Hi, I’m Kynan.
I work with people who’ve practised enough to know meditation touches something real, and who sense there’s more available than they’ve been able to reach. Sometimes that shows up as practice feeling stuck or effortful. Sometimes it’s the sense that what happens on the cushion and what happens in the rest of life have drifted apart.
Most of the teaching I’ve met points one of two ways. Try harder, sit longer, log more retreats, and eventually you’ll break through. Or: you’re already free, so see through the content of your life and let it fall away. I’ve found something truer in the weaving of the two. Meditative insight and the actual content of a life — emotions, patterns, relationships, the difficult and the plainly ordinary — aren’t separate paths. They’re closer to two strands of one movement, each deepening the other. I take the content of a life as the medium depth moves through, rather than noise to rise above. I’ve seen often that the times we fall apart often reveal the deepest truths about our own sense of being.
I came to practice in 2016. I’d dabbled for years before that, but I started practising in earnest to work with stress, anxiety, and depression. What I didn’t expect was how far it would go — that something I’d picked up to get through a hard stretch would change the way I met everything. I teach to share this depth and my hope is to bring new opportunities forward for people who find themselves in similar places to me.
Most of my own practice has grown out of the śamatha-vipassanā approach laid out in The Mind Illuminated, alongside the insight practices Rob Burbea teaches in Seeing that Frees, non-dual work, and the brahmavihārās — si, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. The psychological side has mattered just as much: parts work from Internal Family Systems, and its cousin in Buddhist practice, Feeding Your Demons, as well as Gendlin’s Focusing. I’ve sat a month-long solo retreat, a Goenka Vipassanā retreat in the Blue Mountains, and a number of group and solo retreats online. My recent practice is exploring the Tibetan Buddhist systems of Mahāmudrā, as well as diving into Imaginal Practice via Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking Dharma.
I’m authorised to teach by Dr Tucker Peck, a clinical psychologist and meditation teacher. I’m an Aletheia coach, currently studying Aletheia Advanced Coaching Program Level 2 with Steve March. I’m accredited in Mental Health First Aid, and I continue my own study and co-exploration with other teachers and experienced practitioners to keep my own practice honest. I’ve led a dozen silent residential retreats, taught at the San Francisco Dharma Collective, and co-taught online retreats with Tucker Peck and Michael Taft.
I bring the rest of my life into the work where it helps — years as an artist, musician, and self-taught programmer, a PhD in Media Art from UNSW, a composition and music technology degree from WAAPA. I’m neurodivergent and bring an appreciation for the many varied ways that people find ease and comfort. I’m Australian and Chinese Malaysian.
I live and work on unceded Gadigal and Wangal Land (Sydney, Australia).