About
Dorotea Mendoza is a writer and Zen practitioner based in Brooklyn. She practices with Upaya Zen Center and has assisted in sit, walk, write retreats with Natalie Goldberg. She has facilitated online meditation and writing workshops through Upaya with Sensei Kozan. Her work focuses on Socially Engaged Buddhism and intersections between Zen practice and social activism. She is involved with Buddhist organizing groups addressing militarism, gender-based violence, and trafficking.
Teaching focus
Mendoza'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. Mendoza 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. Mendoza'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
Dorotea Mendoza 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 Mendoza has chosen to share there. Dorotea Mendoza is a writer, community organizer, and Zen practitioner. Though she mostly writes fiction, and loves the flash form, she has also written essays on social activism and Socially Engaged Buddhism. She has worked with women’s organizations in the US and in the Philippines around issues such as militarism, sex trafficking, domestic and gender-based violence. She currently organizes with Black Breath Sits, the Buddhist Action Coalition, and Sari-Sari Women of Color Arts Coup. Earlier this year she facilitated Inside Out: Sitting, Writing, and Being Fully in this World (Online 2022), through Upaya with Sensei Kozan. She has visited Upaya a number of times, as assistant to Natalie Goldberg in sit, walk, write retreats. Dorotea was born in the Philippines and grew up in New York City. She now lives in Brooklyn with her partner Matthew and 53 house plants. You can find her at www.doroteamendoza.com. That body of work places Mendoza 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. Mendoza'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. Mendoza contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Mendoza'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
Mendoza'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. Mendoza 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 Mendoza's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Mendoza at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms paired with teaching in Mendoza's own area of focus. Days follow Upaya's rhythm of sittings, walking meditation, meals, talks, and time for questions. Silence is taken seriously, but so are the conversations that come out of it. The framing is wide enough for people from outside Buddhist practice to take part fully. Long-time Zen students will recognize the forms; newcomers will be supported through them. Expect to leave with a clearer sense of how practice meets the specific subject Mendoza is teaching.
