About
Franka Cordua-von Specht began meditation practice in 2004 and became a student of Mingyur Rinpoche in 2007. She attended Rinpoche's teachings in Bodhgaya, India, in 2009. In June 2013, she helped establish the Tergar Vancouver Practice Group. She is affiliated with Tergar, the organization founded by Mingyur Rinpoche.
Teaching focus
Specht'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. Specht 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, Specht teaches in in-person, group, 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
Franka Cordua-von Specht began meditation practice in 2004 and became a student of Mingyur Rinpoche in 2007. She attended Rinpoche's teachings in Bodhgaya, India, in 2009. In June 2013, she helped establish the Tergar Vancouver Practice Group. She is affiliated with Tergar, the organization founded by Mingyur Rinpoche. Franka Cordua-von Specht was introduced to meditation in 2004 and became a student of Mingyur Rinpoche in 2007 in Vancouver. The meeting was pivotal and inspired her to attend Rinpoche’s teachings in Bodhgaya, India, in 2009. Foremost, she appreciates the profound transformative power of Rinpoche’s teachings on awareness, and in June 2013, she helped found the Tergar Vancouver Practice Group. Specht's teaching home is Tergar, where the practice community shapes the rhythm of retreats, sittings, and dharma talks. That work sits within the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition with its layered approach to sutra and tantra, and the recurring concerns of Specht'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 Specht'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. Across the recorded talks there's a clear preference for plain speech over technical vocabulary, which lowers the barrier for new listeners while still rewarding longer-term practitioners who catch the lineage references underneath. The teaching also tends to come back, again and again, to how practice survives outside the cushion. Family, work, illness, and the slow shifts of midlife all show up in the talks as fair territory rather than distractions from the real practice.
Lineage
Specht teaches within the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition with its layered approach to sutra and tantra. Current affiliations include Tergar. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Specht 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 Specht, you can expect grounded instruction in shamatha, with space to ask questions and bring whatever's actually showing up in your practice. Group settings have a community feel without becoming social. People sit, listen, and check in. The teaching voice is steady. Specht 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.
