About Richard

Richard Shankman lives in Oakland, CA. He has been a meditator since 1970 and teaches at dharma centers and groups throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and nationally. Richard is a co-founder of the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies and of Mindful Schools, a program bringing mindfulness training into inner city and low income schools. He has sat many silent, intensive meditation retreats for periods up to eleven months long.

Richard began meditation practice in a Hindu oriented yoga tradition, and spent several years living in an ashram engaged in concentration-based meditation practices. He transitioned to Buddhist practice in the late 1970’s and has been a vipassana meditator ever since.

Richard has been active in bringing dharma and meditation practice into prisons, jails and drug rehabilitation programs in California. In the 1970’s he taught meditation in San Quentin State Prison, the Marin County jail and a San Francisco drug and alcohol rehabilitation center. Although no longer actively teaching in the prisons, programs that he started are continuing in both the Salinas Valley State Prison and the Men’s Correctional Training Facility, both near Soledad, California.

Richard is the author of “The Experience of Samadhi: An In-Depth Investigation of Buddhist Meditation.”