Spirituality Cafe opens doors, minds to diverse faiths

It is 11 a.m. on Thursday. Busy students walk by UNH's Strafford room worrying about midterms and their next class. 

Walk into the Strafford Room. 

Welcome to the Spiritual Praxis Cafe.  Shoes are not required. Dancing, chanting, and physically expressing oneself are all encouraged. 

Doria Bramante, a Durham resident in her twenties with long blonde hair, twirled around the floor of the room in flowing orange pants. She smiled at the eight other bare-footed women dancing around her, some faculty, some students, some community members. At the end of the song they cheered and refreshed themselves for the next song by drinking apple cider out of tiny paper cups. 

Bramante and these women were participating in a yoga dance, which was one of the half hour sessions being held at the Spiritual Praxis Cafe yesterday. 

Each semester for the past five years a spirituality and society committee, consisting of UNH staff, put together a buffet of spiritual practices in an event that is known as the Spiritual Cafe. 

For three hours yesterday afternoon there were half-hour sessions with a variety of on-and-off-campus spiritual leaders conducting sessions that help students and others explore different kinds of spirituality. 

"I believe Obama said recently that one of the places we are most separate is in our forms of worship," said Sylvia Foster, one of the organizers, who works as an educational program coordinator on UNH's diversity initiatives. "It's about holding up each others' practices and recognizing them as valuable."

There was a wide range of religions represented at the event including Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Doaism, Greek Orthodox, and Baha'i, a monotheistic religion with origins in the Middle East. There was also a session on the spiritual practice of Reiki, which originated in Japan. 

"This event is always aimed to be very inclusive," said co-organizer Paul Cody, a psychologist at the UNH counseling center. 

Inclusion and acceptance of other religions was the spirit of the event, according to Chris Williams, a Buddhist community member from Newmarket who led a chanting session. 

"We all have obstacles we are trying to overcome and we all do it in our own way," Williams said. 

Williams also said that he hopes students who attended put aside preconceived notions about the Buddhist religion they may have acquired. 

"A lot of people think that in order to be a Buddhist you shave your head and have to live in a monastery," said Williams. "I've been practicing Buddhism for 16 or 17 years and it's not like that."