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From journalist and internationally recognized author Lee Carlson comes a life-changing memoir about our journey to seek meaning and the personal relationships we build along the way.

A Single Excellent Night weaves together awakening experiences and pivotal realizations from the first four years of a 15-year apprenticeship Lee Carlson spent with Peter Matthiessen. The relationship between these two men, Zen teacher/student, writer mentor/mentee, trusted confidants and friends, unfolds in beautiful stories as Carlson goes on a quest to the furthest limits of human understanding and mindfulness, culminating with a single magical event on a winter beach.

Layered with profound insights on identity, belonging, and suffering, A Single Excellent Night is more than a book about Zen, spiritual awakening, and the enlightenment found in presence. It is a book about meaningful relationships, healing, love, and community. Unpacking the wisdom and teachings of towering literary figures like Peter Matthiessen and spiritual teachers like Joanna Macy, Carlson invites readers to experience the rare fusion of lived memory and meditative inquiry—a search for insight shaped by Zen practice, poetic prose, and the lasting imprint of a literary legacy. (see more here)

Gary Sanders and Dana Gornall talk with Lee Carlson, traumatic brain injury survivor, journalist, former magazine editor and Zen practitioner. Lee's previous memoir, Passage to Nirvana goes into his journey of near death to recovering from an accident that caused a Traumatic Brain Injury. We discuss some of his background and story along with his latest work, A Single Excellent Night.

Lee's website here: https://leecarlson.life/

Purchase A Single Excellent Night here: https://leecarlson.life/a-single-excellent-night

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Passage to Nirvana here: https://leecarlson.life/passage-to-nirvana

Podcast edited by Brad Parsons at Train Sound Studio, www.trainsoundstudio.com

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*trigger warning: Suicide

Jaqui was a young, 22 year old free-spirited young woman who loved to plant trees and was a part of a tree-planting community.

She was an artist, a tattoo artist and an adventurer. Her dad had no longer needed a contractor van so she renovated it into a traveling van and went exploring.

Jaqui loved meditating and had been trying to get into a 10 day Goenka meditation retreat for awhile and when her name came up on the list to be able to go, she was very excited.

A few days into the retreat, Jaqui's mom received a phone call from a volunteer saying that Jaqui had left in the night and they just wanted to make sure she had gotten home safely. In fact, Jaqui had not gotten home, and this led to a call to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in order to file a missing person's report. While the police were able to locate her van about 30 miles from the retreat center, they did not find Jaqui.

Jaqui was found to have taken her own life.

This is not the first time someone has commit suicide after a Goenka retreat. We sit down and talk to Nathalie St-Maurice, Jaqui's mom, about this story, about Jaqui, and what she and other families would like to see change with these type of Vipassana retreats.

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These retreats were a part of an investigative podcast on The Financial Times. You can listen to those here.

Check out Cheetah House here, a website and community organization that helps support those who have experienced distress during/after meditation. Cheetah House will also have an online event on June 3 called Behind the Scenes at Retreat.

Here is the foundation Jaqui's family started to celebrates and supports education in arts called Nice Day Shining. Their purpose is to advance education by providing scholarships to study arts at post-secondary educational institutions, and o raise awareness and provide support for mental health through disbursement to charitable organizations.

If you need help, or need someone to talk with please reach out by call 9-8-8.

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Kellie Schorr has not only written for The Tattooed Buddha since 2018, she has been publishing as a ghost writer for the romantic suspense genre for several years penning commissioned novels.

She is a Buddhist yogi in the Tibetan tradition and worked as a prevention specialist in the field of HIV and AIDS. She said she has always been a writer. She talks about her journey as a professional writer and how it can take many, many submissions to get published. We also talk about how she found The Tattooed Buddha and began writing for us here.

Kellie recently wrote her own book, A Space Between Breaths, published by Brother Mockingbird, which is a Buddhist mystery story. See the review for her book here, and purchase the book here or here. See her first post from The Tattooed Buddha here.

Check out her website here.

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Follow us on Facebook and Instagram! Interested in being a guest on our podcast? Contact us at editor@thetattooedbuddha.com.