By Lily Rockefeller
Recently, Garrison Institute co-founder and urban planner Jonathan F.P. Rose was invited to “Life As It Is,” the podcast of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Co-hosted by Tricycle’s Editor-in-Chief James Shaheen and renowned mindfulness teacher Sharon Salzberg, the conversation explores Jonathan’s path to Buddhism, the founding and evolution of the Garrison Institute, and the ways contemplative practice can shape how we respond to social and environmental challenges.
One of the most fascinating moments from the episode is Jonathan’s recounting of the Garrison Institute’s founding. Through Reb Zalman Schachter, a pioneer of the Jewish revival movement and later a founding spiritual director of the Garrison Institute, Jonathan and fellow Garrison co-founder Diana Calthorpe Rose met their teacher Gelek Rinpoche. When Diana eventually became executive director of Gelek Rinpoche’s organization Jewel Heart, the couple became involved in the search for a retreat center at Rinpoche’s request.
They came across a beautiful building on the banks of the Hudson River in Garrison, New York, which had formerly been a Capuchin monastery. But setback after setback in acquiring the space led Gelek Rinpoche to turn to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who asked his oracle what the best path forward would be. The response was that Rinpoche’s retreat center should be in the Midwest, where most of his students were – but the monastery on the Hudson still had a part to play.
“There were enough Buddhist retreat centers in the world,” Jonathan recalls being told. This institute, they came to understand, was to connect the contemplative wisdom of world traditions with civil society and the environment, bridging the gap between inner wisdom and outer action. The Garrison Institute opened in the former monastery in 2003.
Sharon also recalls the early days of Contemplative Based Resilience (CBR), one of the Garrison Institute’s flagship programs that she co-founded with Diana, which teaches caregivers and helping professionals skills to manage stress and burnout.
In the episode, Jonathan emphasizes the model that CBR established: keeping one foot firmly rooted in contemplation and the other in the rigor of science, with a focus on application instead of only compelling concepts. The program has not only helped caregivers develop resilience skills but also contributed to a broader shift in how institutions think about the people doing this work—away from treating caregivers as expendable and toward recognizing a responsibility to care for them too. For Jonathan, this is an example of the Garrison Institute’s larger commitment to field development: bringing people and ideas together around emerging approaches to social and environmental challenges.
One of the most inspiring parts of the episode comes when Jonathan shares a teaching from an Indigenous woman from Wisconsin, whose people had been displaced from the lands near Garrison. She taught him one of the most powerful practices he’s encountered for feeling connected to nature and place.
When mindfully walking through a forest, Jonathan explains, we might carefully turn our attention to the nature surrounding us. But seldom do we realize that the woods, as we walk through them, are also aware of us. Jonathan invites us to nurture our sense of this interdependence, the two-way relationship in which we are always involved. If we take this interdependence seriously, it changes not only how we see the world, but how we choose to act within it.
Jonathan, James, and Sharon also discuss Buddhism, bioregional resilience, and planetary health. Ultimately, the episode centers on the question that the Garrison Institute takes as its inspiration: How can contemplation inform the way we respond to social challenges and environmental crisis? We encourage you to give the full episode a listen on “Life As It Is” at tricycle.org/podcast/jonathan-rose/.
