About
Breeshia Wade is a grief educator and author of Grieving While Black: An Anti-racist Take on Oppression and Sorrow. She completed lay ordained Zen Buddhist end-of-life caregiver training through Upaya Zen Center and worked five years in hospital and hospice end-of-life care while engaged in racial justice work. Wade teaches about grief as a lens for understanding impermanence, desire, and relationships. She has led workshops at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Washington.
Teaching focus
Wade's teaching at Upaya sits inside the center's Soto Zen container. The basic form is zazen, just sitting, with the posture and breath held lightly and the mind allowed to settle without force. Around that core, Upaya's programs build out a wider arc that includes the Bodhisattva precepts, oryoki meal practice, walking meditation (kinhin), dharma talks, and the GRACE framework Roshi Joan developed for clinicians working at the bedside. Wade teaches inside that framework, which means the work isn't just on the cushion. Students are asked to bring practice into the spaces where it actually gets tested: at the bedside, in conversation, in moments of grief or political reactivity, in the long, slow work of climate and justice. Upaya's approach is recognizable for its refusal to keep zazen and the world in separate boxes. The cushion and the clinic, the cushion and the kitchen, the cushion and the protest line are all treated as the same field of practice, not different ones. Wade's contribution stays in that key. Teaching sessions emphasize uprightness, attention, and the Bodhisattva vow as something lived in specific situations rather than recited as an idea. There's room for silence. There's also room for hard conversations about what practice asks of a person in a world under pressure.
Background
Breeshia Wade appears in Upaya Zen Center's teacher and faculty roster as part of the wider contemplative community Roshi Joan Halifax has gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over the past four decades. The biographical material on file is drawn directly from Upaya's own teacher page and reflects what Wade has chosen to share there. I am a Grief Expert and the author of Grieving While Black: An Anti-racist Take on Oppression and Sorrow, available in stores nationwide. I received my B.A from Stanford University and completed my M.A at the University of Chicago. I also completed training as a lay ordained Zen Buddhist end-of-life caregiver via Upaya Zen Center. I spent five years working in end-of-life care via hospitals and hospice while actively being involved in racial justice work. I use my role as an end-of-life caregiver to encourage those who are not facing illness, death or dying to be open to what grief can teach them about desire, life and relationships. My goal is to break open my clients’ conception of grief beyond concrete, past loss to recognize the ways that fear of impermanence drives every aspect of their lives. I’ve given workshops at institutions and companies across the country, including Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Washington. That body of work places Wade inside a center known for blending Soto Zen practice with contemplative care for the dying, climate work, neuroscience dialogues, and a long-running program for clinicians and chaplains called GRACE. Upaya's roster mixes resident priests with visiting scholars, doctors, scientists, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders, and the programs reflect that blend. Wade's appearances at Upaya situate this work inside that wider conversation between zazen and the world it sits inside. For practitioners who arrive at Upaya through a sesshin or a Being with Dying training, the common thread is a posture of upright, alert presence under whatever conditions show up. The forms are recognizably Soto Zen: zazen, kinhin, oryoki, the Bodhisattva precepts, dharma talks, and dokusan with senior teachers. The framing is wider than any single discipline, which is part of what has made Upaya a meeting ground for working clinicians, scientists, artists, and long-time Buddhist practitioners. Wade contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Wade's career outside Upaya can follow the linked website and external publications listed on the Upaya page itself, which is where any deeper biographical detail belongs.
Lineage
Wade's teaching home for the work documented here is Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, founded by Roshi Joan Halifax in the 1980s and rooted in the Soto Zen lineage. Upaya's broader faculty includes resident priests, visiting senior teachers, scientists, clinicians, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders. Wade teaches in the Soto Zen lineage as a priest within that container. Information about specific dharma transmission lines, ordination, or external lineage roots belongs on Wade's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Wade at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms held alongside teaching focused on contemplative care for the dying, grief, and serious illness. Many of these programs draw on Upaya's Being with Dying curriculum and the GRACE framework Roshi Joan developed for clinicians. There's room for personal experience and difficult emotion, held inside the container of practice rather than processed away. The schedule is recognizable as Zen: sittings, walking, meals, talks, and time for questions. Quiet is taken seriously. Most participants leave with both a steadier practice and a more honest relationship with mortality.
