ASIA: Seeds of Awareness

From Tibet to Italy. Our journey continues from East to West, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the streets of our cities, to spread the values and principles that Tibetan culture offers us to create a more harmonious and inclusive society, starting from a greater awareness of each other.

This time we are making the journey together with Merigar, with the project “Seeds of awareness: starting from self-knowledge to rediscover the deep bonds that exist between human beings and to cultivate empathic relationships”, funded by the Italian Buddhist Union.

The goal of the project is to help improve the socio-emotional skills of young people and to create a more inclusive and welcoming society by spreading knowledge of the principles of awareness and interdependence.

The underlying principle is that today more than ever, also due to the pandemic that has hit our country so hard, it is important to know one’s inner world and be in contact with what is happening within oneself, in order to relate to others in an empathic way and not lose awareness of that sense of interdependence that binds us to all living beings.

The project is geared toward children in particular. Given increasing juvenile anxiety reported by the WHO and confirmed in Italy by the Italian Society of Pediatrics, which has detected widespread emotional distress (80%), a series of activities were devised aimed at developing the socio-emotional skills of primary school children: workshops with fairy tales from around the world and drawing, courses of awareness and empathy and Yantra Yoga – Kumar Kumari.

Conferences will also be held to deepen values such as awareness and interdependence and there will be an exhibition of Enrico Dell’Angelo’s photos with images and stories of spiritual masters and sacred places in Tibet, but also of ordinary people, in order to create a bridge with a distant culture and make the “different” known, thus increasing the sense of belonging to the same human race.

The one-year project started in September 2020 and takes place in Rome and in the municipalities of Mt. Amiata.