Patricia Genoud-Feldman has been practicing Buddhist meditation (vipassana and Dzogchen) in Asia and the West since 1984 and teaching vipassana internationally since 1997. She is a co-founder and guiding teacher at the Meditation Centre Vimalakirti in Geneva, Switzerland.
Paul Ekman was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and New York University. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Adelphi University (1958), after a one year internship at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute. After two years as a Clinical Psychology Officer in the U.S. Army, he returned to Langley Porter where he worked from 1960 to 2004. His research on facial expression and body movement began in 1954, as the subject of his Master's thesis in 1955 and his first publication in 1957. In his early work, his approach to nonverbal behavior showed his training in personality. Over the next decade, a social psychological and cross-cultural emphasis characterized his work, with a growing interest in an evolutionary and semiotic frame of reference. In addition to his basic research on emotion and its expression, he has, for the last thirty years, also been studying deceit.
From Belfast, Northern Ireland, Paul Haller left home in 1971, lived in London for a year, then traveled throughout Europe, the middle east, Russia, and Afghanistan. He ended up in Japan, where he lived for a year and was introduced to Zen. Then he traveled throughout southeast Asia. He was ordained a Buddhist monk in Thailand, where he spent six months sitting in a remote cave.
Moving to Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in 1974, Paul was ordained as a priest by Zentatsu Richard Baker in 1980, who gave him the name Ryushin Zendo, "Dragon Heart, Zen Way." In 1993 he received Dharma Transmission from Sojun Mel Weitsman.
Founder and formerly Director of Outreach at SFZC, Paul is interested in finding ways of expressing our practice in society, both as compassionate service and making it available to as many people as possible. He became abbot of Zen Center in 2003.
Peter Russell is a writer and speaker who focuses on mind, consciousness, perennial philosophy, the core truth of spiritual traditions, science and environment. As one of the more revolutionary futurists Peter has been a keynote speaker at many international conferences, in Europe, Japan and the USA. His multi-image shows and videos, The Global Brain and The White Hole in Time have won praise and prizes from around the world. Website: http://www.peterrussell.com/
Phillip Moffitt is co-guiding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center and the founder of the Life Balance Institute. He teaches vipassana meditation and is the author of Dancing with Life, a book exploring the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. More information can be found at: www.dharmawisdom.org. He is currently writing a book on skillful living.
Raja Selvam, Ph.D., is a senior faculty member of
Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing professional training programs and the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute.
He lectures and teaches internationally.
After obtaining graduate degrees in business and statistics, and a doctoral degree in marketing, he is at present writing a dissertation towards a Ph.D. in clinical Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Raja’s increasingly eclectic approach draws from bodywork systems of Postural Integration and Biodynamic Cranio-Sacral Therapy, body-psychotherapy systems of Somatic Experiencing and Bodynamic Analysis, Jungian and Archetypal psychologies, psychoanalytic schools of Object Relations and Inter-Subjectivity, affective neuroscience, and Advaita Vadanta, a spiritual tradition from India. His current interests are trauma and attachment on one and hand trauma and spirituality on the other. Raja co-led the first Trauma Vidya team that went to Tamil Nadu, India, in June 2005 to treat tsunami survivors for trauma symptoms.
