Teachers
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Kristina Baré
Kristina Baré is an insight meditation teacher, therapist, and Somatic Experiencing practitioner. She has trained primarily in the Burmese lineages of Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw and Venerable Pa Auk Sayadaw. Currently, Kristina is completing a four-year insight meditation teacher’s program through Insight Meditation Centres in the USA. She enjoys supporting students in deepening samadhi, loving-kindness and insight to open the door to an expansion of the heart and to liberating wisdom. In support of the Buddha’s teachings, Kristina also draws on her knowledge of western psychology and Somatic Experiencing. She invites a kind, patient, and embodied approach as a base for samadhi, loving-kindness and insight meditation practices.
Kristina resides in Victoria, BC from where she offers mediation guidance, somatic experiencing support, and therapy to students and clients via zoom in North America and Europe.
Robert Beatty
Robert Beatty is a member of the first wave of Theravada Buddhist teachers who brought mindfulness to North America from Asia in the 1970s. His goal in life became to help others discover the profound ways Buddhist practices can transform one’s life, reduce suffering and create happiness. He founded the Portland Insight Meditation Community in Oregon in 2001 where he is the guiding teacher.
His meditation training began with S. N. Goenka in India in 1972. He has studied with many teachers in Burma, India and the U.S. In 1983, Robert was empowered to teach the dharma by Ruth Denison, who was among the first generation of women Vipassana teachers in the West. He has worked with thousands of students, creating a unique synthesis of Buddhist methods of awakening and healing and those of western psychotherapy. As well as working with individual students, Robert leads retreats in B.C., Oregon and Washington.
He has a Master’s in Environmental Studies from York University in Toronto, and a Master’s in Social Work from Portland State University. He uses humour, movement, music, poetry and drumming to teach meditation for everyday life, including intimate relationships, parenting, work and our relationship to the greater community.
Richard Shankman lives in Oakland, CA. He is the guiding teacher of the Metta Dharma Foundation, a non-residential meditation center in Berkeley, CA, and teaches classes and residential retreats at dharma centers and groups across North America. Richard is the co-founder of Mindful Schools and the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies, and has been active in bringing dharma and meditation practice into prisons, jails and drug rehabilitation programs in California.
Richard holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and an MA degree in Philosophy and Religion, with an emphasis in Buddhist Studies. Richard is the author of The Experience of Samadhi: An In-Depth Investigation of Buddhist Meditation and The Art and Skill of Buddhist Meditation.
Richard began meditation practice in 1970, in a Hindu-oriented yoga tradition, and spent several years living in an ashram engaged in concentration-based meditation practices. He transitioned to Buddhist practice in the mid 1970’s, and has sat many silent, intensive meditation retreats for periods up to eleven months long.
Richard is interested in how we apply Dharma teachings and practices to live peacefully, with open hearts and in a way that creates less suffering and more well-being for ourselves and others. He practices and teaches meditation that integrates concentration and insight as one path of practice.
Richard Shankman
Howard Cohn
Howard Cohn is a founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in the San Francisco Bay area. He has guided a local sitting group in San Francisco, been in private practice as a psychotherapist, and led Vipassana retreats worldwide since 1985. He incorporates the influences of Theravada, Zen, Tibetan Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta in his teaching, with an emphasis on reawakening our intrinsic freedom. Among his many teachers and mentors are Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, U Pandita Sayadaw, Tulku Urgyen Rimpoche, Tsoknyi Rimpoche, and the Advaita Vedanta Master H.W.L. Poonja.
Kat Boehm is an Edmonton-based meditation and yoga teacher. She began sitting silent retreats in 1997 with renowned teachers in different Buddhist lineages in India, Burma and the U.S., including at the Insight Meditation Society Retreat Centre and Forest Refuge in Barre, Massachusetts. She has taught mindfulness, meditation and yoga in Edmonton since 2004 and more recently internationally online.
Kat received her certification as a teacher with the Yoga Association of Alberta in 2005 and as a Pilates instructor in 2007. She completed a Power of Awareness Training program led by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach in 2014 and a year-long dedicated practice with senior Insight Meditation teachers Steve Armstrong and Kamala Masters in 2018. Kat is known for her accessible and playful approach to mindfulness practice that also incorporates mindful movement. She regards practice as a gradual process that requires care and curiosity as the mind unfolds into its natural state of clarity and compassion.
Her reverence for Mother Earth has led her on treks in northern India, Tibet, Nepal and in the Rocky Mountains. She also enjoys extended summer visits to her family cabin in northern Saskatchewan to slow down and deepen appreciation for life in all its changing conditions.
For more information on Kat, please go to her website at www.movingmindfully.ca
Kat Boehm
Jeanne Corrigal has been practising meditation for more than two decades and is the guiding teacher for the Saskatoon Insight Meditation Community. In May 2021, she graduated from the four-year Insight Meditation Teaching Program in Barre, Massachusetts where she trained with Joseph Goldstein and other international teachers. In 2012, she was certified as a community leader in the Community Dharma Leaders Program offered by the Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Centre , led by Jack Kornfield. She received her certification in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) through the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2016 and has been teaching classes and retreats in various settings in western Canada and in the U.S. As a certified Life Skills Coach Trainer, she has 23 years experience facilitating adult programs.
Jeanne is of Metis heritage and was deeply influenced by one of her first teachers, Cree Elder Jim Settee, in developing her awareness of loving presence. She is especially drawn to nature-based mindfulness practice and compassion practices as powerful ways of connecting with our inner nature of peace and stillness. As guiding teacher at Saskatoon Insight, Jeanne has initiated a number of innovative programs, including the Unwinding Whiteness Affinity Group. This intensive, eight-month program provides facilitated peer support for white participants to explore and unwind systemic racist conditioning.
Jeanne Corrigal
Heather Martin began her meditation practice more than 50 years ago. She was influenced early on by popular Vipassana teacher S.N. Goenka, and was then drawn to the Burmese and Thai streams of Theravada Buddhism, studying with teachers such as Venerable U Tejaniya in Myanmar (then Burma). She received her teacher training at the Spirit Rock Meditation Centre led by Jack Kornfield, developing her own clear, down-to-earth, warm teaching style. She also worked as a midwife and childhood educator before turning her full attention to teaching the dharma in 2001, leading retreats in western Canada and in the U.S.
In 2017, Heather developed the two-year Alberta Deepening Practice Program (ADPP) in response to requests from Calgary and Edmonton practitioners who wished to immerse themselves in an intensive dharma study experience. Heather has continued to play a supportive role in encouraging her ADPP students in Edmonton to create a local sangha and has generously continued to offer her teachings as Edmonton Insight Meditation has found its feet. We are saddened by the recent news of her upcoming retirement, but we are deeply grateful to her for acting as a spiritual midwife during our early development.