Eve Ensler + Koshin Paley Ellison: The Healing Power of Speaking Personal Truths

In this evening of personal storytelling, playwright and activist Eve Ensler and Zen teacher, Psychotherapist and “Modern Monk” Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison recount how they came to terms with painful truths that they have carried with them, hidden, for much of their lives. Together with moderator Eddie Gonzalez, Engagement Manager for On Being and the Civil Conversations Project, they address what this personal dance of inner/outer truth-telling might teach us about how we can approach our differences and work towards healing our fractured society.

The two authors will be signing their books The Apology (Eve Ensler) and Wholehearted (Koshin Paley Ellison) after the program.

Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up is a compact book that takes 16 ancient and essential Buddhist precepts and strips them down to universal themes and teachings that everyone can relate to. The book is available now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM and Indie Reads.

About Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison: Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, MFA, LMSW, DMin, is a best-selling author/editor and nationally recognized spiritual teacher and psychotherapist. Widely acclaimed for his guidance in helping people understand and apply time-tested Buddhist teachings as simple strategies for living in today’s chaotic world, Paley Ellison is a dynamic, original and visionary leader, teacher and speaker. He is a co-founder of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, the author of Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up and an editor of the best-selling book Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End of Life Care.

About Eve Ensler: Eve Ensler, Tony Award–winning playwright, performer, and activist, is the author of one of the most influential works of the 20th century, The Vagina Monologues, translated into over 48 languages, performed in over 140 countries, including sold-out runs at both Off-Broadway’s Westside Theater and on London’s West End. This experience inspired her to create V-Day, a global activist movement to stop violence against women and girls. One Billion Rising, initiated in 2012, continues to be the largest mass action campaign against violence against women and girls. Annually, activists rise in 200 countries through dance and creative expression. Other plays include The Good Body , Emotional Creature, O.P.C., Avocado, and In the Body of the World, based on her memoir. Ensler’s most recent memoir, The Apology, has been hailed a “transfixing, appalling, revelatory, and cathartic performance [which] deepens her mission of transmuting her pain into clarion stories that engender understanding, openness, healing, and liberation.”