Rabbit Hole

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Fact That You Don’t Know Shit MEDITATION: Just Sitting GROUP PRACTICE: Don’t Know Mind and koan practice and collective bogglement.

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Letting Go, of that Lady’s Purse MEDITATION: Non-Attachment GROUP PRACTICE: How to be less odious in relationship and less of a klepto on the bus.

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: What is Contentment? MEDITATION: Aimlessness – the Third Door of Liberation (just down the hall from the men’s room); GROUP PRACTICE: Breaking down the doors to happiness, in a non-violent way

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Hey Bag Head! What’s my Body’s Language? MEDITATION: Feel flow GROUP PRACTICE: Most of us walk around with no sense whatsoever of the chemical energetic signature we’ve giving off. So let’s find out. What do people notice about you, and you about them? Can you play with that signal? Maybe there are clues in […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren and James THEME: The Beat that My Heart Skipped MEDITATION: Feelings and Sounds GROUP PRACTICE: James is putting together a mini-DJ set for this one We’ll work with different sounds and tones and tunes and see if we can notice how they impact our inner-verse, how we are played by the music even […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Arrow and the River MEDITATION: Old School Vipassana Noting, with two main flavors: contentment and agitation; GROUP PRACTICE: Pop Noting Been meaning to bring back this popular social technique for a while. Partner noting ping-pong style, we’ll scour our insides and afterward have a group powwow about the possible differences between stressful […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Solid Ground MEDITATION: Vase Breathing GROUP PRACTICE: The Silent Partner Yeah, space is fun, but sometimes you need to double-down with your feet on the ground. In the main meditation we’ll explore a Tibetan practice called “Vase Breathing” that will turn you into an immovable object. For the group practice, we’ll continue the […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: We Live in the Space Age MEDITATION: Sound and Space GROUP PRACTICE: The Space Between Us OK so first we stabilize the body, then we’ll send our minds out into the audioscape of College street, past the traffic and the streetcars to the boundary-tingling outer limits. For group practice we’ll continue last week’s […]

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: The Way of Emptiness MEDITATION: Opening Up to the Possibility of An Infinite Object GROUP PRACTICE:  TBD. Back to Buddhism now, to what many snobs consider the pinnacle of Buddhist practice: Mahamudra, the “Great Seal” of the mountain-hopping Tibetan lamas, pointing their fingers to the sky as they zoom around on flying carpets fighting […]

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 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 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: La Fin du Siècle: What about plasma? Anyway I’m sick of this metaphor – let’s do nothing MEDITATION: OK GROUP PRACTICE: Ionized Star Guts Lava-Lamp and Mixed Tape Secret State-change Induction Ceremony. We’ll get every single pillow and bolster from the storage area and throw them in a huge pile and then lounge […]