About
Natalie Goldberg is a writer and Zen practitioner affiliated with Upaya Zen Center in northern New Mexico. She has practiced Zen for fifty years. Goldberg is the author of sixteen books, including Writing Down the Bones (two million copies sold, translated into twenty languages), Long Quiet Highway (a memoir about her Zen teacher), Three Simple Lines: A Writer's Pilgrimage To The Heart and Homeland of Haiku, and Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home: a memoir. Her most recent book is Writing On Empty (2024). She teaches seminars integrating writing as a Zen practice.
Teaching focus
Goldberg'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. Goldberg 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. Goldberg'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
Natalie Goldberg 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 Goldberg has chosen to share there. Natalie Goldberg is the author of sixteen books, including Writing Down the Bones, which has sold two million copies and has been translated into 20 languages. Her most recent book is Writing On Empty (July 2024, St. Martin’s Press). She has also written Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage To The Heart and Homeland of Haiku, and Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home: a memoir (Shambhala 2018): the beloved Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, a memoir about her Zen teacher. For the last fifty years she has practiced Zen and taught seminars in writing as a practice. She lives in northern New Mexico. For more information about Natalie and her programs and writings, click here. That body of work places Goldberg 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. Goldberg'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. Goldberg contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Goldberg'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
Goldberg'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. Goldberg 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 Goldberg's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Goldberg at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms paired with teaching in Goldberg'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 Goldberg is teaching.
