Mushim Patricia Ikeda has become widely known for her down-to-earth, humorous, and penetrating approach to Dharma, secular mindfulness, and social transformation. Mushim is a socially-engaged Buddhist teacher, mindfulness meditation teacher, social justice activist, author, and diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant. She teaches primarily at the East Bay Meditation Center in downtown Oakland, where she also served on the board of directors, known as the Leadership Sangha, for seven years.

Mushim has taught residential meditation retreats nationally for people of color, social justice activists, and women. Her work is based in values of cultural humility, acknowledging the wisdom that is ever-present in individuals and collectives, and the need for expression, empowerment, and co-creative self-determination in marginalized communities. Mushim has been featured in the award-winning documentary film Between the Lines: Asian American Women’s Poetry, and as one of three subjects in the documentary Acting on Faith: Women’s New Religious Activism in America, distributed by the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. 

As a writer, Mushim was the recipient of the first Alice Hayes Fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation, to support a one-month residency for a writer working on social justice and environmental issues. She has been named an expert panelist of the Global Diversity and Inclusion Benchmarks, an online resource available through the Centre for Global Inclusion. Mushim is also the recipient of the 2014 Gil A. Lopez Peacemaker Award from the Association for Dispute Resolution of Northern California, which recognized her innovative one-year program, Practice in Transformative Action (PiTA), mindfulness training for social justice activists, at East Bay Meditation Center. In September 2015 she received an honorary Doctor of Sacred Theology (sacrae theologiae) degree from the Starr King School for the Ministry.