Mindfulness, heartfulness and compassion: a dialogue with faith leaders

The facilitators

Rev Anthea Ballam

Rev Anthea Ballam is an interfaith minister, writer and celebrant. She has served as Chaplain to the Mayor of Brighton and Hove on two occasions and is currently the Chair of The Interfaith Contact Group of Brighton and Hove. Anthea is the author of two books of prayer: “Moving Prayers and Quiet Meditations” and “Words for Funerals”; also a history book “Mayflower: The Voyage the Changed the World.”

Before becoming an interfaith minister, Anthea was a journalist and ran her own marketing company. Her interests include photography, art and music.

Lyn Baylis

Lyn Baylis is a mother, grandmother and a great grandmother. She has been a Pagan Priestess for over 50 years, holding senior roles in several organisations and is now Pagan Spiritual Advisor for Sussex NHS Community Foundation Trust, as well as being a Founding member and Chair of The Pagan Seminary. Having worked as a Prison Chaplain for over 10 years before becoming a Hospital and Hospice Chaplain, she is determined that, all spiritualities should have a platform and as the popularity of nature-based beliefs increase, there should be sufficiently skilled Pagan Chaplains to tend to the spiritual and practical needs of this growing community.

Miri B Cohen

Miri has been practising meditation for over 25 years, mainly in the Insight tradition. She is an NHS-trained Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy/Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction teacher and a graduate of Yesod, the Jewish meditation programme from Or HaLev and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. Miri facilitates meditation groups in person and online for HaMakom and secular organisations and gives one to one sessions. She is a member of the Community Dharma Leader system at Gaia House, Devon, UK. Miri is a student of the late Rob Burbea and his teaching influences her approach.

Jason Evans

Jason Evans is a member of Sussex West Area Quaker Meeting and worships at Brighton. He joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in 2002 and has served as Elder, Overseer (now called Pastoral Friends) and as a member of the Clerking team. He has been the Quaker Chaplain at the University of Sussex since 2015. He is interested in lucid dreaming and plays jazz harmonica.

Paul Johanson

Brought up as a Roman Catholic, Paul began training in the Rinzai Zen Buddhist tradition in 1988 at the Hannya temple in London. The temple was run by the London Zen Society and affiliated to Ryutaku-Ji, a monastery in Mishima, Japan founded by Hakuin-Zenji, one of the great masters of Rinzai Zen. In 1991, Paul began sitting with a small, local group called Maitrikara (a Sanskrit word, meaning ‘source of loving kindness’), which is affiliated to the “Centre d’Etudes de Chanteloube” situated in the Dordogne region of France. Chanteloube was founded with the inspiration and guidance of three great masters of Tibetan Buddhism: Kyabje Dudjom Rinpoche; Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche; and Kyabje Kangyur Rinpoche. Paul considers Jigme Khyentse Rinpoche to be his main teacher and has been practising under his guidance since I first met him in 1992.

Paul still feels a strong connection to his Christian roots and to his early Zen training. He has worked in health and social care since 1991, mainly in the field of mental health. He currently works as a psychotherapist in private practice.

Liz Lord

Liz practiced awareness, appreciation and compassion since childhood, as part of a Christian upbringing and in my mid 20’s completed my first 8-day silent guided retreat with the Jesuits. She has regularly attended long silent retreats from different traditions at Gaia House, Dzochen Beara and St Beuno’s as well as themed retreats in a number of different places, both in the UK and abroad. She has undertaken long-distanced walking retreats throughout her adult life, often following ancient pilgrimage routes.

She was introduced to mindfulness while working with teenagers in a Pupil Referral Unit in Salford in 2007.  Liz is currently a tutor on the MSt in Mindfulness at the University of Oxford. Since 2015 she has been a senior researcher in the Dept of Psychiatry, working on the MYRIAD project which has been investigating all aspects of mindfulness in education.  She works freelance as part of the teaching, training and mentoring team at the Oxford Mindfulness Foundation (OMF).

Robert Marx

Robert is Co-Lead (Training) for the Sussex Mindfulness Centre. He is a consultant clinical psychologist and has been involved in running mindfulness groups for staff and patients since 2006. He also trains and supervises others doing mindfulness work. He is interested in relational mindfulness and in adaptations of Mindfulness-based Interventions using compassion practices.

Chris McDermott

Dr. Chris McDermott, an Anglican priest, Third Order Franciscan, and Zen practitioner, spent 27 years as a community mediator in East London before becoming the University Chaplain and Lead Faith Advisor at the University of Sussex in 2014. He is also an ADRg qualified workplace mediator. After retiring as Chaplain, he completed his Ph.D. research on dual religious belonging, especially Buddhist Christian belonging. His thesis is entitled, ‘Gillian Rose and the Question of Dual Religious Belonging: On the Difficulty of Being Buddhist and Christian’. His essay, ‘Aporetic Belonging: Thinking Buddhist Christian Practice with Gillian Rose’ is published in the 2024 edition of the Buddhist Christian Studies Journal, published by the University of Hawaii.

Justin Meggitt

Justin Meggitt is Professor of the Study of Religion, at Cambridge university and Visiting Researcher, Department of Ethnology, History of Religion, and Gender Studies at Stockholm University.  Justin has been employed in the academic study of religion for over three decades in various universities in the UK, the US, and Sweden. Although his interests range widely, he has always had a particular fascination with the relationships between religions, conflict and peacemaking, in all their different expressions, from the interpersonal to the global. He is especially passionate about understanding how countercultural religious movements perpetuate and challenge violence, and are also so often the victims of it.

Rabbi Danny Newman

Rabbi Danny is the Founder and Executive Director of HaMakom. He has been studying and teaching meditation, Jewish spirituality, Jewish thought and mysticism for over twenty years and is currently the Rabbi of two Progressive Jewish communities in London. Danny also works as a Life Coach and Facilitator of Men’s Groups and Men’s Retreats. He read Jewish Studies at Oxford University, studied at several Yeshivot in Israel and trained in psychotherapy. Previously he worked for many years in Corporate Law, Finance and Venture Capital in the City of London. He is married and has two young sons.

Rosalind Pearmain

Rosalind Pearmain, Ph.D., M.A., Dip.Ed., B.A. Hons has been practising and sharing Heartfulness as a trainer for more than forty years. In her professional carrier she has included training in the public sector, in education and health, practicing as a UKCP registered psychotherapist. She was a course director for a Master’s level degree in Integrative Psychotherapy training at Regents College, London. Her book ‘The Heart of Listening: Attentional Qualities in Psychotherapy and Counselling’ (Sage 2001) integrated spiritual, psychotherapeutic and neuroscientific aspects of the heart). She carried out qualitative studies and published on different aspects of transformation, and change including meditation. Mainly retired, she will be finishing teaching qualitative research to psychotherapy trainees shortly and lives in Abingdon.

Binah Taylor 

Binah Taylor, MA, MA, BACP Snr Accredited was initiated into Sufism, a mystical path to awakening, in 1975 by Fazal Inayat-Khan, who founded the Sufi Way. She worked closely with him until his death in 1990, and through his encouragement, undertook psychotherapy training both in California, where she lived at the time, and in the UK. She has a private practice in psychotherapy and clinical supervision based in Brighton.  The Sufi message of love, service and openness to the present moment has been a constant source of guidance – she supports the current Pir, Elias Amidon, and contributes to the Living Sufism online series as well as the quarterly Sufi Way journal called Fresh Rain. A nomad at heart Binah has lived and worked in four continents, giving her a deep appreciation of life’s diversity and expressions of beauty, often found in unexpected places. She divides her time between UK, Spain and Hong Kong nurturing her family connections.

Dheeresh Turnbull

Dheeresh Shinkai Turnbull (Sensei) started meditation in 1975, while on the first year of a Religious Studies degree at Lancaster University.  After trying different kinds, he settled on Zen in 1982, and received the Zen precepts from his then teacher, Genpo Roshi, in 1988.  He received shukke tokudo (monk ordination) from Genpo in 2010, and was transmitted as a Zen teacher by his current teacher Jeremy Ryokan Sensei in 2020.  He has been running mindfulness courses since 1999.  He also works as a cognitive behavioural therapist (part-time), and is married with children, grandchildren and a cat (his other teacher).  He has written two books: ‘The CBT-pot’ and ‘The Mindfulness Handbook’, both of which are under revision, and is working on a third: ‘Getting to Zen’.

Where?

Please join us in person at the Friends Meeting House, Ship street, Brighton (see below).