Where is ajahn sumedho now

In this recent retreat you were leading qi gong in the mornings, again putting a lot of emphasis on the body. How did it come into your teaching, this strong connection with the body? AS : Before I really got into dhamma practice, I started with hatha yoga.

Why not? I found that quite rich. Practice had remained rather dry and just sticking to a point again and again. But with qi gong, I began to sense how the energy of the body relates to the energy of the mind. When the energy of the body is more settled and steady, the effect on your mind stares you in the face: the mind has calmed and steadied and deepened.

So this was beneficial for my practice. But then I began exploring meanings of words like kaya sankhara and citta sankhara , which are translated as bodily formations and mental formations or karmic formations or volitional formations. In Chinese, this is chi qi. The Asian tradition sees breathing as much more than just respiration, but the chi qi , the prana, the flow, the energy flow of life that moves through the subtle channels of the body.

There is an energetic quality of rapture, of suffusion, of calming that comes through skillful access to this prana, qi energy. Qi gong helps with that.

SR : You had another phrase you used during the retreat. It was something like the heart on its own is just driven by its reflexes and can go in many different directions but the body starts to hold it.

You can say it better and what you meant by that… AS : The word citta is often translated as mind. In Thai you can use either mind or heart to translate that, and they have slightly different nuances.

So this citta experience, the conditioning agents or the things that trigger it are perception and feeling. The only other aspect of our experience that has feeling is the body. When we experience fear or grief, we experience that bodily and in our heart. And so as you begin to sensitize you realize that the basic colorations of the heart have bodily references to them. And then what we so often experience to that is there has to be something to latch onto. This attention has to get jumping from this to that to this to that to this to that, to find something to hold onto.

The heart will be happy. And when the heart is happy, it will be concentrated. So body, heart, concentration, yeah, and happiness. And if the body feels steady and comfortable, the heart will feel steady and comfortable. When you come into what we call classic deep meditation the initial instruction is mindfulness of body, as you deepen into that your heart will come to it.

Thank you. You also spoke a number of times in the retreat about the pervasiveness of conflict. What have you learned about working with conflict? And what can we do with this? Well, immediately, the immediate point is the way I see things is part of the problem. What are we in? And that to me is so necessary because we also have this wonderful gift of empathy. What gets in the way of empathy is the views, and the stronger they are the more that natural empathy is cut. So when you have a view, a political view, the person on the other side is an idiot.

And then at a certain point you can kill them. And how much has been done due to religious views which people hold with absolute blazing rigidity and conviction, and the amount of death and destruction, pain caused around these things, which is the most dire irony. So once you begin to soften the view, say this is just a view, and you soften it, soften the emphasis on it, to me quite naturally one feels some sense of empathy for other people which means I recognize you too want happiness, you suffer too.

You have limitations; I have limitations. And then negotiation is possible. And what will I gain from holding my view? I will gain perhaps for a brief time the glorious surge of feeling right - which will flood me with righteousness.

How good is that? Do I really want that? What I could do is gain a sense of trust, non-conflict, ease, humor, compassion, meeting, affection. I could do that. Would it work for what was better? For me. For you. For everybody. Surely the wider that field of empathy can stretch, the more peaceful, the more harmonious, the more capacity we have for non-conflict.

At 19 years old, he decided to take a sabbatical year off and spend it at Wat Nanachat, Ajahn Chah's branch monastery for Westerners in Thailand, under the guidance of Ajahn Pasanno. After 9 years back in lay life, it seemed time to return to Thailand, and was ordained as a bhikkhu by Luang Por Liem. He spent 18 years in Thailand, the last 8 years as Luang Por Sumedho's attendant and secretary.

There he became a Samanera novice in He first visited Amaravati in , and came back to join the community in Santamano was born in Wallasey in He and his parents moved to India for a few years before returning to England in His initial interest in Buddhism came through reading the works of D T Suzuki and started going to meditation classes at the Buddhist Society in London. There he learned of Amaravati and started listening to Dhamma Talks on the Internet.

Santamano began visiting Amaravati as a guest and coming to retreats. He took the anagarika precepts in December and received the pabbajja novice 'going forth' on 27 July, , with Luang Por Sumedho as preceptor. On 10 July, Ven. On 10 July Ven. Bhikkhu Narindo was born to Chinese-Malaysian parents in the Netherlands in the winter of In addition to pursuing his studies he helped with his parents' restaurant business.

In he completed his studies at the Rotterdam school of Management, and started working in international sales and marketing for a Dutch multinational. His interest in people of various cultures led him to travel to different countries. In , during a study exchange in Singapore, he came across a well-informed Buddhist who introduced him to many different traditions of Buddhism, but especially the Ajahn Chah lineage.

His strong aspirations resulted in serious commitment to the Three Refuges and Five Precepts. After some years he felt a need for more guidance in his meditation practice, and looked for meditation classes connected with the Ajahn Chah lineage.

In he found the Amaravati Retreat Centre on the internet, and in June of that year during a ten-day retreat; he surprised himself: there was a sudden urge to renounce his lay-life. In the winter of he arrived at Amaravati and found the monastery supportive for the practice.

Venerable Narindo was ordained as a bhikkhu on 29 July, , with Ajahn Amaro as preceptor. He started early in life with the development of computer software and worked professionally in that field for 18 years. When he was 30 years old he moved from the area of Frankfurt to Switzerland where he lived for 9 years and worked the last 4 years for a Swiss bank. During that time he studied at a university in Bern and completed a BSc. These last years were especially demanding and added to a general feeling of discontent with life.

During his search for new ideas, he signed up for a meditation class without really knowing what it was all about. After taking up a regular meditation practice, he could see the positive effects of the Buddha's teachings for himself. He subsequently joined a meditation group in Bern, also spending his annual leave on Vipassana meditation retreats in Switzerland and the USA. Through the meditation group, he heard about Dhammapala Monastery in Kandersteg where he became a regular guest.

For him, there was a stark contrast between the peaceful environment of the monastery and the dissatisfying work life in the bank. One day, rather suddenly, the idea came up to leave lay-life behind and to ordain as a monk. While not really doubting this was the right way, he nevertheless decided to participate in a 2-month retreat in the USA to see if his mind changed.

As it didn't, he made enquiries for a suitable monastery and decided to ask for the training at Aruna Ratanagiri near Newcastle in the UK. Venerable Balado Walter Meusburger was born in in Goetzis, Austria into a family with a roman catholic background. After commercial school and army service he worked in accounting for some years. Then studied social work in Bregenz, most of the time working in the field of addiction therapy. In he attended a zen sesshin retreat led by a jesuit priest, where he learned the practice of sitting in stillness and appreciated the simple structure of the formal meditation and the focus on the body-mind.

Two years later he turned his interest to the teachings of the Buddha and joined sesshins in the soto-zen tradition with Fumon Nakagawa Roshi. In , he took a 4-month-sabbatical in Thailand and attended several retreats at Wat Kow Tahm. He was particularly affected by the teachings on the five hindrances which brought a new understanding to the practice of meditation with regard to experiences of distress in daily life.

The teachings on Anapanasati at Wat Suan Mokkh also became a substantial support as a way of coping with distress and developing an anchor for the body-mind. It was at this time, that the vision of a simple life as a monk first crossed his mind, but the household life seemed still be bearable and gratifying enough.

Venerable Issaro was born in Stalowa Wola, south-east Poland, in Initially he did not want to meditate, until he read the life story of an extraordinary female meditation master, Dipa Ma, which marked a turning-point in his life. While his interest in the Dhamma was increasing, he discovered the teachings of Ajahn Chah, Ajahn Sumedho and other great Thai Forest Tradition masters. Venerable Issaro received the pabbajja or novice 'going forth' in a ceremony held at Amaravati on 2 May On 27 July , he received full acceptance as a Bhikkhu with Ajahn Amaro as preceptor.

As a teenager, a brief description of Buddhism in a book led to a Eureka moment and an ongoing fascination with Buddhism. In , while looking online for longer meditation retreats near London, he found Amaravati. In , Ven. He was born and raised in Mexico City, and studied in California. Bhikkhu Jayadhammo was born in Doncaster, England in He joined the community at Harnham Buddhist Monastery in , where he stayed for three years, initially as a lay-resident and then going on to train as an Anagarika.

Strangely enough, I found it quite beautiful—the way nature disposes of things. It was quite marvelous to watch how life consumes and takes away. The human body was being recycled into the ecosystem. Noticing the colors and the maggots and the worms, I began to appreciate the process of nature in operation. Not only can we learn from the joy that comes from beauty, we can begin to open ourselves to life itself and all that it includes—not just the nice side but also old age, sickness, death, decay.

Related: Death Awareness. So many of our modern societies want to deny death or shut us away from it. When my mother died, I was giving a retreat in California. I had to leave in the middle of it to go to the funeral. It was a Roman Catholic ceremony. When I got there, the coffin was covered with a nice cloth. The priest gave a nice funeral sermon, which made us feel good. He spoke of how wonderful my mother was and said that she was no doubt up in heaven with the Lord. Everything was very cosmetic.

Nothing was depressing. We were sentimentalizing—talking about how nice my mother was and about her reward in heaven. Next we went in a procession to take her body to the Catholic cemetery. They had it all set up. The hole had been dug, with false green grass now covering it and the coffin propped above. The priest came, said a prayer and sprinkled water over the coffin. We were then told to leave.

I decided I wanted to help bury my mother, so I stayed. Related: Every Day Is a Bonus. In Buddhist terms, death is a natural event. The Buddha encouraged us to observe, to contemplate. Funerals in northeast Thailand, where I lived, were very meaningful because we actually contemplated what happened. It was just a dead human body, and we meditated on that.

We made conscious the reality: the death of the body is like this.