Mark Coleman

Mark Coleman has been engaged in meditation practice since 1981, primarily within the Insight meditation (Buddhist) tradition. He has been teaching meditation retreats since 1997. His teaching is also influenced by his studies with Advaita Vedanta and Tibetan teachers in Asia and the West, and through his teacher training with Jack Kornfield. Mark primarily teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California, though he also teaches nationally, in Europe and India.

He leads backpacking retreats, nature-based retreats, and teaches retreats for environmental activists in the wilderness at Vallecitos Mountain Refuge in New Mexico, and at Knoll Farm in Vermont. In the Bay Area, Mark has a counseling practice, where he integrates his studies of psychotherapy and meditative work. He is the author of “Awake in the Wild - Mindfulness in Nature as a path of Self-Discovery", published by Inner Ocean Publishing, November 2006. Mark has been an avid hiker, and backpacker for most of his life and spends much of his time in the outdoors. He lives in the woods in Marin County, Northern California.

He may be reached via email at info@awakeinthewild.com .


Vocation to solitude is to deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, to trust completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land, and fills its silences with light, to pray and work in the morning, and to labor and rest in the afternoon and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when silence fills itself with darkness and with stars. This is a true and special vocation. - Merton

- Merton