About
Sokaku Kathie Fischer is a Zen priest ordained at San Francisco Zen Center in 1980 and received Dharma Transmission in 2011. She began formal practice in 1971 at Berkeley Zen Center while studying Buddhism at UC Berkeley. From 1976 to 1996, she practiced and worked at Tassajara and Green Gulch Farm Zen Centers. She taught science in Mill Valley public schools until her retirement in 2016. Fischer studies Mahayana sources including the Platform Sutra, Diamond Sutra, and Prajna Paramita sutras. She is affiliated with Upaya Zen Center.
Teaching focus
Fischer'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. Fischer 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. Fischer'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
Sokaku Kathie Fischer, Sensei 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 Fischer has chosen to share there. Sensei Sokaku Kathie Fischer was ordained a Zen priest at San Francisco Zen Center in 1980 and received Dharma Transmission in 2011. She began her formal practice in 1971 at the Berkeley Zen Center at age 19 while studying Buddhism at UC Berkeley, where she completed her undergraduate degree in Buddhist Studies. Kathie practiced and worked at Tassajara and Green Gulch Farm Zen Centers from 1976, 1996 with her husband, Norman, and their twin sons. During that time up until her retirement in 2016 she took her practice to school, teaching science to seventh graders in the Mill Valley public schools. Kathie now enjoys reading and studying our Mahayana tradition through the original sources which have provided the foundation for Zen practice across many centuries, countries and languages. Some of her favorites are the Platform Sutra, Diamond Sutra and the Prajna Paramita sutras. She enjoys seeing students realize their place as part of the ancient and ingenious Zen conversation: a continuous lineage that still offers lively practice and timely lessons for the modern world. That body of work places Fischer 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. Fischer'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. Fischer contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Fischer'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
Fischer'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. Fischer 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 Fischer's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Fischer 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.
