This conference is taking place in the USA, but it looks like it is an excellent learning opportunity for healthcare professionals from Canada! http://zencare.org/symposium2012
Two Canadian speakers will be part of the event:
Andrew Blake—Buddhist Chaplain, Meditation and Qigong Teacher, and Psychotherapist—wears many hats serving and offering healing to his community in Toronto, Ontario. In his early twenties he began practicing as a licensed massage therapist, and he met his root teacher, Ven. Dhyani Ywahoo, with whom he trained in Cherokee and Tibetan Buddhist (Nyingma) practices, as well as teaching for the Sunray Meditation Society, Alongside his BA in Transpersonal Psychology from Norwich University (1995), he completed certificate training in depth psychotherapy at the Psychocultural Institute of Toronto. In 2002, he co-founded an education and community support charity, Gitche M’Qua Centre (For Healing & Dying), while also studying with Roshi Joan Halifax PhD, who awakened in him the need to bring compassion and mindfulness to a society afraid of death. Over the past twelve years, Andrew has offered the lessons gained from the dying and from training at Upaya Institute in facing the suffering that accompanies death, as well as teaching EOL skills to lay caregivers and professionals at conferences, hospices, and locally through his teaching centre. In 2010, after completing his final thesis, Mindful Listening at End-of-Life, Andrew graduated from the first cohort at Upaya Zen Center in an emerging lineage of Buddhist chaplains.
Stephen Liben, MD, is a mostly ego-bound, unenlightened associate professor of Pediatrics in the Faculty of Medicine of McGill University and medical director of The Montreal Children’s Hospital Pediatric Palliative Care Program. He has many years of personal experience with greed, anger and delusion to motivate his ongoing practice and is currently living the question of how to integrate contemplative practice in medical education.
Also affiliated with Zencare, but not leading a workshop at the symposium:
Joshua Mitsunen Moses, PhD, is an anthropologist and currently conducts research on the role of religion in disaster response; health and indigenous peoples in the US and Canada with a focus on Labrador Inuit; and the adaptation of Buddhism to health care settings in the United States. Joshua is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Division of Transcultural Psychiatry of McGill University’s Medical School, where he coordinates a family violence and suicide intervention project among four indigenous communities. He is senior investigator and project manager of a National Science Foundation study of social networks and help-seeking among Labrador Inuit. He has been working with NYZCCC in different roles since the founding of the organization. Joshua has been practicing Buddhism in various forms since he was a teen and active in the American Zen community for nearly 15 years.
Would that there were more people doing this type of work in Canada!
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