Bonnie Duran

Bonnie Duran, DrPH, is a mindfulness teacher, public health researcher, and Indigenous health scholar who is professor emeritus at the University of Washington, where she taught in the Schools of Social Work and Public Health and helped lead the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute. A longtime Buddhist mindfulness practitioner, she teaches insight (Vipassana) meditation and serves on the Guiding Teachers Council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and as a teacher with the Insight Meditation Society, with particular attention to making the practice accessible to people of color. She is best known for bringing together rigorous community-based research on Indigenous and minority health with a contemplative path centered on releasing intergenerational trauma. Below you'll find Bonnie Duran's practices and teachings shared on Mindfulness Exercises.

Duran earned a Master of Public Health and a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) from the University of California, Berkeley, completing her doctorate in 1997. Before joining the University of Washington in 2007 — where she became a full professor in 2017 — she led work on Native American health, including time directing the Center for Native American Health at the University of New Mexico. Across more than three decades, her research has focused on the public health of Indigenous communities, partnering with Tribes and organizations such as the Navajo Nation, the Indian Health Service, and the National Congress of American Indians, and she has been recognized as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Her contemplative training spans several traditions and decades of personal practice. In the early 1980s she sat a month-long retreat at Kopan Monastery in Nepal and trained in Vipassana with Christopher Titmuss in Bodh Gaya, India, before settling into long-term practice within the insight meditation community at Spirit Rock. After years of practice she was encouraged toward teaching by senior teachers in that lineage, and she now leads retreats and teaches within the Insight Meditation Society's teacher training and year-long programs.

Duran describes mindfulness and Vipassana as means of clarifying intention, supporting social-justice work grounded in compassion rather than reactivity, and releasing historical and intergenerational trauma held in the body. As an author, she co-wrote 'Native American Postcolonial Psychology' (1995) with Eduardo Duran, a work that draws on Native cosmology to address internalized oppression and intergenerational trauma — themes that continue to inform both her scholarship and her teaching.