About
Catalina Acosta began practicing Buddhism in 2009 with Montaña de Silencio, a Zen community in Medellín, Colombia. In 2014, she received precepts from Gil Fronsdal at Insight Retreat Center. She is an active participant in the Insight community of Medellín and is affiliated with Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City.
Teaching focus
Her teaching follows the IMC house style of careful insight practice with significant attention to lovingkindness, offered in Spanish for the Medellin community. The work draws on Zen practice as the foundational framework, taught with care for the textures of present experience rather than as abstract doctrine. Zazen sits at the center of the practice, with breath and posture as the steady anchors. Koan practice or shikantaza enters depending on the lineage stream, and the teaching emphasizes direct present recognition rather than discursive elaboration. Lovingkindness gets serious time on retreat, treated as central practice rather than supplemental, and the broader brahmavihara framework offers additional ground for the slower work of equanimity and forgiveness. Daily-life integration runs through the recorded teaching as a steady concern. The same awareness that opens during a sit is the awareness that meets traffic, family, and work, and the teaching keeps coming back to that continuity rather than treating retreat as a separate world. Across the recorded teaching runs a steady commitment to the actual work of practice, the slow unfolding that doesn't always make for inspirational soundbites but that carries the path forward across years of sitting. There's also careful work with the harder stretches of practice, the dry months, the periods when nothing seems to be moving, the recurring difficulties that don't resolve quickly. The teaching treats those stretches as honest dharma material rather than as obstacles to be pushed past.
Background
Catalina Acosta is a teacher whose work is part of the wider Insight and Zen tradition descended from the Burmese and Thai vipassana lineages as carried into the West. Catalina Acosta began practicing Buddhism in 2009 with the Zen community Montana de Silencio in Medellin, Colombia. In 2014 she received the precepts from Gil Fronsdal at Insight Retreat Center. She's an active participant in the Insight community of Medellin. Her practice is guided by the aspiration to learn how to love and to be a catalyst for peace. The teacher's recorded material is mostly hosted through affiliated centers and personal platforms rather than through Dharma Seed. Emerging teachers offer something different from senior figures: the texture of a teaching voice still finding its specific shape, which can be useful for students who want to follow a teacher's development rather than encounter an already-canonized body of work. The recordings carry a quiet warmth and an attentive specificity, the kind of teaching that rewards careful listening over time. The lay-teacher form of practice this teacher works within asks something specific of students: they have to take responsibility for their own practice in ways monastic students don't always have to, since the structures of monastic life don't carry them. That responsibility is part of what the teaching points at. The wider Western Buddhist landscape that grew up across the second half of the twentieth century has produced a range of teaching voices working at the meeting point between classical Asian sources and contemporary lay practice, and this teacher is one of those voices. Across the recorded body of work runs a consistent attention to what's actually workable inside ordinary obligations rather than only in retreat.
Lineage
Acosta is part of the IMC and Insight Meditation community in Medellin, Colombia. She received precepts from Gil Fronsdal at Insight Retreat Center. The teacher works as a layperson, in keeping with the broader Western lay-teacher form of the tradition. She's affiliated with Insight Meditation Center (Redwood City) and the Insight community of Medellin, Colombia.
What to expect
Programs run through the Insight community in Medellin and through IMC-affiliated networks. Retreats run on a Zen schedule with multiple zazen periods, kinhin walking practice, and dokusan or work practice depending on the lineage. The pacing is structured and the silence is firm. The tone is unhurried and grounded, with attention given to the practical questions students bring rather than to large theoretical frameworks. Students new to the teacher's work often find it useful to start with a shorter program or a recorded talk before committing to a longer residential retreat, both to get a feel for the teaching voice and to clarify whether the format suits their practice at this stage.
