Kaira Jewel Lingo

Kaira Jewel Lingo teaches Buddhist meditation, mindfulness, and compassion internationally, with a focus on activists, people of color, artists, educators, families, and youth. She began practicing mindfulness in 1997. An ordained nun of 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing, she is now a lay Dharma teacher based in Washington, D.C., leading retreats in the U.S. and internationally, and offering mindfulness programs for educators and youth in schools, as well as individual spiritual mentoring. She edited Thich Nhat Hanh’s, Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children and helped to start and develop Wake Up Schools, cultivating mindfulness in education. She explores the interweaving of art, play, ecology and spiritual practice and is a certified yoga teacher and InterPlay leader. She teaches each year at Schumacher College, an ecological college in the United Kingdom. In addition to her roots in the Zen tradition, she also practices and teaches in the Insight tradition, and is an affiliate teacher for the Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC. She contributed a chapter to the forthcoming book, Real World Mindfulness for Beginners, from Callisto Press.