With all the development, activity and events going on at the EC all year around, it’s great to sometimes just take the chance for our local sangha members and EC residents to get to know each other better and therefore become even stronger as a sangha. Normally being quite busy with running and supporting the Europe Center from day to day, we all liked the idea of spending a whole weekend together again.

Jesper kicked off the EC team weekend with a lecture about the sangha. The EC sangha consists of many friends coming from different cultural backgrounds with different levels of experience. Learning from “old rabbits” like Jesper and Charlotte living here and sharing decades of experience of how to build up and run a buddhist center AND have lots of fun doing it as well, is very precious and important to us.

On Saturday the rope climbing forest and the mountain huts on the other side of the lake saw an invasion of 50 buddhists. Balancing and dangling between ropes and hopping from one tree to another up to 15m above the ground was both a physical challenge and a great opportunity to observe one’s mind and how it functions in a rather extreme situation like this. No big surprise that lots of us happily went for the most difficult of 13 levels pretty quickly. Applying buddhist teachings to one’s everyday life and meditation do bring about fearlessness sooner or later! And pushing oneself “out of the comfort zone” has rarely ever been so much fun to us. ;-)

After recovering from this challenge by barbequeing and chilling in perfect summer evening weather, Ronald introduced us to the brandnew plans for the new EC building. In this phase of the planning it is very important to bring our EC team’s experience of daily challenges and needs of residents and guests and the technical knowledge of the architects together, in order to build a building that will really be fitting for whichever need comes up in every day, even more busy than now EC life in the future.

Sunday brought the next challenge – a tour of 15 (!!!!) flats inhibited by Sangha members in Immenstadt. We walked from flat to flat – causing quite a stirr on an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon in Immenstadt. Somehow we managed to squeeze into all of the flats, being warmly welcomed by the inhabitants with lots of tasty snacks, delicious cake and drinks. Besides admiring the interior design skills of many sangha members, everyone enjoyed just cuddling up together on the sofas and chatting in the kitchens or on the balconies with amazing views of the mountains and finally celebrating a really memorable EC team weekend with a spontaneous party in Anne and Achim’s flat.

Thanks to everyone who made this weekend happen with their organisational talent and hospitality – probably we all felt our friendship growing over just those two days!

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