About
Yanai Postelnik is a meditation teacher in the Meditation tradition.
Teaching focus
His teaching follows the four foundations of mindfulness with attention to long-arc practice and to the slow unfolding of equanimity across multi-week silent retreats. He's known for warm, careful teaching that holds students through the harder stretches of long retreat. 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. The recorded talks return often to the question of how practice meets specific lives rather than an idealized practitioner, and the careful framing of instructions reflects that orientation. Students don't have to fit themselves to the teaching; the teaching meets them where they actually are.
Background
Yanai Postelnik is a senior teacher in the Insight Meditation tradition descended from the Burmese and Thai vipassana lineages as carried into the West. Yanai Postelnik is a senior international Insight Meditation teacher with one of the more substantial recorded archives in the directory: over 600 talks across more than 160 retreats. He teaches widely at Gaia House, IMS, Spirit Rock, and retreat centers across Europe, North America, and Israel. The Dharma Seed archive at dharmaseed.org/teacher/193 currently holds around 602 recorded talks, gathered across roughly 162 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. 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. 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
Postelnik trained in the international Insight Meditation tradition with significant time on long retreat. He's a long-time member of the Gaia House teaching community in the UK and a senior teacher across the wider international Insight scene. The teacher works as a layperson, in keeping with the broader Western lay-teacher form of the tradition. He's a senior teacher at Gaia House in the UK and teaches at IMS, Spirit Rock, and retreat centers internationally.
What to expect
Retreats with Postelnik are typically multi-week silent residential retreats at Gaia House, IMS, and other major insight centers. The teaching is paced for the long arc. 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 tone is unhurried and grounded, with attention given to the practical questions students bring rather than to large theoretical frameworks. 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.