Shomer Zwelling
Senior Teacher

Shomer Zwelling attended his first meditation in the early 1970s with Ram Das. Even though it was a thoroughly surprising experience, daily meditation practice proved elusive until 1992 when he went to a 10-day silent retreat in the Kathmandu Valley taught by S.N. Goenka and his assistants. Shomer has attended retreats, workshops and courses at various centers in the United States and India, including the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Barre, Massachusetts; the Bhavana Society in West Virginia; and the Vipassana Meditation Center in Shelburne, Massachusetts. Shomer has been teaching meditation locally since 1995 in a variety of settings, including the Williamsburg Hospice House. He participated in intensive teacher training workshops with Matthew Flickstein in the early 2000s. Shomer also teaches yoga and has teacher certification as an E-RYT 200 from the Yoga Alliance.

Ben Thacker-Gwaltney
Lead Teacher

Ben has been teaching meditation since 2010, and he began meditating in 2001 at the Joshua Tree Center in Charlottesville, VA with Dr. Mark Oberman.  He graduated in 1993 with an M.Div. from Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. For 20 years he worked in community organizing for the nonprofit Virginia Organizing, with a strong component in adult education.  He has also completed over 1000 hours of experience teaching Yoga for Arthritis with an additional focus on somatic meditation. He finds skillful teachings in Theravada, Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, but he is a student in the Dharma Path training program of Palpung Thubten Choling monastery, in the Kagyu lineage.

Ben is one of the rotating teachers of the Monday night meditation group at WUU, and he leads a Buddhist book/study group on Thursday mornings at WUU. He is Chairperson of the Teachers’ Committee.

Mary McGovern
Teacher

Mary has been deeply committed to Buddhist Mindfulness and Compassion practices since 2012. Her studies include the works of the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, Tara Brach and others, and she has attended residential retreats of the Insight Meditation Society (MA), Southern Dharma Center (NC) and Insight Meditation Center Washington, as well as completing Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training. In February 2019, she began an intensive, two year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program led by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. She is an ordained interfaith minister who serves individuals and the community by sharing compassion practices, compassionate guidance/support, and sacred ceremony.

Mary began her professional life as a music teacher, spent time working on Capitol Hill (Washington, DC), and then pivoted to association management for 20+ years. Looking for a way to bring Mindfulness and Compassion practices into distressed situations that would benefit from them, she left her job at the end of 2018 to pursue a Master’s in Social Work. She is also a student of nonviolent communication.

Mary is one of the rotating teachers of the Wednesday night meditation group. She is a past president of the Williamsburg Buddhist Sangha and is a current board member.

John Chowning
Teacher

John has practiced meditation for more than forty years and has studied Buddhism for the past 15 years.  He began serving as one of the meditation leaders for our Monday Night Buddhist Meditation Group in 2017.

He has a Masters in Education from the University of Evansville, in  Indiana.  He spent most of his career working with the Job Corps program, which provides education and job training for disadvantaged young adults. He began as an instructor in 1974 and later became an academic supervisor at the Earle C. Clements Job Corps Center in Morganfield, Kentucky.  In 1989 he took a position at the Job Corps National Office in Washington DC, where he soon became responsible for the development of all of the program’s academic curricula. John retired in 2015, having worked for the US Department of Labor’s Employment Training Administration for 24 years. While living in Kentucky and Maryland, he also volunteered as an adult literacy tutor and a tutor trainer.  His hobbies include songwriting and audio engineering.

John is President of the Williamsburg Buddhist Sangha.

Darrell Key
Teacher

Teacher for the Saturday morning Walking Meditation group

Scott Varney
Teacher

Rotating teacher for Monday and Wednesday night meditation groups.

Grace Cunningham
Teacher

Rotating teacher for the Wednesday night meditation group