By Jonathan S Watts | Coordinator
Dear everyone who so generously supported our project,
It has been a whirlwind few months since our week of activities in late September in Thailand! Our work since then has not stopped and has in fact further progressed. We are about to publish on our website a larger report on the events in Thailand that you supported as well as various plans moving forward. This report includes:
1) The Public Symposium on “Overcoming Contradictions in Psychotherapeutic & Spiritual Development in Buddhism” with keynote speaker Dr. Prawate Tantipiwatanaskul (Thailand) and three respondents from Japan, USA, and Sweden. The symposium was held in Bangkok at the Buddhadasa Indapanno Archives, which hosts a museum and dharma center to Buddhadas Bhikkhu, one of Thailand’s most important progressive monks of the 20th century. The seminar hall was filled with around 120 participants plus many who attended live online. It was the goal from the beginning to offer something in our one-week program for the general public in Thailand, and we were pleased to accomplish this goal from the outset.
2) The small intensive 3rd International Conference on Buddhist Psychotherapy and Suicide Prevention. With 19 participants from various parts of Asia and the West, we first engaged in an extended reflection on the public symposium and then dove more deeply into a dialogue on how to connect the popular Buddhist-based mindfulness movement into the deeper systems of Buddhist practice, especially the traditional mindfulness and meditation system of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness or Satipatthana as taught by the Buddhism himself. As practitioners, the participants were less interested in academic presentations and more on sharing a wide range of practices they use in their own clinical environments. In order to maximize the opportunity, the rest of our time was broken into a series of workshops on:
This last workshop introduced and explored the Buddhist psychotherapeutic practice created by the renowned Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and was offered by one of his early students Prof. Elaine Yuen from Naropa University. This workshop took most of our second day as we delved deeply into this traditionally grounded yet innovative practice. The last session of the conference focused on a series of plans and commitments for 2024 and beyond that will be presented on our website.
3) The 3-day Workshop for Buddhist Caregivers entitled “Concepts & Practices in Chaplaincy”. As the culmination of our week program, we moved outside of Bangkok to INEB’s affiliated Wongsanit Ashram, a peaceful green space that has been used for decades for programs such as this and as a place for spiritually engaged activists to find quiet space for contemplation. The course welcomed 21 participants from throughout Southeast and South Asia, including Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Vietnam. They varied from monastics involved in youth education to lay practitioners seeking to apply Buddhist methods to modern clinical and counseling contexts in their own countries. The principal goal of the workshop was to bring some of the important new methods of training in Buddhist psychotherapy and Buddhist chaplaincy to people of these regions where such training has not developed widely. A number of the participants from the previous two-day conference who are highly specialized therapists and chaplains formed a team of trainers over the three days. In a unique experimental method, the flow of the workshop followed the Buddhist teaching of the 5 Aggregates (kandha/skandha), which the Buddha taught as the totally of human experience. Participants began by learning practices to ground the mind and experience in the physical (rupa); then moved to working with the energetic and emotional (vedana & sanya); and finally learned in a more cognitive way (sankhara), which tends to be the sole focus of modern psychiatry and psychotherapy. Especially significant moments occurred during the role play sessions where the instructors acted out counseling sessions with troubled persons and participants had the opportunity to ask questions and inquire more deeply about methods. For 2024, we look forward to expanding this work, perhaps not with another centralized meeting in one country, but through trainers travelling in small teams to offer workshops in individual countries and local contexts.
Concerning your support for our project, while we did not reach the stated goal of $10,000, we did raise $6,819 through this GlobalGiving fund and another $1,714 through other means for a total of $8,533. With the wonderful support of the local INEB staff in Thailand, our costs were not prohibitive. These funds were not only sufficient to run the three programs but we were also able to offer some funds for the international travel expenses of some of the participants in the three-day chaplaincy workshop. We are, again, so thankful for your generosity in supporting our work and look forward to keeping you in our network as we move forward.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can recieve an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
