Meet Nahal Farhi

Nahal is a meditation teacher and ceremonial facilitator at Contrast, bringing a decade of contemplative training to the practice of staying present inside real intensity.

She spent close to a decade in tech in LA and San Francisco after moving to the U.S. for a master's in computer science, a career that never quite matched her heart. In 2014, her father's terminal illness cracked that open, and in the depths of that grief, a book of philosophy led her to her first five minutes of daily meditation. From there the practice deepened quickly: Zazen at San Francisco Zen Center, intensive sitting retreats at Green Gulch Farm, and Vipassana training in the S.N. Goenka lineage that gave her a clear, practical framework for how the mind works, one she still teaches from today.

She left tech for good after a 2023 layoff, though the seed had been planted earlier, including a five-day plan medicine retreat in Peru that reshaped her relationship to grief and to life. Since then, Nahal has trained and served at plan medicine ceremonies in the Bay Area and, in 2025.

Nahal's Contrast sessions draw on Zen simplicity, Vipassana precision, and that heart-led wisdom from the Amazon, helping people trust the body and the breath over the need to control. When she's not facilitating, she's usually traveling, sitting her own meditation retreats, or playing piano. For her, the work is surrender, one breath at a time.