Bart van Melik

Bart van Melik is a Dutch-born insight meditation teacher based in New York, where he is guiding teacher of the Community Meditation Center. He first sat in Thailand in 2002 and went on to train chiefly with Joseph Goldstein and Carol Wilson, whose stress on a relaxed, kindly quality of attention runs through much of what he teaches. With Gregory Kramer he also trained in Insight Dialogue, a spoken, relational form of meditation, and he is an authorised teacher of it. He graduated from the joint Spirit Rock and IMS teacher training and holds a master's degree in the psychology of culture and religion from Nijmegen.

Teaching since 2009, he has made a point of bringing practice to people who rarely meet it: young people in detention, residents of shelters, pupils in city schools and staff in workplaces. Each Sunday he leads an online dharma session for his New York community, offered by donation, and he teaches residential retreats in the United States and Europe, including at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. His talks are warm and down to earth, moving between silent sitting, clear instruction and reflection on the Buddha's account of suffering and freedom. He also contributed a chapter to the anthology Still, in the City.