Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Aishah Shahidah Simmons (she/her) is a Black feminist lesbian survivor-healer, a Sufi Muslim raised Theravādin Buddhist who’s been practicing vipassanā meditation since 2002. She has more than one year of cumulative silent retreat practice in the U.S. and India. Aishah is also a trauma-informed, certified mindfulness meditation teacher through Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s MMTCP, and a qualified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher through a collaboration between both the Mindfulness Center and the School of Professional Studies at Brown University. She is a participant in the 2025-2028 Spirit Rock/IMS Teacher Training Program.

Aishah practiced vipassanā meditation exclusively in the S.N. Goenka tradition for 17 years. After leaving that tradition, she began practicing in the Insight tradition with her primary teachers, Tuere Sala and DaRa Williams. Aishah also studied in the Vajrayana lineage with Dr. Shanté Paradigm Smalls for two years. Aishah commits to practicing daily with the brahmavihāras, Kuan Yin Dharmas, and the Five Recollections. She believes in engaged contemplative practices that support our turning toward and responding to the suffering in our lives and, by extension, the world.

Aishah is also an award-winning filmmaker-author and lecturer whose work—including the groundbreaking, Ford Foundation-funded acclaimed feature film, NO! The Rape Documentary (2006) and the 2020 Lambda Literary-award winning anthology, love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press)—breaks silences, offers healing paths for trauma, and provides visions for humanely disrupting the inhumane epidemic of sexual violence.

Since June 1995, Aishah has screened her work, guest lectured, and facilitated over 400 workshops and dialogues at colleges and universities, high schools, conferences, international film festivals, rape crisis centers, battered women shelters, community centers, juvenile correctional facilities, and government-sponsored events across North America and in several countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.