Joan, Lorena, Paco, Kamlo, Noelia, Rafa, Gernán, Kris, Paloma, Charo, Francoise, Lydia, Jessi, Kiko, Jose, and Luan on the top row, and Javi, Ven. Namdrol, Conchi, Charo, Javi, Fernando, Kelsang, and Pablo on the bottom row, Foundation Service Seminar, Lliria, Spain, November 2019. Photo by FSS graduate.

The Foundation Service Seminar (FSS) is the “FPMT immersion retreat.” It provides essential information and nourishment for all serving, or wishing to serve, in the FPMT organization. The FSS Retreat is key to deeply understanding the FPMT organization and the attitude we seek to cultivate as we offer service in the organization. This experiential retreat helps us actualize the advice that service is practice, practice is service, and how to always enjoy and rejoice when offering service. 

Twenty-two FPMT students graduated from the FSS held in Spain, while thirty one students graduated from the FSS held at Nalanda Monastery, the FPMT monastery in Lavaur, France.

Spain

Francisco (“Kiko”) LLopis, FPMT Spain National coordinator, shared the following:

We had the fortune of hosting an FSS from October 29 to November 3 in Lliria, near Valencia. Twenty FPMT students from Spain and two FPMT students from abroad  joined the seminar.

Under the guidance of FSS registered facilitators Paloma Fernandez and François Lecointre, we had fun together and deepened our experience of offering service to others in the organization. We dealt with fundamental aspects of offering service such as understanding the FPMT organization, the link between service and practice, good motivation and attitude, kind and effective communication, conflict resolution, burn-out prevention, rejoicing, and more. These topics were always addressed with a very practical and experiential approach. 

Germán and Kelsan in the background and Juan, Joan, Paco, and Jessi in the foreground during a Foundation Service Seminar session, Lliria, Spain, November 2019. Photo by FSS graduate.

Graduates offered remarks such as:

• “It has opened my views regarding FPMT and gave more meaning to my service in FPMT for so many years.”
• “Life changing … has deepened my practice and confidence in my spiritual community.”
• “Positive, constructive, and inspiring.”

Of the many useful resources offered during the FSS, we would like to highlight the Inner Job Description, a great tool for developing mindfulness about our thoughts, speech, and actions. It is available for all to use, via a paper format or a  free app, in English, Chinese, French, Italian, Russian, and Spanish.

Foundation Service Seminar graduates and facilitators, Nalanda Monastery, Lavaur, France, January 2020. Photo by Harold Weichart.

France

This FSS was facilitated by Annelies van der Heijden and François Lecointre in January 2020.

Graduates offered remarks such as:

• “I connected with the wider vision of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Now I feel more enthusiastic to help with different projects.”
• “Practice is service, and service is practice. I collected many ideas to implement in our center.”
• “FSS is very practical, providing material to deal with basic problems at the center. Now that I have learned about immersion aversion I better understand why people act in different ways … and I know there is support for that.”

Advice from Lama Zopa Rinpoche on FSS

While meeting with FSS facilitators in October 2017, Lama Zopa Rinpoche offered the advice that follows (which you can also listen to as an audio recording):

“The hard work at the center—one should know and relate to Milarepa or Naropa’s life story, the great practitioners, one must remember and relate to that. What made them enlightened so fast? What? It was following the guru’s advice exactly without arising heresy or anger, by following it perfectly. As a result, becoming enlightened in a brief lifetime of this degenerate time, and receiving realizations. So similarly, however hard it is working for the center, you must relate to that and see the unbelievable benefit, benefit like limitless sky! So then it becomes the most enjoyable work in the life, the happiest thing to do in the life.”

Thubten Kunga Center, the FPMT center in Deerfield Beach, Florida, US, will be hosting a Foundation Service Seminar August 15-19, 2020. Institut Vajra Yogini, an FPMT center in Lavaur, France, will be hosting a Foundation Service Seminar August 17 -22, 2020. For more information on the Foundation Service Seminar and to find out how to register for future events, visit FPMT Service Seminars. 

Lama Zopa Rinpoche is the spiritual director of the Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), a Tibetan Buddhist organization dedicated to the transmission of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and values worldwide through teaching, meditation, and community service.