Other Notes:

Working with me is PSYCHOACTIVE:

(This is also true when working with a group, but I’m writing more from the 1-1 angle here.)

We’re going to go to some weird places - whether we’re taking a psychedelic or not, just conversing with me is psychoactive. From years of practice both in meditation and in intersubjective modalities, from my own weird psychological development, and from intention, whatever we do is going to help open your world and touch some of the deep structures of how you generate a world and a self.

If I had a dime for every time someone told me speaking with me was like taking mushrooms, or being in a lucid dream, I’d have — well not that much money, but enough for a sandwich at least.

I dance (metaphorically) with people, as hard as I can - when you dance that hard out, it’s pretty easy to see where people are holding back, hurting, compensating for something - we bring attention to this and just hang there - and this kind of attention itself is mind-manifesting - it’s psychedelic, sober or not.

Another phrase that seems to fit well for people’s experiences of me: Loving Disruption. There’s no judgment, no harshness, a real open and awake sense of love, care, and compassion. But make no mistake, it’s also a kind of surgery — it is disruptive, even in the service of integration — and I wield a laser scalpel.

Other phrases people have used include: soul chiropractor, and inner engineer. Because of how I do what I do, if we work together we’ll probably have our own metaphor which clicks but might not in any other relationship.

My approach is INTEGRATION-FOCUSED: I’m more interested in how you act in a day-to-day way in your life, than I am with achieving rarified states of consciousness — those states are tools, not destinations. The cosmic joke of course is that this approach actually leads to more rapid transformation. Would you rather achieve some kind of glimpse of peace on a mountain top far removed from your actual life, or do the dishes in a state of overwhelming bliss?

My approach is STUDENT-CENTRIC and EXPERIENCE-FOCUSED: no one approach works for everyone, and so working with others starts with where they are and what you’re looking for. Rather than forcing some framework on you, we’ll look together at approaches, perspectives and practices that you might find helpful for where you are. I’m going to be asking a lot of questions to get into your world, where it becomes easier to see what to say, and what to do. Over time and with familiarity, I may well be able to tell what is helpful for you, but the benchmark is always: what’s going on in your consciousness. How are you responding to what you’re practicing? What’s the next fruitful step? We are always, always starting just from what is actually happening in your direct experience right now.

My approach is META-LINEAGE: By this, I’m pointing at three interrelated things that I don’t believe have really showed up on this Earth yet. Additionally, there’s a whole argument to be made about the nature of human consciousness and what’s happening today on the planet that I’ll write about elsewhere underlying this that won’t show up in the below.

First, a meta-lineage is a way of including any approach to practice that is helpful, without the binds of lineage or of the view of any particular lineage: a meta-lineage is lineage agnostic. There are many, many paths for practicing the things that I teach, all of them out there because they’ve been helpful, in some way, for someone. My approach is lineage-agnostic, meaning, it can be very helpful to come in with your own expertise in whatever practice you’ve practiced. No need to stop doing something which is helpful. At the same time, lineage can become myopic, and this is a fractal. You can get stuck hammering away at a practice that isn’t working for you. You can get stuck trying to concentrate when you should be paying attention to your emotions, or vice-versa. You can get stuck meditating when you ought to be doing something active with your body, etc. You can get stuck practicing and trying to develop when you haven’t had a day in the woods by yourself in 5 years. You can get stuck in a community or a lineage that you might like, or maybe has been helpful at some point, but no longer is.

The integrative nature of the approach I take helps many people in many different lineages practice more effectively, either through correction or through simple supplementation. If you find what you’re already doing helpful, keep going at it until you master it. Nurture whatever you find fruitful and actively seek that out — I encourage this. At the same time, you can go the whole path this way. Taking a meta-lineage approach allows us to flexibly seek and find what’s most helpful for the unique being that you are without dismissing other resources in your life, or getting caught digging too many holes without digging a well.

Second: a meta-lineage also indicates a respect for uniqueness: the unique blend of practices and influences, life history and capacities you have make you a lineage, not just a practitioner within a lineage. Much of my orientation is to help you step into what only you can become in this life, and in bringing together these wide, and unique, array of influences to become one ever-changing deep river.

Finally: a meta-lineage requires an intersubjective practice, which is one of my specialties. We will learn to foster the space, to inquire into and to generate the space where what you know and what I know can come together and flower into something neither of us could be alone.

INTERSUBJECTIVE (Relationally-focused): I operate as, and in, relationship. Where we touch is where the focus goes, whether we’re practicing relationship in the moment (Circling), or working on more traditional meditative techniques. By becoming aware of this dimension more directly, we get a different lever to work on. This is woven throughout basically everything I write and teach about, so poke around if you’re interested in more!

I nurture UNIQUE AWAKENING and EMBODIMENT We have tended to think of awakening or enlightenment as being one thing — everybody’s enlightenment is the same — or it’s not enlightenment. I don’t believe that’s helpful today. While of course it’s important to recognize and discern between various kinds of expressions of and realizations of awareness, how you wake up is going to look very different from how another wakes up, and what you look like — what you can do, what you care about, what you know — is of course also going to be very different. This is more than a relative/absolute distinction. As a very, very simple analogy: if you’ve trained for 30 years as a yoga teacher, your body is going to move very differently than someone who’s trained for 10 years to become a power lifter — but neither of these is a ‘correct’ way of using or developing the body. Your unique interests, curiosities, gifts, and yes, difficulties in your life, are going to come together in an expression no one else will or could be. Awakening makes you much more of an individual, not less, even if that individual wave is never ignorant of being the ocean.

I aim to foster AWAKENED INTERBEING, and further AGENTIC AWAKENED INTERBEING. The first of these is my jammy jam, it’s the emergent possibility that caught my soul on fire the first time I touched it. In short: something is happening, something is possible today in human consciousness. Rather than an individual waking up being the sole vector of awakening, *relationships* are beginning to wake up. I call this Awakened Interbeing. A very common occurrence for people who experience this is to recognize immediately that we (humanity) are going to organize this way in the future —> that this is the future of human consciousness, at least possibly (in a similar way that old age is a possibility for everyone, but some don’t make it there.) Awakened Interbeing operating economically as a force in the world, I call Agentic Awakened Interbeing. To be sure, this is a very incipient possibility at the moment. Nevertheless it provides a pole to navigate by.

Many practices I teach are INQUIRY: Inquiry deserves its own longer post, which I will link here when I’ve done — I think I’m including it in one of the chapters for You are Looking at a Screen — but for now:

Inquiry is NOT abstract. When I ask a question (Are you aware?) what I’m driving at is not primarily linguistic. Instead, I’m looking for you to really sense into your experience deeply, like you’re asking a question of your experience, of everything you can experience as a bodymind, and listening closely for how the question ripples off your experience. You are opening the door to a big house and yelling “Is any one home??”

How am I feeling right now? Is a kind of Inquiry, in this sense.

The practice of Focusing from Eugene Gendlin is a very helpful primer for this kind of practice.

In Inquiry - you can’t do anything wrong. You’re not trying to feel anything in particular — you’re just looking for what you do feel (or notice, etc.)

And yet, in Inquiry, there are sometimes ‘right’ answers — they’re just not linguistic. For example, if I ask “Are you aware,” you may well get a direct, obvious, clear and immediate “yeah duh.” If you don’t, we’ll work with what does come up in a variety of ways — you haven’t done anything wrong! — but we are looking for that “Yes—“ just like if we were shouting into a house “Dad? Are you home??”

ON TANTRA and the unique possibilities of a 21st Century Tantra

THE T WORD!!

Again, I speak and write about this elsewhere, and will speak and write about this elsewhere, and link that here. I’m doing a whole chapter of “You are Looking at a Screen” about this, so sign up to my email list and you’ll be notified when that’s out.

For now: my orientation, explicitly, is Tantric.

In super quick, and without any particular organizational principle:

Tantra: as in classical Tantra. Neo-Tantra (sexual Tantra) is a different thing, though I also don’t separate them as fully as other Tantric teachers. Look under the hood and there are some actual similarities, which are important.

Tantra is a Trans-dual orientation, meaning that the polarities of human experience are embraced as a dynamic unity of expression (some of these polarities I tap out below). One’s awakeness and awareness are not held separate from one’s action, life and body. Freedom & Interconnectivity. Life & Death. Being & Non-Being. Much of what I do is find the particular ways you’re holding these polarities as being separate, and help ease the tension around them.

ENERGY & AWARENESS At the core, Tantra is about working with the intensity of being alive, about realizing the singular nature of one’s energy & experiences of life, and one’s awareness. One the one hand, we are consistently deepening our access to and embodiment of awareness, presence etc. As we turn this awareness to the seams of our life and consciousness, the places where we make meaning, where we are constructed, contracted, attached and identified, experience (often!) becomes more intense! Good! We stay with that intensity to increase our capacity to be with the intensity of life, making more potent our practice of awareness in the midst of life. Awareness deepens and intensity increases, we bring more and more presence to intensity, and this deepens awareness further. Liberating energy in the bodily being increases awareness, and deepening in awareness helps in liberating more energy. Increase your capacity for energy by awakening to reality. Become a conduit for more and more energy without collapsing it, contracting around it, or grasping to resolve it.

RETREAT & ENGAGE Tantra, meaning: we stay in the chaos of life and engage from there, using this intensity to augment practice, rather than retreating from this intensity to perfect practice. Rather than fall on one side or the other of the ‘transcend the world/ immerse yourself in the world’ polarity, we affirm both the value and possibility of waking up radically to something which is not in the world of time, and in turning towards the urgent questions of this embodied life on this planet at this time, giving yourself to them and to who it is you can become.

PRACTICAL & PHENOMENOLOGICAL Tantra is a VIEW, a way of orienting to life, not a metaphysical truth, and my work with others is similarly always oriented towards what works for different people in different situations. We can always talk about philosophy, about the whys behind what we’re doing together, and that may often be important in any one call, or session. For right now, look as deeply into the nature of your experience as you can and tell me what it’s like to be you.

VIEW: all of this, all of this, all of this is a view-based approach. This is also coming with its own chapter, though I do offer an introduction to this in the second half of chapter one of You are Looking at a Screen.

For here: a View is a way of orienting to, or approaching life, like a yoga pose for the mind. While the vast, vast majority (99%+) of people on the planet today are based in a reality-locating way of making meaning about life and mind, a way which assumes something definite, final and real about life which is not in their conscious awareness, (nothing wrong with that, by the way!) View is the central principle behind all the work I do.