UK Inter Faith Week 2012
Posted on | October 3, 2012 | No Comments
Sunday 18 to Tuesday 27th November
Norwich Interfaith Link welcome to Norwich
Alistair Appleton
TV Presenter and Buddhist Retreat Conductor
who will speak on
Spirituality and Sexuality
7.30 – Wednesday 21st November The Octagon Chapel Colegate, Norwich (just off Magdalen Street)
(n.b. no parking on site)
Alistair has considerable experience as a therapist through his
work with Mindsprings and his leadership of their courses and
retreats on mindfulness meditation. Alistair is a gay man who is
probably best known to many for presenting ‘Escape to the
Country’ on BBC Television.
£3.00 including refreshments
All Welcome
Alistair Appleton
Here is some further information about our speaker for Interfaith Week, 2012 (on November 22nd) from Alistair’s two websites.
It was in 2000, alongside his successful career in television, that Alistair Appleton began his serious involvement in meditation. Trained mainly in the Buddhist tradition, Alistair took refuge with Lama Yeshe Rinpoche, the abbot of Samye Ling Monastery in 2000 and sat several retreats at this extraordinary monastery in the Scottish borders and in the meditation hermitage on Holy Island near Arran. In the following years, however, it was the simpler, more direct teachings of the Thai Forest tradition that caught Alistair’s attention. He studied at Chithurst Monastery in Sussex with the sangha around Ajahn Sumehdo and completed a retreat at the famous training monastery in Thailand, Wat Pah Nanachat. He also studied with the wonderful teacher Ajahn Amaro who is abbot at Abhayagiri Theravadan monastery in Mendocino County, California.
In 2004, his Tibetan preceptor, Lama Yeshe Rinpoche requested Alistair to teach a meditation course for beginners up on Holy Island: his “ABC of Meditation”. Since then he has led numerous courses on mindfulness, compassion training, self-soothing and the creation of joy – many of these weekend courses held in the beautiful Abbey in Oxfordshire.
Since 2008, Alistair has also been training in the MA in Psychotherapy at the Minster Centre in London. This is an integrative training institute which looks at combining aspects of psychodynamic and humanist therapy and wonderfully complements the work in mindfulness and compassion, Alistair has learnt through meditation.
Alistair’s lively and non-dogmatic workshops seem to appeal to a very broad audience not usually attracted to spiritual practice and his easy manner brings the techniques of meditation alive for a practitioner living in the modern world.
(from mind springs website – www.mind-springs.org )
And from his personal website – http://www.alistairappleton.com/
Being gay is not always easy and I reckon a lot of that dis-ease is caused by a distorted notion of sex that most of us – gay and straight – carry around in our heads.
Like most modern girls and boys, I grew up thinking about sex in terms of Darwin. It seemed an unconscious truism that we have sex in order to breed, to perpetuate the species. But on mature reflection, I think this notion of sex is wrong-headed. Sex is not about making babies. Sex is about meeting people.
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