Richa Gawande, PhD, is a community mindfulness researcher, teacher and social work trainee dedicated to internal and external liberation from the confusion of forgetting who we truly are. Richa has studied the impacts of meditation and other mind-body practice on stress, emotion regulation, behavior change, and belonging for 11 years as research scientist at the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School.

She is senior faculty for the Mindful Behavior Change program at CMC, cofounder of the VOICES (Vocalizing Oppression and Interconnection in Contemplative and Embodiment Spaces) collective, and research scientist for the Mandela Yoga Project in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Richa has taught the Mindful Behavior Change 8-week course and group leader training for eight years, and consults regularly for mindfulness, self-compassion and mind-body-community teaching curricula throughout the Boston area.

Richa’s practice is organized around devotion, insight, groundedness, and dialogue. In addition to growing up in a community-oriented Hindu family tradition, Richa has been practicing in the Theravada/Insight tradition since 2012 and the Drikung and Shangpa Kagyu lineages of Tibetan Buddhism since 2020. Through personal and professional experience with loss, grief, shame, and inquiries on deep belonging, she is committed to a framework sensitive and responsive to remembering our belonging in the full cycles of nature, and the impact of stories, culture, and compassion on our sense of self and one another.