Charlie Vazquéz
HE / HIM / HIS
Charlie Vázquez is a creative mindfulness instructor with over 30 years of practice and teaching experience in the healing arts and meditation. His roots as an artist and musician inform his style, which incorporates mindfulness coaching, abstract creativity, and sound meditation. The Buddhist values of generosity and compassion inspire his approach to teaching New York City’s most vulnerable residents including senior citizens of color, recovering addicts, and queer youth. He was certified through Tibet House’s 100-Hour Meditation Teacher Training and has designed the Creative Mindfulness Lab© workshop series based on a lifetime of experience.
We start with the most sacred thing of all: the breath.
Popular Talks
Creative Mindfulness: What is it and How Can it Help?
As a certified instructor, Charlie has introduced hundreds of students to the power of the Creative Mindfulness Lab©, a workshop series he’s developed based on over 30 years of practice and teaching experience. Optimizing our mind-body connection can cultivate a lasting sense of wellness and connectivity to others through practice. By fusing meditation and self-expression, we can access the healing wisdom of the subconscious, train ourselves to ignore distractions, and find happiness in simple things, which he teaches and speaks about.
Transforming Pain into the Power of Compassion
Charlie has finished writing a spiritual memoir, Using Pain as the Path: Healing Through Creative Mindfulness, which explores his most painful childhood wound—his father’s abuse—and how he transformed the anguish into helping addicts who suffer as his father did. He guides his students on similar journeys of transformation as inspired by his work with undocumented youth through PEN America’s DREAMing Out Loud program. What lessons can your pain teach you? And how can you use them to help others?
Speaking, Workshops & Consulting
Workshops
Memoir and Meditation
Memoir and Meditation is a workshop series that uses the insights gained from mindfulness meditation as the foundation for deep and revealing self-inquiry and memoir writing.
Consulting
I assist organizations with developing creative writing and mindfulness meditation programs. Most of this work has focused on marginalized and under-resourced communities.
“Mr. Vazquéz is a known leader and catalyst of creative engagement with a strong track record for connecting meaningfully across differences in cultural heritage, language, ethnic-national origin, race, and gender expression.”
– Arnaldo Lopez, Managing Director, Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater
Charlie Vazquez has designed and facilitated creative writing and wellness programs for the NYC Department of Health, the New York Public Library, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and PEN America. Initiatives he’s developed such as Bronx Memoir Project, DREAMing Out Loud, and #OurStoriesNYC have served LGBTQI youth-of-color, undocumented immigrants, low-income communities, and senior citizens—our most vulnerable.
A native of The Bronx, he’s studied story craft for over twenty years. Charlie was certified as a meditation instructor through Tibet House’s 100-Hour Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training, where he studied with senior Buddhist teacher David Nichtern in the lineage of Tibetan master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
Charlie is completing his memoir, which follows his journey of creativity and transformation from New York City to the West Coast.
Currently, he’s collaborating with the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center in New York’s Lower East Side on Cuentos, a memoir and mindfulness meditation program offered as a community healing forum to document the challenges and losses suffered during the Covid-19 pandemic and lock-down. He also teaches meditation to Bronx high school students.
Let’s collaborate to ensure a transformative experience.