About
Lisa Goddard has practiced meditation since 1997, drawing from Zen and Insight Meditation traditions. She trained at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Zen Hospice Project, Mindful Schools, and the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies. She holds certification as a Mindfulness Facilitator through UCLA's Semel Institute and completed training in Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy through Insight Meditation Center. She currently studies with Gil Fronsdal and Ines Freedman at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City. Goddard is the founder of Roaring Fork Insight and is based in Carbondale, Colorado.
Teaching focus
Her teaching combines Zen and Insight Meditation traditions with significant additional grounding in mindfulness facilitation, hospice work, and Buddhist eco-chaplaincy. The wide training profile gives her a distinctively cross-disciplinary voice. The work draws on Zen practice as the foundational framework, taught with care for the textures of present experience rather than as abstract doctrine. Zazen sits at the center of the practice, with breath and posture as the steady anchors. Koan practice or shikantaza enters depending on the lineage stream, and the teaching emphasizes direct present recognition rather than discursive elaboration. 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. A consistent thread runs through the recorded archive: the willingness to be specific about what to do in this moment rather than gesture at long arcs of advanced practice. That specificity is part of what makes the teaching usable in ordinary daily-life practice.
Background
Lisa Goddard is a teacher whose work is part of the wider Insight and Zen tradition descended from the Burmese and Thai vipassana lineages as carried into the West. Lisa Goddard has practiced since 1997, drawing on Zen and Insight Meditation traditions. She trained at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Zen Hospice Project, Mindful Schools, and the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies. She's a Certified Mindfulness Facilitator through UCLA's Semel Institute and completed Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy training through Insight Meditation Center, where she currently studies with Gil Fronsdal and Ines Freedman to deepen her education as a dharma leader. She's the founder of Roar. 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.
Lineage
Goddard has trained extensively across Zen and Insight traditions, including Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, Spirit Rock, Zen Hospice Project, Mindful Schools, the Sati Center, UCLA Semel Institute, and IMC's Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy program. She currently studies with Gil Fronsdal and Ines Freedman in the IMC Dharma Leader Training. The teacher works as a layperson, in keeping with the broader Western lay-teacher form of the tradition. She's the founder of Roar and is in the IMC Dharma Leader Training program.
What to expect
Programs through IMC and through her organization Roar. The cross-disciplinary character of her training informs the teaching format. Retreats run on a Zen schedule with multiple zazen periods, kinhin walking practice, and dokusan or work practice depending on the lineage. The pacing is structured and the silence is firm. The pacing is careful and the teaching is specific, suiting practitioners who want concrete instruction over inspirational framing. First-time retreatants are usually welcomed without fuss, and the format is designed to support practitioners across a range of experience levels rather than only veterans. Newer students may want to begin with shorter programs and work up to longer silent residential retreats over time.
