Willa Blythe Baker (born 1965) is an American author, scholar and teacher of Buddhist philosophy and practice. She trained for twelve years as a monastic and spent seven years in cloistered retreat, after which she was authorized as a lama (Buddhist teacher in the Tibetan tradition, Kagyu and Nyingma lineages).

In her mid-thirties, Baker went on to pursue Buddhism academically, completing a PhD at Harvard University, where she was Visiting Lecturer on Buddhist Ministry at Harvard Divinity School from 2013 to 2017. In 2009, she founded Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston and in 2011, she founded Wonderwell Mountain Refuge, a retreat center in rural Springfield, New Hampshire, where she has focused on adapting the principals of Buddhism to contemporary American life.

Background:[edit]

Willa grew up in blended counterculture family in Berkeley, California, in the 1970s. Her mother was the late Patricia J. Cooper, co-author of the book The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art, an Oral History, a best-selling oral history of women artists that set off a national renaissance in American domestic arts. Her father was the late William E. Baker, critically acclaimed author of seventeen books, including Mountain Blood which won the prestigious Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Non-Fiction.

Both her parents were interested in Buddhism and Asian religions.

In 1985, Willa went on a college exchange program in Nepal with the University of Wisconsin, where she lived in a two-room house with a family of six Tibetans who spoke no English. After returning to the States, she moved into a monastery overlooking the Hudson River and stayed there for 15 years, studying Buddhism, becoming ordained, and completing two three-year retreats, after which she was authorized as a teacher (lama) in the Kagyu Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.

After the monastery, she pursued Buddhism academically, graduating with a masters degree from the Department of Religion at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA in 2004, followed by a PhD from Harvard University in 2013. Her dissertation research explored the subtle body anatomy of the tantric tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. While in Boston, she founded the Buddhist non-profit organizations Natural Dharma Fellowship and Wonderwell Mountain Refuge.

In 2021, she moved to Springfield, New Hampshire, near the retreat center she founded. She currently co-directs Natural Dharma Fellowship with Elizabeth Monson, who she met in graduate school at Harvard.

Willa’s teaching specialties include compassion, natural meditation, heart-cultivation, body-based Buddhist yoga, non-dual embodiment and contemplative care, and practices for deep retreat.

Willa has been married once, from 2005-2021. She has no children.

Publication[edit]

Baker is the author of several books:

The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom (Shambhala Publications, 2021)
The Arts of Contemplative Care: Pioneering Voices in Buddhist Chaplaincy and Pastoral Work (Wisdom Publications, 2012)
Everyday Dharma: Seven Weeks to Finding the Buddha in You (Quest Books, 2009)
Essence of Ambrosia: A Guide to Buddhist Contemplations (Translation) (Library of Tibetan Books and Archives, 2005).

She has written for anthologies as well as both academic and popular magazines including

Tricycle Magazine
Lion’s Roar Buddhadharma
Her 2018 article Breaking the Silence on Sexual Misconduct helped launch the #MeToo movement in Buddhism.
Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies
The Tibet Journal

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