Podcast: Spring Washam

This week, Rabbi Rami interviews Spring Washam. Spring is a well-known meditation teacher and author based in California and Peru. One of the founders and core teachers at the East Bay Meditation Center in downtown Oakland, Calif., Spring has been a pioneer in bringing mindfulness-based healing practices to diverse communities. She wrote an essay about this subject for Spirituality & Health, called “Guest House: Space for All in an Open House.”

“Real practice is getting in touch with the places that we are programmed, where we have deep, unconscious conditioning and biases,” she discusses with Rabbi Rami. Deep practice may involve grappling with real issues. “It involves a reckoning and a coming to terms.” It can break apart a spiritual community, or, the spiritual community can grow from it.

Spring is the author of the book A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage, and Wisdom in Any Moment, which she also talks about with Rabbi Rami in terms of meditation practice. Spring calls Jack Kornfield, whom she studied under extensively, a kind of spiritual father. Spring has practiced and studied Buddhist philosophy in both the Theravada and Tibetan schools of Buddhism for the last 20 years.

In addition to being a teacher, she is also a shamanic practitioner and has studied indigenous healing practices for over a decade. She founded Lotus Vine Journeys, an organization that blends indigenous healing practices, such as using ayahuasca with Buddhist wisdom. Rabbi Rami is down with the idea of trying ayahuasca, but the side effect of vomiting? Not so much!

We hope you enjoy the episode, and if you want to learn more from Spring, she has many of her teachings online here.

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