Josh Korda

Since 2005 Josh Korda has led Dharma Punx NYC + Brooklyn as its guiding teacher. The community is secular and Buddhist in outlook, belongs to no larger organisation and runs on donations, and he serves it as a Buddhist pastor, offering one-to-one spiritual counselling alongside his public teaching. He came to the dharma after a career in advertising, which he left in the years after the September 2001 attacks, and his teaching pairs early Buddhist practice with what modern psychology has learned about attachment, emotion and the way people relate to one another.

He leads a weekly Tuesday evening class on Zoom, meets students in person once a month in Williamsburg, and holds an annual Labor Day weekend retreat at the Garrison Institute in the Hudson Valley, together with fellow teacher Kathy Cherry. His evening talks have been released as a free podcast for many years, and the archive now runs to more than eight hundred episodes. His book Unsubscribe: Opt Out of Delusion, Tune In to Truth came out from Wisdom Publications in 2017, and he has written essays for Tricycle, Lion's Roar and Buddhadharma. For more than ten years he has also spoken to trainee hospice volunteers at ZenCare, a non-profit caregiving project.