Meet Adam Gyokuzan Coutts

• Daily meditation practice since 1989
  
• Teaching meditation since 2002
  
• Lived for four years in Buddhist monasteries in America and Asia
  
• Deep experience in a wide range of Eastern and Western psychospiritual growth lineages

I am in my twenty-first year of helping seekers to open and deepen their concentration and mindfulness practices. I bring a quick mind and a wide array of knowledge to my responses to student’s questions. I also express a dry wit that keeps learning lively and a rapid insight that powerfully gets to the heart of student’s questions and provide individualized practices.

At the age of sixteen, as a confused and emotionally tangled kid, I began a path of growth, awareness, and healing by participating in psychotherapy and counseling groups. I also began years of heavy involvement with twelve-step programs, with their paradigm of letting go to a wider spiritual truth.

In 1989, having practiced Western forms of growth for a few years, I began both a daily meditation practice and a regular yoga practice, both of which I have maintained to this day. Both felt like revelations, opening up dimensions of depth and liberation that I did not even know were possible.  Since then, I have found a daily meditation practice to be an indispensable part of my mental health, something that keeps me able to focus and stay grounded, and to be central to my feeling of what existence is about.

As I began my meditation practice and study, I was immediately drawn to the teachings of master meditation teacher Shinzen Young.  In the years since, I have undertaken meditation facilitator/teacher training under his mentorship.

In 1992, I completed a degree in psychology, with honors, from University of California at Santa Cruz. I then began an interesting career as the statistical analyst for teams of researchers investigating methods to improve drug abuse and alcoholism treatment.

In 1994, I sat my first ten-day meditation retreat, an experience I found to be challenging, but which also left me with a sense of clarity, openness, insight, and peace. I suddenly was able to intentionally focus and be aware of deeper currents in life than I had been able to before.  I have since sat over seventy seven- to ten-day retreats, and continue to find them challenging and rewarding.

In early 1996, I went deeper still, diving into the unknown and living for a seven-week stretch in a monastery as a Zen Buddhist monk. Since then, I have spent four years living as a monk in Buddhist monasteries in America and Asia, including five ninety-day Zen meditation intensives at the Tassajara Zen monastery and long-term residence in several other Zen monasteries.

In 1998, I began sewing a ceremonial garment for lay ordination in the Soto Zen tradition, with the Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, Ryoshin Paul Haller, officiating. I am proud to say that my ordination name, Gyokuzan, means “Mountain of the Sacred Triple Jewels” in Japanese.  The “Sacred Triple Jewels” are Buddha (liberated consciousness), Dharma (liberated teachings and truths), and Sangha (liberated community).

Around this time, I also became involved as an early pioneer in the process of developing “Circling“, a form of transformational authentic interpersonal relating that I have have stayed involved with developing as it has grown to worldwide presence in the years since.  The depth, presence, and intimacy of this work informs both my teaching and my general relating.

In 2002, at the persistent request of friends, I presented the inaugural eight-week “Meditation: A Journey of Depth and Liberation” meditation class, which was a nerve racking but wonderful experience. In the years since, I have taught twenty eight-week sections of the course, helping hundreds of people to open and deepen their experience of being alive through the practice of Buddhist meditation, and getting better at teaching each time through. Overall, I have found teaching meditation to be the most meaningful and fulfilling activity of my life.

In 2006, I began teaching meditation and yoga in the San Francisco County Jail, working through the Prison Meditation Network, which was interesting and rewarding. And in 2008, I completed a colorful and deep training program in personal coaching and transformational course leading (known as the “Transformational Leadership and Coaching Training” program), which provided me with more skills to help facilitate the growth and unfolding of people. I have also developed similar skills that assist people in opening and thriving through years of experience as a leader in a number of different men’s circles over the past twenty-five years, and through years of study of the discipline of Nonviolent Communication with its creator Marshall Rosenberg.

In late 2008, I left to travel on a two-year pilgrimage of exploration, living and practicing in seventeen different monasteries and ashrams located in California, New Mexico, Colorado, Thailand, India, and Japan. At these centers, I practiced meditation and other spiritual practices in various lineages of liberation: Zen Buddhism, Vipassana/Theravada Buddhism, Tibetan/Vajrayana Buddhism, and Hinduism/Advaita/yoga.

Since returning to the United States in 2010, I have continued with my teaching in the forms of:

• Leading weekly and monthly online sitting groups self-produced on Zoom
• Phone trainings through Shinzen Young’s Home Practice Program
• Leading live and online weekly sitting groups for corporate employee bodies, with over 15,000 participants so far
• Leading webinars for corporate employee bodies on such topics as “Mindfulness for the Office Workday”, “Mindfulness and ADHD”, “Mindful Driving”, “Spacious Interpersonal Presence”, “Mindfulness for Holiday Stress”, “Introduction to Meditation”, “Mindful Grief”, and more
• Recordings for the Insight Timer Website/Phone App
• Working with clients one-on-one
• Self-produced eight-week introduction courses
• Leading weekly online sitting groups through the Within meditation corporation
• Leading live monthly sitting groups at the Liberation Institute in San Francisco and the East Bay Healing Collective in Berkeley
• Leading thirty-five classes to over 1,200 participants over eight different years at the Burning Man festival
• Providing mindfulness experiences as part of corporate team wellness days

I have also completed level two “Pathways” teacher training with the Unified Mindfulness company, and am a certified UM trainer.

I am excited to bring “Depth and Liberation” courses to people interested in exploring meditation as a path towards greater depth and liberation in their daily lives. I love to meditate, I love to teach meditation, and I love to share with others the gifts that I have received from the practice of meditation.