Bruce Berlin has been a political activist, writer and Buddhist meditator for over fifty years. After graduating from NYU School of Law, he began his legal career in the fall of 1970 at the Legal Aid Society in Trenton, New Jersey. But he soon became disenchanted with lawyering and took off to find himself in the spring of 1972. A year later, Berlin arrived at Kopan, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery outside Kathmandu, where he spent a month training with Thubten Zopa Rinpoche and Lama Yeshe. Since then, he has attended sesshins with Zen Master Sasaki Roshi and Vipassana retreats at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts.

Upon returning to the US, Berlin practiced poverty law at Western Massachusetts Legal Services with a new outlook. In 1982, he moved to Santa Fe, NM, where he spent the next 12 years initiating and directing a number of peace and justice organizations. A former US Institute of Peace Fellow, Berlin cofounded and directed New Mexicans for a Bilateral Nuclear Weapons Freeze in 1983. A couple of years later, he established The Trinity Forum for International Security and Conflict Resolution, and later founded New Mexicans for Money Out of Politics. Before retiring in 2012, he spent eight years as a senior ethics attorney with the New Mexico Public Education Department.

Berlin is the author of Breaking Big Money's Grip on America and his memoir From Camden to Kathmandu. He has one daughter and lives in Mineral Hill, New Mexico, about 75 miles from Santa Fe, where he writes several times a month at his Substack, Open Road, Open Heart.