Stephanie Nash

Stephanie Nash is a dynamic Mindfulness Coach, Integrative Counselor and speaker specializing in the comprehensive and uniquely structured Unified Mindfulness System, developed by Shinzen Young, with whom she has worked closely since 1998. An accomplished and versatile professional actress and acting coach for more than 30 years, she also has an expertise in body language.

Using the Unified Mindfulness System, Stephanie designed and taught a mindfulness program for a 2012 Harvard Medical School brain study with breakthrough results (in connection with which her brain was also studied by Harvard!). She has co-taught a pilot course at UCLA that explored how mindfulness can enhance learning and writing.

As a mindfulness coach, Stephanie encourages and teaches a joyful, light, practical approach on how to take mindfulness skills and apply them to living more fully in the present moment. She specializes in stress reduction, optimizing performance, and rewiring one’s relationship to food and eating, all with the goal of navigating life with more insight, less suffering, optimal performance and decision making, while enjoying the process. She is currently writing an instructional book on mindful eating – and also shares various meditations (including ones for sleeping, eating, and a program on “Letting Go of Negative Thinking and Judgment”) offered on the Insight Timer app. She addresses these issues in the easiest, lightest way possible, creating a “user friendly” approach to healing and deepening one’s experiences through mindful awareness and physicality, suffusing the learning with humor and joy.

Stephanie has taught her unique style of laughing meditation, which utilizes laughter to help decrease suffering and elevate fulfillment in daily life. Her laughter meditation workshops make laughter contagious. She prescribes 10 minutes of laughing meditation per day to improve one’s quality of life and she incorporates mindful laughing into her stress reduction teaching.

Stephanie has also led "Posture Clinics" at meditation retreats where she teaches how the natural structure of the body can support us in ways that most people are presently not utilizing (and consequently unnecessarily stressing the neck and shoulder muscles). She is presently completing her book, Posture for Meditation and Life, based on her article, Posture-pedia, which she wrote in 2005 and which is now widely used by meditation centers and teachers all over the United States. (She was even asked by Navy Seals if they could use it.)

As a body language expert, Stephanie has taught a popular workshop called, Shifting Positions to Shift Perceptions: How Body Language Affects How You Think and Feel at UCLArts and Healing– calling upon her years of training in various movement and healing modalities as well as her acting training and experience. She has also taught Expressive Movement at the University of Southern California and has taught movement to various acting schools and groups.

Stephanie grew up in Ohio. where the nearby woods were her refuge and seeded her lifelong love of being in nature. With a psychology degree from Duke University, and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, Stephanie’s professional acting career started in the early 1980’s with a national tour of a Broadway show, “Barnum”, where she played the flute, juggled and hung on a trapeze – continuing over the next decades to numerous appearances in theatre and on TV shows, films and dozens of commercials. Los Angeles theatre audiences have seen her play several leading roles at the Odyssey Theatre, and her one-woman (comedic) show based on the true story of her Native American vision quest (where she spent 4 days with no food or water alone on a mountain) played to sold-out audiences.

Stephanie moved to California from New York in 1992. Here she began a semi-annual practice of solitary camping experiences that have had a profound influence on her and led her to a desire to speak with someone about these experiences. She first met Shinzen Young at a meditation retreat at the Vipassana Support Institute. He mentored her in meditation practice and, with her signature joyful and good humored approach, she taught him how to juggle.

In 2007 Stephanie founded the nonprofit, Mindfulness Arts, through which she has offered mindfulness programs for the local community, in addition to audio and video recordings of her teachings, and interviews with other respected teachers, all offered at no cost to the recipient.

Join us with this wise and joyful teacher!