About
Susan Ezequelle has practiced Insight Meditation since 1997. She was a past board president of the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California, which she helped found in 2001 with Gil Fronsdal. She began teaching at IMC in 2003. In 2008, she completed the Sati Center Chaplaincy Training Program and has worked as a hospital chaplain.
Teaching focus
Ezequelle'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. Ezequelle 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, Ezequelle 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
Susan Ezequelle has practiced Insight Meditation since 1997. She was a past board president of the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California, which she helped found in 2001 with Gil Fronsdal. She began teaching at IMC in 2003. In 2008, she completed the Sati Center Chaplaincy Training Program and has worked as a hospital chaplain. Susan Ezequelle has been practicing Insight Meditation since 1997. She is a past IMC Board President and worked closely with founding teacher Gil Fronsdal and other community members to found in 2001 the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA. She has been teaching at IMC since 2003 and in 2008, in response to a deep desire to engage with the world through her Buddhist practice, she completed the year-long Sati Center Chaplaincy Training Program and has served as a hospital chaplain for the past 5 years. Ezequelle 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 Ezequelle'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 Ezequelle'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
Ezequelle teaches within the insight tradition transmitted through teachers like Mahasi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin into the West. Source notes mention training with Gil Fronsdal. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Ezequelle 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 Ezequelle, 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. Ezequelle 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.
