1st Conference on the Practical Application of Buddhism in Western Psychology.

www.buddhisminpsychology.com
www.mindfulness.com.pl/

We are honoured to invite professionals from around the world to attend the 1st Conference on the Practical Application of Buddhism in Western Psychology.

The idea proliferated in the minds of different people as diverse as psychotherapists, psychiatrists, translators, business people and practicing buddhists who came together to create a forum for the cross-discipline discussion of important issues based on certain Buddhist techniques such as mindfulness and contemplative approach to psychotherapy, health care, self-development and organizations. From this inspiration the 1st Conference on the Practical Application of Buddhism in Western Psychology has been established.

Mindfulness can be defined as "nonjudgmental moment-to-moment awareness". There is emerging scientific evidence supporting this great buddhist insight about the benefits of "allowing" experiences rather than suppressing or avoiding them in Western psychotherapy and applied psychology.

Certain Buddhist techniques have already been incorporated in modern-day psychological interventions and psychotherapies, just to mention a few: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Contemplative Psychotherapy.

The aim of our conference is to be the platform of inspiration for scientific research, workshops, and training programmes on mindfulness and other Buddhist techniques. That is why we refer to a "practical application" and not just theoretical and philosophical concepts of psychology and Buddhism.

The conference also refers to the thoughts of the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, who was the first to investigate the relationship between Eastern Buddhism and Western psychology and established the first university in the world (namely Naropa University) to integrate these two traditions of thinking and pedagogy.
We believe that mindful, contemplative and compassionate approach can be combined with rigorous, empirical science.
The meeting is and organised by the Polish Mindfulness Association and partially sponsored by the Marpa Institute (www.marpa.pl).

On behalf of the Organising Committee,
Julia E. Wahl

Phakchok Rinpoche in Poland

I'd like to invite you to participate in Rinpoche's programme in Warsaw, Poland.

Best regards,
Julia

Location: Warsaw
Date: about 20th Sept. 2008
Coordinator: Julia E. Wahl, karmayeshetsomo@gmail.com

Calligraphy again

'Integrity' by Karen Swallow

Calligraphy

'Dream' by Xiaoqian Li-Columeau (from http://china-phoenix.net/)

La obra de Joaquín Sorolla Bastida - 'Madre'

'Safest Place' by Elsa Gidlow

SAFEST PLACE by Elsa Gidlow

As I lay with you here
In the safest place I have ever known
Your breast beating in my ear
My cheek brushing the softness of you
I wander, in a half-dream
chasing wisps of ideas as they float all around me.

With my eyes closed
I flirt with the world
Inviting it to partake of me
Know me for who I am
and accept me.
I court the danger of its wicked mind
Its vicious tongue
and its damaging beliefs.

I take its hand
Talking to it as I would a child
And show it a gentler place

A place in my woman's arms
Where there is no hatred
No pain or worry
The safest place I have even known

Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop

ELIZABETH BISHOP

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

That's how I feel

Is it courage? Or is it being scared? Or is it both?