About
Brooke Kaishin Barss (Hoshi) is a Buddhist chaplain and teacher affiliated with Upaya Zen Center. She graduated from Upaya's Chaplaincy Program in 2018 and was ordained as a Buddhist Chaplain by Roshi Joan Halifax in 2019. Before ordination, she worked as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst for over 30 years. She received the name Hoshi from Roshi Joan in 2022. Barss serves as a chaplaincy mentor and was a collegial leader in the Socially Engaged Buddhist Training program (2021–2023). She has worked with the Sisters of Mercy in Burlington, Vermont, and throughout New England. She is based in Biddeford, Maine.
Teaching focus
Barss'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. Barss 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. Barss'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
Brooke Kaishin Barss, Hoshi 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 Barss has chosen to share there. Hoshi Brooke Kaishin Barss graduated from Upaya’s Chaplaincy Program in 2018. Prior to her ordination as a Buddhist Chaplain by Roshi Joan Halifax in 2019, she practiced as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst for more than 30 years. Brooke was given Hoshi by Roshi Joan in 2022. During her chaplaincy training she began to serve the Sisters of Mercy in Burlington, Vermont, and continues to work with the Sisters throughout New England. Brooke serves as a chaplaincy mentor and was a collegial leader in the Socially Engaged Buddhist Training (SEBT) program (2021-2023). She considers her associations with Upaya and with the Sisters of Mercy two of the great blessings of her life. Brooke now lives in Biddeford, Maine, and loves being this close to the sea. That body of work places Barss 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. Barss'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. Barss contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Barss'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
Barss'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. Barss 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 Barss's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Barss 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.
