Leigh Brasington was born and raised in Mississippi. In 1971, he graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis with a B.A. in mathematics.
He began meditating in 1985 and eventually became the senior North American student of Ven. Ayya Khema. She authorized him to teach and he began leading residential retreats in 1997. He has taught jhanas and insight practices in over one hundred and fifty residential retreats.
Near the end of 2008, he retired from software engineering and over the next three years, he spent twenty months in retreat at the Insight Meditation Society’s Forest Refuge. It was during these half dozen long retreats that, among other investigations, he began closely examining his experiences of the jhanas and the descriptions of the jhanas found in the suttas. His book Right Concentration is the result of that study, coupled with many years of practicing and teaching the jhanas. He is also the author of Dependent Origination and Emptiness.