About
Ronna Kabatznick is a social psychologist and assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at UCSF. She has practiced meditation since 1985 and completed nearly two years of Vipassana retreat study under Forest Masters in Thailand. She is the author of The Zen of Eating: Ancient Answers to Modern Weight Problems and serves on the board of The Center for Mindful Eating. Her Berkeley-based practice addresses depression, weight management, and relationship issues.
Teaching focus
Kabatznick's core teaching draws on mindfulness of breathing, open awareness, noting practice. The frame is the insight tradition transmitted through teachers like Mahasi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin into the West, but the language stays plain. Kabatznick doesn't lecture from height. The talks tend to think alongside whatever's actually present in the room. Recurring themes include sati, sampajanna, and the three characteristics. 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, Kabatznick teaches in online, in-person, 1:1, 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
Ronna Kabatznick is a social psychologist and assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at UCSF. She has practiced meditation since 1985 and completed nearly two years of Vipassana retreat study under Forest Masters in Thailand. She is the author of The Zen of Eating: Ancient Answers to Modern Weight Problems and serves on the board of The Center for Mindful Eating. Her Berkeley-based practice addresses depression, weight management, and relationship issues. Ronna Kabatznick is a social psychologist who has been practicing meditation since 1985. She spent nearly two years on a Vipassana meditation retreat under the guidance of two of Thailand's greatest Forest Masters. She is the author of "The Zen of Eating: Ancient Answers to Modern Weight Problems" and a board member of The Center for Mindful Eating, a web-based organization designed to help educate professionals about Mindful Eating. Currently, she is an assistant clinical professor in the department of psychiatry at UCSF. Her Berkeley-based private practice focuses on helping people with depression, weight and relationship issues. Kabatznick teaches across several communities, including Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. That work sits within the insight tradition transmitted through teachers like Mahasi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin into the West, and the recurring concerns of Kabatznick'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 Kabatznick'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
Kabatznick teaches within the insight tradition transmitted through teachers like Mahasi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin into the West. Source notes mention training with Forest Masters. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Kabatznick 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 Kabatznick, 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. The teaching voice is steady. Kabatznick 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.
