Reimar Wen Shen

From markets to meditation

I started my working life in economics and investment management, including investment strategy at Vanguard Investments in Australia. I know the pace, the pressure and the particular loneliness of decisions that matter. I also know how easy it is to live mostly from the neck up.

Meditation began as a counterweight and became my main work. Over more than ten years I have practised Vipassanā through many intensive retreats in the Goenka and Mahāsi traditions, and I was authorised to teach after four months of monastic training in northern Thailand. I am currently in a five-year programme in non-dual practice with Michael W. Taft. Since 2021 I have taught through Vipassana at Home: group courses, retreats and four years of one-to-one mentoring.

The body as home base

The other half of my training has been in movement. Contact improvisation, which I have lived and taught for five years, remains my deepest embodied practice. It trains listening to the energy moving another person, moving only as fast as you can still breathe and feel yourself, and staying aware of body, space and other while returning to the body as home base. I have trained with Nita Little and completed embodiment coach training with Embodiment Unlimited.

Pressure has been a teacher too. Freediving to 30 metres teaches very directly what happens when you grip: oxygen burns and the dive ends. Climbing, a taekwondo black belt and time on the aikido mat in Japan, mostly overwhelmed by people far more skilled than me, taught me to keep breathing and moving through challenge rather than tightening against it.

What I bring to this work

My hunch, shaped by both practice and research, is that our deepest and most sustainable flow comes from a few things working together: attention that is steady and unified, a refined sensitivity to what the body is telling us, and work that genuinely means something. In the language of my own tradition, it is engagement with form while held by a sense of space. Doing and non-doing at the same time.

I am a father and have been a community leader, and both have shown me that the real test of practice is ordinary life, under load, with other people.

• 10+ years of Vipassanā practice; authorised to teach after monastic training in Thailand
• Five-year non-dual practice programme with Michael W. Taft
• Founder of Vipassana at Home; teaching since 2021
• Former investment strategist, Vanguard Investments Australia
• Five years teaching contact improvisation; training with Nita Little; embodiment coach training (Embodiment Unlimited)
• Master-level freediver (30 m); taekwondo black belt