditation instruction, a community room, a smaller shrine room for advanced practices, and an office for Richard Macgregor, who had come to Atlanta to lead our small but committed group at the request of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. 

And lead us Richard did, with not only his vision of what we could accomplish but in the hard work it would take to get there. On weekday evenings, as we showed up in work clothes after our day jobs were done, we would delight in the progress Richard had made each day. We wielded sledgehammers. Walls were demolished and, with coffee or beer in hand, we debated where new ones should go up. Eventually, after marathon painting sessions, new carpet went down and banners went up. The Atlanta Dharmadhatu had a new home.  

“If you build it, they will come” goes the expression, and come they did. All day sittings every Sunday – three hours in the morning, three in the afternoon, and sometimes an evening session as well – brought members and new people alike, as did weeknight open houses, and ongoing Buddhist classes. The Vajra Regent Ӧsel Tendzin came to teach a weekend program in 1981 and conducted a triple wedding ceremony: Jackie and Keith Muse, Kathy and Harry Tate, and Caroline and Michael Mirando, friends from South Carolina, were married in a shrine room full of well-wishers.

Various contemplative arts found a new venue. Allen Ginsberg gave a poetry reading. A local ikebana teacher taught numerous sangha members who have maintained and passed on over the years the tradition of enriching the center with elegant flower arrangements. Dance parties and celebrations of all sorts helped strengthen and expand our sense of community.

Then came Shambhala Training, a series of weekend programs developed by Trungpa Rinpoche to present the path of warriorship. This non-sectarian approach cultivates the wisdom that arises from recognizing basic goodness as the ground of life and invites us to overcome the habitual patterns that obscure our inherent gentleness, fearlessness, and intelligence. The program, which had been rolled out in other cities in 1978, began in Atlanta in 1981. Because the format called for a secular environment, beautiful portable boxes were constructed to cover the shrines during the weekend levels; the boxes were topped with ikebana arrangements and new banners were hung throughout the space. 

For the first couple of years, with no one in Atlanta yet authorized to teach Shambhala Training, we imported visiting teachers. The first was Ellen Kearney who, with her then husband Peter Lieberson, was responsible for administering Shambhala Training in east coast centers. She asked Carol Hyman to coordinate the program in Atlanta and, as Shambhala Training flourished, Carol and her husband Patton were asked to take on the role of Resident Directors. They began teaching some of the weekends programs and were soon followed by other local teachers who trained and gained authorization to direct the levels.  

Doubtless we’d have stayed put in that happy space above Blues Harbor were it not for another leap. This time it was in the value of rental property in booming Buckhead. In Tibetan Buddhism, bardo refers to an intermediate state, often the period immediately after death. But it can also refer more generally to any in-between place. When time to renegotiate our lease came with an offer we couldn’t accept, the Atlanta sangha entered a bardo that would last more than a decade, until we bought the property on Church Street. More on that wandering period in the next chapter of the history of Shambhala in Atlanta.