Eco-Dharma Centre

The Eco-Dharma Centre is situated in a beautiful and wild part of the Catalan Pyrenees. We offer courses, events and retreats which support the realisation of our human potential and the development of an ecological consciousness honouring our mutual belonging within the web of life – drawing on the Buddhist Dharma and the emerging ecological paradigms of our time.

Spring 2020 marked 10 years of trainings and retreats run at the Ecodharma Centre. We decided it’s the perfect moment to take a step back, reflect on what we’ve learned over the decade, and review what we can most usefully contribute in response to the challenges and opportunities of this historical moment.

Balancing action with reflection has always been a strong theme in our trainings. For Ecodharma, we think this is the perfect moment to pause, cultivate a space for deep receptivity, for questions rather than answers, and for listening to what is most needed now. We’re living at a critical moment in ecological and socio-political terms, making it crucial that we use our learning, our energy and our talents well. To do that it’s important to resist the temptation to just keep doing what we do, just because up to now it has worked. It’s important to take a step back and reflect, analyse and plan strategically – to ‘go slow to go far’, as they say.

So, that’s what we’re going to do. From summer 2020 we’re going to stop running trainings and retreats at the Ecodharma site for a while. We’ll begin a period of deeper reflection and inquiry. We’ll survey the terrain we operate within, carry out a deeper context analysis, looking at the current social, political, and environmental situation. We’ll review the strengths and weaknesses of the approach we’ve taken over the last decade. And we’ll ask questions about what we can most usefully offer and do with the learning and skills we and our colleagues have acquired.

We seek to develop practices which honour the inseparability of the transformation of the self and the world; to support the shift from a destructive industrial growth society to a life-affirming future; to contribute to the creation of a movement of renewal and resistance; to evolve spiritual practice where courageous compassion and a deepening realisation of our radical interconnectedness helps us to live in solidarity with life.