I am 30 year practitioner of Aisan Medicine and the Director of Heartwood Integrative Health and Healing which I founded more than 20 years ago with a group of amazing healers in Evanston Illinois. We are a community based center committed to social justice through our healing work and our study and practice of the Buddhist teachings. I was born into a family of abuse and violence and am a survivor of child prostitution. My saving grace was my Grandmother, Floy Hooper, who was a healer and meditation teacher and had a large following of students. She gave me my healing, meditation and chanting practices and instilled in me my deep faith in these practices as a path out of suffering. She was also an activist, first joining the suffrage movement and fighting for women’s right to vote. With my Grandmother and her sangha, I burned my bra for Women’s Lib, marched for civil rights, fought for Roe v Wade, protested the Vietnam war and helped create safe shelters for abused women and kids. Ours was a path of engaged Buddhism and meditation in action. And this remains my path today.
My Grandmother also did extensive retreat practice and I have followed her example in this and have engaged in years of both solitary and group retreat in cities, forests, in the mountain caves and on the shores of lakes, creeks and oceans. I have prayed and practiced and offered healing in China, India, Nepal and Bhutan, in Europe, Canada and Central America, and in most of the United States. There are so many powerful places on this planet to just fall down in prayer. And with the state of our world, on some days, what else is there to do? I believe in every fiber of my being in the power of prayer, whatever that means to each of us personally, to affect positive change in ourselves and our world. I believe in the Buddha’s teachings as a clear and proven path out of the deep suffering of ourselves, our fellow beings and our planet. It is a path that continues to sustain me.
My deep love is to walk this path given to all of us freely by Buddha Shakyamuni, to continue to come to know the nature of my mind, and through this to be of as much benefit to people, animals, beings in the seen and unseen realms, and our precious Mother Earth I have had the great blessing to study with many teachers, both Buddhist and of other faiths, philosophies and walks of life. And to each of these teachers I am grateful for all the teachings that they have given to me. These days I study and practice with Tsokni Rinpoche and his Dzogchen teachings, Lama Tsultrim Allione and Tara Mandala, with her focus on the teachings of women, Lama Willa Blythe Baker and One Earth Sangha with its focus on eco dharma. I also have experienced sexual abuse and other abuses of power from 2 of my gurus, one male and one female, and in response have co-created the Heartwood program for survivors of guru and teacher abuse to reach out and offer care to others who have been victimized.
These days you can find me either on the beach here on the shore of Lake Michigan in the early morning doing my prayers and practices, or in our beautiful shrine room upstairs at Heartwood with our incredible sangha of students. I have the complete honor of leading classes with my partner Larry who offers the depth of scholarship of the Buddhist path as I offer the meditation and healing practices. If any of my words here speak to you, I would love to practice and study with you as you walk your path of awakening and healing. Heartwood is here for you and our meditation classes are here for you.
