Anna Douglas, considered one of Spirit Rock Meditation Heart’s founding lecturers and the founding father of Perception Meditation Tucson, died Wednesday, March 12, 2025 following “a gradual decline, largely because of superior Parkinson’s.” She was 85.
Douglas taught courses and retreats within the Perception Meditation custom for greater than 40 years, in addition to retreats spanning topics of mindfulness, yoga, ladies’s knowledge, getting older, and creativity.
“She was fairly able to die and for the following journey, as inquisitive about what was on the opposite facet as she was about the whole lot in her life,” Spirit Rock founding trainer Howard Cohn wrote in a tribute to Douglas revealed on the Spirit Rock web site.
“She was all the time pondering exterior the field and taking us all alongside along with her,” Cohn continues. “Her inventive spirit introduced artwork to our retreats, together with applications for ladies and getting older. Earlier than it was central to our mission, she was obsessed with variety and increasing our welcoming neighborhood.”
Within the mid-eighties, Douglas was considered one of 5 dharma college students invited to particpate in Jack Kornfield’s first trainer coaching cohort. In 1988, Spirit Rock Meditation Heart opened on 411 acres of undeveloped land within the San Geronimo Valley of Marin County, about forty-five minutes from San Francisco, with the cohort as founding lecturers.
In a 2018 instructing titled “Using the Waves of Change” revealed by Spirit Rock, Douglas mirrored on the inevitabilty of getting older and dying, writing:
“This very life we live is a short lived occasion — we will definitely die, however the time of our dying and the way we die is just not identified to us or to anybody. Within the midst of such uncertainty, what’s our refuge? If now we have included impermanence as an object of our consciousness observe, our personal thoughts’s equanimity as we journey the waves of change will likely be our refuge, revealing a deeper supply of true satisfaction and peace.”
“She was a talented and beloved trainer, little question the fruit of her depth and breadth of observe,” Cohn writes in his tribute. “By all of it, her intelligence, fast wit, humor, and infectious chortle, proper up till the tip, will ceaselessly reverberate in our hearts.”
Learn Howard Cohn’s full tribute to Douglas on the Spirit Rock web site and discover her teachings of their Dharma Library.