MEAL DANA

We invite you to participate in a particularly beautiful practice of giving, by offering a meal, or a day of meals in a practice we call “meal dāna.”

To provide a meal for a retreat is to feed and fuel the very life force of everyone on retreat at Cloud Mountain. Your meal offering sustains all of the yogis who come to practice the Dharma; the teachers who provide teachings and guidance in the Dharma; and the Dharma center staff, whose labors serve and support the Dharma. Your gift touches each person practicing or serving the retreat at the cellular level. To offer a meal is to offer a truly personal and intimate gift to your brothers and sisters in the Dharma, and to provide them the essential support needed to realize their highest aspirations of liberation.

Sometimes people might join with Dharma friends, or get together with their sitting group, to sponsor a meal or a day of meals. It can be a lovely way to support and surprise a friend by offering a meal in their name during a retreat they are attending! This kind of gift is very personal, and has the potential to touch people’s hearts directly and allow them to open ever more deeply.

A meal offering can be a beautiful way for you to commemorate an important day—a birthday, for example. An offering can also be made on behalf of someone else, perhaps to honor a loved one who has passed from this life.

Meals may be offered anonymously, of course, but we would very much like to be able to provide the names of those who offer meal dāna. Sometimes there might be self-consciousness in making this kind of offering publicly. However, the impact of seeing the names of individual donors is very profound for those receiving such a wonderful gift, whether one knows them or not. It is very powerful simply knowing that someone has provided the sustenance for our practice and for our lives at that meal, but it is even more powerful to see the name, to experience the personal connection, the sense of receiving a real gift from a real person. Feelings of loving kindness, joy and gratitude arise spontaneously. Allowing your name to be acknowledged can be the cause for wholesome mind states to arise in others. This is one reason why offering meal dāna is a profound and lovely practice of giving.

Offering a meal on a retreat—whether you are a participant or not—is its own kind of celebration and a cultivation of wholesomeness. You have the opportunity to offer a single meal or even a full day of meals. All meal dāna donations are fully tax deductible. The specific donation amounts for meal dāna are as follows:

• Breakfast: $100
• Lunch (or Brunch): $125
• Dinner: $75
• A Full Day of Meals: $300

Since this a very unique gift, we want to offer you every opportunity to personalize it in ways that give you the greatest joy in giving! We offer avenues through which you are able to personalize your meal offering. If time is short before the retreat you’d like to offer to, or if you are attending the retreat and wish to wait until you arrive to donate the funds, please email us as soon as possible with the following information. This helps us to best honor the intent of your gift. For simplicity’s sake, you may wish to copy and paste the following questions into an email and send us the information that way:

• Which meal are you offering: Breakfast, Lunch/Brunch, Dinner, or a Full Day of Meals?
• Do you have a specific date in mind for your offering, or are you flexible?
• Do you want your meal offering to be anonymous?
• If you have a special dedication of one or two sentences in mind, please write it exactly as you would like to see it on the dedication board.

We take pleasure in acknowledging each and every meal offering on our dedication board. In the event you have no special dedication in mind and wish to remain anonymous, we will post a dedication that might read: “This meal is offered by an anonymous friend (present/not present) on this retreat.” If you have no special dedication and are open to having your name acknowledged, we will post a dedication including your name, city and state that might read: “This meal is offered by Jane or John Doe of Seattle, WA.”