Some of my trainings & affiliations

  • Co-Founder, Peer Health Exchange

  • Mediate Your Life (MYL) Certified Conflict Coach and Conflict Mediator

  • Eco-chaplaincy Program, Sati Center for Buddhist Studies

  • Fierce Allies JEDI (Justice, Equity, Decolonization, & Intersectionality) Dojo & Community of Practice

  • Healing & Reconciliation Institute Facilitator Training

  • Co-Founder & Co-Facilitator, Earth Activist Retreat at San Francisco Zen Center

  • Covid Grief Network, Chaplain

  • Mentored by Nonviolent Communication trainers & mediators (ongoing)

  • Guided and mentored by Zen priests (ongoing)

 

Short bio

Katy Dion is a coach, facilitator, and conflict mediator who helps organizations and individuals stop sacrificing their wellbeing to their purpose so they can have more of both. She has trained as a Buddhist chaplain and is a certified conflict mediator with a background in Nonviolent Communication. In her early career she co-founded Peer Health Exchange, leading an organization that has created educational opportunities for 500,000+ young people to share the resources they need to make healthy decisions. She also draws on her experiences as a Zen monk, published author, parent, and open water swimmer.

The bigger story

I have always had a sense that life is precious, fleeting, and happening right now.

My early career was in the social impact sector. In my twenties, I co-founded Peer Health Exchange, an organization that has created educational opportunities for 500,000+ young people to share the resources they need to make healthy decisions. When I left PHE, I continued to work for equity-oriented nonprofits while writing a later-to-be-published novel. I put my activism and writing on pause when I got sick in my early-thirties with a mystery autoimmune condition; that suffering brought me to a Buddhist monastery and contemplative practice—and probably saved my life.

I have teachers and mentors across many disciplines and fields. I am certified as a conflict coach and mediator through Mediate Your Life, an approach that uses the insights and tools of Nonviolent Communication to help groups, pairs, and individuals work through difficult conflicts. I have supported organizations, colleagues, couples, and parents to address conflicts in some of their most important relationships. I love conflict work because it requires us to become present to ourselves and each other—our feelings and needs, and others’ feelings and needs, whether or not we agree with their position.

I am also an ordained lay practitioner in the Soto Zen lineage. I trained with the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies as a chaplain, a person who serves as a compassionate companion to others in times of sorrow and joy: witnessing them, listening to them, honoring their truths, and offering prayer and ritual when invited—in other words, showing up for whatever is present. My training focused on ecochaplaincy, an approach to reconnecting humans with our responsibility to heal and be healed by the earth.

Writing is one of the tools I use to get to know my own mind and share its questions with others. My novel, The Dependents, was published by Little, Brown and has been translated into four languages. I am a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Mesa Refuge Pamela Krasny Moral Courage Fellow.

I live on Odawa land in Northern Michigan. My ancestors are Western and Southern European and Ashkenazi Jewish. I am committed to growing my understanding of my ancestors’ acts of harm and humanity, and how they reverberate through my life and actions. Collaborating with others in service of justice and equity is part of how I heal and repair.

My work in the world brings together the three strands of my path: changemaking, creativity, and contemplative practice. My experience is that almost everyone has a longing for all of these. A longing to be working for beneficial change; to express themselves with truth and beauty; and to connect with a spiritual source that speaks to the mystery of life and provides ballast in times of chaos and uncertainty. I'm committed to tending these needs in myself and others for our collective wellbeing.