Celebrate Day 1
— Celebrate Dharma Voyage —
Day 1
Origins
BEN BOOTH
Dharma Voyage was officially incorporated as a 501(c)3 public charity in 2009. But it’s hard to say that is the beginning of Dharma Voyage. Is discerning a definitive point of beginning even possible? It’s all eddies and flows in a river of movement. Beginnings are just chapters within stories, with causal chains that loop through infinite distances amidst an interchange of innumerable streams.
As founder of Dharma Voyage, I suppose there is an inevitable intermingling of my story with the birth of Dharma Voyage. I’ll share some of that story to discover the thread of a beginning…
I’ve always lived unconventionally. Not through any conscious attempt to be different but through an acknowledgement that I was simply unsuitable for convention. As a small child I would slip into deep states of meditation. By junior high school my recreational reading consisted of Buddhist texts, existentialist philosophy, and anthropological explorations that witnessed a more connected way of living with the earth. I balanced all those bookish dreams with X-games attempts to jump over my friends’ heads with my mountain bike, row through mountainous waves in a little boat, and ferociously compete to first place finishes in most of the rowing races I entered.
Such inclinations of philosophical and physical expressions inevitably led me to ride a bike across northern Pennsylvania in a February blizzard to feel a different way of being, spend months at a time exploring the empty expanses of the Southwest, and even to residing in a cave in the Moab desert with barefoot run-hardened feet and a tattered copy of the Tao Te Ching. Numerous wilderness retreats later and a number of years in a Zen temple, and I was off to Asia for full time training in the martial arts, which seemed a perfect way to combine the philosophical-physical mix that had defined my passions.
I lived in China, training from sunrise to sunset with seriously hard-working individuals: Shaolin kung fu practitioners at Shao Lin Temple and the Northern China Shaolin Academy; Taoist monks at Wudang Mountain; a traveling Tai Chi Master in a hostel in Beijing; and a collection of characters along the way. I then went to India, where I lived with a guru of an ancient art called Kalaripayattu. There I took part in some amazing old-world visions: an entranced man become possessed by a warrior spirit; a demon slaying goddess ritual complete with blood offerings and fire dances; a yogi who taught without words or even gestures.
All this, to me, was what was important in life. It was the thoroughly fascinating study of diving into the deep end of experience through following lines of inquiry as far as they would go and wherever they would bring me.
After my years in Asia, I settled into a Zen temple outside of Boston. I had trimmed my life down to a level of monkish austerity that allowed me to work a mere two days a week wearing a slightly hip, but mostly genteel, green Starbucks apron while crafting coffee beverages for the literati in Harvard Square. Not quite “the old tea seller” but as close as I could get to living an ancient poem in a modern city.
I continued my training, spending long days in meditation, martial arts, and physical conditioning. I taught myself how to design and build boats, to go on great watery voyages to further explore my relationship with the natural world. I noticed that when I came back from Asia, I had become better at pretty much everything I did, and I wanted to continue this line of study. There was some sort of magic involved in honing the mind to the moment at hand!
It was while working at this coffee shop and living a life of learning that another person’s story intersected mine and pivoted the flow towards something that would become Dharma Voyage. Tom Putnam, a friend of mine from one of the Zen centers I was involved in, would visit me for a cup of coffee and try to convince me to teach the Tai Chi that I had learned in China. I was thoroughly uninterested in teaching, as I was too busy learning! After weeks of my stubborn “no” he finally convinced me to teach one Tai Chi class at a local health club where he was a member. I immediately found that teaching was not a distraction, but a continuation of learning. It was a place to share the beautiful things I had discovered with others, while deepening my own practice through driving the dialogue of inquiry in the classroom.
Eventually one class became two, then three, then dozens. Then Dharma Voyage was founded to step out of the health clubs and into a more creative space to teach. Naturally, our first classes were in Tai Chi. But we also explored varied avenues of possibility. We looked down a road that had a sailing ship as a mind/body center. We piloted a series of lectures and workshops. We soon ran our first substantive youth programs by having a group of boys on an island learn how to row.
As Dharma Voyage gained a life of its own, two streams really settled into the river: Tai Chi and rowing. Both of these have been major threads in my life. In fact, even as a teen I was applying meditation to my preparation for elite rowing races and had begun a diligent yoga and martial art practice to gain an edge over my fellow athletes when I lived at Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row. Conversely, rowing always had, and continues to, offer insights into the deepest recesses of my subconscious. It has always been a place to question limitations and cultivate the concept of potential. It also brings me into the dynamic sea, where I can feel the liberation of vast horizons. And that, to me, is the point of Dharma Voyage - it is a creative outlet to explore an insightful and fulfilling life through joyful and challenging activity.
Through the years, Dharma Voyage has gathered so many voices and ideas. It is delightful to see how each of these voices brings its own inspiration and adds a deeper richness to the unfolding life of this organization. Dharma Voyage exists to serve our community, but it is our community that enlivens Dharma Voyage. I am excited to see this organization become an ever more textured collection of stories. This week we will share those stories as we paint the picture of this grand adventure!