Michele Benzamin-Miki is a meditation teacher, artist, and martial arts teacher with three fifth-dan black belts in Aikido and Iaido. She has led meditation retreats and workshops for 20 years. She trained with vipassana meditation teachers from Asia and North America as well as with Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh whose student she was for thirteen years. She is cofounder of Ordinary Dharma and Manzanita Village Retreat Center in California.

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 pilgrimage in India commemorating Gandhi & King.
Website: Paths to Change

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  Shambala 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.

Konda Mason is a yoga teacher, a close student of Jack Kornfield, and a teacher at the annual People of Color Retreat hosted by Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. She is a board member of Kripalu Center, and a film maker.

Susan Moon was is a writer, poet, author of The Life and Times of Tofu Roshi, and the editor of Turning Wheel, the quarterly journal of The Buddhist Peace Fellowship. She has received an NEA grant for fiction writing and has been teaching writing workshops for many years. She is a Dharma student at the San Francisco Zen Center, and was a student of Suzuki Roshi.

Caitríona Reed is a meditation teacher, group facilitator, hypnotherapist, life-coach, and poet who has led retreats and workshops in Buddhism, deep ecology, and social responsibility around the world. She has trained with Buddhist teachers since 1971, including Thich Nhat Hanh, in whose lineage she taught for 10 years. She is cofounder of Ordinary Dharma and Manzanita Village Retreat Center.

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. His most recent book The Engaged Spiritual Life was published bu Beacon Press in 2006.

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.

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 Theravada Buddhist monk under meditation master Ajaan 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

Born to and raised by immigrant parents from Shanghai, Larry has explored the identity issues of culture, race, and the experience of difference for most of his life. He maintains a strong commitment to himself to be guided by his dreams, regardless of the cultural complexities that are challenged. He has been a National Park Ranger in the desert southwest and northern California, a trained forest fire fighter, and an award-winning graphic designer with posters in the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York.