Acknowledgements
I would not be teaching meditation if not for Asian cultures. There would be no meditation apps, no secular mindfulness, no Consciousness Explorers Club. They made it all possible. Below I pay respect to these and other lineages, roughly in the order they landed in my life. Because we know where we are, by knowing where we came from.
Exploring “altered states” was my original way into all of this – practicing lucid dreaming as a teenager, doing psychedelics as a university student, all that. Once I became a journalistI got interested in the science of consciousness. An influential and supportive person for me back then was Charles Tart, whom I met in SF and whose seminal Charles Tart’s Altered States of Consciousness anthology anthology was essential reading for me.
In 2007, I wrote my own book about all this called The Head Trip, published by Random House. It was named one of the Top 10 Books About Consciousness by the UK’s Guardian.
So my first debt of gratitude goes to all those explorers and scientists and autodidact weirdos who have deliberately tried to plumb the depths of their own minds and then bore all their friends about it.
Exploring Consciousness
FIRST LINEAGE:
For most of the 20th century, the bulk of the scientific research on consciousness had focused on either external behaviour, or objective brain activity. Subjective experience was considered unreliable and unquantifiable. When I began writing Head Trip, this had begun to change – “first person approaches” were suddenly all the rage.
The question researchers were asking was: how to go about this rigorously? Who can we look to for expertise and insight?
Enter Buddhist thinkers and practitioners, the new stars of the interdisciplinary consciousness conferences I’d begun attending as a journalist in the early 2000s. Not only did these meditators have brilliant scholarly models for understanding consciousness, they themselves had first-person experience with a range of fascinating states and mental phenomena that most Western researchers had hardly heard of. Hence: monks in labs, festooned with electrodes.
The science hooked me. But it was the experience of meditating with different Buddhist teachers that changed everything. Meditation did not come easily for me. I was and am an impulsive over-thinking worrier. I’d rather think about all the things that could happen in meditation than actually do the practice. Very slowly, I learned to observe these and other quite painful and ridiculous patterns. In the observing, they became less acute.
Buddhist techniques showed me a way to more peace and connection, and Buddhism in general gave me a beautiful and influential personal framework for understanding my experience. Thus my second debt of gratitude goes to the historic Buddha Shakyamuni.
Buddhism and the End of Suffering
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SECOND LINEAGE:
After about six years of attending random retreats with random teachers from different Buddhist traditions, I met Shinzen Young. Shinzen was initially ordained in Japanese Vajrayana, and then influenced by S.N. Goenka’s style of vipassana, by Sasaki Roshi’s style of Zen, and by perennial mystical philosophy more generally. The fact that he liked to drink Diet Coke and watch mixed-martial arts in his undershirt while guiding people in meditation over the phone sealed the mentorship deal for me.
Not only did Shinzen have a whole jungle gym of fascinating meditations to explore, he is also a brilliant translator of Asian ideas and languages. Shinzen’s meditation system is built from dynamic categories that anyone can relate to: seeing, hearing, and feeling; flowing or static; present or absent; expanding or contracting, etc. He helped me see how consciousness in the moment is a bit like fluid dynamics, with certain properties and fairly predictable rules of operation. He also gave me a way to think about the skills we bring to meditation – among them, concentration, clarity, and equanimity – how each of these “work” in each moment, and the different ways they get trained in different practices.
My third debt of gratitude goes to Shinzen Young, and my friends and colleagues in the lineage of Unified Mindfulness. For a taste of Shinzen’s precision clarity, I recommend his original 1997 audio series “The Science of Enlightenment”.
Mindfulness & Shinzen Young
THIRD LINEAGE:
The DIY spirit of my not-for-profit community meditation group, The Consciousness Explorers Club, was partly inspired by the philosophy and practices of “harm reduction” in the dance and music scene of my 20s and 30s.
My interest in neurodiversity began very early on with Oliver Sacks books, and then accelerated as I began to read about and identify with the Mad Pride movement. “Neurodiversity” eventually became the buzzword around all this; two influential thinkers for me here are Joel Schwartz and Devon Price.
I've also been inspired by the way gay, trans and BIPOC activists have created their own systems of mental and emotional support outside of the mainstream.
Diversity and Activism
The physical practice of yoga was my initial way into the wisdom of embodiment, and has helped to get me out of my head. I’ve had dozens of excellent yoga and movement teachers, including my good friends Scott Davis and Therese Jornlin. Therese is also my Qi Gong teacher – not only has she changed the way I experience my body’s energy, she has also transformed my understanding of the breath and the wisdom of cycles. I also learned a lot about embodiment through my training in Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing – thank you Jan Winhall – my training in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, and my academic study of embodied cognition.
I’m incredibly grateful for my friends and fellow Consciousness Explorers Club explorers James Maskalyk, Erin Oke, Avi Craimer, Jude Star, Kevin LaCroix, and Lama Tasha Schumann. The CEC is all about the empowerment side of practice – the idea of “being your own teacher” inside a supportive community of fellow practitioners and explorers, everyone sharing their own weird customized practices and learning how to guide each other. This is also the central animating idea behind the Mind Bod Adventure Pod that I cohost with Tasha.
My work with the CEC led Dan Harris to me, a man who eventually changed my life. First by onboarding me to the Ten Percent Happier app, then by inviting me to co-author a book with him, and finally by becoming a good friend. Dan’s genius in popularizing meditation – his whole unpretentious and generous way of speaking about it – had a huge influence on me. He also introduced me to one of my closest friends and collaborators, Sebene Selassie. I also want to mention my long and wonderfully fulfilling collaboration with Lilli Weisz and Rose Nisker, who helped me make my “Daily Trip” meditation over at Calm. Everyone at Calm was terrific to work with, including founders Micheal Acton Smith and Alex Tew.
Final acknowledgement: my parents Susan and Ted, my brother Chris and sister Jane, my awesome wife Sarah Barmak and our two sons Eden and Sasha. I love you all!
Jeff
Friends and Community
For about 10 years I had the privilege of exploring “deep ecology” alongside friends Paul Wapner, Kritee Kanko, David Abram, and other passionate scientists and educators at the Lama Foundation in New Mexico. Many medicine ceremonies have bolstered this view. The longer I practice, the more I realize nature is always my greatest teacher.
Nature
Embodiment
“Nonduality” is a multi-faceted school of Indian thinking whose ambition is to explore the fundamental nature of (one, shared) Being, through an inquiry into awareness itself. Different teachers articulate this in different ways. Notable influences are Sri Ramana Maharshi, Rupert Spira, Frances Lucille, Adyashanti, Mukti, Lama Lena, Douglas Harding, Angelo Dilullo, Loch Kelly, and others.
Nonduality
William James and Evelyn Underhill wrote my favourite books on varieties of religious and mystical experience, with a focus on “perennial” insights into the human encounter with reality. Most of these have to do with an “Absolute” and thus are confounding and ineffable. So it goes! Other important perennial figures for me have been Lex Hixon and Peter Russell. I also really enjoy the many religious studies critiques of perennial philosophy.
Mystical Experience
Other Influential Books and Teachers
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