Rabbit Hole

TEACHER: Jeff Warren THEME: Giving and Getting MEDITATION: Don’t Know Mind GROUP PRACTICE: Activate 1: What Does Activate Even Mean? Beneath that secret contemplative circuit is, apparently, an equally secret dynamic hiding right in plain sight: giving is getting and getting is giving. Expressing your caring in action is, they say, a healing practice, and […]

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 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: 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: 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: 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: The Secret Soft Space Songbook MEDITATION: No Trace Listening GROUP PRACTICE: Kirtan Continuing on with our Summer of Love series, this week we explore the mystery of song. We’ll begin with smoothing out our listening circuits, then we’ll introduce a few cosmic overtones and investigate where and how they activate our body. All this to […]

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 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 Body, The View MEDITATION: Our Somatic Unconscious GROUP PRACTICE: Metaphors We Live By Some Buddhists believe our body is the repository of all our conditioning, that as we move our consciousness into its dark spaces we facilitate a process of expression and catharsis. Let’s investigate. Then for the Group Practice, we’ll […]

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: 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: 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 THEME: And We Will All Be Fools Together MEDITATION: The Parable of Eddie INTERACTIVE PRACTICE: Embarrassing Moment Teaching Stories For the meditation we will internalize, literally, the parable of Eddie – little Eddie in a stream, who learned to become free by unseizuring his guts and allowing the water of life (life is […]

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: 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 and Kevin Lacroix THEME: Harmony and Connection MEDITATION: A Heart so Wide and Soft INTERACTIVE PRACTICE: The Mindful Math of Overtones and Polyrhythm “Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibration?” – Dame Evelyn Glennie, […]

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: 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: 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 […]