Brenda has received training from indigenous elders in traditional medicine and healing ceremony. Trained by teachers in the Purepecha, Xochimilco Toltec and other indigenous lineages, Brenda draws on the healing powers of the natural world to guide her work.

Her book, Real World Mindfulness for Beginners: Navigate Daily Life One Practice at a Time, was written particularly for those who are new to mindfulness. It includes a collection of short mindfulness practices guidance from 10 of the most trusted mindfulness teachers in the country that will help you navigate anxiety and stress, anger and hurt, grief and loss, and more. As she was working on this book, Brenda expressed her committed to including diverse chapter authors, and authors serving and bringing mindfulness into diverse and social justice communities.

In the past, she has served as the Director of the East Bay Meditation Center, considered by many to be one of the most diverse Buddhist Sanghas in the country and a model of gift economy and collective leadership. She has also served as Associate Director at Wisdom & Money, and as a Senior Fellow at the Movement Strategy Center, and on the boards of Movement Strategy Center, Lion’s Roar Foundation, and Unity San Leandro. She is also the founder of Moons Rising Women’s Circle, and has taught, facilitated and led ceremony at numerous gatherings, including Bioneers, Mindful Life Conference, The Future of Religion and Interspirituality, Science and Nonduality Conference on Dying and Living, We Will Dance with Mountains, WisdomWomen, and many more. She has also brought her teachings and ceremony to organizations such as California Institute of Integral Studies, SF Department of Public Health, Genentech, The Ford Foundation and the Latino Community Foundation, among others.

Her current projects are focused on transformational leadership, sacred economics, reconnecting others to ceremony and relationship with the land, mindfulness practices that draw from multiple traditions, ceremony for collective healing and transformation, and the weaving of mindfulness and indigenous teachings for our times. She is committed to co-creating a society filled with wholeness and beauty. Brenda is grateful to her ancestors for the values that have led her to spirituality, healing, and transformative leadership development.

Bayo Akomolafe (PhD) was born in 1983 into a Christian home, and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. Losing his diplomat father to a sudden heart complication, Bayo became a reclusive teenager, seeking to get to the “heart of the matter” as a response to his painful loss. After meeting with traditional healers as part of his quest to understand trauma, mental wellbeing and healing in new ways, his deep questions and concerns for decolonized landscapes congealed into a life devoted to exploring the nuances of a “magical” world “too promiscuous to fit neatly into our fondest notions of it.”

Now living between India and the United States, Bayo is a father of Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi. He is married to EJ, his dear life-partner of Indian descent. 

In 2014, Dr. Akomolafe was invited to be the Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Ancient Futures (USA). He left his lecturing position in Covenant University, Nigeria to help build this Alliance. Bayo has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, where he taught on his own formulated concepts of ‘transraciality’ and postactivism. He has also taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality. 

The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Bayo is a widely celebrated international speaker, teacher, public intellectual, essayist and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak. He is also the Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains’.