Support Community Dharma Leadership Training for Lin

Dear Friends,

I am excited to share with you that I am joining Spirit Rock’s Community Dharma Leadership Training Program (CDL7) from 2025 – 2027. This program is dedicated to nurturing the next generation of dharma leaders, cultivating them to guide and inspire diverse, multi-generational, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural communities.

Over the past seven years, my focus has been on teaching nature meditation and ecodharma. Through this journey, I have learned that community building is at the heart of dharma practice and transformation—both for our own practice and for the wider world. I want to deepen my ability to cultivate and foster communities in a complex world. I also want to widen my teaching not only around nature meditation and ecodharma, but also in daily life. In addition to sharing earth-based teachings, I would like to build communities centered around AAPI, midlife transformation, women, climate resilience, and so on.

I love the phrase “pay it forward.” It points to a sense of selflessness - that our generosity may not directly benefit us today, but it will contribute to the next generation and beyond. And I am moved that this is how the Buddhist teachings have been passed down for two thousand years. As I have benefited from all those who have supported my teachers, whose teachings and practices have transformed my life, I now ask for your support for my own journey.

The Spirit Rock CDL7 program spans two years and includes five retreats. The base registration fee is $9,250, with additional costs for teacher and mentor dana, airfare, and other expenses, bringing the total to around $15,000. I am hoping to raise funds for the registration fee over the coming years.

Every contribution counts and there is no contribution too small. Whatever you are able to offer is received with heartfelt gratitude. Your support would mean the world to me, knowing that this training is supported by a community, and allows me the opportunity to carry the dharma forward to others. Thank you for being a part of this journey.

With gratitude,

Lin

Spirit Rock’s Community Dharma Leadership Training Program (CDL7) Program Description:

We live in a complex, demanding and divisive world. As an antidote to personal, socio-political and environmental suffering, Buddhist teachings can provide a wise, loving, generous ground from which we can respond to the profound challenges of our time—climate change, immigration, animal rights, growing economic disparity, and entrenched systems of racism, misogyny and oppression.

CDL will develop the next generation of dharma leaders with the capacity, resilience and needed skills to carry the dharma forward. This training will cultivate the inner resources to skillfully address these and other issues. Grounded in ancient Buddhist wisdom, graduates of CDL will learn to embody, articulate, share and cultivate the dharma within diverse, multi-generational, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural communities, so that it is accessible for all who seek refuge.

The foundation of the training is rooted in the Early Buddhist, Theravada tradition, and the program is designed to encourage innovative ways to live a life of dharma and to integrate and offer these timeless teachings within our contemporary world.

CDL provides training for future dharma leaders who reside both nationally and internationally. Our aim is to support the dharma in becoming fully accessible. This includes the participation of young adults, communities of color, a more inclusive class structure, and other underrepresented communities.

This is a Spirit Rock, Theravada-based training program to develop community leaders. Priority will be given to those supporting leadership within Theravada communities.