Happy Teachers Can Help Heal the World - hello from Br.Phap Dung
Dear Teachers and fellow practitioners,
I am happy that you are there at the Meditation and Education Retreat, that you are continuing to support and bring your students to explore together the mindfulness practice. I send my energy of support to all the CA teachers and abroad. I know the spirit of Peter Kollock, a UCLA professor that was well loved by his students and community who brought his class to the monastery for the first time, is still alive in all of us. He, along with his good friend and colleague Barney McGrane, had a deep aspiration to make the practice accessible and relevant to the young people. Their dedication has helped this program flourish to this day. Our Teacher and the monastic community just returned home from a tour of the UK and Ireland. Part of the tour included a wonderful Applied Ethics retreat for educators. We had about 250 participants, 40% of whom were from all over the world. It was organized at the American School in London, a K-12 school that did not charge us anything for using their facilities. The school surrounding and ambiance made the retreat very special. During one of the days, we traveled in small groups through urban London to participate with Thay in a "flashmob" sit-in at a large public square. It was a taste of urban mindfulness practice for the teachers - very special. It was an opportunity for many teachers to rest, relax and to look deeply into their situation. They left the retreat renewed and with inspiration and courage to return to their academic environment. Many wanted to help with what we were doing with the Applied Ethics Initiative; that is, to bring mindfulness into the school setting. We met with representatives from the ".b" Group and from Action for Happiness group to see how we could collaborate together in the future. We are looking into the possibility of a conference for groups that are already working in this area, organized in a way that we would not only have a chance to connect and share our experiences but also have time to practice together. Some of us this Spring will go to the European Institute of Applied Buddhism in Germany to brainstorm next-steps for the initiative. Thay also mentioned the intention of the Applied Ethics Initiative throughout the tour, including during his talk to the members of the House of Lords, where Thay specifically commented on the harm on our young students and our education system due to the spirit of competition. I think you can find this talk online if you look up Thay's address to the House. Dear friends, I write this letter to share the happiness of Thay and the Sangha in serving the community of teachers throughout the world. In deed it is true that happy teachers can help change the world. We experienced this during the retreats and trust that they will have a positive effect on their school when they return and to model for the young generation another way of being in the classroom. I would also like to share a few thoughts and invite all of us to reflect:- How can we broaden the Meditation & Education weekend retreat that is held twice a year in Deer Park, so that it can be longer and can reach out to more teachers and even to everyone else who are working with education in general? Can we increase it to a five day retreat? When can the teachers come to such a retreat? Are there organizations that we can collaborate with to reach out beyond our circle?
- How can we involve you teachers more that have come regularly to this Med & Ed retreat? Can we encourage you to reach out to other institutions and share about mindfulness?
- Thay will coming in the Fall 2013. Can we have an Applied Ethics retreat for international educators much like we just had in the UK? If not a long retreat, a weekend, or even a Day of Mindfulness dedicated to this initiative. Some people in the Bay Area are working on this, maybe some of you can contact them to support the efforts.
- Can we create a teacher's Sangha in Southern California that can support each other, meeting regularly physically in Deer Park or another location? A teacher's network that would help give the needed support to our dear Bodhisattvas (awake beings).
These are just some thoughts; quite long for an email. I was just inspired to write to everyone, since I feel it would be a shame to not seize the opportunity while Thay and the large Sangha is there in California in 2013. Also, we had made numerous important contacts during the tour in 2011 that we can call upon to help and be involved with, contacts with Gov.Jerry Brown, Meng, a high executive at Google, and many officials involved in education in the Bay Area.
I hope you have a fruit retreat this weekend and a chance to touch your deepest aspiration. Enjoy the young students for me.
Take care,
Brother Phap Dung
Just thought you might like this recent video for a project to make a documentary film of our children's program this coming Summer. Lots of love happening!
Spring Meditation and Education Retreat Approaches
Hello friends,
Are you coming this semester for the retreat at Deer Park? It's only a 10-days away and I'm looking forward to practicing with my colleagues. We have so many exciting things happening with the applied ethics effort, and I hope to be able to share some about it during the weekend.
I hope you are coming (along with your students).
Applied Ethics Web Site and Information
Please forgive me with this second post this morning (I should have included this in the previous post). We are very excited to announce the presence of the "Applied Ethics and Mindful Education" web site.
In particular, I encourage you to read the Applied Ethics proposal that has been drafted over the past year.
http://mindfuledu.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Applied_Ethics_Proposal_Engl...
Kenley Neufeld is forwarding an email to you
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Educators Week for 2012 at Deer Park Monastery
Dear Fellow Teachers,
We had a gathering with teachers and people involved with education today. We had more than 100 people come. It was an inspiration to hear the teachers share their experiences and how they are bring the practice into the classroom and how they are applying the practice to nourish themselves. I have been involved with this Applied Ethics Initiative since last summer in France and throughout the US Tour; meeting with teachers in dharma discussion groups and making a presentation to them about the initiative.
I write now about the MedEd weekend program that we have regularly at Deer Park Monastery in the Spring and Fall. I am proposing to the community to extend the weekend to include 3 more days for teachers and people in education, that from Tuesday to Sunday. The teachers will arrive by lunch on Tuesday for their part of the retreat/training program and the students will join Friday afternoon like they do now.
This is a new phase for our community and our tradition. This will eventually culminate to a training program for teachers and educators that is 6-7 days long as part of the Applied Ethics Initiative. We are working with Standford people to have their involvement so as to somehow make this credit base and easier for teachers to ask for support from their administration.
I need you all to help find the right week for this proposal so the monastics can start their year's retreat plan. When can teachers and students free enough for this? I stress enough because I know that we will not satisfy every body or every school system out there. We just need to start and to keep the momentum steady.
The work that we have been doing in Deer Park with the MedEd weekend has been very helpful to introduce this to the monastic community. I hope that we can all help bring this to this next level; especially now, when the teachers really need it most.
Thay is so enthusiatic about this. He shared with me during dinner tonight that he is very happy to see that our community is serving this segment of society and teachers and the people are so receptive to this endeavor. He shared how lucky we are to have a clear path with concrete practices that bring about real transformation and healing and to also have a community to support us.
I hope you are all well and not too busy with your service to the students. Is it testing time? I hope you have time to take a breathing break. I wanted to add that a teacher shared this afternoon that she turns out the light once in awhile for the her students to stop and clear their minds before taking the test. She reminds them not to worry about how they are going to do and to close their eyes and touch their calmness. She then turns on the light and starts the testing. I felt so much love from her to her students. What a wonderful place and time that we live in. It is so exciting to be alive now.
Take care and hope to hear from you,
Brother Phap Dung
Applied Ethics for Education - an initiative from Thich Nhat Hanh
The following is a message from Thay Phap Dung.
Dear Teachers and Friends,
I hope you are well and had a chance to join Deer Park last April for the weekend retreat for educators. I have been in Europe and Asia for almost a year now so miss the meditation and education retreat and miss sitting to share with you all. I follow all the events there in our Southern California center quite closely. I hope that you are not too busy with school that you do not have a chance to take a break to care for yourself. This is what I would like to share with you in this email. It our Teacher's recent initiative for educators. We hope you all can help us brainstorm and find ways to bring this into fruition, especially for the US Tour coming up this Fall. It is a long email, I hope you can find the time to read it and share it with us.
Thay and the Monastics at the |EIAB
A Proposal
During one of the German Dharma Talk and again in the monastic talks, Thay shared his new initiative – “Applied Ethics” – to help the efforts to bring mindfulness training to the Educational sector, more concretely as a proposal to the educational policy makers and to university boards that care for educating our young. Thay had asked us to write to you, the Sangha, for your input and aid. We know that many in the Sangha are already involved with bringing the practice into the classrooms and your experience would help us further formulate this proposal and guide it to the right channel.
Sister Chau Nghiem, Brother Phap Linh, and I have worked out the preliminary proposal of this new initiative which I have attached to this message. Thay is calling this new initiative as “Applied Ethics”, which is a de-secularized form of what we teach in Applied Buddhism directed towards teachers and students. It is a training program, with emphasis in the practice and community, for teachers and for teachers to teach to their students after they have gone through the course.
Help Us Connect and Apply
Thay wishes that our Sangha members reach out to our networks of acquaintances in the policy making fields such as the ministry of education, and in the universities that have teachers training curriculum or have some influence with the educational plans of their country, state, or region. As you will see in the proposal, Thay wants this course to be non-sectarian where it is appropriate.
Ethical Crisis Among Youths
Thay has repeatedly shared with us that the young people of our times and our society, in general, need a wholesome and sane direction, and with it concrete practices that would lead them in this direction. On a few occasion, he shared his view that this was a dire need and that our society’s state of well-being is on a fast decline. There seems to be a returning interest in ethical behavior and social responsibility as part of the education of the youth. He also shared about French President Sarkosky’s remark that we need to bring an hour of ethics teaching back into our school and how that has inflamed a national debate on this subject. In addition, as you might have read about in the news, China and many other Asian countries are suffering from an ethical crisis among its youth brought about from decades of following the models of development of the West, holding ideals of capitalism and competition as high aspirations. This has back fired on the youth of these countries.
Applied Ethics - a way in
It seems that there is interest but in reality, the educators are scrambling for material and concrete methods on what to teach the students. Applied Ethics is Thay and the PV Sangha’s offering to society. It is part of the offering stemming back to theUNESCO’sManifesto 2000, and the Creating True Peace book, which were written and created to commemorate this new millennium and the next century as a century of peace for children of the world.
The proposal’s course foundation is Buddhist but is written and taught without reference to Buddhism. It's modeled after the 16 exercises of the full awareness of breathing that helps the practitioner release stress and pain, handle their emotions, generate joy and happiness, and cultivate insight that can free them from their afflictions. It’s emphasis is not just on mindfulness as a technique to help release stress and increase concentration but with an added guide line, the ethics component, taken from the 5 Mindfulness Trainings that guides the practitioner to a more healthy and compassionate way of living. The course also stresses on the embodiment of the teaching, the practice and training of the teachings, and on the community of practitioners that live, serve, and practice together for the duration of the course. Initially, the course can train a group of teachers for an extended period and then they can return to share and train their students and fellow teachers.
Kenley, I tried to post this at our dpeducation site but had trouble. Could you help put it up? And also, if there are some new teachers that attend this last April's retreat that is not on my email list could you inform them for us.
Please email us at: appliedethics@eiab.eu with any questions that you might have.
You might like to hear from Thay directly share about this during the German retreat a few weeks ago in a Talk called Applied Buddhism, Applied Ethics. Thay shares about it during the last 15 minutes of the 1 1/2 hour talk so enjoy.
With trust,
Brother Phap Dung
Spring 2011 Retreat
Dear Educators:
The spring semester Mindfulness and Education Retreat is just around the corner (April 22-24) and I am looking forward to practicing with you again very soon. Though Thay Phap Dung has been a key leader for these bi-annual retreats, he will be away at Plum Village for this one. The other monks and nuns of Deer Park are sure to facilitate a great learning environment for the students and faculty.
As we consider this retreat, what are you looking from the weekend? What kinds of things could be handled differently than in the past? What are your personal aspirations of practice?
I hope we can use this space to reconnect before the retreat.
Peace.
Kenley
An Introduction
A bi-annual retreat at Deer Park Monastery for university educators and college students at all levels who are interested in meditation and its correlation to our life at school, in our family, and in our minds.
Meditation is not to get out of society, to escape from society, but to prepare for a re-entry into society. Only when our mind is at peace can we help bring peace to society. Meditation helps us take care of our mind and our body, and prepares us to remain in society, because we are aware that if we leave society, we will not be able to help change it. This is our hope for peace.
Every year our monastery holds two weekend retreats for college students and educators from academic institutions or other organizations that somehow are involved in transmitting and exchange knowledge and wisdom. We have had professors bring their students as part of their course from UCLA, CHAPMAN University, local California State Universities and Colleges and others. Attendees arrive on Friday early noon and leave Sunday after lunch. Past course topics included: zen meditation and psychology, living and building community, peace making and the tools of reconciliation, deep listen and loving speech, and the art of mindful living.
