Meet the Speakers
On its Fourth year, the annual Be Wise, Go Kind Online Retreat changes format to an interconnected series of six conversations with authors, artists, explorers, storytellers, and more. Below you can find a brief intro to each of them.
Mitra Mark Power
Mark has over 30 years of experience supporting, training and coaching people to bring their lives into alignment with their most important values. He is a longtime student of the Buddha’s teachings, studying with his teacher, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, since the early 1990s. Like so many, he came to this path seeking to engage a larger, kinder, more playful sense of being.
Laura Simms’ accolades and accomplishments are simply too lengthy to list in their entirety, but the heart of the award-winning storyteller, recording artist, author, dharma teacher, and international humanitarian’s storied career can be summed up in three words: compassion in action.
Laura Simms
Born and raised in eastern Bhutan, Acharya Tashi moved to Rumtek Monastery in Sikkim, India, at the age of 15. While there, he studied for ten years and graduated from Karma Shri Nalanda Institute, the principal Karma Kagyu monastic college. After his graduation, Acharya Tashi assumed teaching responsibilities for the Karma Kagyu lineage in Hong Kong before returning to Rumtek Monastery to teach at the college from which he graduated. Read more…
Acharya Lama Tenpa Gyaltsen
Chapman To
From a being a gangster in Hong Kong to playing one as a celebrated film actor, from seeking a Buddhist blessing for his career to teaching meditation, from being blacklisted for activism to surviving a deadly illness — with stops along the way as a radio personality, film producer, and businessman — Chapman To is full of surprises and no stranger to adversity and success. Yet humor and joy pepper all his conversations. In his own words, said with a twinkle in his eye, no matter what he does, he’s always in trouble.
Mimi Zhu
Mimi Zhu is a queer Chinese–Australian author, writer, and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. They explore the intersections of love and fear through the healing power of the written word in essays in The New York Times, The Guardian and VICE among others, Instagram, and their debut book, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy and Connection, published in 2022 by Penguin Life.Â
As a young child growing up in northern Arizona, artist Seffa Klein (b.1996) would gaze at the star-studded night sky with a deep sense of wonder. As a student at UCLA, she studied astrophysics and art, recognizing the inherent harmony that exists between the two disciplines. As a professional artist, her multidisciplinary practice includes paintings composed with elemental metals, sculptures built with her SK Brick, drawing, installation, writing, and music.Â
Seffa Klein
Matt Fioretti
As an alpine climber of the world’s highest peaks, and as a survivor of the depths of a life-threatening diagnosis, Matt Fioretti has traveled many paths in life, some more arduous than others, yet as he recounts his story, the experience of awe is clearly evident and deeply inspiring to all who have heard or read about it.
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