Insight Meditation Teacher Steve Armstrong Has Died

Steve Armstrong, a longtime insight meditation teacher who cofounded the Maui Dhamma Sanctuary and Vipassana Metta Foundation, has died. Armstrong had been living with a brain tumor since 2018, according to updates posted on GoFundMe. He passed away peacefully at home on December 23, 2025, according to a post by his wife and teaching partner Kamala Masters that announced his death in early January.

“A private ceremony was held at the Maui Dhamma Sanctuary, our home. His cremains were respectfully interred into the earth, with the sharing of merit, and prayers for continuing his journey with the Dhamma in his heart,” Masters wrote. 

Born Jan 29, 1949, Armstrong first encountered the dharma while living in a Deadhead commune in Maine, he recalled in a 2016 podcast with Wisdom Publications. Another commune member had a book on meditation, which contained an address to write to for more information. That led Armstrong to a retreat with Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Jack Kornfield in Maine. 

“When I heard the evening dhamma talks, and they were the basic dhamma talks of the four noble truths and the eightfold path . . . it’s like I heard something for the first time that I’d always known, felt, and believed inside of myself. It was just so resonant,” Armstrong said. 

Armstrong became a student and volunteered to work on the building that would become the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, the first Western retreat center dedicated to Theravada and vipassana meditation. He went on to serve a decade in various leadership roles at IMS, including executive director, board member, and senior teacher of the annual three-month retreat.

In 1985, Armstrong traveled to Burma and spent five years as an ordained monk (U Buddharakkhita), studying insight and loving-kindness with Sayadaw U Pandita (1921–2016), and then abhidhamma in Australia with Sayadaw U Jagara.

“One of my strongest memories of Steve was when he, as a meditator at IMS, rather surprisingly said he had decided to give up all the familiar elements of his life and go to Burma and ordain as a Buddhist monk, which was not a common path of practice at the time,” recalled Insight Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg in an email to Tricycle. “There was such an unusual feeling in the room as we were talking, almost like seeing destiny unfold. Much later, I went to Burma myself to practice, and seeing him there, I could see how very right that sense of destiny had been. His time there instilled gifts of faith and clarity in him that years later, back in the US and no longer a monk, he could offer to the rest of us.” 

After returning to the West, Armstrong and Masters founded the Vipassana Metta Foundation’s dharma sanctuary on Maui, Hawaii, a seventeen-acre property where they planted 2,500 new trees. He continued to teach international retreats and stayed connected to Burma. In 2006, he cofounded the Burma Schools Project Foundation, which builds new schools and improves educational infrastructure in poor communities. 

Armstrong studied in the lineage of Mahasi Sayadaw (1904–1982), a leading 20th-century Burmese monk who is credited with disseminating vipassana meditation practice. Armstrong served as managing editor for the first English translation of Mahasi Sayadaw’s Manual of Insight, a comprehensive explanation of the method, which was published in 2016.

Armstrong is survived by his wife and teaching partner, Kamala Masters.