IMS Online Learning Center

Éowyn Ahlstrom grew up a stone’s throw away from the then emerging Insight Meditation Society. She left the area to go to college, and looked around the world for about a decade, searching for a way to live. In her journeys, Éowyn first discovered meditation through the yoga tradition. But, to her happy surprise, that way to live she was searching for turned out to be very close to home – at IMS, with the liberating practices of vipassana and metta meditation and the profound wisdom of the early Buddhist teachings. During the past two decades, she has attended many IMS retreats, both at the Retreat Center and the Forest Refuge, and has often led mindful movement sessions for retreats too. Éowyn has served as a staff member and volunteer here, and is currently glad to be receiving mentorship from Kamala Masters and Greg Scharf as she continues her ever deepening relationship with practicing and teaching dhamma. Her contributions to the broader field include the development of MBSR2 at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University; teaching community mindfulness, meditation and yoga programs at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at the Cambridge Health Alliance; and teaching for many other organizations in the region as well. She loves consulting with both individuals and organizations to provide pragmatic guidance and support for integrating contemplative awareness into 21st century living. Éowyn is also a poet, and the author of Mindscapes: Practice Poems. In addition to her master’s degree in health and wellness, along the way Éowyn has received qualifications as a massage therapist, yoga teacher (E-RYT 500), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher, and Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) teacher. For more about her work and practice, please visit her website, Middle Path Healing Arts.

Bob Stahl, Ph.D., a long-time insight meditator, lived in a Burmese Buddhist monastery in the Forest tradition of Ven. Taungpulu Sayadaw for over eight years. He founded and directs mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programs in three medical centers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bob is a professor of the practice in the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences in the School of Public Health at Brown University, and is a senior teacher at the Brown Mindfulness Center. He formerly served as a senior teacher at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Bob is the co-guiding teacher at Insight Santa Cruz.