Our Team

Teachers Facilitators Associates

Guiding Teachers

Michele Benzamin-Miki and Caitriona Reed

Michele Benzamin-Miki is a meditation and martial-arts teacher, an artist and a performance artist, a hypnotherapist and NLP life-coach.

She has three 5th degree black belts in Aikido and Iaido sword, and has many years’ experience as a teacher of Vipassana and Zen. She has worked extensively with youth in the juvenile justice system and on reservations in southern California.

She works with individuals to eliminate fears and limiting behaviors and beliefs.

She is co-founder of Manzanita Village and Five Changes. Here For More

Caitriona Reed


Caitríona Reed is a teacher, Group Facilitator, and poet. She has led retreats and workshops in Buddhism, Deep Ecology, Social Responsibility and Personal Change in the US and Europe for more than twenty years and she has trained with Buddhist and Sufi teachers in several traditions since 1971—including Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in whose lineage she was given formal transmission as teacher in 1992. She practices as a Clinical Hypnotherapist, NLP certified trainer, and Performance Coach, facilitate systemic change for individuals and groups. She is co-founder of Five Changes and, Manzanita .Click Here for More

Associates and Visiting Teachers

Tabitha FronK


Tabitha Fronk is an artist, Board-Certified Registered Art Therapist and Certified Child Life Specialist.  For the past sixteen years, Tabitha has worked primarily with children and youth facing trauma, grief and loss, and has facilitated numerous collaborative mosaic murals in the United States and Canada.  She currently works on a contractual basis with a variety of mental health organizations including the Psychological Trauma Center, ECHO Malibu and the Wellness Community.  Tabitha also sees private clients and provides clinical supervision at her Culver City office.  For more information, please go to www.heartworkcenter.com



Pascal Gasbarro


Pascal Gasbarro is a Paradox Process Certified Teacher, Master Results Coach, and Workshop Facilitator. The Paradox Process is an amazing modality that empowers you to use your natural intuitive ability to cut through inner obstructions and establish the skills that allow you to truly live on purpose. The work centers on enhancing your ‘emotional intelligence’ as it cultivates an awareness of emotions and emotional energy as well as harnesses that energy to proactively transform it in positive ways. This is amazing, insightful, profoundly effective and intuitive work. For more information More information



Mushim Ikeda-Nash


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 co-editor 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 system.

Peter Levitt


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.

Clare Mann


Clare Mann is committed to ‘living life on purpose’ and encouraging others to take responsibility for their choices. Clare encourages people to expand their possibilities, thereby facilitating individuals and organisations to excel. By truly embracing the richness and diversity that international consultancy offers, she continues to bring people together to form global collaborations.

Clare’s desire to dispel self-limiting myths, are highlighted in her two texts on transforming life and business. Her jointly authored text on Strategic HRD is essential reading for the training of chartered HR professionals in the UK. She continues to lead entrepreneurs, therapists and small businesses towards success and sustainability. Path of Conscious Leadership

Susan Moon


Susan Moon is a writer, author of The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi , was 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 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 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. Susan Moon

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 His book At Hell’s Gate: A Soldier’s Journey from War to Peace is published by Shambhala. www.zaltho.org.

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. Los Angeles Gender Center

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

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