The first ever Buddhist Geeks conference wrapped up last weekend to thunderous applause and what looked like some exhausted yet happy geeks. With two full days of material spread out over three days and TONS of great conversations in-between sessions, this event was a jam-packed exploration of the emerging face(s) of Buddhism.
Some of the highlights included the brilliant presentations by sisters Jane and Kelly McGonigal (speaking on totally different topics), Jack Kornfield joining one of our panels as a surprise guest, a totally jammin’ classical guitar performance by Buddhist musician Benjamin Beirs, a stirring talk by BG collaborator Rohan Gunatillake on disrupting the awakening industry, and a ton of interesting Unplugged conversations (we wish we could have been to ALL of them!). But instead of trying to summarize everything that went on—most of it was recorded and videos will be released soon—we thought it would be easier to summarize some of the best coverage from the event.
Live Coverage
Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/albill/
Buddhist writers and bloggers were at #bgeeks11 in full force doing what they do best! Here is a run down of some of the coverage that came out of #bgeeks11:
Mitchell Landsberg covered the conference in the Religion section of the Los Angeles Times
Richard Eskow attended the conference and wrote a review in Tricycle Magazine, in the Winter 2011 edition
Another nice piece on the event by Ed Halliwell, blogging for The Guardian.
A fantastic overview of the conference by Paul T. Bradley writing for the LA Weekly
A fascinating look at one of the unplugged sessions, held by conference participant and Brown University researcher, Willoughby Britton. Written by L.J. Williamson for the LA Weekly.
A multi-part series from one of our official bloggers, @C4Chaos:
- Buddhist Geeks Conference 2011 – Streaming Entry
- Towards a Science of Enlightenment: A Keynote by Shinzen Young
- Awakening is an EPIC WIN!
- Monkeys in Mid-Swing
- Epilogue: It’s Good To Be In Something From the Ground Floor
- Flickr Photoset
More full day reflections, plus some awesome photos, from uber-geek @openbuddha:
Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/albill/
Detailed notes from Kristen Stancik (@kstancik) on several of the main presentations on Friday and Saturday:
- Shinzen Young: Towards a Science of Enlightenment
- Buddhist Geeks Live: Kenneth Folk
- Buddhist Geeks Live: Kelly McGonigal
- Buddhist Geeks Live: Ethan Nichtern
A great overview of the whole event from Seattle-based yoga-design-Buddhist uber-woman Nikki Chau (@dragonc):
A short reflection from Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield on his experience of the conference:
And also some great conference brainstorming, coming out of one of the Unplugged sessions, from David Chapman (@meaningness):
Blowin’ Twitter Up
Most of the conference nuggets were shared live via participants on twitter. No surprise since we encouraged everyone to tweet using the #bgeeks11 hashtag! Although there were hundreds of conference tweets, we rounded up some of our favorites:
#bgeeks12
From everything that we can tell #bgeeks11 was a massive success. Coming into this event we had no idea if we’d do another, or if this one would even fly! But we realized about half-way through—probably around the time that we saw an unplugged session organized to plan #bgeeks12 (hey, why didn’t we get an invite?)—that we’d need to start planning the next event. We’ve begun working on finding a venue and incorporating what we learned from this event to make the next one even better.
If you want to start tweeting your ideas for #bgeeks12 just use that hashtag on twitter and fire away! And in the meantime we wanted to thank everyone who joined us for what ended up being a beautiful and life-changing experience. It’s amazing what can happen when you get so many brilliant and heartfelt Buddhist Geeks into one room.
