Issue date: December 22, 1999
By BARBARA WOOD
The silence is not complete. Rustles, sighs and small sounds of breathing can be heard inside the former school gymnasium, while outside, the ringing of church bells and the shouts of playing children testify the world is still there.
But the 50 or so people who gather on Sunday mornings at the Portola Valley Town Center to practice meditation find an oasis of peace and calm in the cavernous room. Many come at 8:30, sit on mats or plastic chairs for 40 minutes, stretch and walk quietly for 15 minutes of "walking meditation," then return to their mats for 35 minutes more.
They slowly rejoin the world during the next 45 minutes as they listen to and question their "teacher," Gil Fronsdal. Mr. Fronsdal, who has practiced and studied the 2,500-year-old Buddhist practice of Vipassana, or Insight Meditation, for more than 15 years, leads several such sitting groups for the Insight Meditation Center of the Mid-Peninsula.
Mr. Fronsdal has been leading meditation groups since 1990, when he started with 12 to 15 people. By 1993 there were 40 attending; now they meet three times a week with between 50 to 100 at each sitting. There are 800 on the center's mailing list, and three times a year they offer a five-week introductory course in Vipassana meditation.
"We're definitely growing in all kinds of ways," says Mr. Fronsdal, who calls himself a "spiritual counselor."
In addition to the Portola Valley Town Center, the group meets in Palo Alto at the Friends Meeting Hall, at St. Mark's Episcopal Church for one-day retreats, and at the Zen Center, Jiko-ji, in the Longridge Open Space Preserve, for weekend retreats.
Being so spread out makes it hard to expand. "There's a kind of movement to grow and no place to do it," Mr. Fronsdal says.
The group hopes to soon have its own home. One possible location for a community meditation center is the long-vacant former AME Zion Church, home of Palo Alto's first African-American Church.
"I don't know if we can pull it off," Mr. Fronsdal says, but the neighbors seem supportive of the concept. If the group can't buy the church, it will find some other home, he says.
He and his wife Tamara and their almost-2-year-old son Toren live on Skyline Boulevard in Woodside in a house rented from the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. He supports his family with donations he receives as a Buddhist teacher.
Mr. Fronsdal, who describes his parents as "disinterested atheists," discovered Buddhism and meditation in college at UC Santa Barbara and UC Davis. "I felt a level of integrity from the meditation part that I wanted to make a bigger part of my life," he says.
He spent the next several years studying and meditating -- first at the Zen Center in San Francisco, then in the monastery at Tassajara, followed by a year in Japan training as a Zen priest.
He left to renew his visa and spent the 10-week wait in Bangkok studying Vipassana, a form of Buddhism originated in Burma. "Ten weeks was long enough for it to get my attention," he says.
Mr. Fronsdal then went to Burma as one of the first Westerners allowed to make extended visits to the country.
"They told us there were two spies watching us meditate. They must have been very bored," he said.
After 18 months in Southeast Asia, where he was ordained as a monk, he came back and did a three-month retreat in Massachusetts. "And then I felt like I had done enough intensive meditation," Mr. Fronsdal says.
He did want to continue to study, however, so he went on to get a master's degree in religious studies from the University of Hawaii and then his doctorate in Buddhist studies from Stanford University.
While attending Stanford, Mr. Fronsdal trained as a meditation teacher under the direction of Jack Kornfield of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, and began his affiliation with the Insight Meditation Center.
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