About
Rev. Jessica Monshin McKimmie is a Buddhist chaplain, death doula, grief counselor, and meditation teacher ordained in the White Plum Asanga lineage at Upaya Zen Center in 2022. They work across educational institutions, youth incarceration facilities, veterans' services, and with cancer patients, terminally ill individuals, and bereaved families. McKimmie facilitates Upaya's monthly "Gather and Grieve" ritual and holds certifications in Buddhist chaplaincy, death doula work, pastoral crisis intervention, and mindful educator training.
Teaching focus
Rev. Jessica'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. Rev. Jessica 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. Rev. Jessica'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
Rev. Jessica Monshin McKimmie 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 Rev. Jessica has chosen to share there. Rev. Jess (any pronoun) is a death doula, ordained Buddhist chaplain, grief counselor, and meditation teacher. Their chaplaincy work spans across educational and youth incarceration institutions, work with veterans, cancer and terminally ill patients, LGBTQ2IA+ communities, bereaved families, and more. Jess currently facilitates Upaya’s “Gather and Grieve”, a grief ritual for communal grieving and healing, held on the third Thursdays of each month. In August 2022, Jess was ordained in the White Plum Asanga lineage as a Buddhist Chaplain under the care and oversight of Upaya Zen Center. Other formal training includes Upaya Zen Center’s Buddhist Chaplaincy Program (thesis: Coming Alongside our Grieving Education System ), Pastoral Crisis Intervention Training, Going With Grace’s death doula certificate program, and Mindful Schools’ Mindful Educator Training. Additional identities Jess holds are: forever student, white/white bodied with W. European ancestry, Queer, non-binary, sister, auntie-uncle, LGBTQ2IA+ educator and advocate, friend, listener, nature-admirer, bird-observer, sunset-chaser, and lover. That body of work places Rev. Jessica 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. Rev. Jessica'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. Rev. Jessica contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Rev. Jessica'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
Rev. Jessica'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. Rev. Jessica 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 Rev. Jessica's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Rev. Jessica 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.
