Creating Sacred Community: The Wisdom of Contemplative Psychology
May 3 @ 9:00 am - 5:00 pm MDT
$50.00 – $108.00
An IN-PERSON Day-long Retreat at Albuquerque Shambhala Meditation Center
Saturday, May 3, 2025
9:00 AM to 5 PM MDT; registration starts at 8:30 AM MDT
This one-day seminar focuses on the Mandala of the Five Buddha Families. Through ritual and chanting, participants will explore and build connections with each other using the energies of the Buddha family mandala. While many energies are invisible, we are familiar with them and can learn to tap into the wisdom of the mandala through simple practices of Contemplative Psychology. The day introduces us to exchanging potent energies in the world and with one another, helping us shift our allegiance to basic sanity rather than habitual thinking.
We have time to explore three of the Five Buddha Families in one day. Each family offers an elemental blueprint for sanity that we will examine. The Buddha family energy provides a relationship with space and has a natural connection to the practice of meditation; Vajra energy offers clarity and creates a natural link to mindfulness of speech practice; Padma energy emphasizes the practice of exchanging self with others and fostering compassionate exchange. Drawing on the sacred invocation of Chögyam Trungpa and each other, we will touch upon and evoke the sacredness of community in just one day.
As we introduce the sacred mandala, participants are invited to engage in experiential work with all the seen and unseen energies of the world. We will become more skilled at responding to their experiences with kindness and compassion rather than reaction and judgment. We hope you will join us.
Facilitators
Melissa J. Moore, Ph. D. (she/her), has been a Lead faculty member and Karuna Training North America Executive Director since 2014. She co-founded Karuna Training in Germany in 1996. She has a Master's in Contemplative Psychotherapy from Naropa University and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Integral Studies in Psychological Anthropology. Melissa has trained and certified students in Contemplative Psychology for over thirty-five years in nine Countries. She has been a Buddhist practitioner for over 40 years.
Kai Fulker (they /them she/her), is a non-binary artist and Jeweler and was born and raised in the Mountains of Colorado. Their formal path in buddhist meditation began in 2005 which led them along with their wife of many years to become co- directors of Casa Werma, a Shambhala retreat center in Pátzcuaro, Mexico for 6 yrs. Kai began the Karuna Training in Contemplative Psychology in 2022 and graduated in 2025. They are an avid Qigong practitioner as well as a tennis player. They are fluent in Spanish and English.