The Buddha asked his monks: What happens when you drop a spoonful of salt into a glass of water? It turns undrinkable. How about the same spoonful into the Ganges? You can’t taste the salt at all.
This is something awareness can do. Open it wide enough and there is room for anything: the leftover charge of the day, an emotion you’d rather not feel, a discomfort you’ve been carrying since this morning. Nothing has to be solved. Held in a space this big, the feeling diffuses and shifts on its own. Awareness itself does the holding, with warmth and tenderness.
Begin with sound. Listen for the most distant noise, then notice the field that holds it — open, roomy, extending in every direction. Let the body appear inside that field. Then gently let whatever you are feeling come forward to be met.
Stay with it, and the feeling loosens. Where you thought there was a solid thing — sadness, or fear — you find movement, a shifting texture. Look for the one who is feeling it, and that too can’t quite be found.
What’s left is spacious knowing. Let the feeling move through it like a ripple through water.
It’s late, you’re winding down, and a notification arrives on your phone. Nothing serious. But there’s a flicker of irritation, a small charge moving through the body against the quiet you were just resting in.
The nervous system is always moving like this — across a spectrum of activation and rest, energy and ease. All of it is good. The charge that sets a boundary, the rest that restores, even the freeze that was once trying to keep you safe: each has its place, just as every part of the mind does. When nothing blocks the way, the system regulates itself. It rises into activation and on its own it settles again.
In this practice we bring a little activation in on purpose, in order to watch it shift and settle. Swing the arms for a minute, then stop. Feel the warmth, the quickened heart, the breath. Notice what happens as you pause and get out of the way.
Then bring something to mind — something small and irritating, an email you didn’t want, whatever brought a bit of feeling. Hold it in whole body awareness and tune into how it feels for you. Stay with the heart, the breath, the charge, with no need to change a thing.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
— Dune, Frank Herbert
Life is uncertain. There are things we can’t know, things we can’t control — the body ageing, the world shifting through change with no clear path ahead.
Begin by settling. Ease in, collect the mind, find an anchor that feels stable and grounding. Then open to the whole body and let the mind rest into it. Notice the felt sense — the overall tonality of this space, vague and murky, more than words.
Now bring to mind something uncertain: a situation, an area of life where there’s turbulence, unknowns, something out of your hands. Small or large, whatever feels alive. Doing this on purpose lets you meet it on your own terms. Let the fear, the worry, the concern arise, and find where it lives in the body.
Open, soften, allow. Don’t brace against the feeling — go towards it. Every cell of your body dilating to accommodate this texture of experience. Let it move through you, shifting and changing, a trickle from a deep well.
Let it fully envelop you, and you’ll emerge on the other side. What remains is the one who can hold all of it. Untouched. Whole. Nothing missing.
In a moment of reactivity, there’s a part of you that jumps into the driver’s seat. It stresses you out with anxiety, defends you with anger, or entices you to reach for that coping strategy. It’s so sure it has an important job to do, trying so hard to protect you. However, there’s a cost to that strategy.
Most of meditation invites us to see through and deconstruct. Instead we let the part stay solid, and turn towards it with loving attunement — the way you might turn towards someone who’s been carrying something heavy by themselves, weary and alone.
First ground into the weight of the body as a steady anchor that you can return to. Bring the part to mind. See it as a part of you, not the whole of you. Notice its cost. Then, rather than trying to change it, sense how it’s been trying to help.
Ask how it feels. Let it answer — in sensation, in an image, in words. Ask how it protects you. Acknowledge the effort: “I see this is how you protect me.” Then offer your thanks.
Met like this, a part will often soften on its own. As it settles back, you are more than the part — you’re the awareness holding it.
If you could have a cup of tea with one part of you, which one could use the company? Is it the part that gets anxious you’ve forgotten something every time you leave the house? Or perhaps the part of you that is always trying to find the next problem to solve?
All parts of the mind are wholesome, just not all of them are skilful. The inner critic is driving you to achieve your greatest aspirations. The part that is stressed wants to make sure things get taken care of so you don’t let others down.
Realising this, you can offer genuine kindness and appreciation for just how hard this part is working for you — even when it seems to cause difficulty. Embracing it just as it is lets this part feel appreciated. When truly seen, the part relaxes.
9:00 – 5:00 pm AEDT (Sydney time) Sunday 5 July 2026 Online via Zoom
Description
After some time in dedicated practice, you’ve seen first-hand that formal meditation and the content of your life cannot be cleanly separated. You sit and realise how dysregulated you are. Or you find yourself still stuck after many silent retreats — the practice hasn’t yet integrated into life. The general instructions — follow your breath, return to the body — don’t quite bridge the gap to the rich and complex specifics of your thoughts and feelings.
To find this integration, you can work directly with feeling as the nexus of life and meditation. There are two primary practices for working with feeling: contacting and being with, and seeing through with insight. In contacting, you offer loving attunement to all parts of yourself. In insight practice, you see feeling as impermanent, flowing energy. Each opens space for the other to deepen.
By practising feeling in different ways, the felt experience of meditation and the felt experience of daily life begin to integrate. Emotions and felt senses become the practice itself as you move toward being fully free and fully feeling.
The foundation of the workshop is awareness of the body — grounding, attuning to felt senses, and creating space to hold the complexity of feeling in awareness. To work with emotions and patterns of mind, we’ll use parts work, drawing on Aletheia and Internal Family Systems. You’ll learn to recognise parts, disidentify from these patterns, and acknowledge their good intentions. Through offering yourself a kind, loving presence, these patterns soften and relax.
Once emotions are allowed to be present, we use insight meditation to open to emptiness and experience emotion as energy, allowing the experience to transform. Contacting and insight deepen each other, like two strands of practice that need each other to spiral open.
About this format
This workshop is taught through embodied experience: guided meditations that point out key insights, supported by talks, Q&A, grounding movement and breathwork, and group exercises.
You are asked to participate by engaging in the practice for first-hand, direct experience. You are also asked to bring your questions and practice experiences to group activities and to listen generously as part of the community.
The event is structured as a full day to provide the opportunity for deep focus, while you temporarily put aside other concerns.
Please attend for the whole day. It can be highly beneficial to be in silence for the day, and especially to minimise technology usage. However, full silence is not a requirement. We encourage you to do what you can to create a supportive environment for your practice.
This is an online event. You will need a device with Zoom installed. Please ensure you have a stable internet connection.
This workshop is suitable for practitioners with some experience of meditation. This work can open up some challenging territory — please consider your own situation in terms of feeling grounded and stable.
The Elephant Path is an ancient meditation teaching, believed to be a transmission from the Buddha-to-be Maitreya and written out by Asanga in around 500 CE. It describes the Nine Stages of Calm Abiding — a map of how experience shifts as the mind deepens in meditation. In this meditation, we traverse all the stages, using the appropriate antidotes and techniques at each stage to progress to the next. Through this we move from scattered monkey mind all the way to effortlessly stable attention. By practising The Elephant Path, you learn how to navigate the mind and how to cultivate different states of mind. This makes the mind a nice place to be — not only from landing in calm and clarity, but also from the confidence of knowing how to move the mind appropriately to whatever is present at any given moment.
9:00 – 5:00 pm AEDT (Sydney time) Sunday 3 May 2026 Online via Zoom
Description
Why does practice come alive for some people and not for others? Often this has to do with the sense of the path itself. When practice is alive and full of fire, there is a rich sense of the possibility and vision of the teachings, and a sense of the capability of the practitioner. This is the guiding image of practice that can be sensed into, played with, and reignited through imaginal practice.
This workshop will open up possibilities of Imaginal Meditation Practice. More than just imagination or visualisation, this is the exploration of how images (seen, felt, heard, and known in the mind) arise in meditation. When we move towards images rather than passing them off as distractions, spontaneous experiences of meaning and depth arise. Opening to the imaginal also opens to resource and creativity, even becoming a source for novel ideas and drawing connections that can be taken into art, work, and relationships.
We begin our exploration by tuning into the felt sense of the body and then bringing in different images of the body that can shift perception. Sitting as a mountain brings grounding and stabilising, seeing the body as filled with light is often energising, or seeing all experiences as waves in an ocean of awareness opens up spaciousness. Practising with images reveals that experience is more fluid and constructed than we tend to assume. This also makes Imaginal Practice a way to open up insight and to understand emptiness.
The power of images comes from embodied experience — a kind of poetic perception. They reveal more than just the physical world or the mind, opening to unexpected resonance. These practices draw from the work of Rob Burbea, who taught extensively on extending insight meditation into other dimensions of experience to open more freedom and meaningfulness.
About this format
This workshop curriculum will be taught through a method of embodied experience delivered through guided meditations that point out key insights, supported by talks, Q&A, and group discussion. The day will include grounding, breathwork, and anchoring practices to support your exploration.
You are asked to participate by engaging in the practice during the session so that you get first-hand experience. You are also asked to bring your questions and practice experiences to the whole group and to your practice pod, as well as to listen generously as part of the community.
The event is structured as a full day to provide the opportunity for deep focus, while you temporarily put aside other concerns.
Please attend for the whole day. It can be highly beneficial to be in silence for the day, and especially to minimise technology usage. However, you are not required to be in full silence. We encourage you to do what you can to create a supportive environment for your practice.
This is an online event. You will need a device with Zoom installed. Please ensure you have a consistent internet connection.
A background meditation practice is recommended. You do not need prior experience with imaginal practices or a strong capacity for detailed visual imagination. This workshop is geared primarily towards practitioners with an established practice, but open to those who sense possibility here. This work can open unexpected territory — please consider your own situation in terms of feeling grounded and stable. After registration you will receive further information and resources.
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.
