San Francisco Insight Dharma Center is a collaboration between six teachers and four insight sanghas based in San Francisco. Our sanghas share a love of San Francisco, a passion for the Dharma, and a desire to create a home and practice center in the city for insight practitioners.
Our Mission
Our meditation community is a welcoming, diverse place of refuge in San Francisco. We offer Insight meditation and Buddhist teachings for awakening wisdom and compassion in daily life. We are committed to nurturing friendship, lovingkindness, freedom, and peace—for ourselves, each other, and the world.
Our Insight Sanghas
Mission Dharma: Mission Dharma is a sangha led by our teacher Howard Cohn that has gathered in the Mission District of San Francisco for over 38 years. Sangha members come together as a community on Tuesday nights for meditation and to hear Buddhist teachings. As a sangha, we support one another in the process of awakening in order to live our lives with more mindfulness, compassion, and joy.
SF Insight: San Francisco Insight Meditation Community offers the teachings of the Buddha as they are developing in the West, including classes, retreats, and other events, as a community devoted to the embodiment of awakening in daily life.
SF BIPOC Insight Sangha: We are an insight meditation sangha for Black, Indigenous, & People of Color in San Francisco.
Insight Upper Market: John Martin leads an on-going weekly Monday evening meditation group.
Our Board
Anushka Fernandopulle, Board President, has trained in the Buddhist tradition in the US, India and Sri Lanka for over 30 years and teaches retreats and workshops around the world.
John Martin, Board Treasurer, has been devoted to dharma practice since 2001. His practice includes both long retreat practice and an engaged practice in the world. In his teachings, he emphasizes the aliveness of practice in everyday life, as well as the cultivation of the beautiful heart qualities (brahmaviharas).
Howie Cohn, Board Secretary, has led the Mission Dharma sitting group in San Francisco for over 35 years. He has practiced meditation since 1972, has led vipassana retreats in the US and internationally since 1985, and is a senior teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center.
Eugene Cash is the founding teacher of the San Francisco Insight Meditation Community of San Francisco. He teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and leads intensive meditation retreats internationally.
Advisory Board
Ayya Tathaaloka is a Buddhist scholar and Abbess of Dhammadharini Vihara and Aranya Bodhi Hermitage in California.
Pascal Auclair is co-founder of Voie Boréale/True North Insight Meditation in Canada
Bonnie Duran is a Professor at Univ of Washington, faculty at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute, and a Dharma teacher in Seattle
Gil Fronsdal is the founding teacher of Insight Meditation Center, Redwood City CA.
Joseph Goldstein is co-founder of Insight Meditation Society in MA.
Jack Kornfield is a founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in CA.
Narayan Helen Liebenson is a Guiding Teacher at Cambridge Insight Meditation Center.
Catherine McGee is a member of the Gaia House Teacher's Council, UK
Sharon Salzberg is a co-founder of Insight Meditation Center in MA
Larry Yang is a Founding Teacher of Insight Community of the Desert in CA
Carol Wilson is a Guiding Teacher at Insight Meditation Society in MA
