“Our difficulties are not obstacles to the path;
they are the path itself.”
– Ezra Bayda
The following teachers have made valuable contributions to the Heart Insight group over many years. The links below will allow you to continue to follow their teachings and give them support.
Lulu Cook
Lulu has studied Buddhism for over a decade, and is deeply influenced by her primary teacher, Ayya Tathaaloka of the Dhammadharini bhikkhuni sangha. Lulu trained extensively to teach meditation with Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Community Dharma Leaders programs. Through the charity Mind with Heart she also teaches mindfulness in the schools.
Lulu is certified as a mentor in the Meaningful Life and Meditation Interventions for the Addiction Process model, supporting individuals to create sustainable habit change and find freedom from suffering. Lulu has taught meditation internationally, yet finds that the richness of dharma practice reveals itself equally in daily householder life.
Victor von der Heyde
Victor von der Heyde has been practising meditation for thirty-five years. His main teachers have been Rob Burbea from Gaia House in the UK, and Toni Packer in the US. He has also practised with Joseph Goldstein, Aitken Roshi, Joko Beck, Stephen and Martine Batchelor, Tsoknyi Rinpoche and others. He has spent over two years in silent retreats and has taken dharma teaching roles since the mid 1990s.
Victor has an interest helping people understand the varieties of meditation so that they’re in a position to choose what works for them.
He has had a long-term focus on environmental ethics, he spent two decades helping manage a small overseas aid organisation, trained in Gestalt Therapy, completed graduate studies in counselling and worked for many years as a counsellor.
Patrick Kearney
Patrick Kearney is an independent dharma teacher in the lineage of Mahāsī Sayādaw. He has trained extensively in the Mahasi approach to insight meditation, his principal teachers being Paṇḍitārāma Sayādaw and John Hale. He has also trained in the Diamond Sangha lineage of Zen Buddhism. His original teacher was Robert Aitken Rōshi, and he has also studied with Paul Maloney Rōshi.
Patrick has a particular interest in the original teachings of the Buddha — Buddhism as it was before Theravāda or Mahāyāna were ever thought of. He studies Pāli, the language of the earliest surviving Indian recension of the Buddha’s teachings, and seeks to bring his understanding of the early texts to the practice of dharma in the contemporary world.
Lynn Kelly
Lynn Kelly started meditating in 1975 and undertook eight lifetime precepts with Ven. H. Gunaratana in the early 1990s. From 1996-2004 she co-lead a weekly sitting group in Takoma Park, MD (USA), with Luisa Montero-Diaz under the auspices of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC. Lynn completed the first Community Dharma Leader training offered by Spirit Rock Meditation Center.
In 2004 she moved from America to Brisbane, Australia, with her husband John. Her principle teachers are Patrick Kearney (Australia) and Sayadaw U Tejaniya (Myanmar), and supporting teachers are Shinzen Young and Bhikkhu Bodhi. She regularly posts to her website: The Buddha’s Advice to Laypeople
Pasha Lyndi
Pasha Lyndi has been practising open awareness and loving kindness in the Buddhist tradition for twelve years and instructing for seven. For a couple of years, she lived and worked at retreat centres.
Her meditation teachers come from Insight, Vipassana, Tibetan Buddhist and indigenous traditions.
She coordinates the educational mindfulness charity Mind With Heart Australia, is a trained Mindful Self-Compassion teacher and teaches secular mindfulness on retreats and in workplaces.
Regarding her personal practice, she has a natural love of body-based mindfulness, relational meditation and “listening deeply”, appreciating and connecting with the natural world, as well as the nature of our own being.
