Aaron Stryker
Founder and director of Dharma Gates

After a spiritual crisis at the age of 18, Aaron began practicing Mysore-style Ashtanga Yoga with Angela Jamison in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He encountered Zen on a trip to Dai Bosatsu Zendo in New York State, with an emerging student meditation group at Wesleyan University. During his senior year, he worked with the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship to co-found Dharma Gates, supporting young students to do retreats in various traditions. He wrote an honors thesis in philosophy on the relationship between traditions of embodied practices, trauma, and cultural transformation. Since graduating in 2019, he has spent four years living in various communities in all three vehicles of Buddhism, and is currently living at Padmasambhava Buddhist Center and working on the preliminary practices in the Nyingma tradition.