Buddhism is nearly invisible in the Napa Valley. The monks from the Gyudmed Tantric Monastery made their sandpainting several years ago at a Napa art gallery; Treasures of Tibet in Calistoga shut its doors a couple of months ago. While Protestants numbered 800 at the Meritage Resort in Napa on Sept. 10, Buddhists in the Napa Valley are few and far between. However, they do exist in Napa, St. Helena and Calistoga.

A case in point is Dean Mattioli, whose day job is cabinetry and furniture restoration. He led meditation sessions at the Carnegie building in St. Helena on Tuesdays and at a private home in Napa on Thursdays. He belongs to Ati Ling, the Bay Area chapter of the Chagdud Gonpa Foundation. Ati Ling has a retreat center, Yeshe Ling, in Oakville, operates the Padmasambhava Peace Institute in Cazadero and also runs a Treasures of Tibet store in Occidental.

Mattioli came to Buddhism from a Christian background. He observed, “(In Buddhism), it is your responsibility to find out. I went to a Catholic church, they offered me information, but didn’t encourage me to question or find out if it made sense. (In Buddhism), it’s not shuffled off to an outside force, it’s your responsibility.”

Mattioli commented on the attraction of Buddhism, saying, “It’s a mystery; it’s all personal.  … It could be something superficial, a memory. It could be the result of previous karma, of aspirations in a previous life. I find something that makes sense. It’s like falling in love. People come to Buddhism because they feel like there’s something missing in their life. They think ‘What is it that makes me happy? It’s not stuff, what is it?’”

He described his formal practice, saying, “It is deity practice like Red Tara and Vajrasattva (the god of purification). … In deity practice, the deity represents something, but is not literally a deity.” Red Tara is the principle object of his meditations; she is depicted as a red-skinned woman with a flowered bow and the nectar of immortality. In Tibetan Buddhism, she represents bountifulness and transforms lust into compassion. Mattioli observed, “Red Tara represents pristine awareness. … Deity is pristine awareness, and the essential nature of all things.” In deity practice, meditators visualize themselves as enlightened, blissful, and divine.

Mattioli also commented that he would be receiving empowerments for all his practices all day from his lama, Jigme Tromge Rinpoche at the Padmasambhava Peace Institute in Cazadero. He continued, “An empowerment is like signing up for college courses, like sitting with a professor and getting the inside information. In Buddhism, there’s transference of blessings of the lama that isn’t spoken. It’s knowledge that doesn’t require conversation; it’s about being open to receiving knowledge. It’s a mind-to-mind transmission. It’s an informative process, a better understanding of the practice. … Without empowerment, words don’t make sense.” Empowerments are complex rituals that involve chants, vows and visualizing one’s lama and one’s self as the deity. Many forms of Tibetan Buddhism require empowerments to engage in certain practices, the empowerment ritual functioning as initiation.

Mattioli’s other future plans include making a new flier for the meditation sessions; he is tentatively planning on holding them at his workshop studio in St. Helena on Monday or Tuesday evenings. He said, “I don’t go out recruiting people. …There are traditions where they try to recruit people like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. … (In Buddhism) the motivation comes from the person.”

Anna Abbott is a freelance writer living in Napa.

She can be reached at Religion_News@hotmail.com.