Meditation and Dharma Teacher

Embodied Presence, Awakening, and Healing.

Working Together

Who I support:

Open to all, no matter what your life and path looks like. All levels of practitioners welcomed, whether you’re a newbie, an urban yogi, super parent, or an ex-monk. Offered in transparent generosity.

My Lineages:

Buddhist Geeks, The Realization Process, Integral Dharma, Dzogchen.

Big areas in which we can explore:

  • Waking up as presence.
    Already whole, spacious, luminous, inextricably interconnected with everyone and everything right from the start. Here.
  • Healing from fragmentation to wholeness (cleaning up).
    Liberating constricting patterns resulting from pain in your past that limits your embodied presence in our daily life.
  • Maturing into fullness to meet the complexity, demands, and richness of our lives.
    Waking up and cleaning up alone are not enough to adequately respond to the complex problems and crises we all face. We must also grow up.
  • Embodying all of who you are so you can show up for your life and flourish.
    To love in action, to work in wisdom, to serve in whatever ways you are called, for your loved ones, for your communities and the planet.

Read more about specific issues and goals we can work on together, and approaches and practices we can use.

Dharma Talks, Guided Meditations

Explore the media library for talks, meditations, and guides

Current Trainings and Practice Groups

Led or Co-Led by Ryan Oelke.

Past Trainings and Retreats

Led or Co-Led by Ryan Oelke.

A few reasons why people work with me

This is not an exhaustive list, but an observation of some common reasons people seek my support:

  • Systematic or customized support.
    • Both practitioners looking for a systematic training or path of practice AND those who already have a path(s) and are looking for additional support, branching out to augment their practices.
  • Seekers of awakening trying hard to have their first big breakthrough, awakening experience.
  • Embodiment meditation and practices.
  • Nondual approach to healing trauma, integrating meditation, awakening, and healing.
  • Navigating difficult phases and moments in a path of awakening, healing, and life.
  • Navigating stages of awakening
    • Various models, but including Waves of Wakefulness
  • Dissolving the separation between practice and life
    • So your awakenings feel like who you really are, not simply a special experience that happens on the cushion (and so your practice and life don’t feel in opposition).
  • Folks struggling with social anxiety, panic attacks, and depression
    • Who want to integrate their practice of deep meditation with the healing work they are doing with mental health professionals.
  • Spiritually sensitive individuals
  • Spanish Speakers.
    • I have an advanced level of fluency.
  • Anyone who speaks English as a second language.
    • I’m attuned to unique communication style and needs of ESL speakers.

Testimonials

“I’ve practiced for nearly 15 years with a number of teachers, and, to me, Ryan’s one of the best. Open. Playful. Caring. Sharp. Modern, yet informed by tradition. With his help, I bounced back from a darkness that had left me stagnant and dispirited for months. Together, we investigated its causes, created an integrated, targeted plan-of-action, and acted. Thanks to him, I got my contemplative life out of the mire and onto the next level. He’s the real-deal in geek chic.”

Private Student

“I was very fortunate to be on Ryan’s Awareness Meditation training. He is very knowledgeable, kind and gentle. He made me feel very comfortable and it was very easy to learn from him such a complex and advanced topic. I would recommend his classes to anyone looking for deepening their meditation practice”

Agenor Castro

indestructible
uninjurable
reality beyond reality
space within space:
the pulse of the universe
seeks sore hearts
reflecting, reminding
we, the time worn
effigies of love,
can never be fully lost:
we are made of this.
we are made of this
we are made of This.

Who am I?

I am a co-founder and teacher of Buddhist Geeks and a Senior Teacher of Judith Blackstone’s Realization Process. I have an MSEd in counseling psychology and I’m a contemplative teacher of awakening, healing, and embodiment. I have 20 years experience in meditation, particularly in the Tibetan Buddhist and Dzogchen lineages. I am also the the founder of Awakening in Life.

I live in the beautiful mountains of Asheville, NC with my partner Alyssa, stepdaughter Fiona, and our 1-year old German Shepherd, Beau.