About
Merce Lopez began meditating in childhood under her father's guidance. She trained as a yoga teacher and later ordained as a Buddhist nun in Thailand for one year under Phra Ajahn Thong Sirimankalo. She returned to Colombia and has taught the Dharma for seventeen years with the abbot's authorization. Andrea Castillo has been her primary teacher since 2018. Lopez is currently in training with Gil and Ines Freedman through the DLT program. She is affiliated with Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City.
Teaching focus
Her teaching combines Theravada training from her year as an ordained nun in Thailand with the IMC Insight tradition. She teaches in Spanish for the Colombian and broader Latin American 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. The recorded talks return often to the question of how practice meets specific lives rather than an idealized practitioner, and the careful framing of instructions reflects that orientation. Students don't have to fit themselves to the teaching; the teaching meets them where they actually are.
Background
Merce Lopez is a teacher whose work is part of the wider Theravada and Insight tradition descended from the Burmese and Thai vipassana lineages as carried into the West. Merce Lopez began meditating in childhood under her father's guidance. She trained as a yoga teacher and ordained as a Buddhist nun in Thailand for one year under Phra Ajahn Thong Sirimankalo. She returned to Colombia and has shared the Dharma there for 17 years with the abbot's authorization. Andrea Castillo has been her primary teacher since 2018. She's currently in the IMC Dharma Leader Training 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. 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
Lopez was ordained as a Buddhist nun in Thailand for one year under Phra Ajahn Thong Sirimankalo. Her primary teacher since 2018 has been Andrea Castillo. She's 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. She teaches in Colombia and is affiliated with Insight Meditation Center (Redwood City) Dharma Leader Training.
What to expect
Programs in Colombia and through IMC-affiliated Latin American networks. Bilingual offerings in Spanish and English. 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 setting is unceremonial and present-focused, with care taken that practice meets the actual lives students walk in carrying. 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.
