About
Iréne Kaigetsu Bakker is a Zen priest and Dharma successor of Joan Jiko Halifax Roshi, trained in the White Plum Sangha tradition since the mid-1980s. Based in the Netherlands, she founded Zen Spirit in 2004 and teaches annually at Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico. Bakker is known for teaching in the areas of death and dying, and Being with Dying practice. She has worked as a family and systems therapist in cancer care, end-of-life care, and psychiatry, and trained mindfulness instructors in MBSR methodology.
Teaching focus
Bakker'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. Bakker 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. Bakker'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
Iréne Kaigetsu Bakker, Roshi 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 Bakker has chosen to share there. Irène Kaigetsu Kyojo Bakker is a certified Zen teacher from the Netherlands, a Zen priest and Dharma successor of Joan Jiko Halifax Roshi. She has been a student of Zen in the White Plum Sangha tradition since the mid-80s. Irène Sensei first met Roshi Joan Halifax in Auschwitz in 1996 and they had a strong connection. Irène Sensei then became involved in Upaya’s Zen training and Being with Dying training. In 2004, Roshi Joan asked her to continue her training on death and dying in Europe. Since many years Sensei has been coming to Upaya Zen Center once a year to teach. In Holland Sensei Irène serves as teacher for Zen Spirit, which she founded in 2004. As family and systems therapist, she worked with people with cancer, end of life care, in psychiatry, and private therapy practice. As a mindfulness trainer she taught future MBSR trainers at the College / School for Social Work in Utrecht, Netherlands. That body of work places Bakker 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. Bakker'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. Bakker contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Bakker'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
Bakker'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. Bakker 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 Bakker's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Bakker 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.
