devon hase has practiced intensively in the insight and vajrayana traditions since discovering meditation in 2000. After a decade of bringing mindfulness to high school and college classrooms, she entered several years of silent, solitary retreat in the mountains of Oregon. She now teaches at the Insight Meditation Society, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and the Forest Refuge, and serves as co-guiding teacher of the online dharma community Refuge of Belonging. Devon supports practitioners in both long and short retreats, as well as through personal mentoring, with an emphasis on relational practice and connection to the natural world. Along with her life partner, nico, she co-authored How Not to Be a Hot Mess and the forthcoming This Messy, Gorgeous Love: A Buddhist Guide to Lasting Partnership (2026). Learn more at devonandnicohase.com.
The second refuge invites us into intimacy with truth: something alive, immediate, and here for us whenever we remember to look. Using the ancient chant of the Dhamma’s qualities (here and now, timeless, inviting us to come and see, leading inward), this talk explores awareness as a refuge that can hold even chronic pain and old grief with both equanimity and compassion. Drawing on the suttas, Thai Forest masters, and poets like John O’Donohue and Ada Limón, we turn to kalyāṇa, the Pali word for the Dhamma as beautiful in the beginning, middle, and end. Beauty shows up in our practice, our actions, and our spiritual friendships, and it can become a companion and guide on the path home.
At the moment of his awakening, Kondañña saw that whatever arises also passes away. This talk explores impermanence at three scales: the vast span of geologic and cosmic time, the arc of our own aging and mortality, and the moment-to-moment flicker of experience. Drawing on the suttas, poetry, and stories from practice, we look at how assuming permanence shapes our lives, and how seeing through it can open into awe, gratitude, and the freedom of letting go.
This talk follows the breath into the mind itself: experiencing it, gladdening it, gathering it, and liberating it. Along the way we look at how samādhi and insight work together, and at the small, ordinary tastes of freedom that show a mind can feel light and unburdened. Drawing on long retreat stories, poems, and Pali, it asks what becomes possible once there is, for a moment, nothing to want.
Teachings on setting the conditions for anapanasati - having gone to the forest, or to the root of a tree, or an empty hut, one sets their body erect, and places mindfulness at the fore. Ever mindful one breathes in, ever mindful one breathes out. Guided meditation on the breath.
A talk on muditā, the joy that isn't ours alone. After days steadying the heart through warmth, tenderness, and spaciousness, we turn toward the brahma vihara most easily overlooked: the capacity to feel glad simply because someone else is. Through stories of borrowed delight, dancing tigers, and the quiet gladness of showing up to practice, we look at what gets in the way (envy, and its louder cousin, toxic cheer) and what it might mean to let another's happiness warm us too.
