About
Larry Yang is a meditation teacher in the Meditation tradition.
Teaching focus
Yang teaches the four foundations of mindfulness with care and rigor, alongside the brahmaviharas and the wider insight curriculum. What's distinctive in his teaching is the seriousness with which he holds the meeting between dharma practice and social context. For Yang, race, sexuality, ability, and class aren't backdrops to practice; they're part of what practice is meeting. He's spent decades teaching that students don't have to leave their identities at the door of the dharma hall, and that retreat communities that ask them to do so end up reproducing the harm they claim to be alleviating. His teaching of inclusivity isn't abstract. He works carefully with practical questions about how communities make decisions, who gets invited to teach, who feels welcome at a retreat, and what happens when dharma centers are confronted with their own inherited patterns. Awakening Together lays this material out at length. He also teaches metta and the brahmaviharas as serious meditative work, with particular attention to forgiveness practice. Across his work runs a steady, exacting warmth.
Background
Larry Yang is a senior American Insight Meditation teacher and one of the most influential voices in the work to broaden access to dharma teaching for people of color, queer practitioners, and other communities historically under-represented in Western Buddhist spaces. He's a co-founder of the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California, an explicitly anti-oppression dharma center, and a long-time teacher at Spirit Rock and IMS. His recorded archive on Dharma Seed holds over a hundred talks across nearly fifty retreats, and he's the author of Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community, a widely-read book on building dharma communities that take race, class, sexuality, and ability seriously as ground for practice rather than peripheral concerns. He's mentored many of the senior teachers now working in BIPOC and queer dharma in the US, including Kaira Jewel Lingo and other figures across the insight community. His teaching draws on classical Theravada vipassana, the four foundations of mindfulness, and the brahmaviharas, alongside decades of work with social justice and community organizing. Students describe his presence as warm, exacting, and uncompromising about both the depth of practice and the seriousness with which Buddhist communities should hold their commitments to inclusion. East Bay Meditation Center, which Yang co-founded, has become a model for dharma centers across the US working to embody anti-oppression principles in concrete practice rather than aspirational language. Yang's mentorship of younger BIPOC and queer dharma teachers has shaped a whole generation of teaching now active in the wider insight community. Yang's work also extends into formal teacher-training programs at Spirit Rock and IMS, where his presence has shifted what new generations of insight teachers are trained to hold seriously. The community-building dimension of his teaching is inseparable from the meditative dimension; both reflect the same underlying commitment to dharma as collective rather than purely personal practice.
Lineage
Yang trained as an Insight Meditation teacher at Spirit Rock and through the broader IMS-Spirit Rock lay-teacher network. He's a senior member of the Spirit Rock teaching community and a co-founder of East Bay Meditation Center, the Oakland-based dharma center founded explicitly with anti-oppression principles. He teaches as a layperson and has mentored many teachers now active in BIPOC and queer dharma work.
What to expect
Retreats with Yang follow standard Insight format, sittings, walking, dharma talks, and meetings with the teachers, with careful attention to the social context in which practice happens. He often co-teaches with other senior teachers, including BIPOC-specific retreats and intergenerational programs. The talks are well-shaped and the teaching is exacting rather than loose. Expect dharma that takes social context seriously without flattening practice into politics.