Anouk Aimée Shambrook, PhD

With a passion to integrate science and spiritual inquiry, Dr. Anouk Aimée Shambrook’s path has taken her from earning a PhD in Astrophysics and being a NASA fellow to completing seven years of Vajrayana and Dzogchen meditation retreat. A Black Buddhist teacher, she integrates the latest in neuroscience with trauma resilience, nondual meditation, and the Aware Ego Process in her coaching practice.

Inspired by The Tao of Physics, which questions our perception of reality, Anouk majored in Physics at Columbia University, where she earned her BA and MS degrees. While doing research for her PhD in Astrophysics, she developed a severe illness and was bedridden for months. During this period, she deeply questioned what kind of life she wanted to look back on when she was on her deathbed. This query moved her into understanding the intersection of trauma, social justice, race, and spirituality.

Dr. Shambrook uses trauma resilience as a tool to promote racial diversity, equity, and inclusion. She coaches individuals and organizations through the experiential Aware Ego Process. This process provides clarity on the unconscious perceptions and habits that limit freedom. In collaboration with Carlee Adamson, she teaches Trauma Literacy, helping people develop tools to work with (often unconscious) individual, intergenerational, and collective trauma in support of connecting with our profound inner freedom. Her training includes the Aware Ego Process and the Trauma Resiliency Model

In 1995, she lived and worked at the center founded by Chagdud Rinpoche, her Tibetan Buddhist teacher. In 1999, she spoke with her Buddhist teacher Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche about spiritual bypassing and racism in many white US Buddhist communities. It was then that he asked her to start teaching. Anouk’s teaching of Buddhism reflects the diversity of her personal and academic experiences. She focuses on timeless awareness and embodied, spontaneous presence. Her guiding passion is supporting people in connecting to their innate wholeness as we work together for liberation through an embodied path of self-knowledge, free of the limiting trappings of oppressive, psycho-emotional confines.