WOMEN DHARMA LEADERS

Lama Willa Blythe Baker

Lama Willa is the Founding Teacher and Spiritual Co-Director of Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston, MA, and its retreat center Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, NH. She was authorized as a dharma teacher and lineage holder in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism and holds a doctorate from Harvard University. She is a contemplative faculty member for many organizations, a member of the first Council on the Uncertain Human Future and sits on the advisory board for One Earth Sangha. She writes, teaches, guides meditation retreats, and supports cultivating a deep meditation practice in daily life; her teaching interests include the wisdom of the body, eco-dharma, non-dual awareness, and compassion. Her most recent book is The Wakeful Body (2021).

Kristin Barker

Kristin is co-founder and director of One Earth Sangha, whose mission is to cultivate radical response to ecological crises grounded in Buddhist wisdom and practice. She is a graduate of Spirit Rock’s Community Dharma Leader program and now teaches with the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (DC). As a co-founder of White Awake, Kristin has been supporting white people since 2011 with a Dharma approach to uprooting racism in ourselves and in our world. With a background in software engineering as well as environmental management, she has worked at several international environmental organizations. She is a GreenFaith Fellow and serves on the advisory board of Project Inside Out.

Sarah Buie, convener

Sarah is a designer / educator who encourages collective awakening to / presence with our oneness with the Earth and the flow of life. She is Founding Convener of the Council on the Uncertain Human Future, an international network, and the campus-wide curriculum initiative A new Earth conversation at Clark University. Sarah is Professor Emerita and Research Scholar at Clark, where she served as Director of the Higgins School of Humanities and its Difficult Dialogues initiative. She was an award-winning museum exhibition designer for twenty-five years, and has taught and written on sacred space, with spatial archetypes as a guide to holistic understanding of our interdependent relationship with the living planet. A Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for forty years, she co-founded the EcoDharma stream of teachings and practice at NDF / CUHF with Willa Baker, Liz Monson and Barbara Waldorf.

Damchö Diane Finnegan

Damchö Diane is spiritual director and a founder of Comunidad Dharmadatta, one of the largest Buddhist practice communities serving Latin America. Dharmadatta Community understands the path to liberation to be a primarily collective rather than individual path. In her teachings, Damchö transmits an earth-based vision of the Dharma in which care for our more-than-human kin is integral to spiritual practice. She has a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in gender and ethics in Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist narratives, and is translator and co-editor of Interconnected: Embracing Life in our Global Society.

Anne Carolyn Klein

Anne Carolyn Klein / Lama Rigzin Drolma, is Professor and Former Chair of Religious Studies, Rice University, where she developed a contemplative studies concentration for graduate students in the Department of Religious Studies. She is also a Founding Director and Resident Lama of Dawn Mountain Tibetan Temple and Dawn Mountain Community Center & Research Institute. In connection with this work she was named a Dorje Lopon by her teacher Ad.Zom Rinpoche in 2009. She brings 40 years of study and practice in Heart Essence Dzogchen traditions to her teaching at Dawn Mountain and to the Dzogchen Cycles program, where committed students receive full transmission of Heart Essence practices. Her translation work encompasses Geluk, Bon and Nyingma texts and oral commentary on them. Her eight books include, most recently, Being Human and a Buddha Too: Longchenpa’s Sevenfold Mind Training, translated into Spanish as Sera un Humano y También un Buda.

Michelle Levey

Michelle and her husband Dr. Joel Levey are founders of Wisdom at Work and The International Center for Corporate Culture and Organizational Health at InnerWork Technologies, Inc., a Seattle-based firm dedicated to developing and renewing organizational cultures and communities. The Leveys have worked around the globe inspiring people to deepen the wisdom, wonder, compassion, resilience, and creativity they bring to life, work, and relationships amidst the myriad changes, challenges, and opportunities of turbulent and rapidly shifting times. The Leveys’ pioneering work spans many disciplines and decades; they were among the first to introduce principles and practices of mindfulness and mind-fitness training, interpersonal neurobiology, collective wisdom, deep systems thinking, inner-development-goals, and contemplative science into mainstream business, medicine, higher-education, sports, and government arenas beginning in the 1970s.

Lama Elizabeth Monson

Lama Liz is the Spiritual Co-Director of Natural Dharma Fellowship and the Managing Teacher at Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, NH. She was authorized as a dharma teacher and lineage holder in the Kagyu Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism after over 30 years of studying, practicing, and teaching in the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages. She holds a doctorate from Harvard University and was a Visiting Lecturer in the Study of Religion in 2015-16. She writes, guides meditation retreats, and develops curricula for people interested in reconnecting with the natural world and in responding to contemporary social and spiritual issues as a path for liberation. She is exploring combining Buddhist meditation and indigenous plant medicines and psychedelics as portals for accessing and resting in the natural state. Liz is the author of two books: More Than a Madman: The Divine Words of Drukpa Kunley (2014), and Tales of a Mad Yogi: The Life and Wild Wisdom of Drukpa Kunley (2021).

Susan Morgan, CNS

Susan is a long-standing meditation practitioner and psychotherapist in Cambridge, MA. She consults with therapists who are interested in deepening therapeutic presence. Susan has practiced in Theravada, Zen, and most recently, the Tibetan schools of Buddhism. She is a board and faculty member of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy and contributing author to Mindfulness and Psychotherapy. Susan has co-led mindfulness retreats with her husband Bill for the past 15 years. Lovingkindness and mindfulness of the body are integral to her mindfulness teaching. She recently completed a four-year meditation retreat.

Roshi Susan Murphy

Roshi Susan, founding teacher of Zen Open Circle, is an Australian Zen teacher whose deep feeling of kinship with the natural world began during her barefoot early childhood years living near the Great Barrier Reef and the Gondwanaland rainforest. Susan is a successful filmmaker, radio producer, and writer, with a Masters degree from Northwestern University and a PhD from Sydney University. In 2001 she received dharma transmission from both Ross Bolleter in the Diamond Sangha (Robert Aitken) lineage, and from John Tarrant in the Pacific Zen lineage. She leads regular retreats around Australia and teaches an Australia-wide sangha that extends internationally online. She is the author of Upside-Down Zen; Minding the Earth, Mending the World; Red Thread Zen; and her most recent book, A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen koans for facing the climate crisis, was published by Shambhala in November 2023.

Deborah Eden Tull

Deborah, founder of Mindful Living Revolution, teaches the integration of compassionate awareness into every aspect of our lives, bridging personal and collective awakening in an age of global change. She is an engaged Buddhist teacher, spiritual activist, author, eco-dharma educator, and facilitator of The Work That Reconnects, created by Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy to transform our love and pain for our world into compassionate action. Eden teaches dharma intertwined with post-patriarchal thought and practices, resting upon a lived knowledge of our unity with the more than human world. She trained for seven and a half years as a Buddhist monk at the Zen Monastery Peace Center, and has been teaching for over 20 years. Eden has written 3 books: The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide for the Sustainable Food Revolution, Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Ourselves, Each Other, and the Planet, and Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown (2022).