Our Community

Our community is diverse, capable, and heartfelt. Our members and friends include dedicated senior teachers who have walked the Shambhala Buddhist path for many years, and enthusiastic newcomers who are just discovering our teachings on realizing basic goodness and building enlightened society.

Commitment to Inclusivity

The Austin Shambhala Meditation Center is an inclusive environment where all are welcome, regardless of nationalities, cultures, languages, ethnicities, races, spiritual traditions or religious faiths, age, genders, sexual orientations, or physical, perceptual, and mental abilities. If you find yourself here, you were welcome before you ever arrived.

What we share as a community is a desire to lead sane, dignified, and confident lives. Through the practice of meditation we cultivate the capacity to be fully open to our experience, and the ability to respond to everyday life situations with greater clarity and respect—respect not only for our life situations and ourselves, but for all individuals, social groups and cultures as well.

Our community is actively engaged in working with what it is to be human, which means looking into the suffering of all beings and inquiring into the causes and conditions of that suffering. We participate fearlessly in waking up to the reality of interdependence, exploring both individual and collective conditioning that divide and separate us.

By engaging in practice and society, we commit ourselves to meditation in action, regardless of the discomfort arising from societal norms that subjugate the basic goodness of all beings. We are committed to honoring and respecting the lives and life situations not only of ourselves, but of all individuals, social groups, and cultures.

May all beings who enter this place find connection, warmth, and acceptance.