Online: Living An Ethic of Love – Celebrating Black Dharma Teachings
with Leslie Booker, Pamela Ayo Yetunde, Devin Berry, Kaira Jewel Lingo, Lama Rod Owens, Myokei Caine Barrett, Rhonda V. Magee, Bhante Buddharakkhitta, Dalila Bothwell, Rashid Hughes, Marisela Gomez, Vimalasara Mason-Joy, Valerie Brown, Gina La Roche, Jan Willis, Allyson Pimentel, Shanté Paradigm Smalls, Lopön Karla Jackson-Brewer, Lissa Edmond, Amana Brembry Johnson, Peace Twesigye, and Rima Vesely-Flad
Weekdays, February 2nd – 27th, 2026
Registration is still open — join now and receive immediate access
Folks of African descent carry a rich legacy of contemplation—an enduring wisdom that, even in the face of colonization and enslavement, has taught us how to pause, rest, and reconnect with what is most true.
This February, New York Insight invites you to explore that legacy through a month-long series of Black dharma teachings, offered as a daily practice of reflection, resilience, and connection.
Each weekday throughout February, participants will receive an email with a prerecorded dharma talk from a Black dharma teacher. These teachings are designed to meet you where you are, offering insight and grounding in daily life. All talks remain accessible for at least one year, allowing you to engage at your own pace.
Our ancestors dreamed of freedom, prepared for it, fought for it, and manifested it against all odds. Through resilience, joy, and deep reflection, they embodied profound truths of interdependence and belonging—wisdom we inherit not as history alone, but as a living practice that reminds us none of us stands alone.
From these traditions, the world learns how to hold paradox with care: grief and joy, struggle and beauty, existing side by side. Black dharma teachings show us how reflection becomes resilience, how community sustains practice, and how love functions not as sentiment, but as an ethic for living.
These teachings are offered by experienced Black dharma teachers whose work is rooted in lived experience, ancestral wisdom, and a deep commitment to the path. Together, they offer perspectives that speak directly to resilience, belonging, and collective care.
With twice the number of talks as last year’s offering, this expanded series offers a steady rhythm of teaching and reflection throughout Black History Month.
This offering is open to people of all backgrounds and levels of experience. Whether you’re reconnecting with your practice or exploring these teachings for the first time, you are warmly welcome.
Testimonials from last year’s participants:
“This series has been a balm for my soul—deeply healing and nourishing.”
“It was a beautiful experience to connect with all the ways in which the teachers offered their own ‘love’ insights. I have copious notes from every session.”
“It was affirming and healing having the Dharma reflected back to me through the lived experience of Black Dharma teachers.”
“What made it even more profound was learning these sacred teachings from teachers who looked like me. Seeing myself reflected in their wisdom created a sense of belonging that made the practices feel more accessible and authentic.”
Join us to experience a celebration of resilience, joy, and the power of community.
Registration:
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Teacher(s)
Lama Rod Owens
Lama Rod Owens is a Black Buddhist Southern Queen. An international influencer with a Master of Divinity degree in Buddhist Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Author of The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors and Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger, and co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation, his teachings center on freedom, self-expression, and radical self-care.
A leading voice in a new generation of Buddhist teachers, Lama Rod activates the intersections of his identity to create a platform that’s very natural, engaging, and inclusive. Applauded for his mastery in balancing weighty topics with a sense of lightness, the Queen has been featured by various national and international news outlets.
Highly sought after for talks, retreats, and workshops, his mission is showing you how to heal and free yourself. Wanna keep tabs on what Lama Rod is doing next? Be sure to sign up for his email list here. Stay tuned to his website here for upcoming offerings and click here for bookings and other requests.
Leslie Booker
Booker is a heart – centered, spirit – driven activist and meditation teacher committed to creating a culture of belonging through her teaching and writing. She completed Spirit Rock’s 4 year Retreat Teacher Training in 2020, and shared the practices of yoga and mindfulness with New York City’s most vulnerable populations for over a decade. Booker has co – authored and contributed to several publications including the trauma – informed anthology Practicing Liberation and its accompanying workbook, for folks working towards social justice. She is a co-founder of the Yoga Service Council at Omega Institute and the Meditation Working Group of Occupy Wall Street. In 2020 she was invited to be a Sojourner Truth Leadership Fellow through Auburn Seminary and was voted by her peers as one of the 12 Powerful Women in the Mindfulness Movement.
Booker moved to Philadelphia in August of 2020 to vote in a swing state, and currently serves as the Guiding Teacher of New York Insight.
W | LeslieBooker.com
IG | TheRealBookerProject
FB | LeslieBooker
Pamela Ayo Yetunde
Pamela Ayo Yetunde, J.D., Th.D. is a Community Dharma Leader, a pastoral counselor, and founder of Marabella StoryCraft (www.pamelaayoyetunde). She is the founder of Buddhist Justice Reporter (www.buddhistjustice.com). Ayo is the author of Casting Indra’s Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community, co-editor of Nautilus Book Award-winning Black and Buddhist: What Buddhist Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom and author of the Frederick J. Streng Book Award-winning Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, U.S. Law, and Womanist Theology for Transgender Spiritual Care. Ayo is also an associate editor for Lion’s Roar Foundation. She is working on a film project called Birdsong, a modern rendering of the Kisa Gotami/Mustard Seed story.
Devin Berry
Devin Berry began practicing in 1999. His teaching is rooted in the Buddhadharma and mindfulness daily life practices. His training includes Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher training, the East Bay Meditation Center Commit to Dharma Program, Spirit Rock’s Dedicated Practitioners Program, and Insight Meditation Society’s four-year Residential Retreat Teachers Program. Devin also cofounded both the Teen Sangha and Men of Color Deep Refuge Group at East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland. Twenty years ago, Devin began some of the first mindfulness programs in San Francisco Bay Area schools, including weekly mindfulness groups for youth, and worked as a frontline advocate for marginalized youth living on the streets. Over the years, Devin’s work has included leading wilderness camps for teens, rites-of-passage programs for tweens, and a summer camp for boys. Devin co-created Deep Time Liberation, an ancestral healing journey that explores the impact of ancestral legacy and intergenerational trauma on Black Americans. He is passionate about the power of witnessing and storytelling as a liberation tool. Devin is a father and teaches nationally.
Kaira Jewel Lingo
Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher whose path is rooted in spirituality, social justice, and embodied wisdom. A lifelong lover of dance, singing, and the performing arts, Kaira Jewel integrates movement and creative expression into her teaching as a way to access joy, healing, and deep presence. Her early background in improvisational movement, dance, and capoeira, along with her long-standing practice of InterPlay—which she began in 2005 and now teaches and trains leaders in—shapes her commitment to liberation through the body as well as the mind.
She lived for 15 years as an ordained nun in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village community and was ordained as a Dharma teacher in 2007. Her teaching continues the work of Engaged Buddhism, drawing inspiration from her parents’ lives of service and her father’s work alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. She now teaches internationally in both the Zen and Vipassana traditions, as well as in secular mindfulness settings.
Kaira Jewel’s work bridges the inner path of awakening with the outer path of justice, focusing especially on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities, activists, artists, educators, families, and youth. She is dedicated to holding spaces that welcome the whole self — breath, voice, story, grief, joy, and movement.
She is the 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. She offers spiritual mentoring, teaches embodied dharma, and is co-creating a spiritual sanctuary in upstate New York — The Beloved Community of Engaged Spirituality — with her partner, Episcopal priest Adam Bucko.
Upcoming events and offerings can be found at www.kairajewel.com.
Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad
Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad is the author of Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation (NYU Press, 2022) and Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice (Fortress Press, 2017). She is currently at work on a new manuscript, The Fire Within: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. She is the Founding Director of the Initiative for Black Buddhist Studies and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. She leads retreats and classes for dharma centers throughout the U.S.
Myokei Caine-Barrett
Myokei Caine-Barrett is the Guiding Teacher and Chief Priest of Myoken-ji Temple in Houston, TX. She is also the current Bishop of the Nichiren Shu Order of North America, supports Healing Warrior Hearts programs for military veterans, and is a board member of Lion’s Roar Magazine.
Rhonda V. Magee
Professor Rhonda V. Magee is a teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction interventions for lawyers, law students, and for minimizing social-identity-based bias. She is a nationally recognized thought and practice leader in the emerging fields of contemplative legal education and law practice and contemplative teaching in higher education.
She presently serves as a member of the board of advisors to the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine’s Center for Mindfulness and the Steering Committee of the Mind and Life Institute, and is a founder of the effort to transform the criminal justice system through mindfulness and compassion practices (Transforming Justice).
Bhante Buddharakkhita
Ven. Bhante Buddharakkita, Founder & Abbot, was born and raised in Uganda, Africa. He first encountered Buddhism in 1990 while living in India, and he began practicing meditation in 1993. He was ordained as a Buddhist monk by the late Venerable U Silananda in 2002 at the Tathagata Meditation Center in San Jose, California. He then spent eight years under the guidance of Bhante Gunaratana at the Bhavana Society, West Virginia. Bhante is the founder of the Uganda Buddhist Center in Uganda. Besides spending time at the Buddhist Center in Uganda, he is the spiritual director of Flowering Lotus Meditation Center in Magnolia, Mississippi. He is also on the council of spiritual advisers to the Global Buddhist Relief, New Jersey. Bhante has been teaching meditation in Africa, Australia, Europe, Asia, and the U.S. since 2005. His book “Planting Dhamma Seeds: The Emergence of Buddhism in Africa” tells the story of his religious and spiritual work in Africa.
Dalila Bothwell
Dalila Bothwell’s (she/her) Dharma-meditation practice lives at the intersection of love for community, land, wholeness, and 12-step recovery. The granddaughter of Claudia and Gussie Pearl, she finds refuge and hope in the liberation teachings of revolutionary lovers – from the Buddha to bell hooks. During her nearly decade-long tenure as a director for New York Insight Meditation Center, she learned the priceless value of sangha and the role relationships play in embodying the teachings and in creating kinder human beings.
Dalila is a graduate of the Spirit Rock Community Dharma Leaders Program, formally educated in nutritional science and food studies and has served with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Insight Meditation Society, and Dharma communities throughout the US. She loves dancing furiously in her kitchen and taking long walks in the desert with her handsome pup, Brisco. Dalila believes freedom is a holistic art. Learn more about Dalila at www.dalilabothwell.com.
Rashid Hughes
Rashid Hughes (he/him) is a writer, meditation teacher, yoga instructor and a restorative justice facilitator. He is the co-founder of the Heart Refuge Mindfulness Community, a Mindfulness Community in Washington, DC that is dedicated to inspiring Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to live with love and courage. Rashid is an Affiliate Teacher for the Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC and he is also a teacher of the Presence Collective. He holds a Master of Divinity Degree from the Howard University School of Divinity and has two recently published articles in Mindful Magazine “R.E.S.T. – A Guided Practice for the Tired & Weary” and Lions Roar Magazine “When Aggression Masquerades as Compassion.”
Marisela B. Gomez
Marisela B. Gomez (she/they) is a dharma teacher in the Thich Nhat Hanh Order of Interbeing, and a dharma practitioner for more than 20 years. Her practice focuses on mindfulness in everyday life. This includes her work as a public health scholar, activist, physician, and solidarity economy organizer. Of Afro-Latina ancestry, they live in Baltimore. She co-authored the book Healing our Way Home and authored Race, Class, Power and Organizing in East Baltimore as well as numerous book chapters, and articles in popular and scholarly publications. She has blogged on the intersection of spirituality and justice at Huff Post and on the intersection of community rebuilding, wisdom justice and health at mariselabgomez.com. They’ve also delivered a TedTalk on healing racism through “waking up.”
Vimalasara Mason-Joy
Photo: Juan Luis Rod
Vimalasara Mason-Joy is the award-winning author of 8 books, including the Great Black North, Contemporary African Canadian Poetry, and Eight Step Recovery Using The Buddha’s Teachings to Overcome Addiction.
She has co-founded 8 Step recovery meetings that take place in 3 continents and has been named leading African Descent voices in Mindfulness Approaches for Addiction. Her new collection of poetry, ‘I’m Still Your Negro: An Homage to James Baldwin” will be published in 2020. She is currently working on a Mindfulness book accessible to African Diaspora Sensibility, Addiction an Invitation – Unknow Yourself through Mindfulness. Vimalasara is a senior teacher in the Triratna Buddhist Community tradition and dedicates her life to the suffering of all beings, “The more emancipation I have – the more I must share with the world.” She resides in Canada.
www.valeriemason-john.com
Valerie Brown
Valerie Brown is a Buddhist-Quaker Dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition, author, facilitator, and executive coach. She focuses on leadership development and mindfulness practices, emphasizing diversity, social equity, and inclusion. Formerly a lawyer and lobbyist with a twenty-year high-pressure career, Valerie now supports leaders and nonprofits in building trustworthy, authentic, compassionate, and connected work environments.
Gina LaRoche
Gina LaRoche is a trainee in the four-year IMS and Spirit Rock teacher training program. She started her meditation practice in 2000 and was introduced to Insight Meditation while attending her first residential retreat in 2010. Deeply transformed by the Dharma, Gina integrates its teachings into her daily life and work. She is a 2017 graduate of the Spirit Rock Community Dharma Leader Program, a founding teacher of Elm Community Insight in New Haven, CT, a former IMS Board member, and co-holds the monthly POC sit at CIMC (MA). Gina is married with two adult children and co-authored, The 7 Laws of Enough: Cultivating a Life of Sustainable Abundance.
Amana Brembry Johnson
Amana Brembry Johnson, Core Teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center (EBMC) in Oakland, California, and Coordinating teacher for residential retreats at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Her work integrates spirituality, social justice, body awareness, and intuitive creativity, offering a holistic approach to individual and community transformation.
Allyson Pimentel, EdD
Dr. Allyson Pimentel is the Director of Mindful USC, a psychologist, and longtime practitioner and teacher in the Insight meditation tradition. She holds degrees from Brown and Harvard Universities, writes for Lion’s Roar magazine, teaches on the UCLA Mindful app, and shares mindfulness as a path of healing, wisdom, and collective liberation.
Dr. Shanté Paradigm Smalls
Dr. Shanté Paradigm Smalls (They/Them) is a teacher and student in Vajrayana/Tantric Buddhism. They currently study under Lama Rod Owens and Lama Justin von Bujdoss, co-founders of Bhumisparsha. Shanté began studying and practicing Buddhism at age 17 and has practiced in Zen, Sokka Gakkai International, Shambhala, and Bhumisparsa communities. They began on the teaching path in 2009 and were authorized by the Shambhala lineage to teach meditation and buddhadharma in 2015. Shanté is focused on the healing impact of meditation in Black, Indigenous communities, and People of Color communities, LGBTQ+ communities, and incarcerated and recovery communities. Shanté is a Teacher on the Liberate App and is a Lead Teacher on Weekly Dharma Gathering, which they co-founded and curate. Shanté identifies as a Black person descended from enslaved and trafficked African Indigenous people. Shanté is queer and genderqueer. They live on Canarsie Munsee Lenapehoking Territory (Brooklyn, NY).
Jan Willis
Jan Willis (BA and MA in Philosophy from Cornell University; PhD in Indic and Buddhist Studies from Columbia University) is Professor of Religion Emerita at Wesleyan University. She has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland, and the U.S. for five decades, and has taught courses in Buddhism for over 45 years. She is the author of “The Diamond Light: An Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Meditation” (1972), “On Knowing Reality: The Tattvartha Chapter of Asanga’s Bodhisattvabhumi” (1979), “Enlightened Beings: Life Stories from the Ganden Oral Tradition” (1995); and the editor of “Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet” (1989). In April of 2020, her book “Dharma Matters: Women, Race, and Tantra—Collected Essays by Jan Willis” was released.
Tuere Sala
Tuere Sala is a Guiding Teacher at Spirit Rock Retreat Center and Seattle Insight. She is a retired prosecuting attorney who has practiced Vipassana meditation for over 30 years. Tuere is committed to lay practice and inspired by bringing the Dharma to nontraditional places. She is a strong advocate for practitioners living with high stress, past trauma and difficulties sitting still. Tuere has been teaching since 2010 and has a long history of assisting others in establishing and maintaining a daily practice.
Tuere’s Dhamma talks can be found on dharmaseed.org. You can contact Tuere at tueresala.org.
Lissa Edmond, DNP
Lissa Edmond began a dedicated Dharma practice in 2008 and studies vipassanā and the brahmavihāras as their primary path with influences from Zen. Lissa is a participant in the Spirit Rock/IMS teacher training. Alongside sharing the Dharma, Lissa is a nurse practitioner, somatic facilitator, and death and grief doula. Lissa identifies practice as a deep form of love and care and offers compassionate, embodied, and trauma-responsive practices for the wellness and liberation of all beings.
Lopön Karla Jackson-Brewer, MS
Lopön Karla Jackson-Brewer is a student of Lama Tsultrim Allione and a senior teacher of Vajrayana Buddhism at Tara Mandala Buddhist Retreat Center. As an experienced Chöd practitioner, she has taught Chöd and other tantric practices for over 15 years. She is an initiated priest in the West African spiritual system of Ifa.
Peace Twesigye
Peace Twesigye is the former Director of Programming for Buddhist Studies and the Thích Nhất Hạnh Program for Engaged Buddhism at Union Theological Seminary. Peace has taught meditation and Buddhadharma in the northeastern U.S. and in France. A recognized Insight Dialogue teacher, Peace brings together meditative awareness, Buddhist wisdom, and our relational nature as a path to awakening. Peace is currently in the retreat teacher training program offered by Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Meditation Center which will conclude in 2028. Additionally, Peace serves on the board of Lion’s Roar Foundation and previously served on the board of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. Peace Twesigye has two master’s degrees; the first in violin performance, and the second in education, with a specialization in students with disabilities, and is committed to the path of being a lifelong student.