Mushim Ikeda

Mushim Patricia Ikeda is a core teacher at the social justice-centered East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California. She teaches both Buddhist and secular mindfulness meditation, primarily for historically excluded communities in the US, including Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and multiracial persons, and people with disabilities and chronic illness. Author of "The Great Vow Not to Burn Out for Mindful Activists," which went viral after it was published in Lion's Roar some years ago, she is also one of the first published Asian American poets, and holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa's Graduate Writing Workshop. Her training in Zen Buddhism in the United States, Canada, and in South Korea as a monastic living a completely renunciant life in the 1980s and subsequent struggle with years of poverty while raising a child led to 11 years of volunteering as a literacy tutor in the Oakland Unified School District and her commitment to the opening of the East Bay Meditation Center in 2007. She is the recipient of a Global Diversity Leadership Award as well as an honorary doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Starr King School for the Ministry. Mushim has published essays and poetry in Tricycle, Lion’s Roar, and many Buddhist and arts anthologies, and has been on many podcasts, including Dan Harris’s Ten Percent Happier.