About
Susan Shannon is an Interfaith Minister and Buddhist Chaplain who has practiced in Tibetan Buddhism since the early 1970s, beginning with Chinese Buddhism. Based on Orcas Island, she teaches at Sukhasiddhi Foundation and The Chaplaincy Institute. Shannon works in restorative justice and emotional literacy. She served as Buddhist chaplain at San Quentin, facilitating rehabilitation groups and providing care on the mainline and death row. In 2019, she founded Buddhist Prison Ministry, which serves incarcerated people across the United States. She also holds credentials as a Clinical Pastoral Education supervisor with the Center for Spiritual Care and Pastoral Formation.
Teaching focus
Shannon's core teaching draws on shamatha, analytical meditation, deity practice. The frame is the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition with its layered approach to sutra and tantra, but the language stays plain. Shannon doesn't lecture from height. The talks tend to think alongside whatever's actually present in the room. Recurring themes include bodhicitta, emptiness, and tonglen. 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, Shannon teaches in online, in-person, 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 Shannon is an Interfaith Minister and Buddhist Chaplain who has practiced in Tibetan Buddhism since the early 1970s, beginning with Chinese Buddhism. Based on Orcas Island, she teaches at Sukhasiddhi Foundation and The Chaplaincy Institute. Shannon works in restorative justice and emotional literacy. She served as Buddhist chaplain at San Quentin, facilitating rehabilitation groups and providing care on the mainline and death row. In 2019, she founded Buddhist Prison Ministry, which serves incarcerated people across the United States. She also holds credentials as a Clinical Pastoral Education supervisor with the Center for Spiritual Care and Pastoral Formation. Susan Shannon is an Interfaith Minister and Buddhist Chaplain. She’s been “married to the dharma” since the early ’70’s, beginning with studies in Chinese Buddhism, then discovering her forever home with Tibetan Buddhism. Her work is based in Restorative Justice and Emotional Literacy, and has included at-risk youth, refugees, the unhoused, the differently abled, and the incarcerated. For many years she facilitated many rehabilitative groups in San Quentin including GRIP, VOEG, and Houses of Healing. She also served as the Buddhist chaplain to the men in the mainline as well as Death Row. After her return to Orcas Island in 2019, she founded Buddhist Prison Ministry, now serving tens of thousands of incarcerated people across the United States and is a Clinical Pastoral Education supervisor (CPE) with the Center for Spiritual Care and Pastoral Formation (CSCPF,) a dharma teacher at Sukhasiddhi Foundation and The Chaplaincy Institute, and a steward to the sacred land she inhabits. Shannon teaches across several communities, including Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. That work sits within the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition with its layered approach to sutra and tantra, and the recurring concerns of Shannon'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 Shannon'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
Shannon teaches within the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition with its layered approach to sutra and tantra. Source notes mention training with Chinese Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Shannon 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 Shannon, you can expect grounded instruction in shamatha, 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. Shannon 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.
