Certified Listener Poet,
Cohort 12 Fall 2025
Lena Soo Hee Wood is a certified nurse-midwife, clinical educator, listener poet, and mindfulness practitioner and teacher. Her work as a midwife is grounded in presence, reproductive justice, and a trust in the power of transformational change in her patients’ lives.
Her areas of clinical interest include perinatal mental health, mindfulness-based interventions, narrative medicine, and medical humanities. She is currently working on post-graduate training to become dually certified as a nurse-midwife and psychiatric mental health nurse-practitioner.
During the 2024-2025 year, she was a Contemplative Medicine Fellow with the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. Her capstone project explored the literature around tolerance of clinical uncertainty among medical students and residents, and implications for the development of educational interventions grounded in contemplative practices for midwifery students and new graduates.
Lena lives in Portland, Oregon with her family, and spends her time reading and writing poetry, gardening, flatwater kayaking, and tending a colony of neighborhood feral cats that adopted their family. She is a student at Dharma Rain Zen Center in Portland, and her Zen practice continues to teach her lessons on the power of deep listening and compassionate attention both on and off the cushion.