A Deep Conversation With Deborah Eden Tull

DEBORAH EDEN TULL, founder of Mindful Living Revolution, teaches the integration of compassionate awareness into every aspect of our lives, bridging personal and collective awakening in an age of global change. She is an engaged Buddhist teacher, spiritual activist, author, eco-dharma educator, and facilitator of The Work That Reconnects, a field created by Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy for transforming our love and pain for our world into compassionate action. Eden teaches dharma intertwined with post-patriarchal thought and practices, resting upon a lived knowledge of our unity with the more than human world. She has practiced meditation for 30 years and  trained for seven and a half years as a Buddhist monk at the Zen Monastery Peace Center, a silent Zen monastery in the Sierra foothills. She has been teaching for over 20 years. Eden’s teaching emphasizes relational presence, acknowledging the personal, interpersonal, intrapersonal, transpersonal, societal, ecological, mystical, and global impacts of embodied dharma. She has worked with a wide range of audiences, from dharma students and spiritual teachers to those practicing or teaching secular mindfulness, to concerned citizens, activists, leaders, and change agents, to parents, schools, inner city youth, nonprofits, corporations, and people who are incarcerated. Eden taught for many years with UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, and has been collaborating with Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers since 2012, on the topics of Regenerative Leadership, Women’s Leadership, and Sacred Activism. She is also a member of the national Eco-Dharma Advisory Committee of Buddhist teachers and leaders in the eco-dharma movement. Eden has a special gift for facilitating mindful inquiry and fierce compassion, and bridging personal, ancestral, and collective healing. Weaving dharma with her embodiment of animism, deep ecology, shadow work, somatic awareness, ancestral healing, and conscious movement/dance, she helps people release limiting beliefs and collective biases that have been passed down over generations. She draws upon her own experience of navigating loss, illness, and trauma, guiding people to embrace the mystery and celebrate the value and alchemy of light and darkness as teachers of love. Having lived in or taught about sustainable communities and organic gardening/permaculture for decades, Eden weaves the essential wisdom of nature into everything she teaches. She currently resides in the mountains of western North Carolina, originally Cherokee land, with her husband Mark. She offers retreats, workshops, and consultations nationally and internationally, integrating presence and partnership with nature. Eden feels that the most important aspect of being a teacher is continually being a student. She continually immerses herself in trainings and retreats, recognizing direct experience as our truest guide. She works closely with mentor Pam Weiss, author of A Bigger Sky: Awakening a Fierce Feminine Buddhism, to deepen her embodiment of Soto Zen Buddhism in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi.