Ted Mehl, Alan Clements, and Burma

My friend Ted Mehl, a philosopher who teaches courses related to Buddhism at Tulane University (New Orleans), just directed my attention (and thank you, Ted, because my attention is OFTEN in need of being directed!) to Alan Clements and some internet sites related to work Clements is actively engaged in. All this was new to me, and I found it very interesting. I have linked several of these sites in the del.icio.us list on this blog; as of today, they will be near the top of the list of links. This is Ted's brief intro:

[In the class I am now teaching] we're going to discuss our last book next week, Alan Clements' Instinct for Freedom. He was a monk in Burma and got involved in the democracy movement there and has experience as a journalist in other places of crisis, e.g., eastern Europe. He has an interesting website about his notion of World Dharma and one called Everyday Revolution... Anyway, check it out. He also has recently been one of those crazy spoken word comedians, deep deconstructioners of politics, culture, and spirituality. He has a DVD of some of his performances called Spiritually Incorrect, which is out there a ways. Anyway, his book is wonderful, a spiritual adventure story.

As always, Ted, thank you for this teaching, and for reminding me that I need to write more. We are smack in the middle of the first year of the Mindfulness-Based Wellness (MBW) program at Avila, finishing up the first semester of the course, and preparing for post-intervention data collection. This will be followed, as day follows night, with the scoring of the various instruments (our grad assistant, Ian Butterbaugh, tells me we have nearly 100 variables we are tracking), entry and analysis of this data, and writing a proposal for the APS national meeting this Spring. Mid-semester questionnaire results from the participants were VERY positive, and we anticipate that our results will support our hypotheses in a big way.

The design of the MBW program may change next semester; discussions and decision-making about this are ongoing. Engaging in collaboration is not always a smooth process! As I fervently vow every day: "The teachings are infinite; we vow to learn them all."