Meditation is More Than a To-Do

A native Angeleno and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Joslyn Hitter attended Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland for high school and American University in Washington, D.C., for undergraduate study. After a stint in NYC working in fashion publishing, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she worked and studied hatha yoga closely with Tias and Surya Little, studied Ayurveda with David Frawley, and studied Sanskrit with Nicholai Bachmann. She first studied insight meditation in 2008 and began a dedicated daily practice in 2012. Joslyn’s approach is greatly informed by her multiple masters’ degrees in Eastern classics, counseling psychology, and depth psychology with an emphasis in somatic studies. “You already have everything that you need to practice mindfulness meditation, and you already know how to do it,” she says. “Being mindful just means being alive and feeling free. Feeling free to make choices instead of reacting. Feeling free to go inside yourself to find peace and ease, instead of depending on things from the outside to feel good.” She credits Donald Rothberg, Trudy Goodman, Spring Washam, and Arinna Weisman as her sources of inspiration and motivation for sharing the practices of loving awareness with communities suffering from intergenerational trauma and systemic violence. Since 2008, Joslyn has sat over 350 nights of retreat at Spirit Rock, and she has practiced Ashtanga yoga since 2000.