From Belfast, Northern Ireland, Paul Haller left home in 1971, lived in London for a year, then traveled throughout Europe, the middle east, Russia, and Afghanistan. He ended up in Japan, where he lived for a year and was introduced to Zen. Then he traveled throughout southeast Asia. He was ordained a Buddhist monk in Thailand, where he spent six months sitting in a remote cave.
Moving to Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in 1974, Paul was ordained as a priest by Zentatsu Richard Baker in 1980, who gave him the name Ryushin Zendo, "Dragon Heart, Zen Way." In 1993 he received Dharma Transmission from Sojun Mel Weitsman.
Founder and formerly Director of Outreach at SFZC, Paul is interested in finding ways of expressing our practice in society, both as compassionate service and making it available to as many people as possible. He became abbot of Zen Center in 2003.
Pawan Bareja, PhD has practiced Vipassana meditation since 2001. She is a Buddhist Ritual Minister and a Community Dharma Leader at Spirit Rock. She has taught classes and daylongs on healing trauma using mindfulness at Spirit Rock, San Francisco Insight, EBMC, and Esalen. In her private practice as Trauma Resolution Practitioner, Pawan works with a diverse population of clients and teaches mindfulness meditation. For the past 14 years, Pawan has been a senior assistant at Somatic Experiencing trauma healing trainings and has traveled to India to teach this work to professional care providers.
Phillip Moffitt is co-guiding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center and the founder of the Life Balance Institute. He teaches vipassana (insight) meditation and is the author of two books: "Dancing with Life," which explores the Four Noble Truths, and "Emotional Chaos to Clarity." More information can be found at: www.dharmawisdom.org.
Rabbi Jeff Roth is the founder and director of The Awakened Heart Project. He was the co-founder of Elat Chayyim where he served as Executive Director and Spiritual Director for 13 years. He is the Author of Jewish Meditation Practices for Everyday Life, Jewish Lights 2009. He is an experienced meditation teacher and the facilitator of over 90 Jewish meditation retreats.
Rachel Lewis began practicing insight meditation in 2003, while completing her physics PhD at Yale. Since 2011, she has taught dharma and meditation classes and retreats in British Columbia and beyond. She completed the IMS/IRC 4-year teacher training in 2021, and is a guiding teacher of the British Columbia Insight Meditation Society. Her dharma teaching interests include the power of music, humour, and creativity to increase our capacity for learning, as well as the way that practice supports and is supported by social justice work.
Raja Selvam, PhD, is a senior trainer in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing (SE) professional trauma training programs and the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP), an advanced approach for integrating body, energy, and consciousness into any psychological process, a master training for experienced clinicians.
Dr. Selvam’s eclectic approach draws from bodywork systems of Postural Integration, Biodynamic Cranio-Sacral Therapy, and Polarity Therapy, body-psychotherapy systems of Reichian Therapy, Bioenergetics, and Bodynamic Analysis, Jungian and Archetypal psychologies, psychoanalytic schools of Object Relations and Inter-Subjectivity, Somatic Experiencing (SE), Affective Neuroscience, Quantum Physics, and Advaita Vedanta, a spiritual tradition from India.
Dr. Selvam teaches in the United States, England, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Israel, India, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, China, Brazil, and South Africa.
