Barnet, Vermont · Since 1970
Karmê Chöling
Meditation Retreat Center
Develop mindfulness & awareness for your everyday life
However you arrive
There is a way in.
Nobody arrives with nothing. Bring what you carry; the practice begins exactly there.
For the weary
Rest & Heal
A quiet room, a woodstove, three meals a day, and time. Rest is a practice too.
For the curious
Learn to Meditate
Sit, breathe, begin. Instruction in a practice this lineage has carried for centuries.
For the brave
Go on Retreat
A weekend, a month, a cabin in the woods. The adventure is inward.
For the grateful
Support us
Karmê Chöling is sustained by the generosity of the people who practice here.
The practice place of the Karma Kagyu
A lineage
held on this land
Karmê Chöling is a Buddhist land center and residential practice place grounded in the Kagyu, Nyingma, Rimé and Shambhala traditions.
1970
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche founds Tail of the Tiger on a former dairy farm in Barnet, his first land center.
1974
His Holiness the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa, on his first visit to North America, names it Karmê Chöling, the practice place of the Karma Kagyu.
1987
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche is cremated in the upper meadow, where the Purkhang still stands.
Today
Six meditation halls, seven cabins in the woods for solitary retreat, and a household organized around meditation.
“The sadhana brings these two traditions together as a prototype of how emotion and wisdom, energy and space, can work together.”
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, on the Sadhana of Mahamudra
The land
Meadow, forest and garden in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, land that was home to the Abenaki people long before it was a dairy farm.
500 acres,
four seasons
It is autumn here now. The hills are on fire.
Winter. Snow to the sills, the woodstove lit, the long quiet of the dark months.
Spring. Mud and rain, then new life: fiddleheads unfurl and goslings cross the pond.
Summer. Heat and thunderstorms, a rainbow over the house, a swim in the lake down the road.
Autumn. The hills catch fire, and then the leaves let go.
Still water shows the sky
exactly as it is.
Meditation is not becoming someone else. It is letting the water settle.
“First, you have the sky; then you have the earth to complement the sky, and having sky and earth already, you have somebody to occupy that space, which is humanity.”
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Dharma Art
Heaven. Thunderheads build over the hills, the rain comes, and the sky clears again.
Earth. A stone Buddha in the woods, weathered and patient, the moss for its robe.
Humanity. Friends around the fire on a summer evening, someone playing the guitar.
Welcome
Visit
Karmê Chöling
Karmê Chöling is at 369 Patneaude Lane, Barnet, Vermont 05821, in the Northeast Kingdom, a few minutes from Interstate 91.
Reception answers questions about your stay at info@karmecholing.org or (802) 633-2384.
Sit long enough and the walls dissolve:
the land, the sky, the person beside you.
There is no other.