Arawana Hayashi first saw Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche at Naropa Institute when her dance company toured across the US in the summer of 1974. She attended one or two of these talks. Seeing how he moved in the space and feeling his presence in the room compelled her to buy a cushion and begin meditating. She joined the Naropa Institute faculty in 1976. Rinpoche asked her to study bugaku, Japanese Court dance. She studied bugaku and the accompanying music, gagaku, with Suenobu Togi, Sensei, until he passed away in 2007. She returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1981 and founded the Jo Ha Kyu Performance Group that presented performances and workshops in both bugaku and contemporary dance. In that year she also began teaching Shambhala Training. She was senior teacher in residence at the meditation center, Karme Choling, in Vermont, from 2000-2003 and was appointed an acharya (senior teacher) by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche in 2015. She is a founding member of the Presencing Institute and currently brings embodied presence practices and meditation into leadership, education, and social change. With colleagues, she created a social art form, Social Presencing Theater—an awareness-based method that makes visible both the underlying “stuck” patterns and the basic goodness in individuals, teams, and social systems. It brings body-knowing and an appetite for not-knowing to the process of co-creating healthy, compassionate futures. She is the author of Social Presencing Theater: The Art of Making a True Move.