EASE Lab Monthly Meeting

Join us in 2026 for our EASE Lab Monthly Meetings! These are open to all U of T faculty, students, and staff.

Location: New College, Wilson Hall, Room 2007D – 40 Wilcocks Street. Enter the front sliding doors, up the stairs, and curve right around the staircase.

Or on Zoom: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/85072398524 (Meeting ID: 850 7239 8524, Passcode: 101210)

This month’s presentation:

For January’s meeting, we have two special guests! Geshe Sonam Ngodrup will tell us about the four close placements of mindfulness (dran pa nyer bzhag bzhi/ smṛtyupasthāna), a core meditation practice within most of the world’s Buddhist traditions. In these practices, one can develop insight by developing mindfulness of the body, feelings, mind, and phenomena. Geshe Sonam will begin with gentle awareness exercises to develop our concentration, and then help us explore the four close placements through explanation and guided meditation.

At the age of 13, Geshe Sonam Ngodrup left Kham, Tibet for India to join Sera Jey monastery. After graduating as a Geshe Lharampa (the most distinguished of the four geshe degrees) at the top of his class, Geshe-la began teaching. As one of the monastery’s most popular scripture teachers (dpe khrid dge rgan), Geshe-la spent a decade guiding over a hundred monastic students through the key scriptures of the tradition. From 2010 to 2018, Geshe taught in Europe, and since 2019, he has been a resident teacher at Lama Yeshe Ling in Burlington, Ontario.

Rory Tasker (Venerable Khedrup) has been a Buddhist monk since 2004 and graduated from the Lotsawa Rinchen Zangpo Translator Program in Dharamsala, India, in 2010. He has served Geshe Sonam and several other respected Himalayan teachers as their Tibetan-English interpreter since 2011. He completed an MA in Buddhist studies at McMaster in 2019 and had his PhD thesis accepted at the University of Toronto, OISE in 2025. His research focused on the experiences and pedagogies of Tibetan and Himalayan teachers of Buddhism in North America.