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I had already meditated a bunch and sat multiple silent retreats by the time I arrived for Steve Armstrong’s silent 10 day retreat at Spirit Rock in 2016. I thought I knew a few things.

I had no idea it would be Steve who would help me realize my own low level of knowledge. Steve helped me connect the teachings of the Buddha to intellectually rigorous modern arguments about the nature of the mind. The clarity of thought with which Steve presented arguments about the “Three Characteristics” of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self uniquely transformed my understanding of the connection between evolution/natural selection and the way the Buddha described suffering, its causes, and the path to free oneself from suffering.

In the world of spirituality and self-help, there are many wise and well meaning teachers whose eloquence is lacking; their dharma talks are semi-rambling, their argumentative structure muddied by woo woo platitudes. Steve was different. He was verbally efficient and precise.

Sadly, his wife Kamala Masters (a senior teacher in her own right, whose retreat I sat a couple years ago) announced today that Steve Armstrong passed away over Christmas from a brain tumor. I’m taking the occasion to recall some of my experiences on Steve’s retreat.

First, Steve was a devoted champion of his teacher in Burma, Sayadaw U Tejaniya. Tejaniya, a Burmese meditation master, teaches a version of insight meditation that doesn’t prioritize object-awareness like the breath or a bodily sensation. Tejaniya starts with awareness of any thought or sensation that comes through one of the sense doors (sight, sound, smell, etc.), and the teaching emphasizes the higher level awareness of the fact that you are perceiving an object over focusing on that object itself.

Here’s what Steve asked a thousand times on the retreat, echoing the words of Tejaniya: What does the mind know right now? Are you aware that you’re seeing something with your eyes open? Are you aware that you’re hearing something? Are you aware of a specific thought? To transpose the questioning to this blog post: You, dear reader, are seeing words on the screen right now, but are you meta aware — right now — of the fact that you’re engaged in the act of reading, in addition to processing the words in this sentence to discern meaning? In these moments of awareness, you might sub-vocally tell yourself, “Reading, reading.” If you hear a sound in the background as you read this, you might tell yourself, “Sound, sound.” Eventually you move away from specific noting and try to maintain a continual awareness of any and all sensations, with no concrete focus other than noticing the mind that is doing the observing — which is to say, you maintain a meta awareness of consciousness. (If you’d like to learn more about Tejaniya’s approach, you can read his book When Awareness Becomes Natural.)

This kind of open awareness can be a real breakthrough for beginning meditators who aren’t sure what to “do” during meditation. It can also be a useful practice for very seasoned meditators. At present, when I’m not on retreat, I actually find it more difficult to practice choice-less open awareness than to steady attention on an object of focus like the breath.

Second, Steve explained inner peace as the ultimate aim in a way that stuck. Peace, he said, is not permanent (nothing is) — but it’s always accessible. A life with inner peace is not a grey, neutral, muted life. You can be as energetic as you want, but there’s inner contentment and serenity that you can access, even if it’s frequently interrupted.

Third, Steve’s chant one evening always stuck with me. It’s a popular chant in the pali cannon, I now know, but I heard it from Steve first:

Anicca vata sankhara

Upada va-ya dhammino

Uppajjitva nirujjhanti

Tesam vupasamo sukho

Translation: All conditioned things arise and pass away. They’re impermanent. Understanding this truth deeply brings the highest happiness, which is peace.

This is the audio of his evening closing remarks near the conclusion of the retreat, where that chant comes at the end. He’s riffing with no notes. I’ve returned to it often in my sits as I find it a good 15 minute overview of the goals of a retreat and the basic argument of mindfulness meditation. 

Fourth, one of the claims of mindfulness meditation practice is you can notice and eventually uproot negative habits of mind. Steve told a story on the retreat about self-pity, from his five years living in Burma. When he was a monk, his “job” was meditating from 3 AM to 11 PM every day. He said that in the early years of his practice he would feel a lot of self-pity. “It’s so noisy in Burma and it’s making it hard to concentrate” or “I’m so sleep deprived, how could I possibly meditate” or “I’m too white and western to really understand meditation.” He noticed that when these feelings of self-pity arose in the mind, his body would feel drained of energy. He spent years observing the seeds of self-pity. He’d try to catch the very early fragments of the feeling, and when he did, he’d say to himself, “I see you self-pity!” He did not invite the thought to tea; he kept it at the doorway to the mind but did not let it enter. He could “catch” the thought while it was still in formation. And he watched the feeling pass away. Over time, he said, you become better and better at noticing and catching unconstructive thought patterns like this, and eventually you can uproot the tendency altogether.

Self-pity is indeed noxious. While gratitude practice would seem to be the right counter-habit, I’ve actually found “agency practice” — reminding myself, “I chose this, I have agency, I made a choice that led me to this experience” — is actually a better combatant to self-pity.

A few other closing thoughts, which I’m writing in haste on a Sunday night before the world goes back to work and 2026 begins:

• On Steve’s retreat I met Franz Moeckl who taught Qi Gong. It was my first experience with movement meditation and the martial arts. Franz himself was a fascinating character, living a very spiritual life in the mountains of India, and he was a great complement to Steve on the retreat. Franz once told us, to encourage folks to do Qi Gong with him, that your best meditation sits come after movement/exercise. It made the determined meditator group very keen on qi gong and very keen on sitting the optional sitting session afterwards. Steve got a kick out of how Franz motivated people. This is a video of Franz’s qi gong movements, which are the exact movements we learned. I think back wistfully to standing barefoot in the beating sun practicing these movements…pushing the ocean waves, gathering the qi. All the things. I haven’t seen Franz teach a retreat in many years. I wonder if he’s still teaching, if he’s still alive.

• A couple years ago, when I asked a senior teacher from Insight Meditation Society about Steve’s cancer, she said, “He can’t talk much anymore, but the dharma is so in him, that you can still feel his energy.” Some people radiate their ideas energetically, in addition to verbally.

• There’s a cohort of the original Western dharma teachers who all studied in Asia, brought their insights back home, and formed the early meditation communities in epicenters like Barre, Massachusetts and Woodacre, California. They will soon die. Teachers who I have learned from and admire in this cohort include Joseph Goldstein himself (the OG), along with Phillip Moffitt, Kamala Masters, Carol Wilson and James Baraz. There’s a real passing of the torch that’s happening right now in the Buddhist insight meditation world.

• Lastly: Steve said on retreat 10 years ago that your spiritual life begins the moment you deeply understand that everyone you love will die and everything you love will go away.

Goodbye, Steve. Thank you for teaching thousands of students how to see the world through dhamma eyes.