Tibetan Buddhism, Meditation & Sacred Land
Reflections by Charlotte Z. Rotterdam
My first visit to Hollyhock was in 2000. I remember taking the ferry from Vancouver Island to Quadra Island, and then again from Quadra to Cortes Island. Standing on the ferry deck, the sea spray covered my face and hair in a luscious moist embrace. Ahead of us lay this small, beautiful island covered in deep forests and gentle rocky beaches. This is no ordinary trip, I thought; it is a pilgrimage, a journey where we meet the land, the water, the sky as though for the first time, rediscovering who we are when we let the project of “being me” relax. What opens, what is revealed in the simple presence of wind and sun, rain and earth?
A few years later, my husband Pieter and I moved to Tara Mandala Retreat Center in Southwestern Colorado, a completely different type of land with fields of sage and rolling hillsides of pinion and ponderosa pine. Vast views out to the snow-peaked LaPlata Mountains to the West and San Juan mountains to the East, with endless skies of blue and a deep stillness at night that lets you rest more soundly into the slumber of earth. Here we came to love our meditations in a meadow where the wind and rain whipped around the teaching tent or sitting on Prayer Flag ridge where the vastness of your gaze becomes a mirror of the nature of your own mind.
Land becomes teacher. Space and sky become teachers. We tap into Skymind – our inherent nature which is spacious and open, and thus also profoundly intimate and connected to all things. We are earth, we are water, we are air, we are space itself. The Tibetan Buddhist teachings describe the ground of being as the Great Mother, giving rise to and embracing all that exists. We too are arising as a display of the ground of being, like a wave rising from the depths of the ocean, never actually separate from its source. To know this ground, to recognize this true nature is the journey of Skymind. It is a journey that is less about searching for something outside ourselves and more about resting into the truth of who we are. Machig Labdrön, a great 11th century Tibetan yogini, suggested “since there is no path to traverse, rest in the basic ground, noble child.” She means we don’t have to go somewhere else, become something else in order to come to know who and what we truly are. Rather, trusting our inherent dignity, we can rest like a child in the lap of the Great Mother. And here we realize that we are profoundly interconnected to all beings and all things, however beautiful or gruesome they may appear to us; so this path-less journey is one of profound acceptance and compassion, for ourselves and ultimately for all beings.
How do we rest? Into the earth, into the gentle embrace of trees and wind and sea. “Rest your mind in the way of the sky,” says Machig. This June, we’ll again be at Hollyhock, meeting ourselves, each other, and the land in that intimate encounter that reminds us of our wholeness and our capacity to meet whatever we encounter in life with an open mind and a fiercely loving h
Join Pieter Oosthuizen and Charlotte Rotterdam this summer, June 5 – 10, 2026 for SKYMIND: Tibetan Buddhism, Meditation and Sacred Land
