Tara Mandala--a vital growing retreat cnter

The Community Building, added a year or two ago.

The stupa, based on a series of dreams of Nyala Pema Duddul, a great adept of the Dzogchen lineage, this was put up in the late nineties.

From December 14 to the 24, I was on retreat at Tara Mandala.  Rinpoche has been leading a sequential program of teachings over several years there, related to the pinnacle teachings of the Nyingma tradition known as the Great Perfection, Dzogchen in Tibetan.  

Tara Mandala is a 700 acre piece of land we used to call wilderness.  Now, with a stupa, two large buildings, and one on the way, I guess we could call it one of the greatest Tibetan Buddhist retreat centers in the U.S.  Founded by Tsultrim Allione, an American Dharma teacher and visionary, in 1993, outside of Pagosa Springs, Colorado in the Western foothills of the Rockies--it is a stunning representation of what sticking to a clear and ambitious vision statement and pure intention can wrought.  I remember in about 200- being struck by seeing the architect's diagram of what Tara Mandala would become in the small yurt bookstore near the stupa in the summer of 2000, after a night of being kept up by wolves frolicking by my tent.  A community building, a temple, a three year retreat, environmentally responsible design principles.  Right!  My home Dharma center was in a circus tent at that point and it was headed by a Tibetan Dzogchen master, how was this woman and her crew of college students on work-study going to do that!  

Actually, I could see clearly that she would.  Tulku Sangngak Rinpoche later said that TM is a pure land of Tara, and she met Rinpoche a few years later who confirmed it is a "Ney" of Tara and many people will attain enlightenment in the future there.  Rinpoche is now the guiding light of TM and comes annually.  

Tsultrim has always emphasized mainly the practice of Chod (hint, you begin to approximate the pronunciation of this word by dropping the D, the o is pronounced as like it has those two dots over it) in her teaching.  She resides at TM and travels widely, helping bring Dharma to the west, and fundraising for TM.  She became well known through her book Women of Wisdom, a collection of biographies of some of the female meditation adepts of our tradition, turning on an interest in TB for western women who would not be magnetized by men in red robes sitting on thrones (which for some reason works for me, even though I have a radical feminist background).

This summer Tsultrim went to Nepal and Tibet with her large retinue, and was officially recognized by two different lamas as an "emanation" of Machig Labdron, the 11th century female meditation master who was the first native Tibetan chod practitioner.