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.
Johnathan Woodside is an Insight Meditation teacher offering Dharma instruction rooted in the Theravada tradition of ethics, concentration, and wisdom. Johnathan has been teaching since 2011 and is the guiding teacher of Mindfulness Outreach Initiative in Omaha, Nebraska, and Dallas Insight Sangha in Dallas, Texas.
I have two main aims in teaching. The first is to spread the dharma as widely as possible, offering it to as many different people as I can. The second is to teach a smaller number of people over sustained periods of time. This in-depth teaching engages my tremendous love for intensive, long-term meditation practice, where people can immerse themselves in the retreat experience and see how it transforms their understanding.
Although deeply rooted in the Vipassana tradition of Theravada Buddhism, I enjoy working with various skillful means from different Buddhist schools to help convey the essence of all practice, the one dharma of liberation. This essential dharma includes the wisdom of non-clinging, the motivation of compassion to practice for the benefit of all beings, and the potential for liberation within us all.
Given the speed and complexity of our culture, the Buddha's teachings offer a much-needed means to slow down, a way to create some inner calm. We need to touch base with this place of tranquillity in order to allow our bodies and minds to unwind. We then have the chance to see more deeply and profoundly the nature of our lives, how we create suffering and how we can be free. The dharma begins with the development of calm and it carries us all the way to liberation.
joshua bee alafia’s meditation practice began in 1989 when his mother gave him a mantra to work with. This sparked a rich journey into different styles from the Hawaiian Shamanic, Hindu, Sufi, Dzogchen, Taoist, and Vipassana traditions. Wanting to bring Vipassana practice to the youth, he began teaching mindfulness practice to incarcerated, court involved and system vulnerable youth through New York’s Lineage Project in 2010. He is a graduate of the Community Dharma Leaders training through Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He currently teaches mindfulness meditation with South Side Insight in Chicago and Taoist Meditation with Immortal Arts Chicago. He is the founder of Liberation Center Worldwide, building meditation/wellness centers internationally and the founder and co-executive director of South Side Liberation Center in Chicago.
Jozen Tamori Gibson (they, them) began formal meditation practice in 2004 through Sotō Zen while living in Japan joined by a Theravada practice in 2010. Jozen is a participant in the 2017-2021 Insight Meditation Society (IMS) Dharma Teacher Training program and serves on the New York Insight Meditation Center’s teacher council. With certifications and embodiment studies in Yoga, Qigong, Indigenous Focusing Oriented Therapy (IFOT) and Complex Trauma, Jozen lives to provide and nourish contemplative mind-heart-body alignment practices and spaces rooted in wellness, anti-oppression and interdependent liberation for all beings. Jozen honors the wisdom and compassion of all teachers, highlighting their mother, Akimi, and dharma root teacher, Pamela Weiss.
Kabir Hypolite is an African American gay man, father, poet and visual artist. Kabir began practicing Vipassana meditation in San Francisco in 1990, during the AIDS crisis. During the 2000s, Kabir practiced sitting meditation at the Syda Foundation in Emeryville, and he attended East Bay Church of Religious Science services lead by Rev. Elouise Oliver in Oakland, California. Kabir has practiced sitting and walking meditation with the East Bay Meditation Center’s POC and Alphabet sanghas and was a participant in the Spirit Rock/IMS Commit to Dharma 6 cohort before it was suspended due to COVID-19. He is currently a participant in EBMC’s Spiritual Teacher and Leadership Training cohort.
Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher and lived as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing, and is now based in New York. She provides individual spiritual mentoring and leads retreats internationally, offering mindfulness programs for educators, parents and youth in schools, in addition to activists, people of color, artists and families. She mentors with the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, was lead teacher for Mindful Schools’ year long training for educators, teaches teens and adults with Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, and is a guiding teacher for One Earth Sangha. She edited Thich Nhat Hanh’s Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children and has been published in numerous other books and magazines. She explores the interweaving of art, play, ecology and embodied mindfulness practice and is an InterPlay leader. Read her recent article, In Times of Crisis Call Upon the Strength of Peace, published in Lion’s Roar magazine.
It has long been important for me to offer the purity of the teachings of the Buddha in a way that connects with our common sense and compassion as human beings, which allows for the natural blossoming of wisdom.
Katchie Ananda, E-RYT 500
Katchie Ananda is an international Yoga and Dharma teacher who has well over 10,000 hours of teaching experience spanning 25 years as a full-time teacher.
She is certified in Anusara, Jivamukti, Integral and Ashtanga yoga by Richard Freeman.
A committed student of Vipassana Meditation, she has practiced with Jack Kornfield, her Buddhist teacher, for over 15 years. She offers retreats and workshops world-wide, often with her co-conspirator, senior Dharma teacher Wes “Scoop” Nisker.
She was the co-founder/director of Yoga Sangha, a beloved community center in San Francisco dedicated to Yoga and Dharma.
She works with authors and activists, such as Milena Moser, John Robbins and Julia Buttefly Hill and is dedicated to raising awareness about human and animal rights, the environment and social justice. Her leadership in yoga and social change prompted Yoga Journal to name her one of five top yoga teachers making change in the world and she volunteered for many years at San Quentin, teaching Yoga and Dharma to long-term inmates.
She has brought her humor and stories to conferences, festivals and workshops all over the world and is loved by her students for her authenticity and wisdom.
She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband Joshua and dog Leelou.
Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between the two my life flows. Sri Nisargadatta
Hi! I’m a meditation teacher, facilitator and writer based in Philadelphia. I teach classes and retreats on mindfulness, creativity, and social change in museums, universities, and meditation retreat centers all around. A lifelong dancer turned systems change nerd, I've also trained hundreds of business and nonprofit leaders to use embodied awareness practices that support resilience, spark innovation, shift culture and inform organizational transformation. I just finished a book called Radical Friendship: Seven Ways to Love Yourself and Find Your People in an Unjust World (August 2020 - Shambhala Publications).
Kate Munding is co-guiding teacher of IMCB. She has been practicing since 2002 and has done numerous 1-2 month intensive practice periods. Kate is currently in Spirit Rock's Teacher Training program. Kate has also trained approximately 2,000 educators, therapists, and parents in mindful awareness techniques and philosophy in the U.S. and abroad.
She is founder of The Heart-Mind Education Project, a consulting business focused on mindfulness in education.
Katy Wiss began meditating in 1976. In 2002, she shifted to a focus on Vipassana meditation. She graduated in 2012 from Spirit Rock's Community Dharma Leaders Program. She has also completed Spirit Rock's Dedicated Practitioners Program and other advanced study and practice courses at New York Insight Meditation Center with Gina Sharpe, and Chuang Yen Monastery with Bhikkhu Bodhi. She regularly teaches insight meditation at Katonah Yoga in Bedford Hills, NY and Western Connecticut State University where she teaches relational communication. Her aspiration is for relational communication to begin to repair trauma. Her classes focus on listening, emotion, and family dynamics. Her practice focuses in part on ways to bring together the spiritual study of insight and kindness, and the academic study of relational communication. She is also interested in meditation, pain, and chronic illness.
Kevin Griffin is the author of the seminal 2004 book "One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps" and the recent "A Burning Desire: Dharma God and the Path of Recovery". He has been practicing Buddhist meditation for three decades and been in recovery since 1985. He’s been a meditation teacher for almost fifteen years. His teacher training was at Spirit Rock Meditation Center where he currently leads Dharma and Recovery classes.
Kim Allen has been practicing Insight meditation since 2003, and has trained intensively in the U.S. and Asia with cumulative years of silent retreat. She has practiced with primary teacher Gil Fronsdal and other Western teachers, Theravādan monastics, and a few Mahāyāna teachers, and now offers retreats, sutta study, and experiential Dharma engagement. A teacher and author, Kim aims to bring classical Dharma to a modern context and to encourage lay practitioners in fully living a life of Dharma. Her education includes a PhD in physics and a master’s degree in environmental sustainability, and her website is https://www.uncontrived.org.
