Renshin Lauren Lee

Renshin has been a resident at MAPLE since May 2019.

Renshin is in a lifelong struggle for truth and virtue. She has been a Magic: The Gathering competitor / content creator, an iOS developer, a rationality researcher / instructor, a community builder, and a Circling facilitator. Now, at MAPLE, she seeks the ability to stay in one place and become someone people can rely on—a dependable, trustworthy, wise and loving leader.

Bhadda Heidi Marchi

Bhadda Heidi Marchi is a joyful, empathetic, energetic human who cares deeply about all beings, and is motivated to serve the world in the most compassionate way possible.

She graduated from Grand Valley State University with a BS in Psychology, and a minor in Studio Art in 2020. While enrolled, she served on the executive board of Meditation and Mindfulness Club, witnessing firsthand the healing powers of gathering in a trustworthy community of practice. She was introduced to Buddhism through Dharma art workshops led by her painting professor and mentor, Jill, and is very enthusiastic about the intersection of mindfulness and creative expression. Over the last 5 years she has been urgently and intentionally striving to do less harm to the planet, working with individual and collective sustainability and environmental protection efforts. She has been vegan for 4 years, and finds this a spiritually supportive diet. Her vow is to fully embody grace and compassion, and she is incredibly grateful for the MAPLE community fostering the development of the skills of wisdom, love and power in order to actualize this.

Trinley Matt Goldenberg

Trinley came to MAPLE for his own spiritual growth, as well as to help build systems that can improve the spiritual growth of humanity. He has a background in entrepreneurship, previously having run a startup dedicated to helping organizations make wiser decisions. He owns a coaching practice focused on helping people be productive and process their emotions without beating themselves up.

Previously, he worked with character development in children, including developing a magician training program for youth, and a character-development based after-school curriculum. He looks to use these varied skills to help MAPLE preserve life on earth.

Bodhi Joe Pucci

Bodhi was drawn to MAPLE to advance his spiritual practice and to learn how to facilitate transformative education. He spends his time studying and practicing the Buddhadharma and working on curriculum, culture, and civilizational design. He is interested in meditation and spiritual awakening, social emotional learning, purpose development, emerging technology, and existential risk – and how their convergence in education might create trustworthy leaders and systems that benefit all life and respond to the crises of our time.

After graduating from Hamilton College where he played basketball and studied inequality and development, Bodhi won a post-graduate fellowship to investigate exemplary learning environments around the world. He visited schools, accelerators, and ministries in the Nordics, participated in teacher trainings, meditation retreats, and education conferences in Asia, and immersed himself in leadership academies, NGOs, and intentional communities across Africa. The most insightful and joyous moments, however, came from his time at Buddhist monasteries. This propelled him to become a mindful leadership teacher with the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, an education non-profit born at Google, and ultimately to the Monastic Academy where he gets to deepen his practice and help shape a network of transformative wisdom institutions.

Ānandabodhi Becker

Ānandabodhi first came to MAPLE as a co-working guest in 2019, following his longing to live in a community that truly cared about, and embodied, the question: “How can we be of service to the world?” While here, it became clear that his studies in economics and work in international development, while interesting and beneficial in some ways, were still both grossly and subtly perpetuating a way of living based in greed and destruction. He is incredibly grateful to the bird he met on the November 2019 retreat that revealed to him a way of being that is in accord with what is actually good, true and beautiful.While it took him some time (about a year and a half) to align his life situation with this newfound truth, he did eventually return to MAPLE as an apprentice in March of 2021. Since then he has been striving to answer the updated question of his life: “How can I give my body, mind, and life completely to Great Love for the benefit of all beings?” No matter what task is before him, he commits himself to doing it as fully as he can, praying that his actions are of true benefit for all beings.

Maitrī Huffaker

Maitrī grew up in the suburbs of Southern California in a mixed Middle-Eastern / White family. Her first encounters with a spiritual world were through the framings of the Seventh-day Adventist church as a child, where as a child, she developed a relationship with a loving God. Impulses to move beyond her small suburban world and closed religious community took her to UC Berkeley for college, where she studied Anthropology. After a stint in the world of Corporate Social Impact (at eBay), she moved to Guatemala, where she devoted five years of life to community development work in projects devoted to health, education, and artisan market access in Indigenous communities. For her graduate research at the University of Oslo, a deep fascination with the interconnections between spirituality and global crisis lead her to explore the role of the Maya Cosmovision—the worldview of Indigenous Guatemalans—in climate change transformations. She joined the MAPLE community to more fully embody lifelong inquiries around what is true, what is Holy, and how to live a life worth living during a time of profound upheaval.

Autumn Turley

Autumn is a 5th generation Californian with a background as a violinist, massage practitioner, contact improv teacher, poet, and project manager.

Before joining the Monastic Academy in 2017, she co-founded the Bridge Within movement and traveled the US and Canada doing massage, teaching contact improv, and organizing events. In 2021 she founded the Mobile Monastery Chautauqua Tour, an annual tour that organizes events and workshops to share the work we do at MAPLE across the land. She is passionate about networking, growth, helping people discover and actualize their dreams, going on adventures, sharing art and healing and movement, creative collaborative projects, community-building, Spiritual Practice, and the ocean.

Kyōshin Liu

Kyōshin grew up in Guangzhou, China until she moved to New York City with her parents at age 10. After graduating from Brown University with a degree in Computer Science, she worked as a software engineer for about ten years. During this time, she accumulated many unhelpful mental patterns, resulting in depression, anxiety, self-hatred and loneliness. She began teaching herself psychology, philosophy, and interpersonal communication, as well as practicing meditation and mindful self-compassion.

Gradually, she has embraced new ways of showing up, including eating a 100% plant-based diet to stop participating in causing animal suffering, and dancing like no one’s watching whenever she feels called to. In June 2019, she attended Sōryū’s first talk at OAK and was intrigued by his candor, insightfulness, and ability to see people unusually clearly. She began attending OAK’s morning meditation and chanting, until one morning she felt as if she was going to where she truly belonged, and knew that she needed to train with MAPLE and OAK. She has since trained at both locations as an apprentice and now as a student.

Tachok

Tachok found his way to MAPLE while seeking, as if caught in a fever dream, to find the others. The last several years have been a nomadic chapter as Tachok faced midlife and sought answers to existential dilemmas. Tachok lived in Berlin 2018-2022, traveling throughout Europe, and also going on to explore communities and projects in Central America, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. For years, while he sought out communities with big visions, he often discovered that they lacked the depth, sincerity, or clarity he longed for. Tachok has stayed and continued to train at MAPLE because he found a community that’s real, that’s fully engaged, and up to something that’s visionary, that truly matters. With a background in startups, venture capital, and technology sales, Tachok is currently training to be wholehearted and capable of showing up in ways that help others wake up from their own fever dreams and discover how to live more meaningfully and authentically during these challenging times.

Joshua

Joshua Meyers was born and raised in New York City, and received a very good education through homeschooling.  In college, he was torn between his love of mathematics and his aspiration to do something with his life that would address the global crisis.  In 2023 he organized a project to pilot an alternative higher educational institution, as an attempt to address the global crisis.  This experience revealed that he did not have the competencies required to do the kind of work that is needed to address the global crisis, so he enrolled at MAPLE in December 2024 to train to be able to do this kind of work.

Vimoksha

Vimoksha is a student at the Monastic Academy (MAPLE), where he is deepening his practice of responsibility, presence, and service. He first came to MAPLE in August of 2023 during a period of uncertainty, after completing a chapter of his life with no clear sense of what should come next. Encouraged by a close Dharma friend, Vimoksha arrived for a co-working stay. What struck him most was the culture of self-responsibility—how people simply took care of what needed to be done, without external oversight.

After some time living in Boulder, Vimoksha found himself lit on fire by a single, penetrating question: Where does money come from in my life, and how do I justify receiving it? When two friends invited him back to MAPLE, he was filled with terror—knowing that here, the illusions he had allowed to persist in his life would be exposed. That fear, with time, became excitement.

Vimoksha returned as a Steward and completed his initial training, with a growing clarity that this path was not just valuable—but necessary. In the outside world, it became apparent how much effort was required to maintain clarity and purpose alone. At MAPLE, the structure of community and the demand for integrity reveal what is real and needed. He chooses to stay not because he must, but because of who he is becoming: a man who rises to meet what’s needed, who cannot hide from the truth, and who is willing to give himself fully to a life of depth, love, and awakening—for the benefit of all.

Gigen

What am I doing this with this life? WIth this breath? This?

Often it was drinking! Letting my body be ravished by seizures in-order to escape responsibility. Now I am looking for something to do with THIS that does not hurt me or others, but actually helps. Who knows how long I will live?

Far into the Wadi Rum in the land of Jordan, the beautiful flat red desert that reminds me of mars, the only light that was around was that of the stars and the fires lit by camp. My friend and our arabic teacher had gone on a walk hours before and much time passes without their return. Eventually I break and start freaking out. Not knowing what to do I runaway from camp, and fall to the ground and just pray. I prayed to Jesus, Muhammad, God, the angels whomever! And for some reason at the very end of the prayer I even said “Buddha.” I had not prayed for a long time and I just prayed because nothing else was possible. 10 minutes later my friends return and as soon as I see them I break down and feel how the prayer had an effect. This broke me even further and I just started sobbing and proclaiming to the stars “please… please…. let me be a servant.”

I didn’t know it then but that was one of my first encounters with realizing cause and effect, and compassion. My heart broke from the fear and gratitude and all that I could do was just aspire to serve. Here, now, at MAPLE years later, I am continuing that aspiration, that absolution demolition of heart and that genuine prayer. Everyday I am broken more and more and the servant abides clearer and clearer. Everyday MAPLE helps make sure the prayer continues, that it is genuine, and that I cannot ignore the horror/violence that befalls earth as we choose to be rather than to serve.

River

River hails from the pines of Western Massachusetts, where he grew up surrounded by nature, family, stories, and games. After studying international relations in college, he began teaching, coaching ultimate frisbee, and studying permaculture. His path serendipitously took him to Sogenji Monastery in 2023, where he was introduced to zazen through one month of practice and realized he knew very little about the nature of our mind.

During his stay at the Sirius Community in 2024, he met MAPLE’s mobile monastery tour and decided to visit MAPLE. River’s now returned to the student program because MAPLE brings together family, technology, and integrity of practice with the highest aspiration to meet the crisis of our age and realize the Path for the benefit of all beings. He is never far from a frisbee.