About
Dana DePalma teaches in the Insight Meditation tradition. She holds a Masters degree in Counseling Psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies. DePalma serves as Founding Guiding Teacher at Dharma Ground and as a Stewarding Teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Her teaching emphasizes samādhi, ease, and the natural arising of understanding. She employs a relational teaching style.
Teaching focus
MA'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. MA 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 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, MA teaches in online, in-person, 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
Dana DePalma teaches in the Insight Meditation tradition. She holds a Masters degree in Counseling Psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies. DePalma serves as Founding Guiding Teacher at Dharma Ground and as a Stewarding Teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Her teaching emphasizes samādhi, ease, and the natural arising of understanding. She employs a relational teaching style. teaches regularly online through Dharma Ground, where she serves as the Founding Guiding Teacher, and also at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, where she serves as a Stewarding Teacher. Her approach emphasizes samādhi, ease, and the natural arising of understanding. Dana holds a Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies and has a relational teaching style. She is a Bay Area native, married, mom to an awesome teen, and grateful beyond words to be living a life focused on the Dharma MA 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 MA'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 MA'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
MA 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 MA 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 MA, 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. MA 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.
