About Our Teacher

About Victor Byrd

Our guiding teacher has been sitting in meditation and studying the Buddha-dharma for over thirty years. He also has a Psy.D in clinical psychology and is a Marriage and Family Therapist in Long Beach, California. Victor grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee. He hid out in college (where he studied music, psychology, law and English) until his mid - twenties when he left school behind and spent the next few years playing in piano bars from Atlanta to Phoenix.

After winning a scholarship to a prestigious Broadway theater workshop, he moved to New York City where he also discovered the Integral Yoga Institute. Hatha Yoga has remained a core part of his spiritual practice ever since. Eventually he studied in India and taught at Integral Yoga and the United Nations in New York. His interest in meditation was piqued when he sat for the first time at a Zen Center in Manhattan. But the prospect of sitting in meditation for long periods of time seemed an impossible task for this poster child for Attention Deficit Personality.

So he turned his attention to analysis, working with the noted Jungian analyst, Dr. Edward C. Whitmont. From this in-depth exploration grew Victor’s love of Jungian therapy and dream work. Concurrently, he discovered a new Vipassana meditation center in Barre, Massachusetts – The Insight Meditation Society – and decided to give meditation another try.

He began with short weekend retreats in 1980. Four years later he was doing ten day retreats and by 1987 he was sitting for several months at a time. He estimates that he sat over 5,000 hours in meditation at Barre from 1987 to 1990. Eventually, there came a healing stillness of body and mind and a desire to share the dharma and meditation with others.

Our teacher has a passion for the fathomless wisdom of the Ch’an Buddhist masters of ancient China and the profound truths of Advaita masters such as Nisargadatta. What he brings to his teaching is Southern wisdom, the irreverence and humor of a piano bar entertainer and the experience of an accomplished yogi. Grounded in both western psychology and Eastern thought, he shares a deep respect for the psyche and an equally deep commitment to waking up from the conditioned suffering self. As he often repeats from the Upanishads: May we be led from the unreal to the Real.