Photo by Dharma Keeper, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsNyingma · The Body as a Doorway into Practice
American Tibetan Buddhist teacher and author whose work brings together traditional meditation, somatic mindfulness and nondual awareness, with a particular emphasis on the body as a doorway into practice.
Willa Blythe Baker trained for twelve years as a monastic and completed two consecutive three-year retreats, after which she was authorised as a dharma teacher and lineage holder in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. She has also trained in the Nyingma and Shangpa traditions. She completed a doctorate at Harvard University in 2013 and was a visiting lecturer in Buddhist ministry there until 2017.
She founded Natural Dharma Fellowship, based in Boston, and is its founding teacher and spiritual co-director. Its retreat centre, Wonderwell Mountain Refuge, sits on a hillside in Springfield, New Hampshire, and holds most of the residential programmes; several of them run as hybrids, so people can join from home.
Her teaching keeps returning to the body. Rather than treating meditation as something done in the head while the body waits, she works with sensation, breath and posture as the material of practice, and moves from there towards nondual awareness and compassion. Eco-dharma runs alongside it, with the natural world treated as a teacher rather than a setting. Her books include The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom (2021), The Arts of Contemplative Care (2012), Everyday Dharma (2009) and Essence of Ambrosia (2005), and her essays and translations have appeared in Tricycle, Lion's Roar and Buddhadharma.
“Somatic mindfulness is informed by one very simple observation: the mind is distracted but the body is not.”Willa Blythe Baker
Talks, day programmes and retreats currently listed in the Paths Are Many calendar.
Short introductions and longer conversations, to hear this teacher in their own words.
A Dharma Sunday teaching that uses fungal networks under the forest floor as a working image for dependent origination and for why a separate self does not hold up.
An hour of teaching and guided sitting from Tricycle's online practice series, working with the body as the place attention actually rests.
Talks, guided meditations and podcast conversations, playing from the platform this teacher publishes them on.
A conversation around her book The Wakeful Body on what somatic mindfulness is, the four levels of the body she works with, and how to meditate without straining at it.
Listen on YouTubeOldest school of Tibetan Buddhism; strongly associated with Dzogchen and numerous treasure lineages.
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