About
Trudy Goodman is a meditation teacher in the Meditation tradition.
Teaching focus
Her teaching weaves Zen and Insight traditions with significant additional integration of psychotherapeutic understanding. She's particularly attentive to the meeting between contemplative practice and clinical work. The work draws on the Insight Meditation lay-teacher lineage as the foundational framework, taught with care for the textures of present experience rather than as abstract doctrine. The four foundations of mindfulness, breath, body, feeling tone, and mental states, organize the formal practice, with lovingkindness woven through as supporting work. Sitting and walking are the standard formal forms, paired with daily-life mindfulness as the integration practice. 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. Across the work runs a careful refusal to oversell. The teaching points students toward what practice can actually do rather than what students might wish it would do, and that honesty becomes part of the trust students develop in the teacher's voice.
Background
Trudy Goodman is an established teacher in the Insight Meditation tradition descended from the Burmese and Thai vipassana lineages as carried into the West. Trudy Goodman is a senior American dharma teacher and the founder of InsightLA. She trained in Zen Buddhism beginning in the 1970s and later in Insight Meditation, and her teaching weaves the two traditions. She's a co-founder of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. The recorded archive holds about 69 talks across 32 retreats. The Dharma Seed archive at dharmaseed.org/teacher/183 holds about 69 recorded talks across 32 retreats, a substantial body of work for students to study at distance. Established teachers occupy a useful middle position in the directory, with enough recorded teaching to give students a sustained body of work to study, and enough ongoing practice to keep developing. Recorded talks suggest a careful pacing and a refusal to dress dharma up in inflated language. Like many teachers in the wider Insight community, this teacher's path includes time on long silent retreat, ongoing study with senior teachers, and gradual integration of teaching responsibility through co-teaching and small local programs before stepping into broader retreat work. That apprenticeship model shapes the careful pacing of the teaching. Students who follow a single teacher's archive over time tend to pick up not only practice instructions but a quality of attention, the way the teacher meets restlessness, doubt, or sudden opening, and that transmission across recordings is part of what makes a sustained body of recorded work valuable for practice over years rather than weeks.
Lineage
Goodman trained in Zen Buddhism in the 1970s and 1980s and later in Insight Meditation through the IMS-Spirit Rock community. She founded InsightLA, the major Los Angeles-based dharma center. The teacher works as a layperson, in keeping with the broader Western lay-teacher form of the tradition. She founded InsightLA at insightla.org and co-founded the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy.
What to expect
Programs through InsightLA and her own teaching schedule include retreats, ongoing classes, and online programs. The cross-tradition character distinguishes the teaching from purely Insight or purely Zen lineages. Retreats follow standard Insight format: sittings, walking, dharma talks, and meetings with the teachers, with lovingkindness practice woven through and daily-life integration treated as serious work rather than an afterthought. The pacing is careful and the teaching is specific, suiting practitioners who want concrete instruction over inspirational framing. For practitioners working at distance, recorded talks and online programs often offer a good initial point of contact, with in-person retreat following once the teaching voice and approach have become familiar.