About
John Brehm is a poet and meditation teacher based in Portland, Oregon. He has published four books of poetry and a collection of essays on the relationship between poetry and contemplative practice. He is also the editor of an anthology on impermanence, mindfulness, and joy. With Feldenkrais teacher Alice Boyd, he leads mindfulness retreats that combine sitting meditation, Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement lessons, and mindful poetry discussion. He is affiliated with Insight Meditation Center and Insight Retreat Center.
Teaching focus
Brehm'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. Brehm 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, Brehm teaches in retreat, in-person, 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
John Brehm is a poet and meditation teacher based in Portland, Oregon. He has published four books of poetry and a collection of essays on the relationship between poetry and contemplative practice. He is also the editor of an anthology on impermanence, mindfulness, and joy. With Feldenkrais teacher Alice Boyd, he leads mindfulness retreats that combine sitting meditation, Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement lessons, and mindful poetry discussion. He is affiliated with Insight Meditation Center and Insight Retreat Center. John Brehm is the author of four books of original poetry: Sea of Faith, Help Is on the Way, No Day at the Beach, and most recently, Dharma Talk. He’s also the author of a book of essays, The Dharma of Poetry: How Poems Can Deepen Your Spiritual Practice and Open You to Joy, and the editor of the bestselling anthology The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, both from Wisdom Publications. With his wife, Feldenkrais teacher Alice Boyd, he leads mindfulness retreats that incorporate Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement lessons, meditation, and mindful poetry discussions. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and can be found online at johnbrehmpoet.com. Brehm 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 Brehm'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 Brehm'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
Brehm teaches within the insight tradition transmitted through teachers like Mahasi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin into the West. Source notes mention training with Insight Meditation Center. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Brehm 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 Brehm, you can expect grounded instruction in mindfulness of breathing, with space to ask questions and bring whatever's actually showing up in your practice. On retreat the structure follows a classical rhythm of sittings, walking practice, and dharma talks, with silence held between sessions. The teaching voice is steady. Brehm 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.
