Lorin Roche

Dr. Lorin Roche is a meditation teacher and the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. He co-founded Instinctive Meditation®, a natural, life-affirming approach to inner practice, with his wife Camille Maurine. Together they lead a meditation teacher training and travel widely to give presentations, workshops and retreats.

His own path began at 18, when he signed up as a control subject in a research project on the physiology of meditation. He was paid to sit in a dark, soundproofed lab room for two hours a day for several weeks, with no instructions and no prior knowledge of meditation. He simply attended to the silence and darkness and spontaneously entered a state of intense alertness. A few months later someone handed him a small book describing 112 meditation practices, and he realized he had already experienced some of them in the lab. The experience convinced him that meditation is a spontaneous, natural human capacity with many doorways. The Insight Timer page adds that he was introduced to the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968, and that he was enchanted on first hearing it.

In 1987 he was awarded a PhD from the University of California at Irvine for his study of the language meditators use to describe their inner experiences. His guiding question has been which style of meditation works for each individual, and what helps people thrive in practice. His approach centers on customizing practices to a person's own nature.

The Radiance Sutras, published by Sounds True in 2014, is his lively version of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. It offers his perspective on each of the 112 teachings, with guidance on how to meditate with them. He teaches in two modalities: Instinctive Meditation, which uses only common-sense language, and Pranava Meditation, which draws on Sanskrit. He also leads the Radiance Sutras School of Meditation, and his teaching is easy to learn and free of dogma.