8:30 - 9:30am Krishnamurti Audio
at the Grove
9:30 - 10:00am Morning Tea / Coffee
Main House
10:00 - 10:25am: Welcome and Overview / Music
with Francisco Mazza (KFA Executive Director) and Karolina Kalo (Pianist) at the Student Center
10:30 - 11:50am: The Significance of True Learning in Our Lives
with Mary Kelly at the Student Center
12:00 - 1:15pm: Lunch
Collect your pre-ordered lunch ticket or purchase one at the information hub. Lunch will be available at the Main House.
1:30 - 2:30pm: Conditioning and the Individual
with Connie Jones at the Student Center
2:40 - 3:00pm: Piano Concert
with Karolina Kalo at the Student Center
1:45 - 2:45pm School Tour: 50 Years of Oak Grove School
with Joel Keeler at the Main House
3:15 - 4:30pm An Inquiry Into the Nature of Self
with Pathik Wadhwa at the Student Center
3:15 - 4:30pm Workshop: Being a Light to Oneself
with Andy Gilman at the HS Math Classroom
4:30 - 5:15pm Social Time with Tea/Coffee
at the Main House
1:45 - 3:15pm Dialogue with John Duncan
at the Reflective Classroom
3:15 - 4:30pm Dialogue with Richard Waxberg and Deborah Kerner
at the Reflective Classroom
8:30 - 9:30am Krishnamurti Audio
at the Grove
9:30 - 10:00am Morning Tea/Coffee
at the Main House
10:00 - 10:25am: Welcome and Recap / Music
with Maxi Kogoi (Krishnamurti Center Director) and Karolina Kalo (Pianist) at the Student Center
10:30 - 11:50pm: Thought and Observation
with David Moody at the Student Center
10:30 - 11:50am Workshop: Poetry and Krishnamurti
with Karen Hesli at the HS Math Classroom
12:15-1:30pm: Lunch
Collect your pre-ordered lunch ticket or purchase one at the information hub. Lunch will be available at the Main House.
1:30 - 2:50pm: Intelligence, Goodness and The School
with Siddhartha Menon at the Student Center
1:45 - 2:45pm: School Tour: 50 Years of Oak Grove School
with Jodi Grass, Meredy Beson Rice, and Karen Hesli at the Main House
3:00 - 4:10pm The Living Experiment: 50 Years of Oak Grove School
with Jodi Grass at the Student Center
4:20 - 5:00pm A Commentary and Discussion of KFA’s Core Mission
with Trustees and Staff of the KFA at the Student Center
10:30 - 11:50am Dialogue with Richard Waxberg and Deborah Kerner
at the Reflective Classroom
1:30 - 2:50pm Dialogue with John Duncan
at the HS Math Classroom
3:00 - 4:10pm: Dialogue with Rowan Lommel
at the HS Math Classroom
———————-
Krishnamurti on Education and the Significance of Life
Jodi Grass has worked at Oak Grove School and the Krishnamurti Foundation of America in different capacities since 2005. Currently, Jodi is in her seventh year as Head of OGS. In her words, “I don’t feel as though I ‘work’ at Oak Grove. I spend my days here out of a deep devotion to the Intent of the school as originally shared by Krishnamurti in 1975.” Before Oak Grove, Jodi worked for several nonprofits, and community organizations, as well as K-12 schools and a community college. She has also served on the boards of three nonprofit organizations and two schools over the past 34 years. Jodi has taught students of all ages through community education agencies that provided compensatory content to local public schools. Just before joining Oak Grove in 2005, Jodi was the Executive Director of a nonprofit organization that provided information technologies through NGOs in developing countries.
Constance A. Jones, PhD is a sociologist of religion who has pursued a long interest in the cultures and religions of the East as well as the adoption of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and practices in the West. She researches spiritual teachers as well as new religious movements around the world. She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA and a Fulbright Scholar at the Krishnamurti Research Centre and Banares Hindu University, Varanasi, India. Her publications include: C.A. Jones and J. Ryan Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Facts-on-File; G.I. Gurdjieff e la sua eredita, Elle-di-ci Press; and Krishnamurti: Self-Inquiry, Awakening, and Transformation, Cambridge University Press. She teaches courses in: J. Krishnamurti, Bohmian Dialogue, and Inquiry, Self-Inquiry, Introduction to Eastern Systems of Contemplation, Self, Society, and Transformation.
Mary Kelley attributes her call to the teaching profession to her reading of Krishnamurti’s Education and the Significance of Life (1953), which she first encountered in her formative teenage years. She still feels daily inspired by what K proposes true learning to be, as a life-long experience of discovery over and above one limited to accumulating mere knowledge, skills, and experience. Mary considers it a wonderful blessing to have served as an elementary and middle school teacher at Oak Grove School for the past ten years, and now is both honored and humbled to be called to a new role as Director of the High School, where opportunities abound to see herself, her colleagues, and the students together with fresh eyes and an open-learning mind.
Maxi Kogoi comes from a German-Italian family and completed his high school years at Brockwook Park School in the mid-80s. He attended college in the US and earned a BA in Anthropology, then pursued further studies in Political Science in Germany. When the opportunity to return to the States presented itself, he eventually found his way to Ojai which he has been calling home for 20 years. He has been working in education administration in various capacities for two decades and has recently joined the KFA as the Krishnamurti Center Director. He continues to delve into Krishnamurti’s teachings and has found Integral Theory to be an interesting contribution to the understanding of the world at large.
Siddhartha Menon is a trustee of the KFI, a former principal of Rishi Valley School, and former director of the Rajghat Education Centre. He is currently based at the Valley School in Bangalore. He is also an alumnus of RVS and has been working in the Krishnamurti schools for more than thirty years. He has published six collections of poetry and is an avid runner.
Francisco Mazza is the Executive Director of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America. Originally from Argentina, where he studied psychology and marketing, he became connected to Krishnamurti’s work over twenty years ago at Brockwood Park School in England, where he lived as a residential student. He later joined the staff of the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, managing the translation and subtitling of Krishnamurti’s video recordings across multiple languages.
After moving to Ojai, he has served the Foundation in a wide range of role — from archives and digital content to marketing initiatives, including the launch of The Immeasurable platform—before becoming Development Director, Center Director, and now Executive Director.
For him, Krishnamurti’s work is an ongoing inquiry into whether the mind can meet life without the filter of its own assumptions—a question that remains as relevant in organizational stewardship as it is in personal observation.
David Edmund Moody, PhD, is the author of three books about Krishnamurti. His most recent book is Krishnamurti in America: New Perspectives on the Man and his Message. This biography examines the whole of Krishnamurti’s life and work, with special attention to the crucial events in the United States that have been neglected or overlooked by previous biographers. These events include the unusual and challenging circumstances leading to the formation of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America. David worked closely with Krishnamurti during the early years of the Oak Grove School, where he served as teacher, educational director, and director, from 1975 to 1987. He took his PhD in educational psychology (UCLA, 1991) with a research focus on the role of insight in students’ understanding of concepts in the sciences. Further information about David and his work is available at davidedmundmoody.com.
Meredy Benson Rice has been a member of the Oak Grove School Community since 1991. She was drawn to Ojai from her native Canada and UK by her interest in Krishnamurti and Oak Grove School specifically. Over the last 35 years, she has held various positions in the school including parent, teacher, HS Director, Head of School, Director of Teaching & Learning, and now serves the school by coaching teachers in their ever-present commitment to continuous growth. She has a deep love of the school and continues to be inspired by its mission to “offer a place where the whole community can inquire together into the perennial questions of humankind”. She holds an MA in Educational Leadership (Columbia) as well as a BA in English Literature (University of Sussex), a B.Ed. in Education/Teaching (York University, Toronto), and a post-graduate Certificate in Evidence-based Coaching (Fielding University). She is also the author of three published novels for young readers.
Pathik Wadhwa, M.D., Ph.D., was born and raised in India and has spent most of his adult life in Southern California, where he lives with his wife, Meha, and their dogs. He is, by profession, a physician-scientist and serves as a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, where he founded and directs the UC Irvine Development, Health and Disease Research Program. This transdisciplinary initiative focuses on the origins of human conditioning during the earliest phase of life—from conception to birth—and specifically on the role of maternal-placental-fetal stress-related processes during this period in shaping key structural and functional features of a wide range of physical and mental health outcomes across the entire lifespan.
Alongside his scientific career, Pathik has had a longstanding engagement with the work of J. Krishnamurti, both as a personal pursuit and through formal association with K schools and foundations, drawn by questions about the nature of mind, perception, and the sense of self. For him, scientific research and exploration of K’s work are not distinct interests but expressions of a single underlying investigation into the origins, nature, and consequences of conditioning. Drawing on his examination of conditioning’s biological architecture, his inquiry centers on a fundamental question: whether there can be a clear perception into the underlying causal structure of that which, for most of us, feels more palpably real than anything else we experience—our felt sense of being a separate, continuously persisting self—and whether such perception can dissolve the misapprehension that this self is an independent entity standing apart from the very experiences that constitute it—what K encapsulated in his central insight: ‘the observer is the observed.’
John Duncan has been involved with the Krishnamurti Foundation for several decades. After first seeing Krishnamurti speak in 1984, he attended the first dialogue retreats and May Gatherings beginning in 1986. Following many personal retreats in Ojai, he moved there in the late 1990s and began working for the KFA. He was proofreading for Krishnamurti Publications at a time when many books were being put back into print, including the entire Collected Works, which deepened his interaction with the teachings. Working in the Krishnamurti Library and facilitating countless dialogues has rounded out his education into what Krishnamurti has shared with us. He is working on a book based on what he has learned with the working title: Fragmentation, Meditation and Freedom: All you need to know to allow the unknown. He also plans to move to New York where he will share his music, which has also manifested through what he has learned these many years. Other than that he is just another nobody, living, loving and learning.
Andy Gilman was raised in Ojai. He teaches high school English and History at Oak Grove School part time, and is the current Mayor of Ojai. In addition, Andy is the director of the Agora Foundation, which offers great books seminars, teacher training, and Ojai Chautauqua panels promoting civil discourse in the community. He loves to garden, hike, cook, play music, read, draw, and enjoy our valley with his wife Kate. He has three adult children, and one three-year-old grandchild.
Karen Hesli
“After teaching in Minneapolis Public Schools for 10 years, I had grown weary of the large classes and entrenched systems of grades, testing, rewards and punishments and began to imagine that a vibrant and happier learning environment was possible … As things go, within a few months of becoming acquainted with Krishnamurti’s writings on education, I had moved to Ojai to teach at Oak Grove School! The campus itself was a breath of fresh air, along with its stunningly expansive and revolutionary full page intention about the art of learning and listening. The shared experience of inquiry among the parents, staff and children became a source for never-ending discovery and renewal not just related to what it means to be educated, but what it means to be alive. Working at Oak Grove has been a gift of a lifetime, a gift that continues since ‘retiring’ in 2018. The mysterious “curricula of life” keep presenting themself in new forms. One of these forms has been to compile the poems that have been markedly significant to students, parents and/or teachers (and/or written by them) during these decades. During this 1-2 hour workshop, we’ll read aloud some of these poems, reflect, discuss, and perhaps write/share some of our own.”
Rowan Lommel, PsyD is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Certified Yoga Therapist living in Ojai. She grew up in the Krishnamurti schools, and has been working on and off for the Krishnamurti Foundation since she was a teenager. She is a professor in the Clinical Psychology program at Antioch University.
Richard Waxberg and Deborah Kerner moved to Ojai, California by invitation in 2004, to create and begin facilitating the Explorations into Freedom Intensive Retreats for the Krishnamurti Foundation of America. They offer two retreats each year at the Krishnamurti Center in Ojai, in June and October. They have also facilitated retreats in British Columbia, Canada and in Denmark. They left their lives in New York City to begin a new spiritual life, taking up the challenge Krishnamurti proposed of stepping out of the ‘me-centered’ paradigm of consciousness. Their journey took them to Ojai, California to study Krishnamurti’s teachings, and to India to teach for a school year at the Rishi Valley School in rural Andra Pradesh, a school based on Krishnamurti’s teachings located near his birthplace. As part of their earlier spiritual work, they studied Native American shamanic practices with traditional Native American elders before discovering the profound life-changing teachings of J. Krishnamurti. It was during these studies that they learned the importance of gathering, storing and releasing energy as an essential part of spiritually transformational work. They continue studying and exploring current scientific studies and observations on human consciousness that reflect Krishnamurti’s profound message of transformation, freedom, and love.
Karolina Kalo is a Los Angeles-based concert pianist, recording artist, and multi-genre composer whose artistry spans classical and contemporary realms. Through both tradition and experimentation, she creates music that serves as a vessel for presence, healing, and the unfolding of inner worlds, bridging centuries-old practices with forward-thinking soundscapes.
For many years she performed under her classical music name, Karolina Rojahn, establishing herself as a leading interpreter of contemporary music. She premiered more than one hundred new works and recorded forty four albums of solo and chamber repertoire on labels such as Naxos, Navona, Ravello.
Now composing and performing under the name Karolina Kalo, she brings her classical foundation into a new creative realm of neo-classical and ambient music. Her interdisciplinary practice often includes collaborations with visual artists and dancers curating immersive and ethereal soundscapes that serve as a conduit to a deeper communion with self. A central focus of Karolina’s creative practice is Cor Karoli – her musical duo that focuses on exploring intersections between neo-classical and electronic music by blending seemingly distant musical styles into an innovative cross-genre sound. Their debut album “Becoming” premiered in the fall of 2025.
Karolina is a graduate of Boston Conservatory at Berklee, where she earned both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Piano Performance as a full-scholarship recipient.
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