Healing Ourselves, Healing Our World: An Online Benefit

Joseph Goldstein

Joseph Goldstein has been leading insight and lovingkindness meditation retreats worldwide since 1974. He is a cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, where he is one of the organization’s guiding teachers. In 1989, together with several other teachers and students of insight meditation, he helped establish the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.

He is the author of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, A Heart Full of Peace, One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism, Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom, The Experience of Insight, and co-author of Seeking the Heart of Wisdom and Insight Meditation: A Correspondence Course.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde

Pamela Ayo Yetunde, J.D., Th.D. is a Community Dharma Leader, a pastoral counselor, and founder of Marabella StoryCraft (www.pamelaayoyetunde). She is the founder of Buddhist Justice Reporter (www.buddhistjustice.com). Ayo is the author of Casting Indra’s Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community, co-editor of Nautilus Book Award-winning Black and Buddhist: What Buddhist Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom and author of the Frederick J. Streng Book Award-winning Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, U.S. Law, and Womanist Theology for Transgender Spiritual Care. Ayo is also an associate editor for Lion’s Roar Foundation. She is working on a film project called Birdsong, a modern rendering of the Kisa Gotami/Mustard Seed story.

Mark Epstein

Mark Epstein, M.D., a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City, is the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy, including Thoughts without a Thinker, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, Going on Being, Open to Desire, Psychotherapy without the Self, The Trauma of Everyday Life and Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself. His latest work, The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life, was published in January 2022 by Penguin Press. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University.

DaRa Williams

DaRa Williams is a trainer, meditation teacher and psychotherapist. DaRa has been a meditator for the past 25 years and is a practitioner of both Vipassana and Ascension meditation. She is a graduate of the Spirit Rock/Insight Meditation Society Teacher Training Program and is currently a Guiding Teacher at IMS. She is the Program Manager and a core teacher in the current IMS Teacher Training. DaRa has been a clinician and administrator in the field of Mental Health for over 25 years and currently maintains a private practice in Manhattan. She is a certified trainer and practitioner of Indigenous Focusing Oriented Therapy and Complex Trauma. DaRa integrates these skills, understandings and world views in her intention for contributing to the ending of suffering for all beings.

“Both formerly and now, it is only suffering that I describe, and the cessation of suffering.” The Buddha

Tuere Sala

Tuere Sala is a Guiding Teacher at Seattle Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Retreat Center. She is a retired prosecuting attorney who has practiced Vipassana meditation for over 30 years.  Tuere is committed to lay practice and inspired by bringing the Dharma to nontraditional places. She is a strong advocate for practitioners living with high stress, past trauma and difficulties sitting still. Tuere has been teaching since 2010 and has a long history of assisting others in establishing and maintaining a daily practice. Tuere can be contacted at tueresala.org and at https://www.dharmaground.org.

JoAnna Hardy

JoAnna Hardy has been exploring and practicing multiple traditions since 1999. In 2005, her focus landed on Buddhism and Vipassana meditation. Helping communities and individuals that don’t typically have access to traditional dharma settings, social/racial justice, and building multicultural community is top on her list of priorities. She is an empowered teacher in the Spirit Rock, IMS lineage, on faculty at USC and a Mindfulness Trainer for Apple Fitness Plus.

Dan Harris

Dan Harris is an author, podcaster, and entrepreneur. For 21 years, he worked as an anchor and correspondent for ABC News, hosting such shows as Nightline and the Weekend editions of Good Morning America. Dan has reported from all over the planet, covering wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and producing investigative reports in Haiti, Cambodia, and the Amazon. After having a nationally televised panic attack on Good Morning America, Dan discovered meditation and then wrote the best-selling book “10% Happier” as a way to encourage fellow skeptics to give the practice a shot. After that first book, Dan launched the Ten Percent Happier app, wrote a second book, and started a podcast where he interviews celebrities, entrepreneurs, authors, scientists, and meditation teachers about how to do life better.

Devon Hase

Devon Hase began intensive meditation training in 2000. After spending a decade teaching English and social studies in high school and college classrooms, she entered a two-year period of retreat. She has studied at monasteries in Nepal and India, and practices in the Insight and Vajrayana traditions. Currently, Devon teaches at the Insight Meditation Society, Spirit Rock, and throughout North America and Europe. Along with her life partner nico, she co-authored their first book, How Not to Be a Hot Mess: A Survival Guide for Modern Life, which offers six really good pieces of semi-Buddhist advice to keep you anchored and steady amidst the chaos of modern life. Devon loves long retreat and is passionate about creative ways to bring depth practice into the daily spin of things. She now lives together with nico in urban retreat in her hometown of Ashland, Oregon, splitting each week between teaching and practice. For more info visit www.devonandnicohase.com.

Narayan Helen Liebenson

Narayan Helen Liebenson is a guiding teacher at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, MA, where she has been teaching since it opened its doors in 1985. She is also one of the guiding teachers at IMS (the Insight Meditation Society) in Barre, MA. Narayan is the author of a small book entitled Life as Meditation as well as The Magnanimous Heart; Compassion and love, Loss and Grief, Joy and Liberation, published January 2019. Her training includes over 35 years in the Theravada tradition as well as ten years in the Chan tradition with the late Master Sheng-yen. She finds it a joy and a privilege to share the buddha’s teachings with all who are interested.

Tara Mulay

Tara Mulay’s (she/they) teachings stem from the lineage of Mahasi Sayadaw. She has gratefully drawn influence from many other teachers within and outside of the Mahasi lineage, including Howard Cohn, Kamala Masters, Gil Fronsdal, Joseph Goldstein, Sayadaw U Tejaniya, and Ayya Anandabodhi. She was a leader of Mission Dharma in San Francisco, and in 2016 she co-founded the San Francisco People of Color Insight Sangha. She remained a core teacher with the group until the spring of 2019, when she relocated to Western Massachusetts. She has been trained and authorized by Insight Meditation Society to teach. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Insight World Aid. Tara is of South Asian (Indian) descent. She felt initially drawn to dharma practice upon encountering the Buddha’s teachings rejecting social caste as a measure of worth and of capacity for awakening. She believes classical Buddhist practices, designed to cultivate compassion, non-greed, non-hatred, and non-delusion, are uniquely potent vehicles for empowering people in marginalized communities and effecting social change

Ajahn Sucitto

Sucitto was born in London in 1949, and became a bhikkhu in Thailand in 1976. He trained under Venerable Ajahn Sumedho at Cittaviveka and Amaravati Monasteries in the UK before being appointed abbot of Cittaviveka in 1992.

Ajahn Sucitto has taught extensively since 1981. The emphasis of his teaching is on referring to the body, or the energies of embodiment in order to access and release stress and suffering at the somatic level of experience.

Ajahn Sucitto has written several books and many articles, many of which are available via forestsangha. Dharmaseed hosts many of his dhamma talks. Please visit his website for more information on his activities.

Gary Singer

 Gary Singer is a teacher of New York Insight and a graduate of the Community Dharma Leader’s teaching program. He’s been practicing vipassanna meditation since 1992 and integrates mindfulness into his psychotherapy practice. As a founder of NYI’s Family Sangha program, he writes and gives workshops on mindfulness, stress reduction, work/life balance, and intercultural/interracial relationships.

Jeanne Corrigal

Jeanne Corrigal is the guiding teacher for the Saskatoon Insight Meditation Community, and a graduate of the 2017-2021 IMS teacher training program. She deeply appreciates metta and nature based practices. She has been practicing since 1999, and is a graduate of Spirit Rock’s Dedicated Practitioner and Community Dharma Leader Programs. Jeanne is certified with Indigenous Focusing Oriented Trauma Therapy (IFOT), is a certified MBSR teacher, and she has trained with Mindful Schools and Somatic Experiencing. She is Métis, and one of her first teachers in loving presence was Cree Elder Jim Settee.

Yong Oh

Yong Oh began meditating through the Soto Zen tradition and eventually transitioned to study, practice and teach in the Insight tradition. He serves as a teacher on the Dharma Council for the Durango Dharma Center, as well as teaching for the Chattanooga Insight Meditation group, and has taught retreats at Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He is also currently serving on the Guiding Teachers Council for Sacred Mountain Sangha.

Yong is a graduate of Spirit Rock’s two-year Community Dharma Leaders program and the Sacred Mountain Sangha two-year Dharmapala training, taught by his primary teachers Kittisaro and Thanissara. He is also a graduate of the 2017-2021 Insight Meditation Society Retreat Teacher Training program. Yong is an acupuncturist, loves the outdoors and bringing the practice into nature, and has a particular interest in devotional practice as well as supporting communities of color in the Dharma.

Thanissara

Thanissara started Buddhist practice in the Burmese school in 1975. She was inspired to ordain after meeting Ajahn Chah and spent 12 years as a Buddhist nun, where she was a founding member of Chithurst Monastery and Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in the UK. She has facilitated meditation retreats internationally the last 30 years, has an MA in Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapy Practice from Middlesex University & the Karuna Institute in the UK, and is a core teacher at IMS. With Kittisaro, she co-founded Dharmagiri Insight Meditation Centre and helped initiate and support a number of HIV/Aids response projects in South Africa. She has written several books, including two poetry books. Her latest book is Time To Stand Up, An Engaged Buddhist Manifesto for Our Earth.

Daisy Hernández

Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of an Insect, a Family and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease. She is also the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. The former editor of ColorLines magazine, she has reported for National Geographic, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Slate, and she has written for NPR’s All Things Considered and CodeSwitch.

Betty Burkes

Betty Burkes has been an educator/activist for five decades. She has been a Montessori teacher for children, a peace educator with the United Nations, and educational consultant with Rethinkers in New Orleans. Her activism has been expressed internationally and nationally with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and as a columnist at the Cape Cod Times. She began her meditation practice over 40 years ago with Phiroz Mehta at the Buddhist Society in London, and with Krishnamurti during his residences near London. Since 2001 those seeds of mindfulness and loving kindness have been nourished at CIMC. Betty has served on the CIMC Board since 2012.