Mary Taylor began studying yoga in 1971 while earning a degree in psychology. It was not until the early 1980s, when she moved to Boulder, Colorado and started studying yoga with Richard Freeman, that yoga became a central thread in her life. Before that, yoga had provided a means of relieving stress, and honing a sense of focus and well-being. In 1988, she traveled to India to study with K. Pattabhi Jois, and began to see the overlay of yoga with her interests in food, cooking, movement, anatomy, and art.

Taylor has authored three cookbooks, along with What Are You Hungry For? Women, Food and Spirituality, a book that explores yoga, meditation, and finding one’s personal dharma as a means of finding lasting meaning and happiness. As the Yoga Workshop’s director, she has attended all of Richard Freeman’s teacher trainings. She brings to her teaching a deep respect for the healing and calming effects of yoga. Her classes are engaging and fun, focusing on the flow of breath, steady movement, and the feeling of completeness that can be cultivated through a lasting practice.

Zindel Segal, PhD is Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Mood Disorders at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He pioneered the use of mindfulness meditation for promoting wellness in the area of mood disorders. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Douglas Utting Research Prize and the Mood Disorder Association of Ontario’s Hope Award and has been continuously funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for the past 15 years. Segal’s program of research has helped to characterize psychological markers of relapse vulnerability in affective disorder, especially the link between affective and self-devaluation components of dysphoria. This work has, in turn, provided an empirical rationale for offering training in mindfulness meditation to recurrently depressed patients in recovery.

An author of ten books and more than 200 scientific publications, including The Mindful Way Through Depression—a patient guide for achieving mood balance in everyday life—he continues to advocate for the relevance of mindfulness-based clinical care in psychiatry and mental health. His recent book, Better in Every Sense, describes the surprising role of sensation in mental health.

Darnell Lamont Walker, Ph.D., is an award-winning writer and filmmaker, currently traveling and living around the globe collecting stories to share. He is a native of Charlottesville, Virginia, and a graduate of Bethune-Cookman University and Howard University, where he completed his degree in Communication and Culture. He’s found the intersection where his education and art meet. His first film, “Seeking Asylum,” explores safe spaces around the world for black Americans seeking to escape American injustice. Next, Darnell created “Outside The House,” exploring mental health in the black community. It is his goal to continue to develop and empower people and communities around the world.

Dr. Parks’ research focuses on self-help methods for increasing well-being via books and digital technology. She is Chief Scientist for tech startup Happify, which brings the cutting edge in research-based well-being interventions to large businesses and consumers. Her research spans across the whole spectrum of wellness, from non-distressed consumers to stressed employees, sufferers of chronic health conditions, and individuals with depression and/or anxiety. She works to pioneer new methodology in the study of internet interventions, especially when it comes to outcomes assessment. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, and in addition to editing three books, she is also an Associate Editor at the Journal of Positive Psychology.

Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India and Burma. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. After Asian Studies at Dartmouth College he joined the Peace Corps and worked on tropical medicine teams in the Mekong River valley. He studied with Buddhist masters Ven. Ajahn Chah, and Ven. Mahasi Sayadaw. Jack co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, with colleagues Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein and then Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California. Jack has taught in leading universities, convened International Buddhist Teacher meetings, and trained hundreds of teachers. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is a father, husband, grandfather and activist.

His books have been translated into 22 languages and sold more than a million copies. They include, The Wise Heart; A Path with Heart; After the Ecstasy, the Laundry; Teachings of the Buddha; Seeking the Heart of Wisdom; Living Dharma; A Still Forest Pool; The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness and Peace; Bringing Home the Dharma; and No Time Like the Present.

Jack is featured in the Mind & Life podcast episode Wisdom for our times.

Nielsen leads the National Institute on Aging (NIA)’s Individual Behavioral Processes Branch, which supports behavioral, psychological and integrative biobehavioral research on the mechanistic pathways linking social and behavioral factors to health in mid-life and older age. She examines aging processes across the full life course, including early life influences on later life outcomes, as well as research on behavioral and social processes in midlife that play a causal role in shaping trajectories of aging. Her own portfolio supports transdisciplinary research in affective science, health psychology, and life-span developmental psychology. She coordinates NIA research initiatives on midlife reversibility of risk associated with early life adversity, conscientiousness and healthy aging, socioemotional influences on decision-making, and stress measurement. She serves on the Implementation Team for the trans-NIH Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) Common Fund Program, which promotes a mechanisms-focused experimental medicine approach to behavior change intervention design.

Lis Nielsen, in her personal capacity, served on the Mind & Life Steering Council from Summer 2018 to Fall 2020.

Elizaveta Solomonova is an interdisciplinary scientist of the mind, working at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and the arts. Her main research interest is the neurophenomenology of conscious experiences across sleep, wake and contemplative states. She is currently finishing an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Montreal, and starting a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University’s Neurophilosophy Lab. She has been working at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine and at the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University. She previously worked on a variety of projects in neuroscience of sleep and in media arts, including meditation, sense of presence, sleep paralysis, sensory incorporation in sleep, memory consolidation, nightmares, emotion regulation, collective experiences, and experimental philosophy. In addition, she is a research scientist at the YHouse, a New York-based nascent interdisciplinary institute, dedicated to the study of awareness from biological, phenomenological and contemplative perspectives.

Brooke D. Lavelle, PhD, is the Co-Founder and President of the Courage of Care Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to facilitating the co-creation of a more just, compassionate world. Together with her diverse, interdisciplinary, and multi-generational team at Courage, Brooke provides training and consultation in relational compassion practices, anti-oppressive pedagogies, restorative healing methods, and systems tools to social service and caring professionals, as well as to educational, spiritual, and human rights organizations.

Holding a PhD in Buddhist Studies from Emory University and an MA in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism from Columbia University, Brooke’s academic work focuses on the diversity of contemplative models for cultivating compassion as well as the ways in which spiritual practice and social activism inform one another. 

Brooke is a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany, where she co-developed a climate justice program for ecological sustainability researchers. She has served as a lecturer at San Francisco State University and as an education consultant to the Mind & Life Institute, the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia, Teachers College at Columbia University, The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, and the Greater Good Science Center at University of California, Berkeley.

In 2016, Brooke received a Mind & Life Think Tank grant to study various conceptualizations of compassion, which she is now applying in her work to include a more consistent justice and equity framework in research and training in the field. She recently completed a book manuscript on courage and spiritual activism and is co-writing a book on compassion and equity in education with an education collaborative she founded in Oakland.

Brooke splits her time between Berlin, Brooklyn, and the Bay Area, and travels regularly to lead Courage workshops and retreats in the US and abroad. Brooke will be leading the contemplative faculty at the 2020 Summer Research Institute, where she will bring her expertise and skills to bear on the theme of “Cultivating Prosociality Across the Lifespan”.

Catherine Shaddix, PhD began her training in Buddhist meditation and hatha yoga in 1991. She is greatly fortunate to have studied under Tsoknyi Rinpoche for the past 12 years, as well as to have received teachings from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Venerable Trulshik Rinpoche, and Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. In addition, she was a student of Sazaki Roshi in the Rinzai Zen tradition for eight years, living for two of those years at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center. Her primary yoga teachers are Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor at the Yoga Workshop, with whom she has studied traditional Ashtanga yoga for 17 years. She has also trained extensively in
Mysore, South India, with the late Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. Her teaching style is greatly influenced by her early studies of Iyengar yoga as well as by her Buddhis meditation practice. In 2013 Catherine was invited to design and is currently co-facilitating a mindfulness meditation and Ashtanga yoga program emphasizing emotion regulation for the Baywell Psychiatry Group, a consortium of UCSF psychiatrists. She is also a co-facilitator for the TARA study, which is investigating the integration of Ashtanga yoga and body-centered awareness training in a novel intervention for teen depression at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.

Andreas Roepstorff, Ph.D. is Professor, Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience and Department of Social Anthropology, Aarhus University / Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark.

As an anthropologist in neuroscience, Andreas tries to maintain a dual perspective. He studies the workings of the brain, particularly at the levels of consciousness, cognition and communication. He is equally interested in how brain imaging, as a field of knowledge production, relates to other scientific and public fields.

He is project manager of Technologies of the Mind:

People have a unique capability to change actions, behavior and their ways of organizing. The technologies that surround us influence our perception of the world, but at the same time our ways of organizing ourselves is part of a technology that influences the world we are living in. How are we going to understand the interaction between technology, practice, and cognition? This project is focusing on how human thought activity exploits technology and culture and how it is influenced in return. Usually the brain is seen as a biological and “natural” part of the body, that can be separated from “artificial” inventions like culture and technology. As opposed to this, this project tries to understand technology as a way of using the brain and body, incorporated into practices that people develop naturally to reach different objectives. This project includes resources from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and cognitive sciences to investigate e.g. rituals, reading and writing, masquerades, and physical objects. 

Andreas edited Imagining Nature: Practices of Cosmology and Identity and coedited Trusting the Subject? (Volumes 1 and 2). Read the full list of his publications. 

Andreas earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Biology at the University of Aarhus in 1995. He earned his BA and MA in Social Anthropology at the University of Aarhus in 1996. He earned his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the University of Aarhus in 2002.

Andreas was featured on the Mind & Life Podcast episode: Interacting Minds.