About
Holly Yang is a physician in hospice and palliative care at Scripps Health in San Diego, California, where she directs community-based palliative care services. She is Co-Director of the UCSD/Scripps Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship Program and an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSD. Yang completed her fellowship in hospice and palliative medicine at San Diego Hospice and the Institute for Palliative Medicine. She holds a Master of Science in Health Professions Education from Massachusetts General Hospital. Her teaching focuses on communication skills training, health professions education, and whole-person care for healthcare providers. She is affiliated with Upaya Zen Center.
Teaching focus
Yang'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. Yang 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. Yang'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
Holly Yang, MD 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 Yang has chosen to share there. Dr. Holly Yang provides hospice and palliative care services in the Scripps Health system in San Diego, California and serves as the Director of Community-Based Palliative Care for Scripps Health. She teaches medical and interdisciplinary trainees in Hospice and Palliative Medicine (HPM), and serves as the Scripps Co-Director for the UCSD/Scripps HPM Fellowship Program. She is also a voluntary Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Diego. Dr. Yang completed her fellowship in HPM at San Diego Hospice and the Institute for Palliative Medicine after her internal medicine residency at University of Minnesota. She received her Master of Science in Health Professions Education from the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Professions. She earned her BA and MD degrees through the Honors Program in Medical Education at Northwestern University. Her particular interests include: the intersection and integration of HPM with national and international health care systems, communication skills training, health professions education, and whole-person care for the healthcare provider. That body of work places Yang 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. Yang'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. Yang contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Yang'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
Yang'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. Yang 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 Yang's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Yang 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.
