Upaya Buddhist Chaplaincy Program
 Invites New Applicants
 
A visionary chaplaincy program for those serving our imperiled world
 
• Two-year certificate program founded in Buddhist
teachings and systems thinking
 
• Training paths in End-of-life Care, Prison Ministry,
Peacemaking, Environmental Ministry, Interfaith and
Multi-faith Ministry, and Women’s Ministry
 
• 2009 faculty includes Roshi Joan Halifax, Fleet Maull,
Margaret Wheatley, Daniel Siegel, Richard Davidson,
Stephen Batchelor, and many more.
 
 
Applications now being accepted for 2009 Cohort
 
More info: www.upaya.org/training/chaplaincy.php
Email: chaplaincy@upaya.org
 
 
 
 
 

JANE FONDA’S
SPEECH ON ART & ACTIVISM FOR
V-DAY NEW ORLEANS…April 13th, 2008


Oh mercy, oh my—it feels like when the levees broke it blew the lid off the ninth ward and Parrish unleashed these voices, these poems, these words, these doves of peace, these attitudes --power and solidarity. I don’t know think they knew what they were unleashing. And I say “they” because it wasn’t the natural disaster that did it, it was man made—it was negligence and lack of caring. That broke the levees.

I don’t know about you but I’ve been rocked to my core and I’m so grateful to Eve and V-day for creating this chance for all of us to witness the power of the women of New Orleans. Their words, their poems and songs gave voice to all the women from all the corners of the world that have been represented here so beautifully—the Congo, Kenya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Croatia, Serbia, Phillipines and it has enabled us to understand in our bodies, in our cells what sisterhood and solidarity feel like. That’s what art does. No woman no cry. Everything’s gonna be alright.

And the beautiful “vagina-challenged” men on that panel yesterday who helped us see that patriarchy doesn’t just wound women, it wounds men as well. It allows men to engage in violence without knowing it’s wrong. It makes them define their manhood by machismo, it creates a toxic brew called masculinity that is so easily shamed and so ready to turn to violence to cover the shame and win back their dominance. Our brothers yesterday helped us understand that all of us must work to create a masculinity that is less vulnerable to shaming. This means raising our sons and grandsons and nephews to understand their manhood is connected to their hearts, not their fists or their penises. And then we have to be sure we’ve created a safe space for them to be sensitive, loving men.

Patriarchy is the enemy, not men. And the opposite of patriarchy isn’t matriarchy—although that might be nice for awhile—just to right the balance a little. But no, the opposite of patriarchy isn’t matriarchy, it’s democracy. There can be no democracy in the hierarchal paradigm that is patriarchy—somebody’s always gotta be on top and it’s not supposed to be women unless they’re ventriloquists for the patriarchy. Can’t have true democracy that way. We’re the majority, for heaven’s sake!

We are at a crossroad right now in the world—we cannot continue the way it’s been. We’ve seen these last two days where that’s taken us.

As Naomi Klein made real clear this afternoon, all we have to do is look at what the U.S. government has done in Iraq after the invasion--the exact opposite of what needed to be done and, then, here in New Orleans during and after the flood. Same thing. How people’s needs were ignored, how the same private corporations that botched it in Iraq were brought in to do reconstruction here and again botched it through waste and corruption and got incredibly rich, in both places—with our tax money.

We can even see how from the point of view of the old, patriarchal paradigm, that global warming and the natural disasters that result from it are a boon. It means that disaster capitalism doesn’t have to create the chaos and shock like it did in Iraq, Nature will do it for them. New Orleans showed how it can be done.

This is the paradigm that says “Never mind governance. Never mind humanity unless it’s rich, powerful and mostly white. The “others” will be in such a state of shock they’ll be powerless to stop us, their government will be unable to help, and we’ll be safe behind our walls and partitions that separate us from them.”
If we continue on this path we will all perish because the planet will have been destroyed. What do they care? Many of them believe in the Rapture, when everyone like them will rise up to the Kingdom of heaven. Well guess what? The Kingdom of Heaven is right here, right now, all around us and within us. That’s what Jesus taught. And that is what this whole weekend is about—manifesting the Spirit –the new paradigm—right here on earth, through art and activism.

The combination of Art and Activism is the perfect way to celebrate the new paradigm. All the great conduits of perception who represented this paradigm --Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, Lao Tse, all of them, spoke to us in poetry, parable, metaphor. Why? Because the non-linear, non-cerebral forms that are Art speak on a different frequency above the chaos and dysfunction and awaken us to consciousness, to the Spirit. Never is this more needed than when the world is in transition as it is now. Art reminds us that the world as it is, is not all there is, that there are other possibilities to strive for. Activism helps us turn the possibility that is opened by Art into reality. Art can jolt us open. Activism can step into our openness and offer us the structures and community to turn our awakened selves into action. Art can penetrate our defenses so that we can see and hear what we have been afraid of seeing and hearing. Activism can offer ways to turn us from preoccupation with ourselves into the healing action of service.

I’ve had a lot of experience with what can happen when Art and Activism are joined. I produced a movie, “Nine to Five” that was inspired by activists in the National Association of Women Office Workers. For some, it was a light comedy. For others, especially office workers, it exposed through laughter the very serious problems they were up against and empowered them to organize for change. Out of the movie the organization became a national union within SEIU and Dolly Parton’s song became the movement’s anthem.

“China Syndrome,” another movie I was involved in as a producer, exposed the dangers of nuclear energy—the unforgiving technology-- and helped people understand exactly what had happened at Three Mile Island—which occurred just 2 weeks after the film opened.

“Coming Home,” couched as a love story, helped expose the realities Vietnam veterans were facing when they got back.

All the didactic speeches in the world couldn’t have penetrated people’s consciousness the way those films did. The messages, embedded as they were in the genres of comedy, thriller and love story, could creep up and take people by surprise.

That’s what the Vagina Monologues did to me. I first saw it in New York in 2000. Eve was performing solo. Up until then I had been a feminist in the sense that I supported women, brought gender issues into my movie roles, helped women make their bodies strong, read all the right books--I had it in my head. I thought I had it in my heart--in my body--but I didn’t, not really. I couldn’t. It was too scary, like stepping off a cliff without knowing if there was a trampoline below. It didn’t just mean being with men differently, it meant doing life differently.

I don’t think I’d ever laughed as hard or cried as hard in the theater as I did during Eve’s performance. And something happened to me. I think it must have been during the laughter part because I was off guard, my defenses were down. My theoretical feminism slipped from my head into my body. I became an embodied feminist. I think, without my realizing it, the play allowed me to really own the reality of what has been done to us, because we are women, and at the same time, how beautiful we are and poignant and brave. It’s hard to explain in words. But that’s what Art can do to us.

There has probably been, or will be, at least one moment during this weekend when you feel this happen to you: A shift in consciousness, when the Spirit will move through you and you know you are not alone. You feel love. You feel power. You will cry, because that’s what happens when the soul is broken open. And you know this can never be taken away from you again. It has become who you are.

The fact that you are here shows that you are ready to be vehicles for this Spirit, this consciousness. Each of you is like a ripple of energy and, because consciousness is contagious, your energy will keep circling outward until a tipping point is reached.

This isn’t just new age hogwash. This is how reality works. Think of it this way: in the middle of the ocean, many, many small, almost undetectable currents occasionally come together in just such a way as to suddenly produce a very high wave which appears as if from nowhere.

Physicists believe that the “big bang’ origin of our universe was just such a little ripple out there in what we think of as empty space, little concentrated excitations in the immense ocean of cosmic energy, coming together to create a sudden wave pulse that exploded outward and eventually manifested as what we see out there in the sky at night.

Maybe some of you saw the film, “What the Bleep Do We Know.” There was a scene in which someone told about the experiment that was conducted one hot summer in Washington DC, usually a time of heightened violence and crime. Thousands of people came from around the world to DC to meditate on peace. The Chief of Police ridiculed them, but at the end of a month, violence in the city had dropped an unheard of 25%.

We are simply fields of energy and what we put out can expand and ripple far beyond what we can see and touch to become a critical mass.

Eckart Tolle, in his book, “The New Earth” that is rippling out to millions of people because of Oprah, talks about the next stage in the evolution of consciousness on the planet —the new paradigm. He says, “The closer we get to the end of our present evolutionary stage, the more dysfunctional the ego becomes, in the same way that a caterpillar becomes dysfunctional just before it transforms into a butterfly. But the new consciousness is arising even as the old dissolves.”

Today the “old” can’t get any worst. It’s like a wounded, flailing beast—very dangerous, but dying. We have to take care of ourselves and each other.
And we must, in all humility, understand what our role is as women and men of conscience. We are the way to the future. Eckart Tolle explains it this way: “The suppression of the feminine principle especially over the past two thousand years has enabled the ego to gain absolute supremacy in the collective human psyche.” He says that it is harder for the ego to take root in the female than in the male because women are more in touch with the inner body and the intelligence of the organism where the intuitive faculties originate, have greater openness and sensitivity toward other life-forms, and are more attuned to the natural world.”

So—we’re it. The leaders. The fields of energy. We’d better be brave and have faith. Someone, I don’t remember who, gave me these words: “Hope is the ability to listen to the music of the future. Faith is the ability to dance to that music in the present.” We have to keep the faith and keep dancing to the music of the future. And, like the butterfly, we will rise.

May 22, 2008 — May 25, 2008

LIBERATION THROUGH YOGA AND BUDDHISM

Instructors: Richard Freeman, Roshi Joan Halifax
Description: This powerful and rare retreat brings together Yoga and Buddhism with two master teachers in a radical approach to healing and liberating body and mind. Richard Freeman, a renowned teacher of Ashtanga yoga in the tradition of K. Pattabhi Jois, integrates yoga practice with Dharma. Roshi Joan, Abbot of Upaya Zen Center, explores the shared principles of yoga and Buddhism through dharma exchanges with Richard in the evenings. The spirit of yoga and Buddhism is realized in a retreat setting that includes five hours of guided yoga practice, evening talks, two hours of meditation, and silence.
Tuition (Members): $475.00 Tuition (Non-Members): $525.00 More details: Plus lodging. Dana to teachers.

roshi joan teaching in toronto in june

very important: check this out!

here is the weblink with the webcast of seattle. i am so grateful to have had the opportunity to facilitate this panel. And i feel that something remarkable happened in the course of this event.

include this note: go to the upper left of the website and scroll down to the bottom of the Event Guide; the last event: Tuesday, April 15 - Youth and Spiritual Connection Day; click on this red title; the screen on the right will open to the session; you can scroll a bit forward to where the panel begins. Enjoy.......  http://www.seedsofcompassion.net/webcast/index.html

Roshi Joan Halifax's talk at the Mayo Clinic on compassionate end of life care
for Mind and Life Institute

Roshi Joan Halifax, Ph.D.: "Compassionate and Mindful End-of-Life Care:
A Relational-Contemplative Approach for Clinicians"
http://mayo.dayport.com/viewer/content/special.php?Art_ID=851&Format_ID=2&BitRate_ID=8

Report from the New Orleans Superdome, V-Day
April 11, 12
Roshi Joan Halifax
Upaya Zen Center

Thousands of women (30,000-40,000), plus many men, gathered in the New Orleans Superdome, April 11-12, to mark the tenth year of Eve Ensler's extraordinary work of bringing to light violence against women, Vday. Twelve hundred of those women, through Eve, had on the opening morning returned to New Orleans after their displacement as a result of hurricane Katrina and the diaspora. Present were also women from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Kenya, the Congo, Bosnia, and many other wounded countries around the world, including many women from America who have experienced rape, physical and mental abuse, and fundamental misogyny.

The two days of intensive presentations, panels, and performances wove around two great contemporary tragedies that focus on violence against women: Katrina and the Gulf South, and the violent rape of women in the Congo.

Hurricane Katrina exposed what was going on in New Orleans and the Gulf South: the shocking lack of resources, total lack of care for its poor in general and its women in particular. People of New Orleans were abandoned, and as I traveled through the Ninth Ward, saw the decaying houses with spray painted x's, indicating how many had died and saw the amber waterlines on the crumbling buildings, I thought I was looking at a war zone. The degree of neglect of the people of New Orleans is not to be ignored. And the direct and indirect violence toward women and children is profound. I kept saying to myself: “This is America. This can't happen here….” But it has happened and is happening………..

This extraordinary event brought to light not only the great suffering in New Orleans and travesty of our government, with the Superdome being a national symbol of horror, but also in many other places, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which itself is being raped for its vast natural resources, and its women and girls being sexually brutalized by invading armies. The hero of V-Day and Eve Ensler’s friend, Dr. Denis Mukwege, Founding Physician of the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu in the Congo, heads up the only center for victims of sexual violence in eastern Congo and currently is overseeing the worked being done on the ground to create the City of Joy, a refuge for survivors of rape and torture who have been left without family and community. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-sawyers/eve-enslers-vday-voices_b_36455.html) Ann Veneman, extraordinary Executive Director of UNICEF, also at the conference, is collaborating with Eve and Dr. Mukwege on the City of Joy project. I think few of us realize what is going on in the Congo at this time. I personally was horrified to hear of the extent of the violent sexual abuse of women of every age. I was reminded of the daylong panel I led in Nanjing on rape as a deliberate weapon of war. The women of Nanjing whom I meet in November feel as if the trauma of rape will never leave them, even after seventy years since this terrible invasion happened. The work that Dr. Mukwege, Eve, Ann and their team is doing in the Congo is heroic beyond measure. Please take note of this endeavor and support it.

And in the mix, slam and rap poets, dances, the Vagina Monologues, the Mahalia Jackson Choir, and gorgeous young girls who were going through a rite of passage graced our presence. At the end, Jane Fonda brought the house down with her brilliant and radical concluding speech on art and radicalism. This woman takes no prisoners!

In addition to the rich presentations, the upstairs lounges were filled with women meeting each other and receiving support. The faces of many of the attendees bore the scars of their experience, and Ensler, knowing that many of the women who would be attending have not had access to medical care and respite, brought in friends from all over the country to provide services, from medical screening to yoga and massage.

The event concluded with a splendid performance of the Vagina Monologues in the New Orleans sports arena. More than twenty thousand people gathered and roared with laughter, cried, and clapped wildly as local women and Hollywood’s best collaborated in what has got to be one of the bravest, crazies, realist, and most wonderful events in the history of the planet: The Vagina Monologues. No prisoners taken here either.

I am including here a letter written by Eve Ensler to all the “performers” in V-Day. Also included is a text of the opening I did for the event. It was a great honor and joy to contribute to this historical gathering.

I thank sangha member Jane Fonda for encouraging Eve to invite me to contribute. It was totally wonderful to be standing on the stage of the Superdome, in my deep magenta Zen robes, and meeting thousands of women in that moment and for the two days that followed. I feel inspired, educated, and now am clear why our work at Upaya with women, both in our daily sangha and in the powerful gathering every year, In the Shelter of Each Other in July, is a total necessity at this time.

Read Eve’s letter below. The mental and physical abuse of women continues. When at the end of the Monogues, Eve asked women to stand who had been raped, I stood along with thousands of other women. My own experience of rape in my twenties is not something I have shared with many. But to share it with so many brought great healing to me. I am sure that every woman there, whether a victim of rape or not, felt the same.

RJoan


Letter from Eve Ensler:
Dear V Warriors,

I am on my way to San Francisco, the last city of the V to 10th tour before New Orleans. It has been a wild, inspiring, disturbing journey. I have spoken at nearly 22 places—colleges, conferences, auditoriums, theatres. I have traveled on some main roads, but mainly I have been off the beaten track in small towns like Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, Clemson, South Carolina, and Florence, Alabama. I have spoken to crowds of hundreds and thousands. I experienced nearly seven snowstorms, a hail storm, one blessedly hot day in Austin, Texas. I have stayed in places with names like the Sleep Inn, Apple Butter Inn, and The Mansion.

I have seen the faces of hundreds of activated, vital, committed, diverse women and men who are literally giving their lives to end violence against women and girls. Women and men who have changed their cultures, told their stories and helped others do the same. I have met the V-Day activists who have raised money, raised hope, raised hackles, raised the V flag in community after community. I have seen the most beautiful original posters, t-shirts
and buttons. I saw Megan’s red and black skirt in Alabama, where she sewed the V-DAY logo as a design. I heard 200 women chant “Cunt!” in Alma, Michigan. I spoke in several churches, one called Beneficent, which is my new favorite word. It means “loving kindness”. These churches and the feisty spiritual women and men who run them or work in them gave refuge and support to V-Day when other churches or religions tried to censure the productions.

I signed a woman’s hip at Slippery Rock University so she could get a tattoo and drew a red V on a woman’s back in Alabama so she could do the same. (This woman had already had a vagina and uterus tattooed on her entire back after her first V-Day.)

I heard the stories of three women in the military, April Fitzsimmons, Suzanne Swift, Dorothy Mackey, who flew in to Austin Texas to be honored at a V-DAY in an Enchanted Forest. I learned from them that one out of three women in the military will be raped and that very few men are every held accountable. I learned that there is something called Military Sexual Trauma. This is a condition in which, after suffering terrible trauma on the battlefield leading to PTSD, women -and some men- are then raped by their own comrades who they were trained to trust. This secondary betrayal and violation throws them into multiple layers of trauma, often resulting in severe depression and suicide.

I heard stories of great success. In Clemson, one of the most conservative colleges in America, they began V-Day 5 years ago. Initially they experienced strong resistance. One of the organizers even got spit on when she was handing out fliers. The first year they had 100 people in the audience. This year there were 1000 and it has now been established as an annual event. I visited places like Dartmouth, where tenacious women are fighting to keep the women’s movement alive in the face of resistance and apathy, and places like Stetson College, where there is a wildly supportive and active administration and teaching body.

I admire and am profoundly grateful to professors in Women Studies programs across this country who keep Feminism alive, often with very few resources or support. I was moved at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee to have the evening include a discussion on race and gender. And throughout the country I was deeply moved by men: how much things have changed, how honest they were in the q and a’s when they talked about wanting to be part of this movement, wanting to take a stand against violence, wanting to find a way out of the current tyranny of masculinity.

At Clarion College one young man talked to me about how hard it had been coming from a home where his father hated his mother and sisters. He grew up trying not to hate women as his father had. I heard men say how much they needed to cry and be vulnerable.

I met many women from local beneficiaries who have been supported by the local V-Days for the last years and heard stories of how that money had kept shelters open, developed new programs, changed laws.

In Toronto, I was able to get a taste of the scope of the V-DAY movement throughout Canada. I got to participate in a most wonderful evening called FEMCAB, filled with theater and music where great Canadian women artists gave voice to all kinds of issues with passion and humor.

And I was crushed by story after story of women who have been raped, beaten, incested, date-raped, or who have daughters or friends of daughters who were murdered. Whether it was the 18 year-old in Providence, Rhode Island, who told me that at 15 she had gone to a doctor, been raped by him under anesthesia, developed a dangerous eating disorder and was sent to a clinic where she met many other women who were there because they, too, had been abused, such as the anorexic girl who was actually pregnant with her fathers baby. Or the woman whose sister had become a serious drug addict since her father raped and sodomized her and was now in a lock-down facility. Or the18 year old woman who broke down in my arms because she had only learned recently that she was the product of her mother being gang raped in the army.

I would say that at least one out of every three women told me stories of abuse. This was in front of a camera as we documented the tour. In some places almost every single woman told a story of abuse.

I know that our movement has had huge victories, even the ability of women to tell these stories is progress, but I must say that after 22 states I feel shell shocked.

I no longer believe violence against women is random, individual or accidental. After 50 countries,10 years, thousands of women’s stories and this 22 state tour, I know there is a global pattern destroying and undermining women through violence.

Many would like to think that this type of systematic violation of women does not happen in America. I want you to know that indeed it does. In homes, colleges, streets and armies, thousands of women are being raped, beaten, dishonored, and undermined.

I am not sure the language has yet been invented to describe the breath, depth and insidiousness of violence towards women. This global pattern of raping and abusing one out of three women in every village, town and city on this planet (a UN statistic), has got to be named. Femicide is a word that was used by the brave and visionary women in the early feminist movement to describe the systematic killing of women. I want to enlarge the definition to include the innumerable violations that destroy not only women’s bodies, but their souls, their spirits, their dreams, their ability to trust, love and prosper.

In three weeks, we will be in New Orleans with V to the 10th. We will take back the superdome and throw the biggest mega event of our times. I am fueled by this tour, this journey into this wild, spreading movement. I am enraged and heart broken by the violence. My commitment has only become surer and deeper. I am more brave today because I have absorbed the bravery of the women who are fighting for their lives and their sister’s lives on the front lines—in conservative towns, in liberal cities, in living rooms and bedrooms where leaving the battery means going without income, leaving means taking children and finding your way alone, leaving means building the new world: V-World.

Ten years ago, there was one production of The Vagina Monologues in one city. This year there are 4000 productions in 1500 places. We are growing and spreading. We are fierce and loving and strategic and full of sexuality and humor. And we are winning.

For those of you in places I wasn’t able to visit, I am with you in my heart. I thank you for standing up and for not being afraid.

I know there are buses and trains and planes and cars filled with V-Day activists on the way to support our sisters in New Orleans. This will be our moment to gather and celebrate and mourn and heal and inspire each other. This will be our moment to escalate this movement and layer our vision and amplify our creativity and include more warriors as we move towards victory in the next ten years. It will be our moment to push the edge and stand firmer and speak louder and love deeper.

I can’t wait to see you all there.

V to the Tenth!!!! Eve Ensler
THE LOTUS OF NOLA OPENS
Roshi Joan Halifax

There is a great vow,
a holy promise that we are called to make:
For as long as space exists
and the world abides,
may I too remain
to dispel the suffering of this world

Thus are we here

Just as a lotus, rises from the mud of suffering
making her way through gloomy waters,
so too is New Orleans rising up from the shadows of sorrow,
ancient and recent.
As well, courageous women are gathered here from every world quarter
to heal and move through and past the shadows of violence and neglect.

Like the lotus, you have been resilient and beautiful.
You, like the lotus, have risen through and above the murky waters
of hatred, betrayal, neglect, terror and violence.
You, like the lotus, are compassion in its female form,
saving beings from suffering.

You have perceived the cries of the world.
You, with hearts open and brave, have responded in myriad ways.
You have shown up in spite of it all.
You have taken a stand.
And we bow to you, all of you…..

Lotus-like, the superdome also now arises from the mud of suffering
See her now opening to the light
She was a vessel of sorrow.
Now she is a lotus of hope.

And as we are taught in our Buddhist holy scriptures,
the red lotus symbolizes feminine love and compassion,
the human heart and healing.

New Orleans is a holy place where this healing is happening
through the courageous efforts of women in communities…..
Women who have manifested patience and determination
Women who are filled with mercy and charity
Women focused on relationships and commitment to rebuilding their communities
Women who have blossomed as leaders
Women who are fearless peacemakers
Women determining that if they survived, they would contribute
Women who stayed through it all
Women as defenders of community—finding their dispersed neighbors and bringing them home
Women who returned
Women as inventors of processes to assist people to deal with the tangled bureaucracy
Women dedicated to making resources available
Women of courage and resilience
Women ignoring the politics and insisting on strategies that build community
Women as protectors of children, each other, neighborhoods, communities, the earth

Even after months and years of frustration, trauma, heartbreak, exhaustion, illness, women have kept going against seemingly insurmountable circumstances.
Thus it is with women; we will never give up!

You must be praised.
You have turned the tide of violence and despair in New Orleans,
and from these tidal waters, you have blossomed and caused much to bloom.

Others of you have turned the tide of violence in your own communities and families,
and you have watered the seeds of hope and courage.

It is important to understand that it is people and communities who are the lotuses growing from the mud left in the wake of Katrina,
and also in the wake of generations of the abuse of women, power, and basic goodness
in every part of the world

We honor all named and unnamed women warriors and saints,
mothers, grandmothers, daughters, and sisters,
who have worked to end violence, neglect, despair and abuse.
To all those who have risen up in the face of the complete failure of our government at all levels

We are gathered to honor those who have vowed to change their cultures, told their stories and helped others do the same
To honor the compassionate ones
who are bringing about healing in the great city of New Orleans
and are bringing about healing in communities and families far from here

We are gathered to honor all those taking a stand to end violence
against women, children and the earth.
It is an ancient and pervasive story
and this story must end
Can end
Will end
We must bring it to an end
by bringing it to light.

We must celebrate and we must mourn in order to heal.
It is our moment to stand firm, send our voices, and love deeply.
It is a moment to actualize compassion, knowing that we cannot separate ourselves from the abuse and neglect of one woman, one girl, one neighborhood, one city, our very earth.

New Orleans is a sacred place rising up like a great lotus from the mud of human abuse and suffering, thanks to each person gathered here today.

Chant:
MAY WE EXIST IN MUDDLY WATER,
WITH PURITY LIKE A LOTUS.
THUS WE BOW TO ALL OF YOU.

a great success of a learning
chaplaincy candidates and i were totally engaged
now off to new orleans and vday
the seattle and seeds of compassion
and mayo clinic
and ann arbor
then home to prof. training program in care of the dying

upaya thriving

complex dynamical systems
what we need to sense
re. breakdown, emergence
and the life of organizations
in the midst of abhidharma
true modern buddhism

a great and important training at upaya,
www.upaya.org
upaya@upaya.org
505 986 8518

Apr 03, 2008 — Apr 06, 2008

THINKING LIKE A SYSTEM: How to Intervene in a System for Social Change

Instructors: Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D, John Goekler
Description: For many of us, the greatest challenges to living our principles arise in the social systems of which we are a part, such as our families, communities and work places.  This training blends complexity science and Buddhist principles to guide our interventions in these systems to foster positive social change.  Drawing on emerging work in physics, neuroscience, biology and systems dynamics, we examine how the alignment of spiritual practice with science can open space for joyous collaboration and creativity, and give deeper meaning to all our endeavours.  Just as attraction and repulsion need each other, our goal is to accept the deep sense of powerlessness that many of us feel when confronted with oppressive structures, and recommit our efforts with wholeheartedness to a skilful transformation process.  Merle Lefkoff a Ph.D in Political Science, has been involved in peacemaking and mediation efforts in some of the most troubled places on Earth. John Goekler integrates emerging understandings in physics, neurobiology, systems dynamics and complexity science with spiritual traditions.
Tuition (Members): $440.00 Tuition (Non-Members): $490.00 More details: Required for Chaplaincy. Plus lodging. Dana to teachers.