Dr. Arbel has been immersed in Buddhist practice since 1997, practicing with variety of teachers in Asia and the West. She also holds a PhD in Buddhist Studies.

She teaches workshops and retreats on mindfulness and insight meditation (vipassana), loving kindness (metta) and Buddhist wisdom at the Israeli Insight Meditation Society Tovana. She is a co-founder and a teacher at Nalanda: an Israeli Buddhist institute dedicated to contemplative study of the Buddhist path. She also teaches in the MBSR teacher training program and the MBCT Facilitation Certificate at IDC Herzliya’s Muda Institute for Mindfulness, Science and Society. For more than ten years she taught Buddhist philosophy and psychology as an adjunct professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University. Since 2017 she dedicates all her time to teaching the Dhamma.

~ Adapted from Dr. Arbels website

Selected Works (in chronological order)

the common interpretation of the jhānas as absorption-concentration attainments [is] incompatible with the teachings of the Pāli Nikāyas. […] one attains the jhānas, not by one-pointed concentration and absorption into a meditation object, but by releasing and letting go of the foothold of the unwholesome mind […] the entrance into the first jhāna is the actualization and embodiment of insight practice.

this study critically examines the traditional Buddhist distinction between the ‘practice of serenity’ (samatha-bhāvanā) and the ‘practice of insight’ (vipassanā-bhāvanā); doing so challenges the traditional positioning of the four jhānas under the category of ‘serenity (or concentration) meditation’ and the premise regarding their secondary and superfluous role in the path