Jack Kornfield, Ph.D., trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma. He is a founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Center and has taught meditation internationally since 1974. He holds a doctorate degree in clinical psychology, and is a husband and father. His books include A Path with Heart; Buddha's Little Instruction Book; Teachings of the Buddha; Seeking the Heart of Wisdom; Living Dharma; A Still Forest Pool; Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart; After the Ecstasy, the Laundry; and The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness and Peace.

Ajahn Amaro
Ajahn Amaro trained in Thailand with Ajahn Chah and with Ajahn Sumedho at Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in England. He is co-abbot of Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery in Redwood Valley, California where he resides with a small monastic community. The author of Small Boat, Great Mountain, Silent Rain, and the new Rugged Interdependency, Amaro Bhikkhu is also a member of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center teacher's council.
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Keith Armstrong
Keith R. Armstrong is the Director of the Family Therapy Clinic and a member of the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Clinical Team at the VA in San Francisco, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. The co-author of Courage After Fire, a self-help book for returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families, he is the recipient of numerous teaching awards.

David Black
David M. Black is a Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and Fellow of the Institute of Psychotherapy, London. He edited Psychotherapy and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators? and has written on psychotherapy in relation to science, consciousness, sympathy and values. He has also recently published a number of translations of Goethe’s poems, Love as Landscape Painter. He studied Buddhism and Hinduism under Ninian Smart at Lancaster University in the early 1970s and has been a fellow-traveler and intermittent practitioner of Buddhism for many years.

Joseph Bobrow
Joseph Bobrow is the founder and president of the Coming Home Project and Deep Streams Zen Institute. A Zen master in the Diamond Sangha tradition, he is also a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. Joseph writes on Zen, psychotherapy, and the interplay of Western psychology, Buddhism, and the beloved community in transforming suffering. Click here for a list of his published writings.

Erika Curran
Erika Ann Curran was a clinical social worker since 1969. From 1987 she was the Family Treatment Specialist for the Trauma Recovery Program at the Palo Alto VA, working with over 1500 families whose lives were impacted by trauma and PTSD of a family member. This included families of veterans who served in WW II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and now active duty members serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. Recently she worked with families of active duty personnel facing the additional challenge of reunification following deployments in a war zone. Erika passed away suddenly on December 19, 2008, weeks after recording her presentation for "Treating the Invisible Injuries of War."  Her fourty-year career was dedicated to helping families. Erika will be greatly missed by all who knew her.
 

Paul Ekman
Paul Ekman is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at UCSF and an expert on the physiology of the human face, especially as it relates to interpersonal deception, emotional expression and non-verbal communication. The author of Emotions Revealed: Understanding Facial Expressions, Emotions and Deception, he is working with the Dalai Lama on a new book about the iinfluence of meditative practices on our emotional life.

Gerald Fogel
Gerald Fogel is a training and supervising analyst, founding member, and former director of the Oregon Psychoanalytic Institute. Before moving to Portland in 1996, he had been affiliated with the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center in New York City. He has edited books on perversion, the psychology of men, and the work of Hans Loewald, and written numerous papers and book reviews for psychoanalytic journals. He is currently on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and Studies in Gender and Sexuality and has served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychotherapy.

Mai-Ling Garcia
Currently a Senior Policy Associate with Swords to Plowshares in the San Francisco Bay Area,  Mai-Ling Garcia has worked with the California State Senate Office and facilitated courses for Social Issues and Social Action at Cal Corps Public Service Center.  Her education includes a Bachelor of Arts in sociology from the University of California Berkeley, Social Justice & Civic Leadership from Mills College, and graduate-level course work at Carnegie Mellon University.  Ms. Garcia was a grant recipient for 18-month qualitative study on the role of families in institutions, which included conducted 30 semi-structured in-depth interviews with military personnel and their families.

Donald Kalsched
Donald E. Kalsched Ph.D. is a Jungian analyst, clinical psychologist, supervising and training analyst with the Inter-Regional Association of Jungian Analysts, and faculty member of the Westchester Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. His writings focus on the area of early trauma and the effect that overwhelming childhood experiences have on the inner world of the trauma survivor. He has attempted to show how archetypal energies and structures in the deep unconscious come to the aid of the beleaguered ego of the trauma victim, assuring the survival of an "imperishable personal spirit" or soul--protecting it at all costs, while (paradoxically) at the same time-- persecuting it. This dynamic, which he considers a major "spiritual" problem in our time, is the subject of his book The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. He is working on a second book Trauma and the Soul in which the spiritual dimensions of his previous findings are explored.

Alicia Lieberman
Dr. Lieberman is currently the Director of the Early Trauma Treatment Network (ETTN), a collaborative of four university sites that include the UCSF/SFGH Child Trauma Research Project, Boston Medical Center, Louisiana State University Medical Center, and Tulane University. ETTN is funded by the federal Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) as part of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a 50-site national initiative that has the mission of increasing the access and quality of services for children exposed to trauma in the United States. As a trilingual, tri-cultural Jewish Latina, she has a special interest in cultural issues involving child development, childrearing, and child mental health. She lectures extensively on these topics nationally and in four continents.

Joanna Macy
Joanna Macy, Ph.D., is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. She has created a new theoretical framework for personal and social change, and a workshop methodology for its application that helps people transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming crises, into constructive, collaborative action, and brings a new way of seeing the world. Her books include World as Lover, World as Self, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World; and Widening Circles: A Memoir.

Helen Marlo
Helen Marlo, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Burlingame, CA, working with adults and children. She is Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Art's in Clinical Psychology Program at Notre Dame de Namur University. She is a candidate, in analytic training, at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.

Richard C. Miller, PhD
Richard, author of Yoga Nidra: The Meditative Heart of Yoga, is a contemporary spiritual teacher of nondualism. He is the founding president and CEO of the Center of Timeless Being, founding board member and past president of the Institute for Spirituality and Psychology, and co-founder of The International Association of Yoga Therapy. He serves as a research consultant studying the effectiveness of yoga nidra with soldiers, veterans, college students, children, seniors, the homeless, and abused women, and people experiencing issues such as PTSD, substance abuse, sleep disorders and chronic pain. He leads retreats and trainings throughout North America with a focus on enlightened living in daily life.

LTC David Rabb
Currently serving on active duty as the Director of Psychological Health and Wellness, 63rd Readiness Support Command, Western Region of the U.S., headquartered at Moffett Field, Mountain View, CA. Formerly Western Regional Medical Command Military-VA Liaison, with oversight of Army Service Members (Warriors in Transition) admitted to VA Medical Centers in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada and Idaho. He served four years of active duty as infantryman in the United States Marine Corps, and 20 years in the United States Army Reserves. From 1989 to 2007, he served in the 785th Medical Company, Combat Stress Control (the last four years in the unit, he served as the Commander). The primary mission of the 785th is to provide combat stress control services and treat Soldiers with combat stress, grief and loss, and battle fatigue. The unit returned from a one-year deployment in Iraq in February, 2005 and returned from its second deployment in May 2008. In his civilian job LTC Rabb is Executive Assistant for the Veteran Health Administration Under Secretary for Health's Diversity Advisory Board.

Matthieu Ricard
Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk who had a promising career in celluar genetics before leaving France to study Buddhism in the Himalayas in 1970. He is an author, translator, photographer, and an active participant in scientific research on the effects of meditation on the brain. He lives and works on humanitarian projects in Tibet and Nepal.

Sharon Salzberg
One of America’s leading spiritual teachers and authors, Sharon Salzberg is cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts. She has played a crucial role in bringing Asian meditation practices to the West. The ancient Buddhist practices of vipassana (mindfulness) and metta (lovingkindness) are the foundations of her work. Her books include The Force of Kindness; Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience; Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness; and A Heart As Wide As The World.

Steven Torgerson
Chaplin, Lt Col Steven M. Torgerson is the former Chair of the Air Force Integrated Delivery System, which serves as a forum for cross-organizational review and resolution of individual, family and installation community issues.  Suicide prevention is at the forum's heart.  From May 2006 to April 2007 Chaplain Torgerson was the Deputy Command Chaplain for Multi-National Force – Iraq and experienced first-hand the DoD suicide prevention program on the battlefield.  Presently, Chaplain Torgerson is stationed at Travis AFB where he is the Wing Chaplain (command chaplain) and serves as the Executive Director of the Travis AFB CAIB (Community Action and Information Board). 

Brian Turner
Brian Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award and the New York Times “Editor's Choice” selection. Turner served seven years in the US Army, to include one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. Turner's poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. He earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and has lived abroad in South Korea.

Ann Ulanov
Ann Belford Ulanov, Ph.D., L.H.D. is the Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychaitry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary New York City, a psychoanalyst in private practice and a member of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association. Her numerous books include, Spirit in Jung; Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work; The Unshuttered Heart: Opening to Aliveness and Deadness in the Self; and with her late husband, Barry Ulanov, Religion and the Unconscious; and Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer.

Robyn Walser
Robyn D. Walser, Ph.D, is a psychologist for the National Center for PTSD at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System and is also a consultant and workshop presenter through TL Consultation Services. During her graduate studies she developed expertise in, traumatic stress, substance abuse and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and has been doing ACT workshop trainings since 1998. She is currently involved in several research projects investigating use of mindfulness and ACT. Dr. Waiser has a private practice that includes consultation, workshop services, and psychotherapy.

Darrah Westrup
Darrah Westrup, Ph.D. is clinical psychologist providing counseling, consulting and training services. She has a private practice in Menlo Park, CA, and has been an active proponent of enhanced mental healthcare for women veterans, serving eight years as Program Director of the Women’s Mental Health Center at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, and as Co-Director of the Women’s Trauma Recovery Program (a national residential treatment program for women veterans with military-related PTSD).  She is a recognized authority on the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related problems. Darrah is currently a consultant to VA. In collaboration with Dr. Robyn Walser, Dr. Westrup co-authored Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for the Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Trauma-Related Problems, the first published book on applying ACT to the treatment of PTSD, and also The Mindful Couple: How Acceptance and Mindfulness Can Lead You to the Love You Want.