Peter Seishin Wohl
Peter Seishin Wohl is the spiritual director and senior teacher at Treetop Zen Center and the guiding teacher of Wild Fox Sangha, a Treetop-affiliated sitting group based online.
Peter was ordained a Zen priest by Margaret Ne-Eka Barragato in 2005 and received dharma transmission from her in 2008. Prior to joining Treetop, he had practiced Zen for more than 20 years and faced a variety of personal struggles while maintaining Zen practice. “When I experienced Stef and Margaret’s simple and unpretentious approach to Zen — supported by the enormous generosity of these two gentle and compassionate teachers — I knew I had found the home I had sought over the two previous decades,” he says.
Peter was born and raised in New York City, where, paradoxically, he developed a love of wildness — the more than human world. As a result, he has spent most of his adult life in Vermont and Maine, where that love of nature has become an enduring theme that deeply influences his teaching of Zen. Since 2001 Peter has actively developed eco-psychological and eco-spiritual workshops to help people form an intimate connection with the natural world. Upon becoming a Zen teacher, those took the form of contemplative retreats in Maine, Vermont, and Québec, including some in and around urban settings.
Over this same time period, the urgency of averting humanity’s trajectory toward further ecological devastation, climate change, and the ongoing extinction of species has become much more apparent. Peter believes we can make many important contributions to our communities and the world: “As Zen practitioners, part of our challenge is to continually be awake, to face reality directly, and to shed the self-protective filters and avoidant distractions that are ubiquitous today. We are simultaneously trying to deepen our sense of intimacy by breaking down the boundaries of self and other and realizing the truth of the One Body. That truth reveals to us that all life is interwoven in a single tapestry. Out of that realization of non-separation and interdependence, we more fully appreciate the broad implications of the Buddhist imperative to save all beings.”
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Peter Joryu Harris
Peter Joryu Harris is a teacher at Treetop. He received dharma transmission from Peter Wohl in 2014 and is an ordained Zen priest. He has studied Zen for more than 20 years in the White Plum lineage and began with Stef and Margaret at Treetop (first in Orono and then in Oakland) in 2004.
Until his retirement, Peter was the Zacamy Professor of English at Colby College, where he taught American poetry and poetry workshops. He’s also a published poet and sometimes offers workshops on Zen and poetry at Treetop.
He and his wife enjoy hiking, and he sails on Penobscot Bay.
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Listen to Peter’s dharma talks.
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Heiku Jaime McLeod
Heiku Jaime McLeod is a priest and teacher at Treetop Zen Center in Maine, having received dharma transmission from Peter Seishin Wohl in 2016. Jaime is a member of the White Plum Asanga.
She’s a proponent of socially engaged Buddhism and believes practice must find its expression through compassionate activity in the world, growing out of a direct experience of connection with the Earth and all beings. Her teaching focuses on the opportunities for figurative “home-leaving” available to those who remain householders, and she strives to help students awaken right within the realms of work, love, and home.
Jaime makes her living as the communications manager at the Colby College Museum of Art and as a freelance writer and editor, most notably serving as a former contributing editor for Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly.
She lives with her wife, Melissa, and their two children, Silas and Lydia, in Winthrop, Maine, and enjoys reading, camping, nature walks, swimming, science fiction, mythology, and crafting.
Read Jaime’s essay, “Picking and Choosing” in the compilation Zen Teachings in Challenging Times, published by Temple Ground Press.
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Todd Hotai Watson
Todd Hotai Watson is a priest and teacher at Treetop. He received dharma transmission from Peter Wohl in 2016.
Todd is also the guiding teacher of Walking Tree Zen, a Treetop-affiliated sangha in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
He lives with his family and two dozen animals in rural New Hampshire.
Shindo Jim Nowik
Shindo Jim Nowik started on his dharma path with an introduction to Zen at Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York, in the early 1980s. After years of dabbling in the Dharma, he became a formal student of Helen Kobai Yuho Harkaspi, sitting regularly with her practice group in Poughkeepsie, New York. After he showed interest in a more disciplined practice, Helen introduced him to Stef Mui Barragato at Dragon Cliff Zen Center in Kerhonkson, New York, where he received jukai in 1997 and shukke tokudo in 1998. He practiced there for 12 years, focusing on koan study. He also served for years as an assistant Buddhist chaplain at the Eastern NY Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Napanoch, New York.
When Stef moved to Maine to start Treetop Zen Center, Jim began practice at Valley Zendo in Charlemont, Massachusetts, a Soto branch temple of Antaiji under the direction of Isshō Fujita, focusing on shikantaza. Though never a formal student of Isshō’s, Jim considers him an important mentor.
Jim spent several years in the interim sitting with different teachers before beginning a residency at Treetop in 2016. He continued his formal practice there with Peter Joryu Harris, receiving denkai and dharma transmission in 2018. He now serves Treetop as a senior priest and teacher in residence. He also serves as a Zen Buddhist instructor at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Previously Jim practiced anesthesia as a nurse anesthetist in New York City for more than 25 years. He has two grown children, Kailen and Dylan.
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Brad Gendai Beukema
Brad Gendai Beukema is an ordained priest and teacher at Treetop. He received dharma transmission in January 2024 from Peter Joryu Harris. Brad was introduced to Zen practice by a retired Episcopal priest in 1998 while he was discerning a call to ordained ministry with the bishops of Washington, DC. He sat with a lay Zen group in the DC area but did not begin formal practice with a teacher until he moved to Maine in 2016.
Prior to coming to Maine, Brad worked as a hospice chaplain and pastoral counselor in the regional Washington, DC, area, where his patients and families taught him the practice of spiritual care at end of life and deepened his experience of and commitment to the interfaith path of many threads, one heart.