Gaylon Ferguson, PhD is the author of a Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With. He is a member of the core faculty at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and has led meditation retreats since 1976. His article, “Making Friends with Ourselves,” was selected for inclusion in The Best Buddhist Writing 2005. His essay “No Color, All Colors” appears in the book Mindful Politics.
As a youth, he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and studied philosophy and psychology at Yale University. There, Ferguson encountered Zen master D.T. Suzuki, who confirmed “that it’s not possible to learn Buddhist meditation entirely from a book.” Gaylon dropped his studies and took up work on a radical Catholic fruit farm near Kalamazoo, Michigan.
He continued his Buddhist studies and practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and eventually returned to Yale in 1987 to finish his undergraduate degree, this time in African Studies. In 1994, he was a Fulbright Fellow to Nigeria and completed a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology at Stanford University two years later. After several years teaching cultural anthropology at the University of Washington, Ferguson moved to Karmê Chöling, a Shambhala meditation center in Vermont, as teacher in residence through 2005. He joined the faculty at Naropa in 2006.
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