Last spring in conjunction with the NYC Department of Education, Jules Harris provided three days of meditation instruction to a middle school in Brooklyn, NY. He first worked with the teachers, then students and then observed teachers working with students.
The Soji Zen Center received a grant from the Lenz Foundation for its work with 3 groups of people in Philadelphia. The first group is juvenile delinquents (usually drug related), the second are mothers with addiction problems who still have their children and the third is mothers who have lost their children due to addiction problems. We are doing a pre and post test to ascertain the effects of meditation. These programs run in eight week cycles.
One of Soji’s members is heading up a homeless group at Broad Street Ministries in Philadelphia (30 participants). Broad Street Ministries provides the homeless with a free lunch and health screening. The hour prior to the lunch, one of Soji’s members leads thirty minutes of meditation followed by a Q&A and health screenings.
We have a men’s and women’s weekly meditation program at the Philadelphia Federal Detention Center. This started off as a women’s program and the men requested time for meditation as well. We are going to incorporate this into our grant program from the Lenz Foundation by administering pre-and post tests.
Attendees at Soji Zen Center now attract a diverse population which includes: unemployed, homeless, welfare recipients, Asian, African-Americans as well as Caucasians and continues to grow.
We have stepped up our ‘Introduction to Zen: Beginner’s Mind’ workshop and now are offering it on a monthly basis. Attendance is increasing with each workshop.
I travelled to South Africa last March to give a public talk and lead a meditation retreat at Robertson Retreat Centre with Helia and Rodney Downey of the Dharma Centre in Cape Town. Heila is the first Afrikaner to receive Zen transmission and I was the first African-American with Zen transmission to visit South Africa. I believe this step will continue to be a very important step in spreading the dharma in South Africa.
We had our second Urban Sesshin in August with 20 people attending.