About
Monika L. Son is an Assistant Professor and Chair of the SEEK Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She holds training in psychology and works as a facilitator and teacher. With twenty years in higher education, Son integrates mindfulness and contemplative practices into her teaching and scholarly work. She is affiliated with Upaya Zen Center. Her focus includes critical dialogue on race, power, and oppression, restorative and embodied pedagogies, and strategies addressing internalized oppression.
Teaching focus
Son'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. Son 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. Son'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
Monika L. Son 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 Son has chosen to share there. Monika L. Son is an Assistant Professor, Chair and Director of the Percy Ellis Sutton SEEK Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. A self- proclaimed rejector of roles and categories, Dr. Son is known for walking to the beat of her own drum. Guided by heart-spirit, the ancestors, and palpable connections to suffering in the world, her calling has been grounded in finding ways to be free from the conditions of oppression to discover paths to self- realization, connection to the world and radical love. She is an embodied mind, body, spirit teacher, healer, coach, truth-teller and a fierce loving warrior-leader. With 20 years of experience in higher education as a justice-centered scholar-practitioner and teacher, Dr. Son integrates mindfulness and contemplative practices to foster spaces for building community, compassionate engagement and healing oriented strategies that cultivate presence, critical inquiry and action. As a trained psychologist and expert facilitator, she is skilled at supporting discomfort and ambiguity in challenging dialogues about race, power, privilege, and oppression. In her current role as Chair, she is co-building curricular strategies that center on resourcing resilience and undoing the impact of oppressive and racist pedagogy via critical methodologies such as contemplative, embodied, restorative, and Freirean approaches. She is most passionate about building strategies that support the undoing of internalized oppression and movement towards transformative change. That body of work places Son 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. Son'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. Son contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Son'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
Son'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. Son 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 Son's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Son at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms paired with teaching in Son'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 Son is teaching.
