DEBORAH EDEN TULL

DEBORAH EDEN TULL, founder of Mindful Living Revolution, teaches the integration of compassionate awareness into every aspect of our lives, bridging personal and collective awakening in an age of global change. She is an engaged Buddhist teacher, spiritual activist, author, eco-dharma educator, and facilitator of The Work That Reconnects, a field created by Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy for transforming our love and pain for our world into compassionate action. 

Eden teaches dharma intertwined with post-patriarchal thought and practices, resting upon a lived knowledge of our unity with the more than human world. She has practiced meditation for 30 years and  trained for seven and a half years as a Buddhist monk at the Zen Monastery Peace Center, a silent Zen monastery in the Sierra foothills. She has been teaching for over 20 years. 

Eden has written 3 books in compassionate response to the ecological, social, and spiritual crises of our times. Eden’s first book, The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide for the Sustainable Food Revolution (Process Media), was published in September 2010 and her second book, Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Ourselves, Each Other, and the Planet, was published by Wisdom Publications in May 2018. Her newest book, Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown, was released by Shambhala Publications in September 2022. 

Eden’s teaching emphasizes relational presence, acknowledging the personal, interpersonal, intrapersonal, transpersonal, societal, ecological, mystical, and global impacts of embodied dharma. She has worked with a wide range of audiences, from dharma students and spiritual teachers to those practicing or teaching secular mindfulness, to concerned citizens, activists, leaders, and change agents, to parents, schools, inner city youth, nonprofits, corporations, and people who are incarcerated. 

Eden taught for many years with UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, and has been collaborating with Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers since 2012, on the topics of Regenerative Leadership, Women’s Leadership, and Sacred Activism. She is also a member of the national Eco-Dharma Advisory Committee of Buddhist teachers and leaders in the eco-dharma movement. 

Eden has a special gift for facilitating mindful inquiry and fierce compassion, and bridging personal, ancestral, and collective healing. Weaving dharma with her embodiment of animism, deep ecology, shadow work, somatic awareness, ancestral healing, and conscious movement/dance, she helps people release limiting beliefs and collective biases that have been passed down over generations. She draws upon her own experience of navigating loss, illness, and trauma, guiding people to embrace the mystery and celebrate the value and alchemy of light and darkness as teachers of love. 

Having lived in or taught about sustainable communities and organic gardening/permaculture for decades, Eden weaves the essential wisdom of nature into everything she teaches. She currently resides in the mountains of western North Carolina, originally Cherokee land, with her husband Mark. She offers retreats, workshops, and consultations nationally and internationally, integrating presence and partnership with nature. 

Eden feels that the most important aspect of being a teacher is continually being a student. She continually immerses herself in trainings and retreats, recognizing direct experience as our truest guide. She works closely with mentor Pam Weiss, author of A Bigger Sky: Awakening a Fierce Feminine Buddhism, to deepen her embodiment of Soto Zen Buddhism in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi.

Please read on for more, in Eden’s own words.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS FROM EDEN

“Every day, priests minutely examine the Law and endlessly chant complicated sutras. Before doing that, though, they should learn how to read the love letters sent by the wind. And the rain, the snow and moon.” - Ikkyu

Most of my life has been an inquiry into how to be of service in an age of global uncertainty, and how to inspire others to do the same. This past year I turned 50 and have been feeling appreciation for the wisdom of my younger self, who paved the way for my path and built the foundation for my life’s work at a young age. Heartbroken by the state of the world my generation has inherited and passionate about asking big questions, I have always sought outside-the-box teachers and visionaries who take us beyond the mind of separation and limitation, whether in the area of Buddhist practice, earth-based spirituality, ecological restoration, or social justice. My journey has taken me from city to farm and back many times, to intentional earth-based communities, to life as a Zen Buddhist monk, and now to life as a lay teacher and author who has learned through experience to build bridges between ancient tradition and creative forms of teaching and guiding transformation.

I was raised in a family of activists, artists, and free thinkers who inspired a life of curiosity and of questioning the dominant paradigm. My experience growing up in a family dedicated to social justice and community engagement instilled a love of service and a constant tenderness in my heart towards the grave challenges we all face today. It also inspired a recognition of the power of community as medicine for the individualism and powerlessness that is pervasive in the dominant paradigm. While I was raised in the city of Los Angeles, my grandparents and parents nourished my love for the wilderness and kinship with the more-than-human world throughout my childhood. This seeded the intersection between presence, partnership with nature, service, and sacred activism that is the core of my work. I am grateful to my family and my ancestors for the gifts they passed down to me - including both the light and the shadow. 

I also acknowledge - with respect - my personal experiences of grief, trauma, loss, and illness that have woven through this life. They have affirmed for me, continually, that both light and dark are our teachers, helping us to recognize that love is all we are here for. They have affirmed for me that our greatest strength is our vulnerability. Through dharma practice, the adversities I have faced have required me to continually reach far beyond the conditioned guidebook we are each given into the domain of curiosity, not knowing, inquiry, and the willingness to turn towards the whole of our human experience. This has nourished an unwavering faith in the capacity of the human heart for clear seeing, healing, and resiliency. This has nurtured a regenerative well of wonder towards what is possible when we bring our hearts together to meet our collective challenges.

At the age of 18, I began a daily meditation practice. That same year, I learned the art of organic gardening, farming, and permaculture. As my learning progressed, I began to recognize clear and subtle overlaps between these two compassionate disciplines for presence and partnership with nature. Putting my bare hands in the soil has been a source of truth and joy for me since then. I've studied organic farming with John Jeavons of Ecology Action and at such places as Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, California; at Arcosanti, a visionary urban ecology project in the Arizona desert where I co-operated the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture); as well as at the Zen monastery where I trained. At Hampshire College in the early 1990s, I created a self-designed major called Ecology, Community, and Social Change: Design for a Sustainable Future and wrote my thesis on Urban Gardening for Youth in Low-Income Communities. During this time I was supported to travel around the world for a full year focusing on intentional earth-based communities.

As the years progressed, I began to recognize that so many of the solutions humanity seeks already exist in the intelligent matrix of the natural world - but that the human ego seems to so often get in the way. I recognized the need for an embodied practice that re-awakens us to interbeing and holds us accountable to engaging in our world from the joyful responsibility of interdependence. This was, ultimately, what inspired me to become a Zen Buddhist monk at the age of 26, and to dedicate the rest of my life to finding creative ways to help people embody relational presence. And I began to humbly understand that spiritual maturity requires us to hold our shared challenges in deep listening, spaciousness, and discomfort resiliency, and the mind of "I don't know" rather than through binary perception or seeking conclusions.

When I exited the monastery after seven and one-half years, seeking direction, I asked Life to use me in service to healing. This path has taken the form of teaching dharma and leading retreats, writing books, guiding conscious movement/dance and community rituals in partnership with nature, and the founding of a non-profit organization. This has taken the form of marrying my beloved and becoming a steward of the land on which we live. This has taken the form of continuing to be a student  and allowing my practice to unfold and evolve in fresh ways, recognizing the importance of stepping outside the teacher's seat in order to remember who and what we are beyond roles and concepts. And this has taken the form of continuing to ask clear and emergent questions about what it means to live in loving service - particularly as the polycrisis we face continues to unfold in ways that feel increasingly overwhelming.  

What I am continually clear about is that we can only hold our global challenges and collective trauma together...and that the role of a good teacher is to affirm the space that affirms clear-seeing and emergent vision amidst division.

Through love of service, I feel a sincere commitment to making this work accessible and available to anyone who feels the call. You can learn about ways to get involved here.

Thanks to Jess Hopkins for the portraits of Eden.