Peacemaker Circles UK

From Zang: This weekend I was invited as one of three guest speakers at the annual Quaker Universalist Group conference. It was held in the beautiful Roman Catholic pastoral centre, Hinsley Hall, just outside Leeds city centre, and was attended by about 45 people from all over the country- mostly Quakers or regular attenders at Quaker meetings. The theme of the weekend was "The Roots of Peace and Justice", and I led a theatre-based workshop based on the techniques of South American activist/director Augusto Boal. The aim was to allow people to explore their sense of injustice and peaceful solutions in an intuitive and physical way, to compliment the excellent conceptual ideas presented by the two other speakers (Prof David Cadman and Prof Joseph Milne). We used a sequence of exercises learning to "sculpt" another person's body into an image of "peace", "violence" and "injustice", and then in larger groups we created bigger images th...

This is a rough report of the basic outlines of what we discussed and what we would like our next steps to be at the next meeting. We met at Anna's. Many thanks for her kind hospitality and lovely coffee and herbal teas and fruits and nuts. We first of all had a quick check in. We then had a discussion on whether we should have set practises or not looking at the advantages and disadvantages of this or a more spontaneous approach. I won't give an account of the discussion because I haven't checked whether this is ok or not but we decided that at the end of each circle we would decide what practise we would do next time around and we decided this time that Anna would lead a "mystery" meditation ! I think we also decided that we'd do nembutsu at the next circle too (I could be wrong about that but I hope we do !) We then had a discussion around the subject of "intention" (again I won't go into the discussion) and we decided at the next circle we...

We had the second multi-faith meeting arranged jointly with the Zen Peacemakers and local members of Soka Gakkai (Nicherien tradition of Buddhism) It was a very friendly and constructive meeting, mostly focussing on plans for a full meeting to be held on April 5th, to which we'll invite new people. The plan is to invite people from different spiritual and religious backgrounds to dialogue about practical means for peacemaking in society. Since it's the weekend of Martin Luther King's anniversary in April, we'll have some readings and reflection about him too.