Rabbit Hole

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Boundaries MEDITATION: Boundary self-space yo-yo machinery GROUP PRACTICE: Yes it’s true – your boundaries are dysfunctional. Too rigid. Too porous. Too superball springy, so that huggers bounce off you and end up hugging the random person behind them. Or maybe your boundaries are super healthy, in which case you can show me what that looks like, cause I have […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Effort MEDITATION: Dog on a Bone Concentration GROUP PRACTICE:  Lucid Dreaming mini-workshop Everything starts with concentration. The ability to focus, to stay on task. In meditation you learn the things you once thought were boring – like breathing – are actually fas-ci-na-ting when you concentrate on them. That’s because when the discursive mind settles, there’s […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Mind MEDITATION: Samskara Party GROUP PRACTICE: Partner Noting For this practice you have 100% permission to ruminate and agonize and daydream and make compulsive to-do lists – the only condition is you will also follow this thinking pattern, like a detective, like a meditative gumshoe. Where is this thought-train going, and what […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: The Ground MEDITATION: Earth-Breathing GROUP PRACTICE: WTF: Exploring Meditation Questions and Challenges. Our first meditation comes by way of Reggie Ray, Vajrayana bad-boy in the tradition of his teacher, Chogyam Trungpa. This practice will turn you into a mountain, a hunk of breathing earth, like the way soil breathes when it’s […]

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

In this first Monday of the month, we’ll set the stage with a classic bit of Hindu Vedanta-inspired self-inquiry. This particular version of the practice comes by way of my colleague Vince Horn, who runs the Buddhist Geeks podcast and offers many excellent courses with his partner Emily Horn over at meditate.io.  Instead of asking “Who am I?”, we make it less personal, and ask “What IS this?” – as in, what is this whole existential boondoggle that we find ourselves running around inside?

There is a profound space between our unchanging awareness – what some contemplatives call our “True Self” – and our ever-changing thoughts and feelings and body sensations. In this meditation, we use our imaginations to open up that space.

TEACHER: Jeff Warren and Avi THEME: Devotion 4: Ye Gods! MEDITATION: Deity Yoga GROUP PRACTICE: Inter-Personal Adventure Psyched to welcome my new friend Avi Craimer, a smart and rigorous Toronto-based meditation teacher with an interest in the devotional side of practice. This is rare in the West, where there is much more emphasis on dry “attentional skill” training. Check […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Life is a Highway MEDITATION: I Wanna Ride it All Night Long GROUP PRACTICE: Are You Going my Way? CEC’s Emily Squirrell gave me this idea and I love it. All this talk of meditation-as-path. Well of course, in some ways EVERYONE is on a path, we just rarely take the time to […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Balance MEDITATION: The Seven Factors of Enlightenment INTERACTIVE PRACTICE: Mapping a Balanced Practice, Part 2 The first Monday of every month we explicitly explore challenges and questions related to practice and meditation. This Monday we’ll begin with a guided tour through the qualities known as the Seven Factors of Enlightenment. Although […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Always Negotiating MEDITATION: Noticing the Push and Pull INTERACTIVE PRACTICE: A Safe Space Buddhist call it vedana. The subtle push or pull on sensations, on our general lack of neutrality. We are always negotiating: ‘I like this, I don’t like that,’ etc, ad infinitum. Gumming up the machinery with our preferences, our biases. So […]

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.

What actually wants to emerge in each moment, before thinking jumps in? Inquiring minds want to know! As the saying goes, thinking is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. Many traditions argue that our actual default conditions – the factory settings, as it were – are wise and caring, but that we cover them up with our maddening stresses and schemes and agendas. In this meditation, we see what emerges when we practice not knowing.

One of my son Eden’s more endearing habits is thanking every random object and creature he passes by. In this meditation, we channel our inner two year old, and Pepper our Practice with apreciation. Then, for the grand finale, we’ll appreciate ourselves, by gathering any remaining self-consciousness into our loving arms, and slow-dancing the night away.

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Reality / Unreality MEDITATION: Melting into the Dream of You GROUP PRACTICE: Mini Lucid Dreaming workshop In my other life I wrote a book about dreaming and waking, and, like many before me, I became enchanted with the alternate reality known as lucid dreaming. Excellent for celebrity sex and super power rehearsal, obviously, but oh so much more. […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Smoothness in the Sensorimotor System MEDITATION: The Empty Ground GROUP PRACTICE: Authentic Movement. OK, the ground that keeps on giving. In the meditation we’ll see if we can sort of sneak down into the subbasement of the mind, below all the spinning turbines, below the machinery. Just empty smoothness down here, which frees us up […]

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Giving MEDITATION: Silent Illumination INTERACTIVE PRACTICE: The Natural Generosity of Presence The television told me the holidays are a time of giving; who am I to argue? There are at least two interesting and related questions here. The first: what do we want to give? I mean, beyond the stocking stuffers […]

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 […]

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.

There is some interesting new research emerging from the field of smart-people-in-lab-coats that suggests we have more agency around our emotions than many of us realize. The key isn’t in the suppression; it’s in the reframing. We can choose HOW we want to experience our various tugs and tingles. And if we choose to experience them in an empowering light, it seems they no longer cause us the same kind of suffering.