About
Richard Shankman is a meditation teacher in the Meditation tradition.
Teaching focus
His teaching focuses particularly on samadhi (concentration) practice, the jhanas, and the relationship between concentration and insight. The Experience of Samadhi explores the disagreements between Visuddhimagga jhanas and lighter sutta jhanas in detail and is widely read among serious concentration practitioners. 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. Across the work runs a careful refusal to oversell. The teaching points students toward what practice can actually do rather than what students might wish it would do, and that honesty becomes part of the trust students develop in the teacher's voice.
Background
Richard Shankman is an established teacher in the Insight Meditation tradition descended from the Burmese and Thai vipassana lineages as carried into the West. Richard Shankman is an American Insight Meditation teacher known for his work on the relationship between concentration practice and insight, and on the jhanas. He's the author of The Experience of Samadhi: An In-Depth Exploration of Buddhist Meditation and The Art and Skill of Buddhist Meditation. His recorded archive holds about 57 talks. The Dharma Seed archive at dharmaseed.org/teacher/146 holds about 57 recorded talks across 26 retreats, a substantial body of work for students to study at distance. Established teachers occupy a useful middle position in the directory, with enough recorded teaching to give students a sustained body of work to study, and enough ongoing practice to keep developing. The recordings carry a quiet warmth and an attentive specificity, the kind of teaching that rewards careful listening over time. 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. 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
Shankman trained as an Insight Meditation teacher through Spirit Rock and the wider IMS-Spirit Rock community, with substantial additional study of Theravada concentration practice and the jhanas. The teacher works as a layperson, in keeping with the broader Western lay-teacher form of the tradition. He teaches through richardshankman.org and at insight retreat centers in the US.
What to expect
Retreats with Shankman often emphasize concentration practice alongside standard insight work. Programs include systematic instruction in samadhi practice that's less commonly taught at general Insight retreats. 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. The center or platform where the teaching happens publishes current schedules and registration information, and email contact is generally the most direct way to ask specific questions about a particular retreat or program.