The three who brought it home

In 1975 three young Americans who'd spent years in monasteries in Thailand, Burma and India bought an old Catholic seminary in Barre, Massachusetts, and opened a retreat center. Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg called it the Insight Meditation Society, and it did something that hadn't been done: it made the Buddhist meditation of Southeast Asia available to Westerners in plain English, without requiring anyone to become a Buddhist.

Each of the three became a teacher in their own right. Goldstein is the precise one, the teacher of insight meditation, the clear seeing of how the mind works. Salzberg is the heart; her Lovingkindness, from 1995, is the book that brought metta to the West, and you met that practice on day sixty-one. Kornfield is the psychologist and storyteller, whose A Path with Heart brought meditation and Western therapy into the same room. Between them they trained most of the teachers you'll meet at any meditation center in America.

Their key, as a group, is the one Vault Human is built on: the great traditions can be taught to anyone, with respect, in their own language, without demanding conversion. IMS kept the practice and dropped the barrier.

For the month of Awareness, I'd take Goldstein's simplest instruction, which is the heart of insight practice. Note it. When a thought arises, note "thinking." A sound, "hearing." An itch, "sensation." A plan, "planning." The noting is quiet and quick, and it does something remarkable: it puts a tiny space between you and the experience, enough to see that you are not the thought. You're the one noticing it.

Vault Human points to IMS and its sister centers for retreats, and to the three teachers' books, which are among the kindest ever written on this subject.