Lauren "Robin" Tejeda

Robin Tejeda (they/any) is a contemplative clinician, educator, internship supervisor, Maitri retreat director, and mindfulness instructor in Naropa University’s MA Clinical Mental Health Counseling: Buddhist Inspired Contemplative Counseling (BICC) program. Robin came to study and practice of Buddhist dharma & meditation as a teenager on Lenape Land of Queens, NY, through portals of their own suffering and a resonant knowing of their inherent freedom reflected in the teachings. Their spiritual practice has also long been rooted in land-based, animistic, magical, and contemplative practices from their multicultural ancestral lineages -Cuban, Puerto Rican, Ashkenazi Jewish, and Germanic peoples- that assimilation pressures in prior generations had buried, including brujeria and hedge witchery, ancestral reverence, and Jewish ritual. For Robin, their spiritual practice has always been inseparable from the path of relationships and engaged action in the world and being in service to collective liberation. As a clinician, Robin largely works with LGBTQIA2s+ populations, specializing in relationships, affirmative sex therapy, and trauma, and they are committed to anti-carceral and abolitionist practice and disability justice in mental health. They bring the their many passions into their work as a contemplative educator.