Dana DePalma
Dana DePalma teaches Insight Meditation retreats at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California and online through Dharma Ground, an organization she co-founded. She specializes in teaching Nine Bodies Insight, a method of practice which utilizes specific teachings on the structure of consciousness to balance, refine, and empower one’s Insight Meditation practice.
Dana began her Vipassana practice in 1993, when she was a psychology student at UC Berkeley. She graduated from Spirit Rock’s first Community Dharma Leaders (CDL) Program in 2000 and completed Spirit Rock’s four-year retreat Teacher Training Program and joined the Spirit Rock Teachers Council in 2010. She serves as a Board member and Guiding Teacher at Spirit Rock, and recently completed a four-year term as Co-Chair of the Guiding Teachers Committee (2018 - 2022). Dana holds a Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies, and a Marriage and Family Therapist license, and is most influenced by Relational psychology, Depth psychology, and Jungian perspectives. She is a Bay Area native, married, mom to an awesome teen, and grateful to call the ancestral Coast Miwok Land also known as Marin County, with Mount Tamalpais and its rugged coast, home.
Useful Links
Featured Audio Talk
May 27, 2021 - Feeling the Ouch with Dignity and Integrity (Second Insight)
Each of the four insights has three levels. The first is reflecting, the second is deepening, and the third is knowing. At the first level, we’re trying on the idea from the Buddha: that suffering is entwined with life. Then we drop into the direct experience, touching right in—this is the heart of our practice, saying that we’re ready to feel this. As we become available for the felt sense in the present moment, this naturally deepens into knowing it for ourselves, and the insight becomes part of how we relate to life, how we dance with life.
Dana is co-teaching Dancing with Life, July 28-31.