Awarewolf!

Our theme this month is irreverence. We’ll be practicing mundanity, enlightenment, sacred cow tipping, befuddlement, worshiping false idols and probably more bad jokes. Like this one!

-Why do meditators love going to the airport?

- Free body scan!

Thanks, we’ll be here all month! Check out our offerings here: https://mailchi.mp/consciousnessexplorersclub/august2026

*****

Imagine you are a luscious summer berry in a carefully tended garden. After months of your plant receiving ample sunlight, consistent water from the storms, and care from a gardener who tends to you daily, pruning and protecting you from disease and creatures who want to consume you before you’re plump and ripe, your plant grows healthy and tall and strong, and your once pale color turns a deeper and deeper shade as you ripen on the vine.

One day, a small bird finds its way through a somewhat larger gap in the wire fence that shelters you. It lands on a vine above you and eats all your friends and family, and in its thrashing, you fall to the ground, alone. Not to be harvested by your beloved caretaker and turned into a delicious jam or pie, but to have half your mushing body begin to sag into the earth, while the other half of your body, the “good half,” is unevenly plucked at and consumed by a different bird, until you’re gobbled up and then piss-shatsomewhere completely strange and random.

Let’s be totally fucking real. Sometimes this is how life feels.

As someone who organizes their life around mutual aid, and practices small-scale socialism in the form of collective living and community organizing, it’s surprising to me that this is the reflection which surfaced as I meditated on interdependence.

Of course networks of care and mutual trust can feel good; I think a lot of us are painfully aware of how unfathomably inequitable, short-sightedly sociopathic, and self-and-ecologically-destructive our systems of hyper-individualism are making our collective human organism. And I think more and more people, meditators or not, are “waking up” to the basic idea that we are not apart from the world, but a part of it.

So yeah, no surprise that interdependence can feel like sweet balm in an otherwise-imbalanced world. But what we seem to forget is that interdependence isn’t something we have to try for, orchestrate or strive for. It’s something we simply can’t fall out of.

In other words, you do not have to try to be interdependent. You simply can’t not be.

Whether you think you need to rely on others or not (and if you’re reading this, I wholeheartedly assume you are not among the world’s wealthiest 1%, nor are you harboring isolationist fantasies of elite space colonization), we are all entangled in a messy, beautiful, and asymmetric web of interconnection. The wealthiest among us eat food which is grown by the most marginalized (and even if you don’t own a spacecraft, this part probably is true for you, and you probably feel rightfully incensed thinking about it). There is no falling out of the net of interdependence. It shapes us. It is us.

But you can lean into it. Like a gardener who will only ever harvest a percentage of the berries they tend to, you can cultivate interdependence in your life into something more intentional, more beautiful, more mutually supportive. Sometimes it is gonna be dirty work, unrewarding and full of conflict and requiring more trust than feels easy. Sometimes it will require you to lean into growing edges that are vulnerable and scary. And it will probably require you to learn what your boundaries are, and the indispensable necessity of communicating them, the hard way.

Moments of crisis, demonstrably, are also times that we deepen our trust and connection, and open to each other more. That’s certainly true for me. The instigating reason I live in a communal structure which pools all our income (enabling us to co-own our home - something none of us could have done independently), and dedicate my time to studying past-and-present mutual aid projects, is because I once found myself unemployed and without “independent” options for making it through. In other words, I live with conscious interdependence because the systems of zero-sum individualism failed me, as they have failed all of us.

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.

Reflect on the times in your life of genuine crisis, the real-hard-shit you have grown through: disaster, grief, loss, anxiety, suffering. I can all but swear the way you made it through these experiences was by relenting yourself to a network of relational care, by depending on others.

I want to be clear that the narratives of selves as self-determined individuals aren’t completely untrue; there are desires and idiosyncrasies and facets of yourself that are untouchably unique and singular. There are parts of yourself you have worked for, that you have cultivated through hard-won self-commitment. And I am someone who devotedly holds the position that individual interests and collective interest do not have to be unreconcilable aims.

But there’s more to the story than independence shows us. And those parts usually take a little more patience to really see or understand, because they require touching into perspectives that are different than our own, bigger than our own.

What is also true is we are interconnected, that we belong to each other, and that in some ways, we are each other. But we have collectively constructed a world which tends to make us forget this. This world personalizes “success” or “failure” as some moral indication of a person’s worthiness, (and therefore, their access to food, water, shelter, and companionship). If this makes you angry, that’s a good sign.

OK. Remember that you-berry that was piss-shat out of a bird’s cloaca?

Through being consumed, the seeds inside of your berry actually ended their dormancy and began to germinate in the process of being digested. Right now, they’re being deposited in a nitrogen-rich environment (of piss-shit) far away from your original plant such that your seeds do not have to compete for light, water, or soil. Those berry seeds may grow into a wild bush that feeds countless other creatures.

And even if it doesn’t, and it remains a pile of “rot” on the ground, well hey, it will have always fed that one bird. And it will always be composted back into the earth, as something valuable and serviceable and beautiful to the organism and/or ecosystem and/or organisms-as-ecosystems that are around it, in one way or another.

There’s no way to fall out of it.

You’re the shit. Literally.

*****

Resource List for Those Wanting to Lean In to Interdependence (and Inspiration for This Essay):

Dean Spade - Mutual Aid

Sarah Nahar’s concepts of defecatory and excretory justice

Joanna Macy’s reflections on dependent co- arising and mutual causality

Thích Nhất Hạnh on interbeing and the reflecting on a flower as made entirely of “non-flower” elements

Rebecca Solnit - A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

David Griffiths - Queer Theory for Lichens

Ed Yong - I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

Above me a crow’s wings warble in the wind, hovering. Beyond its black frame a bright blue sky smeared here and there with small clouds. Soon the train will lurch from this station, and I will be on my way.

One of my favourite kōans, Rinzai Zen riddles whose meaning emerges rather than is discovered, is this:

Hyakujo went out one day attending his Master Baso, when they saw a flock of wild geese flying.

“What are they?” Baso asked.

“They are wild geese, sir,” Hyakujo replied

“Where are they now?”

“They have flown away.”

Baso, abruptly taking hold of Hyakujo’s nose, gave it a twist. Overcome with pain, Hyakujo cried out: “Oh! Oh!”

Said Baso, “You say they have flown away, but they have been here from the beginning.”

Has the crow left us, or have we left the crow? What does this have to do with ‘liberation’, the theme of this month with CEC and this essay, and can I get to it by the time this train arrives in Montreal? If time and pressure birth essays and universes, maybe freedom too.

Or is it freedoms, in the plural? Tiny instances, shards of a bigger inheritance that we can glimpse in our mind’s eye or feel in our bodies when the questions fall away. Like Hyakujo saw of the geese disappearing into specks on the horizon, and that Baso reminded him of with his painful twist. In this way, freedom is not finding a moment where everything makes sense, it is calling off the search for the sensible.

Freedom from what? Into what? In Buddhist framing, you might hear the word ‘dukkha’, a word often translated as ‘suffering’. I don’t like that translation, particularly as it is the entry point for the First Noble Truth in Buddhism, life as dukkha. Life is so much more. It is crows and the wild geese, and the train lulling my neighbour so his lids blink ever more slowly as he drifts into sleep.

A much better interpretation for dukkha is ‘at times unsatisfying’. Marrying the love of your life, and everyone you know is in that room. You landed the dream job for more money than you thought possible. Your wedding dress gets caught under the chair and tears. There is talk of a European company interested in yours. The train ahead of you has derailed (true) and you will be indelibly late to your rendezvous. The biopsy comes back and your oncologist tells you it is time to get your affairs in order. Have the geese flown away or have you? To where?

Dukkha. Unsatisfactoriness. Your grave before it even arrives.

If this is the truth of life, can we ever be free?

Yes. As we let go of a search for freedom. Or liberation or immortality or whatever word is as far away as the perfect wedding or train ride and begin to understand what we actually hold as incredibly more perfect because the million happenings have been smithing it from the beginning.

It is why we practice mindfulness. Not to get anywhere, but to be. Baso grabbed Hyakujo’s nose just as the chair grabbed the corner of the dress.

Not up there.

Here, on a train with nowhere to go.

One of the three paths to liberation is ‘aimlessness’, calling off the search. It is not the acceptance of the present moment so much as understanding its completeness. And its stakes as fulcrum and lever. If you don’t move your dress from under the chair leg, it will tear further. If you don’t look for other work, you may need to move. Getting your affairs in order is a parting gift to those you love. Watching the world drop bombs pulls you on the slow train to Montreal and the MSF annual meeting so those people on the ground will watch medicines landing too.

Hyakujo’s story continues:

The next day Hyakujo attended an informal teaching given by Master Baso, where a few monks had gathered. Hyakujo stepped forward, rolled up Baso’s prostration mat and put it away.

Baso got down from the lecture seat and returned to his room, followed by Hyakujo.

Baso asked: “I went to the lecture hall, but why did you put away the prostration mat before I had preached anything?”

Hyakujo said: “Yesterday the Master caught me by the tip of my nose, and it was very painful.”

Baso said: “Yesterday, we walked along the fields.?”

Hyakujo said: “Today my nose no longer hurts.”

Freedom is not over there. It is not an anodyne experience, death or sadness or aging delayed. It is right here. It is knowing the moment and what it contains.

That is what we will be working on this month with CEC, sitting with it, noting it, riding it, watching it go. We will work on expanding our awareness to include questions and dissatisfaction. It is all allowed.

Oh. The train has stuttered forward. The track has cleared. My neighbour is awake, blinking sleepily at the passing trees.

And the crow is right where it always has been, riding high in the rolling air underneath him.

*****

About a year ago I started noticing the state I wake up into every morning. Not the state of the world or current events - war, corruption, environmental collapse facilitated by an orgy of political and economic opportunism… erm… wait where was I? Oh right. Not the state of the world, but the state of mind that seems to already be up and running before I am. The simplest way to describe it: dread.

The more I notice it, the more I notice how pernicious and insidious it is. In the 15 minutes between waking up and sitting down to meditate, I’ve gotten out of bed, gone to the washroom and started making coffee before realizing that I’m already embroiled in some agitated negotiation with the day, the world, life; my attention fragmented between imagined tasks, projected outcomes, and challenging interactions (read: catastrophising). I’m already feeling panicked and powerless. Somewhere along the way, this has become the norm.

One of the reasons I’ve been so committed to formal meditation first thing in the morning is the aim of setting a positive tone for the day; to “habituate to openness” (as Andrew Holecek aptly defines meditation), before I wander onto the habit trail of reactivity and self-concern. And yet, after all this time, this dread still seems to always get a jump on me.

How did this happen? How did waking up into dread every morning become the default? It happened just like every other habit: with practice.

The dread - the signature of hyper-vigilance trying to assert control to keep ‘me’ safe - is a habit I have unconsciously been practicing for who knows how long. Like a song stuck in my head, it goes about its business, hidden in the noise floor, until all of a sudden it isn’t. But by that point, it’s a habit so well rehearsed that it has become the default activity. It is what I am practising when I don’t even know I am practicing anything.

So I’ve started to bring more curiosity and openness to how I wake up. What thoughts am I first aware of? Do they come with or cause any emotional affect in the body? Or am I driven to thoughts to distract myself from some emotional discomfort already present in the body? And whatever I notice, can I meet it with equanimity, just allow it without any resistance, agenda, or need for it to go away or be other than it is?

As it turns out, sometimes I can. And in those moments, the empty nature of thoughts and sensations shines through like sunlight burning through fog. Other times, when everything is more solid and sticky, the relief might be very subtle and fleeting, but palpable nonetheless. And sometimes, I still get swept up into the old traps before remembering to fold it into my practice - in which case, patience and compassion do the heavy lifting.

Why is it that some mornings are more equanimous than others? What factors might be influencing how I greet the day?

The most obvious one is, of course, the phone. If I get involved with it - checking email, news, or worse: social media - either right before sleep or when I first wake up, I start the day more prone to distraction, confusion, and overwhelm. A more subtle factor: waking up from a disturbing dream. I’ve noticed I can easily get unconsciously drawn into analyzing or trying to figure it out, getting caught in the content while the emotional impact flies under the radar, affecting my mood, thoughts, behaviour, etc. In those cases, it isn’t the disturbance of the dream being imported into waking life that causes the friction, It’s what the newly-assembled self that just woke up does with it: seizes it, tries to explain or contain it.

In both of those cases - phone-use and dream-stickiness - the on-the-spot intervention is simple: bring mindfulness to the behaviour as soon as I recognize that I’m caught in it (or even as soon as I feel the tug towards it), including whatever reactions and ‘second-arrows’ I’m experiencing.

Something I’ve discovered that seems to make a meaningful positive difference in how I wake up into the world: starting my practice before I go to sleep. This might mean actual meditation practice - even just for a few minutes, seated, or lying in bed. But it also seems that just being more mindful as I prepare for bed can have a noticeable impact. Doing the dishes in the sink and cleaning my kitchen counter creates a tidiness in the mind — when I go to bed, but also when I wake up in the morning to a clean kitchen, and one less chore to do.

Maybe most effective: reading something related to practice, even for just 5 or 10 minutes. Lately, the first-person accounts of practitioners working through the fierce demands of intensive retreat - and glimpsing what lies on the other side - as compiled in The Three Pillars of Zen strongly gather my attention and rekindle my affection for practice. I go to bed inspired by the reminder that waking up is possible, now. Call it intention setting, bodhicitta (the aspiration to awaken for the benefit of all beings), or just pressing a thumb on the scales ofexpectancy bias (which might otherwise lean towards doubt), my sense is that there is a certain momentum that carries through sleep into the morning; I wake up into my practice!

When I get out of bed and walk to the washroom, I just walk to the washroom. When I grind the coffee, I just grind the coffee. My morning meditations tend to have a subtle positive charge - they feel like coming home rather than going to the gym. I’m less distractible, and more equanimous with distraction. There is less of a sense of drivenness, or trying to achieve something, and more of a sense of relaxing into what’s already always present. Most of all, there is a subtle sense of openness and connection - with everyone on the Zoom screen*, everyone in my life, everyone in their lives, and that we are practicing for the benefit of all.

Recognizing this habit of hyper vigilance and dread has been a teacher; a reminder that I’m always practising: either intentionally cultivating mindfulness or unintentionally reinforcing habits. In shifting into that reframing, the distinction between practice and life disappears and the present moment becomes an inexhaustible invitation to wake up.

As practice continues to permeate my life— making its way into daily activities, situations, and interactions — conditioned behaviours that once ran unchecked start to be recognized for what they are. And in that recognition is freedom! Over time, as the more obvious and coarse habits are purified, deeper and more subtle ones are revealed. My best guess is that this is a lifelong project for all of us.

*Kevin hosts a free silent morning drop-in meditation called Morning Bell from
7am - 8am EST daily on zoom (https://zoom.us/j/405959303, passcode: 123456)
Come sit anytime for as much/little as you like!

*****

photo by Ruth Raymond

Last week I got a migraine so bad it made thinking itself painful. Lying down in the dark wasn’t enough: my eyeballs were making micro-movements, following every mental thought as eyes do, and just that tiny reflexive movement was shaking my whole skull. So I got very specific. I decided to try relaxing my eyes so completely that my fussing, moving mind had nothing left to work with. The eyes and the thinking mind, it turns out, are running the same operation.

“Soften the gaze, let your eyes sink back into your skull”. Meditation folk use this prompt often, usually in passing, before moving onto more exciting practice. I’ve been saying it myself and doing a halfway okay version of it for decades. But this migraine laid me down and said “girl, you will learn to let ‘em go for real this time.” And suddenly every tiny muscle in and around my eyeballs finally released. For the first time ever, they were completely passive orbs, open and aimless as a corpse. And my scanning, planning mind fell apart along with them.

And the moment they did, my body came alive like something uncaged.

Warmth flared through my gut and chest like a fire that finally got air. Something mercurial and quick moved through the belly, the way water finds its level after a long time being held in shape. The meat of me felt earthen, mountainous. And my eyes didn’t feel like eyes at all anymore, but like two small pools, just reflecting the sky. The hunting, controlling, pointedness of my habitual mind, which is constantly mirrored by movements of the eyes, finally went slack and in that power vacuum my body was freed to be as it really is: a weird living landscape. Just a place, doing what places do, moving and feeling and existing for no reason at all and without anyone’s permission.

It was weird and overwhelming and freeing and wonderful and scary and very much out of my control. And miraculously, the headache was gone.

In the Buddhist tradition, the elements — fire, water, earth, air, space — are a way of knowing the living texture of reality itself, how it moves and changes and dances on its own. The elements are not on any self-improvement mission. Fire is just warm. Earth just heaps. Water coheres, air moves, and space accommodates. Nature is not FOR anything. It just IS. Us too.

But easier said than felt. We tend to reign over the wilderness of the bodymind like land-developers, trimming the unruly underbrush, damming up the emotional rivers, paving over the spooky swamps where the wild things are. Even stillness and meditation, tools of self-discovery, can get co-opted into this project of self-control and self-curation. We don’t even realize we’re doing it. And as a total and continuous experience of being, it is exhausting.

Working with the elements is an antidote to that exhaustion. It’s a direct practice of unwinding the uber-control in favor of being with the weird magic of what’s here. We rest the feeling of being a pointed thing hurtling through space on a mission, and come home to being a place. This place. We rest as messy, moving, unpredictable landscapes.

Of course, the curating mind will pipe up again. The eyes start to dart and hunt and track. You lose nature and return, lose nature and return, again and again. But gradually the experience of yourself starts to include both. The aimed and the aimless. The mission and the mountain.

I’m a person with projects, who gets untimely migraines and tries to fight them off in the name of forward motion. But underneath that story, I am the untameable elements that reveal themselves when I let go. I am fire burning, I am pounding rivers of blood, I am dense earthen weight of bones on a couch, air pouring into lungs like a gale through a forest. And I am the space that holds this whole landscape, too. All this life is just occurring, wildly and particularly, and just because.

I am a place. Alive the way nature is alive.

*****

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth. - George Saunders

I’ve never really had a hero before, but I realized the other day that George Saunders is mine. Saunders is a writer and teacher, author of the Booker Prize–winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo, and a ton of other brilliant work, including my personal favourite, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. In this profoundly wise, surprisingly funny, and endlessly useful masterclass on reading and writing, Saunders talks about writing in a way that deeply resonates with me and my work as an editor. But what has always struck me most is how unstintingly generous he is, how he can manage to articulate specific, practicable ideas about writing without ever sounding, well, like a pretentious dick about it.

Once I found out he’s a regular meditator, it all made that much more sense. He recently gave an interview to The New York Times, in which he talks about kindness, writing, and meditation. The interviewer mentions a commencement speech Saunders gave at his alma mater, Syracuse University, about the value of kindness. The talk went viral, turning him into, as the interviewer half-jokingly says, something of a “secular saint.” Saunders, naturally, rolls his eyes at this, and clarifies that he isn’t some paragon of kindness, but a fallible human who fails to be kind all the time. This is probably what I admire most about Saunders: he understands kindness as a practice, not an end. He talks about coming to realize that kindness is not about niceness so much as it is about awareness—being aware of, and truly present with, another person.

Which brings us to this month’s theme at CEC: compassion. The root of the word means “to suffer with.” We are all overwhelmed these days with stories of suffering, and it can be almost unendurable, trying to keep in mind the suffering of all those who are enduring war and persecution and injustice. But I don’t think that having compassion means we should suffer, too. Shinzen Young defines suffering, in his charmingly nerdy way, with this equation: suffering = pain x resistance. If suffering comes from resisting whatever is happening, then true compassion is about being present with the pain of others, acknowledging it; it means, perhaps, focusing at least as much on the “with” as on the “suffer.”

What’s the point of having compassion for someone else’s suffering—shouldn’t I just try to alleviate it? What about trying to have compassion for someone who causes suffering to others? While it might seem impossible to have compassion for some—say, a tyrannical world leader wreaking havoc on democracy—the effort to cultivate that compassion doesn’t mean what they’re doing is okay. Compassion doesn’t mean condoning, but it does start with trying to see the humanity in everyone.

What’s happening in Minnesota right now is a compelling example of compassion at work: neighbours seeing neighbours suffering, acknowledging that suffering, and stepping up in ways that are genuinely heroic. Bringing groceries to those who are afraid to leave their homes, coordinating rides for detainees, and defending the vulnerable, sometimes with their lives. Awareness and compassion go hand in hand, and equip us to act in the world, sometimes—most powerfully—against injustice.

Heroes and villains aside, I’m most curious about the people who forget to choose kindness in the course of their day—me, you, and George Saunders included. Why do we forget to choose kindness? Well, for me, it’s often because I’m in a rush. That person is taking soooo long in front of me in line! Don’t they know that I’m a busy person with things to do? Or, even more often, it’s because I’m feeling hurt or scared or judged. That driver nearly ran me off the road! He must hate cyclists. Or he’s an asshole. If I try to have compassion for that person, by remembering that they’re likely absorbed in their own thoughts and troubles, I’m not saying it’s cool that they nearly killed me, but that it’s understandable that they weren’t thinking about me, the same way I wasn’t really thinking about the other pedestrian when I was rushing down a crowded, unplowed sidewalk, or when I spoke thoughtlessly, or was sarcastic when a friend needed sincerity.

And here’s the toughest move for me: trying to have compassion for that person, too, the self that doesn’t always choose kindness, that isn’t always aware, that fails every day to be their preferred self. That person also deserves compassion. In those moments when I can generate compassion for myself—to love what I find unlovable—I increase the measure of compassion in myself for others, too.

Having compassion doesn’t mean being nice, which has a kind of flattening effect, but being kind, which begins with awareness. What do you need? Maybe it’s just for someone to listen. To be present with you when you are in pain. What do I need? Maybe it’s the same thing: to listen to myself. To be present. To be with whatever is happening, even—maybe especially—when it hurts.

This month, we invite you to cultivate compassionate ways of being with our fallible selves and imperfect others, and perhaps find some solace in the practice.

“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Real talk. 2025 was a hard year for a whole lot of people, with so much suffering in the world - war, corruption, oppression, destruction - that we wish wasn’t happening. The good news as we enter this new year? Change is possible. Inevitable even. The other news? Before we can truly affect change, we have to actually accept what is happening. To that end, CEC’s first theme of this brand new year is “acceptance”.

Accepting something doesn’t mean you like it. Acceptance is the act of acknowledging. This exists. That is happening. If I break my leg, I have to accept its brokenness in order to proceed skillfully. “Good vibes only” power of positive thinking isn’t going to unbreak it. Denial and avoidance will only make it worse. Feeling the pain, seeing the injury for what it is, is the first crucial step to making it better.

Acceptance doesn’t always show up as equanimous calm or detached observation, even for the most seasoned meditators. Sometimes it comes with big feelings - anger, frustration, sadness, despair… the whole Kübler-Ross gamut and then some.

I like to call this version of acceptance “fuckceptance”. It gives it a vaguely nihilistic flavour, a slightly punk rock feel. It helps me to acknowledge the shittier things in life - the injustices and heartbreaks of the wounded world - and also the hard, true feelings that accompany bearing witness to those things. Fuckceptance comes with a lot of fucking feelings (and a lot of swearing, obviously).

Last year this beloved meditation community CEC hit some hard timesfinancially*. As the person most responsible for the organization and aware of the day-to-day operations, I cycled through all the stages of grief. “Maybe I just won’t look at the bank account and it’ll course-correct on its own? Ok if I reduce my own salary enough, maybe i can buy enough time to turn this around. Does anyone care?!? Why doesn’t anyone realize we’re in trouble?? Oh god I don’t want anyone to know we’re in trouble!!!”

It took me some time to accept the hard truth that without significant intervention, this job and community that I love so much would cease to exist. I felt like a failure, and was stuck in that guilt and shame spiral until I really opened up to the reality that I couldn’t fix it on my own. I needed help. Fuuuuuuuck.

I am notoriously bad at accepting help, let alone asking for it. But I fuckcepted my way into being candid with my fellow CEC board members about the state of things and they in turn reminded me that I’m not alone in this. Together we made a plan to put out a call for help to you, the larger community, who overwhelmingly came through with support and encouragement and cold hard cash and we all lived happily ever after.*

I hope. At least for now…

Meditation practice is an amazing training for developing acceptance. By turning attention again and again to what is happening in the here and now, we sharpen the focus on our inner and outer landscapes so we learn to see (and hear, and feel) more clearly. Then, when discomfort arises in our experience (as it inevitably does), we practice being with it, observing its form and function. This expands our capacity for tolerating what’s difficult. Instead of turning away from the challenges of life and world and hiding out in the comforts of distraction and denial, we get better at accepting (or at least fuckcepting) what’s going on. All the while, we practice compassion and kindness, for ourselves and for others. We try to give ourselves grace, and recognize the shared humanity in our struggles and missteps. “Cause it’s fucking hard work. And it’s the work that needs to be done.

                              “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.”
                                           Mary Oliver-Wild Geese

As I reflected on this month’s CEC theme of ‘community’, meaning, at least to me, a human order bigger than our self, another word lifted to the surface: ‘electricity’. A moment later, a vision of my younger self, standing in the lab, waiting for some.

Days before I injected RNA into a frog oocyte and was waiting for the proteins to find their way to the cell surface, at which point, I would detect a faint electrochemical current, life’s signature.

Can you feel it? It’s often easiest to glean in your lips, fingers and toes. All those nerve endings, sparks coursing up and down. If you like, you can close your eyes and try for a few seconds. That buzz is the feeling of ‘alive’, what connects to each other, all living things.

Did you know that the leading hypothesis for how electricity arrived in us is a few billion years ago, one cell ate another and discovered an eternal agreement that more beautiful things are built together than alone?

Do you know that inside every mitochondrion, those cellular furnaces where glucose and oxygen become electricity, lives the genetic legacy of that ancient coupling? And that all of us, no matter our parents or where we live, share the same mitochondrial DNA from one woman in Africa about 200,000 years ago, before this mitochondrial Eve marched north to build the Taj Mahal, then paint the Sistine Chapel?

It soothes me to imagine we are all connected like cells in our body are, shifting, moving, being born, dying, in service to a wholeness larger than ourselves that we can feel but not see. It’s hard to believe at times, with wilderness in retreat and the visions of war falling into my eyes from far away, but I think that’s just part of it. I might not believe this as strongly if, on that afternoon in the lab, the cathode hadn’t startled me with a faint hum of current where before there was none.

It is why I sit. I want to hold the open position from which I can take the essential into the future and build on it, shedding a layer that once contained me but no longer confines me. At least for a few minutes, I find something bigger than myself.

My late friend Dave Courchene once told me “When settlers arrived to Turtle Island, they looked at my people, watched us bow to a crow, and said, ‘These heathens have no god…they will worship anything!’ But we only have one god, same as you, but we don’t stand above anything in creation, so we bow to the crow, we bow to the river, because they are our relatives.”

In meditation, we remember our community. It is each other. It is our ancestors and the people who will be walking down our street long after we return to our solid place in the ground. Our community is the family of living things, and we are carried by the same current.

This is why we built the CEC. To sit with each other in that ever-flowing current. To give and receive the encouragement and feedback that lets us know both which way to grow and if we are. It makes for a much better party. Now that I think about it, that is the main reason we built the CEC, why we are all-in on this ‘wishing safety to all living things’ thing: it’s funner. So after we remember, we dance about it.

In that peculiar, symbiotic way, at a time when the world needs CEC, we need something of the world. We are in the middle of a fundraising drive to help us maintain, even expand, our programming. More meditations, more speakers, more retreats, more dancing in the streets.

To the many who have joined our sits thus far, we bow to you. To the donors who believe that this connection to all living things is worth practicing and gave generously such that we can continue creating space for it, we bow to you, our relatives. To those of you who have some funds to contribute, we bow to you, and are honoured to devote them to keeping this signal strong, making a place where all people, regardless of belief, can sit in peace.

In these times where things can feel like they are falling apart, let’s keep up with that love buzz.

Can you feel it?

Dr James.

I have always felt allergic to the Ordinary. “Live an extraordinary life” was my mantra, those very words plastered right across the first vision board I ever created. In my 20s and 30s, I sought out jobs which afforded me the opportunity to travel, and the next vacation or adventure was always booked before I’d even returned from the present one. I was always seeking the next big thing to save me from the tedium of the everyday.

Even if it wasn’t trips to far off destinations, it was the next party, the next event, or the next training to further my growth and education. I have lived most of my life thus far in a constant mode of expansion - always forward looking, always wanting bigger and better experiences, but also wanting to learn, grow and expand, rather than rest and integrate.

Granted there were a few bumps in the road - periods of forced rest either by injury or illness, giving birth, or a global pandemic - that required me to slow down my usual pace. Now, with the world 5 years out from the onset of Covid 19 and a 7 year old daughter, I should be right back on track to living my “extraordinary” life, no? Far from the decades of non-stop adventure and growth, I find myself living a life probably very similar to most middle-aged parents of a school-aged child.

Days are filled with the challenges and stress of getting kids to school on time, getting lunches packed, filling out forms, reading school emails, checking agendas for homework, driving all over the city to extra-curricular activities, playdates, children’s birthday parties, grocery shopping, family dinners, dishes, and laundry. While that might not sound very ordinary to some, if you are the parent of a kid in school and any other activities, you know, this is as ordinary as it gets. And it seems that the more my daughter’s world expands, mine gets smaller and smaller. Every day starts to feel a little bit like Groundhog Day with Bill Murray.

For me, this is where the discomfort starts to set in. With no deviation from the school and activities schedule until at least June, and no vacation on the horizon, I start to get antsy, when I feel like I’ve personally hit a plateau. Over a decade into my mediation practice, I’ve at least developed an awareness of this: my extreme distaste for when it feels like nothing is happening in my life. When there’s momentum, forward movement, growth - I’m good. But the second that starts to slow, I get that itchy allergic reaction.

My usual response? To resist - to book or plan something exciting immediately - rather than just be in that space of acknowledgement and acceptance. But hey, at least I’m doing this in full awareness, right? However, with a child, with school commitments and activities, it’s not possible to take off with a moment’s notice. And so I sit, with myself, in my practice, and my familial commitments, steeping in the ordinary. This is the hardest place for me to be. Just sitting. Just being. Not moving. Not planning. Just breathing. Resting. And being ok with that, and things, exactly as they are. Not trying to change anything.

A funny thing happened while I was busy resisting the Ordinary in my life - my life got extraordinary. But not in a great, exciting adventure fun-filled way. Seemingly overnight I started to experience extreme pain, digestive upset, fatigue, rapid weight loss, and a host of other issues. All of a sudden my body forced me into an immediate period of slow down and rest, in the way only a health problem can. Six months later, I wish I could say these were resolved as I write this, but sadly they are not yet.

No conclusive answers have come from the western (or eastern) medical community despite undergoing several diagnostics, and there has been no significant improvements from my own efforts, time off and self-care. I’m currently in another holding pattern - one that is physically painful, but also mentally and emotionally challenging - and one that is schooling me in sitting with discomfort. Suddenly my world no longer felt ordinary, but I felt that contraction. It got smaller, and so much slower, as most days I struggle to do my ordinary tasks, in my ordinary life.

On my high pain days, I would love for the Ordinary. I quite literally beg, cry, plead and wail for it. I would love nothing more than to get back to the ordinary - back to making lunches, walking to school, taking my daughter to dance, doing laundry all without pain. I see now, what an extraordinary (and lucky!) life I was living: to be able to have the mobility, energy and drive to do all these ordinary things. I never realized just how extraordinary the ordinary can be.

With no official diagnosis yet, I’ve had to become my own healer, and meditation has become my medication. Between that and my other self care practices, I’m learning how to hold space for my own pain - not to fix it, just to be with it. The pain is there for a reason. My practices allow me to feel what needs to be felt, to cry the tears I held in too long, and to listen to the wisdom of my body that always knows the way. My time spent on the cushion (or more accurately these days, the couch), also teaches me. “It won’t always be this way” it says. This too - this extraordinary time I find myself living in - shall pass. And when it does, my remembrance of this time will hopefully encourage me to cherish the ordinary days to come.

The challenge of sitting still, and trying to quiet the mind, all the while meeting it, and your emotions and your body with curiosity and compassion, is not an easy one on the best of days - let alone when you are in a rough patch, or feeling stuck in the everyday. Even though it feels like nothing is shifting right now in my life - from my bodily pain to my very structured schedule as a parent - through my meditation practice I’ve come to realize these moments are exactly where change begins. Spring cannot emerge without Winter.

We cannot live in a constant state of growth. Periods of rest, integration, normalcy and nothingness are required for us to continue. Just as the seasons cycle through moments of contraction and expansion, so too, must our lives. In learning to “just be” with both the extraordinary and ordinary times, I am learning how to surrender to it all. Not seeking, not grasping or pushing away. Just learning how to live through all the seasons of my life, with and without the allergies.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
-Rumi

Walking in the woods as a kid, I always wanted to go off the trail into the unknown, convinced that there was something magical out there; something mysterious, sacred, divine.

The times I did wander I never quite found it. It always seemed just out of reach.

A similar feeling hit me as a teen, when I first heard about raves happening in the city. Growing up in a small town, me and my friends had begun to hear stories about these all night parties in warehouses. They were mysterious, with the location only announced the day of the event via an infoline, rented school buses picking us up at town hall, taking us out to industrial spaces transformed into epic parties.

It was like entering an alternate reality. Thousands of young people from all over the city coming together, wearing wide legged pants, big beads, bright colours, dancing all night to loud rhythmic music, glow sticks and fog machines and lighting making it feel truly otherworldly. All of which was enhanced by an abundance of psychedelics and empathogens. It was wild.

For me, stepping into a world so different and experiencing the bliss of dancing all night (enhanced by psychedelics), was both transcendent and clarifying.

It’s not surprising to learn how many people have turned to Buddhism as a result of their psychedelic experiences. We get a taste for transcendence, realizing there is a deeper dimension to life, and that there are disciplined traditions that explore this.

I believe that all that partying, combined with growing up in a Buddhist family, really opened me up to exploring spirituality. It was actually J. Krishnamurti that hooked me, a spiritual teacher who rejected the title of spiritual teacher, and instead hoped to guide people towards true freedom.

Krishnamurti wanted people to awaken their inner intelligence instead of looking outside for guidance. He was very clear on the topic of belief; that all belief only serves to solidify reality into concepts and ideas, but reality is not fixed, and ultimate truth cannot be reduced to ideas or beliefs.

“Belief is a form of prejudice which prevents you from seeing clearly. To find truth, the mind must be free from belief.” -J. Krishnamurti

I took the advice seriously. Although I was raised by Buddhist parents, they were not dogmatic, and decided not to force any worldview on their kids. I had long found the ideas of karma and reincarnation appealing, but I wouldn’t go so far to say I believed in these things.

Similarly, the big question of God came up often in life, and after reading Krishnamurti and having my transcendent rave experiences, I thought the binary “yes” and “no” were missing the point.

I didn’t believe or disbelieve God. Instead I wanted to know what people meant by “God”, and the definition never seemed clear. So my contemplation instead was “What is the nature of God?” or “What is the nature of existence/reality?”.

I had a vague notion that there was something divine about the world, something that connected all life. I was content enough to remain in the unknowing, continuing to inquire, and not have any clear answers.

Until everything changed.

Around my 30th birthday an old friend came back into my life and invited me to accompany him on a road trip to British Columbia to attend a big music festival.

The festival had some unexpected consequences for me. I was reintroduced to psychedelics, and this time in a totally new environment, one that felt playful and fresh. It broke me out of a crusty shell of cynicism that had become hardened by city life.

A photo I took at a music festival in BC during sunrise

It was like re-encountering the magic I had experienced in the rave scene, but this time in a more mature way. It was that same feeling I had while walking in the forest as a child, a sense that there was something magical there to be discovered. I felt a strong pull to this new mystical world, and started to make regular trips west.

On one such trip, I attended a friend’s cottage party on a remote island. I felt that I was approaching something meaningful in life, so as I took a relatively light dose of psychedelics, I made the intention to simply be contemplative, hoping some clarity about my life would come.

We hung out near the ocean for a while, admiring the stars. I had my first experience of bio-luminescent algae, which covered the rocks on the beach as the tide receded, lighting up each step with a gentle explosion of wonder.

I went inside the cottage, which had been transformed into a dance party, and as I moved my body to the music something began to happen that I had never experienced before.

I started to have ideas enter my mind that had a distinctly different quality from my regular thoughts. These didn’t feel like my thoughts, more like fully formed concepts that were being dropped into my mind from some outside source.

It began as a vision or understanding of culture and energy, and how we humans essentially channel the energy of our culture, carrying and amplifying that cultural energy.

I visualized culture as something living and growing like a moss, and this was a clear message that culture is alive. Whether we are passively engaging with it, or pushing its boundaries into new territories. My takeaway was that we can intentionally evolve culture into a better direction. That if we engage in our culture with more compassion and care, we can move culture in that direction.

I recognized the power that each of us has, that our actions are constantly impacting those around us. This insight was in direct opposition to the apathy I had felt about the individualistic and materialistic values I saw driving much of the world.

I was in awe of what was happening. It wasn’t like I had never thought about these types of things, but at that moment these ideas felt like divine messages that were being given to me intentionally.

I left the cottage party and headed back to the beach where I could find quietude and focus on what was coming through, walking along the water until I found a big rock to sit on where I wouldn’t be disturbed.

Sitting there that night, I could feel a divine presence of profound love and wisdom. It was so deeply loving and wise that I don’t feel those words accurately portray the experience. It was like the deepest love I had ever felt, or even could imagine, was only a distant reflection of this truly profound love. It was the ultimate source of all love, and I don’t know how I knew that, but at the time it was undeniably clear to me. This was the source of everything, the heart of the universe, the origin of all life and consciousness, and it was loving beyond comprehension.

The only label that felt fitting for this experience was “God”. Although I had been somewhat agnostic before, uncertain of the true nature of God, this was a clear revelation. I felt a kinship with all of the saints and prophets from all the various traditions, understanding their devotion and conviction.

I could easily see this type of experience converting someone to a religion. Had I been raised only in a Christian environment, I’m sure I would have deemed myself born-again and started to attend Church regularly.

But having been exposed to many religious and spiritual perspectives, I recognized the truth in all of them, that they are all genuine paths to the divine, as this presence was universal and indiscriminate. It was clear to me in that moment that we are all connected to this divinity, whether we realize it or not.

There was another vision that came through. I could see the Earth in my mind’s eye, covered everywhere in specks of light. The meaning was again somehow clear, that these specks of light were humans who were embodying this love and divinity and bringing it into the world.

I had begun the night looking for some direction or inspiration on what I should do with my life, and now I was getting this message that what you do isn’t nearly as important as the energy and presence you bring to it.

This experience shook me to my core, in the best way. It inspired deep devotion towards the divine and compassion for all beings. I spent the next few months in a subtle state of bliss, sensing the presence of the divine everywhere and in everything, and feeling deeply grateful for the fact that anything exists at all.

I went back to the rock I’d been sitting on the next morning and this seal carcass had washed up on shore in nearly the exact spot.

This experience made me feel that I better understood the world and my place in it, and helped me get clear on what I want and how to focus my energy. But despite a renewed commitment to my meditation and daily prayer practices, I eventually felt myself slipping back into a more isolated consciousness, the connection with the divine becoming more faint.

As the spiritual highs faded and I came back to a more grounded reality, I was confronted with the real challenge of the spiritual path: integration. For me it came by seeing everything in a new way.

Spending time simply observing nature began to inspire wonder and awe. Contemplating everything from trees to flowers to insects to mushrooms to moss to animals to birds to rocks… The beauty, variety, and complexity in nature is truly unfathomable.

Many traditions all over the world see reality as animate, meaning the world itself is alive and intelligent, that all things are conscious and have an essence or spirit that we can engage with. The more open I became to receiving messages from the world, the more it seemed to speak to me.

More and more I began to feel a sense of dialogue with the world. I would express my hopes or desires or curiosities — either through prayer or a more elaborate ritual — and would often receive some sort of response, whether through life’s synchronicities or through a sense of intuitive clarity.

Meditation is ultimately about dropping as much of the framework or understanding as we can, and beholding directly the mystery of existence. The more we shed our ideas about what the world is, the more intimately we can encounter it.

While getting out of my comfort zone and having new experiences was a big part of my path, I’ve recognized more and more that the magic and mystery of the world is right here, right now. My practice has become about the full embrace of life, recognizing the sacredness of each moment and seeing the divinity in everything and everyone.

So join us this month as we wander down unexplored paths of practice to see what magic and mystery awaits!

Disclaimer: this one is a heady academic one, I couldn’t help it. And so, references are indicated in parentheses throughout and are listed at the end. -P.W.

Every once and awhile a familiar sensation rises from the deepest recesses of my stomach, a place that feels as deep as the core of the Earth—deeper than I can fathom—an iron core I didn’t know I could feel inside my body. It has the combined gravity of everything I could imagine imploding on itself so that I never existed. On the outside, I feel like Jabba the Hutt raging with PMS. I feel ugly and nauseous, with the inertia of 1008 grocery bags on a full bus during rush hour at the peak of an ever hot summer day. I used to say that being single is like baking myself an elegant fruit pie from scratch, pulling it hot out of the oven and delightfully cutting a single slice for me. In actuality being single felt more like lying to myself as I ate a stale apple pie from No Frills out of the box (if No Frills ever made apple pies).

Why do I feel so desperately lonely?

1. “I think”, over “I am”

In the Samyutta-Nikāya, a monk likens “I am” to the smell of a flower—the smell is neither the petals, the color, nor the fibres of the plant, just the smell itself (1). My yoga philosophy teacher used to describe this as an am-ness: a primordial state that just is.

“I am”, my body.

My body just is.

My mind, however, is “I think”.

Maine de Biran described the transition from sleep to wakefulness as a state that is beyond cognitive reach, one that presents as a unique opportunity to reexperience our primordial state (2). At birth, our worlds begin as an “I am”: pure existence—a field of needs and present moments that we totally and utterly adhere to, if not completely merge with. This field has also been described as emotions and impulses void of subject-object distinction—vague forms, images, and reactions cocreated with external and internal stimuli (3). All is subject–subject. This field begins to organize itself: through a slow process (with our patient caregivers), we start to experience events as if one after the other, from which we establish a sense of time. Language develops shortly after as a tool for sense-making. We become fertile soil for the birth of “I think”: Ego and everything non-Ego is simultaneously born. “I think” presides over everything that does not belong to it (perhaps it incessantly consumes to accumulate more belongings, and we hence birth colonial capture and capitalistic modernity, but I need not digress here). In its ceaseless desire to distinguish itself, “I think” isolates from “I am”.

Why do I feel so desperately lonely?

Because “I am” is now invisible: it is ungraspable, uncertain, unstable, perpetually withheld from my reach. “I am” is always becoming and persists at the end of time. “I am” is inexhaustible movement, relationship, fluxing transition between states. But “I am” is breathing me when “I think” I am breathing it. It is an affirmation of my existence. It is Change. Always changing (thank God, always changing).

Octavia Butler writes, “all that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change” (4). Perhaps God wanted to experience love—re-knowing, re-union, and re-turn—so s/he fragmented themself into illusory separations to will themself back to wholeness (5). Brahma birthed and then cut Maya (illusion) into an innumerable number of pieces in a game of each piece remembering Brahma (6).

“I think”, therefore I forgot that “I am”, perhaps.

2. Mind over Body

In the 17th Century, “I think” as preconditional and superior to “I am” went viral thanks to Descartes (7). The context was a mechanical century: the body was framed as a complex machine that functions via material interactions and finally dissembles at death. Descartes considered thinking to be distinct from the body-machine: ”I think” could not be reduced to the material conditions of the rest of the body and was, instead, rescued from it on the seat in the pineal gland (8). To Descartes, “I think” came first. Mind became subject, body became object: Mind-over-Body.

Mind-over-Body is a double edged sword: Mind-over-Body beliefs can result in ignoring physical and/or psychological discomfort to achieve high performance, at the cost of health (9). The immune system, epigenetics, and microbiome-gut-brain axis all empirically denigrate the Mind-over-Body idea (10). Still, our tendency is to reduce our body to an automaton to preside over—to control, to keep in check.

But what if the body governed the mind instead, controlling and keeping in check what we could use to sense-make? In trauma, intense emotional reactions to events interfere with our ability to integrate those experiences into our memory. Our body bypasses our higher-order (neural) processing, reducing our memory to fragments (11) that may appear as visceral sensations (e.g., anxiety) and/or images (e.g., flashbacks; 12).

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Dai Mai is the horizontal meridian in our bodies that stores our trauma: what we cannot feel, process and/or integrate that would otherwise compromise the day-to-day functioning of our viscera. Dai Mai literally keeps things below our belt, creating dampness to stagnate movement when we are not ready for it. However, the understanding is that when we feel safe, we would restore flow; chronic stagnation manifests physical illness. When we are fragmented, we cannot discern “the big picture” within and without, particularly in new contexts that we would otherwise not consider harmful.

Audre Lorde writes, “the white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free” (13). Feeling is the longing of our forgotten self’s return.

Why do I feel so desperately lonely?

I am not a trauma specialist by any means, but I can say that when I am triggered, it feels as though my body is stuck in a time portal that my mind hasn’t caught up to yet. I rage at my partner for avoiding conflict after forgetting his half of the chores we agreed on this week. Meanwhile, my body is feeling the flashback of my parents who never apologized or repaired fractures with me because any semblance of an elder prostrating to a child was considered a defiance of culturally-endorsed social codes. Perhaps emotional neglect, then, felt like a risk to my life. Perhaps defying social codes, at another time, was a risk to theirs. My body is also flashing back as an inheritance from my grandparents; on both sides of my family they were abandoned by their partners during the Communist Revolution. After reuniting over 20 years later until their time of death, they never spoke about that fracture and what it did to their hearts. Perhaps speaking honestly about matters of the heart, during a time of social-political upheaval and surveillance, was a risk to life. My mind, however, cannot distinguish why my partner’s avoidance feels like life or death. I respond as if it were life-or-death. I rage so that I am too big to be forgotten.

But if I could source the courage to face what my body is trying to say, I realize that she is trying to protect me, as she always had, and that this particular response in this time and partnership would only create more distance, and sooner or later I would be looking for stale apple pies at No Frills.

3. Self over Other

Embodiment is a praxis of re-posturing and -orientation that sees the body as the existential foundation of culture (14). Embodiment is an indeterminate commitment to presently engaging with the world—it has no end. Embodiment is healing the perception that what starts in the body ends in objects—no, our bodies are enmeshed and interdependent with a world of subject-subject. An “I am” kind of world.

The promises of modernity continue to convince us that we are master possessors of a mechanical world separate from us. We coexist with supposedly passive beings, that we rank according to their likeness to Self: animate over inanimate, human over nonhuman, binary over spectrums. Anything Other is lesser-than, manipulatable, and controllable; hence commodifiable, colonizable, dehumanizable; Self over Other.

What does commitment to engaging with a collective body that also produces AI, corporate greed, environmental destruction and global violence mean? It means radically accepting that I am a fractal microcosm of that whole. It means being honest to myself about using ChatGPT to render photos of my cats playing mahjong, when the query consumes more than 500mL of clean drinking water (15). It means I make Amazon Prime purchases because I dread weaving through traffic among Others to the closest superstore, where I have to push a shopping cart and stand in long lineups behind even more Others. I spend even more time making online supplement, herb, and book purchases to feel better about my body, while the plastic packaging produced along the way will outlive any body on the planet. It means choosing to invest in a relationship with my neighbor who just told my Chinese body that immigrants are what the real problem is in Toronto. It means the collective body needs healing, just as much as my body does, and my body is part of it. It means it is easier to sever myself from the people and beliefs that “I think” are the problem, rather than truly see who they are: because being able to truly see others requires us to first honestly see ourselves.

Why do I feel so desperately lonely?

Because this feeling is an opportunity to discern real from unreal. Because this feeling is an invitation to quiet “I think”/Mind/Self, and feel all of the moments I abandoned myself. Because this feeling is a love so unconditional it offers me the freedom to turn away. Because this feeling is a portal to the collective—to other bodies finding our way back to ourselves and through that, to each other. And If I have the courage to sit with this feeling long enough, I might experience a fleeting moment of “I am” as if a flower longing to know the scent of itself.

*****

References:

1. Gragnani, C. 1975. Birth, life, and death of the Ego. Buddhist Publication Society. Available at: https://www.urbandharma.org/pdf1/birthofego.pdf

2. Maine de Biran, FPG. 1954–1957. Journal. Edited by Henri Gouhier. Neuchâtel: Éd. de La Baconnière. 3 vols.

3. Aloisi, A. 2024. Coenesthesia or the immediate feeling of existence: Maine de Biran and the problem of the unconscious between physiology and philosophy. Perspectives on Science 32: 47–69.

4. Butler, O. 1993. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows.

5. Walsch, ND. 1996. Conversations with God: an uncommon dialogue, Book 1. Deckle Edge. One of my favorite reads when I started my spiritual journey.

6. This Hindu creation story is also described here: https://cynthiaoneillcpj.wordpress.com/2017/09/21/maya-and-brahman/

7. Descartes, R. 1637. Discourse on the Method; origin of “I think therefore I am”.

8. Mokrycke, S. and Li, H. 2015. Separation and reunion: a short history of mind-body dualism. History of Medicine 84. Available at: https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/uwomj/article/download/4338/3504

9. Schüler, et al. 2023. Mind-over-body beliefs in sport and exercise: a driving force for training volume and performance, but with risks for exercise addiction. Psychology of Sport and Exercise 68: 10262.

10. Luas, G. 2017. All ‘in the mind’?: towards a new model of embodied mental health. Thesis (unpublished). Available at: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40287/1/Fullversion-2017LucasGphdBBK.pdf

11. Hovdestad, W.E. & Kristiansen, C.M. 1996. Mind meets body: on the nature of recovered memories of trauma. Women & Therapy 19: 31–45.

12. Van der Kolk, B. 1994. The body keeps the score: memory and the evolving psychobiology of post traumatic stress. Harvard Review of Psychiatry 1: 253–265.

13. Lorde, A. 1984. Sister Outsider. The Crossing Press.

14. Csordas, T. 1993. Somatic modes of attention. Cultural Anthropology 8: 135–156.

15. Ren, S. 2025. AI consumes a lot of water—but why?. TED Talk: https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2025/03/05/professors-ted-talk-warns-ais-hidden-water-costs

As a child I liked to squeeze myself into small spaces, reading or playing with action figures in the nook between the dining room bay window and the plant shelf in front of it. As a teen I’d enjoy sneaking into a random empty bedroom at a party, listening to the muffled revelry of my peers from a distance. For the vast majority of my adult life I’ve lived alone and flown solo, being able to retreat to a quiet, contained space almost anytime I choose. Still there’s often a voice in my head that pops up, saying “I want to go home”, even when I am in my actual home. So strong is the urge to retreat further, find a quieter, safer place.

This urge is fiercest when I’m at my worst. During a mental health slump or after an intense stint of busy overwhelm, I really don’t want to be seen. If I don’t have the energy or wherewithal to be of use in the world, then turtling in my own makeshift shell feels like the best, sometimes the only, possible strategy. Like a twist on the old adage, “If you don’t have anything useful to be, don’t be anything at all!”.

Over time, meditation practice has helped me get clearer about these old stubborn patterns and more curious about challenging them. I went through one of these low ebbs recently, a protracted period of feeling useless and unable to do much of anything. Faced with a regularly scheduled therapy session, I made the decision that, instead of cancelling or donning an affable mask of objective distance from my true feelings, I would try to speak honestly from this hopeless place.

It was scary as hell. My capitalist-patriarchical conditioning and trauma-wired brain/body are primed to expect rejection when I have needs of my own, when I can’t be of service to others or “productive” in the world. My mind goes blank, my throat closes, involuntarily responses to the prospect of sharing vulnerably.

But staying in that fear, finding the words, sharing the struggles, was ultimately deeply healing.

Turns out, maybe I didn’t want to be seen but I sure wanted to be found. No matter how many times I learn this particular lesson, it still sometimes comes as a surprise that showing up just as I am, messy parts and all, can actually strengthen connections with others. That shared vulnerability can be a gift and not a burden.

There’s a lot to hide from these days. The sense of hopelessness in witnessing climate catastrophe, helplessness in the face of war, injustice, and the erosion of multiple rights and freedoms can be overwhelming. The urge to turtle into the comfort of our own safe harbours of distraction or like-minded ideological bubbles is completely understandable.

But to address these giant crises and their systemic roots, we’re going to have to come out of our hidey holes eventually. Truth is we need each other, and not just those in our comfortable circles. Our existence as a species, our survival and safety, is absolutely tied to one another. We live in relationship, to everyone and everything.

How can we shore up our internal resources, be brave enough to speak our minds and take on the potential conflict and rejection that comes with that? And then stand in our own truth and while holding space for the experience and beliefs of others ? And ultimately find common ground, shared humanity, and ways forward through these troubled times to a better future?

“Being human takes practice”, we like to say at CEC. This week I’m teaching a meditation retreat for teenaged humans with Inward Bound Mindfulness. The practices I’m leaning into right now, and sharing with the teens this week, are made for these times. We’re practicing sitting with uncertainty and “don’t know mind”, softening to other ways of thinking and being. We’re trying to notice our present experience with clarity and equanimity, accepting the reality of now so we can more skillfully shape a future in need of changing. We’re cultivating compassion, for ourselves and others and all beings, so we can communicate from a kind and truthful place, holding each other and ourselves gently while also holding ourselves accountable for harmful behaviours.

At the beginning of these retreats, we ask the young participants to take “mindfulness trainings”, adapted from the traditional Buddhist precepts. They all begin the same way, “Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine…”

“Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, I undertake the commitment…
…to protect life
…to take only what is offered to me
…to use sexuality wisely
…to speak truthfully and kindly
…to not harm myself or others with substance use.”

In that spirit, our deepest practice has been tuning into interconnection. We’re paying attention to inner and outer nature, and realizing it’s all made up of the same matter. And if you look back far enough, we’re all descending from common ancestry.

These meditating youth give me hope. They have language and skills and self-awareness levels that I didn’t even know existed until I was twice their age. Phew. Because we’ll need them to get this big beautiful wounded space rock that we call home back on track. We need all of us. All-y all-y oxen free. Come out of those hiding spots when you’re ready. We’ve got good work to do.

-Erin Oke

When I was young, I used to fantasize about a magic trunk. A heavy, weathered crate covered in runes or hieroglyphs or… something mysterious. I imagined crawling inside, closing the lid, and making the world stop. Time would pause. Grown-ups would freeze mid-sentence. Even my thoughts would shut up. I could stay for eons if I wanted. And when I was ready, I’d lift the lid, refreshed and ready to do all the peopling again.

That was my idea of freedom: an indefinite break from the world. From others. From my own noisy mind.

I didn’t yet have language for overstimulation or neurodivergence. I just knew the world was full of moods and demands I couldn’t control, and being a person in the mess of it all felt sticky and tangled. So I went looking for a real-world equivalent of what that magic trunk promised: freedom from it all.

I got very jazzed when I found meditation. It seemed, on the outset, to promise exactly that: sanctioned stillness and cosmic invisibility. Sit, go inward, flick the thinking switch, and disappear it all into “emptiness.” Yes please!

I came in, convinced as Sartre, that hell was other people. But slowly, a suspicion muscled its way in as I kept practicing: what if hell wasn’t other people, but all my damn ideas about them? My projections. My stories. My labels and concepts and mental gymnastics. My habitual recoiling from the raw, relational weirdness of the world.

And when I pulled that thread, something started to open. I caught a whiff of a braver, deeper freedom than I’d imagined: the blooming capacity to be with whatever’s actually here without needing it (or me) to shape-shift into perfection first.

Freedom, as they say, is an inside job. Turns out, we don’t need to free ourselves from everything if we can expand the field so wide that nothing’s left out. The inside job is less spa day, more hanging out with the full cast of your inner sitcom without needing anyone to shut up.

And yet, it’s not only an inside job. My ability to even consider “inner freedom” has always been propped up by outer freedoms that rely on—surprise!—other people. A room of my own. Patient, brilliant teachers. Cats that sit in my lap when I meditate so I don’t dare get up.

If you’ve ever called yourself a Consciousness Explorer, practiced in community (like this one!), or adventured through your mind-bod via a podcast or app, your burgeoning inner freedom rests in a beautifully wide web of entanglements: A bit of extra time in the day to practice, an internet’s worth of guidance on the other side of your cracked phone screen, the emotional and financial bandwidth for retreat or reflection. Maybe even a family that values the inner life (or at least thinks your “woo woo” stuff is kinda cute). And let’s not forget a sociopolitical regime that hasn’t outlawed the contemplative path—yet.

None of us gets free alone. Contemplative life isn’t a path leading up and out of the world, it leads us further into it. And without collective freedoms (economic, social, political) inner freedom doesn’t get very far.

Still, old fantasies die hard.

I catch myself reaching for that magic trunk all the time. I sneak off to quiet corners to be alone. Lock myself in bathroom stalls at dive bars for a break from the noise. Screen calls. Forget texts. Disappear into the night. I still love to close a door and block out everything but my breath. (What can I say? Once an introvert, always an introvert.)

But wherever I go, the world always follows me in. It’s part of the landscape of my own being. The pounding bass, the news cycle, the broken systems, the big moods. The silence I steal in those moments is heavenly, but I don’t mistake it for liberation anymore.

Like the Tao, the peace that can be disturbed is not the real peace. And liberation that depends on conditions is not lasting. We won’t find what we’re looking for by escaping each other. We are made of each other. Even when it’s hard. Even when it smells like beer and bad decisions in a dive bar bathroom.

These days, freedom feels less like a locked trunk and more like a window flung open. I catch glimpses of it in the dissolving of lines between quiet and loud, self and other, inner and outer. I practice finding it in the silence that sings inside the noise, in the stillness that dances in the movement.

And whenever I taste it – briefly, wildly – it’s so delicious that I can’t help but want to share it all around. Because real freedom isn’t fromeach other. It’s with each other. With others on your path. With difficult people. With total strangers. With you!

*Tasha Schumann is a creator, community-builder, and explorer of the mind. She's practiced and taught in the Indo-Tibetan traditions of Vajrayana, Dzogchen, Bön, and asana yoga for over a decade, she's a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Psychology Research program, and she holds certifications in several Western contemplative modalities. She's also a Juno-nominated recording artist performing under the name Tasha the Amazon). She gets really excited about helping creatives and adventurers explore the "WTF-IS-GOING-ON-HERE?!" of existence in as many ways as humanly possible - which (among other things) she does by teaching and mentoring emerging artists, hosting one of the most popular nature shows on YouTube (Floralogic/Animalogic), and co-hosting the Mind Bod Adventure Pod, alongside Jeff Warren!