Dekeling (day-kay-ling) means “a place of happiness”
At Dekeling, by attending community meditations, classes, and (if you wish) one-on-one meetings with a teacher, you’ll learn to expand your capacity for love and fearlessness. Together, we’ll cultivate basic sanity, kindness, and compassion. Using age-old Tibetan practices, your meditation, combined with your everyday life, will become a path to awakening.
Practicing together in this way, we aim to be relaxed, welcoming, and realistic about the challenges of being a spiritual seeker in the modern world. Together, we’ll leverage the power of clarity and compassion to create radical acts of change, starting with our own hearts and minds.
Dekeling’s History
In 2018, Lama Lekshe had just finished a three-year retreat, and a group of long-time students expressed interest in forming a new practice community. In telling the story, she said, “The idea was delightfully ‘old school,’ and not far off from how many practice groups formed in centuries past. The students that year ranged in age from those in their early twenties to folks in their eighties. Many of them had practiced or worked together before. We sat in a tiny house in Portland, Oregon, sitting elbow to elbow.”
The year before the pandemic, Lekshe moved to Great Vow Monastery, where she took up residency for a year. In October, she was called away suddenly to do home hospice care for her mother in Eugene, Oregon. During that time, Dekeling’s meditation services were streamed from her mother’s home to a group of about 30 students from Ireland to Atlanta, Georgia. After her mother passed away, Lekshe returned to Portland, and Dekeling found a new practice space in a lively neighborhood in NE Portland. Dekeling continues to stream mediation sessions, classes, and retreats from there.
Friends in Nepal hand-painted this little “lamas of color” sign to welcome our guests:
