Mei Elliott is a Dharma teacher in the Theravada Buddhist tradition, who practices at the intersection between Zen and Vipassana. Mei began training as a Zen monk at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in 2014, and has spent eight years living at Zen temples and monasteries. During this time she served as the director of San Francisco Zen Center and the guiding instructor for Young Urban Zen. Mei was authorized to teach by James Baraz and is a graduate of Insight Meditation Center’s Dharma Teacher Training. She now resides at Insight Retreat Center where she serves as Managing Director.
The spacious field of awareness has the capacity to know any experience without reactivity. Through connecting with a mind that is vast like the sky, we can see all objects arising and passing without entanglement.
This talk explores vedanā within the framework of dependent origination, highlighting the role it plays in shaping habitual reactivity and suffering. It shows how mindfulness of feeling tone reveals the moment where suffering is conditioned—and where freedom becomes possible. By learning to meet vedanā directly, we cultivate equanimity and the capacity to relate to all experience with balance and ease.
This talk explores how the three supports (faith/confidence, well-being, and stability/concentration) provide the necessary conditions for insight into the three characteristics (impermanence, suffering, and not-self). In doing so, a map of the development of practice is unfolded, covering how insight occurs, what the insights are, and how they culminate in liberation.
