Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Aishah Shahidah Simmons (she/her) is a Black feminist lesbian survivor-healer, a Sufi Muslim raised Theravādin Buddhist practitioner, and Insight Meditation teacher. She has practiced vipassanā meditation since 2002, with more than one year of cumulative silent retreat practice in the United States and India, serves as Resident Teacher at Delaware Valley Insight, and is a participant in the 2025–2028 Spirit Rock/IMS Teacher Training Program. She is also a certified mindfulness meditation teacher and a qualified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher.

Aishah practiced in the S.N. Goenka tradition for 17 years before continuing in the Insight Meditation tradition. Her practice reflects a commitment to engaged contemplative practices that support our turning toward and responding to the suffering in our lives and, by extension, the world. Practice, for her, does not erase or overshadow the realities of our world, but supports remaining in wise relationship with ourselves so we can meet what is here without collapsing, numbing, or bypassing.

Aishah is an award-winning filmmaker, author, and lecturer whose work—including the Ford Foundation-funded feature film NO! The Rape Documentary (2006) and the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press)—breaks silences, supports healing, and invites accountability that is not reliant on carceral responses.

Since 1995, she has taught, presented, and facilitated over 400 workshops, lectures, and dialogues across the United States and internationally, including at colleges and universities, conferences, sexual violence crisis centers, the United Nations, and non-governmental organizations, as well as in community and healing-centered spaces across North America and in several countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.