Dr. Catherine Anraku Hondorp, Sensei is an authorized Zen teacher in the White Plum lineage, a Soto Zen Buddhist Priest and co-founder with her spouse Ryūmon Hilda Baldoquín Sensei of Two Streams Zen in Westhampton, Massachusetts, USA. (temples@twostreamszen.org)
Anraku founded The Zen Center on Main Street in Northampton, Massachusetts which for 10 years was an affiliate of The Village Zendo and served as the Buddhist Chaplain at Smith and Hampshire Colleges. Anraku Sensei is currently the guiding teacher of Body-Mind (ShinJin) Temple where her work emphasizes the spiritual path of renegotiating trauma through the body. Responding to the need of white dharma activists to have a space to unpack power and patterns of white privilege, Anraku initiated a peer support group for white anti-racists that has now met regularly for the past 3 years.
Anraku’s passion for social justice stems from growing up White in a northeastern U.S. urban Black ghetto. Raised by White parents, a Dutch Reformed Church minister and an early childhood educator in a multiracial family during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the racial and class inequities were painfully evident. Seeking to make sense of the world, of God and who or what she REALLY was, eventually brought her to the path of Zen.
She began Zen studies with John Daido Loori Roshi at Zen Mountain Monastery in 1987 later becoming a student and dharma heir of Enkyo O’Hara Roshi in 2009.
Anraku has an MFA in dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a Doctor of Chiropractic degree from Logan College of Chiropractic. She is a master practitioner of Network Spinal Analysis and a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner.