Welcome!
I guide people to transform and heal through embodied presence, stillness and play.
Early Life
My lifelong journey of weaving contemplative practice with social justice started with being born into an interracial family within a residential Christian community that was focused on voluntary simplicity and service to the poor and marginalized. I grew up in an old, repurposed insurance building in Chicago with several hundred people, with spiritual practice at the heart of our collective life. As a child, I would wake up to a bell at 5:30 a.m. each day and then go to daily office for prayer at 6:00 a.m with the rest of the community. From the age of eight, I spent four rich and impactful years living over a bar in an area considered “one of Africa’s biggest slums” on the outskirts of Nairobi while my dad worked in our community’s human development projects in Kenya and neighboring countries. I fell in love with dance as a child, beginning with ballet and later dedicating myself to modern, African, and hip-hop forms as well as improvisational expressions of creative movement. As a teen, I spent a summer with a family in Puebla, Mexico learning Spanish and my junior year as an exchange student in Brazil, learning Portuguese, and the Afro-Brazilian martial art, capoeira.
Me in Kindergarten
I earned a B.A. and M.A. at Stanford University in Anthropology and Social Sciences with a focus on the African Diaspora and liberatory education for African American students. In addition to regularly attending church in high school and college, I began practicing yoga and meditation. After graduating, I knew I wanted to dedicate myself more intensively to spiritual development, to learn how to be truly happy and care for my suffering, and to help others do the same. I set out in search of a teacher and a community and this led me to Plum Village in France in 1997.
The day Thich Nhat Hanh ordained me in December 1999
Nun Life
As soon as I saw the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay as his students call him (Vietnamese for ‘teacher’), I knew he was my teacher. The community of nuns, monks and lay practitioners was also deeply inspiring to me, living authentically what he taught. In 1999 I was ordained as a Buddhist nun at the age of 25 and spent fifteen years as a nun, engaging in a 24-hour-a-day mindfulness practice made up of daily sitting and walking meditation, eating meals in silence to be fully present for our food, dharma study and community building, leading retreats and guiding students individually.
I also helped develop and lead our community’s mindfulness programs and retreats for teens, children and families, and I worked closely with Thay to edit transcripts of his talks into books, including the New York Times bestsellers, Anger and the Art of Power. I also curated and edited, Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children in addition to other titles. I received Lamp Transmission from Thay and became a Zen teacher in 2007. Another area of my focus was opening the doors of the dharma to Black, Indigenous and People of Color. I helped instigate, organize and lead our community’s first retreat with Thay for BIPOC in 2004, with 400 people--the largest BIPOC convert Buddhist retreat in the US to date. I have supported BIPOC retreats and the development of BIPOC sanghas and spaces in the larger community ever since, and edited and contributed to Together We are One, teachings of Thay and BIPOC practitioners from BIPOC retreats. I also helped establish Wake Up Schools, bringing mindfulness into education and leading retreats internationally for educators.
I have taught thousands of children, teens and young adults on family and youth retreats internationally
Present Day
Then, in my early forties, after spending nearly my whole adult life as a nun, I made another huge shift after a long discernment process, deciding to leave monastic life to start all over. So, when many friends from my youth had already started families and spent several decades in their professions, I was learning in middle age to do the things my peers had been doing since their early twenties—using a cell phone, running a household, and paying taxes. It was a major transition on many levels: personally, socially, financially, professionally, spiritually, and culturally. In a sense, I was reinventing my whole identity.
Teaching a Mindful Schools’ retreat for educators
But as I spent time with lay sanghas, or spiritual communities, around the world, and as I responded to invitations to teach, I began to discover that actually the whole world was becoming my monastery and that I could make my home wherever I was.
Currently, I continue what I’ve learned from my teacher and my mentors by teaching and leading retreats internationally, helping to train a new and more diverse generation of Buddhist and mindfulness teachers who can translate the gifts of this beautiful tradition and offer it in a way that addresses the cries of our world. I also mentor groups and individuals and support social movements, offering a contemplative grounding and perspective to change makers whose courage to address injustice inspires me daily.
In addition to teaching in the Plum Village Tradition, I am also a teacher in the Vipassana tradition through Spirit Rock Meditation Center.
I am now setting up a Buddhist-Christian community of practice, study, and action, which will source, seed and feed the Village of Interbeing, an eco-village rooted in spiritual nourishment and the transformation and healing of societal suffering, racial justice, and care for the earth.
I see my work as a continuation of the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh as well as the work of my parents, inspired by their stories and my dad’s work with Martin Luther King Jr. on desegregating the South. My teaching interweaves art, play, nature, racial and earth justice, and embodied mindfulness practice and I feel especially called to share the Dharma with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, as well as activists, educators, youth, artists, and families. I live in New York, with my partner, Adam, and use she, her pronouns.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh at a news conference in Chicago in 1966
My first book, We Were Made for These Times: Skilfully Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption, is published by Parallax Press.
You can reach me at info[at]kairajewel[dot]com
“Kaira Jewel deeply enriches the lives of anyone who practices with her both spiritually and emotionally. Like her teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, her teachings are sourced in heart-wisdom, and offered with a wonderful blend of compassion, warmth and openness.”
— Tara Brach
“My spiritual and emotional life has been enriched deeply by Kaira’s insightful teaching, which she conveys with warmth and openness, inviting inquiry with great compassion.”
— Kolya B-G.