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Bhante Kondanna at SHA

SHA Wellness Clinic

May 14, 2013

Bhante Kondanna, the prestigious buddhist monk, mentor and meditation teacher of famous people such as Shakira, will visit SHA from May 16th to 18th.

Bhante Homagama Kondanna Bhikku is a follower of the Theravada school that preserves the original purity of Buddha’s teaching and maintains that meditation is like the inevitable path to self discovery and liberation. This school has fans as famous as Richard Gere, Ricky Martin, Sharon Stone, or the late Apple founder Steve Jobs.

SHA guests are welcome to attend a conference that will be held during his stay in which he will talk about “How to live in peace and harmony through meditation”. He will also be giving group meditation classes.

Bhante, who has been a meditation teacher for famous celebrities such as Shakira, states that “the deepest concentration enables us to comprehend the nature of our thoughts, distinguish positive thinking from negative, develop what’s beneficial and reject anything that could harm us”.

Bhante Kondanna was born into a noble family on the 15th of April, 1939 in a village called Homagama (20 km from Colombo, Sri Lanka) which he was named after. He studied at Royal College, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Then he went to live and study in the United Kingdom. He graduated in automotive engineering and went to work for the company Rolls-Royce. He was ordained as a monk in 1978 (when he was 39) in the style of Ajahn Chah, a respected Buddhist master of the ancient Thai Forest Tradition of Theravada Buddhism. He started off on his pilgrimage around the world to disseminate his message of peace and spiritual concentration in 1983.

Nowadays, he is the director of the Siresena Meditation Centre of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka and he travels all over the world sharing his message of peace and spiritual concentration. He runs meditation retreats in Latin America and he gives talks on Buddhism and concentration all around the world. “Meditation is the only way to transform human beings, get them away from their bad habits, from their bad temper, from hate. We can change just by thinking, we can control our mind”, states the monk.

As a meditation teacher, Kondanna highlights the importance and the advantages of using concentration as a way to understand ourselves, learn how things happen in our mind, in our body and cleanse those continual stressful thoughts associated with modern-day life. He teaches others to live and shake off the problems of today’s society which include hate, greed or confusion.

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