Bonnie O'Brien Jonsson teaches Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) through the University of California at San Francisco's Osher Center for Integrative Medicine. She has taught mindfulness courses in person at Google, the University of California Berkeley School of Law, and in federal prison for incarcerated women. She has taught daylong and multiple-day workshop/retreats called Living Mindfully Now! And is a Buddhist Ritual Minister through Spirit Rock Meditation Center.

Bonnie is a founding supporter of the Compassion Coalition and a member of an international community of MBSR teachers. She a member of The Author's Guild, Women's National Book Association, and the Coalition of POW/MIA Families.

Bonnie would like to discuss her life journey of absence/presence and life/death detailed in her in-process memoir, tentatively titled "Bone, Breath and Fire: A Daughter's Search for her Missing Father," and offer tips for reducing stress and anxiety.

Bonnie's intense but diffuse grief for her Missing-in-Action father gradually became the fuel that propelled her towards becoming present to her own life. a childhood full of secrets, whispers, and hidden sorrows to a tumultuous and thrill-seeking adolescence; a painful first marriage and early initiation to parenthood; and an unfolding discovery of her own true vocation as she becomes first a student and then a teacher of meditation, eventually leading hundreds of people to face their own mortality through small groups based on the book A Year to Live. Throughout the many wrenching changes, upheavals, and zig-zags of her life, one constant theme is that of breath: from early childhood fears of gasping for air; to her work as a respiratory therapist, which first brought her to the bedside of dying patients; to the focus on breath which was central to her meditation practice; and then to the intimate experience of breathing alongside people who were facing death.

Bonnie recently published an article in Tricycle Magazine, which aligns with this conversation. You can read it here: https://tricycle.org/magazine/daughter-grief-dharma/

Find Bonnie at [email protected], http://bonnieobrienjonsson.com

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