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.
Rebecca Bradshaw has practiced vipassana and metta meditation since 1983 in both the United States and Burma. She has been teaching since 1993 and is one at the guiding teachers at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. "My passion is encouraging students to drop into embodied presence, and grounding this presence in wisdom and lovingkindness. When a sense of love and kindness underlies our practice, we can explore life deeply in a truly integrated way, bringing together mind, heart, and body. Wisdom then holds it all in spaciousness. I especially enjoy connecting with young people in the Dharma, teaching students on longer retreats, supporting sangha on a community level, and sharing the dharma in Spanish." For more information about Rebecca and/or to make a donation to support her teaching, please visit her website at www.rebeccabradshaw.org.
Once called “the most intriguing African-American Buddhist” by Library Journal, Rev. angel Kyodo williams Sensei has been bridging the worlds of spirit and justice since her critically-acclaimed book, Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living With Fearlessness and Grace. Ordained as a Zen priest, she returned to her activist roots and began applying wisdom teaching to social issues to become a leading voice in the ever-emerging field of Transformative Social Change. Recently becoming only the second black woman to be recognized as a Zen teacher, she is known for her unflinching willingness to both sit with and speak uncomfortable truths. angel notes, “Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.” Whether in writing, teaching or speaking, her voice is unique.
