About
Corina Urdaneta has practiced Zen meditation since the early 1990s and Vipassana meditation for the past seven years. She completed the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program led by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield in 2021, and the Awakening Joy Program with James Baraz that same year. Since 2020, she has led bi-weekly virtual 30-minute guided mindfulness sessions through the Center for Mindful Living in Washington, DC. She co-facilitates the Latinx Sangha Café con Leche, a virtual community offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington since 2022.
Teaching focus
Her teaching follows the contemporary Insight curriculum with significant attention to bilingual offerings in Spanish and English. She co-facilitates the Latinx Sangha Cafe con Leche through IMCW. 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. The recorded talks return often to the question of how practice meets specific lives rather than an idealized practitioner, and the careful framing of instructions reflects that orientation. Students don't have to fit themselves to the teaching; the teaching meets them where they actually are.
Background
Corina Urdaneta 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. Corina Urdaneta has practiced Zen meditation since the early 1990s and Vipassana for the past seven years. She graduated from the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program led by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield in 2021 and the Awakening Joy Program with James Baraz the same year. Since 2020 she has led bi-weekly virtual 30-minute guided mindfulness sessions through the Center for Mindful Living in DC, and co-facilitates the Latinx Sangha Cafe con Leche through the Insight Meditation Community of Washington since 2022. 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 teaching reflects both the depth of a long practice lineage and the practical concerns of contemporary practitioners working ordinary jobs, raising children, and trying to integrate serious dharma into lives that don't pause for retreat. That practical orientation runs through the recorded material as a steady undercurrent.
Lineage
Urdaneta has practiced Zen since the early 1990s and Vipassana for the past seven years. She's a graduate of Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield's Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program (2021). 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), the Center for Mindful Living in DC, and the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (IMCW).
What to expect
Bi-weekly virtual sessions through the Center for Mindful Living and the Latinx Sangha through IMCW. Standard insight format with bilingual offerings. 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 pacing is careful and the teaching is specific, suiting practitioners who want concrete instruction over inspirational framing. For practitioners working at distance, recorded talks and online programs often offer a good initial point of contact, with in-person retreat following once the teaching voice and approach have become familiar.
