Stories of Transformation through Contemplative Practice
- Frank Ostaseski of the Zen Hospice Project
"We had two doctors who were taking care of a patient who was a Buddhist and for whom there wasn't anything more they could do medically. Frustrated, they came downstairs to the kitchen and they asked me if I could teach them some Buddhist practice that might help. So, I asked them what they did when their children were sick..." - Doug Tanner of the Faith in Politics Institute
"Glen Bouchard was at the time a freshman Congressman from southern Illinois. He had come from a fundamentalist southern Baptist background, but he read a lot of Thomas Merton and he went on retreats like Gesthemine..." - Joe D'Arrigo of A Tuscan Sabbatical
"When I first met this guy, he was on Prozac and thought he was going out of business. That was three years ago. Today he understands his values, he journals, he has - but would never call it - a contemplative life..." - Lorain Fox Davis of Rediscovery, Four Corners
"We were called by the Justice Department to ask if we could take this boy in at the last minute, and it was like, in two days the camp was going to start. We were filled; and they said, "We have to get this kid out of town; his life is in danger..." - Harrison Owen of the Organizational Transformation Network
"I was in Serbia a couple of months ago and we did an 'open space' for nine villages and towns in Western Serbia, all of whom, if they were going to survive meaningfully, were going to have to work together, none of whom really thought that was a good idea..." - Rachael Kessler of the PassageWays Institute
"In a senior class in Colorado I watched two young men, a burly football player and a tall slender drama student, scale the walls of prejudice and discover what it feels like to overcome divisiveness..." - Judith Thompson of Children of War
"The story that I often tell is a story of one evening where we were doing group support work in a number of different ways, small groups and large groups, so that the stories were being told and the process of healing was happening..." - Shugen Arnold Sensei
"Another story that comes to mind is from a fellow I was talking to, who's this big guy - most of these guys are pretty big - who has been in prison a long time and is just a very model prisoner..."