A Summer Vacation That Never Ended

30th Anniversary of Dechen Chöling

Jessica : Hello David. For the 30th anniversary of Dechen Chöling, I’m meeting different actors who represent a piece of its history. And if there is one person who is there, from the very beginning of Dechen Chöling, that’s you.

Of course, there was also Catherine Éveillard and Herb Elsky along, but you in your dusty work clothes and a protective mask is one of my first memories of you and Dechen Chöling.

David : We were all involved. Yeah, yeah, quite involved even, yes.

Jessica : And what memories do you have from the very beginning of Dechen Chöling? Were you there the time that they chose the place?

David : No, I wasn’t there that day. I think Catherine was. She was possibly not there the day they chose it. But I believe she was there for the day that the Sakyong came and did a Lhasang and he signed the papers.

By that time, it was already chosen. This would have been late 1994. So, they chose it in the spring of 94 and there’s some videos still available from that visit where it looks very wild and uncared for.

I wasn’t on that visit, so they sent the video to the Sakyong and he said this looks great. He may even have made a quick visit at that time, I’m not sure, but he certainly approved it. So, by the time he came for his official first visit to Dechen Chöling in the autumn of 94. They’d prepared all the paperwork and they’d done all the agreements and it just had to be signed off by him so that it was officially his, you know, under his auspices.

Renovating the Château

David : Catherine was there and a whole bunch of other people and there’s quite a bit of video available of that occasion as well. And I then, then, then Catherine moved to Europe and I guess she, I guess she and her moved into Dechen Chöling in the spring of 95, early spring, and then they did a tour of the European, big European centres, including London, in which they not only announced the, you know, existence of the project, but also showed us the videos. We had a big evening at the London Shambhala Centre and they were calling for volunteers who could help with the renovation.

At that point, it was a renovation project. That was the main thing because the place needed a lot of work and we didn’t have enough money to use only professional workers, as you can imagine. We needed volunteers.

And so they were calling for volunteers and myself and Christina, my wife. We both thought it was a great idea to go out to Dechen Chöling and we would spend a few months there helping with the renovation.

That was the original idea. A few months. And we both loved it there.

She had a job, a regular job, which she’d managed to take some summer leave off from. It was a job where she was very flexible and I was self-employed, so I could just tell my clients : “Well, I’m going to France. I won’t know when I’ll be back.” That was the first phase.

Within about a day or two of arriving in Dechen Chöling, there were a very small number of people there already. Herb, Catherine, and a small bunch of somewhat kind of, I should say, hopeful, slightly lost young men, wondering what to do with their lives, thought they’d come and try that. I was an established builder by that time.

I knew what I was able to do. So within two days, Herb, who was sort of helping Catherine, Catherine was the architect in charge. Herb was really her right-hand man and helper.

And Herb said to me : “Well, I think you should be in charge of renovation. We appointed you as head of renovation because all the young men who were there didn’t really know that much about renovation.” They were simultaneously using some of the local French workers as much as they could afford to use for doing, they were actually working on, at that point on the, what we call the gardener’s house, the one opposite the chateau, doing that up to make it habitable.

And the one we call the gardener’s house was already habitable because that was where the man who sold the property lived in the château. Nobody was living in the château, which was pretty run down. So Herb and Catherine were living in the gardener’s house and they offered me a room there as well. We each had a room and Chris went back to work in London. I stayed on.

And within a few months, Chris was so keen to be involved, she sold her flat in London and bought a property nearby in France at the village of Aubepeyre, where we lived later.

Then the next stage was a renovation of the chateau, which required a lot of help from the French artisans, as well as our team, which was constantly growing at that point, our team of volunteers. And so for a while, nobody could live in the chateau because it was a building site.

Finally, it would have been the spring of 1996, some of the rooms were ready to occupy. I was the first person to go in and live in the chateau, up in the top, on one of the side corridors. And that’s where I lived for the next four or five years, while the renovation proceeded and then we opened as a centre in June 1996.

The First Programmes

At the beginning of June, the first programme took place, which was a dathün, led by a German sangha member called Pawo Baner. There were, I think, about 20 to 30 participants, a big success.

Jessica : The first ever programme and the first dathün in Europe ?

David : No, we had been running dathüns since probably the late 70s.

We ran them at, in a house in Ireland, which we had renamed Dao Chönu, which is one of the names of Gampopa. Originally, they were run by Sherab Chödzin, one of his senior students, who was sent by Chögyam Trungpa as an ambassador to Europe. There were dathüns every summer.

And people came all, all the way from Germany and all the European countries, Holland, obviously, not much from France at that point. All the way across Europe. They took a ferry across to Ireland, and Dao Chönu, and ran dathüns there.

So, the one at Dechen Chöling, it would have been about the sixth or seventh dathün. The first one is on our own property. Well, actually, Dao Chönu was our own property, because some sangha members had given it to Chögyam Trungpa, and Chögyam Trungpa gave it to the sangha.

And so, it was, in fact, owned by the European sangha. And it was by selling Dao Chönu, this house in Ireland, that we were able to buy the château in France. Property prices in France were much lower.

Jessica : The other place was smaller? Why wasn’t Dao Chönu preferred ?

David : Because it was such a long journey for people. You know, either a very long car journey and ferry, or some occasional people flew in. It wasn’t so common to fly, but some people flew.

But it was a long journey, and we knew from years before we bought Dechen Chöling that the sangha needed a place in Europe, on the continent of Europe, more in the middle.

And there was an attempt to get one in the Czech Republic, because property was very cheap there. But that was also a little bit off to one side, and it was complicated. Various things didn’t work out with that one.

Anyway, that was the beginning, the first dathün. And then we had a whole summer programme, which included a visit by Jeremy Hayward.

Jessica : There was a Warriors’ Assembly with Melissa Moore and Jeremy Hayward.

David : That’s right! Oh, so you’ve been doing some background research.

Jessica : That was around the time that I first came to Dechen Chöling.

David : You came very early.

Life at Dechen Chöling

Jessica : What was your first impression of the place when you visited it for the first time?

David : When I very first visited it with Herb and Catherine, well, I thought it was kind of romantic, because it was a semi-ruin. It wasn’t a ruin. The walls and the roof were perfectly sound, although the roof has needed a lot of work since.

But, you know, there was ivy creeping all over the place. You really had to struggle to get through some of the doors. And it was kind of romantic.

Everything was overgrown. There was, you know, wilderness around it. The grounds that are now sort of fairly well taken care of were pretty wild.

I thought it was charming and delightful and I was very pleased that we had bought it.

And it was also, at least for me, quite comfortable to live in this, the farmer’s house. I can’t remember where the other people were living. Perhaps they were sort of camping out in the château, actually, at the beginning, before the renovation work started.

We certainly used the big kitchen. The kitchen, that’s still the kitchen, was habitable. And I think that’s because Simon Lahaye and some Kasung volunteers had gone in before we did, in the winter, because Simon was appointed as the first caretaker.

And he was there for the visit with the Sakyong in the autumn of 94. And he agreed to stay through the winter and do some preliminary work. And one of the things he did was to get the kitchen up and running, with a very old stove that was still there, from an old woman who’d lived in it.

The last person to live in the chateau was an old lady of the De Havilland family. She was dead and gone by the time we got there. But she’d lived in that kitchen, which had a primitive central heating system and a working, functioning gas bottle stove.

And she lived in the room immediately above, which has more recently been an office room, because that was the part of the house that could be warmed. She lived also in one of the smaller rooms downstairs, which later was opened up and converted into the dining room.

She just lived in some small rooms. But that meant that the kitchen was pretty much ready to go. When Simon (Lahaye) got there, we had a kitchen.

And my first impression was that it was livable, but most of the rooms needed a lot of work. A lot of work. And the layout was not the way we’d want it.

It didn’t have that big dining room, for instance. That dining room was made up from three smaller rooms. You can still see the divisions in the floor where the rooms changed. If you look at the tiles and you look down, you can still see where that one room ended and another room began.

Jessica : I’ll look for it next time!

From Renovations to Teaching

Jessica : When was the first time you taught in Dechen Chöling ?

David : That’s a good point. Because in those early days, I was not, although I was already a Shambhala teacher, active in Europe.

But I was not teaching at Dechen Chöling, because my main focus was on renovations, which went on for the next.. Well, it’s still going on, actually!

I was certainly active with renovation until about the millennium, when I moved to Chris’s house in Aubepeyre. And so, whenever I was at Dechen Chöling, I was working on renovation and I would occasionally go off and teach in other places. London, obviously, because I was a London member. But also in many other centres, but those would mean leaving Dechen Chöling for a weekend or a longer period.

I didn’t start to teach in Dechen Chöling probably until, well, again, memory is a trick, but probably in the 2000s. When I was no longer involved in renovation. At that point, I decided I’d done enough renovation. I’d done five years of it, and there were lots of other people involved.

Herb was always big on renovation, and Koos had arrived to do a lot of work for us. A lot of good people got involved in the renovations.

And then, of course, once the chateau was livable, the focus turned to the barns and outbuildings, which were developed. I became involved in that because I was a member of the European donor group, and we funded the renovation of the barn, which now has the big shrine room in it.

When I first came by, there was no barn. The barn was in its original state. You could hardly go in there. There was an upstairs, which we were told not to go up to because the floor was unstable. And we did have one or two little bits of the barn that we were using.

I think we had a little boutique in one of the rooms or something like that. Some sort of place where you could go in and do things.

But it was all very messy and dark and not suitable. That’s my memory of it.

The Growth and the Challenges

Jessica : How do you see Dechen Chöling in the future?

David : Well, I hope it has a future. As you may know, I’m involved in the Dechen Chöling Council.

And we worry about this because we’re not really breaking even. We’re surviving mainly because of some generous donors, but that might not go on forever. And we certainly haven’t got back anywhere near where we were before the crisis with the Sakyong and COVID. We closed the place down for a while, and we haven’t returned to that size of operation. And of course, the European Community lost many members at that time.

And we haven’t got that big sangha back as it was before. We’re just hoping that various centres, including London, Sweden, and hopefully Amsterdam, are gradually building up their numbers again to recreate a better, bigger community. But the problem is that the scene has changed a lot.

When I say the scene, I mean the spiritual environment in which Dechen Chöling exists. There are many more different forms of spiritual practices and activities that are available, so we’re in a much bigger market, and it’s harder to compete.

Jessica : The bigger market also means there’s a lot more people that are interested in such programmes and retreats.

David : Well, yes, it does. There are a lot of people interested, and our challenge is to find those people, bring them in and that’s partly your job, isn’t it?

Jessica : Yes, it is, and I’m happy to contribute to Dechen Chöling’s well-being.

David : Anyway, my vision of the future, the first vision of the future, is to try to get back to roughly where we were before the COVID and the Sakyong crisis; and from there, I’d like to see us basically become an active centre in the way that, say, Plum Village, the centre of Thich Nhat Hanh is, where they have survived the loss of Thich Nhat Hanh.

So we should be able to survive the loss of the Sakyong, continue as an independent centre, and invite lamas to perform the necessary transmissions and abhishekas that the Sakyong used to do. I think the lamas are very willing to do that. The gap is that we won’t be able to recreate the Scorpion Seal Path, I don’t think, but maybe in the long term we will somehow. …Maybe. That’s not clear to me.

Jessica : From Tulku Rinpoche’s visit, I saw that Rinpoche was very pleased to come to Dechen Chöling. He talked about Trungpa Rinpoche and how he knew Trungpa Rinpoche, and it was a very touching moment.

David : Yes. I heard about it also from some of the other people on the council, that it was a very successful programme. Basically, we’ve known for years that the Tibetan community as a whole and the teachers in the Tibetan community, have always wanted us to succeed and have always been willing to support us.

So I think, with their help, we can come back to where we were before the Sakyong went away. I think so. But it will take some time.

In the meantime, we have to continue to grow our sangha base and our programme base and see if we can start to break even again. It’s a challenge, but it’s doable.

You know, I still have many memories of Dechen Chöling, but I don’t have something that could be put into the form of an anecdote, or I’d have to really sort of get into a long conversation, and then things might start to come out. You know, how one thing leads to another.

Jessica : True. The other day, I was watching Karin Hazé’s documentary. Don’t know if you’ve seen it recently ?

David : Yes, Karin Hazé. She made one of the most informative movies of Dechen Chöling’s early time.

Jessica : It was wonderful to look at all the people that came and helped.

David : Yes, that’s right. Lots and lots of people, especially in the summer.

We got lots of people coming, which is how it began for me and Christina.

We saw it as a summer holiday, a working summer holiday, and it was delightful. And we treated it in a very holiday-like way.

We used to go every hot day at the end of the working day, around five o’clock, we would go down to the river at Saint-Victurnien and swim in that nice deep area above the, above the, what do they call it, that dam that, the thing that holds the water back at Saint-Victurnien, just above the bridge. That was a great swimming place. And we used to go swimming every hot evening.

Whenever I go to Dechen Chöling in the summer, which I haven’t actually done for a long time, I would take my swimming things and go and swim in the river.

Jessica : Thank you for this moment with you, David. It was delightful to talk to you.

Interview with David Hope and Jessica Sarapoff – On September 14, 2025
For Dechen Chöling’s 30th Anniversary Series