Robert Aceves

Robert Aceves is a Zen meditation teacher and coach who was born in Mexico and grew up in California, where he still lives. He came across Zen Buddhism as a nine-year-old and has kept practising for close to three decades, including a spell of training at Bukkokuji, a Zen monastery in Japan. He studied psychology and social behaviour at the University of California, Irvine, and has worked as a coach with individuals, couples and groups, using meditation, mindfulness and hypnosis alongside practical self-help tools.

He teaches mostly in Spanish, in a plain, down-to-earth style that avoids dogma and jargon and treats Zen as a way of being fully present in ordinary life rather than a retreat from it. His main offering is a ten-day online course in Spanish that introduces zazen, breathing, self-observation and the core teachings of the Buddha through short daily video lessons. He runs two YouTube channels, one in Spanish and one in English, with guided meditations, body scans and sleep meditations woven around traditional Zen stories, and shares a similar mix on Insight Timer, where he also has a ten-day Spanish course on Zen practice.