Our Mindful Caregiver Education Instructors and Presenters are dedicated teachers practicing mindfulness and compassion at the bedside.  Experts within their field, this team is dedicated to providing support to those who are serving the chronically ill and dying. 

• Roy Remer has been an end-of-life caregiver and educator since 1997.  He trained with Zen Hospice Project (ZHP) to become a volunteer, and served at the bedside for six years at the Guest House facility before serving for seven years on San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital’s Palliative Care Ward. Roy served on the ZHP board of directors from 2002 until 2008. In 2008, he completed a yearlong end-of-life caregiver training at the Metta Institute in Sausalito, CA.

  Roy assumed a leadership role at ZHP in 2010, and currently is the organization’s Director of Education and Training. In addition to leading in-house training, and teaching Mindful Caregiver Education courses throughout the country, Roy facilitates grief support workshops and Open Death Conversations for ZHP. A dedicated practitioner in the Soto Zen tradition, Roy is a student at the San Francisco Zen Center. He also guides wilderness-based rites of passage programs in partnership with EarthWaysLLC of Sebastopol, CA.

• Shelley Adler, PhD, a Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the Osher Center for the Integrative Medicine at UCSF, Shelley was trained in medical anthropology, sociocultural gerontology, and medical education research.  She is actively involved in health professions education, narrative research, and studies of under served people’s experience of end-of-life.

   

• Mary Doane is a Senior Instructor of Mindful Caregiver Education, involved from the first pilot program. Joining Zen Hospice Project in 2005, she served at the bedside as a volunteer caregiver, first at Laguna Honda Hospital and later at the Guest House. She began facilitating New Volunteer Training in 2009. Mary has also served ZHP as an outreach speaker and peer grief support partner, and as Volunteer Program Coordinator. Currently, she is collaborating in the development of the Mindful Caregiver Education curriculum. Mary is a Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT™) Instructor certified by the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University School of Medicine, and teaches CCT courses throughout the Bay Area. She is a graduate of Mills College and has completed Chaplaincy training at the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies. 

• Alistair Shanks has been a dedicated practitioner and teacher of the Taoist Internal Martial Arts for over 20 years. Since 2004, he has been an adjunct faculty member at the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine where he teaches Tai chi. Alistair has been a volunteer since with Zen Hospice Project since 2004 where he also helps facilitate new volunteer trainings.  His volunteer work includes working as a Buddhist chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital and conducting meditation sessions for inmates in the San Francisco County Jail. Alistair has a degree in Philosophy and Religion from SF State and is currently completing the Masters Buddhist Chaplaincy program at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

• Irene Smith is considered the founding visionary of the hospice massage field having introduced massage into hospice care on the West Coast in 1982. As founder of Everflowing, www.everflowing.org., Irene is an internationally respected author, educator and practitioner in the field of Mindful Touching Irene has taught health care providers Mindful Touching for over three decades , creates educational resources utilized by health care institutions worldwide and holds a private hospice massage practice in San Francisco California. As a west Coast assistant to the late Elisabeth Kubler- Ross MD, Irene brings extraordinary depth and wisdom to her work.

• Celeyce Matthews, CNA, CHPNA. first came to the Zen Hospice Project's Guest House as a volunteer caregiver in 2014. She immediately felt she had found her next true calling and is now a Certified Nursing Assistant and a Certified Hospice and Palliative Nursing Assistant on staff at the Guest House and is in school working toward a nursing degree.  Additionally, Celeyce is a writer and publishes stories about her experiences as a caregiver at the Guest House. You can read her published stories and brief reflections on her blog here.   Celeyce has been practicing mindfulness for more than two decades, formal Vipassana for 4 years and has sat almost 50 days of residential meditation retreat.  She also participated in the Metta Institute's Mindful and Compassionate End of Life Service training in 2015.  In addition to being on the nursing staff at Zen Hospice Project working directly with people at the end of life, Celeyce has been a mindfulness coach teaching mindfulness and meditation to private clients for two years.  Previously, Celeyce was a children's art teacher for 8 years, incorporating mindfulness techniques in her teaching after participating in Mindful Schools' Mindful Educator training in 2010.

• Kate Nitze, MFA completed Zen Hospice Project’s volunteer training in 2015. She continues to serve as a bedside caregiver at the Guest House and facilitates both the Open Death Conversation and Mindful Caregiver Education courses. Following a career in book publishing, she works as an editor with healthcare organizations and individual authors. Her interests include stories of loss, provider/patient communication, sources of comfort in the context of serious illness, and the often unwitnessed role of caregivers. Kate has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana where she taught creative writing and completed coursework on end-of-life issues, grief, and narrative medicine.

• Hephzibah Plotkin, MPH has been a member of the Zen Hospice Project community since 2008, serving as a volunteer caregiver at both, Laguna Honda Hospital and the Guest House; she is passionate about end of life issues. She has been meditating since the early eighties and has found great joy and peace in the many retreats she has attended. A teacher of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Hephzibah seeks to be present in each moment at the bedside for whatever is arising.  Since 2014 she has facilitated Open Death Conversations and Mindful Caregiver Education courses. Hephzi has also been a therapist in Scotland since 1989 and has been trained as a Rosen Method Bodywork practitioner.

• Cassandra Palmer has served as a volunteer caregiver at the Zen Hospice Project Guest House for five years and is committed to providing mindful support to families and residents experiencing the end of life process. Cassandra is an active facilitator in the Mindful Caregiver Education and Open Death Conversation programs and is passionate about providing opportunities for people from all walks of life to explore their relationship with death and compassionate care. Cassandra is also trained in being an End of Life Doula and has an academic background in Holistic Psychology and Counseling. 

• Todd Jordan began meditating in the Vipassana tradition in the 1980s, while working as a refugee advocate. He holds a dual degree from the Graduate Theological Union in Buddhist Studies and Chaplaincy. Todd has trained as a Buddhist chaplain with the Sati Center and as an interfaith chaplain at Sojourn Chaplaincy. He completed Clinical Pastoral Education training at the UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals. Todd is passionate about family systems and family care. He’s also passionate about whole-body wellness. He’s an avid open-water swimmer and has completed many long-distance endurance events. 

• Amanda Coggin lived and taught in Southeast Asia in 2000 where she began Vipassana meditation in the S.N. Goenka tradition where she sits and serves annual silent retreats. While writing on grief, she discovered Zen Hospice Project through a mindfulness grief group and became a volunteer caregiver in 2011. She served at the bedside at both Laguna Honda Hospital and the Guest House and later joined its staff as Volunteer Coordinator until 2014. Amanda completed Clinical Pastoral Education training at the UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals and was the unit chaplain in the Emergency Department, Acute Care for the Elderly, the Birth Center, and the Intensive Care Nursery. She's currently training as a Mindfulness-Based Childbirth Preparation teacher and assisting with its course at UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine. At Zen Hospice Project, Amanda facilitates our Open Death Conversations. Amanda is grateful for the teachings of mindfulness and caregiving as caregiver to her elderly mother and preschool daughter.