Minutes – P&E – Jan 2020

P&E GROUP MEETING MINUTES – 27 JANUARY 2020

 

Attending – Paul Gerstmayr (chair), Jane Hope (minutes), Merlin Cox, Rachael Cheang, Jim O’Neill, David Morris

Apologies:  Tessa Watt Ariela Cravitz

 

Review of minutes and actions from last meeting

 

FIEL & LTM

FIEL has been put back one week therefore the LTM will now start on 23 April for 4 weeks. Later –  Decided that FIEL will run from 23 April – 21 May. LTM will run 12 March – 2 April. David Rule has agreed to teach it (not available 2nd week, Jez will find cover).

 

Prices for Programmes

There was some confusion about ‘volunteer’ rates for programmes.  Buddhist and Shambhala programmes are roughly the same price.  Volunteers/regular staff can do programmes at 50% of the normal price.  Staff will continue to volunteer and do not pay.

 

Format for Open Meditation Evenings

After Miranda’s letter in which she outlined the difficulties of co-ordinating the Open Meditation evenings, there was discussion on the format.  It has been hard to find staff/MIs for both evenings.  There was a suggestion that Monday evenings could be designated for existing sitters and meditation instruction would not be given.  The system for allocating MIs was based on people writing their names on Post-It notes and putting them on the board in the PMH and, at present, there were no names on the board.  This system seems to relay on MI’s being present in order to see that there were gaps.

 

(Later found out that PB has been sending out rota to MI’s and then putting their names on the board. The slots are now filled). 

 

It was agreed that we would continue with the present system and review it after 6 weeks.

 

Potential collaboration with Ray Carbullido and Balance

Jim reported that Ray Carullido would accept an honorarium of one participant fee and would send a budget to Finance Team.  (

(Later – Jim has sent an alternative suggestion to Jez involving Ray hiring the Centre or taking one in five student fees as honorarium).

 

Visit by Larry Mermelstein

Larry Mermelstein has offered an evening  public Q&A session  7th March, and a talk for Vajrayana students on 8th March. His specialty are the Kagyu and Nyingma practices as well as translations from Tibetan, so that would be an obvious area of interest..

 

Larry is staying with London friends so there are no costs for the Centre.  If people wish to make a donation to Larry or support the work of the Nalanda Translation Committee, they can do so.

It was agreed to go ahead and publicise the events.

 

Programme with Sarah Coleman

Need budget for potential programme with Sarah Coleman.

JH will contact Sarah

 

Date of next meeting: 20^th February 2020