Peacemaker Circles UK

We held a Manchester Peacemaker Circle evening tonight to connect with the annual ActionAid Fairtrade Coffee and Tea Day, which in turn is part of the wider Fairtrade Fortnight. ActionAid are a wonderful international charity working in grassroots global development and political campaigning for the rights of the poor and marginalised around the world. ActionAid sent us some free teabags, coffee and chocolate, and people brought along biscuits and home-made cakes... there was lots of sweet food! We watched 3 short videos on ActionAid's work with women infected with HIV/AIDS. We also watched a short film on a rural education-drama project informing locals about AIDS and the need to treat those infected as human beings still (from the bonus section of the movie DVD of 'The Constant Gardener'). Then we held an interesting Council Circle on our responses and thoughts on what we'd seen. After that we had more tea and cakes... Jules played guitar and sang some of her compo...

We had a small informal gathering on Sat 16th Feb to mark the annual Parinirvana Festival of the Buddha. It was a very spontaneous affair, meeting with no fixed plan! We met at the beautiful Manchester FWBO Buddhist Centre, where we sat and drank tea together and talked about what "Zen" is. Then we walked to a new community cafe which we'd heard offers cheap drink to the homeless... This cafe, Nexus, turns out to be a cheap cafe-art gallery with a good vibe. We talked for a long time there about future plans for the Manchester Zen Peacemakers, especially discussing possible social action businesses which we could consider developing, helping the jobless and homeless. We then came back to the FWBO centre, where we asked if we could use their shrine room to meditate. Stacie, who is part of the Nicheren school of Pure Land Buddhism, taught us a little about their chant to the Lotus Sutra, and then we did this chant together for a while. It was appropriate that the Buddha...

Blessings everyone, I'm very pleased to let you all know that Shaikh David Bellak Effendi has offered to lead a workshop on Rumi's tradition- the Mevlevi Sufi Way- for our Manchester Peacemaker Circle in mid-March, probably on Sunday 16th March. Times to be arranged. David Bellak Dede, now in his late 60s, lived in Konya, Turkey, and trained very closely with the late Suleyman Hayati Dede, the beautiful dervish who kept Rumi's tradition alive in the last century. David Dede is one of the very few living teachers who have been trained in the old stages of Mevlevi practice, including Sema (whirling) and the wonderful dervish traditions of hospitality. For the past 20 years he owned an oriental rug shop on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, quietly getting on with life and teaching in a very unobtrusive way. The Mevlevi tradition is very close in spirit to Zen, becoming open and receptive to the beauty and inspiration of each living moment... "Wonder is like a small bird tha...

In today's Circle Meeting, 6 people were present- Howard, Joy, Stacie, Kaite, Faisal and Zang. We began with some beautiful Bach cello music chosen by Howard to bring us into the present moment, recorded by a young local musician. Following a checking-in circle, Zang read a piece aloud from Bernie Glassman's book "Bearing Witness", talking about the vision of bringing all the fragments of life into one Whole. Then we read another chapter of the same book together, on the theme of "Becoming Oneness" and split into two groups of 3 to discuss it. We tried an idea from the Swiss Zen Peacemaker Circle- we chose a figure each who inspires us, and when we discussed the chapter we talked about it not only from our own point of view, but tried to explore what our chosen person would think too. Examples of the figures people chose included Maimonides, the ancient Jewish philosopher; Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet and playwright; and Sangharakshita, founder of...