Learning Together: Awareness and Celebration of Transgender Experiences 💻

This is for a past event – please visit our Upcoming Events page for current offerings.


Date: October 23, 2025
Time: 6:30-9:30 pm, Saskatchewan (5:30-8:30 PDT, 8:30-11:30 EDT, other time zones)
Location: Online (Zoom link provided upon registration)
Facilitator: Fresh “Lev” White

Join us for a mindful online gathering to learn about transgender experiences in a supportive and welcoming space. Guided by Fresh “Lev” White – a heart-centered teacher, advocate, and mindfulness teacher – we will practice listening with presence and openness as we explore transgender lives, inclusion, and belonging. Through stories, reflection, and dialogue, we will deepen awareness and celebrate the richness of diversity.

This event is open to all – whether you are part of the transgender community, an ally, or someone seeking to learn more with curiosity and compassion.

Registration Details:

Cost: This event is offered through mutual generosity. When you register, there will be an opportunity to pay a registration fee to help SIMC cover our administration costs. During the retreat, we will provide information for those who are able to offer financial support to Lev.

Administration fee:
The administration fee paid at the time of registration helps cover the administrative costs for SIMC.

Teacher dana/donation:
The registration fee does not include teacher support – there will be an opportunity to offer dana, to support Lev’s work in the world. See dana information on the SIMC website.

Register Here:
Registration is closed.

Let us come together to create a supportive, heart-centered space of learning, connection, and celebration.


This picture of Fresh "Lev" White shows a person smiling broadly against a solid pink background. Fresh is wearing a light blue button-down shirt and a colorful bow tie with a floral pattern in shades of pink, purple, and blue. He has short, dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard.

Fresh “Lev” White is a love and compassion activist. He offers mindfulness, mediation, and diversity trainings as tools for shifting towards more authentic, conscious, and passionate living. He teaches and writes about how unconditional love and self-compassion are the ultimate gateways to honoring and understanding others; thus, healing our communities and our planet.

As certified coach and Founder of Affirmative Acts Consulting, Lev has supported executives, entrepreneurs, artists, other coaches and teams with achieving their goals. He earned facilitation skills through his coaching certification, and an extensive leadership training program, each through the Co-Active Training Institute (formally known as The Coaches Training Institute) in 2011. He was trained on delivering LGBTQIA+ Ally trainings by CUAV in 2002, and in 2005 became a Certified Trainer through Out and Equal Workplace Advocates.

Guest teachers in February 2024 💻

In February, we will be having Wednesday evening practice online-only, as Jeanne will be teaching at the Forest Refuge in Barre, Massachusetts, but she will zoom in to teach our Wednesday evenings. We have taken the online opportunity to invite some very special guests to join Jeanne each week: Lev White, Bob Stahl, Marienala Medrano, and DaRa Williams. Learn more about them below!

Register for the Zoom link here:


Fresh "Lev" White, CPCC

February 7 – Lev White: Readings from Transcending: Trans Buddhist Voices

Fresh “Lev” White is a lover of life and all beings, who lives to reflect and offer the possibilities of unconditional love and self-compassion to his diverse global community through his writing, mindfulness offerings, and Diversity Trainings. A graduate of Spirit Rock’s Community Dharma Leadership Program, Lev offers Dharma at centers around the SF Bay Area, including his sangha home at the East Bay Meditation Center (EBMC).


Bob Stahl

February 14 – Bob Stahl: Making Peace with Ourselves and Life

Bob Stahl, Ph.D., a long-time insight meditator, lived in a Burmese Buddhist monastery in the Forest tradition of Ven. Taungpulu Sayadaw for over eight years. He founded and directs mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programs in three medical centers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bob is a professor of the practice in the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences in the School of Public Health at Brown University, and is a senior teacher at the Brown Mindfulness Center. He formerly served as a senior teacher at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Bob is the co-guiding teacher at Insight Santa Cruz.


Marianela Medrano

February 21 – Marianela Medrano: Healing Historical Grief: A Path to Awakening in Connection. In her offering, Marianela Medrano will address historical grief, which emerges from historical trauma. She’ll speak about her journey tracing and reclaiming Taíno spirituality and how mindfulness practices resonate with the traditions of her people, creating a new sense of home away from home. This offering also looks at indigenous practices that carry the seed of interdependence and interconnecting embodied in Thich Nath Hanh’s interbeing.

Marianela Medrano, Ph.D., was born and raised in the Dominican Republic and has lived in Connecticut since 1990. She is a Mindful Eating instructor/facilitator and a certified Mindfulness Meditation teacher with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield through The Sounds True Foundation, a program for teaching awareness and compassion-based practices. Additionally, she is a mentor/supervisor for the International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy, IFBPT. A poet and writer of nonfiction and fiction, she holds a Ph.D. in Psychology and is now researching interspecies care with a grant from the Bess Family Foundation. Her TEDTALK at Ursuline College speaks about her work and research on the Taino people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pQeBYd2oJk.


February 28 – TBA: DaRa Williams isn’t able to join us on February 28. She will join us another time!

We will still be meeting online!