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NEWS ITEMS BELOW... BRIAN RUHE'S NEW BOOK IS PUBLISHED AJAHN SUMEDHO IN VANCOUVER JUNE 26, 2010 AYYA MEDHANANDHI IN VANCOUVER IN JULY ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ MY NEW BOOK HAS ARRIVED!! My second book is here. It has been 10 years since I wrote "Freeing the Buddha." The new title is: A SHORT WALK ON AN ANCIENT PATH A Buddhist Exploration of Meditation, Karma and Rebirth It is a paperback, 224 pages long and it is more mainstream than my first book but still has a sense of humour and surprise. I have transcribed a talk on kamma and rebirth by Ajahn Sona, which is included plus essays by Bhikkhu Bodhi, both of which are nowhere else to be found in book form. Here is what Ajahn Brahm and Douglas Todd wrote on the back cover of the book: “When even the CIA can't decipher many Buddhist books on meditation, this clear yet profound handbook of teachings stands out from the rest. Moreover, it introduces the Dharma teachings of great North American Forest Monks to the general readership for the first time. If you are serious about Nirvana, get this book!” - Ajahn Brahm. "Brian Ruhe is a long-time Vancouver teacher of authentic Buddhism, not the sugar-coated sentimental kind often marketed in North America. He is clear and engaging, not to mention a nice guy." It is also available at Banyen Books, Odin Books, Oscars Books, Utopia Books and Gifts in North Vancouver and Serendipity's Backyard in Steveston, Richmond. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AJAHN SUMEDHO Announcing a new Meetup for Vancouver Meditation Meetup! AYYA MEDANANDHI We are pleased to inform you that Ayya Medhanandi will be returning to the Vancouver area this July to present an evening talk and lead a 5 day silent retreat. She currently resides at Sati Saraniya Hermitage in Ontario, a Theravada Buddhist sanctuary and monastic community for women training in the bhikkhuni lineage, the first of its kind in Canada. For her background and training please visit her site. http://www.satisaraniya.ca The Friends of Thailand Society and the Langara Asian Studies Department presents *The Joy of No Opinions * Ayya Medhanandi reflects on suffering, its causes, liberation and the way to freeing our hearts, drawing from her experiences as a Buddhist nun over the last 23 years and more recently as a bhikkhuni practicing in the Theravada tradition. Tues July 13th Langara College NEWBERRY HALL Room A130 100 West 49th Avenue, Vancouver 7pm - doors open at 6:30 *5 day Silent Meditation Retreat * * * Wed July 14 – Sun July 18, 2010 Laotian Monastery 6234 - 264 St Aldergrove To register please go to the site below if you have any questions or do not receive a registration confirmation (in about 24 hours) please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it http://www.ssumm.net/Ayya/ Due to the limited number of spaces available please register as soon as possible to ensure your spot. Day visits are welcome, please don’t drop in unless you are attending her tea time talk at 5pm. Please register through the site for a day visit so we’ll know how many to expect for lunch. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Old news: Sil Meditation Day at Temple in Surrey on Saturday January 30th, 2010 Dear meditators, ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Dhamma Brothers: Meditation in Prison This is a Buddhist Peace Fellowship event which will be very widely promoted and we expect it to fill up quickly. The Dhamma Brothers: Meditation in Prison -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The TLKY Program on Buddhism and Contemporary The Buddha's Questions Tuesday 15 September 2009 from 6:00 - 8:00 Admission is free Please RSVP by email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it The University of British Columbia's TLKY Program is a joint initiative of the Institute of Asian
Selves and Not Self A Meditation and Study Course with Venerable Thanissaro Bhikkhu Sept 12th & 13th, 2009
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Meditation Related News Abstracts MIND/BODY MEDICINE Harvard Medical School has endowed a Mind/Body Institute chair, the first in the field of behavioral medicine. Relaxation techniques like meditation and biofeedback- which teach patients to control heart rate, blood pressure, temperature and other involuntary functions- are routinely taught to patients and medical students at universities like Johns Hopkins University. -Time Magazine, Fall, 1996 Special Issue MEDITATION, THE NEW BALM FOR CORPORATE STRESS Beyond the Fringe? Companies such as Marriott, Polaroid, and Boston., an investment firm, have all offered mind/body training to their employees. Adolph Coors Co. has one of the most extensive "wellness" programs anywhere, with a separate building and a full-time staff. Among its many services, the program combines meditation, nutrition, and exercise to help treat any ailment. "The best way to control health-care costs is to prevent costs from occurring in the first place," says Chairman William Coors, who himself meditates regularly. -Business Week, May 10, 1993 MEDITATIVE WORKOUTS The teacher sits cross-legged behind a circle of candles. Bathed in flickering light she reads a few lines from a Buddhist nun. The students meditate, their arms hanging limp at their sides. The room is still except for one sound: the rapidly spinning wheels of about 20 Schwinn stationary bikes. Strangely, all this is happening in a gym- Crunch fitness in downtown Manhattan. At health clubs like Crunch Fitness and around the country, breathing and stretching are replacing jumping and pumping. The number of Americans doing traditional aerobics dropped from 28 million in 1992 to 23 million last year. Meanwhile, 6 million of us are doing mind/body exercises like yoga. New York's Equinox gym has doubled its classes devoted to no-impact workouts. Equinox director, Molly Fox says her clientele demands "conscious exercise" nowadays. "People are going inward as opposed to just exploding the energy outward." -Business Week, August 7, 1995 MEDITATION CAN HELP YOU STAY WARM Recent research by Bruno Kappes, Ph.D., a professor of psychology of the University of Alaska at Anchorage shows that when a person is relaxed, finger and toe temperature rise. In a state of deep calm, best achieved through meditation, one's nervous system releases less adrenaline (the hormone responsible for runner's high), causing heart rate to slow and blood vessels to dilate. That, in turn, causes warm blood to flow from the heart to extremities. -Self Magazine, February 1997 MEDITATE!... FOR STRESS REDUCTION, INNER PEACE... OR WHATEVER! Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD., founder and director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, is internationally known for his work using meditation to help medical patients find relief from chronic pain and stress-related disorders. People come to the clinic with panic disorders, which are usually treated with medication. We don't address their panic or fear directly, we just treat them with mindfulness, and they practice that over the course of eight weeks. Their levels of anxiety and panic drop dramatically over the eight weeks and, according to our later study, for at least three years. Patients are simply asked to observe, to be mindful, to stay in the body, and to watch what's going on in the mind, learning neither to reject things nor to pursue things, but just to let them be and let them go. -Psychology Today, July / August 1993 Excerpted from Bill Moyers's Healing and the Mind (Doubleday; 1993) Copyright c. 1993 by Bill Moyers BIOLOGY OF BELIEF Herbert Benson, MD, founder of Harvard University's Mind/Body Medical Institute, says people can have a powerful influence over their health if they learn how to relax their minds and bodies, and use their beliefs- whatever they may be- to help reduce unpleasant symptoms. "We all have patterns in our brain of the memory of what it is like to be well," says Benson, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard who practices at the Deaconess Hospital in Boston. "We can effectively treat anxiety, hypertension and depression that way," he says. "For people with chronic pain, we can use it to reduce their visits to doctors by 36%. We can cure 75% of insomniacs that way, and infertile women who use it have a 36% pregnancy rate, compared to 15% without it. This is a scientifically proven tool, shown in more than 200 studies to be effective," adds Benson. -The Vancouver Sun, Sept. 1996 SITTING BULL This is not your father's basketball coach. When his team is on a losing streak, he lights incense in the secret cubbyhole of the team room and tells players that he's "going to exorcise the evil spirits" that possess them. He gives his players books to read, hoping their consciousness will be expanded by everything from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, to Beavis & Butt- Head: This Book Sucks. He hangs Sioux artifacts on his office walls; he fills the team's practice facility with so much tribal gear that Dances with Wolves seems more likely than a scrimmage. He teaches meditation at least as earnestly as he teaches the triple- post offenses. He explains the triangle offense to the great Michael Jordon, saying it's based on the Taoist principle of yielding to an opponent's force in order to render him powerless. He mourned last summer's losses of Mickey Mantle and Jerry Garcia equally, and when he finally got around to cashing in on his Chicago Bulls celebrity by writing a book, he couldn't help but include the following advice: "If you meet the Buddha in the lane, feed him the ball." -Sports Illustrated, June 1996 |
