By AMELIA HEAGERTY

Staff Writer

When the Dalai Lama came to Seattle last week, dozens of Islanders heard him speak at the five-day “Seeds of Compassion” event. Many say they’re now working actively to bring his message of compassion back to the Island.

The political and spiritual leader of Tibet, exiled since China’s occupation of his country, said compassion could improve all aspects of one’s life and even transform world politics. Over the course of five days, those who shared the stage with the Dalai Lama ranged from Washington Governor Christine Gregoire to musician Dave Matthews, and presenters included leading thinkers in child development.

The events aimed to find ways to infuse compassion into many aspects of life, from public policy to parenting, with many of the workshops focused on the importance of nourishing compassion in youngsters.

The Vashon contingent included a therapist, a Chautauqua Elementary School class and a group of Zen Buddhists — all of whom attended different presentations touching upon the Dalai Lama’s call for greater compassion in all facets of life.

Jeff Tipp, a therapist at Vashon Youth & Family Services (VYFS), attended a forum on Sunday, April 13, along with 600 other educators and therapists. To enable the group to have meaningful discussions, the attendees were divided into 60 groups of 10 each; Tipp, because he has experience facilitating, was his table’s facilitator.

He said the Dalai Lama suggested nurturing compassion both in school and at home, so that it “becomes part of our societal conversation and is something that is attended to as a value.”

“Currently, it doesn’t get a lot of play,” he said. “The purpose of the event has been to bring up on the screen in America the notion of compassion for others.”

At the end of the event, attendees made commitments to bring compassion to their own communities, and Tipp, as a result, has decided to start a play group for 3- to 5-year-olds at the VYFS play space. Play groups for babies and toddlers already exist at the VYFS site; beginning Wednesday, May 14, Tipp will facilitate a group for the older children as well.

Tipp’s class will incorporate the message of compassion by being taught in a “reflective parenting” format.

“You take the lead of your child, and the child when they’re really young gets to know themselves in how they are reflected in their parents’ response to themselves,” Tipp said. “You’re not trying to teach them anything, you’re just trying to show them that they matter.”

He said the “science of compassion” shows that the development of the brain in a child’s earliest years is directly related to the amount and type of attention that a child receives.

“What has been identified is that good parenting is key to a well-balanced planet,” he said. “This is a time of enormous development. Good attention and good contact is important. It can really give a child a leg up on a sense of self, a sense of security, and give a child the ability to relate to other children, to adults.”

In turn, these children will be more compassionate individuals, he said.

Glenda Berliner teaches first through third graders in a multi-age class at Chautauqua. She took her class to the Key Arena on Monday, April 14, for the Seeds of Compassion’s Children’s Day, a gathering that drew some 15,000 kids from schools across the state. At the event, the children enjoyed Brazilian and Native American dancers.

At the event, the Dalai Lama spoke to the children in the audience and told them that “this is their world,” Berliner said. He said “children are the most important to make changes in this world” and compassion is at the root of everything to change this world.

He asked the children to take the message and spread it forward, Berliner said, adding that her children do just that.

“For days afterwards they wrote compassion poems,” she said.

Her class is studying the solar system, and when she assigned acrostic poems — ones where a word, such as “earth,” is written vertically, and then the poem’s author picks out five words that starts with the letters E-A-R-T-H — she said she expected her students to include something from their solar system lesson. But most of them “wrote about caring for others,” she said.

“When we began studying earth as a kick-off to our solar system unit, the children’s poetry was a direct reflection of what they learned from the Dalai Lama,” she said.

Additionally, she received feedback from parents that her students had soaked up the message of compassion.

One parent sent her an e-mail that said, “Tonight when I was putting my son to sleep I told him, ‘Thank you for not fighting with your brother and sister today — you usually do,’ and he said, ‘I just heard the Dalai Lama. Not only can I not fight with my brother and sister, but I cannot fight with anyone.’”

She said the Dalai Lama’s “very simple message” was “very powerful, and I’m very pleasantly surprised how much impact it had.”

Two days earlier, a group of 30 members of the Puget Sound Zen Center on Vashon took in the sights of Qwest Field, a 67,000-seat venue most often filled with sports fans but on that day packed with those eager to hear a message of hope. Instead of carpooling, the Zen center members took the bus and met lots of Islanders along the way, according to Koshen Cain, abbot of the Zen center.

The Dalai Lama is Tibetan Buddhist, and the Zen center members are Zen Buddhists — Zen is a simpler form of Buddhism, Cain said — but they appreciated his talk greatly.

“I’ve never been to a pro football game, but in a sense we were all pulling for the same team there,” Cain said. “There wasn’t another team to pull against.”

He said the Dalai Lama seemed very humble and had a message that was neither political nor religious, but instead spread a message of nonviolence.

Members of the Zen center — based at a home in Ellisport — were moved by their experience at Qwest Field, he added, and even though it was a stadium of 50,000 or more people, it was an intimate experience for many of them.

“One woman said she felt so supported and loved and mournful about the fact that she doesn’t have that feeling more often,” Cain said. “Another Zen center member said the talk inspired her to be more compassionate in her family.”

He said he looked forward to incorporating some of the Dalai Lama’s teachings into the Zen center’s upcoming family retreat on May 10-11.

“In Zen, there’s a lot of things that help compassion grow, but they’re not short term,” he said. “I think we’re on the right path. Kids were the theme, and it’s given a shot in the arm to our family program. That’s one area that we have new energy to go forward in.”

Tipp said the Dalai Lama dreams big and had an imaginative idea for how the world might achieve peace.

“Get the key leadership in the world to get together for a week and not discuss politics or problems and just be together at a beach or a pool and bring their wives, their families, with no other agendas than to enjoy themselves,” Tipp said. “Then, down the road when problems arise, you could call up a person and talk to someone who you actually knew and talk about the problem.”