The editing team of the “Journal Shambhala” - French Sangha Newsletter, is proud to announce the October issue, Nr 13, which can be downloaded (pdf) in the members section of http://shambhala.fr/

Véronique Villemagne, coordinator and designer, Sylvie Deraime, Clarisse Marandin, Bénédicte Moquard and Rohini Schiff-Bhagwat worked on this issue whose theme is family, children - raising children in Shambhala. The next issue, due sometime early next year, will be about teaching in Shambhala and the new curriculum.

For the last several months, Hamish Maclaren, Chair of the Accessibility Working Group of the Sakyong’s Council, and Chris Montone, Director of Shambhala Europe and have been collaborating on a project to make Shambhala teachings more available to people who are deaf or have hearing impairments, and to the many–six billion or so–non-native English-speakers worldwide. Both of these groups are ones that Shambhala is very much committed to serving and providing ever-improving accessibility to.

In their spare time, Chris and Hamish, with the enthusiastic support of Shambhala Media and Shambhala Information Technology Services, have been transcribing into English and captioning (subtitling) into various languages online video teachings of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Starting with short videos that have already been posted online either on Shambhala.org or Sakyong.com, at least 18 video teachings–most under 10 minutes long–have been transcribed and captioned into English so far. Our goal is to eventually make these videos available for Shambhala Centres and Groups to use on their websites or for their open house/open evening events.

The group is using software available from dotSUB.com, which allows multiple translators to log in and work with the files simultaneously, and makes new translations very easy to add in. If you’d like to see a sample video, just visit the Shambhala Times and look near the bottom of the right column on just about any page. There you’ll see a video called “Learning to Meditate”. The video allows you to easily select the caption language of your preference–English, Spanish, Persian (Farsi ) or Chinese (traditional or simplified). Another video on “Motivation” is also publicly viewable with captions in Czech, English, Spanish, and Swedish.

In this task, we have been greatly helped by several members who have very generously offered to proofread and translate the captions into other languages. Translators for Chinese, Czech, Spanish, French, Swedish and Farsi have recently joined the group and have begun captioning into those languages. Thank you very much to all of them!

We are currently looking for more volunteer translators in more languages. If you’d like to help, please contact either Hamish (maclaren@earthlink.net<a href=”maclaren@earthlink.net”) or Chris (<a href=”director@shambhala-europe.org”).

For more information on Shambhala’s Accessibility and Disability work, please click here. Also see the German and French, Spanish language sections of the Shambhala Times.

Last September, Edyta Wancowicz and Seweryn Julien were married in a Karma Kagyü dharma centre, near Warsaw, where they were to receive teachings. This is what they wrote about it:
“It was absolutely a big surprise for both of us. The whole life both of us were sort of mistrusting about long term commitments. On September 7th (Edyta`s birthday) the planets and stars were probably in opposition to all our fears and worries and we just trusted and JUMPED. Very Venerable Tenga Rinpoche (he was our very first dharma teacher) was kind enough to bless us, so now we are wife and husband (see picture). We are very happy about our new roles. Rinpoche told us that the most important thing in marriage is to have patience, tolerance and to train in loving kindness.”