HIMC Update
Dear Friends,
During this season of giving Thanks, we wish you great happiness and peace.
As you may know, this spring, Vipassana Hawai‘i made the difficult decision to let go of the Hawai‘i Insight Meditation Center project on the Big Island land and put our land on the market for sale. We spent years laying the meticulous groundwork for the project to succeed, including working through long periods in land court, getting county approval for a Special Use Permit, developing public access, exploring conservation easements, working with architects and foresters, and holding tent retreats for adults and teens – all amid oceans of other tasks and responsibilities. Unfortunately, the finances to actually build the center never came together and we realized that we were beyond our capacity for the final stretch of this monumental task.
We are at once deeply humbled by this conclusion and very excited. On a beautiful November full moon, we recently sold 140 acres of our North Kohala land to amazing buyers whose own vision is a beautiful extension and fulfillment of our own. Patrick and Mindy Meiering of Durango, Colorado direct an organization called Inhabit and they plan to use the land and the Special Use Permit we secured to build a retreat center for meditation, yoga, and healing arts of all kinds. It is a great blessing for all of us and we are incredibly moved to see these folks with the necessary resources and energy to be able to take the baton and carry the vision to completion and have the center built out by 2018. Patrick and Mindy have expressed enthusiasm for Vipassana Hawai`i to continue our Sunday sittings on the land and to offer programs once their center is built. We hope you will come to sit our retreats and support all of the activities they offer.
There are so many of us who have given amazing amounts of time, talent, and treasure to make this vision of a mediation center on the Big Island happen: so much effort, so much ground work, so much laughter and tears. We are deeply appreciative. On this long journey together how wonderful and mysterious that it would go this way!
We are profoundly moved by the force of all the work that has gone toward realizing this dream and we hope that anyone who has been involved in any way can see the importance of their own efforts in the accomplishment of this goal, even if it is not quite how any of us planned.In the end, when it comes to land and vision (as with everything else) there is no ownership, only karma and kuleana, intentional action and responsibility, and we feel confident that everyone involved has played their part with integrity in a vast unknowable scheme. Now Inhabit can take the work to the final stages of creation and flourishing. We are excited to support them in any way we can.
We still have some land on the Big Island and maintain this sense of unknowing faith about what will happen with it. As always we will keep you informed about any news or changes.
with aloha and gratitude,
The entire Vipassana Hawai’i team
