Hugh Byrne
Hugh Byrne, PhD, a guiding teacher with the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (IMCW), has practiced meditation for thirty years and taught mindfulness meditation since 2000. He completed a four-year meditation teacher-training program with Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and other senior Insight Meditation teachers and completed a three-year training in Somatic Experiencing, a mind-body approach to healing trauma.
Hugh is the lead meditation teacher of the Garrison Institute’s Contemplative-Based Resilience (CBR) training for Syrian refugee aid workers in Jordan. He is one of four co-founders of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute and serves as a mentor and guide for mindfulness teachers in the U.S. He is the author of The Here-and-Now Habit, a book that focuses on how to use mindfulness to change unhealthy habits. Hugh teaches classes, including Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, retreats and workshops in the Washington, DC, area and throughout the United States and internationally. Hugh has a law degree from London University and a Ph.D. from UCLA and worked for more than two decades in the field of human rights and social justice.
Rebecca Hines
Rebecca lives with deep appreciation for the healing power of awareness available right here in our body, in every moment, that opens up space for greater freedom, choice, presence and grace.
The heart of her practice is creating continuity of awareness from ‘on the cushion’ to ‘off the cushion’— a clear path for continuous exploration of dancing with life — the dance of work-life balance, relationships, health challenges, aging, and bringing wise action to the challenges facing the world.
She began practicing Insight (vipassana) meditation in 2000 with Tara Brach, founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington. Over the years she continues to be influenced by many teachers including Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, Frank Ostaseski, Dipa Ma, Ruth King, Gil Fronsdal, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Marshall Rosenberg, creator of Non-violent Communication (NVC), and her partner Hugh Byrne, among many.
Inspired by the flexibility, adaptability and power of these practices, she completed training in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in 2006 and started teaching MBSR in 2007 in the Washington DC area. She is a teacher locally with the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and is on the faculty of the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program offered by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach where she mentors and trains participants in mindfulness-based teaching and deepening practice. Rebecca also is a teacher with Cloud Sangha, a virtual practice community.
As a life-long learner, she has completed numerous trainings in addition to MBSR, including: Spirit Rock’s two-year Heavenly Messengers–Awakening Through Illness, Aging, and Death program, Spirit Rock’s Year to Live program, Spirit Rock’s Mindful Yoga and Meditation Training Program, the two-year Meditation Teacher Training program led by Tara Brach, Hugh Byrne, Jonathan Faust and Pat Coffey, and numerous Non-violent Communication (NVC) trainings and retreats. She earned a Masters in Health Science from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a BA from Wellesley College in psychology and certification in holistic health counseling from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.