About
Spring Washam is a meditation teacher in the Meditation tradition.
Teaching focus
Washam teaches insight meditation in the Theravada-derived Western insight lineage, with sustained attention to the brahmaviharas, particularly metta and karuna, and to mindfulness practice as it lands in actual lives shaped by race, history, and intergenerational trauma. Her Fierce Heart framing names the way that loving-kindness, in dominant Western insight teaching, can be sentimentalized in ways that don't serve practitioners whose lives include real adversity. She teaches metta as a cultivated capacity for fierce care, courage, and wise discernment rather than as a soft warm feeling. Her teaching weaves in contemplative material from Black ancestral traditions, particularly her sustained work with Harriet Tubman as a contemplative figure, alongside her vipassana training. She's also developed a body of teaching on liberation, both the dharma's classical sense and the political sense familiar to practitioners working at the intersection of contemplative practice and racial justice. The two senses aren't presented as separate. The practice she teaches treats them as one fabric. Across her body of teaching, Washam keeps returning to the question of what dharma practice is actually for in lives where adversity isn't optional. The answer, in her work, isn't transcendence of difficulty but the cultivation of a heart steady enough to meet it without contracting. That's the work the Fierce Heart framing names, and it's the through-line in everything she teaches.
Background
Spring Washam is a meditation teacher, author, and one of the founding teachers of the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California, an insight community that emerged in the mid-2000s with an explicit mission to make contemplative practice available across lines of race, class, and culture that mainstream insight centers had largely failed to cross. She trained in the Spirit Rock and Insight Meditation Society (IMS) lineage, completed the IMS-Spirit Rock teacher training program, and has guiding teachers including Jack Kornfield. She also has a long-running connection with Peruvian shamanic traditions, particularly with curanderos working in the ayahuasca lineage of the Amazon, which informs her cross-cultural teaching but doesn't replace her vipassana grounding. Her books, A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage, and Wisdom in Any Moment and The Spirit of Harriet Tubman, frame contemplative practice as a real resource for working with difficulty inside Black and BIPOC lives. She teaches widely in person and online, leads retreats internationally, and has been a sustained voice in the diversification of American insight teaching. Her work braids classical vipassana practice with attention to liberation in its political sense, the loosening of internalized oppression and the cultivation of fierce, grounded compassion.
Lineage
Washam trained in the Western insight lineage at Spirit Rock and IMS, completed the IMS-Spirit Rock teacher training, and counts Jack Kornfield among her guiding teachers. She's a founding teacher of the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California, and teaches widely through Spirit Rock and other insight centers. She has additional training and ongoing connection with Peruvian shamanic traditions, particularly with curanderos in the Amazonian ayahuasca lineage, which informs her cross-cultural framing without replacing her vipassana grounding.
What to expect
Her retreats and online programs blend conventional vipassana, sitting and walking practice, dharma talks, and Q&A, with sustained attention to the brahmaviharas, particularly metta. She's a warm, direct teacher who works with student questions practically. There's space for grief, anger, and the political weight practitioners are carrying when they show up, treated as practice material rather than as something to be set aside before real meditation begins.