Mara

Nashville, TN

After the devastating loss of her son, Mara turned more deeply toward Buddhist practice, meditation, and Sangha to find a way through grief. Rather than trying to escape her suffering, she learned to meet it with compassion, loving-kindness, and equanimity. Inspired by the Buddha’s teachings on loss and the shared nature of suffering, Mara helped create a grief community where people could sit together, listen, and bear witness to one another’s pain. Her journey reveals how the Dharma does not necessarily take grief away—it can transform our relationship to it, allowing profound loss to become a source of connection, compassion, and service.

Experience

0-15 Years XP

Tradition

Theravada/Insight

Background

Mara, having emerged from alcohol rehab in 2012, found herself on a transformative journey towards Darva. Advised to incorporate meditation into her recovery, she stumbled upon Against the Stream Nashville three months sober. Initially, her ability to sit and meditate was severely limited, given the awakening of her neurological system after years of alcohol and drug use. However, a pivotal moment came during a talk by a teacher at the center that drew her into the world of Dharma.

The teacher spoke of the equality of sitting in various settings, emphasizing that one’s response to the conditions mattered more than the external environment. The concept of the second arrow was introduced—the idea that personal reactions shape the experience of suffering. Mara began to comprehend that her own resistance and aversion to experiences were the sources of her distress. The Dharma teachings revealed the significance of creating space between one’s experiences and thoughts.

In her glued-to-emotion past, there had been no room for reflection or choice. Against the Stream Meditation became Mara’s refuge, offering her the tools to detach from immediate reactivity and paving the way for a more mindful and intentional engagement with life.

For privacy reasons Vimeo needs your permission to be loaded.

Learn more

Mara’s story does not end with recovery or even with learning how to meditate. Her deeper journey is about what happens when Buddhist practice begins to reshape the way a person meets suffering, relationships, community, and the ordinary encounters of daily life.

In the full conversation, Mara reflects on how years of practice taught her to create space between difficult emotions and her instinctive reactions. She describes working with loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity as forms of deepening the practice—not simply ideas to contemplate, but qualities she continually tries to embody.

Her experience also reveals the profound importance of Sangha. Following the death of her son, Mara discovered that community could hold what she could not carry alone. Supported by her teacher, she helped form a grief group at Wild Heart Meditation Center, transforming her own personal adversity into an opportunity for connection and service. Her reflections offer an intimate look at how profound grief can coexist with compassion, and how a broken heart can become more open rather than more guarded.

Mara also explores the role of teachers, the relationship between mindfulness and the body, and the ways Dharma has influenced her work as a longtime martial artist. Perhaps most unexpectedly, she describes driving Uber as an extension of her practice—deliberately meeting people outside her social and political world and discovering how deeply practice can be integrated into everyday life.

Register to explore Mara’s complete profile and hear, in her own words, how recovery, grief, community, and Buddhist practice have shaped a life increasingly devoted to presence, connection, and service.