Founding Core Teacher & Board Member

Tuere Sala is a co-chair of the Guiding Teachers' Council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and a Guiding Teacher at Seattle Insight Meditation Society. She is a retired prosecuting attorney who has practiced Vipassana meditation for over 30 years. Tuere is committed to lay practice and is inspired by bringing the Dharma to nontraditional places. She is a strong advocate for practitioners living with high stress, past trauma, and difficulties sitting still. Tuere has been teaching in the Vipassana tradition since 2010 and has a long history of assisting others in establishing and maintaining a daily practice. 

Phillip Moffit has been a regular guest teacher at Seattle Insight for many years. In December, 2016, Phillip taught a non-residential weekend retreat on the Elements. This retreat had a profound effect on Tuere's practice. She immediately signed up for the 2017 two-month retreat at Spirit Rock. She wanted to use the February monthlong to prepare to practice the Elements with Phillip in March. A whole new world opened to Tuere throughout the month of practice with Phillip. She felt she had found an access to a kind of wisdom that was beyond human wisdom but rather the wisdom of nature. 

Phillip returned to Seattle Insight in December 2017 for another non-residential weekend retreat where he taught an introduction to Nine Bodies Insight. It became clear over the course of that weekend that Nine Bodies Insight would forever be Tuere's practice. Fortunately by this time, she had entered the teacher training program at IMS and Phillip had become her mentor. He invited her to be a trainee at the first Nine Bodies Insight residential retreat held at Spirit Rock in 2018. At the end of that retreat Tuere made a commitment to herself to sit the 2018 three month retreat at IMS and practice with Nine Bodies Insight. The three month retreat was one of Tuere's most difficult retreats, because practicing Nine Bodies Insight cultivated a need to shift from her usual attitude of fierce striving to one of receptive availability and ease of awareness. This generated a lot of doubt in her practice. 

Nine Bodies Insight, however, is a profound practice because it uses consciousness as an object of meditation. Moving through varying aspects and dimensions of consciousness as an object of meditation enhanced Tuere's ability to stay mindful, ardent, and patiently engaged. By the end of the three months, Tuere had cultivated access to a level of equanimity and a deep sense of unconditional kindness that she had not heretofore had access to. Nine Bodies Insight as a foundational practice, enabled Tuere to experience a continuity of mindfulness that lasted long after the retreat was over. She went on to assist at the second Nine Bodies Insight retreat in 2019 and became one of the founding teachers of Dharma Ground. Phillip continues to mentor Tuere as both practitioner and teacher.

In the midst of the pandemic in 2020, Tuere completed training with Phillip to become a Changes and Transitions strategist. This training supports Tuere in recognizing habits of mind that undermine a practitioner's capacity to let go of clinging. She also learned a multitude of protocols that can assist a practitioner in disengaging from those habits. Although her work as a strategist is primarily secular, oftentimes it's the secular aspects of life that interfere with deep spiritual practice. Being a strategist for practitioners has allowed Tuere to accompany them through the various life changes and transitions while calling forth their deepest values.