We live in a busy hectic world.   We are fortunate to have an opportunity to learn about silent meditation that can help bring peace and focus.

Grace has a wonderful interesting life.   Here is her story:

“I became interested in Zen meditation 50 years ago in the midst of the 60’s at the San Francisco Zen Center. My husband and I were married at the Zen Center by the late Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1968. After our two sons were grown, I received ordination as a Zen priest in 1998, and later was fully empowered as a Zen teacher in (2005) and a Zen Abbess at my retreat center, Empty Nest Zendo, in 2009. I have trained in Japanese and Korean Zen monasteries as well as in American practice centers. Along the way, I also became licensed as a Clinical Psychologist through completing a doctoral program at the Wright Institute in Berkeley (1989).

From my first meditation to the present moment, I have experienced the powerful stress reducing effects of meditation. I am particularly interested in how we can use the spacious mind, developed in meditation, to benefit our everyday encounters at work and at home.

Through my own interest in the practice of meditation at home with family, and in my profession as a psychologist specializing in women and families, I have become interested in how women develop their own strength and creativity. This led me to research a book on the history of influential women in Zen Buddhism: Zen Women: Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens and Macho Masters (Wisdom, 2009). The book was published in German (2014), and the photograph is one of my teaching events for the book tour July 2015 in Switzerland. My daughter-in-law is on faculty at Stanford’s School of Medicine, and I now share a home on campus with my son, daughter-in-law, my husband and four grandchildren. I am looking forward to getting to know the SUWC community.”