Meet Meikyo
Joyful Mind Project founder, Meikyo Chelsea True, is a licensed psychotherapist, educator, and lay-entrusted Zen teacher whose work reaches across many disciplines.
Her practice is supported by Dharma Heart Zen (DHZ), a Branching Streams sangha in Sebastopol, California, under the guidance of founder and senior Dharma teacher Hoka Chris Fortin.
Meikyo served as DHZ’s shuso (head monk) in 2018 and received lay-entrustment in 2025, authorizing her as a lay teacher in the Soto Zen Lineage of Suzuki Roshi and allowing her to begin supporting Zen students.
Meikyo holds a bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies and a master's degree in Integral Counseling Psychology. She works as an adjunct professor at California Institute of Integral Studies and brings liberatory values to all of her work.
Encountering Zen as a child, Meikyo began meditating at the age of sixteen. She came to Green Gulch Farm Zen Center through the door of family practice — nearly twenty years ago with her daughter, Amelie. She has supported family practice with San Francisco Zen Center’s (SFZC’s) three temples ever since. As the SFZC Family Sangha Teacher, Meikyo is dedicated to widening the path of family practice through a soft, ancestral, and embodied Zen.
Having known the particular grief of child loss, Meikyo supports Jizo Ceremonies for children and those who have died through San Francisco Zen Center. She hopes her teaching reflects her lived experience with disability, neurodiversity, family separation, gender-based violence, and disenfranchised grief. As a mother and an auntie, she is deeply committed to expressing Buddhist precepts within the heart’s cries of ordinary life.
She currently resides on the unceded land of the Coast Miwok people, where she is taking a year of practice dedicated to long periods of solitude and turning towards the particularities of grief within modernity.
She was given the name Meikyo Kogun (Luminous Mirror, Ancient Source) by her beloved teacher, Hoka Chris Fortin.
“Although I try to hold the single thought of Buddha’s teaching in my heart, I cannot help but hear the many crickets’ voices calling as well.”