About
Daniel Bowling is a meditation teacher and mediator based in Sausalito, California. He has practiced yoga and meditation since 1976 and completed Spirit Rock's Community Dharma Leaders Training. Bowling worked as a public defender and lawyer before focusing on mediation and conflict resolution. He co-authored "Bringing Peace into the Room," which examines the mediator's personal qualities in conflict resolution, and contributed a chapter on Buddhist teachings related to conflict resolution. He taught yoga in Charleston, South Carolina, and served as a teacher and General Counsel at Kripalu Yoga Center in Massachusetts. Bowling is currently President of Spirit Rock's Board of Directors.
Teaching focus
Bowling'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. Bowling 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, Bowling teaches in in-person, online, 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
Daniel Bowling is a meditation teacher and mediator based in Sausalito, California. He has practiced yoga and meditation since 1976 and completed Spirit Rock's Community Dharma Leaders Training. Bowling worked as a public defender and lawyer before focusing on mediation and conflict resolution. He co-authored "Bringing Peace into the Room," which examines the mediator's personal qualities in conflict resolution, and contributed a chapter on Buddhist teachings related to conflict resolution. He taught yoga in Charleston, South Carolina, and served as a teacher and General Counsel at Kripalu Yoga Center in Massachusetts. Bowling is currently President of Spirit Rock's Board of Directors. Daniel Bowling is a mediator and public policy facilitator in Sausalito, California. He co-edited and co-authored "Bringing Peace into the Room" -- the first book on mediation to focus on the importance for resolving conflict of the mediator's personal qualities. He also contributed a chapter entitled “The Buddha’s Teachings on the Personal Qualities of a Conflict Resolver” for Faith and Practice in Conflict Resolution, edited by Professor Rachel Goldberg. He was the first Public Defender in Charleston, SC and then helped start mediation in South Carolina, where he practiced law after graduating from Harvard Law School. He was the first yoga teacher in Charleston and started a spiritual educational center there in the 1980's. He was also a teacher and General Counsel for Kripalu Yoga Center, in Lenox, Massachusetts and founded the Kripalu Yoga Teachers Association. He has practiced yoga and meditation since 1976 and participated in Spirit Rock's Community Dharma Leaders Training. He currently is President of the Spirit Rock Board of Directors and serves on its Executive, Governance, Diversity, and Ethics and Reconciliation Committees. Bowling 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 Bowling'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 Bowling'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
Bowling 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 Bowling 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 Bowling, 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. Bowling 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.
