Two of Lama Marut and Cindy Lee’s students will join them on the tour.
> Mira Kingsley will teach at the Five Freedoms retreat in Australia
> Mary Kay Dyer will teach at the Heart Sutra retreat in Asia
Mary Kay Dyer has completed the eighteen formal ACI courses and participated in the eighteen advanced courses with her teacher, Venerable Sumati Marut. She has also received teachings from Geshe Michael Roach at Diamond Mountain and from His Holiness the Dalai Lama. She continues to offer the Dharma Essential courses at the Vajramudra Center and teachings on meditation and the practice at other locations.
Mira grew up the daughter of a scholar of Eastern Philosophy and from an early age was steeped in the beauty of the Buddha’s teachings. At the age of 21, she took herself into a Trappist nunnery for silent retreat. She has been dedicated to living a spiritual life ever since, focusing her studies primarily in Buddhism, the Yogic traditions and Christianity.
Her practice of Mahayana Buddhism has been guided by her heart Teacher, Venerable Sumati Marut. Under his excellent tutelage, Mira has taken the foundational and higher vows of the Gelugpa Lineage, the lineage of the Dalai Lamas. She has completed the 36 courses of the Asian Classics Institute open and advanced curriculum. The curriculum is based on the 20-year Tibetan monastic course of study, which is equivalent to a Masters of Theology in the West.
She is a staff writer for Awakening Journal (www.awakeningjournal.org), an online journal that shares the spiritual traditions and benefits of retreat. Mira teaches Dharma regularly at Mahasukha Center in Los Angeles (www.aci-la.org), Santa Barbara and around the world. Her classes are known for their poetry and play.
Mira connects her spiritual practice directly with her arts practice. As a dancer, choreographer and theater director she has worked professionally for more than 20 years at major venues world wide including Broadway, the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Whitney Biennial, The Guggenheim Museum, The Apollo Theater, REDCAT and others. Her artistic work integrates many disciplines but is always based in the power of the human body as a pathway to the divine. She believes that the arts and spiritual traditions serve a united purpose in providing radical models for transformation and increased wonder, wisdom and joy in the world.
Among other awards, Mira is a recipient of the prestigious Jacob K. Javits Fellowship in theater. With the Javits, Mira completed two Masters degrees in Choreography and Directing from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where she taught her groundbreaking style of dance/theater for over 5 years. Previously, she taught dance/theater in the Theater department at New York University. She’s been teaching dance as a sacred art around the U.S and internationally for more than a decade and currently serves as a full-time Professor of Dance at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
More information about Mira > http://www.theskydancer.org/
