Levine lives in Highland Park with his wife, Amy, and his infant daughter, Hazel. He earns a living as a psychologist but travels frequently to lead meditation workshops and retreats around the world. He founded and sits on the board of the Mind Body Awareness Project, an Oakland-based nonprofit that teaches meditation to at-risk youths in juvenile halls, clinics, high schools and group homes.

His twice-weekly meditation sessions at Against the Stream are among the best-attended in Los Angeles, and they attract a diverse crowd not limited to punk rockers.

Levine has found an especially receptive audience in recovering addicts. He speaks about his own relationship with drugs and alcohol, saying meditation helped him learn the impulse control that is crucial to overcoming addiction.

“If you can sit through the itch without scratching it, then you can sit through the craving for drugs and alcohol,” he said.

Members say they come because they like his simple style.

“He doesn’t speak in riddles or parables. He’s straightforward,” said Duane Dinham, 46, who has been coming to the meditation center for the last five months — in part, he says, because he likes how Levine doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously.

“I came here because it’s non-dogmatic,” Dinham said. “He has a certain irreverence that I like.”

Before starting his meditation session on a recent evening, Levine walked into the large, airy meeting room carrying a takeout box from the vegan restaurant across the street. “Hey,” he called to the people straggling in. “Anybody want to try fried pickles?”

After the session, he cracked jokes and talked about sex and drugs.

Levine runs things with a casualness that might make a Tibetan lama cringe, but that’s what attracted Holly Brown, 39, a self-described “goth girl” who has belonged to Against the Stream since it opened.

“We all respect the Dalai Lama, but we’re living a totally different life than him,” she said. “Noah’s living our same life.”

Noah Levine’s Shambhala Mountain Center weekend retreat, The Buddhist Path to Freedom: Breaking the Addiction to the Mind, is open to all levels of experience and will provide an opportunity to learn and practice several different forms of Buddhist meditation oriented specifically toward breaking free of old ways of thinking. People in 12-step recovery programs are especially welcome. Contact the Shambhala Mountain Center to learn more.

Continuing to meditate, he got sober with the help of a 12-step program. He attended his first meditation retreat in 1991 — with Jack Kornfield, an influential Buddhist teacher who trained as a monk in Thailand and Burma.

Levine liked Kornfield’s message — he went on to study with him — but he said he felt a little out of place.

“I was the only 20-year-old there and certainly the only punk rocker,” he writes. “Looking around, I didn’t see anyone even close to my age. This was my father’s scene, not mine.”

After 10 years of studying Buddhism, Levine was certified to teach by Kornfield. But he wanted to create a new scene — for people like himself, the kind who liked to rock out to bands like Suicidal Tendencies and slam-dance in mosh pits. So he began leading meditation groups in Santa Cruz and San Francisco and in 2003 launched a Dharma Punx group on New York City’s Lower East Side. He moved to Los Angeles three and a half years ago and founded Against the Stream last year.

Though he draws inspiration from many strains of Buddhism (including Thai, Sri Lankan and Burmese), he said, he has tried to tear down the hierarchical difference between teacher and student that is common in those forms.

“I tend to present the teachings as a peer, as, ‘We are all in this together seeking happiness,’ ” he said. “We are all the students. Can we take the wisdom and the compassion of the Buddha’s teachings and roots and leave behind some of the other things that I see as corruptions — the dogma, the power, the patriarchy and superstition?”

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