This evening is encouragement to unlearn rigid meditation practice, and to open to ongoing responsivity to whatever arises. This is nimbleness and can be our form of life. Such a form of life is spiritual. But it could also be called ethical, political, engaged, ecological. It’s about participating in the unfolding of life, history, and collective metamorphoses. The evening will include conversation and dialog to touch in to whatever is arising in the moment.
Adam Lobel, PhD, is a practitioner-scholar of philosophy and religion and has served as a longtime teacher (acharya) in the Shambhala tradition. He would like to acknowledge with a full-heart the challenge of having been part of the leadership in Shambhala in the midst of the revelations of sexual abuse and abuse of power within our tradition.
A speaker on ecology and spirituality at the United Nations, he was part of the first delegation of Buddhist teachers invited to the White House under President Obama. He leads ecodharma workshops called “Silent Transformations,” has taught alongside Joanna Macy and others in the Ecosattva Training, is a Greenfaith fellow, and is active in ecopsychology, ecological, and social justice movements. Adam’s teachings focus on Great Perfection Tibetan Buddhism, modern phenomenology, and inoperative studies (Heidegger, Foucault, Agamben). As a founding practitioner-educator at the City of Bridges High School, he has a longstanding interest in progressive contemplative education and transformative pedagogy. A professor of Buddhist and phenomenological psychology, he is curious about a cultural therapeutics for our collapsing society. He remains attuned-to an awakened, just, terrestrial society. Adam teaches a critical style of contemplative training that seeks to avoid enclosure in neoliberal mindfulness while still disclosing effortless awareness.