Teachers and Dharma Leaders

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  Dawn Neal Guiding Teacher
  

  Dawn Neal

  Guiding Teacher

  Dawn Neal, Guiding Teacher of Insight Santa Cruz, has devoted several years to silent retreat. Before teaching full time, she was a professional interfaith spiritual care counselor (chaplain) at Stanford Medicine. Her practice includes ordaining in Burma, where she was authorized to teach Buddhist practice through the lens of Mettā.

  Dawn has been teaching meditation since 2010. She serves as a teacher at Insight Meditation Center, and as core faculty for the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies Online Buddhist Chaplaincy Training. She offers both residential and online retreats.

  Dawn holds an MA in Buddhist studies. She completed Dharma teacher training with Gil Fronsdal and Andrea Fella in 2025.

  For more about her, see http://www.liberatingdharma.org.

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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