About
Thanissara is a meditation teacher in the Meditation tradition.
Teaching focus
Her teaching weaves classical Theravada with heart practices, poetry, and engaged-dharma work. She's particularly known for her work on Avalokitesvara devotional practice, on engaged Buddhism, and on the intersection of dharma with climate and ecological crisis. The work draws on Theravada Buddhism in its classical form as the foundational framework, taught with care for the textures of present experience rather than as abstract doctrine. Mindfulness of breath, body, feeling tone, and mental states forms the spine of the practice, with the four foundations of mindfulness as the standard organizational frame. The brahmaviharas, lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, are taught as serious meditative work alongside the mindfulness curriculum. Lovingkindness gets serious time on retreat, treated as central practice rather than supplemental, and the broader brahmavihara framework offers additional ground for the slower work of equanimity and forgiveness. Daily-life integration runs through the recorded teaching as a steady concern. The same awareness that opens during a sit is the awareness that meets traffic, family, and work, and the teaching keeps coming back to that continuity rather than treating retreat as a separate world. Across the recorded teaching runs a steady commitment to the actual work of practice, the slow unfolding that doesn't always make for inspirational soundbites but that carries the path forward across years of sitting. A consistent thread runs through the recorded archive: the willingness to be specific about what to do in this moment rather than gesture at long arcs of advanced practice. That specificity is part of what makes the teaching usable in ordinary daily-life practice.
Background
Thanissara is a senior teacher in the Theravada tradition descended from the Burmese and Thai vipassana lineages as carried into the West. Thanissara is a senior dharma teacher and a former Theravada nun who trained in the Western forest tradition under Ajahn Sumedho before disrobing in the early 1990s. With her partner Kittisaro she co-founded Sacred Mountain Sangha and Dharmagiri Hermitage in South Africa. She's a writer and poet, the author of Time to Stand Up: An Engaged Buddhist Manifesto for Our Earth, Living Dharma, and Listening to the Heart with Kittisaro. The recorded archive holds 340 talks. The Dharma Seed archive at dharmaseed.org/teacher/178 currently holds around 340 recorded talks, gathered across roughly 55 retreats and ongoing teaching. Senior teachers like this one often shape not only individual students but the wider ecosystem of practice around them, through retreats, mentorship, and the steady availability of recorded teaching across decades. The recordings carry a quiet warmth and an attentive specificity, the kind of teaching that rewards careful listening over time. The lay-teacher form of practice this teacher works within asks something specific of students: they have to take responsibility for their own practice in ways monastic students don't always have to, since the structures of monastic life don't carry them. That responsibility is part of what the teaching points at.
Lineage
Thanissara was a fully ordained nun in the Western Ajahn Chah forest tradition for twelve years before disrobing. She co-founded Sacred Mountain Sangha and Dharmagiri Hermitage in South Africa with Kittisaro. The teacher works as a layperson, in keeping with the broader Western lay-teacher form of the tradition. She co-founded Sacred Mountain Sangha and Dharmagiri Hermitage in South Africa.
What to expect
Retreats with Thanissara and Kittisaro combine classical insight practice with heart and devotional work. Programs at Dharmagiri in South Africa offer retreat in the Drakensberg landscape, with international programs running elsewhere. Retreats typically follow a classical Theravada structure with sittings, walking meditation, dharma talks, and one-on-one meetings with the teachers, often with chanting and shorter formal periods built into the schedule. The setting is unceremonial and present-focused, with care taken that practice meets the actual lives students walk in carrying. First-time retreatants are usually welcomed without fuss, and the format is designed to support practitioners across a range of experience levels rather than only veterans. Newer students may want to begin with shorter programs and work up to longer silent residential retreats over time.