Ep365: The Last Interview - Lorin Roche PhD
Lorin Roche PhD was a meditation teacher and author of “The Radiance Sutras”.
Available on Youtube, iTunes, SoundCloud & Spotify – search ‘Guru Viking Podcast’.
I first met Lorin at the Summit at Sea conference in 2015 where we were both teaching. We attended each others’ workshops and immediately hit it off.
In those days, we both taught on the California conference circuit and were often booked to teach at the same gatherings. Over the years we spent many weeks enjoying extended conversations, raucous dinners, and long evenings of music and poetry. In short, we became true friends.
It was a desire to share the rich conversations I was having with friends like Lorin that contributed to my decision to start the Guru Viking Podcast. And so, naturally, I asked Lorin to be my first interview subject. He went on to become one of my most popular, recurring guests.
On the 18th of April 2026, Lorin died. What follows is our last interview and conversation, recorded a few months before his passing. The episode covers many of Lorin’s most characteristic teaching themes and I have also included some of the conversation we had before and after the main episode content.
There are many poignant and amusing stories from the years of my friendship with Lorin and there is a lot worth saying about his approach to meditation. One day, I might record an episode dedicated to those themes.
For now I will say that it is obvious to all that Lorin was a vivacious man - the essence of his approach to teaching meditation was an encouragement to wholeheartedly embrace life. But I can also report that behind the scenes and off the stage Lorin was a generous man, irreverent, funny, and very kind.
00:00 - Intro
01:50 - Boats, geese, and hummingbirds
07:05 - Meditating with the flow of nature
08:14 - Being human is like being president of Earth
11:35 - The miracle of attention
13:51 - Teaching was easier in the 70s
15:15 - Agencylessness is a dumb idea
16:38 - Human reaction time
17:52 - Attending to the inner life
18:44 - Evil meditation teaching
19:58 - Misunderstandings about Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras
22:55 - Taming the body
26:33 - The genius of yoga
28:01 - Pros and cons of stopping the mind
28:57 - Where meditation went wrong
35:47 - Tuning the instrument
38:56 - Limitations of the “tuning” metaphor
43:24 - Monastic ideas sabotage lay people
45:41 - Religion vs meditation
50:56 - Is Loren’s approach self-indulgent?
56:18 - Peak experiences and enlightenment
59:20 - Loren’s drug experiences
01:02:20 - LA Yoga community’s enthusiasm for drugs
01:04:50 - Loren asks about Steve’s meditation
Previous episodes with Lorin here:
To find out more about Lorin visit:
Music ‘Deva Dasi’ by Steve James