Ayyā Medhānandī Bhikkhunī (1949, née Mary Fiksel), a native of Montreal, is the founder of Sati Sārāņīya Hermitage in Perth, Ontario, a pioneer Theravada Buddhist training monastery for bhikkhunīs in Canada.
She began meditating at the age of 21, completed an Msc in nutrition, and worked for the UN and other global aid agencies designing and managing programs for malnourished women and children in developing countries.
Inspired by the meditation practice, she made pilgrimage to India, met an Advaita sage, and trained with him as a nun for four years. His death was a call to monastic life and while on retreat in Myanmar in 1988, she was ordained as a ten-precept Buddhist nun by the Venerable Sayadaw U Pandita.
Two years later, with his blessings, she joined the nuns’ community at Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in the UK, training for 10 years with Ajahn Sumedho as preceptor before choosing a more hermetic practice based in New Zealand and later Penang. She has taught in the Southern Hemisphere, Asia, and the West.
In 2007, she received bhikkhunī ordination in Taiwan and accepted an invitation to return to Canada the following year to establish Sati Sārāņīya Hermitage as a registered charity under the Canadian Charities Directorate.
Apart from guiding the nun’s community, she leads retreats and teaches vipassana meditation courses, including programs for Hospice volunteers and staff in Ottawa. She is the author of ‘Gone Forth, Going Beyond’.
