Teachers and Dharma Leaders

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  Tenzin Chogkyi Teacher
  

  Tenzin Chogkyi

  Teacher

  Tenzin Chogkyi  (she/her/hers) is a teacher of workshops and programs that bridge the worlds of Buddhist thought, contemplative practice, mental and emotional cultivation, and the latest research in the field of positive psychology. Tenzin first became interested in meditation in the early 1970s and then started practicing Tibetan Buddhism in early 1991 during a year she spent studying in India and Nepal. She completed several long meditation retreats over a six-year period and took monastic ordination with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, practicing as a monastic for nearly 20 years. Since 2006 she has been teaching in Buddhist centers around the world and taught in prisons for 15 years.

  She is also a certified teacher of Compassion Cultivation Training and the Cultivating Emotional Balance program. Tenzin is especially interested in bringing the wisdom of Buddhism into modern culture and into alignment with modern cultural values such as racial and gender justice and environmental awareness. She feels strongly that a genuine and meaningful spiritual path includes not only personal transformation, but social and cultural transformation as well. She loves interfaith collaboration and is a volunteer for the Interfaith Speakers Bureau of the Islamic Networks Group in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. She is featured on a monthly radio show called “Reflections on Buddhism on KSQD 90.7 in the Santa Cruz area. She also finds time to create her Unlocking True Happiness podcast which you can check out at unlockingtruehappiness.org where you will also find her current teaching schedule. She is currently based on traditional Awaswas Ohlone land, in what is now known as Santa Cruz, CA.

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  Kaira Jewel Lingo Visiting Teacher
  

  Kaira Jewel Lingo

  Visiting Teacher

  Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong interest in spirituality and social justice. Her work continues the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, and she draws inspiration from her parents’ lives of service and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King, Jr.
  After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel now teaches internationally in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition, as well as in secular mindfulness, at the intersection of racial, climate and social justice with a focus on activists, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, artists, educators, families, and youth.
  Based in New York, she offers spiritual mentoring to groups and is author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons in Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption and co-author of the forthcoming, Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation (Feb 2024) from Parallax Press

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  Marisela Gomez Visiting Teacher
  

  Marisela Gomez

  Visiting Teacher

  Marisela Gomez, MD, True Manifestation of Reverence, is co-founder of Village of Love and Resistance in Baltimore Maryland, organizing for power, healing and the reclamation of land. She is a meditation and Buddhist teacher, physician scientist, and holistic health practitioner. She lives in the lands previously stewarded by the Piscataway, Lumbi and other tribes, colonized as Baltimore Maryland in the USA.

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  Valerie Brown Visiting Teacher
  

  Valerie Brown

  Visiting Teacher

  Valerie Brown, True Sangha Power (pronouns she/her), is a Dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition, ordained in 2018, and a member of Religious Society of Friends. She transformed her twenty-year, high-pressure career as a lawyer-lobbyist into human-scale, social-equity-centered work, guiding leaders and organizations to foster greater understanding, authenticity, compassion, and trust.