Kaira Jewel Lingo

Kaira Jewel Lingo is a mindfulness meditation teacher, author and mentor who guides people to transform and heal through embodied presence, stillness and play. She teaches Buddhist meditation, secular mindfulness and compassion internationally, in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition, at the intersection of racial, climate and social justice. Her teaching has a particular focus on activists, Black, Indigenous and People of Color, artists, educators, families and youth.

She was born into an interracial family within a residential Christian community in Chicago, devoted to voluntary simplicity and service to the poor and marginalized, where spiritual practice was at the heart of shared life. From the age of eight she spent four years in Nairobi, Kenya, while her father worked on the community's human development projects. She loved dance as a child, studied capoeira as an exchange student in Brazil, and earned a B.A. and M.A. in Anthropology and Social Sciences at Stanford University, focusing on the African Diaspora and liberatory education for African American students.

Her search for a teacher and a community led her to Plum Village in France in 1997, where she met Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. She was ordained as a Buddhist nun in 1999 and spent fifteen years in his monastic community. She received Lamp Transmission and became a Zen teacher in 2007. In those years she developed and led mindfulness programs for teens, children and families, helped establish Wake Up Schools, and worked with Thich Nhat Hanh to edit his talks into books. She helped organize the community's first BIPOC retreat with him in 2004, and has supported BIPOC retreats and sanghas ever since. After a long discernment she left monastic life in her early forties, and she is now based in New York.

She is the author of We Were Made for These Times, and co-author, with Valerie Brown and Marisela Gomez, of Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy, and Liberation. She also edited Thich Nhat Hanh's Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children. She teaches on the faculty of the Buddhist Eco Chaplaincy Program, co-leads the Spiritual Radicals speaker series, and offers spiritual mentoring to small groups.