Lawrence Ellis. Lawrence Ellis is a social change agent who uses activism, conscious business, and engaged spirituality as vehicles for individual and collective transformation. His current work is in (a) creating communities of love and caring that (b) use spiritual, political and other transformational practices, to (c) support movements for justice, peace, sustainability, etc. Lawrence received his Masters from Oxford University, while on a Rhodes Scholarship, studying the application of Gandhian Non-Violence to individual and large-scale change. Gandhi's grandson invited him to be a delegate to an international yatra (pilgrimage) in India commemorating Gandhi & King. Jack Kornfield is serving as Lawrence's mentor in deepening his practice as a Buddhist Teacher .
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Reflections on Peacemaking
Website: Paths to Change

Sifu Koré Grate is head instructor at Feminist Eclectic Martial Arts (F.E.M.A.) in Minneapolis since 1988. She began her involvement in the martial arts at age 16. She received her first black belt from Dr. Alex Feng of Wu Tao Kuan  in Berkeley, California, in 1991. She started training with him in 1981. She has also studies with Coleen Cragen of Hand to Hand Kajunkenbo in Oakland, California, and Sensei Annie Elman of the Center for Non-Violence and Education (BWMA), in Brooklyn, New York. She was on the original board of the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists (PAWMA) and has chaired the National Women's Martial Arts Federation (NWMAF) Steering Committee. She is also involved with the Association of Women Marital Arts Instructors (AWMAI). She teaches regularly at the annual training camps of all three organizations.

Chad Hamrin has been a yoga practitioner since the early 1970s, studying Iyengar, Viniyoga, Ashtanga and Kundalini yoga styles as well as the Martial Arts. He has taught Yoga for 28 years and also holds a black belt in Karate. He is a skilled body worker with extensive experience in Polarity Therapy, Reiki, Jin-Shin Do and Deep Tissue Massage. His teaching brings together aspects of all these elements; resulting in a style which emphases investigative awareness of the body, flow, mindfulness and breath--leading students naturally into a deep insightful practice.

Andrea Matros is the owner and director of Living Yoga Center in Temecula, California. She has been teaching and practicing yoga since 1978 and has trained with teachers in several traditions. She is also a licensed massage therapist and a reiki and healing touch practitioner.
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http://www.living-yoga.com

Mushim Ikeda-Nash is a community peace activist, writer, diversity facilitator, and mother of a teenage son. She has done both monastic and lay Zen practice over the past twenty years, in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and S. Korea. A consulting editor to Turning Wheel: The Journal of Socially Engaged Buddhism, she also contributes a quarterly column on family life and Buddhist practice, and her poetry and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies such as the  Shambhala Sun and Innovative Buddhist Women: Swimming Against the Stream. Mushim was coeditor of Making the Invisible Visible: Healing Racism in Our Buddhist Communities, and she currently serves as chair of the San Francisco Zen Center Board Committee on Diversity and Multiculturalism. She has been included in two documentaries, Between the Lines: Asian American Women Poets and Women of Faith, a film-in-progress presenting portraits of four women spiritual activists. Mushim lives in Oakland, California with her family, and volunteers as a literacy tutor in the Oakland public high school her son attends.

Scott Kelman, now resident in Portland, Oregon, is a recipient of the Los Angeles Weekly's Special Career Achievement Award and L.A. Theater's most prestigious honor, The Margaret Hartford Award - "for unwavering commitment to innovative theater for L.A; that is unashamedly experimental and unapologetically political." His workshops have inspired countless artists, performers, as well as many others from all walks of life, who have sought to access an bring more creativity to into their work and life. His unique exercises and technique of body, mindfulness and the creative process are an exquisite compliment to formal mindfulness training. The Kelman Group (a group in the U.K. working with Scott's approach to Performance and Theater)

Peter Levitt comes to us from the Gulf Islands in British Columbia.  In addition to Fingerpainting on the Moon: Writing and Creativity as a Path to Freedom , his eight books of poetry include Bright Root, Dark Root and One Hundred Butterflies .  Translator from Chinese, Japanese and Spanish, recipient of the prestigious Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, and longtime student of Zen, he is the editor of Thich Nhat Hanh's The Heart of Understanding and Jakusho Kwong's No Beginning, No End: The Intimate Heart of Zen. He has taught workshops in writing, creativity and spirituality in the US and abroad for more than thirty years.

Diana Lion is the Associate Director of Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and the founding director of BPF's national Prison Project. She started sitting in 1974 with Joseph Goldstein, and has been actively involved in social justice issues since 1968. She has been involved in peace, women's, farm workers', labour, anti-racism, economic justice, and other types of organizing, as well as working to transform the prison industrial complex. She is passionate about skillfully blending the practices of dharma and nonviolent activism.

She is a certified trainer in Nonviolent Communication, and is enjoying combining NVC and dharma. She is currently co-teaching in the Buddhist Chaplaincy Training Program offered through the Sati Center of Northern California.

Susan Moon is a writer, author of The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi , and editor of Turning Wheel , the quarterly journal of The Buddhist Peace Fellowship. She is co-editor, with Lenore Friedman, of the book Being Bodies: Buddhist women on the Paradox of Embodiment , and she is the editor of the recently published Not Turning Away, The Practice of Engaged Buddhism .. She has published many essays and short stories and received an NEA grant for fiction writing. Her writing workshops, which she has been teaching for many years, are known for helping people connect to the riches within themselves. She has been a Zen student since 1976 in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi, and now practices with the Everyday Zen sangha and Norman Fischer. In recent years she has taken up the practice of photography. Website Susan Moon

Donald Rothberg has practiced Insight Meditation since 1976 and has been mentored as a teacher by John Travis, Sylvia Boorstein, and Gil Fronsdal. He writes and teaches classes and retreats on meditation and socially engaged Buddhism at Spirit Rock, elsewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, and nationally, and directs a two-year interfaith program in “Socially Engaged Spirituality” for Saybrook Graduate School. He is currently writing a book on connecting individual and social transformation.

Hozan Alan Senauke is a Soto Zen priest and teacher in the tradition of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He was ordained by Sojun Mel Weitsman in 1989. Alan is presently serving as tanto or head of practice at Berkeley Zen Center in California, where he lives with his wife, Laurie, and their two children, Silvie and Alexander. From early 1991 through the end of 2001, Alan was Executive Director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. He is presently Senior Advisor at BPF. Alan is one of the founders of Think Sangha, a group of Buddhist-activist intellectuals and writers. He continues to work as a social activist around national and international issues of peace, human rights, structural violence, and the development of a Socially Engaged Buddhism. In another realm, Alan has been a student and performer of American traditional music for nearly forty years.

On Race and Buddhism by Alan Senauke

Masakazu Tazaki Sensei has studied the martial arts for more than 40 years. He has been a student of Nishio Sensei for over 39 years in both Aikido and Iaido. He has taught Aikido and Iaido in the United States and Mexico for the past 20 years. He is the only direct student of Nishio Sensei teaching outside of Japan today. Tazaki Sensei is affiliated with Aikikai Foundation International, in Tokyo, Japan and also with Aikido Seishinkai USA
Web site for Masakazu Tazaki Sensei http://www.aikido-iaido.com  International Sosho Shinrenbukai Federation

Claude Anshin Thomas went to Vietnam at the age of eighteen, where he received numerous awards and decorations, including twenty-seven Air Medals, a Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Purple Heart. Today he is a monk in the Soto Zen tradition and an active speaker and Zen teacher in the United States and Europe. He is also the founder of the Zaltho Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes peace and nonviolence www.zaltho.org. His book At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace is published by Shambhala P

Elise Turen Phd. has 20 years experience as a counselor and educator in the field of Human Sexuality and Chemical Dependency. She came to this work early in her life while observing and questioning the strict binary codes of gender and their limiting effects on people's hearts, souls and psyches. She has worked with individuals, couples, and families coping with Chemical Abuse, Eating Disorders, Gender Identity, and Sexual Abuse. Her experience in the field of Gender Identity has allowed her to explore and integrate alternative methods of healing for her clients with Hypnotherapy, Stress Management, and holistic forms of therapeutic interventions. She has a deep reverence for the process of helping those seeking their authentic selves, along with a sense of humor and the need for light-hearted play in one's life.

Diana Winston is the founder of the BASE program, America's first socially engaged Buddhist training program. She has practiced Insight Meditation since 1989 and recently spent a year as a Buddhist nun in Burma. She teaches meditation to adults and teens in India and America and has served as the associate director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. She is author of Wide Awake, a book on Buddhist practice for teenagers.

Larry Yang leads meditation retreats nationally and has a interest in making the wisdom teachings of the Dharma accessible for LGBTQ communities and Communities of Color. He is trained as a psychotherapist and consults in cultural diversity.  Larry is a Spirit Rock Community Dharma Leader and is in teacher-training with Jack Kornfield. He has recently returned from a six month practice period in Southeast Asia as an ordained Theravadan Buddhist monk under meditation master Ajahn Tong, with travels in Thailand, Nepal and India. Larry is a leader and teacher at the new East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, CA. His website is: www.larryyang.org