Shangri-la, Colorado
Meditation, mantras and momos challenge one writer’s notion of what it means to be Western.
© MARC PISCOTTY
Beyond the open window, the clack-clack of high heels on the downtown sidewalk tugs at my attention.
Don’t think, just breathe.
I gaze blankly at the wooden floor before me, breathing naturally, as instructed.
That spot on the floor looks like black pepper. I’m kind of hungry. What am I making for dinner? Right, chicken noodle soup.
“Just be with your breath,” soothes the meditation leader, a gentle woman whose sturdy glasses and unkempt brown hair remind me of a librarian.
Be with my breath? What exactly does that mean? This is SO Boulder.
Pull out a map and you’ll find Boulder, CO, 30 miles northwest of Denver, spreading like a late-day shadow from the base of the Rocky Moun tains. It was born a frontier town that supplied 19th-century gold and silver miners the necessities to survive in the 10,000-plus-foot peaks looming just west of city limits. Towering rocks, snow-fed creeks, breezes laced with pine: This is the American West I dreamed of as a Florida girl raised on cowboy stories and summer long camping trips in the Rockies.
Except that Boulder isn’t the American West. This college town exists in a 25-square-mile force field known (somewhat derisively) to fellow Coloradans as “the Boulder Bubble,” famous for residents who are über eco-conscious, socially liberal, obsessively healthy and, at times, overly preachy about each. A bunch of hippies, they say.
Before I moved here two years ago, I accepted those quirks—after all, there are worse reputa tions a city can have—and I’ve come to love some of them. But I’ve had a harder time getting used to Boulder’s ever-present Eastern influences, and I’m not talking New York City. I mean the Far East: A 1,000-student Buddhist-inspired university, yoga studios and meditation centers by the dozens, scads of alternative medicine practitioners, authentic Himalayan restaurants and more Eastern import shops than you’d think a town of 100,000 could possibly sustain. Here, it’s not unusual to see a man meditating in line at the DMV or hear a woman at the coffee shop rave about her dog’s acupuncturist. I’ve tended to roll my eyes at all this Eastern-ness: That kooky stuff doesn’t belong in my American West… right?
Yet after meeting a few perfectly friendly chai drinking, yoga mat-toting, canine-acupuncturing locals, I began to wonder if my resistance to this Eastern piece of Boulder’s identity wasn’t a bit hypocritical. I like to think I’m open-minded, yet I was alienating myself, at least in part, from the very town I call home. And so I decided to immerse myself, without judgment, in Boulder’s Eastern culture for a week, starting with this Shambhala Meditation Center lesson, seated on a cushion in a circle of strangers staring at some unseen place, before a painting of Buddha and a shrine to the enlightened state of mind, purging my thoughts.
Perhaps, if I just listen, I’ll learn something.
"Ong na-mo… Guru dev na-mo…” The air vibrates with the mantra of a half-dozen women calling upon the infinite creative consciousness in the dim basement of Prana, a yoga-supply store on the Pearl Street pedestrian mall. Mimicking the teacher seated cross-legged on a sheepskin mat, we recite the mantra three times, until the room is thick with our plea.
This Kundalini yoga class (one of about 30 free classes Prana offers) is intended to raise self-awareness en route to one’s highest level of consciousness. The hour-long class progresses from chanting and focused breathing to calis thenics and meditation; yet, after a vigorous round of leg extensions from a crouched position, my awareness seems stuck on my burning thighs.
“We need to take time for our body, which is our temple,” the teacher says. Eyes closed, palms pressed together at her chest, Pavandeep Kaur (meaning “pure, sacred, graceful carrier of breath and light”) looks every bit the spiritual name bestowed upon her by a disciple of Yogi Bhajan, the Pakistani-born master who brought Kundalini to the States in the 1960s.
Born 32 years ago in St. Louis as Carrie Dobsch, Kaur moved to Boulder earlier this year, just a few months after her first visit to the city. “My body just really felt good here,” she says, blue eyes bright behind dark, angular frames. “It was just an energy that I felt.”
Kaur isn’t alone: About half of the Boulderites I meet during my immersion consider their arrival here the answer to a calling of sorts, including David Joseph Cooper, a 26-year-old Middle Eastern-inspired alternative healer who moved here from Eugene, OR, four years ago.
Long brown hair and an unruly beard peek from beneath Cooper’s loosely wrapped raw silk head shawl. He wears a navy tunic and knitted vest, baggy Middle Eastern pants, worn leather sandals and something akin to an oversized loin cloth that time has rendered a shade of gray. Four dark, tattooed bands encircle his right forearm, and a lotus flower graces the inside of each wrist.
We meet up at Ku Cha House of Tea down town for a traditional Chinese tea service, and sip a 9-year-old puerh from ceramic bowls the size of shot glasses. In a lilting accent that belies his Ohio upbringing, he tells me about his Tree of Life Healing Service. Drawing from his study of holistic therapies, ranging from the energy-based Polarity Therapy to traditional Chi nese medicine, Cooper has developed a practice he’s coined “mind-body-spirit harmonization.” Using his hands and his mind, he channels the divine to heal his patients’ emotional and physical ailments.
Cooper, who partly draws inspiration from Buddhist and Hindu teachings, explains our city’s bountiful Eastern influences this way: Boulder’s terrain pulsates with an energy that attracts people seeking deeper spirituality, often of the Eastern variety. “I feel like the people who started Naropa (the Buddhist university) heard the call of the land,” he says. “I feel like these mountains have so much knowledge and wisdom…. They just called me.”
At first, this strikes me as typical Boulder ridicu lousness. But when I think a little more, it doesn’t sound so absurd. I remember how I physically missed the mountains whenever I returned home to flat Florida from a trip out West, and their proxim ity was a big part of my decision to move to Boulder.
Maybe, in my own way, I was called here, too.
In 1971, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, an Oxford-educated Tibetan, came here to give a seminar on Buddhism on the University of Colorado campus. Within three years, he had founded a 400-mem ber Buddhist community called Karma Dzong; an association of meditation centers that would become the 170-chapter Shambhala International; and the Naropa Institute, the precursor to North America’s first Buddhist university. A Boulder Daily Camera article from 1976 largely credits Rinpoche’s teachings with Boulder’s influx of Buddhists and its increasing number of converts.
Frank Berliner, who’s studied Rinpoche’s teachings since Naropa’s inaugural session in 1974 and teaches Buddhist and Western contemplative psychology at the school today, also traces Boulder’s Buddhist roots to Rinpoche’s arrival. “I’m almost certain that there were no Buddhist groups in Boulder when Chogyam Trungpa came here,” he says. “He was the first to teach the dharma to a significant audience here.” As Rinpoche’s following grew around the world, Boulder became the hub for the Shambhala type of Buddhism he founded. “A very large community here in Boulder gathered around him,” Berliner says.
Reader Comments
- Way to go Sarah !!! I love reading your print---it's like you are talking just to me !!! So proud this publisher thought so too !! Grateful to know you--I am Julie, Lisa, and John's Aunt Jo
(Posted on 06 Sep 2011)
- This is a very interesting article, both highly informative and beautifully written.
(Posted on 06 Sep 2011)
- This is a very well written article. The use of imagery reminds me of Cormac McCarthy. Like a wolf. (Posted on 08 Sep 2011)
- Pembrook Pines loves that article! - Cole (Posted on 15 Sep 2011)
- I really enjoyed reading your article, it was very informative and easy to understand. I am tibetan from minneapolis and its (Posted on 18 Oct 2011)
- Just to add, its very interesting to know that a tibetan lama can bring such an influence to boulder community. Thanks for writing this piece. (Posted on 18 Oct 2011)
