If you wish to offer a meal to our women's monastic community at Aranya Bodhi Hermitage, here are possibilities for you:

• Visit the hermitage to offer a fresh meal any day before 10:30 am.  Please consult the hermitage dana calendar and email  to find a good day.
• Contribute to a collective offering of fresh local organic vegetables weekly.  Contact the Dana Coordinator at the number or email below for information.
• Drop off useful non-perishable goods such as grains (whole grains and refined), legumes and canned vegetables either at the hermitage directly or  at the Bodhi House in Fremont.  If these are dropped off at the Bodhi House, they will be brought up to the hermitage whenever a car is going.  Check the Awakening Forest blog (link is on the bar at the top of this page)  to see if there are any foods on the Useful Things List.  Your donated foods will be prepared and cooked and offered to resident bhikkhunis.
• Offer a meal gift card to a restaurant of your choice in Santa Rosa.  This can be used by monastics when coming into Santa Rosa on errands days.  Some gift cards are rechargeable online.
• Invite the monastics for house dana.  If you live in the Sonoma Coast area, you can invite any number of hermitage monastics to a meal offering at your home.  When monastics come for meal dana at a home, normally they will also give blessings and if invited, a Dhamma talk. There may also be time for questions and personal consultation in your practice.  Please consider contributing to the hermitage  for gas, if you invite for house dana.  You may also take this opportunity to offer anything on the Hermitage Useful Things List.  Write the awakening forest email below if your would like to make a House Dana invitation.  Please note: according to the monastic discipline of the Vinaya, individual monastics should not be invited for house days, but only any number of members of the monastic community may be invited.
• Invite the monastics for pindapata.  If you live in the Sonoma Coast area and would like the hermitage monastics to come by your home, meditation group, Dhamma center, restaurant or grocery store  for pindapat (almsround), just let them know. You can do this by emailing.  If monastics have an invitation --either on a specific day or an open invitation-- they may come by your place to receive your offering.  At that time both meals of fresh foods as well as perishable and  non-perishable food supplies may be offered.  The food supplies may be placed in the care of any accompanying lay person, anagarika or novice. 

Finally, a word of advice in offering dana. As you buy, cook, and deliver the food, keep your intention to nourish the bhikkhunis as they strive for Nibbana firmly in your mind. Tell yourself mentally what your intention is. Feel it throughout your body. That way you will gain the most benefit from your meritorious actions.