About
Pamela Ayo Yetunde is a Zen student and Community Dharma Leader affiliated with Insight Meditation Center and Insight Retreat Center. She works as a chaplain and pastoral counselor, and teaches pastoral care. Yetunde is principal co-founder and editor-in-chief of Buddhist Justice Reporter. She has authored Casting Indra's Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community and co-edited Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation and Freedom. She is an associate editor with Lion's Roar and is developing a novella and film project titled Birdsong.
Teaching focus
Yetunde's core teaching draws on shikantaza (just sitting), breath-counting, koan introspection. The frame is the Zen tradition of seated meditation and direct pointing, but the language stays plain. Yetunde doesn't lecture from height. The talks tend to think alongside whatever's actually present in the room. Recurring themes include zazen, samu, and sangha. 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 steady invitation in the talks to keep practice human-sized. Sit when you can, return when you've drifted, and trust that small consistent attention does more over the years than dramatic breakthroughs. Format-wise, Yetunde teaches in online, in-person, retreat, 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
Pamela Ayo Yetunde is a Zen student and Community Dharma Leader affiliated with Insight Meditation Center and Insight Retreat Center. She works as a chaplain and pastoral counselor, and teaches pastoral care. Yetunde is principal co-founder and editor-in-chief of Buddhist Justice Reporter. She has authored Casting Indra's Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community and co-edited Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation and Freedom. She is an associate editor with Lion's Roar and is developing a novella and film project titled Birdsong. Pamela Ayo Yetunde is a Community Dharma Leader, Zen student, chaplain, pastoral counselor, and pastoral care instructor. She is the principal co-founder and editor-in-chief of Buddhist Justice Reporter. Ayo is the author of Casting Indra’s Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community, co-editor of Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation and Freedom, other books and articles, and is an associate editor with Lion’s Roar. She is working on a novella and film project called “Birdsong.” Yetunde teaches across several communities, including Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. That work sits within the Zen tradition of seated meditation and direct pointing, and the recurring concerns of Yetunde'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 Yetunde'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
Yetunde teaches within the Zen tradition of seated meditation and direct pointing. Source notes mention training with Insight Meditation Center. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Yetunde 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 Yetunde, you can expect grounded instruction in shikantaza (just sitting), with space to ask questions and bring whatever's actually showing up in your practice. On retreat the structure follows a classical rhythm of sittings, walking practice, and dharma talks, with silence held between sessions. 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. The teaching voice is steady. Yetunde 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.
