Teachers

SIM-associated Insight Meditation teachers

Here are some key people who give talks at Sydney Insight Meditators Sanghas or lead our meditation retreats.

Subhana Barzaghi
Subhana has practiced Buddhist meditation for 50 years and is a qualified teacher in two Buddhist traditions: Vipassana Insight Meditation tradition and Zen Buddhist tradition. She received transmission as a “Roshi” (Zen master) in 1996 and resident teacher of the Sydney Zen Centre.
Subhana teaches intensive Zen & Insight retreats in Australia and New Zealand She is a founder of the Kuan Yin Meditation Centre in Lismore and founding teacher of Blue Gum Sangha in Sydney and co-founder of the Insight Meditation Institute where she co-leads Mindfulness & Compassion teacher trainings in Sydney and the 4-year Insight Dharma Teacher Trainings.
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.
He is a certified mindfulness based Hakomi therapist and for many years has practiced integrating the Buddha dharma and psychotherapy with leadership development in organisations.
He is the current chairman of SIM, co-founder, chairman and one of the lead teachers of the Insight Meditation Institute. He has been leading workshops and retreats over the last 10 years.
Alan’s teachings are eclectic and practical. He encourages people to awaken to each moment and realise the fulfillment they seek.

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

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.

Renata Malinauskas
Renata has devoted over 15 years to the study and practice of Buddha Dharma, starting with the Tibetan tradition and later exploring Vipassana and Western Insight. She co-founded and leads the Still Water Insight Group in Sydney's Northern Beaches and is an active committee member of the Insight Meditation Institute. Renata has a deep interest in the relationship between Buddhism and Psychotherapy, focusing on their mutual benefits in awakening, healing and personal growth. She is a certified Mindfulness and Compassion Teacher and works full-time as a Body-Centred Therapist in her private practice in Newport, NSW.
www.somawisdom.com.au

Kate Amy
Kate began her journey 23 years ago working directly in clinical psychology and attending numerous Vipassana meditation retreats. She fell in love with the writings of the Venerable Thich Naht Han and along with the range of therapeutic modalities, psychological theories and esoteric readings she has encountered and integrated into her clinical work she always returns to the Buddhist heart and her love of the Dharma.
Kate predominantly practices and teaches from a Buddhist based philosophy which is trauma-informed, focused on embodiment through somatic experiencing, and the constant cultivation in real time of a mindful and compassionate approach to the understanding and being with our direct experiences.

Jampa Jaffe
Jampa has been teaching Buddhism for over 30 years. He was a monk in the Tibetan
Buddhist tradition for 17 years and studied for 15 years in India at the Tibetan Library of Works and Archives and the Buddhist School of Dialectics, followed by one year in Thailand meditating in the Theravada tradition. In 2005, he completed a solitary one-year retreat in Spain. He has been resident teacher at Buddha House in Adelaide and Vajrayana Institute in Ashfield, and was the teaching assistant in a seven-year Masters Program for Buddhist Studies in Italy. He now lives on the Northern Beaches and teaches in both the Tibetan and Insight Buddhist traditions.

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

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

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.

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

Suzie Brown
Suzie co-founded the Melbourne Insight Meditation Group in 2009 and has trained as an Insight Dharma Teacher both in Australia with the Insight Meditation Institute, and in the USA, with James Baraz.
Suzie works as a Mentor in the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program (MMTCP) taught by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach and is also a Dharma teacher in their online dharma platform, Banyan (formerly Cloud Sangha).
She also trained as a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher and has taught mindfulness courses in the community and workplaces for 12 years.
Suzie has also worked as a climate and environmental activist for two decades and teaches Eco-dharma and mindful approaches to dealing with climate anxiety and grief.

Lenorë Lambert
Lenorë is a secular dharma teacher, entrepreneur, psychologist and author as well as an elite Masters track and field athlete. She has been practicing the dharma since 2004 and founded the Beaches Sangha on Sydney’s northern beaches in 2009 at which she is now the primary teacher. Her focus is on daily dharma – integrating the perspectives and practices into daily life with all of its challenges. Her career has included human resources, consulting, leadership development and her latest creation, Flourish Personal Growth which integrates the dharma, psychology and self-guided adult learning. She is the author of the book: The Buddha for Modern Minds: A non-religious guide to the Buddha and his teachings

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.

Sabina Rabold
Sabina is an experienced therapist, lecturer and teacher in the fields of counselling, communication and leadership. Her particular interest is in the study and practice of Buddhism and Psychotherapy. Sabina offers talks, workshops and seminars on many dharma-inspired topics and teaches mindfulness and insight meditation.