About
Dawn Mauricio is a meditation teacher in the Meditation tradition.
Teaching focus
Mauricio's teaching follows the standard four foundations of mindfulness framework and adds a strong undercurrent of metta and forgiveness practice. She's known for plainly worded instructions, careful pacing, and a willingness to slow down on details that other teachers might skim. She works carefully with the body, drawing on her yoga background, and pays attention to the felt sense of practice rather than treating sittings as primarily mental work. Her teaching for BIPOC and queer practitioners isn't a separate track in her teaching; it's part of how she holds the question of what practice is meeting, the whole life a student brings, including its social and political dimensions. Lovingkindness gets significant time on retreat, taught not as a feel-good exercise but as serious meditative work that reshapes the relational field. Her talks often weave in small stories from teaching, family life, and her travels through both Canadian and US insight communities, which gives the recordings a personal, conversational feel without losing dharmic precision. Across her work runs a steady warmth and a willingness to be specific.
Background
Dawn Mauricio is a Filipino-Canadian Insight Meditation teacher based in Montreal who teaches widely at retreat centers across North America. Her Dharma Seed archive holds about fifty talks across eighteen retreats, and she publishes additional teaching, courses, and retreat schedules through dawnmauricio.com. She came up through Spirit Rock's training and has been a steady presence in the Canadian and US insight teaching circuit for over a decade, often co-teaching with senior teachers like Pascal Auclair and others connected to True North Insight. Her teaching is plainly framed and accessible, and she's been particularly active in efforts to widen access to insight teaching for BIPOC and queer practitioners, including teaching at people-of-color retreats and queer-specific dharma offerings. She also has a yoga teaching background that occasionally surfaces in how she works with the body. Students describe her presence as warm, grounded, and direct, with an ease about practical questions that comes from years of meeting students one-on-one in retreat settings. Beyond what's documented in the recorded archive and her own site, biographical detail is light, and rather than guess at training history this page rests on her tradition and the consistent voice that shows up across her published work.
Lineage
Mauricio teaches in the Insight Meditation lineage descended from IMS, Spirit Rock, and Insight Meditation Center. She's affiliated with True North Insight in Canada and teaches at retreat centers across North America, often co-teaching with senior insight teachers. She has additional training as a yoga teacher and works as a layperson rather than a monastic.
What to expect
Retreats with Mauricio follow standard Insight format with a slightly slower pacing and careful attention to instructions. Expect sittings, walking, dharma talks, and meetings with the teachers, often with co-teachers from the wider insight community. She frequently teaches BIPOC- and queer-specific retreats alongside her general programs, and the tone of her teaching, warm, grounded, unceremonial, holds across both formats. Mauricio's role as a co-teacher on many retreats also means students get exposure to a wider range of voices on a single program, since insight retreats often work better when two teachers can share teaching duties and personal meetings. Her steady, plainly-worded style complements teachers with more rangy or charismatic styles, and the pairing tends to give retreats a balance between depth and accessibility that suits practitioners at different stages.