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.
Kara has been practicing meditation and studying Buddhism since 1993. She has been leading Vipassana meditation since 1996. Kara practices the fifth precept of full renunciation from intoxicants and has over twenty years sober. In 2013 she assisted in starting Buddhist recovery groups “Refuge Recovery” in Santa Cruz and has been a foundational member and mentor for the community. Kara attends multiple silent Vipassana retreats each year. She has attended Gil Fronsdal’s online Sutta Study course and has also been trained to facilitate Mindfulness and Buddhist meditation through the Against the Stream Meditation Society. Kara has been active as the Program Coordinator for Insight Santa Cruz for four years and has been a member of the Board for the last three years. She teaches weekly meditation groups at Insight Santa Cruz, such as “Fierce Hearts” on Sunday; where new and experienced practitioners meditate, discuss the dharma, and practice transforming greed, hatred, and delusion by way of the heart. Kara currently lives in downtown Santa Cruz and recently went back to school to study towards a master’s degree in Social Work.
To directly contact Kara, email karahaney108@gmail.com
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.
Margarita Loinaz, M.D. has been a Buddhist practitioner since 1977 in the Tibetan and Theravada traditions with an emphasis on Dzogchen practice for the past 10 years. She is a graduate of the first Community Dharma Leader's program at SRMC where she contributed to the initial stages of the diversity program and taught at the first POC retreat. She also trained in MBSR at the UMass Stress Reduction Clinic and is a student of the Diamond Approach. She is originally from Dominican Republic.
