Loch Kelly

Loch Kelly is an American meditation teacher and author whose approach, which he calls Effortless Mindfulness, draws on the Mahamudra and Dzogchen teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. After graduate study in theology and social work in New York, a travelling fellowship took him to Sri Lanka, India and Nepal, where he learned from several Buddhist masters, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche among them. For about two decades he also worked as a psychotherapist in New York community clinics, and he later founded a non-profit, the Effortless Mindfulness Institute, to carry the teaching forward.

His method centres on short practices he calls glimpses, which invite students to notice the open awareness that is already present rather than to concentrate harder, and then to bring that shift into ordinary activity. He sets this out in two books from Sounds True, Shift into Freedom and The Way of Effortless Mindfulness, and in the Mindful Glimpses app of brief guided meditations. He teaches through recorded Level One and Level Two trainings, conversations and guided practices on his YouTube channel, and weekend programmes at Kripalu with the IFS therapist Paige Kelly, where in recent years he has paired the meditation with the parts-based model of Internal Family Systems.