TL;DR: Joseph Goldstein, co-founder of Insight Meditation Society, reflects on the organization's transformation since 1974. His teacher M emphasized "empty phenomena rolling on"—a pure emptiness teaching that became Goldstein's initial approach to Western students. But Goldstein discovered that lay practitioners in the West required a different transmission: one rooted in psychology, gender inclusion, racial justice, and social awareness. Over 40 years, IMS evolved from narrowly focused emptiness teachings to an inclusive dharma practice. Now, with secular mindfulness spreading everywhere, Goldstein argues the community must re-anchor teachings in their liberatory essence—not just stress reduction, but awakening.
What Did His Teacher M Actually Teach?
Goldstein begins by describing his years of practice in India under his teacher M, whose central refrain was simple and repeated obsessively: "empty phenomena rolling on." This phrase encapsulated the Buddha's teaching on emptiness—the absence of a solid, permanent self, and the constantly flowing, insubstantial nature of all experience. "All the thoughts and feelings and everything in our experience," Goldstein explains, referring to this emptiness perspective, "empty phenomena going on." The teaching pointed to what Goldstein calls "wisdom or ultimate perspective"—the recognition that "there's really nothing substantial there." The logical consequence was renunciation: "the whole teaching is about just not clinging, not holding on."
This was Goldstein's deepest connection during his years in India. It was his lens, his language, his truth. Coming back to the United States in 1974 to teach, he naturally brought this orientation with him.
Why Pure Emptiness Teachings Didn't Work in the West
When Goldstein returned and began teaching, he applied this lens to every student who came to him. A person would arrive with problems, and Goldstein would respond: "Oh, it's just empty phenomena rolling on." For a while, it seemed effective—Goldstein notes that curiosity alone kept people engaged. But the strategy quickly proved limited. "It didn't take too long to realize something else was needed," Goldstein admits. Even though emptiness teaching represents "the heart of the more ultimate expression of the Dharma," something crucial was missing when dealing with Western lay practitioners.
The gap revealed itself gradually. "One of the first big insights for myself anyway was that within our society really the Paradigm for inner investigation is a psychological one," Goldstein observes. Western culture had developed sophisticated psychological frameworks for understanding the self—frameworks that his training in India had not equipped him to engage. "I was not trained as a therapist," he says plainly. "That wasn't my world. My world was empty phenomena rolling on."
Yet people coming to him brought psychological content, emotional stories, and unresolved inner material that demanded attention on their own terms. Goldstein faced a choice: dismiss this as insubstantial (the emptiness view), or learn to meet practitioners where they were. He chose the latter. "Those first years there was really a learning of just opening up—okay, what's what does all this mean? You know, what's happening on the psychological level with people as they come with the various experiences and how can I relate to that and open to the particular content and the particular stories of what people bring without drowning them?" This represented a major expansion: the dharma in the West had to become "a little more inclusive of our inner experience than what we deal with in Asia."
The Women's Movement and Gender Consciousness
As Goldstein was learning to integrate psychology, a second challenge emerged: social justice. In 1974, coming back from India, Goldstein was often oblivious to the cultural currents reshaping Western society. The women's movement was gaining momentum. Many strong women practitioners were coming to practice. Goldstein initially couldn't see why gender mattered at all.
"I kept thinking, you know, the four noble truths—it's not men, it's not women. It's just it's just the four truths. What's the story with all this women stuff?" he recalls, laughing at his own blindness. But one yogi in particular challenged him on this directly—pushing him to use inclusive pronouns in his dharma talks. "Because in growing up it was always just 'he,'" Goldstein notes. "I never thought about it. It was outside the range of what, whatever." The yogi's persistence began to crack open his awareness.
Over time, IMS began offering women's retreats. At first, Goldstein wondered why they were necessary: "Why isn't the dharma just the same for everybody?" But empirical reality answered his question. "About 70 percent of the IMS population... women coming on the retreat," and practitioners reported that certain ways of teaching and sharing the dharma were particularly supported in gender-specific environments. "There are particular ways of talking about the Dharma and sharing the Dharma which are supported in that kind of environment," Goldstein acknowledges.
This represented a fundamental shift in how dharma transmission happened. Goldstein describes it as "beginning to weave together the relative and the more ultimate"—holding both the ultimate truth of emptiness and the relative truth of gender identity, lived experience, and the particular ways that teachings need to be expressed to be heard and understood.
Race, Inclusion, and the Barriers to Access
A third major opening came with the introduction of People of Color Retreats. "Around 2002," Goldstein recalls, "Gina and I and some others started leading the People of Color Retreats first [at IMS] and then at ANS." This launched what Goldstein describes as "the beginning of a huge, huge opening and learning curve—which was still very much on."
The question driving this work was profound: "How do we bring the big community of people... really having access—not only physical access but emotional, connected access—where the teachings are expressed in ways that can be heard and understood?" This required addressing not only individual psychological barriers but systemic ones. "The problems not only what individuals face but the huge systemic problems in our society which affect all of our lives—this has to be brought into the Dharma."
For Goldstein himself, this learning has been humbling. "It was shocking for me to realize how unaware I have been of all this for most of my life," he admits. Only through sustained engagement with racial justice and diversity work did he begin "to get inklings of this whole world of genuine diversity and inclusion and what were the barriers to it." These barriers were not accidental; they were systemic, embedded in how dharma was taught, who felt welcome, and whose experiences were centered.
The Secular Mindfulness Movement: An Expansion and a Risk
By the 2000s, something remarkable had happened: mindfulness became mainstream. When Goldstein returned from India in the 1970s, "people hardly even knew what the term mindfulness meant. It wasn't a word in our culture." Now, three decades later, "we can't escape it. We might want to escape it in some situations—it's mindfulness everywhere." Corporate wellness programs, schools, clinical settings—mindfulness had been extracted from its Buddhist context and repackaged as a secular technology for stress reduction, emotional regulation, and cognitive performance.
Goldstein acknowledges the value: "This is a huge, huge spread of teachings... this is helping a lot of people." But he identifies a critical risk. Secular mindfulness is "not necessarily connected to the potential Awakening, the potential of Enlightenment." The Buddha's teaching was about liberation—radical freedom from the patterns of suffering and craving that bind consciousness. Mindfulness as stress management is something else entirely: it's optimization within the existing system, not liberation from it.
How to Reground Dharma in Liberation
Goldstein articulates the challenge facing IMS and the broader dharma community: how to honor everything learned over 40 years—psychological sophistication, gender and racial inclusion, accessibility to secular practitioners—while re-anchoring the teaching in its original liberatory power.
"Having gone through this whole trajectory from the even more targeted teachings of India of empty phenomena rolling on, through the opening to all the ways we have to incorporate psychologically, emotionally, gender identity, the racial issues—everything, how we have to include it all in the way we're teaching and practicing—and now with this huge move across the whole country [toward] secularism," Goldstein asks: "Can we relink back to how it was originally transmitted to us?" Not by abandoning the expansiveness of contemporary dharma, but by continuing to learn and grow while grounding practice in the teachings of liberation.
"It would be very easy, and you can see it happening already in the widespread secularization of mindfulness," for the essential message to be lost. But Goldstein proposes a different path: "Can we incorporate everything we've learned and the expansiveness of the current vision of what's happening, and can we reground it now back in the teachings that actually free the heart and mind?"
When dharma is rooted this way, "mindfulness becomes much more than a simple technology for getting a little more balanced in life. It really is the vehicle for awakening." This is what Goldstein identifies as the critical task for IMS and the broader community at this stage of the dharma's transmission to the West: "to rewire the teachings with this essential core value of liberation." The work is to transmit not a stress-reduction technique, but the Buddha's radical vision of freedom.
Where to Go from Here
Goldstein's reflection suggests several directions for serious practitioners and dharma communities:
- Integrate, don't segregate: The dharma in the West requires both ultimate (emptiness) and relative (psychological, social, cultural) truths. Neither can be ignored without losing practitioners or truth.
- Listen to barriers: Inclusion work is not charity; it's essential dharma work. When women, people of color, and other marginalized communities report particular barriers to practice, those barriers deserve investigation and response.
- Resist commodification: Mindfulness as a secular tool is valuable, but it is not the Buddha's teaching. Communities that teach dharma should be explicit about the difference between stress reduction and liberation.
- Reground in essence: As dharma institutions grow and adapt, they should regularly ask: What is the essential vision we're transmitting? Are we still pointing toward awakening, or only toward adjustment to the existing world?
Goldstein's 40-year arc reflects a maturation in how Buddhist dharma can be transmitted in a new cultural context. The work ahead—as he suggests—is not to choose between breadth and depth, between inclusion and liberation, but to hold both, and to ensure that the dharma community continues to evolve in service of genuine freedom.
