Retreat Teachers
Trudy Goodman
Founder, Executive Director and Guiding Teacher of InsightLA
Trudy Goodman is the senior Vipassana teacher in Los Angeles from the Theravada lineage of the major meditation centers on both coasts where Trudy trained, and now teaches: Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, CA, and Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA.
Trudy has trained and practiced in two fields for over 25 years: meditation and psychotherapy. She studied developmental psychology with Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan, and trained with a widely respected psychiatrist/psychoanalyst in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- Richard Chasin, MD. For 20 years, Trudy worked with children, teenagers, couples and individuals in a full psychotherapy practice and was a psychological consultant to K-12 independent schools. Since 1974, Trudy devoted much of her life to practicing Buddhist meditation with Asian and Western teachers in the Zen and Theravada traditions, including Zen Master Seung Sahn, Kobun Chino Otagawa Roshi, and Maurine Stuart Roshi.
She taught mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn in the early days of the MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) clinic at University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. With Zen Master George Bowman, Trudy created courses and retreats for clinicians and others for many years. From 1991-1998, Trudy was a resident Zen teacher at the Cambridge Buddhist Association. She completed Jack Kornfield’s teacher training program and teaches meditation retreats and workshops with Jack (and others) at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the Insight Meditation Society, the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, and throughout the United States.
In addition, she co-founded, and is the Guiding Teacher for the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, teaching Buddhist psychology and mindfulness meditation for clinical practice at conferences and workshops nationwide. In 2002, Trudy founded InsightLA, dedicated to teaching mindfulness to people from 'cradle to grave'. In addition, Trudy teaches at UCLA, USC, Children’s Hospital of LA, and a variety of community settings. She co-founded Growing Spirit, a family program, in 2004. Trudy’s mother, sister, daughter, son-in-law and her grandchildren — four generations — are now all settled in Los Angeles.
You can read articles by Trudy here.
Christiane Wolf, MD, PhD
Director of MBSR Programs
Christiane is a physician licensed to practice Ob/Gyn in Europe and holds a PhD in Psychosomatic Medicine from Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. She has completed all steps of the professional Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training program of the University of Massachusetts under Jon Kabat- Zinn and his colleagues and is a certified MBSR teacher. She is also a graduate of the 2.5 year Community Dharma Leader program at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, CA. She first encountered meditation and Buddhism in 1988 at Amaravati Monastery near London in the Vipassana tradition of Ajahn Chah. Between 1996 and 2003 she studied and practiced with the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) in Germany and England before moving to the US.
Christiane has been training with Trudy Goodman in Los Angeles since 2003. In 2005, she co-founded InsightLA’s MBSR program together with Trudy and has since implemented three other MBSR related programs: Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting (MBCP), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and MBSR for chronic disease and pain management.
Christiane has worked with different populations such as patients with chronic pain and disease, parents of children with developmental disabilities and low income, non-English speaking immigrants. She has taught mindfulness and MBSR classes for research studies for UCLA, Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA and the Westside Regional Center in Culver City, CA.
Christiane's areas of expertise include working with patients who have cancer and chronic disease, and working with pain in the general population She is the mother of three young children in addition to being an OB/GYN, so mindful parenting and preparing for birth are both personal and professional interests of hers.
Beth Sternlieb
Beth was introduced to Buddhist sitting practice in the late eighties at Ordinary Dharma in Venice, CA. by Caitriona Reed, a student of Thich Nhat Hanh. She was inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on inter-being and nonviolence and practiced regularly at home while her two children were young.
Beth started practicing with Trudy Goodman in 2003 when she invited Trudy to teach a group of health care practitioners at UCLA who were interested in bringing integrative healing practices to the wider Los Angeles community. She hosted the Insight LA Dedicated Practitioners group in her home for several years until Insight LA moved to a permanent home.
Beth has an interest in Buddhist studies and long silent retreat practice, which she has perused at Insight Meditation Society (IMS) and Spirit Rock. She has helped to develop InsightLA’s Essential Dharma Program. She is a student of Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and a graduate of the Dedicated Practitioner Program at Spirit Rock.
Beth is a certified Iyengar yoga teacher and a member of the UCLA Pediatric Pain Program clinical team where she teaches Iyengar Yoga to children and young adults with chronic pain and health problems in an integrative medical setting. She began her studies of Iyengar yoga with Manouso Manos an expert in Iyengar Yoga therapeutics in 1991 because of her own health problem at that time. Manouos’s ability to address chronic pain and health issues in a wide variety of students inspired her to become a teacher and focus on the therapeutic application of Iyengar yoga. She assisted Manouso for several years in his therapeutic classes and traveled to India twice to assist in the medical classes taught by BKS and Geeta Iyegnar at the Ramamani Iyengar institute in Pune.
In addition to teaching yoga and meditation to students with a wide variety of chronic health and pain issues, Beth has been a co-investigator on several therapeutic Iyengar Yoga research intervention studies at UCLA including Iyengar yoga for breast cancer survivors with persistent fatigue, and Iyengar yoga for young adults with Rheumatoid arthritis, Iyengar yoga for young adults with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and Iyengar yoga for young adults with Depression.
Beth has found her yoga practice to be a great support to mindfulness and Loving Kindness (metta) practice. She enjoys helping people integrate these practices so that they feel more comfortable, at ease, and embodied in their meditation practice.
Maureen Shannon-Chapple
Maureen Shannon-Chapple has been working with children and families for over twenty-five years. Her professional experiences have included classroom teaching, parenting classes, adult school and college teaching. She currently teaches first grade at Chadwick School. A long-time practitioner of yoga and meditation, Maureen is able to merge her teaching and yoga/meditation background through her participation in Growing Spirit. She is a founding member of The Center for Non-Violent Education and Parenting.
Class and Workshop Teachers
Ron Ames
Ron Ames is a meditation practitioner who has studied with both Trudy Goodman and Noah Levine. He is currently a member of Spirit Rock’s Dedicated Practitioner’s Program. Ron serves as a member on InsightLA’s Executive Council. He is a teacher in training with Trudy Goodman in InsightLA’s first teacher training cohort. Ron has a deep interest in the Twelve Steps particularly as they relate to meditation practice. He works in the film industry as a Producer and 1st Assistant Director on feature films.
Jane Davis
Jane Davis has practiced in both the Vipassana and Zen traditions. She is currently enrolled in Spirit Rock's Dedicated Practioner's Program, an intensive 2-year course studying the Buddhist Suttas. She also volunteers as the Insight LA CFO. Jane has had a twenty-five year career, first practicing as a CPA and later specializing in financial management for small businesses. She is currently working in the non-profit and entertainment industries. Jane has been practicing since 1996 and lives in Santa Monica with her two beagles.
Allen Weiss
Allen Weiss is a graduate of Spirit Rock's Dedicated Practioner's Program and a member of InsightLA's Executive Council and architect of the InsightLA web site. He is also a professor at USC and founder/CEO of an online media company (Marketing Profs, LLC). Previously, he was a professional musician, business consultant, technology columnist and worked at other unrelated jobs.
