About
Jill Genki De La Hunt practices in the Zen tradition and is affiliated with Upaya Zen Center. She received precepts from Thich Nhat Hanh in 1991 and lay ordination with Roshi Joan Halifax at Upaya. De La Hunt is a graduate of Upaya's Buddhist chaplaincy training program. Her professional background includes work as an attorney in tribal sovereignty and environmental law. She currently works as a hospice social worker and bereavement counselor with experience in crisis work, addiction recovery, and somatic trauma healing. She serves as a practice guide and volunteer chaplain.
Teaching focus
Hunt'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. Hunt 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. Hunt'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
Jill Genki De La Hunt 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 Hunt has chosen to share there. As a seeking young person, Jill practiced with a small zen sangha in Anchorage, AK. She first received precepts with the Venerable Thich Nhat Hahn in 1991. She is deeply grateful to have found her way almost twenty years ago to Upaya and Roshi Joan’s teaching. Jill was fortunate to participate in the 2006 Nomads Clinic and pilgrimage in Kham, Tibet. She is a graduate of Upaya’s Buddhist chaplaincy training program and has received Jukai and chaplain lay ordination with Roshi. Professionally, Jill worked as an attorney in the areas of tribal sovereignty and environmental law. She currently works as a hospice social worker and bereavement counselor with a background in crisis work, addiction recovery, and somatic trauma healing. Jill also serves as a practice guide in her local sangha and as a volunteer chaplain. She is committed to an engaged practice path of collective liberation through social/environmental justice, racial equity, and unraveling systems and conditioning of white supremacy. That body of work places Hunt 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. Hunt'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. Hunt contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Hunt'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
Hunt'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. Hunt 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 Hunt's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Hunt 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.
