Meikyo Chelsea True 

Title: Lay Teacher 

Dharma Name: Meikyo Kogun

Preferred Name: Meikyo

Pronouns: she/they

Lineage: Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

Organizations: San Francisco Zen Center, Dharma Heart Zen, Joyful Mind Project

Meikyo Chelsea True (she/they) first encountered Zen as a child and began meditating at the age of sixteen.  She came to Green Gulch Farm Zen Center nearly twenty years ago with her daughter, Amelie, and has supported the growth of family practice with San Francisco Zen Center’s (SFZC’s) three temples ever since. As the SFZC Family Programs Director, Meikyo is dedicated to widening the path of family practice through a soft, ancestral, and embodied Zen.

Meikyo holds a bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies and a master's degree in Integral Counseling Psychology. She spent three years working as an adjunct professor at California Institute of Integral Studies and now brings liberatory practices to her work as a licensed psychotherapist with the nonprofit Joyful Mind Project, which she founded.  

Meikyo also practices with 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.  

"I am inviting you to go deeper, to learn and to practice so that you become someone who has a great capacity for being solid, calm, and without fear, because our society needs people like you who have these qualities, and your children, our children, need people like you, in order to go on, in order to become solid, and calm, and without fear.” —Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh