Core Influences

Jack Kornfield

Jack’s books and teachings have had a significant impact on my meditation practice. His two-year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program (co-led with Tara Brach) gave me an intimate window into his teachings, wisdom, and approach to meditation practice. I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to learn from Jack and to be able to incorporate his practices into my meditation offerings.

From Jack’s website:

Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India and Burma. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. After graduating from Dartmouth College in Asian Studies in 1967 he joined the Peace Corps and worked on tropical medicine teams in the Mekong River valley. He met and studied as a monk under the Buddhist master Ven. Ajahn Chah, as well as the Ven. Mahasi Sayadaw of Burma. Returning to the United States, Jack co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, with fellow meditation teachers Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein and the Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California. Over the years, Jack has taught in centers and universities worldwide, led International Buddhist Teacher meetings, and worked with many of the great teachers of our time. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is a father, husband and activist.

Tara Brach

Tara taught me to appreciate the strength and resilience of love. It was a gift to spend two years training in close (virtual) proximity to her teaching ethos, presence, and compassion.

From Tara’s website:

Tara Brach’s teachings blend Western psychology and Eastern spiritual practices, mindful attention to our inner life, and a full, compassionate engagement with our world.

After college, she lived for ten years in an ashram — a spiritual community — where she practiced and taught both yoga and concentrative meditation. When she left the ashram and attended her first Buddhist Insight Meditation retreat, led by Joseph Goldstein, she realized she was home.

Over the following years, Tara earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the Fielding Institute, with a dissertation exploring meditation as a therapeutic modality in treating addiction. She went on to complete a five-year Buddhist teacher training program at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Working as both a psychotherapist and a meditation teacher, she found herself naturally blending these two powerful traditions — introducing meditation to her therapy clients and sharing western psychological insights with meditation students. This synthesis has evolved, in more recent years, into Tara’s groundbreaking work in training psychotherapists to integrate mindfulness strategies into their clinical work.

In 1998, Tara founded the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC (IMCW), which is now one of the largest and most dynamic non-residential meditation centers in the United States. Her themes reveal the possibility of emotional healing and spiritual awakening through mindful, loving awareness as well as the alleviation of suffering in the larger world by practicing compassion in action. She has fostered efforts to bring principles and practices of mindfulness to issues of racial injustice, equity and inclusivity; peace; environmental sustainability, as well as to prisons and schools.¹

Ram Dass

From my first reading of Be Here Now, Ram Dass has been an influential figure in my life. During my first full winter in Montreal, in the height of COVID, I went on nightly walks in Laurier Park and listened to his teachings. The honesty, candor, and humor of his words have been a consistent anchor for my meditation practice over the years.

Although I never met him in person, I consider him a teacher who’s had a significant impact on my practice and life philosophy. His oratory gift and framing of the spiritual path cut through the fluff and struck the resonant chord at the heart of it all.

Ram Dass’s teachings remind me to appreciate the humor and the mystery of life, to approach meditation practice with levity, and to walk the line of paradox with grace.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

My first formal encounters with meditation were at the Shambhala center in Boston in 2013. I frequented the young adult meditation nights there, participated in weekend retreats, and eventually sat for a month-long Dathün. The Shambhala approach and Tibetan lineage were brought to the West by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a mysterious Tibetan Buddhist master with crazy wisdom.

David Chadwick recounts: [107]

Suzuki [Roshi] asked Trungpa to give a talk to the students in the zendo the next night. Trungpa walked in tipsy and sat on the edge of the altar platform with his feet dangling. But he delivered a crystal-clear talk, which some felt had a quality — like Suzuki’s talks — of not only being about the dharma but being itself the dharma.

Although he is a controversial figure, his delivery of the dharma had a resounding impact on me and Western culture writ large. I choose to separate the art from the madness.

After fleeing the war in Tibet in 1959, he studied at Oxford and ultimately moved to the US to spread the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism to the west. He spoke with a mesmerizing poise, patience, and clarity that is often mysterious. His books, particularly Meditation in Action, helped me connect to the heart of the practice and illuminate it in everyday life.

He died in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1987.

Acharya Bill McKeever

Acharya McKeever was the lead teacher during my month-long retreat at Karmê Chöling. I still recall meeting Acharya McKeever for the first time and being struck by his fiercely compassionate gaze. I wrote in my journal that he had “dragon eyes.” The man had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for years and struggled to walk and talk. His presence said all that needed to be said. My daily task during the retreat was to make his smoothies and bring them up to him during breaks. Those small moments of connection left a lasting impact.

I asked for him to be my mentor during the retreat and he helped give wings to my practice, and see challenges in my life from a new perspective. I am deeply grateful for his presence and his teachings.

Bill McKeever passed away in 2025.

Thich Nhat Hanh

A man of fierce compassion and love, embodied. Listening to him speak I hear the simplicity and power of softness. His essence feels pure. And he opens the door for all of us to open to presence in every breath, that coming home is always right there a breath away. To wake up, bow to the sky and earth, and say, thank you. I’m grateful for another 24 hours to live and breath on this earth.

He passed away peacefully in the early moments of 22 January 2022, in the Deep Listening Hut at Từ Hiếu Temple in Huế, Vietnam, surrounded by loving disciples.

Lao Tzu

The Tao Te Ching rests at the heart of my practice.

1

Tao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Tao.
Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name.

As the origin of heaven-and-earth, it is nameless:
As “the Mother” of all things, it is nameable.

So, as ever hidden, we should look at its inner essence:
As always manifest, we should look at its outer aspects.

These two flow from the same source, though
differently named;
And both are called mysteries.

The Mystery of mysteries is the Door of all essence.

Tao Teh Ching, Chapter 1 as translated by John C. H. Wu