Exploring Enlightened Society Together: Shambhala Winter Retreat

Come—join us for a 5-day deep dive into Buddhism and social practice led by emeritus professor Janet Bronstein, who draws on the work of Joanna Macy, Arawana Hayashi, Otto Scharmer and, of course, Chögyam Trungpa. Expect lots of meditation practice, embodied practices for navigating polarization and conflict, practical tools for facilitating group wisdom, generative discussions, and opportunities to explore community.

Register here! https://portland.shambhala.org/event/817525-exploring-enlightened-society-together-portland-shambhala-winter-retreat-with-janet-bronstein/

The Buddhist and Shambhala teachings take the view that humans are basically good, kind, wise and resilient. What we call "becoming enlightened" is waking up to our own basic nature and then stabilizing this experience of sanity so that it becomes the source of all of our actions. In this retreat we will explore how we can bring the insights and experiences we have with the individual path towards enlightenment to the societal level.

We will consider the enlightened qualities that societies express when they can deal with reality, treat people with respect, and liberate themselves from reactive emotions and fixed assumptions. We will tap our own experiences as humans who have lived in social environments all of our lives to map out practical steps that each of us can take, in our own social contexts, to move our society towards wakefulness.

About Janet
Janet Bronstein has been in the Shambhala community since 1979.
She helped found the Birmingham Shambhala Center in 1998, and has been a meditation instructor and teacher at the center since that time. She joined the Shambhala Process Team when it was formed in the Fall of 2018, and continues to volunteer in various ways to support the Shambhala community through its many transitions.

Janet was a faculty member at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health from 1986 to 2016, and is now an emeritus professor. A medical anthropologist, she conducted research on health services and health policy for underserved populations and taught courses in public health ethics and public health policy.

Janet has always been inspired by the societal aspects of Shambhala, both the vision of enlightened society and Trungpa Rinpoche's insistence that human wisdom is multifaceted and universal, not belonging to any one culture or era. Exploring enlightened society with others allows her to bring together her dharma commitment to Shambhala and her background and interest in how societies are organized, how they function and how they change.