About
Annanda Barclay is an Associate Pastor at Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church. She completed advanced spiritual care research fellowships at Auburn Seminary and Stanford University, focusing on moral injury and spiritual care. She is co-creator and host of the podcast Moral Repair: A Black Exploration of Tech, produced with PRX Productions and the John Templeton Foundation. She is trained as a Death Doula through the Going with Grace program and is currently enrolled in the UC Berkeley Psychedelic Facilitation Program. She is affiliated with Insight Meditation Center and Insight Retreat Center.
Teaching focus
Barclay's core teaching draws on mindfulness of breathing, open awareness, loving-kindness. The frame is the Western Insight Meditation movement that grew out of Burmese and Thai Theravada lineages, but the language stays plain. Barclay doesn't lecture from height. The talks tend to think alongside whatever's actually present in the room. Recurring themes include mindfulness, loving-kindness, and equanimity. None of those get presented as abstract ideas. They're worked into the body, into ethics, into how a practitioner shows up in family life or at work, so that the dharma stops feeling like a separate compartment. There's a steady invitation in the talks to keep practice human-sized. Sit when you can, return when you've drifted, and trust that small consistent attention does more over the years than dramatic breakthroughs. Format-wise, Barclay teaches in online, in-person, and the tone moves easily between guided sittings, dharma talks, and Q&A. Questions tend to get answered the way they were asked, without being reframed into something cleaner. That alone tells you a lot about how the room feels.
Background
Annanda Barclay is an Associate Pastor at Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church. She completed advanced spiritual care research fellowships at Auburn Seminary and Stanford University, focusing on moral injury and spiritual care. She is co-creator and host of the podcast Moral Repair: A Black Exploration of Tech, produced with PRX Productions and the John Templeton Foundation. She is trained as a Death Doula through the Going with Grace program and is currently enrolled in the UC Berkeley Psychedelic Facilitation Program. She is affiliated with Insight Meditation Center and Insight Retreat Center. Rev. Annanda Barclay currently serves as Associate Pastor at Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church. She completed advanced spiritual care research fellowships at Auburn Seminary and Stanford University, where she focused on moral injury and spiritual care. Annanda is the co-creator and host of the award-winning, AMBIE-nominated podcast Moral Repair: A Black Exploration of Tech, produced in collaboration with PRX Productions and the John Templeton Foundation. She is a Death Doula, trained through the renowned Going with Grace program. Currently, she expanding her practice through the UC Berkeley Psychedelic Facilitation Program, integrating psychedelic care into her holistic approach to spiritual support. Barclay teaches across several communities, including Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. That work sits within the Western Insight Meditation movement that grew out of Burmese and Thai Theravada lineages, and the recurring concerns of Barclay's teaching, ethical foundation, steady attention, and the slow softening of habitual reactivity, echo the older texts without sounding distant from a 21st-century practitioner's life. What stands out across Barclay's talks isn't a single technique but a steadying tone. Practice is treated as something built slowly, in ordinary life, with care. There's room for the difficulties practitioners actually bring into the room, grief, restlessness, the body's complaints, family obligations, and the encouragement is consistent without being pushy.
Lineage
Barclay teaches within the Western Insight Meditation movement that grew out of Burmese and Thai Theravada lineages. Source notes mention training with Insight Meditation Center. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Barclay talks about practice, with steady reference to the older Buddhist vocabulary while keeping the door open for people who've never read a sutra. Whether that framing lands as monastic or lay depends on the specific talk, but the consistent thread is care for the form without letting the form become the point.
What to expect
Sitting with Barclay, you can expect grounded instruction in mindfulness of breathing, with space to ask questions and bring whatever's actually showing up in your practice. Online sessions tend to keep the same shape, shorter sits, a talk, and time for Q&A, in a format that's accessible from home. The teaching voice is steady. Barclay won't push you past your edge, and there's a clear preference for slow, sustainable practice over breakthrough chasing. Bring a notebook if you like, or don't. Either way, you'll be met where you are.
