Teachers copy to April 21

Australian based teachers

Here are some of the key people who teach or have taught at Sydney Insight Meditators sanghas

Subhana Barzaghi
Subhana Barzaghi is a Zen roshi and a senior teacher in the Insight Meditation tradition. She is a resident teacher of the Sydney Zen Centre and founding teacher of both the Bluegum Sangha in Sydney and the Kuan Yin Meditation Centre in Lismore. Subhana’s teaching emphasises liberation here and now through the practice of calm abiding and enquiry. She leads Zen and Insight Meditation retreats in Australia, New Zealand and India.
http://www.subhana.com.au

Alan Bassal
Alan has been studying and practicing Buddha’s teachings for over 35 years beginning in the Vipassana meditation tradition and then developing in Eastern & Western Insight. For over 28 years he worked internationally in the field of management and organisational change. For many years he has integrated the Buddha dharma and psychotherapy in his leadership development work. Alan’s teachings are eclectic and practical, he encourages people to awaken to each moment and find the fulfillment they seek.

Michael Dash
Michael works as a counsellor and educator and has been a Buddhist meditation practitioner for over 20 years. He has studied in Australia, Thailand and Burma, where he practised satipatthana vipassana in the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition. Michael has taught courses and retreats in Melbourne and Sydney, including courses at the Buddhist Library, Wat Buddha Dhamma and the Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre. He teaches Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), has a private counselling practice in Sydney and works as a bereavement counsellor in the Public Health System.

Betsy Faen
Betsy has been meditating for over 40 years, beginning first in the Goenka Vipassana tradition and later in the Zen and Insight Traditions. Her present practice is focused around Recollective Awareness, an insight meditation practice developed by Jason Siff with whom she has been training for the last six years. Betsy teaches regularly at Beaches Sangha in Sydney, leads Recollective Awareness retreats, workshops and an ongoing meditation group, and has a private practice offering counseling and supervision.

Ken Golding
Ken first became interested in Buddhist meditation forty years ago. Since then he has practiced and studied in the Insight and Zen traditions. Eight years ago he met Jason Siff and began to train and study in the Recollective Awareness approach. He currently offers retreats and workshops using this gentle, allowing and reflective approach. Combined with a rich history of social and environmental activism Ken has a deep and abiding love of the Australian landscape. These influences inform a view of Engaged Buddhism he brings to teaching roles in retreats and various meditative Yatras and Gatherings in both local and remote natural areas.

Winton Higgins
Winton began meditating and practising the dharma in 1987. He took up teaching (mainly Vipassana) meditation in 1995, in city classes and in silent residential retreats in rural venues. In 2003 he became one of the regular teachers of the Bluegum Sangha – an ongoing commitment. These days he also teaches regularly for Golden Wattle and Beaches sanghas, and residential retreats for SIM, which he helped to found in 2005. Since that time Winton’s meditation teaching has developed towards non-formulaic insight practice based on the Buddha’s original teachings, while his dharmic orientation inclines towards secular Buddhism. He fosters interest in the original teachings and their affinity with modern streams of thought and progressive social commitments. Winton is a social science academic and a writer; he and his partner, Lena, have two grown-up daughters and a grandson

Jampa Jaffe
Jampa has been teaching Buddhism for over twenty years. He was a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition for seventeen years, fourteen of which were spent studying and meditating in India and one in Thailand meditating in the Vipassana tradition. Jampa was resident teacher at Buddha House in Adelaide for eleven years and taught a Dharma teachers’ training program in Italy for seven years. For the last three years he has participated in teacher training retreats with Jason Siff. Jampa teaches regularly at the Vajrayana Institute in Ashfield and periodically at Beaches Sangha in the Northern Beaches.

Patrick Kearney
Patrick is an independent dharma teacher in the lineage of Mahasi Sayadaw. He has trained extensively in the Mahasi approach to insight meditation, his principle teachers being Panditarama Sayadaw and John Hale. He has also trained in the Diamond Sangha lineage of Zen Buddhism. His original teacher was Robert Atkin Roshi, and he has since studied with other Diamond Sangha teachers in Australia.
Patrick has a particular interest in the original teachings of the Buddha - Buddhism as it was before Theravada or Mahayana were ever thought of. He studies Pali, the language of the earliest surviving Indian recension of the Buddha's teachings, and seeks to bring his understanding of the early texts to the practice of dharma in the contemporary world.

Elaine Kelly
Elaine has been interested in Buddhism for about 10 years, and started practising regularly a few years ago. She has a decade of teaching experience at universities in Sydney and a doctorate in critical and cultural studies. She is passionate about social justice, refugee rights and climate change. While she loves to write, she is currently retraining to go into a psychotherapy and counselling career. As a new lay teacher of the dharma she embodies the notion of ‘beginner’s mind’ over and again. When she engages with the dharma as a practice and a text she is always interested in how it relates to psychology, everyday life, social relations, a kinder politics and a deeper reflection on what it means to be alive. Her Teaching creatively weaves the insight tradition, with other Buddhist traditions.

Joyce Kornblatt
Joyce is a Blackheath resident and Buddhist practitioner in the Insight tradition for 25 years. A writer and Hakomi-trained psychotherapist, she has offered writing/meditation workshops and retreats in New South Wales since 2003. She is the founding teacher of Cloud Refuge Sangha in Blackheath.
www.joycekornblatt.com

Christopher Ash
Christopher has been teaching Buddhadharma in Sydney for nine years. These days he lives in the Blue Mountains and teaches at Cloud Refuge Sangha with his wife Joyce Kornblatt. His main interest is in adapting the methods and concepts of modern psychology, phenomenology and psychotherapy in ways that can support our embodied realisation of this profound, ancient heritage.

Peter Mackie
Peter began yoga and meditation practice in the 70's with John Cooper and became a yoga teacher in 1985.
His interest in Buddhism and meditation practice deepened through his involvement with the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. More recently he attends the training retreats held by Jason Siff and employs the Recollective Awareness approach to meditation practice. He continues to teach yoga and meditation and is a member of the Bluegum Sangha. He is a commercial and visual artist and is married with 2 children.

Angela McGee
is a Dharma teacher in the Buddhist tradition of Insight Meditation. She teaches with Melbourne Insight Meditation group, and leads regular Yoga and Insight Meditation retreats in Australia and in Bali. She is an experienced psychotherapist, and a senior Yoga teacher at Prahran Yoga with over 25 years of teaching experience.

Jonathan Page
Jonathan has been a medical oncologist for 30 years and enjoys endurance cycling. He began his meditation practice in 1984 but to his chagrin was largely an erratic practitioner until 2004, generally employing meditation as a last resort to manage innumerable life crises (with variable impact). He was persuaded to be more diligent in his meditation with the onset of more refractory dysphoria, particularly burnout admixed with depression. These were poorly managed by the “orthodox” medical establishment, but over time yielded to regular meditation and the comfort of the Three Jewels. The Dharma is a wonderful resource in the care of patients (and their families) with advanced cancer.
Jonathan has been conducting several six week Introduction to Meditation courses each year.

Gawaine Powell-Davies
I've had had a lifelong interest in the ideas of Buddhism, starting with a chance encounter at age 13 with Christmas Humphrey's book on Buddhism. I took up dharma practice seven years ago, since when I have sat regularly with Bluegum sangha. I have been delighted to find mysterious things come to life - and into my life - in very practical ways. I am now exploring how other long term interests such as philosophy and story telling can be woven into the fabric of dharma practice.

John Seed
John is an environmental activist and facilitates experiential deep ecology workshops. He first studied Buddhist meditation with Lama Zopa and Goenkaji in 1973. John has an interest in engaged Buddhism, founded the Dharma Gaia Trust, has developed a workshop called “Buddha Touched the Earth” and gives occasional talks on Engaged Buddhism, Buddhism and Ecology and the like.

Jill Shepherd
Jill began practicing insight meditation in Thailand in 1999, and since that time has lived and worked at several meditation centres and monasteries in the US, Australia, England, and Thailand. She recently spent seven years on staff at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts, where she participated in several long retreats and Buddhist study programmes, as well as offering weekly meditation classes at a nearby men's prison. She is a graduate of the IMS / Spirit Rock teacher training program in the US under the guidance of Joseph Goldstein and Gil Fronsdal. She divides her time between the US, Australia and New Zealand, teaching vipassana and brahma vihara retreats and offering ongoing study and practice groups focused on bringing the dharma into daily life.
http://jill0shepherd.wordpress.com

Lizzie Turnbull
Lizzie has been studying in the Buddha Dharma since 1985 first in the Vajrayana tradition and then in Zen and Western Insight.She guides the Flowing Mountain Insight Meditation Group in Brunswick Heads. For many years she has been interested in exploring the interrelationship of the Buddhism with psychotherapy with a particular interest in how somatic practices support healing and awakening. Lizzie was a director of Somatics - Body Oriented Psychotherapy Training in Sydney and teaches and supervises on the Australian Association of Buddhist Counsellors and Psychotherapists (AABCAP) professional training programme. She has a private practice in Byron Shire.
www.LizTurnbull.com.au

Jenny Taylor
Jenny has been a dharma practitioner for 30 years, studying with a range of teachers in the Thai forest tradition and the Mahasi tradition. She began teaching 10 years ago and participates in teacher training retreats with Jason Siff. She lives in Alice Springs, works as a visual artist and teaches art in remote communities. She has a particular interest in the affinity between unstructured meditative experience and the practice of creative arts.

Sylvie Vanasse
Sylvie has been an educator and facilitator in the private and non-for-profit sectors for over 30 years. She has trained, mentored and coached hundreds of people locally and internationally. Six years ago,
Sylvie resumed and committed herself to deepen her meditation practice by regularly practicing “Recollective Awareness/Skilful Meditation”. She also decided to give back to her community and started to work and volunteer as a counsellor and compassionate communication workshop facilitator.

Victor von der Heyde
Victor von der Heyde has been practising meditation for thirty-five
years. His main teachers have been Rob Burbea from Gaia House in the UK, and Toni Packer in the US. He has also practised with Joseph Goldstein, Aitken Roshi, Joko Beck, Stephen and Martine Batchelor, Tsoknyi Rinpoche and others. He has spent over two years in silent retreats and has taken dharma teaching roles since the mid 1990s.
Victor has an interest helping people understand the varieties of meditation so that they're in a position to choose what works for them. He has had a long-term focus on environmental ethics, he spent two decades helping manage a small overseas aid organisation, trained in Gestalt Therapy, completed graduate studies in counselling and worked for many years as a counsellor.
www.dharma.org.au

International teachers

Martine Batchelor
Martine lived in Korea as a Zen nun under the guidance of Master Kusan for ten years. She is the author of Meditation for Life, The Path of Compassion, Women in Korean Zen and Let Go: A Buddhist Guide to Breaking Free of Habits. She is a member of the Gaia House Teacher Council. She teaches meditation retreats worldwide and lives in France. Her latest work is the forthcoming The Spirit of the B

Stephen Batchelor
Stephen was a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan and Zen traditions for ten years. Known for his agnostic and secular approach to the Buddhadharma, he has authored several books, including the bestselling Buddhism Without Beliefs. His latest book is Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist. He lives in France with his wife Martine and teaches seminars and leads meditation retreats worldwide. www.stephenbatchelor.org

David R. Loy
David Loy is a professor, writer and Zen teacher who has articulated the idea of institutionalised greed, hatred and delusion and developed a modern Buddhist engagement with our collective contemporary suffering. His seminal books include the acclaimed Money Sex War Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution, The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory and his latest publication, A new Buddhist Path: Enlightenment, Evolution and Ethics in the Modern World.
Further reading www.davidloy.org

Linda Modaro
Since 1987 Linda has been studying and teaching various meditation style. In 1997, she completed her Master’s in Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine and treated patients for 15 years before transitioning to meditation teaching full-time. She completed the Skillful Meditation Project training in 2008 working closely with Jason Siff; studying, teaching and participating in teacher training development. In 2016 Linda made the decision to form Sati Sangha, a non-profit organization, to continue meditation teaching, on a donation basis, for her livelihood.

Offering unique and individualized mentorship to meditators and meditation teachers, Linda encourages a blending of reflective meditation with other mindfulness, insight, and awareness practices. In Santa Monica, where she lives, she works with small groups and individuals online connecting with meditators around the world.
https://satisangha.org/about/

Jason Siff
Jason teaches an approach to insight meditation called Recollective Awareness – based on the principles of gentleness, permission, and interest. It emphasizes open awareness, and encourages the student to remember, write down and reflect on her or his meditation experience, and in this way, mine its insights.
The approach thus honors both the mindfulness and the recollection aspects of the Buddha’s original teaching of the ‘direct path’ to realisation.
Jason Siff’s long experience includes time spent in Sri Lanka as a monk in the 1980s. Over the last two decades Jason has been teaching retreats in the USA and Australia. Jason’s approach to teaching meditation has been enriched by his psychotherapy training. A number of his teachings are available at www.skillfulmeditation.org, the website of the Skillful Meditation Project where he is the guiding teacher.