Jeff began practicing insight meditation in 1996 at Spirit Rock. He later moved from San Francisco to Oklahoma and in 2003 started a meditation group there, where he continues to teach. He has taught at meditation groups, daylongs, and residential meditation retreats in California, Massachusetts, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Jeff is a Chiricahua/Warm Springs Apache and a former longtime tribal leader. He is currently developing plans to adapt meditation instruction to provide culturally relevant teachings to the Native American community. Visit the website https://collectedmeditation.com
Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey aims to inspire the skills, determination, and faith necessary to realize the deepest human freedom. He is the resident teacher for Vipassana Hawai’i and when off-island teaches across the US, Canada, and in Burma.
Jessica Morey, MA, is the executive director and lead teacher of Inward Bound Mindfulness Education. She began practicing meditation at age 14 on IMS Teen Retreats. She has undertaken longer-term practice in Asia and the US, and worked in clean energy finance. She is a participant in the 2017-2021 IMS Teacher Training Program.
Jill Satterfield has been a quiet pioneer in the integration of embodied awareness practices and Buddhist teachings for over 30 years.
Her heart, mind and body approach developed from somatic and contemplative psychology, 35 years of Buddhist study, extensive meditation retreat time and decades of living with chronic pain.
At the invitation of her primary teacher, Ajahn Amaro, Jill was the first to offer mindful movement and somatic practices on silent retreats first at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and then the Insight Meditation Society 30 years ago. She has since developed teacher trainings and mentoring programs that integrate embodied awareness with Dharma ever since.
In addition to teaching embodiment and Dharma with Ajahn Amaro, she was also invited to teach on Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s retreats in the US and Nepal. It was at his urging that she teach subtle body practices to his students. She contributed movement practices to his brother Mingyur Rinpoche’s retreats and was a consultant for his 2 best-selling books.
Jill’s Applied Embodied Mindfulness Trainings were part of UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. She was on the faculty for Spirit Rock’s Mindful Yoga and Meditation Training, and she is currently a mentor for Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s Mindfulness Teacher Training. She was the scholar and teacher in residence at Kripalu Center in 2003 and is a graduate of the Sati Center’s Buddhist Chaplaincy Training.
Her organization School for Compassionate Action was a training and service organization that taught mindfulness and somatic practices for chronic pain, illness and post 9/11 trauma in NYC hospitals and at-risk facilities for over ten years. She has been featured in and has written for numerous publications such as Tricycle, Lion’s Roar and the NY Times.
JoAnna Hardy has practiced in multiple traditions since 1999, and in 2005 her practice landed on the Theravada insight tradition. Retreat teaching, bringing the Dharma to communities and individuals who don't typically have access to traditional settings, and building multicultural community are her focus. She is a co-founder of the Meditation Coalition: meditationcoalition.org
Joanna Macy, PhD is a scholar of Buddhism, systems theory and deep ecology. A respected voice in the movements for peace, justice and ecology, she gives trainings worldwide for eco-warriors and activists for global justice. As the root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, she has created a ground-breaking theoretical framework for personal and social change. Her books include "World as Lover, World as Self" and "Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World."
John Martin teaches Vipassana (Insight) and Metta (Loving Kindness) meditation retreats. He leads an on-going weekly Monday evening meditation group in San Francisco, and an Advanced Practitioners Program group. He serves as Co-Chair of the Guiding Teachers Committee for Spirit Rock, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors. John is also the co-guiding teacher for the LGBTQueer Sangha at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City.
John is currently leading a year long Satipitthana Intensive Practice program and will be on the teaching team for the two year Spirit Rock Dedicated Practitioners Program that will begin in the Spring of 2022.
In his prior work life, John served as Airport Director of SFO for over twenty years. He had a career committed to public service.
His practice has been supported by twelve years as a hospice volunteer: including five years at Shanti Project during the AIDS crisis, and seven years with the Zen Hospice projects.
After thirty-five years of experience around the dharma, with eight of these years in Asia, I am still deeply inspired, as a teacher, by students' progress with the practice. I see the questioning I do with myself reflected in others. The infinite loop of my practice and my teaching becomes a self-fulling prophecy. As I see others letting go of old baggage, it inspires me to continue questioning myself.
My teachings, for I am not a scholar, come from my experience on the pillow. In the first ten years of the practice, I worked on the pain of life, the confusion, how to gain clarity. In the next ten, I was finding balance in non-attachment; being in life, but not wanting to enter life. In the last ten, I've been learning how to engage with the stickiness of living and loving. I ask, how kind are people to each other? How can we find a place inside that is not afraid anymore?
We need to know what drives us and our minds, how to relieve the cultural anxiety all around us. We need to stop and slow down, to start feeling. But the dharma not just a stress reduction course; the teachings point directly toward the nature of human conditioning and our freedom.
Overall, my teachings are very much about self-acceptance, giving ourselves space to do the practice and find our own voice. My intention is to give people permission to listen to themselves, to become friends with themselves. Ultimately, this moment is enough, we're enough, and don't need to be anything other than we are.
