How to Embody Kindness

Lessons from a lifetime of spiritual adventure

- By Stephen Kiesling. Photographs by Leila Rose Fanner

Willa Blythe Baker began meditating when she was eight years old and developed her practice through a pair of three-year meditation retreats to become a lama in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. She also earned a doctorate from Harvard and founded the Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston and the Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, New Hampshire. All that has led to an embodied practice called somatic mindfulness—a practice that wonderfully dovetails with what we know from modern neuroscience. Her marvelous new book is The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom.

Let’s start back in the late ’60s, in Berkeley, California, when your spiritual adventure began.

Well, it actually started earlier than that, in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-’60s. My dad was a professor at Reed College during the heyday of all the crazy psychedelic stuff. Our neighbor was kind of a cult figure, a legendary English professor who had these wild parties. We were tamer than he was, but still, my dad was pushing the envelope in his way, wearing a baja jacket and cowboy boots to class at a time when the dress code was a suit and tie.

When I was three, my parents divorced and my mother got a job at UC Berkeley. She was a professor of cell biology, and when I was eight we started Transcendental Meditation together. She took me down to the Berkeley Flats, where there was a TM center in a big old house converted into an ashram, populated by swamis in peach-colored robes. TM became kind of a mother/daughter thing.