NYZCCC will now be able to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices more fully into professional chaplaincy training, creating a dynamic program that is interfaith and experience-based.
Leading large health centers such as Beth Israel and Visiting Nurse Services Hospice of New York City have integrated
more than thirty of NYZCCC’s students, both Buddhist CPE Chaplain Interns and Contemplative Care Volunteers, onto
their floors to work directly with the ill and dying. Buddhist approaches such as mindfulness and meditation are being
practiced with hundreds of patients every week.
Beth Labush, VNS Hospice Residence Nurse Manager, states:
Seven of your Buddhist Chaplaincy Training Program students have been volunteering at VNSNY Hospice Residence.
They bring calm and joy to their interactions with patients and staff … and form authentic and deep relationships with
our patients and with their families, even with patients who appear to be “loners.”
The students are great collaborators, sharing the patient information and insights they gain through concise patient
chart and journal entries as well as more informal verbal reporting…Their sense of wonder about the end of life and
dying, their openness to this experience and their enthusiasm for this work nurture my own commitment to hospice work.
ZEN Buddhist Priests Koshin Paley Ellison, Robert Chodo Campbell, and ACPE-accredited supervisor Trudi Jinpu
Hirsch, all of whom have received formal Clinical Pastoral Education and undergone extensive clinical work as
chaplains, comprise the core-teaching faculty of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. Healthcare advocate
Roshi Enkyo O’Hara is the Guiding Spiritual Teacher for the program. NYZCCC’s mission is to refine caregiving skills
for chaplains, doctors, nurses, social workers, counselors, therapists, and lay people using a contemplative and
mindfulness-based approach, as well as to provide direct care to those in need. They expect to have seventy-four new
students in the Fall of 2009.
NYZCCC teachers and their students – seventy volunteers and chaplains, graduated and in training since 2007 – have
touched the lives of hundreds of dying individuals and their grieving families and friends. Volunteering more than 4,302
hours of groundbreaking service, they have provided:
• 7,879 individuals with contemplative care in the face of death, cancer AIDS, and other illnesses.
• 1,694 family members, couples and friends with contemplative care as they dealt with grief, mourning, and loss.
• 2,074 staff members in hospitals, hospices, and prisons with spiritual care
• 782 contemplative care and meditation groups
• 2,279 men and women from the general public with education in topics such as death and dying, Buddhist
approaches to death, addictions and spirituality, and contemplative practices.
For more information on our vision, programs and activities, please contact us above or visit www.zencare.org.
Mary Remington
Programs and Events Manager
New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care
70A Greenwich Ave, No 333
NYC, NY 10011
917.453.1615
[email protected]
