Awakened Life

Joan Sutherland, Roshi is the founder of Awakened Life. She is deeply involved in re-imagining the koan tradition and exploring its relationship to creativity, and she also integrates mythopoetics and contemporary mind and consciousness discoveries with meditation. She holds frequent koan and meditation retreats, and her work appears regularly in Shambhala Sun and Buddhadharma.

She lives and teaches in Santa Fe, New Mexico and is also the holding teacher for The Open Source, a network of communities that includes Springs Mountain Sangha in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Wet Mountain Sangha in Pueblo, Colorado, The Open Source in Northern California, and a new group in Tucson, Arizona. She is one of the founders of the Pacific Zen School, an innovative contemporary koan school.

She is also a writer, and a translator from Chinese and Japanese. She is currently working on a philosophical memoir and collaborating with John Tarrant on a new translation of three major koan collections. Before becoming a Zen teacher, she worked as a scholar and teacher in the field of archaeomythology, and for nonprofit organizations in the feminist antiviolence and environmental movements.