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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.

Here is the article from John Pendall on the dark side of meditation.

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 calling 9-8-8.

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

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

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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.

Substack

Book club resources

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

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Today we had a long term friend and former TTB board member, Daniel Scharpenburg on our podcast!

Daniel has written a lot for The Tattooed Buddha as well as many other Buddhist magazines. He has worked for the IRS for 16 years now and he became a Union Steward in 2018 and during the COVID pandemic in 2020 he was elected as the first Vice President of his union.

He has really enjoyed being a leader and activist during this time and is taking those leadership skills as first Vice President to also be an activist for social liberation. Daniel has been a Buddhist and meditation teacher for years and is active member and Dharma Facilitator of the Rime Buddhist Center & Institute of Tibetan Studies.

We discuss the Buddhist role in politics, what role Buddhists can, and has historically played, and how to peacefully and effectively take part in protests.

"Right now it's like this, what can I do?" is one of Daniel's favorite Buddhist slogans.

See Daniel's Substack here. See Daniel's books here. See Daniel's writing on TTB here, and on Patheos here.

Check out 50501 here.

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

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