Teachers

Dido Dunlop

Round the dinner table every day my family discussed ways to create a better world. Educate girls, give politicians psychoanalysis, get women into parliament, eat organic food, make compost, go solar. From childhood I was conscious of environmental degradation.

I’m aware the climate emergency is coming upon us, and we need to live a different way, very soon indeed. So I foster social change, through transformative meditation and group work.

I’ve practised Tibetan Buddhism for 45 years, and have taught most of that time. I reckoned Buddhism could change our culture around. My teacher Cecilie Kwiat said I became a teacher of compassion because of the suffering I had, both from painful emotions and health issues. This gave me an understanding of how to work with difficult emotions, a crucial part of facing into climate change and cultural transition.

My life is an experiment in how to integrate spiritual practice and daily life. I took myself and my life as a practice ground. I shaped myself like a piece of clay, tried out shapes that might work, in my own bodily experience. Like I did with the clay ‘goddesses’ you see here. I asked myself, what shapes would be good for my happiness, and the world’s happiness? I see those as the same. What I did was often unusual.

I’m a painter, potter and singer, and in my youth worked as an art therapist. I trained in counselling, group work and facilitation, and in the arts. I lead groups in a cooperative model, with a lot of sharing and interaction, which participants find empowering. We explore creative ways of working with traditional meditation, towards a natural spirituality accessible for people in our times.

I lived for many years in ecovillages and other intentional communities. I’m a Transition Towns trainer, and involved in building community in my local Transition Town. I specialise in Inner Transition work called Heart and Soul, and social and spiritual permaculture.  I’m part of the Environmental Advisory Group to Hutt City Council.

the many strands in my life contribute to a vision of how we can embody a much needed paradigm shift to regenerative life-affirming partnership culture. My kind of mind links all kinds of things together into an overall pattern and vision. On this website are some of the areas I’ve put together so we can create a different world. I led workshops and meditation groups in all these areas. I draw on psychotherapy, ecopsychology, permaculture, ecofeminism, Mother Nature.

I lived and taught in many countries. I’ve published a workbook “Storm Weathering for our Inner and Outer Climate’, and am working on several more books.

Jangchub Ling, Dzogchen Nyingthig

   Adzom Paylo Rinpoche

Jangchub Ling, Centre for awakening, is the name Adzom Paylo Rinpoche gave our group.

Dido’s teachers

Her main Buddhist teachers are Adzom Paylo Rinpoche and Namgyal Rinpoche. She also studied with Nagaboshi Tomio, Cecilie Kwiat, Chimie Rigdzin Rinpoche, Kenpo Tsultrim Gyatso, and Lopon Tenzin Namdak of Yungdrung Bon.  She has two degrees from Oxford University: MA in Greek, Latin and English literature and philosophy, and a Cert Fine Art.