Éowyn Ahlstrom grew up a stone’s throw from the then-emerging Insight Meditation Society. She left the area for college and spent about a decade traveling the world, searching for a way to live. Along the way, she first discovered meditation through the yoga tradition. To her happy surprise, the way of life she had been seeking turned out to be very close to home—at IMS, with the liberating practices of vipassana and metta meditation, and the profound wisdom of the early Buddhist teachings. Over the past two decades, she has attended many IMS retreats, both at the Retreat Center and the Forest Refuge, and has often led mindful movement sessions during retreats as well.
Éowyn has served as both a staff member and volunteer at IMS, and was honored to be authorized as a retreat teacher by the IMS guiding teachers after a mentoring process with Kamala Masters, Greg Scharf, and Bhikkhu Analayo. Her broader work has included developing programs and training MBSR teachers at Brown University; teaching community mindfulness, meditation, and yoga programs at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at the Cambridge Health Alliance; and teaching for many other organizations in the region, including IMS’ next door neighbor, the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. She loves both teaching and consulting with organizations to offer pragmatic guidance and support for integrating contemplative awareness into the complexities of 21st-century life.
Éowyn is also a poet and the author of Mindscapes: Practice Poems. In addition to her master’s degree in health and wellness, she has qualifications as a massage therapist, yoga teacher (E-RYT 500), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher, and Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) teacher. For more about her work and practice, please visit her website, Middle Path Healing Arts.
