About
Susy Keely has practiced Buddhist meditation since 2001 and began practicing insight meditation in 2006. She trained with Rob Burbea starting in 2015 and was authorized to teach in 2020. Based in Los Angeles, California, she teaches meditation through various platforms including in-person sessions, online programs, and retreats. She also works as an artist and parent. Her teaching focuses on the relationship between creative practice and contemplative meditation.
Teaching focus
Keely'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. Keely 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. Keely works comfortably with longer-term practitioners. Talks assume some familiarity with sitting, and the questions tend to circle around how to keep practice alive once the early enthusiasm has thinned out. Format-wise, Keely 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
Susy Keely has practiced Buddhist meditation since 2001 and began practicing insight meditation in 2006. She trained with Rob Burbea starting in 2015 and was authorized to teach in 2020. Based in Los Angeles, California, she teaches meditation through various platforms including in-person sessions, online programs, and retreats. She also works as an artist and parent. Her teaching focuses on the relationship between creative practice and contemplative meditation. Susy Keely has practiced Buddhist meditation since 2001, and began practicing insight meditation in 2006. In 2015 she began training with Rob Burbea, who authorized her to teach in 2020. She teaches meditation in Los Angeles, California, and is an artist and a parent. She is passionate about exploring the intersection between creative energies and contemplative practice, and supporting practitioners wishing to pursue deep practice in the midst of daily life. Keely 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 Keely'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 Keely'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
Keely teaches within the insight tradition transmitted through teachers like Mahasi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin into the West. Source notes mention training with Rob Burbea. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Keely 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 Keely, 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. Keely 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.
