About
Chris Clifford has practiced in the Insight Meditation tradition since 1995, primarily at Insight Meditation Center. She completed IMC's Dharma Mentoring program and Local Dharma Leadership program. Clifford teaches introductory meditation classes and co-leads the Eightfold Path Program at IMC. She also manages retreats at The Mountain Hermitage in New Mexico and serves as kitchen coordinator at Insight Retreat Center. She is a retired software engineer.
Teaching focus
Clifford's core teaching draws on mindfulness of breathing, open awareness, noting practice. The frame is the insight tradition transmitted through teachers like Mahasi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin into the West, but the language stays plain. Clifford doesn't lecture from height. The talks tend to think alongside whatever's actually present in the room. Recurring themes include sati, sampajanna, and the three characteristics. 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 real care for beginners in Clifford's teaching. Instructions get repeated, jargon gets translated, and people new to sitting aren't asked to pretend they know what samadhi feels like. Format-wise, Clifford teaches in in-person, online, retreat, 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
Chris Clifford has practiced in the Insight Meditation tradition since 1995, primarily at Insight Meditation Center. She completed IMC's Dharma Mentoring program and Local Dharma Leadership program. Clifford teaches introductory meditation classes and co-leads the Eightfold Path Program at IMC. She also manages retreats at The Mountain Hermitage in New Mexico and serves as kitchen coordinator at Insight Retreat Center. She is a retired software engineer. Chris Clifford has practiced meditation at Insight Meditation Center and other Insight centers since 1995. She appreciates the integration of intensive meditation retreats with daily life Dharma practice and service. Chris is a graduate of IMC's Dharma Mentoring program and Local Dharma Leadership program. She has taught IMC's various introductory classes and co-leads the Eightfold Path Program. She also manages retreats for The Mountain Hermitage in New Mexico and serves as the kitchen coordinator for Insight Retreat Center. She is a retired software engineer. Clifford teaches across several communities, including Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. That work sits within the insight tradition transmitted through teachers like Mahasi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin into the West, and the recurring concerns of Clifford'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 Clifford'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
Clifford teaches within the insight tradition transmitted through teachers like Mahasi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin into the West. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Clifford 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 Clifford, you can expect grounded instruction in mindfulness of breathing, with space to ask questions and bring whatever's actually showing up in your practice. On retreat the structure follows a classical rhythm of sittings, walking practice, and dharma talks, with silence held between sessions. 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. Clifford 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.
