About
Craig Manbauman is a Family Nurse Practitioner and United States Air Force veteran. He serves as faculty at the Yale School of Nursing and as Lead APRN Clinician for the FINGER program at LiveWell. Manbauman studies Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and contemplative traditions. In 2026, he joins the Being With Dying professional training program at Upaya Zen Center as a Collaborator and Intern. His work connects clinical medicine with contemplative practice, with particular attention to aging and end-of-life care.
Teaching focus
Manbauman'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. Manbauman 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. Manbauman'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
Craig Manbauman, FNP 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 Manbauman has chosen to share there. Craig Manbauman is a Family Nurse Practitioner and United States Air Force veteran who believes in the power of nursing as a driver for radical systems change. Currently serving as a faculty member at the Yale School of Nursing and Lead APRN Clinician for the Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability (FINGER) program at LiveWell, Craig operationalizes Yale’s Center for Aging Well’s goal of translating science into clinical practice and community action. In 2026, Craig returns to the Upaya Zen Center to join the Being With Dying professional training program as a Collaborator and Intern under the guidance of the Upaya team. This role deepens his study of Taoist, Socratic, and contemplative traditions, a journey that has taken him from the peaks of Huashan Mountain in China to the site of his primary care practice in New Haven, Connecticut. Whether through his research or his creative pursuits as a writer and poet, Craig remains a resolute seeker. He is committed to bridging the divide between evidence-based clinical medicine and the contemplative traditions that foster true connection and catharsis. By treating the human spirit with as much rigor as the human body, he is dedicated to building a future where healthcare finally feels like coming home. That body of work places Manbauman 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. Manbauman'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. Manbauman contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Manbauman'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
Manbauman'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. Manbauman contributes as part of Upaya's wider faculty rather than as a Zen priest. Information about specific dharma transmission lines, ordination, or external lineage roots belongs on Manbauman's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Manbauman 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.
