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PAST DHARMA TEACHERS
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Carla Brennan is a Vipassana teacher in the Santa Cruz area and offers a weekly meditation group, classes, retreats and other programs with the Bloom of the Present Sangha. She is a visiting teacher with the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, CA. Before founding Bloom of the Present in 2009, she taught with Vipassana Santa Cruz for five years. Carla began meditation practice in 1975 in the Zen tradition and was a student of Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn in Cambridge, MA. A few years later she began attending the newly formed Insight Meditation Society, completing many retreats with Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein and others. Later she added the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Dzogchen with Lama Surya Das, Lama John Makransky and Tsoknyi Rinpoche. In the early ’90’s, Carla began attending wilderness retreats with John Milton and Sacred Passage, completing 2 one-month solo retreats near Crestone, CO, and training to be a Sacred Passage Guide. As part of her regular teaching she offers meditation in nature and encourages her students to open to the wisdom of the natural world. Carla has also worked as an artist and illustrator and is a former psychotherapist and counselor trainer in Psychosynthesis, a spiritual psychology. She has taught Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for 18 years. In addition to teaching Vipassana meditation, Carla is a teacher of Natural Wisdom and Compassion Meditation with Lama John Makransky and the Foundation of Active Compassion. Her personal spiritual practice also includes qi gong and hatha yoga.
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