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.
Drawing from the Culasunyatta Sutta and the teaching to Bahiya, this talk explores how the entire Buddhist path unfolds within the immediacy of our sensory experience. Emptiness is revealed not as a metaphysical abstraction but as the progressive letting go of what distracts us from what is peaceful—a movement from palace to forest to space to freedom itself.
The whole world exists within this fathom-long body and its six sense doors. Liberation happens here, in the seen, heard, sensed, and cognized—not through traveling to some distant realm, but through radical presence with what is. When we meet each moment of contact with the quality of spiritual friendship, recognizing the loving awareness we already are, even the difficult journey over open ocean becomes workable. We learn to fly between the lives we have and the lives we imagine, without the extra burden of complaint, held by the spaciousness of mind itself.
What if aging, illness, and death aren't enemies to avoid, but teachers bowing at our feet? This talk explores the Buddha's radical invitation to turn toward life's inevitable difficulties—not with morbidity, but with the clear-eyed realism that sets us free. Through poetry, contemporary dharma voices, and the ancient practice of death awareness, we discover how contemplating our mortality doesn't diminish joy—it ignites it. When we stop living heedlessly and wake up to the preciousness of this breath, this moment, this life, we find the courage to love completely and let go gracefully. A New Year's reflection on endings, beginnings, and the alchemy that transforms suffering into compassion.
A Winter Solstice reflection on faith (saddha) as heartfelt confidence rather than blind belief. Drawing on personal stories of religious transitions and crisis, this talk explores how suffering can become the ground for genuine spiritual trust—the kind that arises from direct experience and opens us to the possibility of awakening exactly as we are. Through poetry, Buddhist teachings, and the paradox of being already free while still practicing, we examine how verified faith allows us to meet life with both acceptance and wise action.
