A senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist Tradition, Roland Cohen has taught meditative practice in a variety of environments around the world. His teaching experience has taken him from the U.S. to Australia, Europe, New Zealand, India and Southeast Asia. Roland was the resident senior teacher of Shambhala in New Zealand for five years, and has extensive experience serving as the director of Shambhala Training in Boulder, Colorado and at Naropa University.

His lineage includes respected teachers Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Dzongsar Jamyang Kyentse Rinpoche and Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. He has been a Buddhist practitioner since 1972 and an authorised meditation instructor and teacher since 1982. Roland has extensive knowledge on the theory and practice of mindfulness-awareness meditation and its myriad benefits.

About New Life Foundation

How did you find out about New Life?

I heard about the foundation initially because my friend John Morecock had been coming here for years as a meditation teacher. He was working here six months on six off, for three or four years at least. He’s in the same community as me in Boulder and we knew each other from 20 years before when we lived in the same area in the Rocky Mountains. I was in Bangkok teaching a Shambhala training level last year and someone taking the course came up here after I’d left Thailand and he’d told John about the course. John emailed me and asked whether I’d be interested in taking his place.

How has the status of New Life as a recovery community affected your teaching practice?

Concerning the one-on-one meditation interviews: first I suss out whether the person is really brand new to mindfulness, have they read much, and that will affect how I approach the discussion with them. Many people at the foundation have a deep interest in Buddhism – I had no idea that was the case and because of that we are forming a Buddhist group here – we will study a text of some kind, discuss it and sit together once a week, which is wonderful. For people with a more secular interest in meditation (which is to say non-denominational, non-religious, not presenting it as part of Buddhism) – I’ve taught that for years at Naropa, so I’m accustomed to that.

The benefits

What would you consider to be the benefits of bringing your practice into this environment?

I was surprised when I arrived here, this place feels profoundly dharmic: there is a really strong meditative presence in the environment, so it is very supportive of my practice from that point of view, much more than I had expected. It’s a magical place, a very powerful place, and now that I’ve met Julian I can see that he’s an authentic practitioner, a very senior practitioner in his tradition of Buddhism, so I can see that’s very much woven into the energy here, the feel here, the environment here.

You’ve been a practitioner of Buddhism since ’72 teaching since ’82 in several different places around the world. What brought you to this practice?

Like many people, it was the times. I was at university in ’72, during the Vietnam War. There was a period when it got particularly deadly – there was a sense of impending doom that conflict at the time might lead of WWIII. There was a sense that we might not be alive tomorrow. So I was walking around with a very strong feeling of my own mortality, and it was during that day a book someone gave me fell out of a bookshelf into my lap. And I read through that and it mentioned people that had attained enlightenment – it mentioned people completely going beyond confusion and understanding the nature of existence, and it was like being struck by lightning.

I didn’t know such a thing was possible, and if it is, then that’s why I’m here. I just immediately knew that I had to seek out the teachings that led to enlightenment: I looked at Taoism, Confucianism, and western psychotherapy. And then one day someone mentioned ‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’ and I read that book and it was like a clear bell just sort of rang, and it wasn’t asking me to believe in anything, it was just talking about how it is and I just knew that was what I wanted to do.

The mission of Roland

What led you to become a meditation teacher?

I really was very neurotic when I started, and I’d been into marijuana and I was a musician in the early ’70s, need I say more. All my friends were hippies – I came out of that culture. When I quit marijuana I was very depressed for a year – it was a real depression. I’d never experienced anything like that. Then I really started getting serious and looking for a teacher, and I went to a place called Karmê Chöling in Vermont and I met Chögyam Trungpa and something really stuck with me, some deep connection I couldn’t put my finger on, so that was the start of my practice.

I couldn’t imagine ever being a teacher though, I felt so depressed, so neurotic, it never occurred to me I’d be sane enough to teach, and it took a decade before I was ready. From studying under Chögyam Trungpa it was a natural progression to become a teacher – it turned out that I had an aptitude for it, I liked it and started teaching at Naropa University and teaching a lot of Shambhala courses wherever I was including in New York, Boston, Boulder. Since then I’ve taught in Australia, India, New Zealand, briefly in France, England and quite a lot in other parts of the U.S. too. I taught all over the place for many years.

What does a typical day look like for you here?

I engage in about 5 hours of ‘work’ a day – I get up at around 5.30 in the morning to start the early morning sitting, then there’s breakfast and the morning meeting. Following this there’s one-on-ones at 9.30: today I had two and a group meditation discussion, most days I will have three one-on-ones, starting at 9.30 to around 12.30. On Wednesdays I have the ‘Intro to Mindfulness’ teaching and everyday I have something at 4.30, some kind of guided meditation – except for those Wednesdays. That’s pretty much an average day. After that I do my practice, and then I go to dinner.

From your point of view, what specific benefits would someone get from regular mindfulness- awareness meditation practice?

Some people are not interested in meditation as a spiritual practice, but it benefits everyone, whether spiritual or not. I would say your intention in doing it does flavour and impact the practice itself. If you’re doing it to get into mindfulness and to enrich your life, it brings about a sense of greater clarity in your mind, greater connection with your body, and it tames your mind to an extent. It helps you to focus because you’re really training and noticing when your mind goes away – you’re starting to see the difference between somewhere else and here, so it trains that particular perception and that particular knowledge of the differences between those two, and if you keep doing it, a lot of people end up preferring to be present over not being present, and that’s kind of a key point.

In the beginning it might just be because ‘I’m miserable and I need to do mindfulness practice because I need to feel less crazy’, and that’s often the reason people begin to do it, they just want to feel better. And that’s a great reason – further on your problems become more workable, you feel you can see them more clearly, you can work with things without exaggerating, things sort of level out a bit. And that levelness is a reflection of your basic sanity which is always there. If you see it as the beginning of the spiritual path it is particularly profound, because mindfulness enables you to first settle down enough so you can begin to connect with some kind of unconditional presence, which we call basic goodness in Shambhala or Buddha nature in Buddhism – you start to realise that you’re fundamentally okay, and you can go through all kinds of things and yet there’s something more basic that’s more reliable there, and that brings you a lot of confidence.

In general, what inspires you?

People who really, genuinely want to help and uplift others – I feel it’s modelled beautifully at New Life by Julian. I’m also inspired by the dharma and getting to teach. I’m inspired by things that lead towards undoing our suffering, and for me that’s connected with Buddhist meditation and Shambhala training. I think I’d like more exposure to Thai culture.

I’ve only been to Bangkok, and I didn’t get to hang out with any locals there, so I’d like to have that experience – meeting people from the local culture inspires me. I committed to being here for six months, with the stipulation if it worked out for both of us I’d like to stay longer. I feel like I can make a contribution here by meeting so many people and helping them to learn about mindfulness and meditation practice – it makes life worthwhile on one hand and on the other I feel it’s making a difference.