About
Michele Benzamin Miki is a meditation teacher in the Meditation tradition.
Teaching focus
Her teaching integrates classical mindfulness with martial arts, qigong, and embodied movement practice. The pairing reflects a longer tradition of cross-discipline contemplative work, where the body's discipline is treated as serious dharma rather than as background. 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
Michele Benzamin Miki is a teacher associated with the Insight Meditation tradition descended from the Burmese and Thai vipassana lineages as carried into the West. Michele Benzamin Miki is a teacher whose work integrates mindfulness practice with martial arts and movement. The Dharma Seed archive holds about 13 talks. Her own platform at fivechanges.com publishes additional offerings. The Dharma Seed archive at dharmaseed.org/teacher/125 currently holds about 13 talks across 3 recorded retreats, a focused body of work that rewards careful listening. Teachers with smaller public archives still represent serious training and ongoing practice, even when the public footprint is limited. Listeners may want to combine the available recordings with the websites of the centers where these teachers offer programs. Students often note a warm, grounded presence and an ability to slow practice down to its actual texture rather than rush through technique. 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. 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.
Lineage
Benzamin Miki teaches in the broader Western contemplative community, with influences from Insight Meditation alongside martial arts and movement traditions. The teacher works as a layperson, in keeping with the broader Western lay-teacher form of the tradition. She teaches through her own platform at fivechanges.com and in the wider contemplative and movement community.
What to expect
Programs often include movement practice alongside formal sitting. The fivechanges.com platform publishes courses and retreat schedules. 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 atmosphere is warm and committed rather than performance-oriented, with serious dharma underneath an accessible surface. 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.