Paying attention and following along…
“You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.”
—Denise Levertov
Judith Day was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a photographer who documented local people and places for over 40 years, and through him Judith became strongly connected to the city and the Mississippi River, and the many small rivers in Missouri. She counts St. Louis, rivers, and seacoasts among her friends, and is grateful to have a few excellent human friends as well. She has been married to her best friend for 35 years.
In 1964 Judith was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” in her high school class. She also jumped out of an airplane for the first of over 500 times. In 1969 she became active in health care reform work in St. Louis, becoming director of an American Friends Service Committee project. In 1975 she left St. Louis to travel and study meditation and contemplative prayer for six years, ending up in northern California where she now lives.
Since 1975 Judith has practiced mindfulness meditation in the Buddhist tradition. She began teaching mindfulness in 1990 and in 1993 she completed a professional training with Jon Kabat-Zinn. From 1995 to 2019 she taught this work at Kaiser-Permanente. Judith currently teaches and consults privately.
In 1986 Judith received her master’s degree in counseling psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Lomi Somatics Associate. She has worked in private practice and in low-fee mental health clinics. From 2008 to 2014 she was a life consultant to service members and their families on U.S. military bases around the world.
Judith has been writing since childhood. A collection of her stories from the last few decades will be published in 2024. Currently she is working on a novella about a chance meeting in an Italian resort town of three characters: a Vietnam vet, an Iraqi vet, and a woman who grew up in Soviet-bloc Europe.
Like so many lives, this one has bumped along an unforeseen path as Judith has done her best to follow what really matters.
DREAM
I am in a woods. A young boy tosses a ball into the air and hits it with a bat. It flies into the sky and I chase it out of the woods through a hole in a cyclone fence, across an open field sloping uphill. The ball shines in the sunlight, high ahead of me.
I run very fast. The ground becomes rocky and the rocks get bigger and bigger, I am running across large boulders. I am afraid I’ll fall, but I quickly understand that my feet know exactly where to step and how to carry me safely.
Joyfully, I keep chasing the ball. It flies out over a cliff into space. The ground disappears from beneath me, and I continue to follow the whirling rainbow sphere as it falls towards bright, shimmering water far below.
judith@judithday.com
P.O. Box 936, Monte Rio, California 95462
Judith Day 