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 Buddha’s first noble truth names the hard facts of life (birth, aging, illness, death, separation from what we love), then says in brief: it all comes down to the five aggregates of clinging. In this talk we explore the difference between the givens we can’t avoid and the tangles we add, and how seeing the aggregates as “not mine” opens the way to freedom.
The Buddha described awakening not as a leap to the summit but as a gradual training, one step laid down after another. Drawing on the image of walking (forest monks on tudong, pilgrims, and the cleared trails of these woods), this talk explores the anupubbasikkhā through generosity, ethics, meditation, and wisdom. With the Buddha’s teaching to Gaṇaka Moggallāna, the bird that carries only its wings, and poetry inspired by freedom, we reflect on how one thing lawfully leads to the next. We set up the conditions, and the dhamma does the rest. The arc of the path is long, but it bends toward freedom.
A dharma talk exploring anattā through the five aggregates and the Anattālakkhaṇa Sutta, alongside Anāthapiṇḍika's deathbed teaching from Sāriputta. Weaves impermanence and death contemplation together with not-self - drawing on Thanissaro Bhikkhu's pragmatic (not metaphysical) framing of not-self - and closes with mettā as the natural fruit of a loosened, undefended heart.
This closing talk distills the sixteen steps of the Ānāpānasati Sutta into what's most portable for daily life — calming the body, calming the mind, opening the heart, and letting go — offered as one continuous gesture rather than four separate teachings. We'll explore simple, concrete tools for carrying retreat-mind into ordinary moments, and extend the practice into patience and sīla as it meets daily relationship and speech. The talk closes with reflections on love, belonging, and letting go: what becomes possible once the hands are finally empty enough to receive what is already here.
In this guided meditation, the breath becomes a frame - a halo around whatever picture we slot into it - as we move through the third tetrad's four ways of looking at the mind. We'll settle into the stillness already underneath the mind's activity, the way silence sits beneath sound; let a basic gladness surface, an inward brightness already present rather than something we have to chase down; gather the mind into a felt sense of wholeness and integration; and finally practice the small, ordinary liberations already available to us - the fist opening, the self growing quieter, a way of looking that's already free.
