Over the past two years, New York Insight has been working to create a new spiritual leadership model.

At the heart of this model is a collective of guiding teachers whose responsibilities include ensuring the authenticity of our teachings, providing personal guidance and support to practitioners, building community among our sangha, and facilitating the transmission of the teachings and practices of insight meditation.

We are pleased to announce that Leslie Booker has been appointed as one of NY Insight’s Co-Guiding Teachers.

Booker began her formal practice at New York Insight in 2006 and has been an invaluable teacher and member of our community ever since.

Our search for the remaining members of the triad to join Booker in the Guiding Teacher Collective continues. Together, they will lead us into the next 25 years of our center’s journey.

We are planning a special inaugural ceremony for Booker and our Guiding Teacher Collective at our 25th Anniversary Celebration in June 2023, and we hope you can join us then.

In the meantime, you can find Booker teaching various programs and events at New York Insight. We invite you to sit with her and support her work on behalf of our beloved community! Find out more about Booker here.

Please join us in congratulating Booker on her appointment and welcoming her into her new role as Co-Guiding Teacher at New York Insight.

Teacher Bio

Booker brings her heart and wisdom to the intersection of Dharma, Embodied Wisdom, and Liberation. Using this framework, she supports folks in creating a culture of belonging through her teaching and writing on changing the paradigm of self and community care. She shares her offering widely as a university lecturer, public speaker, and Buddhist philosophy and meditation teacher.

After training as a yoga teacher in 2007, Booker was drawn to Spirit Rock Meditation Center’s Mindful Yoga and Meditation training which she completed in 2012. Supported by her teacher Gina Sharpe, she was invited to continue her formal Dharma teacher training at Spirit Rock through their Community Dharma Leaders Training, graduating in 2017, and their 4 year Retreat Teacher training program which she completed in 2020. Throughout these years, she worked as the Director of Teacher Trainings for Lineage Project where she shared the practices of yoga and mindfulness with incarcerated and system involved youth for over a decade. She was also invited to facilitate a Mindfulness and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy intervention with the youth population on Rikers Island through the LionHeart Foundation and the National Institute of Health for two years, and worked with several other NYC non – profits, sharing these practices with the city’s most vulnerable populations. This is where she learned to take her practice off the cushion and into everyday life.

She has spoken at Mind & Life Institute’s International Symposium, Contemplative Minds in Higher Education, Mindfulness in America, and Omega Institute’s Mindfulness in Education conferences, along with other pioneers in the mindfulness field such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, Dr. Daniel Siegel, Linda Lantieri, and His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Booker has been a featured speaker and facilitator at the Fetzer Institute, Vassar and Pitzer Colleges, the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia. She’s especially passionate about supporting the folks on the front lines to thrive in their work, and training future leaders through the Peace Corps’ Jaffe Fellows and Teaching Residents at Teacher’s College at Columbia University, as well as the Dalai Lama Fellows through the University of Virginia.

Booker is a co-author of Best Practices for Yoga in a Criminal Justice Setting, a contributor to Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality’s report Gender & Trauma—Somatic Interventions for Girls in Juvenile Justice, contributed to Sharon Salzberg’s book Happiness at Work and Dr. Rima Vesely – Flad’s book Black Buddhist and the Black Radical Tradition. Her writing and other work can also be found in Lion’s Roar, Tricycle Magazine, Yoga Journal and 10% Happier. She is a co-founder of the Yoga Service Council at Omega Institute and the Meditation Working Group of Occupy Wall Street. In 2020 she was invited to be a Sojourner Truth Leadership Fellow through Auburn Seminary, and was voted by her peers as one of the 12 Powerful Women in the Mindfulness Movement. She currently lives in Philadelphia with her partner and pup, and is the Co-Guiding Teacher of New York Insight.

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