Dharma Teachers
of Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre
Teachers are listed alphabetically by first name,
with monks and nuns given priority. You may also enter any part of
a name in the text box and click "Find Teacher by Name."
Ariya B. Baumann left her career as a music and dance teacher in favour of her deep yearing to understand herself and the world. Based on her many years of practice, twenty-one of them as a nun in the Burmese tradition, she now lays a strong emphasis on the practice of loving-kindness (including metta chants) as a basis for the vipassana meditation practice. She has translated a number of Dhamma books from Burmese to English and German, among these are Mahasi Sayadaw’s ‘Manual of Insight’. She is a co-founder and president of ‘Metta In Action’ which supports a variety of social and medical projects throughout Burma, especially nunneries.
Greg Scharf has practiced with Western and Asian teachers in the Theravada tradition since 1992, and has been teaching residential retreats since 2007. His teaching emphasizes the confluence of love and wisdom on the path to liberation. If you feel drawn to donate to Greg on this website, he says, "Please consider making a donation to Dharma Seed instead - Dharma Seed needs your support!"
Wisdom and compassion are two themes that inform my current exploration of the dharma, and I aspire to integrate these as fully as I can in both formal practice and daily life.
Patrick has practised mindfulness meditation (satipaṭṭhāna vipassanā) since 1977. At that time there was little or no Buddhist meditation training available in Australia, so he spent years travelling in Asia and the USA working with teachers from different Buddhist traditions to learn the craft of meditation practice. Most of his training has been in the insight meditation lineage of Mahāsī Sayādaw of Burma, which included several years as a Buddhist monk. His main teachers were Sayādaw U Paṇḍita and John Hale. He has also trained in the Diamond Sangha lineage of Zen where his teachers have been Robert Aitken Rōshi and Paul Maloney Rōshi.
Patrick has been a full-time teacher of mindfulness meditation for over 20 years. He conducts residential and online retreats, workshops and seminars. He has studied early Buddhism at post-graduate levels and has a particular interest in the original teachings of the Buddha, before the invention of “Buddhism.” This allows him to bring the radical insights of the Buddha to our contemporary situation. He sees meditation as a physical practice that reconnects us with the felt world of our senses, allowing us to live our lives directly rather than through the cling-wrap of our habitual thinking.
