If you’re reading this, chances are you hear the call. The silent scream rings in your soul. The call tells you there are still unanswered questions. It’s the feeling that the universe itself is not yet resolved. A distant cry prickles your senses. As you hear it, you become aware of your own yearning. Like the open strings of a guitar, your pain and dissatisfaction resonate sympathetically with what sounds around you. There’s a longing for more understanding and intimacy with life itself.
When they are ready, the student arrives with their particular expression of this yearning. They appear in the meditation hall or by the side of their teacher. While the yearning is uniquely theirs, it is also the same yearning of the students in the suttas of the Pali Canon and the koans of Zen. Just as Neo asks “What is the Matrix?”, so Zhaozhou asks “What is the way?”
The student has been sitting, contemplating, trying, faltering. With humility, they admit their struggle. They let their yearning form into a question. They say, in effect: “This can’t be it. What can I do?”
While the call sounds out to all people — all beings experience suffering — some are less affected. They are more adept at ignoring it, the way people who live in the flight path tune out the sound of planes. Rather than respond to the call, they get used to it or avoid it through busyness. Cypher, who had seen all of it, went back into the Matrix to eat steak in blissful ignorance.
Others are shown the call in such a way that they cannot ignore it. They are initiated through an event that brings great suffering. This may not be their choice or intention, but it is an initiation nonetheless. In a single moment, they are brought into a different life where they cannot hide. They have heard the call and now it rings loudly. Whenever they slow down, there it is, in the background of silence.
The call fills my ears and heart, even as life gets better. I bow down, humbled but not humiliated.
In the path of Zen, the practitioner may be given a koan. This is a phrase or story that they stay with and explore, letting it change them. The first koan in Robert Aitken Roshi’s The Gateless Barrier is Mu, a single word that takes a stand against conventional reality.
How the koan stays with the student is the magic. Aitken shares how Wumen Huikai implores the practitioner:
So, then, make your whole body a mass of doubt, and with your three hundred and sixty bones and joints and your eighty-four thousand hair follicles concentrate on this one word “Mu.” Day and night, keep digging into it. Don’t consider it to be nothingness. Don’t think in terms of “has” and “has not.” It is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You try to vomit it out, but you can’t.
Gradually you purify yourself, eliminating mistaken knowledge and attitudes you have held from the past. Inside and outside become one.
This is how we channel the call into practice. It splinters open a great doubt. “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”, sings Leonard Cohen.
Opened to rather than treated as a problem, the call becomes the question. It’s a fortune cookie that contains all fortunes, but no note.
The student in the zendo, sitting before the teacher, allows a question to form. Neo follows the white rabbit. The meditator practises sitting in uncertainty.
A funeral for a satin bowerbird at the end of a retreat.
The clothes we wear to bed at night to sleep is just pyjamas This flesh we roam this earth in is a blessing, not a promise I bow with those who bow to the creator and pay homage
— Jay Electronica, A.P.I.D.T.A
I hear a crash. Looking up from my tea, I walk over to the source of the sound. On the path outside the meditation hall is a female satin bowerbird. Having flown into one of the windows, she now lies twitching on the ground. I check if she is still alive. My heart races and my mind scatters. I think about what I need to do in each given scenario: if she is injured; dying; dead. When I see that she is badly injured I find my two close friends who are holding the retreat with me. We are all shaken up together. My thoughts go to the suffering that she might be in and what we can do to help alleviate that pain. One friend offers the wisdom that we let the wildness of nature unfold in its own way and only interfere when necessary. We hold this space of uncertainty as witnesses to the transition from life to death.
A memory arises of another speckled satin bowerbird peeking out at me from the broad leaves of a longan tree while I ate breakfast at a long silent retreat. At the time I felt like I had lost my way and the cheeky, monkey-like sounds of these birds felt like an invitation into the cosmic joke.
We go to move her away from the main building and realise she has died. She is so frail in my gloved hands. A delicate arrangement of green speckled feathers, a short beak, two dark eyes, two limp legs. It seems ridiculous that this creature was only minutes before creating a racket as she flew in and out of the plum tree, finding food and evading the retreatants who sought out her beauty. I feel a wave of sadness. As we close the retreat, I lead a guided mettā meditation where I invite everyone to sense into a love for the wildness of nature, for nature’s freedom. On listening back to the recording, I hear my voice crackling with my unfolding emotions, strained through my own sickness and weariness.
After the retreatants leave, the three of us hold a short funeral. We find a patch of land away from the main house where we can bury her and allow her to return to the earth. A rosella watches from a nearby tree, a witness to this sacred transition. I dig a hole and place her in the ground. She has become stiff and dense, seemingly already hardening into earth. The ants quickly move in to begin their work.
I’m nervous as I haven’t led a funeral before. I say a few words that a teacher passed on to me:
Let this bird’s life and death remind us of the preciousness of life. Aniccā vata saṅkhārā. All formations are impermanent.
I notice a peacefulness, an otherworldly quiet stillness. I recall seeing my partner’s grandmother moments before she died and moments after, and how I had noticed this same sacred stillness.
I’d always wondered when I heard that people go to a better place after they die. In this moment, I feel open to something more than an acceptance of death as fact, more than the promise of another life.
The death of the individual body doesn’t mean the end of us when we are “actualized by myriad things”, as Dōgen says.[^1] Yet we forget our connection to the divine, this great gift of life bestowed on us. We forget that we move and speak and dance as part of this great body, the total interdependence of all phenomena.
Each moment of life, each a step in the transition to death, is another opening to walk this path of great wisdom.
She is in the ground now. Somewhere nearby a male is still arranging his blue things — bottle caps, beetle wings, flowers — setting his stage, waiting.
Vejjasala, our retreat home, shrouded in fog.
This song continues playing in my head and in my playlists, each time unravelling a little more.
I go to my Lord quietly, teardrops on our faces Teardrops on my face, it’s like teardrops become waterfalls by the time they reach my laces My eyelids is like levees but my tear ducts is like glaciers As I contemplate creation, the salt that heals my wounds pour out my eyes just like libations
[^1]: Dōgen, Genjōkōan: “To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.” Robert Aitken and Kazuaki Tanahashi’s translation is here.
A family holiday, and the thing I didn’t want to feel
I’m on holiday, staying with my family. I realise that I’m drifting in all the activity. I chat with others, go to the beach, eat food, play Settlers of Catan. Occasionally I’ll get stuck on my phone, but overall it’s pretty wholesome stuff. In the midst of all this I sense that I’m losing something of myself. I’m gradually disconnecting from my feelings. I’m sliding into going through the motions. I haven’t had much time alone, not to mention sitting quietly. On the one hand it feels like time by myself isn’t what’s needed right now, that sitting silently would be going against what I came here to do. On the other hand I’m starting to feel an itch not scratched, a vague and shadowy undercurrent of feeling beneath all of this that isn’t allowed to surface.a
I’m sitting on the couch as we watch a movie. It begins in comfort with cosiness and snacks. Then I get a little restless and fidgety. I sink into the couch, unable to move. It’s like I’ve turned into a log, dead inside. I’ve gone past boredom into zoned out; I stare at the screen like a zombie. When that becomes too much, I pull out my phone and stare at a smaller screen. All the while I’m drifting further into a mire. Eventually there’s a sinking feeling deep in my body, like a void or black hole, the sense of something being really wrong but I don’t know what. It’s a sense of missing something. A wave of tiredness pulls me out of this, and I get up from the couch, only to get stuck scrolling in bed.
All of these are pretty standard ways to be busy and to not pause and feel. There’s a move here of turning away from feeling and immersing in doing. Even when sitting on the couch there’s a lot of doing happening — choosing to direct attention to the external: the TV, scrolling on the phone. It’s a fairly mild form of the second arrow. However, in these mundane actions is something more profound, hiding in plain sight.
The move away from feeling is trying to get away from something. This is why sitting still is so hard for so many people — sitting and being with themselves leaves little room for escape. Being human sometimes requires feeling things that are unpleasant and even painful. The natural tendency is to turn away from this — moving towards what is more pleasant, getting rid of the unpleasant experience, or zoning out.
There’s a tendency to take a feeling as saying something final about who we are. Not just that I am experiencing a feeling of sadness, but that I’m a sad person. I’m not just feeling a sense of hopelessness — I am hopeless. I am broken, incapable, unlovable. From this perspective it makes sense that this is unbearable, and that moving away from the experience seems like the only option. It seems to say something about who we ultimately are. The second arrow is a reaction to feeling like the first arrow means something permanent and solid about us. The feeling becomes a life sentence.
Yet feeling something is not the same as being it. The feeling is the weather, not the sky. The clouds move, rain comes and goes, the sun shines and then doesn’t. All the while the sky remains.
I take a pause in the guest bedroom, creating a makeshift meditation cushion from a stack of pillows on the fold-out bed. I stop doing and sit still. I notice the urges to check my phone and to go out and see what other people are up to. I set the intention to be with this, just as it is. There are waves of restlessness and stress. I yawn and feel my shoulders release as the tension begins melting.
I discover a thread of feeling that bubbles up. It’s indistinct, murky, amorphous. I explore it, like a deep-sea diver sinking down past the well-lit shallows. I navigate a layer of distraction, then agitated worry. I steady my breath and stay with it. I follow a glimmer of sadness to a feeling that lives deep inside my chest. There’s a sense here of something being wrong, of just not being okay. It’s a yucky, grating experience, like a bodily feeling of nails on a chalkboard. I acknowledge the part of me that is bracing against this, and open to what is here as fully as I can. If I can feel it, then it cannot be me. I let go into it, each moment of surrender a little death. I allow the feeling, and it unfolds itself. The resistance gives way. The feeling empties out; my being is hollowed out. The feeling shifts — fading, then disappearing completely.
I breathe a deep sigh and notice that my sense of being feels different. There’s an awareness that is present and clear. I open my eyes to the space and feel ease with everything around me. The space, the objects I see, the activities we have planned, the feeling in the body — all a coherent field. I get up with a sense of trust and okayness. I surface once again, having let myself go through the feeling to find that I was still whole.
Feeling is both what we are scared of and the opening to a different sense of being. Feeling calls us to inhabit the depths, to feel all of it, then to return to the surface. Then it becomes possible to rest in this sense of being. After all, you don’t have to do anything to be what you already are. The feeling I couldn’t bear wasn’t something to be removed or replaced — feeling itself was the way in to presence.
This Sunday I’m leading an online workshop, Liberating Feeling, on exactly this — turning towards what we’d rather not feel, together, in a space made for it. Come explore with me if it calls to you.
How I learned to attune to me protective and judgemental parts
Recalling a time on solo silent retreat… I’m sitting on the sofa in my friend’s apartment, with full-length windows opening onto the balcony and the coolness of the winter air penetrated by rays of sun. Breakfast is oats, topped with peanut butter, banana, and coconut yoghurt, a favourite of mine. I take a moment to appreciate the scene, then go to finish eating quickly, feeling a sudden hurried pull. I get up with the thought ringing out in my head that I had somehow “done breakfast wrong.” I get back to meditating and trying to make the most of the retreat time.
Later that day, I’m practising walking meditation up and down the long corridor. The apartment is still and quiet; there’s barely a sound from the surrounding inhabitants. I step slowly on the carpet. My external world is calm and serene; my internal world is turbulent and chaotic as I start getting caught up in thoughts and emotions. Memories come to mind of times in my life when I felt like I didn’t act as well as I could. I start feeling a sense of guilt and shame. My mind seems to be gaining momentum in the way it presents these to me — one after the other, memory after memory. I see myself acting in an unkind way to others, failing to know things, falling short of the mark. It’s like my mind has taken the role of prosecutor and is presenting evidence at a trial to prove I’m a bad person. I can see a caricature of the proceedings: the lawyer holds up a memory for the courtroom to see, saying, “Here we have Exhibit A demonstrating just how unkind and uncaring Kynan is.” I see myself on retreat as the defendant, with no chance to speak.
I’d known a sense of self-judgement in everyday life as the driving force that pushes me both to do things well and to get things done. But the intensity and constancy of this experience surprise me. I realise how much I normally try to avoid or placate this pattern of criticism — either by turning my attention away, or by attempting to appease this part through trying as hard as I can. I’m also on retreat, so it’s not clear what I should do better to really succeed at breakfast, or how I can improve upon these memories of the past. I recall my colleague Upali telling me “everything that happens on retreat is good,” but I can’t find a way to fold this into that saying. The barrage continues. It seems genuinely bad and I feel like I’m actually a bad person. There’s a continual sense of pressure and frustration.
As the hours continue, I’m crushed under the weight of this sense of not being good enough. I do what I can to be mindful of the sensations and unpleasant feeling tone. The avalanche continues picking up speed, leaving me a wreck as the night draws on. I try skilful ignoring. Paying attention to the breath feels hopeless; investigating the sensations impossible. I curl up into a ball.
Then another memory surfaces: I’m ten years old and going to my very first extension class after being selected to represent my school. I’m so excited — I get whisked away to another school to meet other kids like me, hopeful to make some new friends. In the first class we do a science experiment — placing Smarties in a dish of water and observing the time it takes for the colours to spread and blend into new shades. In the excitement, I barely write anything down; at the end of the class they ask us to hand in our report. I quickly jot down a few notes and put my piece of paper in the pile on the teacher’s desk.
The next week I’m back at the class and the teacher has a stern look. The first thing they do is make sure everyone is listening. Then they hold up a piece of paper. I recoil – it’s my report from the last class. They say that this is inappropriate, unacceptable; this work is simply not good enough. My heart sinks. I’ve never felt so embarrassed and ashamed. I collect my piece of paper. I’m crushed. I never tell my parents, or anyone. I continue with the class, but I’m just going through the motions. The spark has been lost.
I internally vow to never let this happen again. I make sure that anytime there’s something to do, anything that might be judged or assessed, it will be done well enough that I won’t have to feel this way. This is a big job that part of me takes on: to always be good. To push myself so that I won’t be caught out by others.
Seeing this memory has a different feeling. I stop trying to observe the sensations from a distance and fully embrace the felt experience with compassion. My heart opens for this younger self. I sit with him and hear his frustrations. I recognise that bright-eyed ten-year-old and can see that he was just trying his best. It was at best an honest mistake, and at worst he was set up to fail by the adults who expected things without giving clear instruction or support. It’s clear that he didn’t deserve that, and I don’t deserve that. I hold these feelings, lovingly attuning to all this pain and difficulty.
Suddenly I can tune into why there’s such a strong sense of wanting to do things well. I see how this part of me pushes to do well to avoid feeling embarrassed and ashamed. This part of me formed to prevent this hurt. It uses internal criticism to never be caught out. It believes that I need to always be striving to do better to live up to some unreachable standard. I can see how hard this part is working. I feel its pain and exhaustion — all alone in this endless battle to always be better. I understand why it believes this is the only way forward. I feel a tenderness and warmth towards this part of me.
The lawyer, the inner critic, eating my breakfast wrong — all the same movement of protection. Each a pattern of trying to pre-emptively do something better in order to not feel judged, hurt, or attacked later. This part of me just wants to be seen and understood, to know that it isn’t alone. I offer appreciation for how hard it has been working for me. The part, previously so hard and jagged, softens and melts. The intense self-criticism shifts into understanding. I offer kindness and love to this part of me, welcoming it when it arises, appreciating its good intentions. With this, a long-neglected aspect of my being moves towards integration. I feel the spark of being alive and playful return, even if just to enjoy my breakfast and kick my legs as I sit in the sun.
I found my way through this by accident, while suffering more than I needed to. I wish I’d had a map of how to meet my parts through relationship. In the upcoming Liberating Feelings online workshop we’ll explore together how to bring the relational dimension of parts work into meditation.
I recall being on a meditation retreat and seeing someone who was practising diligently but continually running up against a wall in their practice. Over and over they raised their hand and asked what they should do if they weren’t at the level of understanding emptiness. They appeared defeated. Their tone communicated a sense of self-deficiency — that they were failing at the practice. The teacher patiently asked them about their experience, explained the instruction to them again, and tried to give them pointers of what to try next. They praised them for continuing to attend so many of these retreats and tried to encourage them by framing it positively as dedication and perseverance. But I felt like something important was missed. There was an obstacle arising that couldn’t be addressed through insight practice. That felt experience couldn’t be seen through with emptiness practice. I could sense there was a better way, in which the doubt could be explored and felt into, related to differently. I wanted to offer attunement and compassion for their sense of being stuck. My sense was that something wasn’t being touched by the meditation practice; a part of their experience was crying out to be acknowledged and kept being met with silence.
Contemplative traditions, Buddhism among them, offer something genuinely liberating and beautiful in the move from the mundane to the profound. These ways of practising can radically shift how we experience being alive. But the way most traditions and lineages operate falls short for a human being in the world today. This largely comes from setting life and practice in opposition. It sets up a dichotomy that separates and contains rather than integrates.
We might hear this distinction between the ultimate and relative levels of experience. On the ultimate side we place the universal, transcendent, nondual, unconditioned, and “pure”. On the relative side we place the specific, everyday, conditioned, and messy. We can also see this when an experience is taken to belong to the domain of psychology rather than meditation — some content arises and it is thought to be something to ignore, or deal with another time and through different means, such as in therapy.
This separation can be immensely helpful. We need distinctions to make practices clear and usable. At times, skilful ignoring of the content of the mind allows for a powerful deepening and opening. The limitation is that integration is stifled when these are seen as separate concerns, without overlap, and without common ground for bringing practice forward.
—
The image I want to put forward is the double helix. Picture DNA. Two strands spiral around each other as they move forward. They are connected by rods at intervals, lines that bridge and bind them together. The structure is two distinct strands that have a pattern of movement and points of connection.
The ultimate strand is the path of insight. This is insight into emptiness — opened through doorways such as impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self. This path of insight develops through ways of seeing in which the solidity of experience begins to shift and melt, dropping us down into a different sense of existence. These practices reduce fixation and solidity. Eventually, this opens up into recognising that our own nature is beyond what we conventionally experience as mundane existence.
The relative strand is the path of content. This includes feelings, emotions, psychological content, conditioning and upbringing, patterns and behaviours. Rather than being universal, this refers to something specific about our individual experience. It includes our likes and dislikes. It’s also the ways we react and get triggered. It is our style of being, what we are in our humanity, and what it means to be you rather than somebody else (or no one). The side of content also includes the things we desire, that we engage with most deeply, and what we love. These practices contribute to a healthy sense of self that is grounded and stable.
There’s a way of relating to both that brings them onto the meditative path, so that all of experience can be integrated. Sometimes we frame meditation only as the fair-weather practice, when the body, heart, and mind are amenable. A meditator might be cruising along until things start surfacing and they’re left saying “I can’t meditate any more!” The implication here is that we are meditating until we run into something too difficult, then we have to stop and take that into a different domain. Instead, I’m proposing that from the beginning we can learn to relate well to whatever comes up, so that working with content actually deepens our practice. Rather than being a detour or a sidetrack, this is the path.
To do this, we find connections across the spiral. There are moments in practice where we jump from one side of the spiral to the other. We might be practising a specific meditation technique, such as śamatha (calm abiding), and realise that there’s something in our experience that needs tender care rather than to be ignored or calmed. Or we may be engaged in trying to understand our psychology, and realise we’ve become fixated on our past and the self-image that came from it — recognising that we can instead use insight to see through it and find space and relief. We find a bridge to the other strand of the helix and it allows us to deepen.
Eventually this opens to a smooth flow between insight and content, between ultimate and relative. In this sense, we flow along in the centre of the helix, with both sides arcing and spiralling, allowing us to unfold more and more. To do this, bring a loving attunement to your present-moment experience. All content is seen as practice.
—
An example. I was practising the śamatha meditation technique according to The Mind Illuminated. I’d been chipping away diligently, increasing my sitting duration, gradually working on ignoring distractions and coming back to my object. Eventually I had a taste of stability — a clearing where the mind settled and I could stay with the meditation object for a while, able to return quickly when distraction arose. It was really nice! I thought to myself: “Finally, some fruits from all the time I’d put into the practice.”
I wanted to get back to that state and was excited to return the next day. When I sat down, I found myself at Stage 2. The mind was completely off track, wandering like a box of frogs, or like a wild elephant. I found this incredibly frustrating. Where was all this stability I had so carefully cultivated? What did I do wrong here?
In this stark contrast I cognitively recognised that this was the experience of not-self that I’d read about, taking place before my eyes. I could see how I’d been mistaken in thinking the mind existed independently, something I could control and identify with as a self. Rather than relief, this insight brought up frustration. It kicked up old stuff and spun me into a loop. At this point the teachings became an annoyance rather than a source of wisdom. Upon seeing the frustration, I recognised that my experience was also coloured by a kind of sadness. I intuitively let go of my meditation object and went towards the frustration and sadness. I opened to them and let them be there.
This was a great sadness at not being able to control the mind, to will something into existence. I was coming to terms with the fact that even in my own mind, I didn’t have agency. I had lost control of what had felt like the only thing I could control. I’d lost what had felt like me. For the first time, I saw it clearly. I felt the grief of not being able to make something happen through will. As I opened to those feelings and emotions, the grief crystallised as this loss.
I felt into the grief as it appeared in my body. I fully allowed it to open and unfold. Then something shifted. The mind, which had been scattered and restless, settled into a state of calm. A wave of emotion passed through and left a clear space in its wake.
As I continued meditating, I recognised that I’d dropped down into a deeper level of experience. I no longer felt like I was a separate self meditating and controlling the mind. All experience was unfolding on its own. I rested in this state. Everything became so easy and clear, with no sense of needing to do or control anything. Awareness had become spacious and open. Afterwards I realised I’d dropped past Stage 4 into something more like the effortless stability of Stage 8.
Surprised at the efficacy of this, I realised that insight becomes embodied and integrates through these mismatches of experience and opening to emotions. Not only did I shift my way of being and access that resource, but the insight into non-controlling also deepened and became more available.
—
This also works in the other direction from content to insight. I’m thinking back to my first call with an experienced coach who was working in Aletheia,[1] the system I am currently studying. Aletheia is a methodology that integrates psychological modalities such as parts work with the tenets of nondual meditation.
To begin the session, I brought in that I’d been feeling stressed and that there was a “get things done” part of me that I associated with a sense of pressure and tension in my head. We worked on this in real-time direct experience as a form of meditation. We felt into the present-moment experience and contacted this part through the sensations, emotions, and thoughts. We got to know it, asking some gentle questions, making sure we were relating to it from presence with a welcoming, kind attunement. This took some navigating as even just contacting this part of me brought up other parts, including a sense of frustration and a concern that this pattern of stress was causing me difficulty. We acknowledged and felt these, waiting for their okay before going on.
Once the “get things done” part felt seen and understood, there was a turn. Gradually the pressure shifted toward sadness. Underneath was a sense of hopelessness, as if all my efforts are futile. After I stayed with the sadness for a few minutes, a hole opened in my chest like a dark void, an absence. I felt as if I were slowly imploding, sucked into a black hole at the centre of my being. Acknowledging the fear that arose, I stayed with this absence, gently opening to it.
Suddenly it shifted. Instead of an absence, it was a presence of stillness and peace. Rather than a bleak vacuity, there was openness. I rested in this spaciousness. It was serene and profound. I felt a wave of calm and contentment. I distinctly remember sitting and watching the birds outside the window afterwards, in awe of the coexisting movement and serenity. I felt whole and complete. Gratitude spontaneously arose. My life was totally fine. The stress of existing in this world couldn’t damage the core stillness and peacefulness of my being. I could be stillness and also live and act in the world.
I was amazed that in a 50-minute call I’d dropped into what had previously taken me three days of silent retreat to reach. Since then this stillness has become more and more accessible, not by cultivating perfect conditions for silent meditation, but by going through the content and emotions.
—
Aletheia names this as the cycle of deepening and surfacing. When we drop down in depth of being, content often surfaces. Parts of us arise that have concerns, or don’t feel comfortable without a job. When we work with these parts and patterns of mind by allowing the emotions, we can drop further into our depth. Surfacing happens repeatedly in meditation. It also happens just by going about life. To see this as surfacing and deepening is to appreciate that all experience is unfolding meaningfully.
Seen this way, the two movements have names. The deepening is wisdom — dropping into a depth where we recognise that we are Presence. The surfacing is love — turning toward what arises to meet and hold it. Life takes place in between.
This is the flow Nisargadatta points to: “Love says: ‘I am everything.’ Wisdom says: ‘I am nothing.’ Between the two my life flows.”[2] If we think of this flow as the unfolding of life through the double helix, we move between love and wisdom, we connect them, we find the union. When we open to emotions and difficulty with love, it brings forward wisdom; when we open to wisdom, it brings forward compassion.
Integration isn’t a phase of practice — the practice is integration. It only asks that we learn to relate to our experience in new ways. We can honour the liberating power of the traditions and still bring nuance and care to the full range of human experience.
This path lets us open to and choose the direction we move in — to be both released and integrated, to find freedom and meaning, and to discover new dimensions of being right here in this life, in this world
Warmly, Kynan
This is the work that matters most to me. Where I can do it most fully is one-to-one. If something here speaks to you, I’d be glad toexplore it together.
P.S. Retreats are currently being planned for the rest of the year — save the dates! Look out for registration opening in the coming weeks.
4 days, 10-13 September
10 days, 6-15 November
Aletheia is a coaching method founded by Steve March that brings psychological work together with nondual meditation. Its teaching centres on unfolding — letting experience open and integrate as a way of being. I’ve found it deeply helpful. You can learn more here: https://integralunfoldment.com/learn-more↩︎
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That (The Acorn Press, 1973), 269.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
(emphasis mine)
We adopted a cat five weeks ago. Her name is Mimi and we affectionately call her Memes. She celebrated her 1st birthday this week.
I wonder about her life. About her past as a stray on the street. About what she really thinks of this apartment and these two humans that are now her loving companions.
Mimi is vicious when pouncing on a bee soft toy; tender when snuggling to be brushed. She closes her eyes and nudges her head towards the window to smell the outside air. She perches on a shelf and watches us go about our busyness. I bow to her while blinking slowly, doing my best to communicate love and safety.
Since Mimi has come into our lives, I’m moved by her softness and the raw animal of her being. I’m touched by the divine aliveness that fills her graceful movements.
I’m humbled by this creature that depends on me to survive. I come across a reddit thread asking what to do in their cat’s last days. I know it’s likely I’ll outlive Mimi and be witness to her death. The sadness I feel is poignant and clarifying: I choose to move closer and to love her more even though it risks greater pain.
I sit quietly and consider this imaginally. Mimi offers herself to my imagination. The image of self, other, and world has shifted to include her. The threads of my life are now interweaving with Mimi’s. A new meaningfulness unfolds, felt but not named.
Where there is love there is image. When we open to something and find this sense of love, we can recognise that the imaginal is working away in the background, concocting a sense of things, finding our place in the world.
This is a different move from reducing suffering or letting go of clinging. Sometimes it also opens us to grief and pain — there is always that risk. What it promises in return is deep meaningfulness, found in the particulars: softly breathing curled up in a ball, meowing in excited greeting, yawning after a long nap.
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The meditation workshop on Imaginal Practice I’m leading is coming up next week. If you feel the world offering itself to your imagination, come explore with me.
I never met my Uncle Chwan. I’ve only seen a small sepia-tinged photo of him on the altar at my Aunty’s house, next to photos of Ah Ma and Ah Kong, my paternal grandparents. The second youngest of eight siblings, he was kind and gentle. My Dad and Aunty talk of their little brother as the nice one of the family. I can sense the truth in this.
All eight of my Dad’s siblings moved from Malaysia to Australia to go to university. After graduating with an accounting degree, Uncle Chwan decided to become a Buddhist monk in the Thai Forest tradition. This was the time — the family was healthy and well, he’d finished his studies, and something called him to live a different life.
He travelled to Thailand to ordain in the Ajahn Chah lineage at Wat Pa Nanachat — known locally as the monastery for westerners. The details are cobbled together from stories I’ve heard from family and from a monk who was there at the time. To ordain he was required to arrive with few possessions and no money, taking motorbike rides through jungles, giving up everything he knew to live with strangers. He turned his life upside down at 24 for a chance to dedicate himself to something greater.
Uncle Chwan’s Dharma name was Nyanaviro in Pali — meaning “courageous in wisdom” or “one whose courage is knowledge”. This Thai Forest tradition is characterised by austere, relentless dedication to the path.
A couple of years after ordaining, Uncle Chwan became ill. The abbot of the monastery had encouraged the monks to be equanimous with their illnesses rather than seek medicine, a reticence to which Uncle Chwan was already inclined. When his illness got worse, he continued meditating in his kuti. After he didn’t come to the morning chanting and meditation, he was found dead by another monk.
It was incredibly rare for a monk to die so young. The monastery held a special ceremony and dozens of monks travelled from the surrounding towns to pay their respects. But almost all of my family couldn’t travel to such a remote place at that time. The cause of death was said to be encephalitis caused by malaria or rabies. If caught early, this could have been treated. Death by equanimity.
I’m haunted by his ghost. He first came to me in meditation cautiously, hesitantly. I was unsure of opening to this dimension and the image flickered and faded in turn.
Eventually I allowed the image to come. Uncle Chwan visits me — adorned in ochre robes, shaved head, thin-framed glasses. He sits by me. Sometimes he offers me a smile, or a gentle hand on my shoulder. I sense that he is always with me, a phrase I’d dismissed when hearing others talk about these presences. I feel held in a kind embrace, watched over. During a month-long retreat, I experienced so much pain and mental anguish that I felt close to giving in, but I continued on, comforted by his presence in my imaginal sangha. He sat among my field of support.
I can’t explain the tenderness and kindness I feel from this image. What I feel is love. I feel heartbreak. I feel a family that was shattered at his death and maybe never recovered. I feel both endless grief and limitless compassion. I break down into tears when I see his half-smile. I’m held in his Loving Presence.
I’m 10 days into a 21 day silent retreat. Here with one dear friend, at another friend’s property on Birpai land. Each dawn and dusk my friend and I quietly make our way to the riverbank to try to get a glimpse of the platypuses playing in the water. They are shy and smaller than I expect – while keeping our distance we can only just make out their beaks and heads as they coast along the water, dive under, and resurface.
My friend leaves in the morning and we share a warm goodbye. I spend the rest of the day in a daze. Night falls and I settle in to sit. I reach for my shawl and find my friend has left me a parting gift: a block of vegan chocolate and a note of encouragement. I break down into tears, an overwhelming sense of being lost, lonely, and undeserving of such kindness.
The following day I stumble around. I question what I’m doing there on retreat. I wonder why I needed to leave my life in order to go be quiet somewhere far away. I doubt the value of practice and my own place on the path. I lose interest in the birds, the trees, the animals. My mind becomes a solipsistic, harsh desert. I realise I’m in a mini existential crisis. I hope it stays mini.
For solace, I turn to Rob Burbea’s Dharma talks. I bring my headphones and a cup of tea to the riverbank and find a stable rock to sit on, carefully watching for snakes. Rob’s soft, kind voice reaches across space and time, carried by scratchy audio recording. He speaks of being “in love with the way”, of cherishing the path itself, and how there are many different fantasies and myths of the path that we inhabit and take on. These images form the sacred ground of practice. We move between images of being healed, to the reverence of tradition, to being a scientific researcher, to seeing all of the path and life as art. I sense into how my own sense of the path had become small and contracted, not able to hold what was asking to come through. I sit with this, testing out different images of myself on the path.
I am an explorer of consciousness. I am a student of Dharma. I am a lover and mystic. I am an artist, creating a life. I am a servant of the divine.
I see all of these as true, as false, as empty, as image. They are vivid like rainbows in the sky, appearing but without solidity or fixed location. They have no independent existence, no basis of their own, yet they are alive and animating. They shift my way of looking. Each time I reorient myself I notice a different North Star, a different direction to head, new aspects to love and cherish about this life and path.
This immediately moves something deeply in me. I rediscover a love of practice. I see myself in a different light and realise that I don’t want to be nobody, and that my attempts have obviously failed.
In the years following the retreat, I continue unfolding imaginal practice. I notice that practitioners each have their own unique fantasy and myth of the path. To a large degree this image influences, if not determines, their engagement, fire, dedication, and passion for practice. It sets up how they will respond to difficulty, uncertainty, and suffering. I see students grind away, stuck between traditions, as well as those who happily dwell in the in-between spaces, letting their fantasy shift and grow.
I realise I’m being called to teach imaginal practice. I recognise that teaching this is challenging, and perhaps even disturbing for many people. However, the response has also shown that it is validating – confirming that people already encounter the imaginal in practice, without a name for it. There’s already a sense of the beauty and love available when allowing this in. The practice and teaching of the imaginal becomes part of my own image and sense of my own path. I want to point to something, to gesture towards this, to make something visible that is quite likely unexamined and unexplored.
Imagine yourself atop a misty mountain, fog obscuring every direction. As you stand here, you know the terrain is complex — mountains and valleys, rivers and ravines. You gaze around and see only haze. Peaks rise over clouds, the way there shrouded in mystery.
“Wow, that’s some nice mist. Now mist that nice must be covering something pretty specky.”
Climbing a mountain in Liuzhou, from the series “Picture Book of Chinese Poems (Toshi gafu no uchi)” by Totoya Hokkei Original public domain image from Art Institute of Chicago
You know that you aren’t on the highest peak, yet it was a long climb to get here. It took everything you had, for all of your life, to move higher, to do better. Hesitant to begin descending, you take off your bags. You get cosy where you are. Thoughts arise in pensive moments: “well, this isn’t so bad, I’ll just make the most of this” as you open a can of beans from your stash. You’ve become stuck in a good place. Then something calls to you. The possibility of higher peaks. More mountains to climb. To more deeply know yourself. To see what you are capable of. To experience the full range of freedom and meanginfulness.
When you go to take the next step you realise it must be downwards. Stepping down is awkward and your feet hurt when landing on uneven rocks. Trying anything from here is a tad uncomfortable. Whatever comes next challenges you and makes you question whether to stay or try for the next peak.
This is where a guide comes in handy: someone who’s been to a higher mountain can share tales of that place, the path to get there, and what the view looks like from the next peak.
To follow the guide you have to be willing to trust — to set off on a journey that first leads down the mountain, then hopefully up the next one. You commit to following the path long enough to really see if it leads to a higher mountain. Without momentum, you’ll take a few steps then turn back. A good guide instils trust and confidence that each step has its place in the whole journey.
Rediscovering the Joy of Being Taught
For a long time, I attended teachings but they somehow didn’t land. Even when talks were interesting and enjoyable, I sat thinking “this won’t change my meditation tomorrow.” Worse yet, techniques would get mixed and I’d find myself looking for landmarks that were off in the other direction entirely. Something changed in the past 18 months. I’ve attended retreats and workshops where the teachers were doing something genuinely different. I rediscovered the joy of being a student and having things to learn. I delighted in the voyage to get to the next peak.
One time I was learning a new framing of the practice of calm abiding. I was already very familiar with this practice from another set of teachings. I found the first few meditations challenging — I was grinding through, trying to make sense of it, comparing and contrasting to what I already practised, thinking I’d made a mistake to ever leave my cosy hilltop. I was homesick. Realising that this was a golden opportunity right in front of me, I gave in to the new instructions; I trusted the guide. Once I stopped resisting, I quickly landed in effortlessness — not through sitting a long time as I had been taught, but through following elegant, efficient moves. This felt experience of tranquility is now right there, just a few steps away.
Rather than learning from a book, I was being welcomed into a new landscape and invited to play there. I was given new frameworks and maps, but more importantly, I was told where to step so I could feel it in my body. I could sense, in real time, how my understanding shifted and opened up.
From this experience I realised I could do more to show others the views I’d seen myself.
The guide first meets you exactly where you are. Then they point out the way to the next vista. Each step unfolds into the next. When you really land in where you are, the questions begin to form of where to go next, the fog opens up with each step you take until you are steady on the path under your feet.
Meditation Workshops
Let’s unfold a path of meditation that feels alive in your bones. We can walk the trail to the next summit.
My new offering is Meditation Workshops — a full day deep dive. The ask is a full day of your time for a chance to explore the teachings, coming out with a view from the top of a new mountain, and a map to guide you back there.
Feb + Mar — The Elephant Path of Calm Abiding Apr + May — Exploring Imaginal Practice Jun + Jul — Meditation, Emotions, and the Nervous System Aug + Sep — Cultivating Insight Through Ways of Looking Oct + Nov — Insight into Emptiness and Nonduality Dec + Jan — The Freedom of Spacious Awareness
These are on the first Sunday of the month, alternating in-person and online. There’ll be a curriculum with teachings on specific topics: instruction, guided meditation, q+a, practice pod chats, plus recordings and resources. Lots of chances to get support and guidance. Coalescence Sangha will also explore each theme in the lead-up to each workshop.
Okay that’s enough talking, let’s go explore some trails. I’ve got the map and I’ve packed plenty of snacks. Come join me and I’d love to show you some of the views that I’ve had the pleasure of exploring.
I’m sitting on the beige, scratchy carpet in the spare room of my unit in Maylands, a quaint-yet-growing suburb of Boorloo (Perth). I’m trying to meditate and have a growing sense of failure. I gaze at the light slowly crawling across the carpet. Restless and bored, I get up and do something else. Maybe meditation just isn’t for me.
Much earlier, I’m sitting on another carpet. This time I’m young, maybe nine years old, and Dad has offered to teach me to meditate. I’m thrilled, it’s all so mysterious to me. What happens when Dad goes off and sits quietly in the evenings? It could be anything! We sit on the floor in the front room of the house with the lights dim. Dad guides me to notice the sensations of my breath. I picture it like I’m watching an animation: breath coming into my body like flowing coloured lines moving through my nose, filling my lungs, then releasing on the exhale to rejoin the atmosphere. I enjoy the feeling of being calm, but I get sleepy straight away. I also feel like I’m somehow doing it wrong — I’m picturing something but it feels like I’m making it up, using my highly active imagination instead of doing it “properly.” Is this what meditation is meant to be? In the ensuing years I only meditate when in bed as something to do while waiting for my mind to drift off. I don’t recall us sitting together again.
I’m in a chair gazing over a busy Sydney street on a cloudy weekday afternoon. The recent move has been challenging and I’m in the middle of a spell of depression and anxiety. I can’t seem to break out of feeling this way through my usual methods and I’m starting to feel desperate. I come across a book: “The Mindful Way Through Depression.” While it sounds like it’s just what I need, I’m short of spoons and can’t summon the energy to get further than the title. Instead I read a short article online, remember yoga teachers talking about mindfulness, and try to do a practice. I bring my mind to the present moment sensations. I watch myself from a more objective viewpoint. I see myself drinking tea, walking up the stairs, feeling sad, obsessing about a stressful event. I watch a thought arise and pass and suddenly feel a freedom and relief I haven’t felt in ages: I don’t need to be so caught up. But this is only fleeting, fading away mere moments later. After I stop practising I’m right back to rumination. I know that if I could continue this mindfulness it would help but have no idea how to make it stick. It feels like I opened a doorway to a vast beautiful view that closed again in the blink of an eye. I have no idea what the key is to get the door open again, or to keep it open.
In each of these scenes, I felt like I had started school without books, anything to write with, or language to communicate with others. Without a framework and map, I got lost at every turn.
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Once I got my head above water from the period of depression, anxiety, and burnout, I had a moment of insight. I realised that I needed to find some way of working with the mind. It was suddenly clear that my mind was turning an objectively good life situation into something miserable. I felt like I was stuck playing a cursed game that I had invented; I was trapped in a prison of my own creation. Something in how I was relating to experiences wasn’t working. I knew I needed something that would help me learn from these experiences.
A friend happened to give me a copy of the book The Mind Illuminated and I began practising consistently. I moved up and down the stages of The Elephant Path. The guidance I received in that book, combined with a few chats with more experienced practitioners, brought the practice to life. As I sat, I felt more calm and clear. I learned how my mind could so easily shift into criticism and place blame on myself, or feel responsible for things I couldn’t control, such as a moment of distraction. I saw, moment-by-moment, how my mind constructed this prison.
One morning a few months later I’m sitting on a cushion, this time on parquet flooring. I observe the sensations of the body and the breath. I watch thoughts about my unfinished thesis chapter, what to cook for dinner, an idea for an artwork. There’s a gentle sense of calm and comfort. The bell goes off after 45 minutes and I open my eyes to a soft light angled in through the apartment window. I take a moment to appreciate the warmth of the rays in the cool air. I realise that I’m just…fine. It’s another day and my mind isn’t a bad place to be.
Over the months that followed, I knew that I’d never experience the same difficulty with anxiety and depression. Each day, each week, I noticed the patterns of the mind and saw how intention and attention shaped my world.
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Looking back, it became clear that I was lucky to find a foundational practice that helped make meditation not only function, but also to feel good. The Buddha said that practice should be “good at the beginning, good in the middle, good at the end.” That on its own is a vast beautiful view and a doorway worth opening.
I’m delighted to go back to my roots and to bring this practice to life through a full-day of exploration on the 8th of March. Come join me : )
In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a new year (or it will be soon for the lunar calendar devotees). The question I’m asking myself now:
What am I taking refuge in?
Refuge here means what I trust in, what I turn to, what I rely on. Where do I go when the shit hits the fan?
I drop in the question and wait for an answer. What comes is a quiet resonance, a subtle hum, the room tone of spacious awareness. I go about my days and gradually these quiet tones form a stable drone.
I take refuge in the practice. I take refuge in the cultivation of wisdom and compassion.
Wisdom is the clear knowing, the recognition that who we ultimately are is the vast wholeness, the ocean of awareness, the beyond-beyond that is also right here, the deepest sense of being as this clear, pristine knowing itself.
Compassion is the tender caring that arises in response to the suffering of not recognising this wisdom. It’s empathising with others when they experience suffering. Compassion is connecting and sharing the complexity, the uncertainty, and the feeling of insecurity that flows in daily life. It’s embracing the not-knowing, together.
In practical terms, what I’m placing refuge in, for this year and beyond, is the trust that profound wisdom is available through practice, and that connecting with others is the compassion that lights the path. This sharing with others is a real gift, a guiding compass, and the practice itself.
Attunement is picking up on the relational field so that you have an embodied felt sense of what is going on for you, both individually and collectively. It’s about openness and acceptance of another. It’s seeing and hearing the other person, just as they are, without trying to change them. It’s much easier for me be kind and compassionate when I have a sense of what someone else is feeling – this is when I can really understand what they are going through and connect with their suffering, regardless of whether there’s anything I can do about it. By attuning to another, I am meeting the other person’s need for contact, while also allowing my own need for contact to be fulfilled.
For me, I’ve found difficulty with self-attunement, that is, knowing what I’m feeling. Sometimes this is not knowing I’m dysregulated until after the fact. Other times it’s letting frustration or anger build up without being clear about what factors are contributing to it. Sometimes it just takes me some time to realise I’m sad. I also sometimes have had trouble picking up on other people’s emotions, especially if they aren’t communicated explicitly. I just find it hard at times to know whether someone’s body language and slight change in affect means they want something or want to be left alone. The practice of attuned noting has been a great help.
Relationships require attunement. When we are spending time with others, and especially if we are close to someone or spend a lot of time with someone, we pick up on how the other person is feeling and base our actions on that, at least to some degree. The trouble arises if it isn’t so easy to know what the other person is feeling or if we ignore certain cues and signals. There’s three aspects to this: 1) I have my own feelings that I may be more-or-less consciously aware of. 2) I am expressing these feelings in some way. My feelings are influencing the relational field. 3) The person I am with picks up on the relational field.
For a lot of people, knowing your own feelings can be tricky. Feelings shift and change, and your awareness of them comes and goes. This influences what we express, and how skilfully our feelings are expressed in our words and actions. This then influences what the other person will pick up on.
It’s a relatable human experience to be told something about what you are doing and to only in that moment learn that you are feeling a certain way. For example, I didn’t know I was frustrated until my partner pointed out that I’m hunched over and making grrr sounds through gritted teeth while trying to fix a broken electronic device. The expression of feeling and emotion is always happening, even when unconscious.
Ideally, I would know what I’m feeling, I’d express it in skilful ways (appropriate to the situation), and people around me would pick up on this and in turn respond appropriately. This clearly isn’t always the case. It is also an area that can get more and more attuned and refined.
Noting Feeling States Meditation
We can practise noting “feeling states” in order to be more consciously aware of what is arising and to be able to put into language the present moment experience so that it can be picked up on by others.
In this practice the term “feeling state” covers emotion (anger, sadness, joy), mind states (boredom, curiosity), and also the sensory experience in the body that I have that co-arises with emotion or mind states (when feeling anger I feel warm in the face and tension in my arms and hands, or when I notice a mind state of curiosity there’s a lightness in the chest and head). The emotion, mind state, or sensation are all equally valid doorways to knowing what is present for you in that moment.
Importantly this practice held within a container that is agreed upon and made explicit. There’s a set time for the practice and the intention is clear. Try to ensure that the method is understood. This means that it can become a space where there is an appropriate level of intimacy and vulnerability. The goal here is to create a space for simply connecting with how things are right now. It’s not about complaining, or trauma dumping, or oversharing. If it starts to lean towards stories, blame, or trying to understand why a feeling is present, be cautious. Acknowledge what is present on the level of the feeling state (the sensations and emotions are something that you can agree is the present moment experience) – try to bring it back to what is present and how this feels in the body.
This is a practice of out loud labelling, with one person noting their present moment feeling tone and the other person attuning to what they are saying and feeling.
The practice is straightforward once you get the hang of it. Here are the dot point steps:
Instructions for Noting Feeling States – Dyad Practice
Create a container
Find a space that is calm and quiet enough that you can do this without interruption. It helps to face each other, or at least be able to see each other. You might like to sit in a different location from regular activities.
Make sure you both know enough about the practice intention and structure to feel enough safety to proceed, and discuss if there is some hesitation or apprehension. Acknowledge these feelings.
Set an intention together. Something brief tends to work, such as “to find connection”, or “to explore attunement together”, or “to know how we are both feeling right now”.
Decide on a length of time to practice for and the steps to take. Set a timer if that’s helpful. Choose who will note first.
Time in silence – 1 minute
Take some time in silence, optionally with eyes closed. Connect with your internal experience. Notice what is present for you. Allow whatever is there to be there, without exclusion. You may notice physical sensations, thoughts, emotions, and stories or parts of the mind.
Noting and Attuning – 2 minutes each
The noter begins labelling their present moment feeling tone experience out loud (eyes can be open or closed). Aim for a steady pace, around 5 seconds per label tends to work well. You might say things such as: “calm”, “bored”, “agitated”, “happy”, “love”, “anxious”, “humour”, “tender”, “vulnerable”, “frustrated”, “stressed”, “excited”, “joyful”, “murky” etc. There’s always a pressure release option – you can say “don’t know” or “unclear” or “pass” or simply be silent.
While the noter is saying this out loud, the attuner listens and watches, holding space for the noter and connecting with what they are saying and feeling. Tune in to the noter’s tone, rhythm, breath, and subtle facial expressions. The attuner might notice correlations, or they might even intuit what feeling state is arising (there might also be guesses that don’t match up). Notice how it feels to attune and if there is a sense of alignment or misalignment. Listen with presence and allow whatever is taking place to unfold.
Check in and debrief – 3 minutes
Take some time to debrief and talk through the experience. How was that for you? What did you notice? What was challenging? What came more easily? What helped you engage with the practice?
Conclude the practice. Take turns to speak about how you are feeling now, and if there’s anything you need, or some way you will move forward from here.
Extra Tips
The time durations here are just suggestions. Start with something short that is easy to commit to as a low-cost experiment. You can even spend just one minute on each phase.
When noting these feeling states, there’s a few interesting things that occur.
You might find that the states change more rapidly than you expect. This happens because when paying attention to the feeling state it brings more clarity to the emotion and sensation, leading to identifying more complexity and richness, as well as a faster rate of change than you may have previously noted. By saying the label out loud, you are also palpating the feeling state, meaning that you are giving it a little massage that makes it change or shift in some way. The degree of equanimity and acceptance also contributes to this, allowing those present moment states to be there without any need to change them allows them to shift more rapidly. Acceptance leads to change.
The states that you notice might vary wildly, even moment to moment. You might be noting “humour” and then the next second “anger” or “sadness”. There might be “strength” and then shortly after “feeling small”. You might also find it helpful to label things like “thinking”, “story”, “belief”, “remembering”, “planning”, “fantasising”.
There are also a range of labels that are worth familiarising yourself with as they help when you aren’t quite clear on what is there, labels like “something”, “blank”, “vague”, “murky”, “unsure”, “don’t know”. You might also notice that the feeling is changing rapidly, in which case acknowledging this might help, such as “changing”, “shifting”, “flowing”, or “feeling”.
It is normal to find it challenging at first to locate the feeling tone and to note continuously. It’s perfectly fine to say you don’t know or to label “blank”. It might take some time just noting blank before you discover a distinct feeling tone. No problem. The key here is to tune in to what is present for you — the truth of your present moment experience is whatever you are aware of, even if that’s nothing distinct!
For me this has been a high value practice. There have been plenty of times I’ve felt like I didn’t want to do it before we started, but I don’t remember a single time when I didn’t feel glad to have done it afterwards.
Find a friend and try it out – see for yourself if this is valuable. If you are curious and want to try it out in a welcoming space, you can come along to Sit For A Bit, or get in touch with me.
I’ve just left a Zoom call for a self-organised online meditation group and I’m buzzing with an open tenderness. It’s a small group, four of us chatting tonight for an hour. We take it in turns to speak about our practice and anything dharma-adjacent: sharing our challenges of pain and fear, our celebrations of meditative insights and deepenings, and our contemplations on this complex existence. The group feels like a gift, a treasure. It’s a space of heartfelt connection and playful joking. There’s a tone that is somehow both totally uncontrived and deadly serious about awakening. I feel waves of gratitude and appreciation for these other humans and their willingness to connect.
During the call I share that I’ve been thinking about sangha and how grateful I am to have people who listen and understand when I share the contents of my mind. This has opened up a deeper dimension of friendship than I experienced in my first 20+ years. It has also been invaluable to progressing on the path and in life. I talk about how much it helps to just have people who will listen, and that I trust. Sharing this to the group feels like it folds these threads together, my words are understood and find a palpable resonance. My travel companions nod and smile in joyful agreement.
I’ve been gifted with many great sanghas. This online group has been meeting since 2020. I have a number of teacher friends who offer support and guidance and shared understanding. I have dear friends who are devoted to different aspects of the path that help me to expand my understanding (special shout out to my friends dedicated to the practice of Awakened Connection, for the cherished friendship and the gifts they bring). I also have a growing camaraderie with my classmates in the Aletheia Training Program, which has opened up new doorways. Through online groups, I’ve also developed friends that I will keep for life, that will always have a base of understanding to return to. I’m also so grateful for Coalescence Sangha, for everyone who joins the events I lead, and for the amazing team that has helped me offer retreats!
The lovely retreat team!
I’ll go out on a limb and say that sangha is the most important dimension of meditation practice. Having friends that meditate is a better predictor of whether you’ll stick with the practice and deepen practice than any other measure.
Why is having meditation friends so helpful? Sangha is the convergence of social acceptance with interest and meaningfulness – and meditation, practised deeply, cannot help but touch on the deepest and most meaningful aspects of our lives.
It’s undeniable that we are social creatures. Humans have a social capacity that is deeply ingrained in our biology. We take in the culture that is around us; we absorb what we are surrounded by. We can find so much joy and fulfilment in our relationships. We also find that a lot of our deepest needs are around social qualities: love, acceptance, safety, and value. When these aren’t met in satisfying ways, it leaves us hurt. Unfortunately for many of us the greatest pain and difficulty in our lives tends to come in relationships that failed to meet these needs.
Sangha has the capacity to repair this hurt through the offer of contact and connection. Sounds lofty right! But all great journeys begin with a single step.
For me, it has taken some time. At first, I was shy to open up and often felt like there were parts of my experience that simply weren’t okay to share. It’s been a process of folding this in, beginning with saying when I did feel uncomfortable or uncertain, even if I didn’t know what that was about – and to be seen in exactly that experience.
When I turn up to these groups and I share my experience, I gradually open up, and I am seen and understood. I feel held and appreciated, exactly as I am. It’s a felt experience of the practice coming through in relation: I am becoming more equanimous with my experience as others offer being with. I deepen my contact with myself and with others and in doing so it reveals a depth of experience.
Now I’m going to quote a sutta from the Pāli Canon, because I love hearing this, and I think I’ll keep repeating it until I no longer can.
Ananda said to the Buddha, “This is half of the path: admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie.”
“Don’t say that, Ananda. Don’t say that. Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the path. When one has admirable people as friends, companions, & comrades, one can be expected to develop & pursue the noble eightfold path.
— Upaḍḍhasutta, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (with my own adjustments of gender, epithets, and emphasis)
This sutta points to the meaningfulness and significance of having friendship, companionship, and camaraderie – it isn’t an auxiliary to the practice, friendship is the practice. We practice in our relationships, and our relationships sustain our practice.
Sweet Potato Sangha — a painting gifted to me by Ju, I don’t know the artist unfortunately!
How can you find sangha? First, reflect on how sangha fits in with your life and if it matches your intentions and values around practice. Maybe you already have some sense of community – this is an invitation to check in and offer contact. If you feel you could do with more connection, start with finding someone you get along with. When you join a class, if you resonate with someone, reach out and see if they want to chat. Find other people online or in-person that share an interest in meditation, and especially if they seem to be exploring in similar ways. Build from there, step by step. You might just have one friend you chat with, a family member you sit with, or a pal who has read the same dharma book as you. You might like to form a practice pod and have others you check in with. Then you begin the process of connecting and gradually finding ways to be with each other in good friendship.
Sit For A Bit has been a beautiful chance to practice with like-minded folks walking distance from my home in the Inner-West of Sydney, a far-off dream when I started meditating and only knew of people on the internet who were interested in this. I hope that it can help foster the kind of community that leads to this admirable friendship and to provide a spark of connection in the practice. Come join some good meditation friendship : )
Reply and let me know what you find most valuable in sangha – I love collecting stories of friendship and hearing people’s appreciation for their meditating friends and communities.
Sunday 5 October 2025, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm Buddhist Library, Camperdown, Sydney
The opportunity to go on retreat is special. To have the time and space to focus on practice is an amazing opportunity. Unfortunately, many of us don’t get this opportunity very often, so we try to carve out bits of time that allow us to do this in the midst of a busy life. The Day of Practice is an opportunity to practise deeply in the city, without leaving our lives.
You can look at this as a detox from communications and electronics, or a nervous system reset. It can be a deep exhale and shift towards relaxation. It also fosters time to go deeper in practice and explore what is meaningful to you about meditation and the path. The day becomes a container to hold your practice and assist cultivating different states of mind.
Śamatha – Practices for Deep Nervous System Resourcing
Tuesday 14 October 2025, 7:00 – 8:30 pm Buddhist Library, Camperdown, Sydney
Śamatha (calm abiding) is a meditation practice that leads to degrees of samādhi (collectedness and unification of mind and body). This calming is a powerful resource for regulating and balancing the nervous system. Beyond simply relaxing, these practices open up the possibility of deep states of effortlessness and equanimity – which can be directly linked to states of deep nervous system regulation.
Attuning to the state of the body and mind in the present moment provides clues as to how to navigate both meditation and daily life in a way that leads to more grounding, settling, and the state of energised calm that is both a resource in itself and sets the stage for freeing insight to arise.
This session will include lecture, guided meditation, and discussion to provide a first hand experience of these practices. All levels of experience are welcome. If you are interested in a deeper exploration.
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Vipassanā – Attuning to the Felt Sense of Freedom
Tuesday 21 October 2025, 7:00 – 8:30 pm Buddhist Library, Camperdown, Sydney
Vipassanā (insight) is the practice of Buddhist meditation that allows for seeing through obscurations to recognise our deepest nature. But how do you know that your insight practice is moving forwards?
As insight practice deepens, there is a felt reduction of clinging and suffering in the moment. You can track this with an awareness of the body and by tuning in to the sense of lightness and openness that is revealed when habitual tendencies relax. We will explore ways of tracking this felt sense of lightness and noticing the fading of perception that reveals deep insights about the fabrication of experience.
This session will include lecture, guided meditation, and discussion to provide a first hand experience of these practices. All levels of experience are welcome, however previous meditation experience is recommended to get benefit from these teachings.
I’m trudging along, hauling my wheelie suitcase down an unsealed bitumen road that leads to the S.N. Goenka Vipassanā Retreat Centre. I’m about to do my first silent meditation retreat and I’m incredibly nervous. I’ve been meditating consistently and reading about meditation, but it now becomes apparent that I really have no idea what I’m in for. Another retreatant, travelling lighter with a shoulder bag, silently overtakes me. It was a busy day for me, clearing my to-do list and tying up loose ends, communicating with others and putting on auto-responders, packing, and then rushing to the train to head two and a half hours out west into the Blue Mountains. On the train ride I try to read a bit more from the meditation manual I’ve been studying, hoping that cramming in a little more meditation advice will help me navigate this experience.
I’ve recently turned 30, finished my PhD in data-generated audio-visual art, and given myself this 10-day retreat as a gift. Throughout my PhD studies I experienced the worst mental health of my life, with depression and anxiety keeping me bedridden for days at a time. Although my mental health has been improving thanks to yoga, meditation, and a pared-back schedule, my hope for this retreat is that it will help me put those dark mental spaces behind me for good. It’s clear to me now that there’s more to the mind and conscious experience in how I’m perceiving the events of life and I yearn to find the kind of understanding that will bring relief.
When I arrive, I put my suitcase with the ragtag pile of luggage in the alcove and then stand around awkwardly. I’m confused about the centre. There’s a bunch of normal rural houses mixed with gravel walkways and lush ponds that seem to invite the bush to encroach and take over. I gradually look around and poke my head into a room to see people lining up to check in. Someone greets me, takes my name, and tells me which dorm room I’m in, giving me a name tag to put beside my bed. They point me in the direction of the dorm and I head there by myself, but when I find my allocated area — reminiscent of the components of a Japanese capsule hotel: a bed with dividers on either side, a few compartments for storage, and a curtain for privacy — I see someone else’s name tag still in the little plastic sleeve. I assume that I must have been given the wrong number and I go back to the reception to wait in line again. This time the volunteer comes down with me and assures me that it was someone from the previous retreat who accidentally left it. It’s this moment that it hits me just how anxious I am. I wish that this process of arriving and checking in could be clearer and warmer. In the dorm, I sit down on the bed and see a tally scratched into the wall, like someone waiting out a prison sentence. The scratches stop short of 10.
There’s a kind of peacefulness here, but I also pick up on a tone of severity. The lack of talking seems to land me in a space of being back in school, or in a library in a foreign country; I don’t know who I can speak to or how things run. However, this also ties in with a palpable presence, that I can only describe as being bright and clear, austere and striking. I feel a sense of awe and anticipation. It seems that this sense of sacredness is being created by the volunteers and the shared sense of commitment. I’m yearning for some kind of powerful shift in my life and I wonder, apprehensively, if this could be it, if I can commit to this enough for it to lead to deep change.
During the retreat I experience many things. I feel an extreme range of emotions from joy and bliss to frustration and anger, while also battling boredom and sleepiness. I earnestly try to attend all the sits, even at 4:30 am, attempting maximum diligence. Then I crash. My body rebels against the strictness and denial of comfort as I give in to the soothing warmth and comfort of a hot shower. I find myself unable to get out, and when I finally do, I have to sprint to the scheduled meditation session, barely making it in time.
I find my practice deepens and expands; I find new aspects of my mind that I hadn’t come across before. I experience some sensations of pressure in my head that feel to me somehow completely wrong, with incredible tension and a sense of energetic blockage. In question time I go up to the teacher and ask about this tension, fully expecting them to be shocked at the situation. Their response: “try deconstructing it”. The conversation ends abruptly, I get up and leave the hall, feeling like I am missing something.
I’m almost ready to give up from an exhausting two days of precisely investigating and deconstructing sensory experience, when I reach a clearing in the mental space — a kind of beautiful opening where things seem to flow and shift. I can only describe this with vague language and imagery as it is an experience that I can’t match up to anything I’d felt to this point in my life. I feel as though all that I perceive turns into water droplets running down a glass pane — I even see this in my visual field as the light seems to trickle in and soothe my weary brain. There is a sense of flow, smoothness, and ease that I had never felt before.
This experience evaporates when I get frustrated that all the vegan dessert has been eaten and all that’s left is the vegetarian option. Despite eating a lot less than I normally do, I don’t feel hungry, but I also notice a growing disconnection from the signals of my body — getting easier and easier to ignore sensations such as hunger and discomfort. By the end of the retreat I realise I’ve unintentionally lost weight.
I find the teachings powerful, funny, and deeply meaningful, aided by the relief of stories and entertainment after 10 hours of silently observing sensations. I also feel incredibly conflicted at how different this lifestyle is from my regular life. The mandate to sit two hours a day to continue on this path seems impossible to maintain. I leave the retreat floating, but also confused; dizzy from the highs of deep meditation and feeling like a traveller dropped into a new land without a map.
Something opens up, something closes.
Thanks for reading. If you’d like to try out a retreat experience that is warm, supportive, and aimed towards integration, there are still a few places open for the 10-day retreat in October.
A quick warning and disclaimer: I talk about mental health difficulties and systemic issues here. This writing is without gory details but please consider your state before proceeding. This text is from my perspective and your experience will differ, please take what is useful and leave the rest.
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This is a series on meditation and burnout. I’m thinking through the causes of burnout, why it is such a challenging experience, what to do in the moment, meditation practices that create important shifts, and developing an understanding that will lead to burnout being done with, for good. This first part sets the view that burnout is sustained by external and internal systems and that self-compassion is the key to beginning practising with this.
Let’s begin with a definition. Burnout arises when demands exceed your capacity. It is a state of depletion that results from an extended period of stress and demand without appropriate support. Burnout is associated with chronic stress, working in caring professions, caring responsibilities, big life events, activist work, or perhaps just witnessing the turmoil of the world with little recourse.
Burnout is a state of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and sense of hopelessness. The phenomenological experience differs person-to-person: it can be felt physically as a heaviness, pain, or tiredness that is not relieved by sleep; emotionally as a sense of misery, flatness, malaise, or depression; or felt existentially as a sense of hopelessness, futility, or worthlessness. Burnout generally comes with a decrease in skills and capabilities: moving and thinking in slow motion, problems seem harder, increased self-criticism, finding the right words becomes a challenge, your memory falters, task-related skills deteriorate.
It brings to mind Samuel Beckett’s refrain: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” It’s the drive to continue to perform, care, and give effort after the resources have been used up.
Reflections on different phases of meditation, what it means to deepen practice, and how an emphasis on trust, confidence, and humility can allow the practice to unfold.
You don’t know what you don’t know
There’s a Deepening Meditation Practice Course coming up in January that Upali and I co-teach (details), which had me pondering who exactly this course is for. We have some text on our website that says it is for “intermediate to advanced practitioners” (the text may have initially been AI-generated ^_^). It got me thinking about whether there really are intermediate meditators and what would be a useful way to self-identify in terms of meditation experience and orientation.
At my talks and Day of Practices (or is it Days of Practice like Days of Our Lives?), I sometimes poll those practitioners I don’t already know by asking how much time they have spent meditating (in their regular formal sits, their consistency of home practice, the number of months or years they’ve practised for, time spent on retreat). I’m using time spent practising as a proxy for how deep they have gone in their practice, which has some utility but obviously doesn’t tell the whole story.
The thing that seems to more reliably point to a high level of experience is to talk to them and see if they have confidence, faith, and trust that the practice does something. This trust is not because they have some high level of skill, but comes with the humility of relating to the practice in such a way that they know it will do what it needs to do. Allow me to expand on this.
When I was studying music technology, we learned a piece of software called Max/MSP (now known as Max, and yes this was very confusing at a time when everyone was using Apple Mac computers). This is a graphical programming language where the user drops in boxes, types certain commands into them, then links them to other boxes. Some of those boxes generate sounds, some manipulate video frames, some perform mathematical functions or send control information. It was a lot of fun for me. I felt like I learned something key about how to program computers: writing explicit instructions, debugging by checking the output to see what wasn’t doing what I intended, and building up a system by breaking the problem down into small components and building it bit-by-bit. I dove into it. I was obsessed. I completed all the tutorials, started making my own projects, and generally could not get enough of programming — oftentimes to the detriment of my sleep.
An excerpt of a patch of mine that renders graphics based on data.
In the communities around Max/MSP they said that there was no such thing as an intermediate user. That people using the software either were beginners, or if they had given it time, were now serious users. This was partly because of the steep learning curve. People tended to start from a place where they didn’t really have any idea of what to do. Then, if they were able to persevere through a period of confusion and bewilderment where they made mistakes, experimented, and learned how to use the software, they would emerge on the other side with an understanding of how to program and get the computer to do what they wanted. At the time, the developers of Max/MSP explicitly didn’t offer intermediate resources: everything was geared either to beginners to understand how the system worked, or for more experienced users to learn about additional tools and modules they could incorporate to extend their patches. The understanding there was that people who had some experience could then figure things out and didn’t require explicit instruction. They worked it out themselves.
When I found meditation and realised it was something I could learn systematically, I did something similar to when I learned to program. I absorbed the 500 pages of The Mind Illuminated, rereading sections to clarify and motivate myself for practice sessions. I learned as much as I could. I was fascinated by the challenge of getting my mind to move in certain ways, to cultivate skilful qualities, and to understand something about the workings of the mind. It was like trying to program a computer that sometimes would follow the instruction I gave, but mostly it wouldn’t. Plus it had lots of emotions! The outputs of the system were rich and complex in different ways. Whereas with programming I could print the output to a terminal, or watch a graphical interface, with meditation I had to find other ways to troubleshoot, to guide, and to get a sense that the practice was doing something. It was challenging, but the challenge was what kept me interested. Gradually I started to see that I could cultivate helpful qualities of mind, that I could move the mind in certain ways, and that I could work with hindrances and obstacles.
I felt like I went from beginner to intermediate in the sense of developing a set of skills that enabled meditation to have some noticeable effect. The practice started making a difference, particularly in my experience of daily life and the ability calm myself and regulate emotions. But what I didn’t realise at the time, is that I’d actually become overconfident and thought that I could fix any problems I had with meditation. Because meditation worked, it was the answer to everything. This became a problem when I found myself unable to meditate my way out of difficulty, namely the burnout and exhaustion I experienced during COVID lock-downs due to taking on too much activist work, among a few other factors such as career dissatisfaction. I found myself stuck in a place that I thought I could use my skills to meditate out of, but my sits had become marathon sessions of twitching; my days filled with frustration and agitation. What got me out of this was feedback and repeated guidance from a meditation teacher, as well as an intensive process of therapy that helped me see how my approach wasn’t working.
This is where comparing meditation to programming falls a little flat. There is something that happens when working with the mind where it eventually becomes a process of non-doing that arrives at a solution. There’s a realisation there that the problem we have been trying to solve has been stated incorrectly from the beginning — in fact it is exactly this incorrect stating of the problem that causes all the stress and resistance. Meditation eventually becomes a practice of letting go of these preconceptions and formulations. It’s an unbinding that allows us to see a different truth in all of our experience.
I would argue that the difference in outlook as one progresses from beginner, to intermediate, to advanced practitioner is a sense of confidence and an ability to self-guide. At first, this self-guidance is about learning different techniques, learning how to move the mind with intention, and how to navigate hindrances. Figuring out how to use intention (read: mental decisions) rather than forceful, pushy effort is a big one. This phase will also often involve learning about tips and tricks, hearing about how others work through certain experiences, and gaining theoretical or conceptual knowledge to support the practice. There’s often a stage where this works very well and leads to a distinct increase in mental qualities such as calm and clarity.
But this self-guidance isn’t about always figuring it out. Eventually it becomes more of a meta-skill. Knowing that meditation doesn’t always give you what you want, but trusting that it gives you what you need. Or framed another way: being able to see meditation as an intimate connection with the unfolding of experience, just as it is. Knowing that for whatever comes up there is something true and real about that. That there can be an OKness with whatever arises that leads to doing less resisting.
This trusting is actually a bigger space of holding, such that it also allows doing and appropriately responding, without the friction of resisting the experience. I want to be clear here: I’m not saying everyone should practise just letting go. It’s a good idea to use the techniques and tools we have for balancing the mind and cultivating mental qualities. I teach these skills and love talking to people about meditation techniques. What I am saying is that there will be a point where these do not work. There will be a time when we can’t solve the problem, can’t control the situation. Then we need something else.
Another moment from university that stuck with me: I was talking a lecturer about a very skilled musician who I really admired. I was commenting on how on listening to their improvisation, they seemed to have mastered their instrument. The lecturer, who knew this musician well, said that the reason their playing is so skilled is because they know how much they don’t know. While this might point to a Dunning-Kruger effect (overestimating capability in areas we don’t know that much about and then underestimating capability in areas we know more about), I would posit that it also points to a kind of openness, humility, and acceptance in realising that there is always more to unfold. There’s a trust in the process itself, in the exploration and discovery, that is not so reliant on knowing how to do something well right now, of controlling the outcome.
To really trust in the process itself means embracing our own finitude. This trust can be terrifying. To really know that this physical pain, this rumination, this suffering is exactly how it is, right now — this is hard to fathom. To recognise our limited agency and the unreliability of phenomena is difficult. To see that the way we have been viewing reality is at a deep level causing our own suffering is challenging to our whole conception of self and world. Because it is difficult, we practice together.
Experienced practitioners know that they can’t do it on their own. Yes, they have trust in their ability to practise and the skills that they’ve worked on. But they also know that there are some things you can’t know about yourself. In fact, this is one of the core tenets of Buddhism: that all beings who haven’t yet reached full awakening are all operating out of delusion — a fundamental misunderstanding of how things are — that causes suffering. If we knew this delusion, then it wouldn’t be delusion and we wouldn’t be suffering. You don’t know what you don’t know. However, what we don’t know can be revealed in various ways. One of the most expedient ways to reveal delusion is by cultivating calm and clarity, then being in relationship with others in ways where we can inhabit an openness that helps to bring to light these misunderstandings.
In the Deepening Meditation Practice Course, we use the word Deepening because it points in a direction rather than to something specific. There are many qualities that you might want to deepen and it’s quite likely that meditation can help you to do this. It might even be worth asking yourself what qualities you want to deepen. Perhaps more importantly though, deepening also means to deepen your relationship with practice. To deepen your connection. To deepen your trust in the unfolding of practice, happening exactly as it needs to. This then allows for deepening of freedom and meaningfulness. No matter whether you consider yourself new or experienced; beginner, intermediate, or advanced; there is always opportunity to deepen.
This is a reflection on some of the formative moments in the earlier part of my meditation journey.
5 minute read.
I’ve been thinking recently about the moments in my own life and practice when things were not going so well and there was a small shift that put me back on a better course.
These key moments feel pivotal in finding a practice that worked for me and transforming my experience. I’m calling them inflection points because it feels like a moment in time where things could have kept tracking as they were or getting worse, but some event helped to push things in a different direction (I’m not knowledgeable in mathematics so please go easy if I’m using this term incorrectly, the best I could do is Khan Academy and it seems to support this use ^_^).
My background is that I went through an extended period of depression and anxiety and then came to practising meditation to try and shift how my mind operated so that I would not suffer so much. I remember a moment of realising, after coming out of a period of strong depression, that objectively my life was great and subjectively it was terrible. If I wrote down a list of the things in my life, it was great on paper, yet I was miserable. I realised there was something in how I was relating to these experiences, rather than the experiences themselves. I knew then I’d have to work with the mind as the thing that was turning these good things into suffering. So I had strong motivation to practice and a sense that this could work, but it took a number of key moments of support to get on track with practice.
1) Being given a copy of The Mind Illuminated.
I had grown up with Buddhism around (my Dad’s family is culturally Buddhist) and knew that meditation was a thing, I just didn’t know you could actually learn how to do it as a skill. I’d done yoga asana classes where there was a 3-minute meditation. A therapist had told me to meditate but gave me such unclear instructions that I found it basically useless. When depressed I also had an experience of reading about mindfulness, deciding to try it, found that it made things much better for a short period of time, and then being frustrated at being unable to consistently replicate that experience.
I was chatting with a friend about meditation, who knew much more about the topic than I did, and he gave me a copy of The Mind Illuminated. I started reading it and was shocked. I was amazed at the descriptions of stages and the progression of training the mind. More importantly I was glad to finally have some clear instructions on how to get started. Finally there were practical instructions around creating a space, dedicating time, motivations, and preparing for practice. There were clear instructions on how to follow the breath and cultivate stable attention. It was incredibly motivating and inspiring and helped me to first establish a practice.
2) Committing to consistent practice.
After reading The Mind Illuminated I still was only practising for short periods of time, mostly 10-15 minutes. Looking back, I think I just didn’t know any better. This is just what was around me at the time, in yoga classes, when I talked to others, in the meditation apps, etc. I probably thought the advice in TMI to sit for longer didn’t really apply to me.
Reviewing my journal from the time, I can see that I was sitting for short periods of time and judging my practice as good or bad based on whether I felt calm or if I could follow the breath the whole time. It was a frustrating process.
One day while casually cycling to go play pick up basketball, my friend asked me how meditation was going. When I said that I didn’t really feel like much was happening and that I wasn’t clear on what to do, he casually suggested that I sit longer. He said that it might just take more time for the mind to settle and that sitting longer might help to train the mind. This was just the spark I needed. I started sitting longer, although it took a while to take hold, eventually getting to 30 minutes after a couple of months, and then 45 minutes after about eight months of practice. I started noticing changes. It was like the previous meditation didn’t do enough to pass the threshold. Now I was actually seeing changes in the stability of my attention and the clarity of the mind week to week.
Looking back at my journal I can see that there was a shift from judging the practice to appreciating the awareness I was cultivating. I started approaching it more as something I could do each day to train the mind, no matter how the sits went. I started really being glad for the opportunity to practise.
3) Finding community.
It was at this point that meditation started working for me. I was practising more and finding that it helped me to at times feel better throughout the day. I was calmer and my mind was clearer. I started changing how I related to events and situations. My relationships started improving. I became more resolved to practice as I noticed how beneficial it was.
I was doing postgraduate study and decided that when I finished I’d give myself a gift of going on a 10-day retreat (I think most people would go on holiday or buy a Nintendo Switch, which might say something about me 🙃 ). The retreat was highly beneficial but was also somewhat destabilising as the insights were challenging to integrate, so I decided to start trying to learn more about meditation. I thought about getting a teacher. I read more dharma books and started following r/themindilluminated and r/streamentry. I came across Tucker Peck’s posts and found them to be clear and insightful. Perhaps more importantly, they were funny! I thought having a teacher like that would be good for me, so I reached out. I started meeting 1:1 with Tucker and found this to be incredibly helpful. It got me out of some ways that I was stuck or heading the wrong way. There were critical moments where I was practising with Wrong Effort or seeing things in a really deluded way that having a teacher helped to quickly course correct.
I also started going to eSangha (an online class for advanced meditators) regularly and have found that the community there to be totally amazing. I’m so grateful that it is today possible to form deep relationships with people halfway across the world. I made friends that I’ve talked with most weeks for years. For my practice, the friendships here have really encouraged me to be dedicated to practice and be honest with myself and others. It helped to find inspiration from hearing about how other people were practising. It helped to demystify the process and provide support and accountability. The Buddha says that the whole of the path is noble friendships and admirable companions, this seems like good advice to me!
Reflections
Looking back, I can see a number of phases in practice where it would have been easy to drop off. I also feel incredibly grateful that I have continued my practice as it has changed my life for the better in many significant ways. I’m lucky that I found something that helped me and suited my personality at the right time. I’m also super grateful that I had a friend to provide a few helpful tips. Stumbling upon these inflection points of being reoriented into a positive direction helped me to stay on track and find cumulative improvements. I can also see that the whole process would have been easier if I found community and support earlier. Reflecting on this is an encouraging reminder of why I’ve decided to teach and dedicate myself to helping others with their meditation practice.
I’m curious to put the question forward – what have your inflection points been? What moments have been valuable to orient your practice in a positive way? Feel free to write me!
If you’re looking to find ways to go further in your practice, you may be interested in the Deepening Meditation Course that I run with Upasaka Upali.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of community for practice.
I recently returned from spending some time in the United States practising on retreat, teaching, and spending time with the communities over there. It was an amazing trip. I spent time meditating in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona (so many cacti!). I got to meet people in person that I’d talked with for countless hours over Zoom in the last two years. I also had my brain scanned while meditating in service of building a neurofeedback device to help meditators reach deep states of samādhi (more on this later).
But the biggest thing for me was getting to be around the community. There’s something powerful about people coming together, whether that is to practise on retreat or in a local class or just hanging out in a park and eating burritos. There was also something special about seeing communities that have been built over years and have developed a pragmatic approach to supporting each participant in their own development.
In my own practice I’ve found that community has been incredibly important. I’ve made some wonderful friends through practice who help me tremendously with their kindness and encouragement. In Buddhist traditions, we might refer to this as the saṅgha. This is one of the three jewels that we can take refuge in, the others being the Buddha (others who have gone further on the path), and the Dharma (the teachings, or the practices). My understanding of taking refuge in the saṅgha is to go to the community for support, to find inspiration, and to be dedicated to supporting each other and cultivating the practice. Being able to rely on the community to assist us, to shelter us in times of need. The saṅgha gives us the courage to move forward.
Then the question to ponder is:
Do you feel supported in your practice? How could community help your practice?
Spending time with meditators overseas affirmed my goals of building a strong community of like-minded practitioners and doing what I can to support building a community.
It has been my goal to not just offer teachings but to build a sense of a connected community. This means that I will do my best to create spaces that are accessible, offer different pricing options and scholarships, and provide support for wherever you are in your practice. I want to dedicate myself to connecting people with the type of community that will be conducive to reaching their individual goals, whatever they are.
I’d also like to create networks that allow you to be able to connect with each other outside of the classes and support one another as peers.
There’s a lot of work to be done here but it seems more important than ever that we find ways to collectively work towards cultivating our minds, consciously working with the ways that we suffer, and finding new ways of relating to experience.
I hope this encourages you to find community in whatever form feels appropriate and beneficial. If there’s some particular format of class or retreat you are looking for, or some kind of community interaction you are seeking then please reply and let me know. Otherwise I hope to see you at a class or retreat soon 😀
People meditate for various reasons and with different motivations for what they want from practice. We could loosely put these into three levels, which roughly correspond with how much practice time: 1) mental hygiene, 2) training the mind, or 3) curiosity of what is possible.
Should You Meditate?
First, let’s contemplate how things are going right now. This isn’t meant to be an exercise in self-criticism or beating yourself up. Keep in mind that everyone experiences difficulty and that life certainly isn’t easy. See if you can consider your life, with some degree of objectivity:
How is life going for you?
How’s your mental health? Are you happy? How do you relate to your experiences? Do you feel good about what you give your attention to? Is your mind operating as well as you’d like? Are you OK with the fact that this life is (relatively) short and will at some point end?
If your answer is less than an emphatic positive response, then let’s go into why you might meditate and what you might expect. If your answer is that you are happy, content, and satisfied with life exactly as it is, then perhaps you don’t need to meditate! But if there is even a hint of an itch to delve deeper, there is probably something here for you.
The main reasons that I see for people to meditate are to 1) improve mental hygiene, 2) train the mind to improve mental skills, and 3) explore a curiosity about what is possible with the mind.
Mental Hygiene
The most common reason that people begin practising meditation is mental health. Many people find themselves dealing with depression and anxiety. Others find that life is just a bit too stressful. They need some way to calm down, relax, settle, and gain better tools for coping with difficult situations. Sometimes this is brought on by hitting a really bad place, but other times we just have a sense that meditating would be a good thing to learn to cope with what is going on in our lives and in our heads.
It’s commonly known, and for good reason, that meditation helps with stress and anxiety. There are numerous scientific studies about this, it is now a common treatment in therapy, and there are mindfulness programs everywhere.
This is a great idea and meditation does help in this regard. You can’t argue against taking a short period of time to do less, relax, and be more aware. It’s a time to decompress, process some feelings and emotions, and to move the mind towards calm and spaciousness. Meditation provides tools for working with thoughts and emotions that can really help in the midst of difficulty. Everyone could do with doing a small amount of meditation regularly.
The goal here is relaxation and relief from difficult experiences. People who start this way are generally practising for relatively short amounts of time, such as 5 to 15 minutes per session, and might be practising a few times a week or just as an antidote or fix when things get stressful. This is where most meditation apps come in. Sometimes these are used consistently, but often it’s a form of pain relief — a useful aid that you reach for when the situation calls for it.
The downside to this approach is that it is a band-aid solution to a problem. You get stressed, so you realise you should probably meditate to relax. But this falls off easily. When you are stressed, you are also often busy, and then the first thing to drop off is practice time, even if it is probably the best thing you could be doing for yourself. It doesn’t address the root cause of the issue and only treats the symptoms, which takes more consistent practice.
Train the Mind to Change the Baseline
The next reason people meditate is because they want to improve the way their mind works. They want to change the patterns of behaviour and mental habits so that they use the mind more skilfully. They want to begin treating the cause of the problem.
While there are many reasons for this, let’s take the example of focus. It’s important to be able to choose what we pay attention to. Where attention goes determines our experience. Today there are just so many things vying for our attention. Smartphone apps and social media platforms are designed to be addictive and we are constantly bombarded by advertising. Our lives are complex in that we are expected to somehow maintain a balance of work, study, family, friends, entertainment, hobbies, learning, activism, holidays, rest time etc. We often find that our attention is caught up in things that we don’t find deeply meaningful. We also find that we are often pulled out of the current moment into the future with planning or fantasising, or into the past with remembering or ruminating. We find that we go for extended periods of time without noticing what is happening in our own experience.
Unfortunately we can’t just suddenly choose to have different attentional skills. Just deciding to be mindful might help for a short time, but it is unlikely to create a long-term shift. To shift your quality of attention requires training the mind. You do this by learning mental skills through practising meditation techniques. The skills develop through repetition. Over time this leads to changes in the mind and to a shift in the baseline of your ability to focus. The same could be applied to other mental skills, such as observation and balance (see Sit Down and Practice).
The goal here is to create transformative change through ongoing practice. This generally requires learning how to practise on your own and practising more per day. From what I’ve seen, changes often take place when people do somewhere around 30 minutes per day, every day (or close to it). This progress also often snowballs in that there are noticeable benefits in daily life that then make you want to practice more, solidifying the practice. Meditation becomes more integrated in your daily routine, then becomes a habit, and eventually requires no effort to sit down and practice. It eventually can become embedded in your life to the point it becomes part of your identity — you are a meditator!
This type of practice requires more commitment and perseverance but tends to pay off tremendously. There is the possibility to improve the way your mind works and therefore improve every area of your life. You gain the ability to get ahead of potential problems by working with the mind and how you navigate difficulty. You do the practice now, for when you need it later. You begin to learn about how your mind operates. The practice becomes a resource and something that rewards ongoing engagement. Practice also benefits those around you as you gain more capacity to be present, to help others, and to engage in what matters to you.
Curiosity and the Search for Truth
The third reason that people meditate is because they have a curiosity about what meditation can bring in terms of shifting perception, understanding reality, and making sense of what their lives and experiences mean. There is a sense of possibility, aspiration, and determination that drives people to explore what their mind is and how they are perceiving reality.
This can come from a number of different angles. Some people have tried meditation and it worked really well to increase awareness and help them in their lives, so they want to see what comes from doing more of it. Other people get into it because they have some familiarity with spiritual traditions, such as the different traditions of Buddhism, and want to see if the freedom, wisdom, and radical openings that these teachings talk about are possible for themselves. Other people who are nerdier or more pragmatic come to it wanting to see if the techniques can change their cognitive processes and update their “operating system”. There’s also people who have some kind of powerful experience — sometimes due to psychedelics, sometimes just out of the blue — that opens their eyes to a different way of seeing, but these experiences fade. Meditation becomes a way to reproduce these experiences and insights consistently. Another reason why people might get into deep practice is the sense that something doesn’t quite add up. Life has a quality of unsatisfactoriness about it, even when things are good, and this disconnect makes people look for a deeper meaning and understanding.
Other people just notice that the universe is so huge and our lives are so small, yet our existence feels so important. What does it mean?
Meditation then becomes a way to learn about the mind and to learn about how you are experiencing reality.
The goal with this approach is to see how deep the rabbit hole goes and what is possible in practice. This is where people start practising more, upwards of 45 minutes per day. They might go on retreats. They are more likely to find a teacher and seek out resources such as books, courses, and communities that help support their practice and guide them to deeper realisations.
At this level there is the possibility of radical shifts in the way life is experienced. There are openings of understanding self and world in new ways. There is the ability to work through conditioning and past trauma. There is the ability to navigate pain and difficulty gracefully. There might be less suffering and more fulfilment. There is the possibility of deep engagement with the world and being more present and loving in relationships. Actions skilfully align with values.
We will all face challenges and difficulties in our lives. Whether you are practising for mental hygiene, training the mind, or out of curiosity for what is possible, meditation becomes a way to choose how we want to show up — with more awareness, focus, and clarity.
I’ve been hearing a familiar story from friends, students, and peers lately. It goes something like this.
You’ve tried out meditation practice and noticed that it helps! There’s something that’s just good about taking some time out each day to practice. There’s a positive intention there towards training the mind and learning about your experience that has lasting implications throughout the day.
Some of the tangible and important benefits that you might experience while meditating and throughout the day:
You feel more relaxed.
There is more awareness and mindfulness.
You can see situations and events more clearly.
There is a bit more spaciousness in your experience.
Emotions feel less sticky.
More resilience.
Better able to focus your attention towards what is important to you.
These are significant and meaningful shifts in experience. This is great for some time, until….
Suddenly the practice falls off.
Sometimes it quickly goes off the rails. Other times you’ll miss a day here and there, until the practice is happening less often, and maybe even completely stopping. Occasionally there will be some conflict with daily life events and commitments that means that practice just doesn’t quite feel like it makes the cut, so you just choose other things instead.
This can feel terrible, but please know that this is completely normal.
Practice will come and go. There will be ups and downs.
Buddhist teachings tell us that nothing is permanent. Things change. Nothing persists in exactly the same way over time. Everything is dependent on causes and conditions, which are constantly changing in a never-ending dynamic tapestry.
Our practice is affected greatly by our life circumstances. Everyone that I know was (and still is) affected in some way by the global covid pandemic. Sickness is clearly something we don’t have complete control over that can drastically affect what we are able to do and what our most pressing responsibilities are. But even our day to day lives change constantly, whether we are suddenly busy and working on an important deadline, travelling, going on holiday, or even really absorbed in a good TV show (!).
Reflecting on Practice
Often we feel conflicted about how our meditation practice fits into all of this. We both really want to meditate and don’t want to (or want/need to do other things). We know that practice is good, but life gets in the way, or it’s hard to find the balance.
We could roughly place people into two camps here.
People who are unable to practice right now, or other things are more meaningful and important to them at this time.
People who would benefit a lot from meditation, but they just need to overcome a few obstacles to get into it.
If you fall into camp 1), then my advice is that you have permission to not meditate. You don’t need me to say it, but maybe it will help. Of course you get to make these decisions for yourself! If the situation is out of your control, or things are going really well, or you are working on something meaningful with a short-term deadline — that’s fine, don’t worry too much about practising. See yourself with kindness and self-compassion. Have meditation as a tool in your toolbox that you can use when you need it. Come back to the practice when the time is right.
If you feel like you might be in camp 2), then it’s time to assess how things are and make a plan for how to get back into it.
For me, I got into meditation after an extended period of depression and anxiety. My realisation was that I needed to regularly do things that helped me with my mental health or else I would slide back down the slope into that dark place. For me that was enough. I knew the suffering that was chasing me and knew that I had to keep going. The key for me was realising that to stay ahead of it, what I had to do was to make practice a part of my everyday routine. The key to making this an easier task was to find inspiration, motivation, and support.
Ways to Reignite Practice
If this sounds like this article could be talking about you, then here are a few suggestions on how to reignite the practice and light that spark to get practice on track again.
Go on retreat. Find some time to go on a meditation retreat where you will temporarily pause all your other commitments and obligations. This is especially helpful if you can do this with others, but it can also be helpful to practice online, or even to do a half-day on a weekend. Putting aside everything else for a time gives you an opportunity to connect with the practice and with silence. This helps to put us back in touch with why we practice and what the benefits could be.
Do a course. Commit to attending a course where you will be held accountable, given support, and inspired to practice. Courses can give you precise directions on what to do that takes out the questioning and replaces it with support. Courses encourage establishing a practice so that you can make the most of the time and fulfil the commitment. This is especially good if the course helps you to find community, or helps you to see the practice in a different light.
Find community. The Buddha taught that the whole of the path is admirable friendships. When you have friends who are also practising and working on cultivating their minds, it is much more likely that you too will develop the practice. The key is to find a community that works for you and matches what you are looking for. There are many online communities filled with kind, considerate people who are keen to connect. There are local sanghas in many towns and cities. Check them out and see what might suit you.
Read a book. There are so many great texts on Buddhism and meditation practice. I personally love asking people for recommendations. If you’re looking for an in-depth practice guide there’s The Mind Illuminated. A clear explanation of the practice of mindfulness meditation is found in Mindfulness in Plain English. If you want a guide to Buddhist thought you can check out What the Buddha Taught. For those interested in a deep dive that is both poetic and systematic you can read The Science of Enlightenment. Picking up one of these can really fire up the wholesome desire to practice.
These points could be summarised as: find inspiration, support, and community. These help to overcome obstacles to practice. They help to move past lethargy, worry, and doubt and towards confidence and strength.
Shifting to Skilful Action
What we are trying to do is to shift our view and how we are thinking about the practice. We want to move from self-criticism, internal conflict, or unmet expectations, and instead shift towards a sense of doing what is skilful in that situation. We want to clearly see how things are right now, figure out what a good next step is, and then confidently take that step.
The question here is what is skilful? Thought of this way, falling out of practice is just a macro-version of the on-cushion technique. We get caught up, we wake up to that moment and see it clearly, then we return to our intention. We appreciate any moments of awareness, any moments of knowing. This intention is what helps us move towards what is skilful and leads to happiness and benefit for ourselves and for others.
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If you are interested in courses, retreats, or personal instruction, or you have questions about how these can help you, please check out my current offerings and get in touch if I can be of help.
