Spirit Rock Teacher Training Update
Empowering Future Dharma Teachers
Spirit Rock is thrilled to announce that our 2017-2020 cohort of Teacher Trainees, who are majority people of color, graduated their four-year Spirit Rock Teacher Training program in September 2020.
We offer our deepest gratitude to all of you who offered support and input to Spirit Rock throughout the process. Larry Yang, Gina Sharpe and Lila Kate Wheeler were an extraordinary teaching team for this unprecedented program.
The new teachers include: Alisa Dennis, Amana Bremby Johnson, Cara Lai Fitz Gibbon, Carol Cano, Dawn Mauricio, Gulwinder Singh, James Lowe, JD Doyle, Jeff Haozous, Kaira Lingo, Kate Johnson, Katy Wiss, Konda Mason, Leslie Booker, Louije Kim, Noliwe Alexander, Pawan Bareja, Rachel Lewis, Solwazi Johnson, Teresa Abdala-Romano, and Victoria Cary.
This training profoundly enhances our service to the Dharma nationally and marks an important turning point for our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts in empowering this next generation of teachers who reflect the wisdom and diversity in our dharma communities. We are deeply grateful to the core faculty — Gina Sharpe, Larry Yang, and Lila Kate Wheeler — for their commitment to creating this beautiful offering to the Dharma. This training marks the eighth Teacher Training program in Spirit Rock’s history, with the first started in 1984 by founding teacher Jack Kornfield.
The following statement from Gina, Lila Kate and Larry expresses why this teacher training is so important now, more than ever:
"We, as the core faculty of the Spirit Rock Teacher Training, deeply appreciate, honor, and respect the support that Spirit Rock and many communities have given to cultivate a new generation of retreat teachers and to sustain more diverse spiritual leadership for our world. With this support, we have been able to complete the admissions process, specify details of program components, design the curriculum, initiate a container of generative learning, and work on multiple scheduling and logistics for the next four years. It is exciting and inspiring. Especially in these times, we feel that diversity in the preparation of future Dharma teachers for leadership is even more relevant and indispensable to our collective awakening from suffering and delusion.”
If you'd like to make a gift in support of the Teacher Training program, please click here.
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