About
G Schulz began meditating in 2003 at a Vipassana retreat in Thailand. He maintains a daily practice and is affiliated with Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City. At Insight Santa Cruz, he serves as a Community Dharma Leader and leads the Rainbow Sangha meditation group. Schulz completed Spirit Rock's Dedicated Practitioner and Advance Practitioner programs and is currently enrolled in the Dharma Leader Training program led by Gil Fronsdal and Ines Freedman.
Teaching focus
His teaching follows the IMC and Spirit Rock-style insight curriculum. He leads the Rainbow Sangha meditation group at Insight Santa Cruz, an LGBTQ-affirming dharma community. The work draws on the Insight Meditation lay-teacher lineage as the foundational framework, taught with care for the textures of present experience rather than as abstract doctrine. The four foundations of mindfulness, breath, body, feeling tone, and mental states, organize the formal practice, with lovingkindness woven through as supporting work. Sitting and walking are the standard formal forms, paired with daily-life mindfulness as the integration practice. Lovingkindness gets serious time on retreat, treated as central practice rather than supplemental, and the broader brahmavihara framework offers additional ground for the slower work of equanimity and forgiveness. Daily-life integration runs through the recorded teaching as a steady concern. The same awareness that opens during a sit is the awareness that meets traffic, family, and work, and the teaching keeps coming back to that continuity rather than treating retreat as a separate world. Across the recorded teaching runs a steady commitment to the actual work of practice, the slow unfolding that doesn't always make for inspirational soundbites but that carries the path forward across years of sitting. Across the work runs a careful refusal to oversell. The teaching points students toward what practice can actually do rather than what students might wish it would do, and that honesty becomes part of the trust students develop in the teacher's voice.
Background
G Schulz is a teacher whose work is part of the wider Insight Meditation tradition descended from the Burmese and Thai vipassana lineages as carried into the West. G Schulz attended his first Vipassana retreat in 2003 while traveling in Thailand. This sparked a daily practice and his engagement with Insight Santa Cruz, where he serves as a Community Dharma Leader and leads the Rainbow Sangha meditation group. He has completed Spirit Rock's Dedicated Practitioner and Advanced Practitioner programs and is currently in the Dharma Leader Training program with Gil Fronsdal and Ines Freedman. The teacher's recorded material is mostly hosted through affiliated centers and personal platforms rather than through Dharma Seed. Emerging teachers offer something different from senior figures: the texture of a teaching voice still finding its specific shape, which can be useful for students who want to follow a teacher's development rather than encounter an already-canonized body of work. Listeners describe a steady, unhurried voice and a willingness to be specific about practice rather than abstract. Students who follow a single teacher's archive over time tend to pick up not only practice instructions but a quality of attention, the way the teacher meets restlessness, doubt, or sudden opening, and that transmission across recordings is part of what makes a sustained body of recorded work valuable for practice over years rather than weeks. The lay-teacher form of practice this teacher works within asks something specific of students: they have to take responsibility for their own practice in ways monastic students don't always have to, since the structures of monastic life don't carry them. That responsibility is part of what the teaching points at.
Lineage
Schulz teaches at Insight Santa Cruz as a Community Dharma Leader. He's a graduate of Spirit Rock's Dedicated and Advanced Practitioner programs and is currently in the IMC Dharma Leader Training program. The teacher works as a layperson, in keeping with the broader Western lay-teacher form of the tradition. He teaches at Insight Santa Cruz and is in the IMC Dharma Leader Training program.
What to expect
Programs at Insight Santa Cruz include the Rainbow Sangha LGBTQ meditation group alongside general programming. Retreats follow standard Insight format: sittings, walking, dharma talks, and meetings with the teachers, with lovingkindness practice woven through and daily-life integration treated as serious work rather than an afterthought. The pacing is careful and the teaching is specific, suiting practitioners who want concrete instruction over inspirational framing. Students new to the teacher's work often find it useful to start with a shorter program or a recorded talk before committing to a longer residential retreat, both to get a feel for the teaching voice and to clarify whether the format suits their practice at this stage.
