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.

But first …

Why Acknowledgement is Important

It’s important personally, because it situates us in our life. We know where we are, by knowing where we came from and who inspired us. This orients us, the same way learning about our ancestors orients us and connects us to our larger human story.

It’s also important politically, ie, to the larger community of humans around us.  Part of meditation is learning to see some of the unconscious biases and distortions that happen in our minds and our behaviours – that cause us and others suffering – and no longer going along with them. Or at least trying to no longer go along with them!

Well the same dynamic is true in mass society; we can collectively “wake up” and begin to see ways in which the whole culture has been acting unconsciously and causing suffering.

One of these ways is cultural appropriation. Dominant cultures have always taken what they’ve wanted from other cultures. This caused and still causes a lot of pain: of being stereotyped, of being trivialized and exploited and plundered, of not being understood and respected. You may disagree with whether or not something in particular is “appropriation,” but you can’t disagree with the unhappiness it leads to.

I think we can mitigate some of this by practicing appreciation instead of appropriation. We do this by acknowledging our influences, and by offering attention and respect to the contexts from which they emerged. Most of us suck at this, myself included.

Here’s me trying to get better at it:

First Lineage: Mystery

I exist! What’s the deal with this existence situation? I’ve wondered about this since I was a kid; at no point did existing not seem … just … weird.

Thus my first lineage belongs to every human who ever wondered what it was all about.

Second Lineage: Exploring Consciousness

I can explore existence! Not only by rooting around in the external world, but also by turning around and exploring my own mind. As a kid I experimented with visualizing infinity. As a teen I practised lucid dreaming. As a college student I, er, experimented. Good times!

Eventually I got into the science of consciousness. An early influential book for me was Charles Tart’s Altered States of Consciousness anthology, which came out in 1969. Tart helped popularize the understanding that consciousness changes, and that we can explore different states. Hypnosis, meditation, dreaming, psychedelics – all of these were discussed in this single volume.

So that’s what I got obsessed about next. In in my early thirties I published my own book about all this – about sleep and dreaming and hypnosis and blah blah blah and called it The Head Trip.

My second debt of gratitude goes to all those explorers and scientists and autodidact weirdos who have deliberately tried to explore their own minds and then bore all their friends about it.

Third Lineage: Buddhism and the End of Suffering

Maybe exploring can help me!  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 consciousness conferences that I had begun attending as a journalist. 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.

I was hooked, and not just on the nascent science. I began attending meditation retreats, studying with different Buddhist schools and teachers. I figured out that my real interest in consciousness wasn’t actually academic at all – it was personal. I was in agony! My mind had twisted me in knots, and now the simple act of getting still had begun to help me. I say “begun” because my mind immediately over-complicated meditation, and turned it into a whole thing that I’ve had to spent 20 years unwinding my way out of. So it goes with having a mind.

Buddhist techniques showed me one way to more peace and connection, and Buddhism in general gave me a beautiful and still influential personal framework for understanding my experience. You could say that Buddhism showed me what was possible. You never stop feeling grateful for that.

My third debt of gratitude goes to the historic Buddha Shakyamuni, that wandering forest rascal who worked out a systemic approach to all of this (some thoughts on the complexity of lineages here).

Fourth Lineage: Mindfulness and Shinzen Young

Except … I’m still messed up!  Maybe part of this is I’m finding it hard to relate certain Buddhist concepts – like “dependent origination” or “karma” or “the skandhas” – to my own experience.  Especially the whole ridiculous idea of “enlightenment.” I don’t understand how enlightenment can possibly be true, given my humanistic education, which basically considers the whole idea of getting saved to be religious wish-fulfillment. I needed a model for thinking about spiritual development that my over-thinking brain can relate to.

Enter Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young. A geeky contemplative neuroscience consultant from Los Angeles, 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.

Not only did Shinzen have a whole jungle gym of fascinating meditations to explore, he was / 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 behaviours and 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, sensory clarity, and equanimity – how each of these “work” in each moment, and the different ways they get trained in different practices.

This is the Shinzen I encountered in 2008. For a good ten years I attended his retreats and recorded our regular phone conversations. Shinzen has thought clearly about so much in meditation and life – you can ask him anything, and he will eventually take it back to the rich phenomenology of our lived experience, rarely reaching past to some unfounded statement he can’t prove. If he does go there, it is usually with the caveat: “If I had to make a conjecture …” In this way I got to shine my Shinzen flashlight onto our human experience of the moment; he gave me a sense of the outer contour of what can be said with certainty, and what cannot be said at all.

My fourth 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 nerdery, I recommend his original 1997 audio series “The Science of Enlightenment” (not the same as the eponymous book, published much later).

That’s the main stuff. Below is a more rambling detail that I recommend you DON’T read, because – frankly – life is short, and you could be lying under a tree.

More Lineages: The Democratization of Mental Health

Is there an overarching theme here? So happy you asked! I’m interested in helping every human on the planet find their way into a supportive practice (and, perhaps, practice community) – on their own terms, in their own defiantly weird and idiosyncratic way. This is the democratization of mental health.

In order to make progress on that, I think it helps to ask a very big question: what is shared, and what is distinct?  Meaning: which, if any, frameworks and interventions are relevant for everyone, and which are more suited to different human backgrounds and styles and needs??

Here are other lineages and individuals that have shaped my thinking and experiencing:

What is Shared?

William James and Evelyn Underhill wrote my favourite books on varieties of religious and mystical experience, with a focus on “perennial” (ie, forever) insights into the human encounter with reality. Of course, these are ultimately  unnamable and ineffable! Other important perennial figures for me have been Lex Hixon and Peter Russell.

“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, Lisa Cairns, Douglas Harding, Angelo Dilullo, Loch Kelly, and others.

The physical body is also something every human shares. 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; two that stand out are 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 – and in my academic study of embodied cognition.

For many, nature is their way into understanding “oneness” and inter-connectivity. The past 10 years I’ve had the privilege of exploring “deep ecology” alongside friends Paul Wapner, Kritee Kanko, David Abram, and other passionate scientists and educators over at Earth Love Go and the Lama Foundation. Countless personal ceremonies and journeys have bolstered this view.

Another over-arching passion is the idea of practice itself, its many creative expressions and manifestations. A practice is any activity or way of being that we engage in regularly and deliberately. Although there’s a lot of diversity here, there also seems to be certain core skills that get trained again and again across practice modalities. When we know these skills, we have both a framework for understanding any practice, and a way to increase the effectiveness of that practice.

I am particularly keen on the skill of equanimity. Equanimity is central to understanding how healing and so-called “purification” work in practice. Once you understand equanimity, then equanimity starts to teach you about itself. It is a big part of how human’s age gracefully. 

Another apparent universal has to do with terrains of practice – common experiences, or perhaps life landscapes, that practitioners move through, regardless of technique. This is a complicated subject. Although every technique has technique-specific effects, I do think the human journey towards truth and wholeness has recognizable landmarks, whether a practitioner is coming at it through dancing or prayer or meditating on the breath. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism has one overview on this. For a possible Buddhist angle, there’s a way to interpret the influential “progress of insight” as a rapid cyclical version of these same terrains. Which is not to say that every human is on a journey towards truth and wholeness! (Unless that’s how you define being dead.)

What is Distinct?

Every spiritual (and secular) path and tradition has elements that are uniquely their own.

These differences matter. They matter in terms of their unique cultural and historical legacies. They matter because different temperaments will be attracted to different aesthetics and styles of practice. This means each of us can find a path that suits us, and if we can’t find that path, then we can create our own.

I founded the Consciousness Explorers Club as a way to explore exactly this pluralism. My friends James Maskalyk, Erin Oke, Avi Craimer, Jude Star, Kevin LaCroix, Tasha Schumann and others have been some of my fellow guides and explorers. 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 DIY community spirit found inspiration for me in the philosophy and practices of “harm reduction” in the party scene, in the Mad Pride movement (also called the “Psychiatric Survivors Movement”), as well as the work of gay, trans and BIPOC activists to create their own systems of mental and emotional support outside of the mainstream.

You need a philosophy of difference if you want to successfully navigate any contemplative practice and scene. Too many teachers sell one-size-fits-all versions of practice to their credulous students. But no teacher is an expert on your nervous system.

I learned this first-hand in my early days as a practitioner, when again and again I would try to implement some reductive meditation instruction in my wild bipolar / ADHD nervous system (I’ve written a bit about my mental health struggles here and here). It didn’t always work out so well. I had to find ways to adapt the practices to fit my peculiar neurodiverse situation. I also had to learn to pace myself.

For this, my Somatic Experiencing trauma training has been indispensable (thank you Berns Galloway and Peter Levine), as has my reading in trauma literature more broadly, as well as learning from Yogani over at AYPsite.com. I’m grateful to my friends at Ten Percent Happier and Calm for giving me a forum for learning and talking about this, and I love that these apps feature different teachers and perspectives.

The notion of difference has also received an invigorating boost lately from POC teachers, who point to the “white-washing” that can happen in Buddhist practice communities, where a focus on some vague universal oneness can be used as a way to trivialize and marginalize the many challenges related to diversity and social justice. I’ve personally learned a lot here from Lama Rod Owens and Sebene Selassie.

Final Gratitude

I would not have made it through this life without the support of many healers, among them Diane Chung, Jan Winhall, Marlene Russell, Barb Ellias, and Laura McNeilly. This is also true of my writing community – Marni Jackson has been a great friend and writing mentor, as has Barbara Gowdy, and my friends Christine Pountney, Alayna Munce, Patricia Pearson, and James Maskalyk all of whom all hold it down in the writers-interested-in-how-to-be-human lineage.

A note on the whole idea of service: ultimately this lineage came from my mother, Susan Warren. Even as a semi-lapsed Christian, she has always been a good neighbour and a passionate contributor to many charitable causes. Thanks Mom! You and Dad are my greatest tradition.

To my wife Sarah and my sons Eden and Sasha: I love you. You make it real.