Anna Douglas, a Founding Teacher of Spirit Rock, Has Died

Anne Cushman remembers Anna Douglas, PhD (1939–2025), a founding teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, in Woodacre, California. Douglas taught for over four decades. She was the founder of Insight Meditation Tucson. She died on March 25 after a long illness. —  Eds.

Last week, one of my longtime dharma friends, Anna Douglas—a founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center—died at home in her bed at age 85, with her glasses resting against a poetry book on her nightstand.

I might not be a Spirit Rock dharma teacher today if Anna hadn’t invited me, in 1999, to lead the Friday morning yoga and meditation class she had pioneered there a few years earlier. In those days, bringing yoga into a Buddhist center was considered radical and a bit bizarre. But that never stopped Anna.

Back then, I wasn’t aiming for a teaching career, though I was already an integrator and chronicler of both yoga and dharma. I was plunging into motherhood and having a hard time keeping my head above water. I had also thought that what I really wanted to do was write a novel.

But Anna encouraged me to teach the Friday class with her throughout my pregnancy and then, later, to bring my newborn son with me to the center—he even rolled over for the first time in front of our class as we all arced up into cobra pose. And over the ensuing years, I had the delight of teaching alongside Anna on a string of groundbreaking gatherings that were on the fringes of vipassana respectability but where I felt right at home. These events includedwomen’s retreats, where we all sat in a circle around a central altar adorned with goddesses, flowers, and our crayoned mandalas; yoga and meditation retreats, where we invited asana practitioners to undulate on their mats in the dharma hall; and, most memorably for me, the “spirit of creativity” retreat Anna launched—where painting, writing, qigong, dance, yoga, and even improvisational theater blossomed in the container of silent insight meditation.

Before her decades as a dharma teacher, Anna had been a Broadway actress and a psychologist, and she combined her love of traditional insight practice with an indomitable spirit of innovation. On those creativity retreats, we celebrated the power of art-making as a meditation in its own right, as well as a way to channel the energies that surge and whirl in the psyche as meditators scuba deep below the mind’s surface.

I’ll never forget the grand finales, when we would file through the painting studio in the walking meditation hall—with soulful, incantatory music playing from a boom box—and gaze upon papered walls where the retreat’s collective unconscious had exploded in a brilliant, multicolored tsunami of snakes, breasts, rainforests, tigers, embryos, skeletons, owls, yonis and lingams, galaxies, and oceans. Then we’d head back to the dharma hall to laugh and cry as writers offered their poems and stories or improv artists performed ensemble skits.

These retreats were about art as a transformational process, not a perfected product. Anna believed our painting teacher, Barbara Kaufman, when she exhorted us: “The blank white sheet of paper is calling you! What color does it want you to put on it first? There’s no way to do it wrong!” (“Red dots!” Anna exclaimed over lunch in our teacher’s yurt, with her characteristic huge peal of laughter. “I’ve been covering pages with red dots all morning! Who knows where it’s going, but I’m having a fabulous time!”)

In one of her last emails to me, Anna wrote: “I feel very peaceful about moving on, evolving (as I suspect we do) into the next karmic adventure!. . . What a grand time we had!! I suspect we’ll ‘meet again’—who knows where? Who knows when?!”

In those words from her, I can hear the blank white sheet of paper calling her. And I sense her moving toward it, ready to splash it with her brightest colors.

With love, in impermanence,
Anne