Teaching Meditation
This is the only podcast we know of devoted to the teaching of meditation. We interview teachers and others about the process of teaching, how they became teachers, their thoughts on who should and shouldn't teach, tips for new and veteran teachers, and more. While teachers and prospective teachers of meditation will of course find lots to learn here, this is also a great resource for anyone who wants to peer behind the curtain of being a meditation teacher. You can learn more about your hosts Upali over here https://upalimeditation.com/ and about Tucker over here https://meditatewithtucker.com/
Monica Antunes: Borrowed Confidence
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In this conversation with Upali, Monica Anutes traces the path from her first day-long sit to teaching in Rob Burbea's lineage. They then land on confidence: how it grows not from one dramatic insight but from noticing freedom again and again in small moments, and how much of it is borrowed — from teachers, from books, from sangha — before it becomes your own. Along the way: why emptiness and compassion aren't opposites, what dependent arising looks like in a hard morning, and Monica's work bringing Seeing That Frees into Portuguese.
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Monica Heiser: Mindfulness in Daily Life
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Upali interviews Monica Heiser, a teacher in the insight lineage Mindfulness in Daily Life (MIDL). Monica is one of the few guests we've had on the show who is a fulltime school teacher, so she and Upali talk about how this informs her pedagogy. She and Upali talk about effort and overeffort in practice, and how this can lead to big distractions such as lust for jhanas, and they contrast this with the positive feedback loop of wellbeing that comes from balanced practice. You can read more about Monica at https://monicaheiser.com/med...
Lysha Smith: Teaching Goenka's Vipassana
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Lysha Smith is a senior teacher in the lineage of SN Goenka, running the Dhamma Dhara center in Massachusetts. The conversation touches on a number of issues, including
How they manage to keep their courses free of chargeWhy they're so "unhip"? (We think we're the first big Dharma podcast to do an episode on Goenka)Do Goenka retreats cause serious mental health side effects at a higher rate than other traditions, or is it just the sample bias (way, way more people do their retreats than others)?How is the lineage evolving?<...
George Haas: Developing Secure Attachment
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Meditation teacher and attachment theory expert George Haas talks about the effects of insecure attachment, as well as how combining meditation with other modalities can cause a permanent shift in attachment style. See mettagroup.org for more information.
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Leigh Brasington: In Search of a Successor
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Leigh tells us the story of how he became a jhana teacher, and we learn the thrilling story of the life of Ayya Khema, his teacher. He tells us about jhana being an endangered species, and then he tells us about his newest book: Love, Compassion, Joy, Equanimity, which includes the concept of self-Mudita. The middle section is Leigh focusing on his search for a successor to make sure that jhana retreats continue.
For more about Leigh Brasington, head over here.
The Teachers Leigh Recommends in...
Robin Moisson: Meditation Teaching, Meaning, and Making a Living
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In this episode of Teaching Meditation, Upali interviews longtime student-turned-teacher Robin Moisson to explore his journey from an early crisis of meaning in engineering school to intensive retreats in Southeast Asian monasteries, and ultimately back to teaching in the West. They discuss navigating cultural barriers in traditional settings, discovering pragmatic Dharma, and Robin’s path from full-time to part-time teaching as he balances financial reality with practice and teaching.
Learn more about Robin, in English or French, at https://robinmoisson.com/
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Boaz Feldman: Relational Meditation
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Upali interviews Boaz about the relational meditation practices he's been doing, including relational qi gong. Their conversation then pivots to the role Boaz sees meditation practice holding in healing and altering societies. Boaz will be speaking at a conference Dec 5 - 7, 2025, and you can find more information at this link. Boaz's newest paper is over here.
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Professor Steven Haberlin: Teaching Meditation in Academia
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Professor Steven Haberlin is a professor at the University of Central Florida. In this episode, you'll hear him talk about teaching small amounts of meditation to very large amounts of people. Steven tells us about the benefits of this style of teaching, as well as what risks there are. The episode then focuses on research he's been doing on technological adjuncts to meditation and the use of meditation apps. The research forms part of his new book, Meta-Meditation for Mental Health: How Neuroscience, Virtual Reality, and AI are Changing Practice and How You Can B...
Learning Meditation: Anusheh. Meditation (Kinda) Resolved My Anxiety.
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Upali interviews Anusheh, who began practicing The Mind Illuminated in order to improve her anxiety. While it did help, it was a more convoluted path than she had been expecting. One topic she and Upali talk about is the idea that striving is actually helpful, in that it causes you to burn out enough that you stop doing it, which is the route to good practice. Anusheh also talks about the transition from lusting after enlightenment -- "future happiness" -- with the focusing on what happiness could look like in the present moment.
Stephen Zerfas: Making the Jhanas Accessible
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Stephen Zerfas, founder of the Jhana startup Jhourney (get it?), covers a wide range of topics in today's interview. He and Tucker talk about the relationship of the jhanas to the rest of the path, how Stephen has succeeded in getting so much publicity, and how the larger Dharma community has responded to a tech startup teaching meditation retreats.
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Learning Meditation: Yuri. Using Meditation to Cope with War
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Upali interviews Yuri, a Ukranian-British meditator. Yuri talks about how difficult his first retreat was, and how permanently his life changed following this. He then goes into how much better he became as a father as a result of his meditation practice. Later, Upali asks Yuri about what it was like when his country was attacked while his family was still there, and what impact his practice had on his ability to cope with this.
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Dr. Tucker Peck: Freedom is the Opposite of Community
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Upali interviews Tucker in this episode. In a wide-ranging conversation, they touch on:
Many of us look for self esteem to pretty much everyone we meet, or to no one at all, rather than in a sane place.Doing what you'd like to do, and being in community, are opposite stances. How do we balance these?Tucker talks about Sanity & Sainthood, both the name of his book and what he sees as the two goals of dharma practice and psychotherapy. This is distinguished from the point of practice being to get and kee...Learning Meditation: Kacee. Dealing with Overwhelm in Meditation
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Kacee is the first in a series Upali will do with guests who are longtime students, rather than teachers, of meditation. Kacee talks about a number of changes over her years as a practitioner, including her view of what to do when practice makes you feel worse, her view on integrating parts work into her meditation practice, and she deals with the inner critic.
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North Burn: Spending 20 Years on Retreat
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Dharma teacher North Burn has been on a meditation retreat for most of the last twenty years. He teaches a 3-month retreat each spring in California. Tucker talks with North about choosing a monastic life rather than dating, marriage, and a career. North opens up about his relationship with his own teacher, including a period where their relationship was temporarily severed, and what this was like for him.
For more information about North, head to https://boundlessness.org/ or contact team@boundless.org.
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Marianne Bentzen: Intimacy and Playfulness; Trauma and Resource
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Marianne Bentzen is a psychotherapist and trainer in neuroaffective development psychology. She is the author of a number of books including Neuroaffective Meditation: A Practical Guide to Lifelong Brain Development, Emotional Growth, and Healing Trauma. Marianne talks about her path to becoming a meditation teacher as a psychotherapist and how to connect with heartfulness and playfulness in teaching. She also defines trauma, explains its parallels with deep meditative states, and points toward how support might begin for practitioners with trauma.
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Dr. Daniel Ingram: Managing Controversy in Dharma Circles
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Dr. Daniel Ingram is a retired emergency medicine doctor who is the author of two versions of the book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. His current projects are the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium and a charity called the Emergence Benefactors. Daniel discusses the way in which he became a dharma teacher, where he actually began by working with the most advanced practitioners, and he discusses a number of areas in which he has "stepped on minefields" and created controversy.
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Julianna Raye: The Unified Mindfulness Teacher Training Program
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Guest Julianna Raye joins Tucker to describe the Unified Mindfulness teacher training system. This is the second in our series on some of the larger teacher training programs; Vidyamala Burch's episode was the first.
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Dharma 3.0 and Multiplayer Meditation with Vince Horn
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Vince Horn, meditation teacher and co-founder of Buddhist Geeks, talks with Upali about his path of transmission and training in Dharma Teaching. He also explores transparency in Dana, Dharma and Sangha in the world of Web 3.0, and the power of social meditative techniques aka Multiplayer Meditation.
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Shaila Catherine: When Students Get Distracted
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Shaila Catherine rejoins us on the program. We discuss several ancient practices, including the asubha practice (sometimes called "foulness of the body") and what the Buddha calls "crushing mind with mind," and how these practices do and don't work for modern students. Shaila also describes her own process for finding a teacher once one is already a teacher. She has just written a new book called Beyond Distraction: Five Practical Ways to Focus the Mind, so our conversation veers as well into helping students who are struggling with distracted minds.
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Lopon Chandra Easton: 10 years of Vajrayana Training, and Feeding Your Demons
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Lopön Chandra Easton is a Westerner who grew up in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition. She did nine years of preparatory (ngondro) practices and spent 5 - 10 years training to be a teacher. She is a lineage holder under Lama Tsultrim Allione, author of the book Feeding Your Demons. She is currently on the Tara Mandala Board of Directors and the Tara Mandala Bay Area coordinating committee, through which she teaches and organizes events in the Bay Area. To learn about Chandra and connect with her, head to chandraeaston.com.
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Henrik Norberg: Religious Buddhism, or, Teaching Retreats in Caves
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Henrik Norberg is a celibate, non-monastic teacher of meditation retreats, often in caves in Southeast Arizona. Hear him and Upali talk about the difference between Eastern and Western conceptualizations of stream entry, Henrik's view that Western Buddhism hyperfocuses on meditation, and what Henrik's own path looks like, which he said it primarily morality practice.
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Kynan Tan: Success As a New and Fulltime Meditation Teacher
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Australian teacher Kynan Tan, PhD only recently began teaching meditation and was quickly able to leave his regular job and become a fulltime teacher. In this interview, you'll hear how he prepared himself to teach, how he gets continuing education and supervision as a new teacher, and what steps he thinks allowed him to attract so many students in a short time. You can learn more about Kynan and contact him at https://kynanmeditation.net/
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Vidyamala Burch: Growing a Dharma Org Without Losing The Heart
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Vidyamala Burch is the founder of Breathworks, has a teacher training program with over 600 alumni, has been teaching mindfulness for pain for many decades, and has been voted one of the most influential disabled people in the United Kingdom. Hear Vidyamala's story of growing up in New Zealand, moving full-time into a retreat center, and starting and steering Breathworks. She'll discuss how to keep the "heart" in an organization as it grows and how to receive feedback on teachers and colleagues.
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Mukti: Teaching and Embodiment
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Mukti is a teacher in a nondual lineage. She received her authorization to teach from Adyashanti, her husband. You can learn more about Mukti over here.
Mukti’s teachings invite attunement to the act of being and to the heart of awareness. Such attunement can awaken Spirit to reveal Itself as your essential self and as the essence of all of life. This revelation is known as Self-realization, and is the birth of conscious Spirit made manifest, known as embodiment.Her teaching methods for nurturing realization and embodiment are founded in medi...
Upasaka Upali: I Can't Remember How Many Intro Classes I've Taught
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Upali talks about teaching intro courses vs advanced students, coping with the unfairness of the world, working with students' emotional wellbeing, and how to escape Garfunkel syndrome.
Upasaka Upali is a Dharma teacher who aims to demystify meditation, provide tangible instruction, and create a rewarding experience for practitioners. Upali received transmission in a lineage that can be traced back to the Buddha through Namgyal Rinpoche (Ananda Bodhi), and he took his Upasaka vows in 2015. He has a degree from St. Olaf College and has studied Dharma and meditation with Tucker Peck...
Don & Patty: How to Run a Retreat Center
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Don and Patty, both dharma teachers, run the Wellbeing Retreat Center in Tazewell, Tennessee. This special episode focuses, rather than on the usual topic of teaching meditation, on how to start and manage a meditation retreat center.
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Shaila Catherine: Teaching Towards Full Liberation
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Shaila Catherine is the founder of Insight Meditation South Bay, a meditation group in Silicon Valley, and also Bodhi Courses, an online Buddhist classroom. She has been practicing meditation since 1980, with more than nine years of accumulated silent retreat experience. She has taught since 1996 in the USA, and internationally. She completed a one-year intensive meditation retreat with the focus on concentration and jhana, and authored Focused and Fearless: A Meditator’s Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity. Shaila practiced under the guidance of Venerable Pa-Auk Sayadaw from 2006-2015, and authored Wis...
Boaz Feldman: Freedom and Fulfillment
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Boaz Feldman talks with Upali from a multi-year meditation retreat and shares his personal journey of becoming a monk, returning to lay life, and becoming a psychologist. Boaz and Upali talk about the challenges and benefits of integrating ancient tradition in a modern world, and Boaz presents a framework that formulates that possibilty. To learn more about Boaz, please check out his website: http://boazfeldman.com/, and you can also learn more about Neurosystemics at neurosystemics.org .
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Dr. Andrew Holecek: Finding Your Niche
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Dr. Andrew Holecek covers a lot of ground, from describing finding his niche in sleep and dream meditation, to doing a three-year retreat, and his thoughts on the frequent scandals among dharma teachers. Learn more about Andrew at www.andrewholecek.com.
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Dorothy Hunt: How Do We Teach The Ineffable?
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This episode touches on Christian practice, Adyashanti's lineage of Zen, and how to teach meditation from more of a non-doing, already-there perspective, rather than a technique-based one.
Dorothy Hunt is the founder of the San Francisco Center for Meditation and Psychotherapy, and serves as Spiritual Director and President of Moon Mountain Sangha, Inc., a California non-profit religious corporation. Dorothy currently offers meditation and satsang gatherings, awakening groups, weekend retreat days, and longer residential retreats. Following a series of ever-deepening realizations, Dorothy was invited by her spiritual teacher, Adyashanti, to teach within h...
Shinzen Young: The Greatest Dignity Is Absolute Humility
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Shinzen Young is an American mindfulness teacher and neuroscience research consultant.
His systematic approach to categorizing, adapting and teaching meditation, known as Unified Mindfulness, has resulted in collaborations with Harvard Medical School, Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Vermont in the bourgeoning field of contemplative neuroscience.
Shinzen’s interest in Asia began at the age of 14 when he decided to attend Japanese ethnic school in his native city of Los Angeles.
Learn more at shinzen.org.
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Stephen Batchelor: Teaching Dharma vs Teaching Meditation
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Upali interviews Stephen Batchelor, a contemporary Buddhist teacher and writer, a former monk best known for his secular or agnostic approach to Buddhism. They talk about teaching Dharma (vs simply teaching meditation), finding authority through authorship, and plant medicine. Stephen teaches meditation around the world, and he is the author of such well-known books as Buddhism Without Beliefs, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, After Buddhism, and most recently The Art of Solitude. You can learn more about Stephen at https://www.stephenbatchelor.org/
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Dr. Tucker Peck: Coping with Imposter Syndrome
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Upali interviews Tucker. Dr. Tucker Peck is a meditation teacher and clinical psychologist whose specialties include working with advanced meditators and using meditation to help those suffering from psychological disorders.
Tucker began formal training in meditation in 2005 and has studied with Sharon Salzberg of the Insight Meditation Society and Upasaka Culadasa.
Tucker received his undergraduate degree in Psychology from Brown University, and he received his Masters and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the College of Science at the University of Arizona. Tucker is a published author on the s...
Stephanie Nash: Building Your Own Following
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Tucker interviews Stephanie Nash. Stephanie has a psychology degree from Duke University and a Masters from Yale University. In addition to her career as an actress, Stephanie has had the privilege of working closely with Shinzen Young and has been a facilitator with Vipassana Support International since 1999, teaching retreats. In addition to a specialization in mindful eating, Stephanie has written several influential guides, including her well-known guide to meditation posture. You can reach Stephanie over here.
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Jeremy Graves: Can You Be A Teacher And A Normal Person?
Upali interviews Jeremy Graves. Jeremy is a clinical psychologist-in-training in Berkeley, CA, as well as co-author of the bestselling meditation guide The Mind Illuminated. He's also an editor and contributor for a forthcoming book on Mahasi-style insight meditation. Over the past 15 years, he's practiced with many experienced monastics and well-known lay teachers in both the Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist traditions. He has spent a total of over two years in silent retreat. He has taught classes and retreats at venues such as Amazon, Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado, Inner Way LA, eSangha, Sit-Heads Meditation Club...
Jessica Graham: Sex, Money, and Teaching Meditation
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Tucker interviews Jessica Graham. Jessica is a meditation teacher, sex, relationship, and spiritual guide for couples and individuals, international speaker, and author of Good Sex: Getting Off Without Checking Out, which has been translated into several languages, and is a best seller in the Netherlands. She is also a contributing editor of the popular meditation blog, Deconstructing Yourself, and is certified in Grief Recovery coaching. Jessica can be found on many apps including; Simple Habit, Wise@Work, Emjoy, Breethe, and Sanity & Self. Jessica has offered workshops at various centers internationally, including Esalen Institute. S...
Michael Taft: How Not To Become Guru
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Tucker interviews Michael Taft. Michael is a maverick meditation teacher, bestselling author, and podcaster. As a mindfulness coach, he specializes in secular, science-based mindfulness training in retreats, groups, corporate settings, and one-on-one sessions. Michael is the author of several books, including the bestselling The Mindful Geek, Nondualism: A Brief History of a Timeless Concept, and Ego (which he co-authored), as well as the editor of such books as Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson and The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young.
He has often taught meditation at Google, worked on curriculum d...
Introduction to the podcast, with Tucker, Upali, and Shinzen Young
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A short episode where Tucker, Upali and Shinzen explain what the podcast will be about.
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