Rabbit Hole

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Future MEDITATION: The Present GROUP PRACTICE: Activate 7: The Future of the CEC. Our final activate session, at least for this round, this one is about the CEC itself. Based on what we learned last week, what can be integrated into how we do things at the CEC? Should we […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Direct Path MEDITATION: Self-Inquiry GROUP PRACTICE: Who Am I? Time for a trip to Hindustan. For this Advaita Vedanta-inspired practice, we send our attention backwards in an exhilarating and probably frustrating and ultimately fruitless search for yourself, or your small self anyway. Past all the schemes and tics of your personality – all that activity – […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Belief Effect MEDITATION: Powers of Ten INTERACTIVE: How Beliefs Shape Experience We already did this one and it was awesome. Dug into whatever secret beliefs may be guiding people’s understanding of reality and their place in it, brought them out of the shadowy subconscious and into the light of open-hearted […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Damn you technology! MEDITATION: Noticing the compulsive push and pull; GROUP PRACTICE: Cell phone meditation on the absolute need to check your damn email and your text messages. Honourary Buddhist Louis C.K. absolutely nailed it. So on this particular Monday you get to bring your phone and go ballistic consulting every platform except this time you’ll do it […]

For this weekly instalment of November’s devotion month, 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 that you, me, and everyone seems to find themselves inside, now and always, for reality just keeps on being real.

In my experience, there are two kinds of time: horizontal and vertical. Horizontal time is the conventional time we all know. It is mind time – it has a past, and a future, with our worries stretched across it. Vertical time is time out of time – time hidden in plain sight. “There is another world, and it’s inside this one,” said the French surrealist Paul Eluard, probably stoned on absinthe. Vertical time is body time – no past or future here, only the upwelling of the present moment.

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: I am hard MEDITATION: Sensory Experience 1: Solid and Liquid; GROUP PRACTICE: Tough gal / guy tickle fight. Words tickling via a conversation about your STUPID LIFE STRATEGIES. Strategy will battle strategy for cage match domination, and guess what? Softness and love wins. Haha.

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Into the World MEDITATION: Expand in Space, Ground in Sound GROUP PRACTICE: Activate 6: Finding the Golden Thread The poet William Stafford (“for it is important that awake people be awake”) used to talk about finding the golden thread in a poem, in a moment, in a life – the thread […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Open MEDITATION: Open Awareness GROUP PRACTICE: Open Intelligence For this meditation, the open container of our awareness – expressed in our open posture – is both our starting point and our final destination. “Short moments of awareness repeated many times become continuous,” says the nondual teacher Candice O’Denver. We work from this insight in […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren and Christine Pountney THEME: Intentionality MEDITATION: Setting Our Own Agenda INTERACTIVE PRACTICE: Layers of Intention, Layers of Self There are many mysteries in consciousness. One of them has to do with the curious power of our intentions to frame and order our experience. Intentions run like underground rivers through our lives; they […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Being Awesome MEDITATION: The Grounded Body GROUP PRACTICE: I am The Shit practice Basically we’ll get into small groups and interact and, as we do, each of us tries heartbreakingly hard to be and act in a way that we imagine our best selves to be. We make it really obvious to ourselves, which […]

For deep rest, we’re allowed to recruit all of our resources, our imagination as well as our attention. This lovely rhythmic practice can be done lying down or sitting. It’s a luxurious boundary-dissolving plunge into the Mother Sea. Maybe you fall asleep, maybe you slip into a waking dream, maybe you stay utterly present inside a wakeful stillness and tranquility.

In this meditation, we are going to allow ourselves to be utterly defeated. It will be a race to the bottom, as each of us attempts to out-defeat the other. To say nothing of how each sensation will defeat us (by continuing to be ungraspable), each expectation will defeat us (by continuing to be unfulfillable), and each shining Enlightenment will defeat us – whoosh! – as it passes us by on the way to some sanguine dolphin or industrious garden shrew.

TEACHERS: Jeff Warren and Degan THEME: My Emotional Body Wants to Run Away and/or Punch you in the Face! MEDITATION: Down and Dirty with the Emotional Body, Part Un; GROUP PRACTICE: Exploring the Assertiveness Continuum A big line crosses the room – at one end, passiveness, at the other, aggressiveness. Somewhere in the middle (or maybe it’s orthogonal) is healthy assertiveness. Using various playful social […]

TEACHER: Jeff THEME: Hidden Assumptions MEDITATION: Patterns of Inner Activation GROUP PRACTICE: Activate 4: Service is Edge-Riding We’ll continue to flesh out the details of our potential new initiatives, but this week we’ll also mindfully explore what hidden assumptions we may be bringing to the table. One of the big lessons from the development scene […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Empathy vs Compassion MEDITATION: Loving-kindness, Remixed INTERACTIVE PRACTICE: A Kind of Rapture In the mid-90-s the American photographer Robert Bergman travelled through America’s Rust Belt and took a series of stunning photos of ordinary people in extraordinary states of openness and suffering. Bergman’s book – A Kind of Rapture – will be our departure point […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Technology and Attention MEDITATION: Getting Still INTERACTIVE PRACTICE: Addicted to Dopamine OK so for this evening and for this evening only everyone is encouraged to have their technology switched on, we are figuratively sponsored by Apple here, by all the great tech providers in the sky. We’ll start the evening by getting relatively still […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Boundaries MEDITATION: Exploring Body and Space GROUP PRACTICE: Cool movement practice with Nadia Everyone gets up and starts walking and deliberately follows a different person in the room but they don’t let them know who it is, so you just keep walking around and around in circles and everyone is all super-charged with […]

Wow, lots of caveats around action this month, I guess we are a tender bunch – learning about self-care, about boundaries, about humility. But let’s not let our humanist realism trump our contemplative hearts, because, as everybody knows, love and service are still the only real games in town. Is there a place for this kind of idealism in our mangled modern world? What might it look like, and how can we help each other come to it in our own ways?

Again and again, meditation teachers talk about the benefits of “popping out of your thoughts” – of panning back to a more spacious perspective, no longer embedded in fatalistic loops of rumination and mood and whatever else. To successfully do this, it helps to understand the terrain of thinking and feeling in the first place.