Leslie Booker brings her heart and wisdom to the intersection of Dharma, Embodied Wisdom, and Liberation. Using this framework, she supports folks in creating a culture of belonging through her teaching and writing on changing the paradigm of self and community care. She shares her offering widely as a university lecturer, public speaker, and Buddhist philosophy and meditation teacher.
After training as a yoga teacher in 2007, Booker was drawn to Spirit Rock Meditation Center’s Mindful Yoga and Meditation training (2012). She continued to train there formally as a Dharma teacher in their Community Dharma Leaders (2017) and Retreat Teacher training programs (2020). Outside of her formal training, she shared the practices of yoga and mindfulness with New York City’s most vulnerable populations for over a decade. Here is where she learned how to take her practice off the cushion and into everyday life.
Booker is a co-author of Best Practices for Yoga in a Criminal Justice Setting (2017), a contributor to Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality’s report: Gender & Trauma—Somatic Interventions for Girls in Juvenile Justice, and contributed to Sharon Salzberg’s book Real Happiness at Work (2013) and Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad’s book Black Buddhist and the Black Radical Tradition (2022).
She is a co-founder of the Yoga Service Council at Omega Institute and the Meditation Working Group of Occupy Wall Street. In 2020 she was invited to be a Sojourner Truth Leadership Fellow through Auburn Seminary, graduated from Spirit Rock’s 4 year Retreat Teacher Training, and was voted by her peers as one of the 12 Powerful Women in the Mindfulness Movement. Click here to learn more about Leslie Booker.
