About
Muna Shaheen is a Palestinian mindfulness practitioner and veterinary doctor based in Haifa. She co-founded Ihna-Hon, an Arabic-speaking meditation space, and founded Marsa, an Arabic-speaking Sangha where she teaches Dharma. She serves as an assistant teacher in MBSR training. Shaheen integrates mindfulness practice with social activism, environmental work, and animal welfare education. She leads children's nature groups and works as an environmental and animal welfare activist.
Teaching focus
Shaheen's core teaching draws on mindfulness of breathing, open awareness, loving-kindness. The frame is the Western Insight Meditation movement that grew out of Burmese and Thai Theravada lineages, but the language stays plain. Shaheen doesn't lecture from height. The talks tend to think alongside whatever's actually present in the room. Recurring themes include mindfulness, loving-kindness, and equanimity. None of those get presented as abstract ideas. They're worked into the body, into ethics, into how a practitioner shows up in family life or at work, so that the dharma stops feeling like a separate compartment. There's a real care for beginners in Shaheen's teaching. Instructions get repeated, jargon gets translated, and people new to sitting aren't asked to pretend they know what samadhi feels like. Format-wise, Shaheen teaches in in-person, online, group, and the tone moves easily between guided sittings, dharma talks, and Q&A. Questions tend to get answered the way they were asked, without being reframed into something cleaner. That alone tells you a lot about how the room feels.
Background
Muna Shaheen is a Palestinian mindfulness practitioner and veterinary doctor based in Haifa. She co-founded Ihna-Hon, an Arabic-speaking meditation space, and founded Marsa, an Arabic-speaking Sangha where she teaches Dharma. She serves as an assistant teacher in MBSR training. Shaheen integrates mindfulness practice with social activism, environmental work, and animal welfare education. She leads children's nature groups and works as an environmental and animal welfare activist. Dr. Muna Shaheen is a Palestinian single mother of three based in Haifa. She is a long-term mindfulness practitioner who co-founded “Ihna-Hon,” an open Arabic-speaking meditation space, and later founded “Marsa,” a dedicated Arabic-speaking Sangha in which she teaches Dharma. She also serves as an assistant teacher in an MBSR teacher training course. Muna regards mindfulness teaching as a central form of social activism. Alongside this, she promotes animal welfare through her educational work, drawing on her background as a veterinary doctor. She is an environmental and animal welfare activist and leads children’s groups in nature, fostering a deep connection to the earth. Shaheen teaches across several communities, including Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. That work sits within the Western Insight Meditation movement that grew out of Burmese and Thai Theravada lineages, and the recurring concerns of Shaheen's teaching, ethical foundation, steady attention, and the slow softening of habitual reactivity, echo the older texts without sounding distant from a 21st-century practitioner's life. What stands out across Shaheen's talks isn't a single technique but a steadying tone. Practice is treated as something built slowly, in ordinary life, with care. There's room for the difficulties practitioners actually bring into the room, grief, restlessness, the body's complaints, family obligations, and the encouragement is consistent without being pushy.
Lineage
Shaheen teaches within the Western Insight Meditation movement that grew out of Burmese and Thai Theravada lineages. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Shaheen talks about practice, with steady reference to the older Buddhist vocabulary while keeping the door open for people who've never read a sutra. Whether that framing lands as monastic or lay depends on the specific talk, but the consistent thread is care for the form without letting the form become the point.
What to expect
Sitting with Shaheen, you can expect grounded instruction in mindfulness of breathing, with space to ask questions and bring whatever's actually showing up in your practice. Online sessions tend to keep the same shape, shorter sits, a talk, and time for Q&A, in a format that's accessible from home. Group settings have a community feel without becoming social. People sit, listen, and check in. The teaching voice is steady. Shaheen won't push you past your edge, and there's a clear preference for slow, sustainable practice over breakthrough chasing. Bring a notebook if you like, or don't. Either way, you'll be met where you are.
