About
Rick Maddock is a professor of psychiatry at UC Davis School of Medicine who teaches dharma in the Sacramento area and Sierra foothills. He practices and teaches early Indian Buddhism, with training from Spirit Rock's senior student program. His teaching focuses on connections between contemporary neuroscience research on the brain and Buddhist wisdom traditions and practices.
Teaching focus
Maddock's core teaching draws on mindfulness of breathing, noting practice, body sweeping. The frame is early Buddhist teachings rooted in the Pali canon, but the language stays plain. Maddock doesn't lecture from height. The talks tend to think alongside whatever's actually present in the room. Recurring themes include sila, samadhi, and the four foundations of mindfulness. 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, Maddock teaches in in-person, online, 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
Rick Maddock is a professor of psychiatry at UC Davis School of Medicine who teaches dharma in the Sacramento area and Sierra foothills. He practices and teaches early Indian Buddhism, with training from Spirit Rock's senior student program. His teaching focuses on connections between contemporary neuroscience research on the brain and Buddhist wisdom traditions and practices. Rick Maddock, MD, is a professor of psychiatry who teaches and conducts neuroscience research at the UC Davis School of Medicine. A long-time dharma practitioner with a focus on the teachings of early Indian Buddhism, Rick has completed Spirit Rock’s training programs for senior students and teaches dharma in the Sacramento area and Sierra foothills. His teachings explore the convergence between contemporary scientific insights about the human brain and the wisdom traditions and practices of Buddhism. Maddock teaches across several communities, including Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. That work sits within early Buddhist teachings rooted in the Pali canon, and the recurring concerns of Maddock'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 Maddock'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
Maddock teaches within early Buddhist teachings rooted in the Pali canon. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Maddock 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 Maddock, you can expect grounded instruction in mindfulness of breathing, 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. Maddock 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.
