Community

The Providence Shambhala Community

The community of the Shambhala Meditation Center of Providence is friendly, diverse, capable, and heartfelt. Our members and friends include dedicated senior teachers who have walked the Shambhala Buddhist path for 40 years or more, and enthusiastic newcomers who are just discovering our teachings on realizing basic goodness and building enlightened society.

Naturally, being located Providence (recently rated as one of the top 10 ‘hipster’ cities in the U.S), the SMCP community features many creative artists, but it also includes doctors, lawyers, academics, businesspeople, nonprofit leaders, and people for whom livelihood is not a significant point of identity.  We range in age from teens to seventy-somethings and vary just as widely in our ethnic and religious backgrounds.   There is no “typical” Shambhala profile, except that we share a passion for living a good human life, based on mindfulness, wisdom, and compassion.

Like the rest of the global Shambhala community, the organization of activities and responsibilities within the SMCP is divided into three “pillars.”  Although some community members resonate primarily with one or another of these three aspects of our society, many of us participate actively in two or even all three.

The most central of the three aspects is the area of practice and study, which provides training in our various styles of meditation and the Shambhala/Buddhist teachings.  These activities are described at length elsewhere on this website.

We invite you to join with us — for an hour, a weekend, a lifetime…