Rabbit Hole

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Love, Sex and Awakening MEDITATION: Something juicy and embodied GROUP PRACTICE: Collective Wonderment Back in The Day, when the CEC was run out of my living room, the group practice was called “Collective Wonderment,” and the “practice” was basically jamming in a group about a particular theme, exploring ideas and emotions […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Way of the Heart MEDITATION: Centering Prayer GROUP PRACTICE: TBD. I expect this one will cause some reactivity. Many of us are fine exploring exotic Eastern practices, but mention the G word – mention prayer, mention Christ –  hoooweeee, out comes a lifetime of secular conditioning and judgment. BORING. Do you really think Indians […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren and Sarah McCarthy THEME: Premature Enlightenment: How Embarrassing! MEDITATION: Preparing the Body INTERACTIVE: Repellent Spiritual Speed Dating For this special edition of CEC, I will be joined by my pal Sarah McCarthy, a smart Gestalt psychotherapist, who will lead the group in a delightful exploration of all that is most nauseatingly precious […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Lowest Common Denominator MEDITATION: Space all through GROUP PRACTICE: Space Walk We walk around like astronauts. We turn to the human near us and say “Hello. I saw you at the station eating one of those specially-processed freeze-dried nutritional pellets.” We notice how talking is different in space.

GUIDED MEDITATION: Neti-Neti INTERACTIVE: Crossing the Line There’s no getting around this paradox if you want to grok spiritual practice. On the one hand, you are definitely a unique little weirdo. On the other hand, you’re also the irreducible sum of all unique weirdos, and / or none of them. It depends on your perspective. Whether […]

Let’s see … “something something something,” then “nothing nothing nothing.” “Nothing,” you say? “Nothing of any importance,” you respond. “Well, that’s something.” “But it isn’t,” you insist! “It isn’t any thing at all.” etc etc. Yup, this week we’ll explore The Really Big Mystery of Emptiness = Form and Form = Emptiness.

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Lighting in a Bottle MEDITATION: Verve and Vitality GROUP PRACTICE: Activate 5: Activating This last week, we finalize the details of each initiative and share them with the larger group. We’ll explore how to energize the language of caring with an automatic writing exercise, empowering each other to unleash our store […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Way of Surrender MEDITATION: Just Sitting GROUP PRACTICE:  I Give Up – and Look How Much that Made me Love You! Fitting to end with Zen – Soto Zen, sotto voce, a soft surrender. Dogen called it “practice enlightenment.” Forget getting anywhere – where could you go? You’re already here. In a […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Awareness: The Nondual Ideal MEDITATION: Unhooking INTERACTIVE: Pointing Out Guidance and Interaction If you don’t know what “nonduality” is, I’ve written a short overview here, and provided some simple pointing out instructions here. Nowadays it’s used as shorthand for a particular approach to spiritual practice that involves orienting to awareness itself, […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: I am in the Resistance – for no reason MEDITATION: Loving Kindness GROUP PRACTICE: Tonglen This is a compassion practice of breathing in people’s pain and breathing out relief. One of the interesting pieces of this practice is how much we resist doing it. We feel self-conscious, we think it’s cheesy. Or we get […]

MEDITATION: Psychic Shrink-Wrap INTERACTIVE: The Right Practice for the Right Time Our theme this month is different strokes for different folks. This seems to be every bit as true for meditation and spiritual practice as it is for everything else. When I first started practicing mindfulness, I was all about deconstructing myself. A lot of […]

Our deepest healing happens when we rest. That’s when our system makes most of its repairs. I think it is healthy to plug into little nourishing wells of rest throughout the day, by stopping and doing nothing. In this meditation, we do exactly this, and explore what it might mean to orient to the stillness below the busy-busy.

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Way of Sensory Experience MEDITATION: Just Note Gone GROUP PRACTICE: Partner Noting OK so we’ll start this wake-up series with an old school Theravada innovation: the intent noticing of sensation. This is the classic Buddhist path of insight; it involves penetrating our immediate experience with so much clarity and equanimity that eventually […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Stories We Tell MEDITATION: Into the Heart GROUP PRACTICE: Activate 2: Connecting to our Personal Motivation To prepare for this session, try to think about a challenge you faced or an experience you had that really affected you and might hint at an activate direction you’d want to go. Maybe […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Sensory Experience the Third: I Done Goned Away MEDITATION: Just Note Gone GROUP PRACTICE: I have no idea Something awesome and gaseous I made up that day. Maybe we’ll talk about some of the bullshit out there around ENLIGHTENMENT and ohhh STREAM-ENTRY and trying to get somewhere. Cause you can / can’t! […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Shake ‘n Bake MEDITATION: Special Secret Surprise INTERACTIVE PRACTICE: WTF: Exploring Meditation Questions and Challenges. Fresh from our CEC retreat (happening this coming weekend – last chance!), our first practice of the month will be decided extemporaneously, something exactly suited to the moment to prepare the whole giddy posse for our monthly salon-slash-exploration […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Chakra Voodoo MEDITATION: Flow, with a secret chakra / sushumna meditation woven in just to see what will happen; GROUP PRACTICE: This one will be cool The many certainties of yogic science cause more than a few eyeballs to roll. No problem – let’s test it in the interpersonal laboratory. For this […]

MEDITATION:  Welcome to the Party INTERACTIVE:  Three Views of Reality OK, for this weekly instalment of our monthly exploration of devotion, we’re going to explore what it means to be goo-goo ga-ga in love with the hottest sexiest meanest and most ass-kicking entity in all of reality – that is, reality itself, aka the existential wrapper thing […]

The template for our relationship with others is the one we’re engaged in already with ourselves. There is no escaping that truth: friendly or critical, neglectful or curious, the longer someone’s with us and the closer they get, the more we end up treating them as we treat ourselves. Among other things, that means the greatest kindness we can do for others is the one we begin doing for ourselves.

TEACHER: Jeff Warren and Degan THEME: Grrr…. Couple Battle! How to Not Scupper Your Every Kind of Relationship; MEDITATION: Down and Dirty with the Emotional Body, Part Deux; GROUP PRACTICE: In relationship, there are folks who do the walking. Sometimes, walking right over you. And there are folks who do the door matting – sometimes, door matting right under you! And then there […]