Wutai Shan Venerable Dayi Assistant Professor of Buddhist Spiritual Care
Acting MPS Director
- MPS Emmanuel College, 2022
- PhD University of Toronto, 2017
- MA Queens University, 2003
- BA University of British Columbia, 2001
Memberships
- Registered Psychotherapist with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO)
- Associate Member of the Canadian Association of Spiritual Care (CASC)
Contact:
- Telephone: 416-813-4096
- Email: jennifer.bright@utoronto.ca
Teaching & Research Interests:
Jennifer Bright is a professor of Buddhist spiritual care and spiritually integrated psychotherapy. Her current research focuses on decolonial pedagogies in Buddhist spiritual care and psychospiritual therapies, Buddhist responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Calls to Action, Buddhist approaches to the moral emotions and moral injury, and the intersection of Buddhism, medicine and healing.
Before joining Emmanuel College, Bright worked as a spiritual care clinician in the intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. She is a registered psychotherapist with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario and maintains a small clinical practice.
Bright received her PhD in the Department for the Study of Religion with the Collaborative Program in Women’s Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, Women and Hormones in Tibetan Medical Literature, explored how contemporary Tibetan medical doctors and writers draw from Buddhist texts, especially tantric works detailing the subtle body of winds, channels and drops, to integrate biomedical notions of hormones and endocrinology with Tibetan medicine.
Publications
"Engaging with Truth and Reconciliation: De-colonizing Pedagogies in Buddhist Spiritual Care and Counselling", Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies, Forthcoming 2025 special issue.
“Science and Authority in Tibetan Medicine: Gönpokyap’s Extraordinarily Special Features of the Human Body” (2008). In Buddhism and Medicine: Modern and Contemporary Sources, edited by Pierce Salguero. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
“‘Female Nectar’: A Study of Hybridity and Gender in Contemporary Tibetan Medical Literature on Menstruation.” Asian Medicine 6, no. 2 (2011): 387–420.
Review of Secrets of the Vajra Body: Dngos po’i gnas lugs and the Apotheosis of the Body in the Work of Rgyal ba Yang dgon pa, by Willa Miller. Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2013, dissertationreviews.org/archives/7858, (2014).
Selected Courses
EMP3651 Narrative Therapy
EMP1513 Introduction to Counselling and Spiritual Care Practice (co-taught)
EMP3521 Professional Ethics for Spiritual Care and Psycho-Spiritual- Spiritual Care (co-taught)
EMP2010 Buddhist Approaches to Mental Health
EMP3583: Buddhist Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy
EMP3547 Mindfulness Modalities for Spiritual Care and Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy