Monika Winkelmann (2025)

Monika Winkelmann, born in 1952 in Bad Gandersheim, mother of an adult daughter, divorced since 2019, attended her first meditation weekend in Hamburg in 1980 at the age of 28. This profound experience, as well as her life as a single mother to her daughter Lisa, born in 1984, led her to practice alone for many years and to intensify her writing. The Siddharta House in Bonn, where Dr. Paul Köppler taught mindfulness meditation according to Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh, became her spiritual home for more than five years. Thich Nhat Hanh blessed Haus Siddharta, and so she had the great fortune to be involved in an intensive period of preparation for the distinguished visitor, to sit next to Thay during meals and listen to his guided meditation, and to spend the following Sunday as part of the preparation team for the congress in Cologne, spending a whole day in close and intensive contact with this special person. Mindfulness days at the “eiab – European Institute for Applied Buddhism” together with meditation poems by the master laid the foundation for her daily practice. – However, H.H. the Dalai Lama also caught her interest after she completed an Easter retreat with Oliver Peterson at the Semkye Ling retreat center, where H.H. had often taught. In 2008, she signed up for a seven-day retreat with the Dalai Lama on Shanti Deva: “Emptiness” in Hamburg. The following year, it was again the Dalai Lama who drew her to Frankfurt, where she met Bernie Glassman Roshi, whose books she had already begun to study. Bernie impressed her so deeply that in 2010 she signed up for her first Auschwitz bearing witness retreat. This was followed by five more large international retreats and two small self-organized retreats in Auschwitz.

She joined the Zen Peacemaker Order in 2011 and has since attended or organized numerous bearing witness retreats, including in Lampedusa (self-organized), South Dakota, Greece, and Bosnia/Herzegovina. In January 2020, she organized the third refugee pilgrimage in southern Italy/northern Sicily, participated in two longer street retreats in Paris with the Dana Center Paris, and organized a mini street retreat in Bonn as well as days of socially engaged Buddhism called “Being Human in Our World.” Daily zazen, half-day sitting, sesshins, and offerings in “Buddhist meditation,” as well as study and her own training, help her and her Dharma friends practice grounding, deep acceptance, and radical vulnerability so that they can act in the world and in everyday life with an added measure of wisdom and love.

She took lay vows with Barbara Wegmüller Roshi in 2011, in a ceremony in Bonn, followed by further lay ordination in the Rinzai Zen lineage with Genjo Marinello Roshi in Seattle in 2014. In total, she spent several months over five years at seven sesshins (always staying two or three weeks longer for practicing) and a two-month study stay at Chobo-Ji in Seattle. She also organized four sesshins for Marinello near Bonn and founded and led the “Ohne Rang und Namen-Sangha” (No Rank and No Name Sangha) in Bonn with bi-monthly zazenkais. In February 2018, she stepped down as leader of this group.

Since March 2016, she studied and practiced with Zenpeacemaker Michel Dubios Roshi in Paris. In  2018 she committed to a longer mindfulness training with former monk and well-known Dharma teacher Christopher Titmuss, but did not continue when it started to only take place online. She sat with Zenpeacemaker Frank DeWaele Roshi (Bonn, Gent, Lampedusa), and increasingly intensively with Joan Halifax Roshi, whom she had the opportunity to meet in person in Holland in 2018 while she was leading a retreat.

In 2019, she discovered sitting as a “hermit”, while continuing to listen to lectures, mainly by Halifax, the abbess of the Upaya Zen Center. She enrolled in a one-year “Socially Engaged Buddhism Training” with this Zen priest, who, incidentally, had a decisive influence not only on the important Council circle of Zen Peacemakers. Other important teachers – most of them also authors, such as Kaz Tanahashi, John D. Dunne, Prof. Steven Heine, Taigen Dan Leighton, Henry Shukman, and many other guest teachers there – helped her to deepen her understanding of the Soto Zen path and Buddhist Philosophy. – Not only did the books of the poet, writer, Zen priest, and former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, Norman Fischer Roshi, become increasingly important to her, but also his lectures, including those on Jewish meditation. Eventually, when the pandemic allowed almost only online offerings, she appeared in the everydayzen sangha. In 2019, she had her first practice period (Ango, initially from September to December, and for the last few years from the end of January to the beginning of April) with this Zen teacher. Shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic, she found herself once again at the Upaya Center in April 2020 for the three-week online practice period.

After that, she participated almost without interruption in the weekly Dharma seminars, the monthly all-day sitting, and her second practice period in 2020 with Zoketsu Norman Fischer. In late summer 2020, she asked him if he would be her teacher. His affirmation was recently (summer 2025) reaffirmed. In 2022, she participated in the spring sesshin in San Francisco, led by Zoketsu Norman Fischer. In November 2022 she was called to the Akazienzendo Berlin to attend a weekend-retreat with Prof.David R. Loy, whose recent book „Ecodharma – Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis“ was presented. It was translated into German, and Monika appreciates him for earlier books she read, and an undogmatic style of teaching as well as an open interreligious approach to Comparative Religious Studies. 

In September 2024 Monika attended a four-day event at Johanneshof: The climax of which was „the stepping down from the mointain“ ceremony by Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi. On the following day, Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi would be welcomed as a new abbess of the well-known Schwarzwald Center. On that occasion Monika was honoured to meet Kathie Fischer and Norman Fischer and other celebrities from the San Francisco Zen scene.

In 2023, she attended fall sesshin at Haus Felsentor with Vanja Palmers Roshi, where she acquired a small precious liturgy-book of sutras translated into German (from Phönix-Sangha) that is mostly used for recitation in the sitting group on weekends. In November 2024, she flew to Mexico to participate in the annual Rohatsu Sesshin in Mar de Jade, together with Sokaku Kathie Fischer and the founder of the center, Laura del Valle Sensei.

Monika has been leading Zen peacemaker circles and sitting groups since 2011; since then, there have been three large changes in participants. For eight years, she has been leading the “Kleiner-Tempel-Sangha” (Tiny Temple Sangha) in Bonn-Kessenich, now everydayzen tempel, with a challenging program that also includes socially engaged Zen “Sei ein Mensch” (Be a Human Being). The varied program with daily zazen can be found on Monika’s website (see below). This “Tiny Temple,” a former attic room for drying laundry on the fourth floor of an old, worn-down house, has been transformed into Monika’s meditation, writing, and study space, which is mainly used online. The medicine students of that first Kessenich group gradually finished their final exams, completed their internships, either got married and/or had children, or took up their positions as doctors/healers in Norway, Africa, Bonn, Würzburg, or Lübeck. – The group that has been meeting for about four years now studies, in addition to dayly zazen,  Norman Fischer Roshi’s book “The World Could Be Otherwise – Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path” online every Sunday (lectures, reflections, and summaries are posted as an experimental blog on the website). –

The happy combination of Zen and writing, as well as Zen, self-awareness, and violence transformation in “underserved places” will continue to be offered in various formats:

• e.g., the “22 Synagogues in the Rhine/Sieg/District Project,” which will begin on September 6, 2025, in Unkel.
• Writing retreat days and much more are offered continuously on Saturdays, mostly online.
• But also ‘in person’, as in the Waldhaus, you will be trained in how to find your writing voice and how to advance your project in a group well trained in ‘active listening’ and bring it to maturity.
• Many books have now been written or started in a group or writing workshop led by Monika. Or both. At Waldhaus, she has been offering “creative writing workshops,” later “writing retreats” under the name “Writing is like Breathing” for about thirty years, often twice a year.The fine atmosphere there, characterized by silence and cooperation, has shown her the way to the realization that Zen and the arts were and are one.

As a Soto Zen practitioner and Dharma teacher, seminar leader and spiritual guide, dialogue supervisor and independent writing therapist, she has been helping people find their voice and calling for 35 years, expressing them in a value-oriented way and taking their place in the world. She experiences Zen practice as the translucent backdrop of her entire life and beyond.

“May I ever be able to give back what has been so generously given to me.

May all beings be nourished, protected, and happy.

May all beings know peace.”

[August 9, 2025]