Aishah Shahidah Simmons (she/her) is a Black feminist lesbian survivor-healer, Theravādin Buddhist, trauma-informed, certified mindfulness meditation teacher, and a qualified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher through Brown University’s School of Professional Studies. She’s been practicing vipassanā meditation since 2002 and has more than one year of cumulative silent retreat practice in the U.S. and India. She is in the 2025-2028 Spirit Rock/IMS Teacher Training Program.
Aishah practiced vipassanā meditation exclusively in the S.N. Goenka tradition for 17 years. After leaving that tradition, she began practicing in the Insight tradition. Her primary Dharma teachers are Tuere Sala and DaRa Williams. She also studied in the Vajrayana lineage with Dr. Shanté Paradigm Smalls for two years.
Aishah is also an award-winning filmmaker-author and lecturer whose work—including the groundbreaking, Ford Foundation-funded acclaimed feature film, NO! The Rape Documentary (2006) and the 2000 Lambda Literary-award winning anthology, love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press)—breaks silences, offers healing paths for trauma, and provides visions for humanely disrupting the inhumane epidemic of sexual violence.
In this talk, Aishah Shahidah Simmons explores the Buddha's teaching on the Five Hindrances — Sensual Desire, Ill Will, Sloth and Torpor, Restlessness and Worry, and Doubt — drawing on the Saṅgārava Sutta's water similes, the lineage of Sayagyi U Bha Kin through Rev. Dr. Leon E. Wright, and the words of Toni Cade Bambara and Audre Lorde. Offered through a BIPOC lens on Juneteenth, this teaching invites recognizing the hindrances with tenderness, not self-judgment, as a lifetime's practice toward liberation.
