About
Emily Linderman is a Board-Certified Chaplain with the Association of Professional Chaplains and a certified meditation teacher in the Shamatha-Vipashyana tradition through the Open Heart Project, a Tibetan Buddhist sangha. She holds a Master of Divinity from Seattle University and was ordained to authorized ministry by the United Church of Christ in 2020. From 2017 to 2022, Linderman trained as a chaplain resident and palliative care fellow at Stanford Health Care, and completed additional palliative care education through UCSF. She teaches meditation and spiritual direction through online platforms.
Teaching focus
Linderman's core teaching draws on shamatha, analytical meditation, deity practice. The frame is the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition with its layered approach to sutra and tantra, but the language stays plain. Linderman doesn't lecture from height. The talks tend to think alongside whatever's actually present in the room. Recurring themes include bodhicitta, emptiness, and tonglen. 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, Linderman teaches in online, 1:1, 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
Emily Linderman is a Board-Certified Chaplain with the Association of Professional Chaplains and a certified meditation teacher in the Shamatha-Vipashyana tradition through the Open Heart Project, a Tibetan Buddhist sangha. She holds a Master of Divinity from Seattle University and was ordained to authorized ministry by the United Church of Christ in 2020. From 2017 to 2022, Linderman trained as a chaplain resident and palliative care fellow at Stanford Health Care, and completed additional palliative care education through UCSF. She teaches meditation and spiritual direction through online platforms. Rev. Emily Linderman is a queer (Bi+), Board-Certified Chaplain with the Association of Professional Chaplains. She is also a spiritual director, facilitator, and certified meditation teacher (Shamatha-Vipashyana via the Open Heart Project). She was ordained to authorized ministry by the United Church of Christ in 2020 and is a member of the Open-Heart Project, an online Buddhist sangha with Tibetan/Vajrayana lineage. She holds a Master of Divinity from Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry and a Bachelor of Architecture from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Emily was born and raised in Michigan and trained as a chaplain resident, palliative care fellow, and certified educator candidate at Stanford Health Care from 2017 to 2022. She also completed the 9-month long, UCSF sponsored, Practice-PC: Interprofessional Continuing Education in Palliative Care for Practicing Clinicians in 2019. Emily loves collaborating on an interdisciplinary team pursing the highest quality of “full catastrophe”* living for all beings, singing, laughing, baking, and creating along the way. Linderman teaches across several communities, including Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. That work sits within the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition with its layered approach to sutra and tantra, and the recurring concerns of Linderman'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 Linderman'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
Linderman teaches within the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition with its layered approach to sutra and tantra. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Linderman 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 Linderman, you can expect grounded instruction in shamatha, 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. Linderman 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.
