Catherine Pawasarat has developed awakening for the alleviation of suffering for all beings by training daily with awakening master Doug Duncan Sensei since 1997. She’s helped establish and develop centers for awakening in Japan and Canada as well as supporting awakening in other countries.
Raised in Kansas City, MO, Catherine studied literature, languages and philosophy at Columbia University. Thirsting for a more international perspective, she then moved to Kyoto, Japan.
While studying the traditional Japanese arts she worked as a regional correspondent for the largest English daily newspaper specializing in advocacy journalism, as an interpreter/translator and as an editor for several UN bodies. She spent a year studying shamanism in the Brasilian Amazon in 1996, and on returning to Kyoto she met meditation and dharma teacher Doug Duncan, and immediately began an intensive dharma apprenticeship. She’s been studying with him daily ever since.
With Doug Sensei and other students, Catherine helped found Dharma Japan in Japan and the Clear Sky Retreat Centre in Canada. In particular Catherine focuses on dharma training and helping to implement sustainability, and how sustainability figures in the practices of awakening.
Her great talents are diverse and multi-disciplinary, enabling her serve the Clear Sky board as their Chief Visionary Officer. Her involvements include creating an ecological restoration program, helping launch Clear Sky’s organic farm social enterprise, Food Forest and permaculture programs, strengthening financial sustainability, spearheading marketing development, and liaising with the international dharmic community, and many more creations. In addition to playing Japanese musical instruments, she studied traditional Japanese comic theater with a National Living Treasure, and loves dyeing and weaving. She speaks and reads and forgets and remembers again five languages.
Her studies in Buddhism and the Western Mysteries with various teachers has given her a broad spectrum ability to suit the “cure to the patient.” Traveling widely, reading eclectically, Catherine’s teaching style is embracive and inclusive, focusing on practical application to the personal and spiritual as well as social, environmental and economic concerns. Her great sense of humour makes sometimes difficult conditions enriching. Her spiritual passion focuses around karma yoga, the practice of service and “meditating while doing” — the training of beings to fully integrate the meditation cushion with daily life.