Guidance and Team

Adam Lobel, PhD, practices at the intersections of ecodharma, meditation, and psycho-social political transformation. He is a scholar-practitioner of philosophy and religion, a Guiding Teacher for One Earth Sangha, an environmental justice activist working to resist the petrochemical buildout in his region, and a professor of Ecopsychology. Adam served as a teacher (acharya) in the Shambhala tradition from 2005 until resigning in 2018. A speaker on ecology and spirituality at the United Nations, he leads ecodharma workshops called “Silent Transformations,” has taught in the Ecosattva Training, and is a Greenfaith fellow. Adam’s teachings focus on Great Perfection Tibetan Buddhism, modern phenomenology, and inoperative studies (Heidegger, Foucault, Agamben). He has a longstanding interest in progressive contemplative education and transformative pedagogy. Adam teaches a critical style of contemplative training that seeks to avoid enclosure in neoliberal mindfulness while still disclosing effortless awareness. He is currently developing what he calls “four fields” of contemplative practices for potential worlds. For more on his teachings see his website: Releasement.

A long term student of the Diamond Approach, Catherine has been teaching Insight Meditation internationally since 1997. She is a member of the Gaia House teacher council, and since 2014 has been collaborating with Rob Burbea in shaping and teaching Soulmaking Dharma. Her teaching emphasizes embodiment and working with whatever hinders us from living our deepest knowing in the world.

James Baraz has been teaching meditation for over thirty years He is a co-founder teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California where he regularly teaches, and he leads retreats and workshops around the United States and abroad. He created the Awakening Joy course, which has had over 9,000 participants on-site and online, since 2003. He is on the International Advisory Board of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. He lives with his wife, Jane, in Berkeley, California. He is the co-author with Shoshana Alexander of Awakening Joy: 10 Steps that Will Put You on the Road to Real Happiness. He can be reached at

Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong interest in spirituality, ecology and social justice. Her work continues the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thích Nhất Hạnh, and includes the interweaving of nature, ecology, embodied mindfulness practice, art and play. She has extensive experience offering nature and earth-based retreats with environmental and climate activists, children and families, and mindful hiking retreats. 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 Thích Nhất Hạnh’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 Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation (Feb 2024).

Lama Willa Miller is the Founder and Spiritual Director of Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston, MA and its retreat center Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, NH. She is Visiting Lecturer in Buddhist Ministry at Harvard Divinity School. As a writer and editor, her work has been published in Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Buddhadharma, and the Tibet Journal. Willa’s teaching interests include compassion, non-dual embodiment and contemplative care. Lama Willa is a guiding teacher of One Earth Sangha.

Mark is an inner and outer explorer, who has devotedly studied mindfulness meditation practices for three decades. He is passionate about sharing the power of meditation and has taught mindfulness workshops and meditation retreats in six continents for the past twenty years. Mark is a senior meditation teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and has taught there since 2000. Through his organization Awake in the Wild, he shares his passion for integrating meditation and nature.

nischal neupane is a lifelong learner and is broadly and deeply interested in how private and public, and local and global moralities shape individual and communal level engagements with the world. nisch is passionate about integrating compassion, kindness and justice into conversations around climate and is currently deconstructing his understanding of and engagement with environmentalism and Buddhism. He has a Masters’ in the Human dimensions of Environmental Conservation and currently manages the Contemplative Changemaking Grants for the Mind & Life Institute.