Sean Oakes

Sean Oakes, PhD (he/him, queer, of Spanish/Puerto Rican and Northern European ancestry living on unceded Pomo land in California), teaches Buddhism, Yoga, and somatic practice. He has studied in Theravāda, Zen, and Vajrāyāna Buddhist lineages, including training as a monk in Burma, and was authorized to teach Insight Meditation by Jack Kornfield in 2010. His primary Buddhist teachers include Kornfield, Sylvia Boorstein, Gil Fronsdal, and Eugene Cash, Kitissaro and Ṭhānissara, Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, Anam Thubten, and Chammyay Sayadaw (U Janaka), with whom he ordained as a bhikkhu for a Rains Retreat in Burma in 2002.

He studied Yoga with Alice Joanou, Rachel Shaw, Amanda Moran, and David Moreno, and taught mindfulness-based āsana and prāṇāyāma for 10 years, and performed for many years in music, dance, and performance art, including with Keith Hennessy’s Circo Zero, and trained in Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Organic Intelligence (OI) with Steven Hoskinson, integrating the complex systems approach from OI in a distinctively Buddhist approach to trauma resolution. He received his PhD in Performance Studies from UC Davis in 2016, writing on extraordinary states of consciousness in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance. He teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, East Bay Meditation Center, Insight Timer, and elsewhere, focusing on the integration of philosophy, somatics, and social justice discourse with the Dharma.