2024 Year End Reflections

 As the holidays and conclusion of 2024 approaches, I wanted to reflect on the past year, look to the future, and extend on behalf of Geshe Tenzin Zopa, the Rachen nuns, and my family a warm season’s greetings to you and all our best wishes for 2025. 

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

2024 has been an intensely challenging yet meaningful year filled with Dharma activities: I taught my 12-week The Crucible program in February to a hundred students, visited Tsum on a private pilgrimage with Geshe-la in April for the Stupa ground-breaking ceremonies, turned in my final 450-page Return with Elixir manuscript into the publisher representing a nearly 5-year odyssey, offered my first psychotherapy group supervision pop-up called Intuition, and ventured with 30 pilgrims to Japan for our life-rocking Gone Beyond purification pilgrimage. All the while I maintained the Gradual Path's monthly newsletter and BLOG with reflections on a variety of topics including my personal struggles and breakthroughs, our cultural polarization, the war in the Middle East, and the emergence of AI. I'm so grateful to all of you who intersected with any of these activities rendering my life and efforts meaningful.

THE YEAR AHEAD

As we look to 2025, there are equally significant opportunities to work and practice together. Elixir will finally be released in April, you can pre-order it here, and I'll need all your support and help to spread its message across our collective media channels. I'll be launching the book in Bali with my good friend Tjok Gde at Ibah his ancestral home, where we are now offering a monthly series of dialogues called Cosmos and Psyche focusing on the challenges and opportunities, death and rebirth, our civilization faces. Elixir and I will then be featured as author of the month on ancient civilization researcher Graham Hancock's site in April, a huge honor.

After book launch, please consider joining me for the two-week, 100-miles walk across the most famous pilgrimage in the world the Camino de Santiago in Spain in June, or shortly after in early July join a special guest and I for the Inner an Outer Alchemy Retreat in Tuscany, Italy featuring day trips to Florence. I'm also happy to announce applications are now being accepted for my annual pilgrimage with Geshe Tenzin Zopa, this year we travel to the last tantric Buddhist kingdom in the world, Bhutan, for special Vajrayana teaching amidst the sacred landscape in a tour I'm calling Tantric Treasures and Hidden Lands. 

RACHEN STUPA PURPOSE AND FILM

To those who have been supporting the construction efforts of the Rachen World Peace Stupa, I want to celebrate your kindness and generous gifts and to those who have not yet heard about the project or found a way to karmically connect with its mission, please find the details on our Rachen Stupa Service Project page.

Enjoy this short documentary film This is Beyul, focused on the Stupa's purpose, produced by the very talented Matthew Freidell, and shot on location last April when we visited Rachen for the Stupa ground-breaking ceremonies. We have come a long way together and are being guided by unseen benevolent forces as we manifest this unimaginable beacon of hope in such a remote land and at a time when the light of wisdom and compassion are so needed in the world. That you have, or will, respond to the karmic call for action, showing your support, is an inspiring reminder of the power of human dignity to reign over the darker sides of our nature.

Geshe-la once told me that most people think it's better to show support with food and cash donations to meet people's daily needs. This is the goal of charitable projects but represents a very temporary solution and limited skillful means. A Buddhist stupa is not an ordinary vehicle of goodwill. It is strategically designed not to address the conventional needs of human beings for survival but rather their ultimate needs for liberation. This is what makes the Stupa for World Peace so unique and precious. Of all the ways to accumulate merit and wisdom on the path of awakening, few are as powerful as doing practice and service in relation to a stupa filled with holy relics and mantras.  This is why I have amplified Geshe-la's message that we are not benefactors giving to a noble cause, as much as we are beneficiaries receiving unimaginable blessings.

Please keep this in mind as you continue to show your support, offer financial gifts, prayers, and call in friends and family to take part in this historic effort to construct a beacon of hope that should last 1,000 years.

I'd like to conclude this year-end message by forwarding you an update from late October on the Stupa progress from Geshe-la himself. May we always be connected with him in Dharma and service.

RACHEN STUPA UPDATE FROM GESHE-LA: 

Latest updates on the World Peace Stupa, the sunroom and bathroom project and more… 16th Oct, 2024* 

Tashi Delek, dear most kind and compassionate Tsum Rachen Nunnery and Mu Monastery supporters. 

I pray and hope you and your loved ones are keeping well and safe. I would like to provide the following updates on the latest virtuous activities and projects happening in Tsum. Let’s rejoice together. 

Here’s a short update on the 30 sets of sunrooms and bathrooms for the long-term retreat facility project for our resident nuns at Rachen Nunnery. 

We have resumed the construction of the remaining units of sunrooms and bathrooms for the resident nuns, which were interrupted due to the urgent workforce that was needed for the Stupa project. 

Currently, work on the building of the Stupa project is paused for a few weeks or so due to a shortage of building supplies, as the transportation by road to Tsum, as well as by air (helicopters), was cut off last month due to bad weather. 

We are aiming to complete the sunroom and bathroom project before winter arrives. 

Once the road reopens and weather permits, there will be a few helicopters to transport some crucial building materials for the main part of the Stupa construction, the Dome. 

We are hoping to complete the making of the Dome section. If the freezing winter doesn’t arrive before the building supply can reach Tsum, then we can continue with the construction. So, we pray for the best. 

New solar batteries have arrived in Tsum, and we have relocated the solar panels onto the roof of the community kitchen building to give wider space for the circumambulation path around the Stupa. 

We have also started a new project to build a new accommodation block for our most kind resident teacher, Geshe Nyima, who is like a sole refuge and protector, the most qualified teacher, and a kind father-like figure to our nuns and monks there. 

And for our Tsum manager, Ven. Tenzin Lhundrup as well, who has been working tirelessly since day one of the Rachen Nunnery and Mu Monastery project started in the year 2003, and who manages the whole of Rachen Nunnery and Mu Monastery’s needs, looking after all the construction, daily necessities such as gathering food supplies either from Tibet or Kathmandu by foot for days, even during harsh weather (including snowstorms and rains), whose heart is filled with great compassion, care, and responsibility towards our nuns and monks. 

Also, this new accommodation block project will upgrade the accommodation for our resident teacher, Ven. Ani Lhamo, who has been teaching and taking care of our nuns tirelessly for so many years, and whose heart is filled with great compassion, care, and responsibility towards our nuns. 

It is my long-awaited wish to build comfortable accommodations that they can use for their commitment retreats, as well as during their old age, for longer retreat practices while continuing to look after the nuns and monks for a long time to come. 

Rachen Nunnery and Mu Monastery communities are so fortunate to have bodhisattva-like leaders like them. 

My heart is filled with bliss knowing that this project, too, is going to materialize now, and I wish you all, Tsummers, to rejoice in these virtues. You all have been supporting the Rachen Nunnery and Mu Monastery community throughout these many years with your immeasurable love, compassion, kindness, and generosity. 

I dedicate any merits accumulated from these virtues for each and every one of you and your families’ well-being up to full enlightenment. 

With lots of prayers and best wishes, 

Geshe Zopa 

P/S Our amazing younger nuns are diligently continuing to work for many hours, day and night, rolling mantras and offering robes to the thousands of scriptures, and mantra rolls that will be placed in the square section above the Dome of the Stupa.