From the Office of the Executive Director
Hi Sangha- lots to report this month re: planning the annual RR Conference, scheduled for June 8-10, 2018 in Los Angeles.
Speaking of RefCon4, it’s on, people!!! The planning crew is getting organized and it should be quite an event. As usual, we’ll have a combination of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha in more or less equal measure. Our logistics will be different this year as we won’t have the small rooms available to us, so we’ll have lots of cozy togetherness. The recent Southeast Conference in Nashville was mostly held in one room and it seemed to work fine so no reason it can’t work in L.A.! We have reserved 20 beds at the Melrose Hostel to help make this affordable for everyone; you can find the hostel at https://melrosehostel.com/. Just make sure you let them know you’re a part of Refuge. Oh, and one other thing, some of the dharma will be coming by way of Josh Korda from Dharma Punx NYC. He’ll be giving a teaching on early attachment and addictive behaviors- using the Refuge tools to heal early emotional wounds.
We’re launching our new website soon and deep bows to Sanja Rogers, Dan Oliverio and Josh Reisner for their beautiful work. Registration for the Conference will happen on the new site (any day now!).
Finally, our theme this month is renunciation. In pondering that, I bumped across a forum in Lion’s Roar from April 2017 that I’m sharing here for folks who haven’t yet read it: https://www.lionsroar.com/forum-the-beauty-of-renunciation/. The introduction to the forum talks about renunciation as “the beautiful realization that you already have everything you need.” May all of us have everything we need as we turn away from greed, hatred and delusion.