 Stephen Schettini is the author of The Novice: Why I Became A Buddhist Monk, Why I Quit and What I Learned. This memoir opens with the frustrated childhood that led him as a young man on an exciting overland trip through Iran, Afghanistan and the Swat Valley before settling down among the Tibetans for a life of study and meditation.
The Novice will be launched by the Greenleaf Book Group in September 2009, and tells of his unusual journey searching for truth and purpose.
Schettini is not your typical spiritual teacher. Instead of offering a philosophy, he tells stories that provoke deep philosophical thought. Rather than giving answers, he shares stubborn questions. Instead of advocating a life of seclusion and withdrawal, he plunges whole-heartedly into life. Disdaining any claim to enlightenment, he speaks frankly of the stresses of life in a fast-paced, technologically challenging, sometimes soulless consumer culture. He’s found that by developing trust in himself and by honing his intuition he can contribute to contemporary life without having to withdraw. Relying entirely on his ability to learn from experience, without sooth-saying or philosophical pretentions, he’s on a par with students and readers alike.
It’s described in this memoir how Schettini, as a middle-class Italian Catholic boy, hitch-hikes from his native England to India to become a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition, from 1972 to 1980.
He learns to speak and read Tibetan, lives and studies in Sera Monastic University as the only resident Westerner, and is trained at the École des Hautes Études Tibétaines in Switzerland to interpret and teach Tibetan Buddhism to other Westerners. |
Eight years later, and after a year in a Tibetan refugee camp in Southern India and a prolonged encounter with austere southern Buddhism, he grows disillusioned and abandons his monastic path.
Afterwards, he moved to Montreal to measure what he’d learned as a monk against the realities of life. There he acquired the skills he needed to support himself in his new life, founded a print communications company and married unsuccessfully. In frustration, he decided that had no notion of what to look for in a relationship, and gave up. It was then that he encountered his present wife Caroline, and experienced for the first time a successful relationship and family life. After dozens of failed attempts to write The Novice, this provided the nurturing environment he needed to move forward with his lifelong project, which he completed in under ten years.
Stephen is the founder and director of Kudo.ca Communications and Quiet Mind Seminars . He’s led hundreds of meditation workshops in the Montreal area since 2003 (www.thequietmind.org).
He has contributed columns regularly to local newspapers and to The Suburban, Quebec’s largest English-language weekly. He also freelanced for the Montreal Gazette.
Stephen made a living in print communications and over the next 20 years authored, co-authored, illustrated, and designed dozens of books on information technology and health science.
He resides with his wife, Caroline, in Quebec, Canada. Look for more information, stories and articles in the main website. |
