Who?
We are Vanessa Owen and Alan Lewis, and we’ve created this website to have something beautiful to do together and to share with others.
We hope you will enjoy the site and find inspiration amongst its pages.
Please consider contributing a story of your own to Zen Moments
Alan: I became interested in Buddhism and Awareness when studying Psychology at university in the 70′s. I began practising meditation in the Theravada tradition but also spent a year living in Japan teaching English, learning the language and soaking up the culture.
My interest in Buddhism grew to the point where I decided to become a Theravadin Buddhist monk, and joined a Thai-derived monastic order in southern England in 1983.
I lived as a monk in the UK for 11 years and moved to Asia – to Sri Lanka 
and Thailand in the 90′s. I was involved in teaching meditation, training monks and running monasteries for many years, until the same mysterious current that drew me into monastic life started to tug me away. My final monastic year was spent in a small monastery in the Swiss Alps, before I disrobed in December 2000.
Not having owned or handled money for the previous 15 years I had to find a livelihood, and luckily some friends of the monastery who ran a business in Zurich asked for my help with their computers (we had been using computers in the monasteries since the desktop computer revolution started in the late 80′s and having taken an interest I had developed some skill in fixing them).
So having spent 17 years as a Buddhist monk, upon disrobing I found myself working as an IT consultant for an international recruitment company in the financial sector of Zurich!
Things worked out quite well and when I came back to the UK, I started my own IT support business in Devon in the south-west of England, with which I am still very much involved. After a few years of letting the dust settle, and getting used to my new life and identity, I began teaching Buddhism and meditation again.
Vanessa: I have always loved being creative. After gaining a Degree in Fine Art, I was an art 
teacher for many years, working mainly with children, including teenagers who have been excluded from school. I also spent several years just being mum to my two wonderful sons, who are now studying at University.
When I first started teaching, I was persuaded, as a stiff and somewhat wary 20-something, to join a friend at our first yoga class. After a few years she became my yoga teacher and encouraged me to study for the same 3 year Diploma.
I found yoga and meditation to be fantastic tools, which really helped me to become more healthy – physically and emotionally – and then to survive some difficult times, including leaving a relationship of 28 years. My yoga practice has supported and nurtured me throughout this ongoing process of making positive changes in my life.
For the past few months I have been having a break from teaching and have begun to rediscover myself as an artist and also develop new creative skills. ArtyNess.com is a new website I’m working on, which enables me to share my Art Projects and encourage young people to have fun while developing their creativity.
