About
Find a Reliable Support in Your Own Awareness
Wisdom Sun is committed to providing a warm and welcoming space where your body and mind can relax. Within this supportive container, you can free yourself from excesses of anxiety and stress, and learn to live more fully, with joy, humor, and love.
Our experienced teachers have trained for decades in the ancient teachings of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. They combine this with their training in modern psychology and embodiment (including movement practices such as Tibetan yoga and dance, and deep body listening practices) to offer you the best possible support and guidance, as they have done for meditators and meditation teachers since 2006.
We teach Depth Meditation, which offers a sane and empowering way of relating with the incredible layers of your ocean-like being: the bright surface shining with sights, sounds, and thoughts; the deeper undercurrents of emotional energies and patterns; and the profound depths of unchanging awareness that is able to hold whatever arises in your experience
What We Do
In regular weekly classes, you have the time, space, and support to learn meditation techniques that help you relate with the experiences of your daily life. We also offer three-day retreats in San Francisco; an annual six-day residential retreat; and other retreats around the country, where you can deepen your connection with meditation and with yourself, our teachers and our community.
We offer individual sessions to help you most effectively apply meditation to your own unique life circumstances and challenges. In these sessions you develop a close working relationship with Ari or Rose focused on where you are and where you want to be.
Ari Goldfield
I am a father, husband, meditation teacher, and psychotherapist in private practice in San Francisco. Together with my wife, Rose, I co-direct the Wisdom Sun Buddhist community.
What interests me most are my relationships: with the larger society and environment I inhabit; with the people in my life, personally and professionally and with my own internal world. I try to keep a central question in mind: How can I take good care of myself and others?
This question propelled me to leave my corporate law practice twenty-six years ago in search of wisdom in India. I had the good fortune to meet and study under the Tibetan Buddhist master Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso for fourteen years. I learned Tibetan language and Buddhist meditation and philosophy under his guidance, translated his books into English, and served as his interpreter and secretary.
My time with Khenpo was amazing. He helped me gain deep insight about the core nature of my consciousness, my heart, and my being. However, I also discovered along the way that Buddhism felt incomplete for me—there were problem areas in my psyche that meditation alone could not reach; questions about how the human psyche evolves and functions that Buddhism could not answer. So I got into therapy, and went back to school and got a masters in counseling psychology.
Now, I love exploring how Eastern and Western wisdom can complement each other, and together help us live lives that feel joyful and meaningful.
Rose Taylor Goldfield
I am a mother, wife, meditation teacher, writer, and life coach. These activities, each with its own unique challenges and rewards, come together to give me a rich life that feels meaningful and fulfilling. With my husband, Ari, I co-direct the Wisdom Sun Buddhist community, whose home in San Francisco is adjacent to our own.
What interests me is consciousness, in the multitude of forms in which I encounter it—human, animal and plant life. I am particularly fascinated by the myriad human experiences that are possible, and the powerful potential for transforming those experiences. From the major life events of pain, sickness, aging, birthing, and dying, down to simply the ways I move through my daily life experiences, I ponder who I am in relationship to all these experiences. And I seek to connect with the core reality that is their shared foundation. To be able to explore these inquiries with others in small group settings or in private individual sessions is illuminating and deeply satisfying.
This philosophical bent has been with me since childhood when I first became interested in meditation and spirituality. I completed an MA in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Naropa University and deepened this training under the close, personal guidance of Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso. In 2005, Khenpo appointed me teacher at his nunneries in Bhutan and Nepal, where I taught Tibetan Buddhist philosophical texts and meditation methods. In 2007, he appointed me to a full-time position at his foundation for Buddhist studies, where I served as vice-president and secretary until 2011.
When Khenpo stopped traveling and settled at his nunnery in Nepal, in 2009, Ari and I began to explore our Western roots, both in terms of physical location and philosophical inspiration. We moved to San Francisco and immersed ourselves in western wisdom traditions. I explored somatic training, Western psychology, and coaches training, and worked on articles, books, and translations. In 2012, I certified as a coach with The Coaches Training Institute and the International Coaches Federation. In 2013, I birthed Oliver Robert (Olibob) and began the wisdom tradition of mothering. I see no end-point in my growth and exploration, simply a continually unfolding engagement.
Now, my life and work are founded on being in loving, joyful, and meaningful relationship with others using all the resources I have as support.