Religion & SpiritualityBuddhismEducation

Jonathan Foust

Senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and co-founder of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute, Jonathan Foust share weekly talks, guided meditations and inquiries that explore how to cultivate an awakened heart and mind.

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31 episodes
Avg 46 min
English

Episodes 31

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September 7 · 39 min
The Art of Starting Over …. Over and Over
This talk explores one of the most essential—and liberating—skills on the spiritual path: the willingness to begin again. Inspired by S. N. Goenka's simple instruction to "start again," we'll look beyond returning to the present moment and explore how each new beginning also invites us to remember what matters most. Drawing on the experience of moving across the country, letting go of what no longer belongs, and discovering that every ending is also a beginning, this talk offers a fresh perspective on the practice of starting over—not only during life's major transitions, but in the countless moments of everyday life. You'll learn how to re-arrive with awareness, reconnect with your deepest intention, recognize what no longer serves your future, and cultivate the courage to begin again with wisdom rather than self-judgment. Whether you're navigating a significant life change or simply finding your way through the ordinary challenges of daily living, you'll discover that starting over isn't a sign that you've failed—it's the very heart of awakening.
September 7 · 48 min
The Ten Perfections #10: Live in Balance
This talk explores the tenth of the ten perfections. You'll learn how you cannot make steadiness and serenity happen, but can create the conditions that allow this inner state to arise. When you remember the fundamental quality of reality, you can more easily open to embrace your true nature.
September 7 · 48 min
The Ten Perfections #9 : Live from Your Heart
The talk explores the power of loving kindness. You'll learn how to be more of a well-wisher to all, some techniques to more effectively express kindness in the world and a reflection on what might happen in your life if you were to be more adept at responding to challenges with an open heart.
September 7 · 47 min
The Ten Perfections #8: Stay the Course
This talk explores the power of grit. You'll learn the importance of first creating goals that are fully aligned with your heart and spirit and then developing your capacity to stay on your path, developing both perseverance as well as deep, intuitive inner listening.
August 24 · 47 min
The Ten Perfections #7: Live in Truth
This talk explores how to attune to what is true. You'll learn how to discern between conventional and eternal truth, two essential teachings of truth and how to use your relationships and wise speech as a doorway to greater clarity and self-awareness.
August 24 · 48 min
The Ten Perfections #6: Stay Present Under Pressure
This talk explores how to cultivate the quality of patience and self-restraint. You'll learn about the power of refraining from those who have caused you harm, how to endure hardship, how to cultivate greater confidence in ultimate truth and about the near-enemies of patience and forbearance.
August 23 · 55 min
The Ten Perfections #5: Engage with Skillful Effort
This talk explores how to cultivate vitality, courage and resilience in your life. You'll learn how you can manage the energy you have and how to build vigor and confidence to pursue that which calls you.
August 23 · 48 min
The Ten Perfections #4: See More Clearly
This talk explores how to cultivate wisdom and insight. You'll learn about the importance of cultivating the wise heart, what gets in the way of seeing clearly, the anatomy of an insight and how to balance wisdom with compassion.
August 23 · 48 min
The Ten Perfections #3: Let Go
This talk explores the potential of mindful renunciation. You'll learn how critically important it is to know what is most important, cultivate the thoughts, behaviors and actions that will bring about that outcome and as well, identify and modify the the thoughts, behaviors and actions that get in the way of that outcome.
August 23 · 48 min
The Ten Perfections: #2 Walk Your Talk
This talk explores how paying attention to your behavior can support you in your life. You'll learn how all traditions have guidelines regarding your moral behavior, how morality is often based on a negativity bias and how ultimately, it's up to you to determine what you really want and define for yourself what it means to be virtuous and in integrity.
August 23 · 48 min
The Ten Perfections #1: Give Freely
This talk explores the power of cultivating an attitude of love and care in your life. You'll learn what the Buddha said about giving, how intimately receiving is connected to generosity, the shadow-side of the practice and the power of taking generous actions when you feel called.
May 21 · 48 min
Conversations with Depth Practitioners: Stephen Josephs
How has your meditation practice shifted and changed since you first took it up? Please join this conversation with Stephen Josephs, who shares how his mediation has evolved over 60 years of daily practice. As one of the leaders in the Kundalini Yoga tradition at it's peak in the west, Stephen was a devoted practitioner in what he calls the 'fire practices,' willful and powerful practices that can dramatically change one's state. But after many years of dedicated effort, the fire started to go out. His practice evolved into what he calls the 'water practices' - techniques and attentional strategies that are more about dissolving the sense of a separate self. In this conversation he shares some of the essential elements of the water practices and we explore that gnarly question: What it is that is actually dissolving? You'll come away with some key insights from a depth practitioner and a taste of how the dissolving practices might be of benefit to you. With over 60 years of daily meditation practice, Stephen Josephs, Ed.D., brings a wealth of wisdom to his work. His expertise spans a diverse array of mind-body systems—including yoga, tai chi, and qigong—as well as specialized training in NLP, psychodrama, and body-centered psychotherapy. This breadth of experience fosters an open-hearted approach that helps students quickly realize the benefits of mindfulness. For the past 40 years, Stephen has focused on leadership development, integrating meditation as a core pillar for executive growth. He is also the co-author of Leadership Agility, a definitive study on how leaders mature and expand their capacity to lead. For more information and to reach out to Stephen: https://www.stephenjosephs.com/ Teachers and Resources: Connierae Andreas and Core Transformation: https://conniraeandreas.com/ Dr. Les Fehmi and Open Focus: https://openfocus.com/home/ Bruce Frantzis https://www.energyarts.com/about/
May 21 · 33 min
The 8 Fold Path 8: The Collected Mind: How Concentration Opens the Door to Freedom
This talk explores the culminating factor of the Eightfold Path—Right Concentration—and the profound power of a steady, unified mind. In a world of constant distraction and fragmented attention, we investigate how deep focus becomes a gateway to inner stillness, clarity, and freedom. Drawing from classical Buddhist teachings and lived experience, this talk reveals how training attention is not just about meditation, but about reclaiming the depth, presence, and aliveness of your entire life. You'll learn how to strengthen and stabilize attention through practical, time-tested methods, how to work skillfully with common obstacles like restlessness and doubt, and how concentration naturally matures from effort into ease. You'll also discover how a steady mind supports insight, emotional resilience, and a deep sense of well-being—opening the door to a more fully lived and awakened life.
May 21 · 49 min
Retreat #5: All Roads Lead to Now
This talk explores the movement from doing to being—from the disciplined application of effort to the natural ease of presence. After training attention, stabilizing the mind, and refining investigation, there comes a threshold where practice no longer adds anything, but begins to let go of itself. Through stories, humor, and classical teachings, we'll examine how effort serves us and how clinging to it can quietly become another form of tension. We'll explore how investigation matures into direct seeing, how awareness can rest without collapsing into dullness, and how the deepest freedom emerges not from control, but from trusting the field of awareness itself. You'll learn how to recognize when effort is skillful and when it's simply habitual, how to allow investigation to complete itself without turning it into a project, and how to rest in open awareness with clarity and balance. You'll explore the shift from trying to manage experience to allowing it to unfold, sensing how awareness is already present and functioning without your help. We'll also point toward a deeper trust—how to relax into awareness without drifting, and how to live from this understanding in a responsive, engaged way. By the end, you'll have a felt sense of when to apply effort, when to release it, and how to let practice reveal the freedom that has been here all along.
April 28 · 57 min
Retreat Talk #4: Let's Just Cut to the Chase, Shall We?
This talk explores what remains when we stop circling around the edges of practice and face the deepest truths directly. With humor, candor, and a willingness to take the red pill, we'll look at the three characteristics the Buddha pointed to—impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self—and how they shape every human life whether we like it or not. We'll explore how the heart breaks open in the face of change, how our wounds often become the source of our gifts, and how the self we work so hard to protect may be far less solid than we imagine. This is a talk about reality, about freedom, and about what becomes possible when we stop negotiating with what is true. You'll learn how contemplating impermanence can deepen gratitude rather than despair, how dukkha reveals the hidden strategies we use to secure belonging and safety, and how the teaching of not-self can loosen fear at its root. We'll explore the "winning formulas" that shape identity, the ways suffering can become a doorway to wisdom and compassion, and how meditation invites us beyond self-improvement into liberation. By the end, you'll have a clearer way to investigate what is most real, meet the mystery of life more honestly, and sense the freedom that appears when clinging begins to fall away.
April 22 · 21 min
An Earth Day Invitation: Take Your Practice Outside With Heidi Schuttenberg
The best meditation hall has no walls. This talk explores how nature cultivates focus, non-judgment, and belonging, and how mindfulness can help us stay engaged with the world's pain without burning out. Bio: With 25 years of Vipassana practice and a day job in international marine conservation, Heidi Schuttenberg, PhD brings both deep personal inquiry and real-world urgency to her teaching. She mentors in Jonathan Foust's Year of Living Mindfully and is dedicated to making applied mindfulness available to those on the front lines environmental conservation and social change. Learn more at https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidi-schuttenberg-1114a658/.
April 22 · 30 min
The Eightfold Path 7: Seeing Clearly to Live Fully
This talk explores Wise Awareness as the art of seeing life clearly enough to actually live it. So much of human regret comes not from dramatic mistakes, but from drifting through our days half-awake—disconnected from our bodies, driven by unseen reactions, caught in mental weather, and estranged from what matters most. Drawing on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, we'll explore awareness of body, feeling tone, mind, and the deeper patterns of dharma as direct doorways to freedom. Wise awareness is not passive observation; it is precise, embodied, liberating seeing that brings us back to the vividness of this moment and helps us live with greater authenticity, intimacy, and presence. You'll learn how to ground attention in the body, recognize feeling tone before it hardens into grasping or aversion, identify mind states without becoming trapped inside them, and see the lawful patterns of impermanence, suffering, and not-self unfolding in real time. We'll explore how mindfulness interrupts automatic living and reveals a more deliberate, wholehearted way of being. By the end, you'll have practical ways to deepen awareness in everyday life so that you are not merely getting through your days, but inhabiting them fully—with clarity, freedom, and fewer regrets.
April 22 · 40 min
Retreat Talk #3: Working with the Hindrances as a Path to Awakening, with Heidi Schuttenberg
The third talk in a weeklong meditation retreat, with Heidi Schuttenberg. Our unwelcome visitors are guides to our freedom. This talk explores the Buddha's five hindrances and offers practical tools for meeting them with compassion, curiosity, and even gratitude. With 25 years of Vipassana practice and a day job in international marine conservation, Heidi Schuttenberg, PhD brings both deep personal inquiry and real-world urgency to her teaching. She mentors in Jonathan Foust's Year of Living Mindfully and is dedicated to making applied mindfulness available to those on the front lines environmental conservation and social change. Learn more at / heidi-schuttenberg-1114a658 . Dana: Venmo @Heidi-Schuttenberg
April 22 · 1 hr 4 min
Retreat Talk #2: The Alchemy of Difficulty: Turning Reactivity into Freedom
The second talk in a weeklong retreat. We often assume insight arises from calm, clarity, or deep concentration. But in truth, it is often born in the very moments we want to escape. This talk invites a radical reframe: what if restlessness, doubt, and emotional turbulence are not problems to solve—but the precise conditions for awakening? Together, we'll explore how mindful investigation transforms reactivity into understanding, and how even the most difficult inner states can become gateways to freedom. Through practical instruction and reflection, you'll explore how to investigate experience without turning practice into a subtle self-improvement project, how to shift from "my problem" to unfolding process, and how insight naturally gives way to a deep, effortless rest. As understanding deepens, something unexpected emerges—a quiet recognition that nothing needs to be fixed for freedom to be here.
March 28 · 59 min
Retreat Talk #1: Coming Home to the Body, with Lynn Teo
This is the first talk of a weeklong retreat in 2026. Lynn Teo starts by exploring various ways to resource the nervous system to support the capacity to be present to the moment's direct experience. Then, we investigate what mindfulness is and how mindfulness of the body supports present moment awareness. Lynn Teo has been teaching embodied movement and meditation for over 25 years. Deeply grateful to her teachers, she now teaches in the Insight (Vipassana) Tradition and is a Dharma teacher with Open Door Meditation Community in Portland, Maine. A deep believer in Sangha and belonging, she helps to empower community members (in particular helpers, healers, artists, activists, and people of color) with embodied practices of radical rest, resilience, and trauma/burnout recovery. As a clinician, Lynn combines acupuncture, shiatsu, and Somatic Experiencing ® and specializes in helping patients suffering anxiety, stress, overwhelm, burnout and trauma as well as chronic pain and chronic conditions. Learn more at www.lynnteoacupuncture.com. Dana: Venmo @Lynn-Teo.

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