Rabbit Hole

On Tuesday I presented to Canadian university students as part of the “Empowering Neurodiversity” series, hosted by the University of Alberta. Video of the talk has already been posted online – check it out below if you’re curious. It was a hilarious experience, at least for me. As always when I try to discuss ADHD, […]

A big post about ADHD and meditation – a resource for ADHD folks, as well as those who wish to guide ADHD folks in meditation – will appear here within the next day or two.

A new musical collaboration with producer / DJ / sound wizard / friend Noah Pred. The idea of this 12-minute soundscape / meditation is to encourage listeners to adjust their consciousness from the inside, using music both as the object of meditation, and as a reflection of each real-time adjustment.

Forget dissolving my sense of being a separate self. I have two kids now. My boundaries are well and truly dissolved (“trampled” is probably more accurate). What I need now is stability and ground. I need good boundaries, not no boundaries. Here’s a meditation to help with this – for everyone, especially parents!

Back in my twenties, I had this idea of living life like an adventure story. So I did. Until I realized the ratio of fun to struggle was moving in the wrong direction. The fun was getting briefer and more desperate; the challenges were getting longer and more all-encompassing.

I knew parenting would be rewarding and challenging. I didn’t know it would be everything – like the life I had before, except now in 3-D, with the vanishing point always in sight.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of The Consciousness Explorers Club, my friend Andrea Cohen made this beautiful 2-minute animation. The CEC is dedicated to the playful exploration of meditation, in a way that empowers participants and communities to be their own teachers.

What does the practice of dynamic care look like in real life? From protesting to sewing masks, from making documentary films to listening to records to exploring genealogy, in this article I showcase a range of creative practices, submitted by all of you. The community is the teacher.

I’ve seen a lot of posts vilifying scrolling through social media, bingeing on food or news. The advice is to exercise instead, to eat well, get a good night’s sleep, etc etc. This prescription completely ignores the seismic life shift we’re all experiencing.  It is denial masking as medical advice.

When you live on a ship at sea, everything gets amplified in the narrow interiors: ruminations, moods, behaviors. Enter COVID-19, and the fact that many of us are stuck inside. Ping ping ping, go the signals. I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get a clear picture of what I’m comfortable with, and what I’m not. 

“If someone says ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ one more time I am literally going to punch them.” A post is about knowing when and how to meditatively engage with our anxiety and our discomfort, and knowing when and how to pull back and rest.

Healing and growth, self-regulation and self-understanding — these are too idiosyncratic, too personal, too fundamental to depend on specialists-only. We also need to depend on ourselves and one another. In my mind, nothing will accelerate this more than recasting “teaching” as a creative social activity that any informed person can engage in.

Recently I did a Do Nothing Project broadcast on the subject of equanimity, the skill of accepting our experience in the moment. I did OK for the intro and the guided meditation, but then things went off the rails. A post about the perils of losing yourself in caring.

If a practice is important to us, if it’s deepening our engagement with the world, if it’s teaching us about who we are, then you can be sure many of these basic skills are present and probably increasing. Understanding the skills is central to being your own life teacher, and to sharing practice with others.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the word “practice”. Both established practices lots of people do – yoga, tennis, active listening – and weird customized practices people invent – visualizing success, pretending to be a tree, or darning moth holes while listening to Amy Winehouse. 

The most important element for sustaining a meditation practice isn’t what practice to do, or how to do it, it’s how to show up, day after day. It’s structure.

I think then: this freedom is better. Freedom from freedom. Freedom from myself, freedom from the dizziness of a million choices. Parenting is very clarifying. I know my job: keep Eden and Sarah alive. There’s only one thing to do and it is not about me.

Far from being passive, I see meditation as a kind of activism, one that, right now, is sweeping the culture. If you’re reading this, you are part of that movement, a movement of sanity and community and genuine caring for others.

Every morning for five days, our little group put on our climbing harnesses, clipped into a long snaking rope, and began our glacier ascent. As we explored the mountain peaks around us, we were also exploring a dimension of human happiness that depended on our body’s capacity to get absorbed in experience.

Last year, at a mood disorders clinic in Toronto, I was diagnosed bipolar. Whether or not I accepted the label, it was an accurate description of my symptoms. It had taken me so long to notice because mostly my moods were up. How could that be a problem? Being high is awesome, isn’t it?