All who attend our offerings are invited to participate in a growing and glowing field of generosity. Your wholehearted offerings support both your own practice as well as that of others to flourish. While there are important financial realities in running an organization and operating retreats, we also see how a purely transactional model may not evoke the heart qualities most supportive to the transmission of dharma. Thus, we embrace a partial-dana model. This model is what many Dharma communities (i.e. Spirit Rock, IMS, others) have found to be both practical and inspirational in the West, evoking the qualities we want to nourish in our sangha of simplicity, responsibility, generosity, and warm-hearted community. 

Dana, the pali word for generosity, is a central pillar of the Buddha’s teachings.  For centuries the teachings of the Buddha have been preserved and passed on in the context of healthy and intact cultures of generosity, where monks and nuns offer teachings freely in a reciprocal relationship with the wider society who supports them. Generosity itself is considered a core spiritual faculty to develop, which this culture of dana nourishes. 

Boundless Refuge is committed to carrying forward this rich and deep spiritual practice, which you are invited into. Our teachers offer their teachings on a purely dana-basis, which includes North’s one on one work with students, and all of his work while leading the three month retreat. For the three month retreat, we charge fees on a sliding scale to pay for the cost of operations, with scholarship and dana-based places available. A significant part of our operating costs are funded by a wide network of donors, and our organization primarily consists of volunteers. To make it possible for North to do the year round work to organize the retreat and lead Boundless Refuge, he receives a small salary, as does an assistant and occasional consultants; teachers’ travel costs to and from the retreat are also paid for outside the dana model. Rather than hired staff for retreats, practitioners share in the work to set up and take down the retreat and the work of cooking, retreat managing, and so on.