WELCOME TO THE
HOME OF THE NOVICE

This is the personal web site of Stephen Schettini, and is mostly about his writing.Here you'll find dozens of articles and stories, including outtakes from The Novice. Most of it relates to, or is a result of, his eight years’ experience as a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition.

Stephen says, “I wrote The Novice in response to all those who've asked why a good, Catholic, middle class, privately schooled, English-Italian boy would hitchhike virtually penniless to India and enter that rarified world of spiritual scholarship. It also helped me untangle the many reasons I abandoned that idyllic life and how I survived the precipitous, unceremonious fall back into the material world.”

First drafts of The Novice ran into hundreds of thousands of words. To create an effective narrative, it had to be pared down to 100,000 words, but the axed passages, as much they interrupted the big picture, were far from uninteresting. Many are on this web site and can be found by browsing the banner-collage at the top of this and every page. Please let us know you if you stumble on any missing links or if you have any suggestions to simplify the structure. It's a big site, and growing.

ABOUT MY TEACHING
by Stephen Schettini

We all agree that life is stressful, and our best intentions to calm down all too often lead nowhere, but the quiet mind is a constant reality that underlies everything we do. It can be reached by turning inwards, taking an honest look and opening the door to real personal change. It's not easy, but it's very worthwhile.

I don't promise perfect peace, earth-shattering insight or transcendental breakthroughs. On the contrary, I ask my students to work hard, and especially to beware their own expectations. We're all twenty-first century grownups and as much as we want to believe in easy solutions and magical formulas we know perfectly well that a down-to-earth approach will pay off more than all the mantras, visualizations and promises of enlightenment on the world wide web.

People from all walks of life attend my ten-week seminars. A large proportion are professionals and as of 2006, I teach stress-management to professionals and executives in the health and business communities with a view to reinforcing the traditional business skills of leadership, decision-making and creative coping. These services are described in the Private Seminars menu item on the left.

It's my sincere wish that my work will provoke and encourage people of all faiths to think for themselves, question convenient rationalizations, trust their intuition and discover that the complications of life don't have to overwhelm the simplicity of their true nature.

Stephen Schettini
Montreal, 2006