Hello all,
I am a colleague of Loch Kelly’s and wanted to clear up some of the confusions here:
1. I have helped coordinate events for Loch and other teachers. Some of the information about fees is related to communicating with hosts about how many students they think will attend. Most lay teachers like Loch want to accept invitations but want to know that there will be a decent number of students in order to leave home and make a teaching trip from the US to Europe. Loch did not want to charge a very small group of student higher fees to pay for the trip. Therefore, Loch suggests to hosts that he would like do a a 2 1/2 day retreat with around 55 people attending at around $150 per student. Taking into account scholarships given to students that is where the $7700 figure came from. It does sound strange when it is presented out of context. This is a pretty typical way to talk about whether the host can get enough people to attend for a teacher to accept an invitation to spend 5 days including travel. You can easily look at the fees on Loch’s website which are reasonable and similar to other dharma teachers.
2. Loch is a wonderful person who has mainly done clinical social work in New York City with the severely mentally ill, the homeless and families of 9/11, where he was a first responder. As you can read in Loch's book, at the end of a one-on-one student-teacher interview in 2004 Mingyur Rinpoche said to Loch, “I would like you to teach Sutra Mahamudra.” This verbal invitation was known by many of us at the time. Two years later, before the Tergar organization was formed, this authorization letter below was given to Loch using the terms shamatha and vipassana (see
http://bit.ly/2bcWpgQ ). I know that Loch is planning to talk to Mingyur Rinpoche directly about what language he would like to use going forward.