Melissa Moore

Co-founder of Karuna Training

Melissa Moore, PhD, is an educator and has dedicated her life to teaching Buddhism and Contemplative Psychology. She has a master’s degree from Naropa University in Contemplative Psychotherapy and a PhD from California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco in Psychological Anthropology. She has been a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche since the age of 25 and has been a senior teacher in the Shambahla community for the past 30 years.

Melissa is co-founder of Karuna Training, a certification in Contemplative Psychology, which has been offered as a cohort training since 1996 in eight countries: DE, NL, FR, AU, PO, SP, UK, and USA. Melissa has been teaching Contemplative Psychology in Karuna for the past 27 years all over the United States, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. She is currently the executive director of Karuna North America, http://www.karunatraining.com.

In addition to her Buddhist teaching, Melissa has held many positions in mental health, most recently as the founding director of the Felton Institute in San Francisco, California. She completed a post-doctoral degree in 2005 at the University of California San Francisco in a program dedicated to community-based research in mental health, and from that program arose the Felton Institute. The objective of the Felton Institute was to train the least experienced frontline providers in community mental health services in evidence-based practices and then to research the results of that training. Melissa spent many years working as a treatment specialist in eating disorders and issues of women’s abuse. Melissa currently lives in Denver, Colorado, with her husband and dog.