About
Lama Liz Monson is affiliated with the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. Limited information is available about her teaching background, primary teachers, or specific focus areas in the provided source material.
Teaching focus
Her teaching combines Tibetan Vajrayana practice with academic engagement with Tibetan Buddhist sources. The integration of scholarship and practice is part of the BCBS character. The work draws on the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as the foundational framework, taught with care for the textures of present experience rather than as abstract doctrine. Foundational shamatha and vipashyana support the more characteristic Tibetan practices: refuge and bodhicitta, deity visualization, mantra recitation, tonglen as the core compassion practice, and pointing-out instructions in the higher teachings depending on student readiness. 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. There's also careful work with the harder stretches of practice, the dry months, the periods when nothing seems to be moving, the recurring difficulties that don't resolve quickly. The teaching treats those stretches as honest dharma material rather than as obstacles to be pushed past.
Background
Lama Liz Monson is an established teacher in the Tibetan Buddhism tradition with roots in the Tibetan teaching lineages. Lama Liz Monson is affiliated with Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. She's a senior teacher and lama in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition with extensive scholarly and contemplative training. The teacher's recorded material is mostly hosted through affiliated centers and personal platforms rather than through Dharma Seed. Established teachers occupy a useful middle position in the directory, with enough recorded teaching to give students a sustained body of work to study, and enough ongoing practice to keep developing. The recordings carry a quiet warmth and an attentive specificity, the kind of teaching that rewards careful listening over time. The wider Western Buddhist landscape that grew up across the second half of the twentieth century has produced a range of teaching voices working at the meeting point between classical Asian sources and contemporary lay practice, and this teacher is one of those voices. Across the recorded body of work runs a consistent attention to what's actually workable inside ordinary obligations rather than only in retreat. Practitioners encountering this teacher's work for the first time often start with a recorded talk on a topic that addresses something current in their practice, then move into longer retreats once the voice and the framing become familiar. The recorded archive supports that gradual on-ramp without requiring a full commitment up front. For practitioners surveying women teachers in the Tibetan tradition, Lama Liz Monson contributes to a small but growing group of senior Western women teachers in Tibetan Buddhism alongside teachers like Tsultrim Allione, Anne Klein, Lama Palden, and Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo. The wider scene continues to develop as more women in the West complete the traditional training pathways and step into formal teaching roles.
Lineage
Liz Monson is a senior teacher and lama in Tibetan Buddhism, affiliated with BCBS. The teacher works as a layperson, in keeping with the broader Western lay-teacher form of the tradition. She's affiliated with Barre Center for Buddhist Studies as a senior teacher in Tibetan Buddhism.
What to expect
Programs at BCBS combine academic study with contemplative practice in the Tibetan tradition. Programs include traditional Tibetan elements alongside formal sitting: refuge and bodhicitta practice, mantra recitation, visualization, and tonglen, with shrine forms and offerings that distinguish Vajrayana retreats from their Theravada counterparts. The tone is unhurried and grounded, with attention given to the practical questions students bring rather than to large theoretical frameworks. The center or platform where the teaching happens publishes current schedules and registration information, and email contact is generally the most direct way to ask specific questions about a particular retreat or program.
