Khahtee V. Turner
Founder & Teacher
For more than twenty-five years, my work as a founder, teacher, artist, and director in early childhood, elementary, and community education, across the United States and internationally, has shaped my understanding of peace as a lived, cultivated practice. I have come to know the sacred responsibility of stewarding joy, creativity, and presence across the continuum of the human experience.
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As a long-time leader of intentional communities of care and expression for young children and families, I have witnessed the indelible power of early formation. The ways we nurture attention, imagination, embodiment, and relationship in early life leave lasting ethical and emotional imprints. Opening a child’s innate connection to wonder, nature, and breath through consistent, compassionate practice does not only support individual flourishing; it shapes the collective future. In tending to children with full presence, we directly nourish the present, heal the past, and seed the conditions for world peace.
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As a teacher and spiritual leader, I understand that creative and contemplative growth does not end in childhood. We continue to evolve throughout our lives through story, vision, and practice. My deepest commitment is to support all beings in realizing inner peace through the creative prism of their unique consciousness, honoring both the gifts and the obstacles through which awakening unfolds. This, I believe, is among the highest experiences of being: a harmonization with compassion and loving-kindness
that is both intimate and universal.
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Sunstory emerged from this lifelong devotion to art, practice, inquiry, and community. Through its programs, I guide contemplative experiences rooted in breath, nature, movement, and the Brahmaviharas, inviting participants into a direct knowing of their inherent dignity and belonging. Sunstory is a living field of practice, cultivated by daily attention and shared presence.
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In my own life, particularly through profound experiences of grief, I have found refuge and grace in the natural world, walking among trees. I have found salvation in walking beneath their canopies, where messages of patience and inner strength dangle across branches, both as whispers and exclamations. These tall teachers stand available to all of us, emanating timeless truth and insight, and reminding us of our interconnection. This opening to insight also leads me to focus on the protection of our irreplaceable biome, both its beauty and the bodhicitta of its essential, life-giving systems.
It is my honor to collaborate with diverse communities during this era of deep fragmentation and longing for connection. Through Sunstory, I hold a vision of world peace as a lived and embodied reality—one that is sensed, practiced, and created through our daily acts of care and conscious presence.
I look forward to practicing peace, being peace, with you.
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Sunstory was founded by Khahtee V. Turner, a contemplative practitioner, writer, and teacher devoted to the cultivation of peace through spiritual practice, creative consciousness, and communal inquiry.
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Khahtee’s work arises from a lifelong engagement with meditation, mindfulness, movement, and nature-based contemplative traditions. Her practice is rooted in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness and the Brahmaviharas, and is shaped by an ongoing devotion to presence as a lived, ethical, and relational way of being.
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For more than twenty-three years, Khahtee has led and stewarded mission-driven educational and cultural institutions serving children, families, and communities. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Studio Creative Play (SCP), an arts and education nonprofit established in 2003 with a mission to nurture creativity, compassionate awareness, and environmental care through the arts in early childhood. Through SCP, she also founded and served as Founder and Executive Director of The Roberts Field School (2015–2024), an interdisciplinary elementary school integrating academic learning, environmental field science, and the arts to support whole-child development and ethical imagination.
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Across these initiatives, Khahtee has guided large-scale programs, interdisciplinary faculty, and diverse communities, leading with care through periods of growth, social change, and organizational challenge. Her work has reached thousands of families locally and internationally, with a sustained commitment to equity, access, and the belief that early childhood and education are sacred periods of human formation.
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Sunstory emerged not as a concept, but as a practice, one formed through years of guiding meditation, witnessing collective transformation, and listening deeply to the ways individuals and communities seek peace in an increasingly fragmented world. At its heart, Sunstory is an offering of sangha: a shared field of attention, care, and awakening cultivated through consistency, devotion, and creative participation.
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Khahtee serves as Sunstory’s primary teacher and creative director, guiding the vision, curriculum, and contemplative frameworks that shape its programs. While Sunstory is her authored and stewarded work, it is intentionally held in collaboration with diverse practitioners whose voices, lineages, and lived experiences enrich the field of practice.
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Her teaching emphasizes:​
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inner peace as a foundation for outer peace
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creativity as a mode of spiritual awareness
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nature as a primordial source of wisdom and regulation
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presence as a practice that ripples outward—into families, classrooms, leadership, and collective life
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Through Sunstory, Khahtee is devoted to nurturing spaces where individuals remember their capacity to heal, to belong, and to live in alignment with what matters most, becoming, in practice, peacemakers from the inside out.
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​Khahtee is a Certified Meditation Teacher from the Awareness Training Institute, and the
Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.