Community Event
LOSAR - NEW YEAR’S CELEBRATION
Registration is required to enable us to plan accordingly.
We invite you to join us for a special community celebration of the lunar New Year on Sunday, March 2nd, 2025, starting at 10:00 AM. This is the time and location of our usual Sunday Open House at the Aligned Center. We begin with sitting meditation and then practice of the Sadhana of Mahamudra.
As a community we celebrate the new year, or Losar, in accordance with the Tibetan lunar calendar, in which celebrations traditionally begin two days before the day of Tibetan New Year and end on that day with prayers, ceremonies, dances, and family reunions. Each year is associated with an element and an animal, and this year's Losar will mark the beginning of the Year of the Wood Snake. Snakes are known for their ability to shed their skin, symbolizing the process of letting go of the old and embracing the new.
At this event, WMC also celebrates the founding of the Center — our 16th Anniversary! In the practice community founded by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Losar is also known as Shambhala Day. It is a time for us to express the wealth and richness of our spiritual and cultural heritage through feasting, conviviality, and elegance.
The Sunday program begins with meditation and group practice of the Sadhana of Mahamudra, a text composed by Trungpa Rinpoche in 1968. The Sadhana is an extraordinary poetic practice text that beautifully and powerfully expresses the essence of the Vidyadhara Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s dharma transmission to the West. It directly addresses the spiritual materialism, abuse of power, and degeneration of meditation practice that compromised Buddhism in Tibet, and threatens to do the same in the West. It helps practitioners steer a middle path between the extremes of empty intellectualism and blind devotion.
We will follow our practice with a reception including a light lunch, and some remarks looking ahead to our upcoming year together.
The Sadhana of Mahamudra is a practice shared by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche shortly after he began teaching in the West. It is a complex practice that includes a chanted liturgy, visualization, mantra, and periods of formless meditation. Within that complexity, the text underscores the profound simplicity of the dharma. Group practice of this text offers the opportunity for all students to experience the atmosphere and texture of tantric practice.
