Liberación Dharma
Liberación Dharma is an initiative to engage local white (Caucasian descendant) Buddhist communities in Colorado in decolonization work and active participation in reparations.
Liberación Dharma centers its work on the belief that the healing of individuals, communities, and the Earth are inextricably interconnected. You can’t heal one without healing the others. To practice Liberación Dharma is to engage directly with all three.
This nine month cohort is designed for individuals who recognize that they have received material benefits from systems of colonization, and who are also aware of the profound costs—both to the communities dispossessed and to their own sense of connection and belonging in the world.
While Liberación Dharma primarily centers white (Caucasian descendant), financially stable, English-speaking Americans, it is open to anyone who acknowledges their benefit from colonial systems and is committed to working toward their dismantling.
Our end-of-June camping retreat is right around the corner! Click on the button to the left to learn more!
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There is a $150 registration fee designed to secure your commitment to the program. You can either pay the $150, or you can volunteer with Campesino Commons for 5 hours to cover the cost.
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The program will begin with a day-long retreat where we will quiet our individual internal noise through meditation, allowing us to learn to listen and attune to Land Spirit. We will explore how building a relationship with Land Spirit can integrate with Buddhism and Dharma practice, as well as begin to reclaim our natural belonging to the world as our birthright. This will be our foundation. We will also come together for a weekend camping retreat to deepen in our circle and reconnect with land spirit in June.
After our opening daylong retreat, we will meet twice monthly to explore, with great self compassion, how we have been trained by our families, our schools, our communities to perceive different cultures and races as ‘other’. We will explore how we have come to adopt perceptions of white supremacy, white savior mentality, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and other views of entitlement and exceptionalism that we may be completely unaware of. This will require engaging large topics such as colonization, rewilding, re-indigenization, and collective liberation. As we visit these places in ourselves, we will do so with a gentle hand and a loving heart. It is said that true healing is not about fixing the broken parts of ourselves, but about loving them. This work is foundational in building authentic and meaningful relationships with communities who have different backgrounds and worldviews. We suspect the opportunity to connect with others will emerge after doing this healing work together, especially due to Campesino Commons' connection with rural communities in Teotecacinte and the Latinx/Mexica community on the Front Range, who are also engaging in healing work and circle process. However, we hold this lightly and will trust the circle to decide direction, as we know that agendas can easily kill the creative potential that is present when working with groups of people. Our socio-political landscape is also constantly shifting, and so a part of the training will be about adapting and remaining flexible in these times.
There will be a fundraising aspect to the Liberation Dharma circle. We intend to leverage our privileges to engage in exchange with communities who are different from us, planting seeds to be transformed by encountering other ways of being while also bringing our ofrenda to the table. There will be opportunities to fund community-led initiatives in Nicaragua, local initiatives in Colorado, and Campesino Commons itself in developing transformative programs such as this one.
We will close the circle in early December of 2026.
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Campesino Commons uses Restorative Justice Circle process that is primarily grounded in ancient indigenous traditions from around the world. At the heart of this process is the notion that no one is either above or below, in front of or behind anyone else. Every voice is equal and everybody belongs.
In circle, we hold individual agency as sacred, ensuring that everybody who participates in the circle truly wishes to be there, and only speaks if they feel they want to. This agency creates a foundation of safety for all, as there are no hidden agendas or covert manipulations. If you don’t want to be there, you don’t have to. If you don’t want to share, you don’t have to.
Our circle also holds the talking piece as deeply sacred. The person holding the talking piece is invited to share. The people who are not holding the talking piece are invited to listen. This means that individual sharing is not timed, and the direction of conversation is not dictated by any individual. Leadership belongs to the entire circle, which allows for wisdom to arise that is far greater than anything that can be offered by a single person. We move into a more ancient sense of time, not segmented by second, minutes or hours, but rather something that flows, grounded in a sense that we are not trying to get somewhere other than where we already are.
People who participate in this kind of circle report an experience of becoming part of a larger whole in an intimate and integrated way– something that is far too rare in our western culture.
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Each cohort will participate in one day-long and one camping retreat in the Rocky Mountains (Exact location TBD). The day-long retreat will begin at 8:00 am, and end at 6:30pm MT. The camping retreat will be three nights. Arrivals will begin Thursday evening between 2-8 PM and the retreat will close by 3:00pm on that Sunday.