Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg has served in multiple capacities in the Jewish community — including Hillel director, day school teacher and community relations professional. She is a 1986 graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and has served as a congregational rabbi for seventeen years, including thirteen years at the Jewish Community of Amherst. In the past twenty-four years, Rabbi Weinberg has studied mindfulness. She has introduced meditation into the Jewish world as a form that can enliven and illuminate Jewish practice, ideas and community. She teaches mindfulness meditation and yoga in a Jewish idiom to laypersons, rabbis, cantors and other Jewish professionals, and was a founder and senior teacher for the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, a retreat- based program for Jewish leaders. She also serves as a spiritual director to rabbis, cantors and educators across the U.S. She is a developer and teacher of the Jewish Mindfulness Teachers’ Training. Weinberg has written extensively on a variety of subjects including Jewish spirituality, social justice, feminism, and parenting. She is a major contributor to the “Kol Haneshamah” prayerbook series. Her CD, “Preparing the Heart: Meditation for Jewish Spiritual Practice,” integrates Jewish sacred text and meditation. Her first book, “Surprisingly Happy: An Atypical Religious Memoir,” was published in 2010.

Buddhist Author and Teacher

Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel has studied and practiced the Buddhadharma for 30 years under the guidance of her teacher and husband Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. Elizabeth is known for her willingness to question the entire path in order to reach a place of genuine practice and awakening. She asks audiences to engage in the practice of open questioning with her while she takes a fresh look at all the assumptions and beliefs we have about spirituality. Audiences repeatedly comment on how this approach has reinvigorated their meditation practice and the way they relate to their lives as a whole. She is the author of “The Power of an Open Question,” and her new book, “The Logic of Faith,” is coming out in 2018.

Alan ‘Abd al-Haqq Godlas, PhD, is authorized to teach Sufi contemplative practice in the Shadhili tradition of Sidi Shaykh Muhammad al-Jamal of Jerusalem and the naqshbandi tradition of Hazret Ibrahim Jan of Kokand, Uzbekistan. He has been practicing both American and traditional Islamic forms of Sufism since 1973. First initiated into Sufism in the Chishti tradition of Hazrat Inayat Khan through the lineage of Murshid Sam Lewis, Dr. Godlas subsequently encountered the naqshbandi-Shattari Sufi way, as taught by Idris Shah, through study under Dr. Claudio naranjo. From 1974 to 1977, he lived and practiced in the nimatullahi Sufi center in Tehran. He received his PhD, concentrating in Islamic Studies and Sufism, from the University of California–Berkeley in 1991, and began teaching as a professor of Religion, Islamic Studies, and Arabic at the University of Georgia. In addition to teaching at numerous Sufi and Islamic venues, he has taught and lectured about contem- plative Sufi practice at the Sivananda Yoga ashram in the Bahamas as well as at the Tibetan Buddhist Mangalam Center in Berkeley. His current research investigates resources of the world’s religions (in particular, Islam) for enhancing emotional intelligence. as a part of this work, Dr. Godlas became autho- rized to test emotional intelligence by David Caruso of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He has delivered scholarly papers about Sufism in 14 countries, including Turkey, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, egypt and Morocco. Dr. Godlas’ website, “Sufism, Sufis, and Sufi orders: Sufism’s Many Paths” is the leading comprehensive academic website for Sufism.

Mohammed Hamid Mohammed is a senior program officer at the Fetzer Institute. Trained in the humanities, social science, and human-computer interaction, Mohammed is a philanthropy professional with decades of experience leading research, technology development, and programmatic projects around the world. He has worked in the academic and the corporate sectors before transitioning to philanthropy.