Patrick Kearney

Dhamma Talk - A Genealogy of Insight (Online)

The practice of insight meditation (vipassana bhavana) is something many meditators in the west take for granted. It is easy to forget or overlook just how revolutionary the modern form of practice developed by the late Mahasi Sayadaw has been, and the importance of the Mahasi lineage in the propagation of Insight practice among lay people. […]

Dhamma Talk - Contemporary Theravāda (Live Stream)

In the modern Burmese insight movement students are trained in classical insight meditation (vipassanā bhāvanā). They attain a level of understanding (ñāṇa) and return to their normal lives. If the students are Burmese Buddhists, they enter the meditation centre from a deep intuitive understanding of their own tradition and return to this tradition, where they can now make sense of what happened to them inside the centre. But what about students from outside the world of Theravāda Buddhism?...

Wednesday Night Talks - Livestream

Over four Wednesday nights Patrick will explore the project of insight meditation as understood and practised in the lineage of Mahāsi Sayādaw. The teaching that animates our practice originates in ancient India, while the practice itself comes to us from a very different culture with its own assumptions and ways of communicating. These talks represent an attempt to understand mindfulness meditation and the insight that emerges from it in terms of our own time and culture. The talks are experimental and tentative, and far from a finished project.

The Way of Insight

In this nine-day retreat we will practise mindfulness and explore its application to the discovery of insight. For the Buddha, “insight” means seeing into the three universal characteristics of impermanence or change (anicca), pain or dis-ease (dukkha) and not-self (anattā)...