there’s a feeling in the middle of my chest and back i’ve been sitting with for a few minutes here, looking for the words that might go along with it. it feels sort of tired, like the energy after a sprint. it has a sort of downward, consolidating momentum. there’s a pleasantness to it, a restfulness. it’s not the energy that stands on the table and says look at me, but rather the energy that’s content — relieved, even — to nuzzle into the corner, where no one can expect me to perform.

i don’t know much. i’m finding my way. i’m the same person i was before i started teaching and coaching — just sincerely trying to learn, not giving up.

various topics present themselves in my mind for candidates to be written about, swirling, half formed. but so often they are tiresome, they are meaningless, they bear no fruit

there’s a tyranny of being useful, of being impressive. here is this opportunity to speak to many people, many readers. is it ok to not perform?

i don’t edit myself. i don’t check to see if the thread can be followed from the outside. i let it slide, just a little, towards poetry

something small

to me, it feels like scuba diving. spelunking. going down through the layers of consciousness and only surfacing what i find beneath the waves. i wonder if for anyone else, it feels like going up, or forwards, or back. or left? or right?

i’ve gotten afraid about managing my image. what a drag. my livelihood is supported by my reputation. what a bind! will they allow me a post that’s not useful? can i show that i don’t have it figured out? is it ok if i’m sad, sometimes? … sad is still noble — what if i’m confused? what if i despair? what if i hate?

i try to let simple things be simple, and let complex things be complex

usually, when the pattern isn’t clear, there’s an invitation to let all the appearances get more nebulous. i thought that was a boundary… maybe it’s a pathway? i thought this space was closed… maybe it’s a different kind of open? i thought this was good…. thought this was bad… thought this was easy… thought this was hard… can i let my eyes fuzz? can i breathe into the static? can i die, enough, for the deeper pattern of life to emerge?

and it does, and it does. i heard recently of great lama who says “i like to see the whole pattern”

i thought this was nothing… maybe it’s something? i thought this was something… maybe it’s nothing?

i had a physics teacher once who asked the class what was the most special part about e=mc^2. not the c, not the m, not the 2, not the e — it was the equals sign, he exclaimed! energy IS matter!

i don’t know what the conversion factor is, but i think there’s a similarly stunning equals sign between love and all of consciousness, love and all of creation. when i die, enough, the pattern emerges.

i thought this was infinite… maybe it’s finite? i thought this was finite… maybe it’s infinite?

beings of form, wrapped around emptiness. beings of finitude, wrapped around infinity. beings of conditions, wrapped around the unconditioned. beings of yeses and nos, beings of machine, beings of synapses and electrical currents, wrapped around the Deathless, wrapped around Nibbana, wrapped around Peace.

that was nice, thanks for indulging me :)

this week i’m heading off to an airbnb with friends to meditate in silence for a week. i have such wonderful spiritual friends here. we'll all be practicing in whatever ways we wish, which i think is fun.

i’m planning to make secure attachment meditation (Ideal Parent Figure, as well as John Churchill’s practice of secure attachment to the ground) my main focus, which i’m quite excited about. i’ve never practiced these techniques in an intensive way, and i find that every practice benefits greatly from being seen in silent retreat conditions. on silent retreat, there’s finally time and space to reeallyy get in there, to be a nerd about technique, to let it sink in, to see it in all conditions.

many good things happening this fall — more training around attachment work, training from tucker peck in motivational interviewing, medicine work, retreats of various kinds.

and i’m continuing to see students/clients for meditation and attachment healing coaching! next month i’ll be finishing up my website and making a bigger announcement, but if you want to beat the rush, feel free to sign up for a free intro call with me here: https://savvycal.com/danielbrottman/intro-call.

i recently was interviewed by wystan bryant-scott for his podcast, Natural Awakening! i was so delighted to be on a podcast that i have myself listened to many incredible episodes of. some topics we explored:

-my journey into dharma practice
-the relationship between dharma practice and attachment healing
-sincerity and authenticity as the aim of practice
-how attachment repair works and what i do in 1:1 sessions
-the nature of attunement
-the value of wise speech

please enjoy! (available on youtube, spotify, or any podcast feed)

i’m excited to share that on this saturday, the 25th of july, i will be teaching a workshop at the SF Dharma Collective titled:

the workshop is from 1-5pm PT, in person AND on zoom(!) and is supported on the dāna model (pay-what-you-want).

here’s the copy i wrote for the event. you’ll note i Very Professionally used capital letters at the beginning of my sentences and everything.

Sincerity and Sovereignty

with Daniel Brottman

What is it that we actually want from spiritual practice? If we look beneath concepts handed to us from books and traditions and get honest about our true motivations, what do we find?

How can we take full ownership of our practice? What does it mean to take responsibility for our own views, determinations, and practices? What role can creativity and playfulness take in our formal practice? What does it mean to be in a truly wise and humble relationship with teachers and traditions, from a place of self-sovereignty?

Contacting the sincerest desires of our hearts, with the courage to stand fully in what we sense to be true, makes our practice all the more personal, organic, and even expedient.

Our afternoon together will include practices, a dharma talk, and discussion. From a standpoint of both sincerity and sovereignty, we’ll spend time together in body-based meditation, metta practice, core transformation (a modality to help uncover deeper desires of the being), and ideal parent figure practice (an attachment healing method, related to many of our deepest desires as humans).

This program is for anyone who is drawn to these questions, and to a relationship with spirituality that is fully genuine.

Join us in person at 2929 24th street
OR online via Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/SFDharma (password: 108108)

Daniel Brottman is a meditation teacher and emotional integration coach who began practicing the dharma in 2013. Rooted in the Insight tradition and early Buddhism, Daniel’s practice is also informed by later Buddhist traditions and a wide inquiry into human psychology, spirituality, and contemplative practices. His experience includes over 8 months of cumulative silent retreat, mentorship from Tempel Smith, and training in Core Transformation and Attachment Alchemy. He trained as a meditation teacher with Inward Bound Mindfulness, where he currently serves as an assistant teacher. Daniel regularly teaches group classes in meditation and dharma practice online, and offers individual guidance to practitioners on their unique paths.

To learn more about Daniel’s offerings, visit

https://danielbrottman.com/

RSVP here! https://events.humanitix.com/sincerity-and-sovereignty

wow

i’m still a bit shocked this is happening. what happened was, some months ago i applied to be an assistant teacher with inward bound mindfulness, an organization i love that puts on meditation retreats for teenagers. incredibly excitingly, they accepted my application, and i’ll be helping teach a teen retreat this new years.

when the news came in, i shared about it on twitter. my friend and very-established-meditation-teacher tucker peck messaged me saying congratulations, and also that i should email so-and-so at SFDC to see if i could teach a workshop, and to use him as a recommendation. i wrote to them with a bit of my background and said that tucker sent me. they got back and said what dates work for you? do you want an evening 90 minutes or a weekend half-day?

wow

i guess i have a huge blank canvas? at an established dharma center? to say whatever i think is important to say about the dharma?

as is my usual mode for gathering my thoughts on sharing about the dharma, i went on a long walk and spoke freely into claude (who makes a great note-taker). i realized i had a whole dharma talk’s worth of material to share about sincerity and sovereignty.

only in the last few years have i come to see sincerity and authenticity as an organizing principle of my practice. to be sure, this direction has been present much longer than that. but when i recognized it as a compass heading, my practice came a lot closer to home, and became more intimate with my actual life.

aspects of self-sovereignty have also always been a thread in my practice, but only in the past year or so, as my personal work in attachment healing revealed subtle layers of my being i hadn’t known were hurting, have i started to even more fully appreciate what it is to rest in my own embodied authority, and what this makes possible. the depth of the tradition is available to one who wishes to come and see it for themselves. humility is possible for one who knows they stand on their own two feet. and real human connection becomes available for one who has the backbone to stay true to themselves.

i hope that my sharing in depth about these topics, and guiding meditations that are resonant with them, will be of benefit to those who attend.

if you would like to reflect upon and practice these themes with me, visit https://events.humanitix.com/sincerity-and-sovereignty to RSVP

(retroactive blogging)

(the above should be the end of this blog post, but seeing as my last entry on this substack was 3 months ago, i feel i have a little catching yall up to do!)

(metta may was a great success. 87 people signed up, and many of these attended the classes live, or watched recordings, and showed up for a 1:1 call with me. i loved refining my understanding of metta, refining my way of teaching and sharing about metta, and i loved getting to help SO MANY PEOPLE in this beloved practice. metta is the natural orientation of the human heart, and i think we pushed a great big wave of it through each of us and out into the world.)

(i took the advanced core transformation training program, and also worked with an expert NLP coach for a month. i still think CT is a really cool technique that can be quite useful at times, but i was honestly fairly disappointed with the pedagogy of the training program. it was based in an attempt to flow chart and script every possible issue someone might face in guiding CT — and while there’s value in that and i learned many helpful things, fundamentally it’s not the way i want to go about session work with my clients.)

(i went to a daylong planetary dharma event at the beginning of june that really excited me. john churchill (a student of daniel p brown, creator of the ideal parent figure protocol) seems to be some kind of mixture of deeply rooted in tibetan buddhism, wildly syncretic, obsessed with attachment healing, metamodernly-informed, and bodhisattva-pilled that i really like. i’m considering joining a course he teaches that begins this fall.)

(i started working with ayurvedic doctor jessica vellela, of myayu.com. too early to report much major results yet, but i can confirm my digestive system is clearly happier, already!)

(i made the difficult decision to skip vibecamp this year, mostly in order to rest. metta may took a lot out of me and i sorely needed downtime. it stings to have missed my friends, but the chance to recuperate was worth it. i also got in touch with some deep anger (while trading session time with a friend) that helped me find some needed clarity.)

(i DID however attend “revel,” a 4-day festival put on by the organization “dance meets tantra.” this was about a year after i attended a similarly sexy summer event in massachusettes, where i learned an aawwful lot about my myriad triggers and growth edges in that realm! revel was a rollercoaster of feelings, too, as expected, but it also showed me that a year of intensive attachment work really does make a difference.)

may all beings be happy! may all beings be free! may all beings know the most sincere desires of their hearts! may all beings delight in the sovereignty of their being!

i offer coaching in dharma practice, meditation practice, emotional integration, and attachment healing. feel free to book a free intro call here: https://savvycal.com/danielbrottman/intro-call

i’m wildly excited (and a little nervous!) to have so many people involved. the more people that are gathered for a thing, the more real it becomes, the more energy it has, the greater its effects will be to ripple out into the world.

and the effects of a community coming together to help each other practice kindness, compassion, friendliness, and love for a whole month, i feel confident, will be tremendously positive!

what is metta may again?

metta may is a class i am teaching from may 3-31. each week, we’ll have a 90 minute group call to practice meditation that opens our hearts, to connect with each other, and to have Q&A time to refine our practice and address difficulties.

we’ll cover things like learning to identify the feeling (or stance, or frequency, or energy, or sense) of metta in our hearts, minds, and bodies, and learning to deepen and absorb in that feeling, and spreading it out to more and more people and living beings in our lives and around the world. we’ll explore lots of ways to cultivate metta directed towards ourselves. we’ll cultivate compassion, forgiveness, and equanimity. we’ll explore different techniques like using phrases, using imagery, and cultivating the felt sense of metta in the body.

and perhaps even more substantially, we’ll be supporting each other to practice metta every day. having 40+ other people on our team for an intention like this is like a super power! we’ll connect about our daily practice through a group chat, and share our metta wins and experiments.

i’ll also be meeting with each participant once for an hour long call, to give personal attention to their metta practice.

gee golly where can i sign up!

right here partner - tinyurl.com/mettamay26. the more the merrier!!

metta may is offered on a dāna basis, which is to say on a system of generosity. if you wish to participate and are able and willing to donate money, that form of reciprocity is deeply appreciated and valuable for my mission. at the same time, one’s willingness to practice metta together is all that is required to sign up, and those who can’t or don’t wish to donate money are still very much welcome!

where are these memes and accompanying meme-commentary i was promised by the subtitle of this substack post???

comin right up! (i made all these to dribble out slowly on twitter to help spread the word - it was a really fun little project :))

metta is one of the simplest and most direct meditation techniques. in essence, i simply orient to my heart and immerse myself in its true nature. ill will and delusion wither, peace and joy often arise, and i see the world more clearly

i think of ill will like a very detrimental shortcut our minds take up as a habit. if someone is being unskillful, it can be easier to believe they deserve retribution than to find grief and compassion, all while holding our needed boundaries

the problems with this are:
1) it makes it easier for us to cause unnecessary harm to ourselves and others
2) the mind is not typesafe, and if we think other beings are deserving of pain, we will think parts of ourselves are as well
3) the very act of ill will is a defection against our deepest authenticity, and is itself painful

so ill will is like a short cut to protect ourselves that ends up harming us (and others) a lot more in the long run

this is one of the reasons metta practice, the practice of cultivating good will, is so important and so freeing!

this gets complicated when we consider people who are horribly abusive or exercising power obscenely, but it’s still possible, and skillful.

wishing for the wellbeing of a harmful person isn’t wishing for them to “get away with it” or excusing their actions. it’s recognizing that their true wellbeing would be synonymous with their healing, their being lifted out of ignorance, and their own grieving and reckoning with their actions

we can also be compassionate for the welfare of others even simultaneously with defending ourselves, even simultaneously with using force, if needed

we need not force ourselves into this view at our own detriment. we are fragile beings, and we learned and inherited patterns of ill will very early in our lives, to protect ourselves.

but, when it’s safe enough, when there is enough resource, i find that when i am able to hold this view skillfully, i suffer less, and my actions are more aligned with the wellbeing of all living things.

this is the type of metta practice known as metta for “the enemy.” we start by learning to recognize the quality of metta for ourselves, for loved ones, etc. but in time, we can practice expanding the circle.

sometimes i’m like
>well what’s this suffering about?
>don’t i *deserve* to be suffering?
>if i give myself compassion then wont that just cause *other* problems??

so quan yin (seen here as patrick star) helps me, because her algo is just
>suffering?
>ok, compassion

referencing quan yin (in her, uh, more usual form) can be such a relief, because it allows me to see that any contraction in my system, no matter the cause, is worthy of being held with love. otoh if i judge my suffering as “unworthy,” it only creates more tension, and invites the confusion to fester.

metta and compassion are closely related - practicing with a focus on one helps the other come online as well.

something useful i’ve found in my own metta practice is that **even just looking for metta IS practicing metta**

metta practice can be “successful” even if the whole sit, we get no clear sense or feeling of metta in the body. the intention to cultivate metta, the openness for it to enter, the feeling around in the dark for it, are all part of the process.

metta does eventually have a noticeable somatic component, but i would argue that the seed of metta does not require this - it’s simply the intention of goodwill. it’s the stance of the heart.

and even if i’m meditating and feeling grumpy and judgemental and contracted etc etc -- if the INTENTION is alive to be in a stance of the heart that relates to all beings with goodwill, in some sense, the stance is already there (if perhaps embryonic).

of course it’s lovely when there’s a practice session with a metric fuckton of metta shining like the sun. learning to open to this without grasping is marvelous!

but how valuable also is it to find myself in some strange cold wilderness of the psyche, and learn to navigate from there to somewhere with at least a warm hearth.

ok, that’s all for now!

if you’re considering joining for metta may, know that i and all of us who’ll be there would love to have you be part of it

❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥tinyurl.com/mettamay26❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

may you be well!

i offer coaching in dharma practice, meditation practice, emotional integration, and attachment healing. feel free to book a free intro call here: https://savvycal.com/danielbrottman/intro-call

metta is the natural quality of the heart that relates to all living beings with good will. metta practice brings our kindness, compassion, and love more to the surface, all without relinquishing any of our strength and clarity.

for me, over the years i've been practicing it, metta has become a way of life. i love how metta practice helps me find what feels like my true heart, my most authentic self, and who i am when defenses and fears have been soothed.

as one of my recent meditation students shared:

“Man, the way the world has been opening toward me in response to this intentional 2 weeks of metta practice has actually been insane. I actually feel so seen, even by people I barely know. It’s been feeling like the me that I know I am has had a curtain yanked off of it.”

as i mentioned above, i'm offering this program on a donation (dāna) model. this means it is freely offered to anyone who wants to participate. at the same time, there is an invitation into reciprocity in accordance with your desires and means, and in the sign up link i offer some suggested donation amounts.

but at the end of the day, while this is my work and i wish to be financially supported, my primary goal in hosting metta may is to help as many people as possible learn and deepen in this wonderful practice.

so do not let any lack of $ keep you from signing up, if you wish to! and if you want to talk with me about your feelings around not having money to give, or not knowing how much to donate etc, feel free to send me a DM.

the group calls will be every sunday in may, for 90 mins, at 10am PT. they will also be recorded so you can watch later, if you can't make that time.

i hope to see you there!!!

head to tinyurl.com/mettamay26 to sign up and learn more <3

i offer coaching in dharma practice, meditation practice, emotional integration, and attachment healing. feel free to book a free intro call here: https://savvycal.com/danielbrottman/intro-call

a more true answer is that it was ineffable, or that it went exactly how it did, it was what it was. maybe i’ll start saying that, when friends ask.

so, why write about it? there is some value, i’ve found, in doing some sense-making after an experience of diving deep into the layers of consciousness. i can reflect on and shape the story of what happened, what i know, what i don’t know, how it fits into my life, what it means for my practice, without ultimately losing sight of its ineffability, and the concurrent knowledge that i will never fully know the effects of this (or, indeed, any) event.

additionally, i can hope that by sharing my experience, others may feel safer, more inspired, more encouraged, or more oriented to their own unfolding practice. also it’s kinda fun

what i did

from feb 2 - feb 22 (3 weeks), i was on a solo and silent meditation retreat, at my home in boulder. i spoke to no one other than my meditation teacher and my attachment work coach, once a week each. until the last few days, i almost never used the internet, and only read the occasional passage from a dharma book that was relevant to my practice.

in terms of formal practice (seated, lying down, or slow-walking), i got in around 9 or 10 hours a day. on retreat though, the line between informal and formal practice starts to blur. when i am making and eating food, cleaning myself or the house, or taking a walk around the block, there is equally nothing else to do with myself other than inhabit the present moment fully with awareness, just as in formal practice.

most days looked like this:

5 or 6am: wake up, meditate half-awakedly in bed, or sit to meditate, or do some stretching
7am: chant (om mani padme hum, the heart sutra, the five remembrances, the metta sutta, the refuges and precepts)
7:30am: meditate
8am: breakfast, take a walk around the neighborhood, find something in the house to clean
9am: meditate (alternating between sitting, lying down, and walking, as desired)
12pm: lunch, take a walk around the neighborhood or a slightly longer walk around chautauqua park
~1pm: meditate
4pm: core transformation, or calisthenics + cold shower + meditate, or just keep meditating
5pm: dinner, neighborhood walk
~6pm: guided meditation from michael taft, listen to a dharma talk and stretch, meditate
9pm: chant (verses of sharing and aspiration, om mani padme hum)
~9:10pm: get in bed, sometimes falling asleep quickly, sometimes meditating in bed for a while first. sometimes i’d wake up in the middle of the night and not fall back asleep quickly, in which case i’d either practice in bed or get up to sit for a bit

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cleaning

in a very long and very silent day filled with fairly intangible progress that slips through your fingers when you try to grasp on to it, it’s deeply satisfying to perform at least this one task that is so tangible, so tactile. with the heightened mindfulness of retreat conditions, the magical and positive effect of cleanliness on the energetic field of a room (or the stagnancy of the qi, or however you want to think of it) is greatly heightened.

making the bathroom sparkle, dusting places i never used to notice, keeping the floor swept every day, getting all the hair out of the fabric on the stairs, cleaning out the microwave, wiping down the windows — there is a simple pleasure in these activities that reveals itself on retreat, and can be surprisingly nourishing to the heart.

a few days in, i also started to notice that there was some… no wait, a LOT of trash all over the place, on my usual 3x/day walk around the neighborhood. i thought this was a great example of how increased mindfulness highlights what is in need of care, in life. so i started picking it up, more and more. before long i was taking a garbage bag out with me once in a while and wearing plastic gloves so i could get even the grosser stuff. one time i went out on a special mission just to pick up a discarded diaper.

cleaning up the neighborhood, too, i found to be very supportive for my wellbeing. i liked the idea that my practice period was having this modest but tangible effect on my physical surroundings and my neighbors.

meditating

breath

sometimes, i would do shamatha (calm-abiding) practice, using the breath as the focus of attention. i might feel the breath throughout the whole body, or just in the actual places where air was moving, or maybe very, very finely, just at the tip of the nose. sometimes the conditions in the mind were already quite content and even, allowing for a steadiness and ever more collection around the breath, moving towards a state where the breath feels like all that exists in the universe. sometimes the conditions in the mind were discontented, contracted in some way, and while i would still maintain some awareness and connection with the breath, my intentions were more occupied with practicing bringing the heart and mind to a state of ease, contentment, and wellbeing.

shamatha is described by some as simply “concentration practice,” which in one sense it is, but the broader meaning is that it is wellbeing practice. the emotional tenor of the being and the collectedness and unification of the mind are not two separate aspects. they are more or less one axis, inseparable.

metta

sometimes, i would practice cultivating metta. i found that the trees in chautauqua park and a very cute toddler i saw on one of my walks were amongst the easiest beings for me to generate the feeling of metta for. i practiced cultivating metta for them, and for each of my housemates, and for my sister and her family, and for my brother and his family, and for my parents. i cultivated metta for my teachers and guides, for my neighbors, for my whole city. i cultivated metta for myself, and for all beings.

sometimes i used my tried and true metta phrases like a mantra. sometimes i looked into my own eyes in the mirror, and said my metta phrases in the 2nd person, or used the phrase “i love myself.” sometimes i focused just on the physical and imaginal sensation of metta radiating outwards from my body and my heart in all 6 directions. sometimes i tapped into a sense of underlying cosmic love i had learned to access through core transformation, and simply rested in the ambient field of metta that seemed at times to pervade all beings and all phenomena, without exception.

jhana

sometimes, while practicing with the breath or with metta as described above, i found that i had access to jhana. at least, i can say that the states i practiced with seem to match descriptions of the first and second jhanas in leigh brasington’s book. as rob burbea suggests, i can put a post-it note on those states for now, and say “i’m calling that jhana 1 and jhana 2, but maybe one day i’ll think of those labels differently.”

i’ve never been the most gifted jhana practitioner around, but i have fairly consistently now, in the last couple of years, found that access to this kind of jhana becomes available to me in sufficient retreat conditions. in the past i’ve only ever accessed jhana through metta, but this retreat i had access through breath meditation as well, which was exciting to me.

i noticed that the degree of ekaggatā, or “one-pointedness, indistractability,” was not actually the sole determinant of my access to jhana. some of the sits where i had the most collectedness, the most sense of absorption into the metta or the breath, were not the ones where i entered jhana. indeed, the pali suttas list 5 factors of entering jhana, and ekaggata is only one of them. despite this though, i think it’s a common assumption that to enter jhana at all we have to be super-humanly one-pointed in our focus. part of me still clearly believed this, as i was surprised to find that my access to jhana was more mediated by the state of the energy body, the sense of how much i could “taste the pīti in the air,” so to speak. (i won’t go into what piti is in depth here, but just to give a handful of descriptions/translations i’ve heard: “glee,” “rapture,” “body-buzz,” “any pleasure born of abandoning the 5 hindrances,” “aliveness-flow.”)

i used to think that entering jhana would surely be like being suddenly struck with a full-body lightning bolt of bliss (which apparently it can be), but i’ve found that for me it’s more often like this incredible clip of stephen colbert very very slowly smiling wider and wider over 20 seconds. in my memory the bit was even more hilarious, lasting well over a minute, which is more like the usual pace of how my smile grows when entering jhana.

as the piti grows and grows, nourished by however much indistractibility of attention i am able to give it (the sufficient amount of which is called “access concentration”), it’s like a little divet, and then a deeper bowl, is being formed in the fabric across which attention can traverse. there are still thoughts happening in the background, and i could still use my will to put the attention somewhere else, or get up and stop meditating, but more and more it feels like there is a momentum, a gravity, that is drawing the attention into the piti itself. in my humble jhana practice, a “bowl” is about as deep as that gravity well gets, so far. but according to reports from meditators across many traditions and centuries, there is no limit on how deep the absorption can go. it can become a deep gorge, a canyon, an unimaginable chasm. maybe on my next retreat, i’ll graduate to a bucket!

starting sometime in the 2nd week of retreat, i found myself entering this kind of jhana once or twice a day. i did some experiments with them. i practiced broadening the field of attention to include more of the body, to help the piti spread. sometimes i tried taking a big relaxing breath (as leigh suggests) to make the sukkha (happiness, wellbeing) more prominent than the piti, thus entering the 2nd jhana (or at least, what i’m sticking my “2nd jhana” post-it note on). but mostly i just enjoyed the piti, was simple, let the “aliveness-flow” move through my system and open and clean me according to its own natural tendencies. this would often be a lovely pick-me-up in my day, and be supportive for my other subsequent practices.

hindrances

sometimes, i found myself awash with hindrances.

like: restlessness!
can’t sit still can’t lie down walking is too open sitting is too closed hnnghgh ok open the eyes see the tree out the window hnng ok ahhhh breathing in ahhhh breathing out ahhh open the eyes look at quan yin on the altar ok ahhh hnggg

and: loneliness!
i want to talk to people pleaaaassee, will my friends even remember me after this, it’s like i died and became a ghost, i miss this friend, and this friend, and this friend, and this friend, and smiles, and hugs

and: as-yet-unexplained-primary-emotional-wound-that-lives-in-my-left-shoulder!
ow. owwwww. ooowwwwwwwww. ow ow ow. owwwwwww. owwwwwwwwwwwww. ~deep breath~ ooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

and: sense desire!
[redacted]

and: doubt mixed with self-judgement!
i don’t think i’m doing this right. have i ever understood how to do this right? maybe i should do exactly what mahasi sayadaw says. or no wait what he says seems different than what rob burbea says. but wait what rob says seems different than what my teacher says. does meditation even work? wait i don’t think this is doing anything? i have no idea what i’m doing. i’ve never known what i’m doing! oh my god i shouldn’t be teaching. is the dharma fake? oh no i’m a fraud

thankfully, the doubt only got THAT bad maybe two or three times in the retreat. but doubt is not just a storm that washes over me, a force of nature i have no part to play in (anatta aside, for now). it’s a path that is always open, that i contribute to walking down or abstaining from at many fine points throughout a day of practice. there’s a spectrum of identification with doubt, a spectrum of how much i believe doubt’s assumption that some question is, in fact, binary.

doubt is said to be the most dangerous of the hindrances, as it is the one that can lead to ceasing practice altogether. i have found this to be true, and therefore learning to work with doubt is of special importance. (i could write a whole piece on the difference between doubt and discernment, but i’ll leave that for another time.) there are subtle ways to work with doubt in the mind, such as recognizing even the small flickers, and not needing to either defend against or endorse their assertions. and then there are gross ways to work with doubt when it’s gotten strong, such as loosening my container to go take an extra walk, or just connecting with one of my teachers or guides.

the gift of doubt, hard earned as it may be, is humility. and i am grateful for the gift of humility. it feels soft, and pure. it is a condition for my deepest honesty and sincerity.

when other hindrances were strongly present, i might use bits of a technique like being with the breath, metta or self compassion, or noting, but these become more in service of just staying with my experience however i can and letting go of proliferating thought than “practicing concentration” or “developing insight” per se. i might also not really use any technique, but just exist with myself. just be present to the energies of the hindrances as they crush or tear through or vibrate my body.

maybe the hindrance would pass within 20 minutes, and i could apply myself more fully to another aim. maybe it would be a 4 hour stretch of just existing with it, with no apparent progress or end in sight. occasionally, a hindrance or group of hindrances might characterize the better part of a day. during these times, there are some skillful qualities i am practicing, such as attentional facility, equanimity, kindness, and maybe some ways of nudging my state into a more wholesome direction. but any sense of struggle, any sense of trying to control the states or dominate them, is generally fruitless. so the deeper qualities being practiced are a wholesome surrender, and a true patience.

vipassana, vipashyana, and non-duality

noting (vipassana)

while insights can and do arise in any kind of practice (or non-practice), at times i would also engage with techniques that are meant to foster them, in particular.

the main method of this i have practiced on retreat is mahasi noting, as taught to me at IMS. the technique is quite simple - simply use a soft mental label (“hearing,” “tingles,” “annoyance,” “seeing,” etc) for whatever is arising in attention, to help strengthen mindfulness and stay very close to experience. in this way of working, i’m trusting mindfulness to naturally lead to the other 6 factors of awakening, and for insights to appear out of the blue.

and this they sometimes do! i remember one session when i had a very nice amount of wholesome factors present, and was practicing the shinzen young method of noting, in particular. i remember seeing quite clearly, several times, how some little dukkha that arose in my system had a surprising quality. on some level, my mind was used to assuming that dukkha simply happens, it happens “to” me, in a sense. but with the clarity brought by very close attention, i saw the way that i was habitually lumping together an arising thought and an emotional body sensation into a single “entity,” and that reified “thing” had a sort of thickness or density that i experienced as dukkha. and simultaneously, i saw the option to not lump together those sensory phenomena (and in some sense, not connect them to a sense of self), and then there was no dukkha! the dukkha was something concocted, fabricated by volitional activity in my system! “i” did that! which means i don’t have to do it.

seeing something like this in meditation practice once is fascinating and nice — seeing it hundreds and thousands of times is what helps the system begin to learn on a deeper level how to fabricate dukkha less.

insight ways of looking (also vipassana)

most of the dharma talks i listened to in the evenings came from the 2010 retreat “Meditation on Emptiness,” taught by rob burbea and john peacock. in his talks, rob covers most of the same material that is presented in his much-loved book “Seeing That Frees.”

rob suggests that simply “being with” experience with a kind of “bare attention,” while immensely valuable and at least revealing of the fabrication that is normally brought up by mental proliferation, is nonetheless usually insufficient as a means to fully understand the depths of emptiness and dependent arising.

he suggests that we can go deeper by viewing our insight practice as cultivating “ways of looking” that are counter to our habitual patterns, and that have the effect of fabricating less and less dukkha. among these are taking any of the three characteristics (impermanence/unreliability, suffering/unsatisfactoriness, not-self) as lenses through which to view experience. another suggestion of his that was interesting for me was practicing viewing any phenomena at one of the six sense-doors as merely “impressions arising in awareness.”

while this can feel like “doing more” in practice compared to the bare noting i described above, rob points out that it is also a way to help us do less, by running counter to the habitual doing we are used to. an example of this is the very doing i discovered through my noting practice, also described above. in fact, each of the three characteristics point to a habit of mind that we don’t tend to realize we are usually engaged in.

learning to practice in this way was a little delicate for me — if not careful, it’s easy to turn “applying an insight way of looking” into another form of trying to control practice and being greedy for outcomes, all of which tends to upset the balance of wholesome factors which actually lead to insight deepening. nonetheless, there were times i found that these methods did seem to help me inhabit states of less reification, less fabrication of dukkha.

vipashyana and non-duality

starting in the second week, i decided to allow myself one of michael taft’s guided non-dual meditations each evening, as a little treat. in describing vipashyana (the sanskrit word, rather than pali), michael suggests that rather than looking for or through one of the three characteristics, one can simply examine phenomena closely and look for their quality of emptiness. this has the benefit of being somehow more direct, and the drawback of a bit nebulous as an instruction. i decided to not worry too much about “doing it right” or not, and just let the word “emptiness” be my pointer. faith in the possibility of a practice working is generally a precondition for it to do so.

but with most of michael’s guided meditations, i explored a whole other mode of practice, which he calls, broadly, non-dual meditation. we could think of vipassana practice as a kind of “zooming in,” putting phenomena under the microscope so we can discover what they’re really made of (or not made of), and we could think of non-dual practices as a kind of “zooming out” to recognize the empty and luminous nature of mind and awareness, which empty phenomena appear within. this metaphor might break down if you take it too literally, but i think it gives the flavor of how these approaches feel different.

i’ve many times dipped my toes into non-dual meditation styles, but still have yet to take a proper plunge. practicing with some of michael’s guided recordings was very pleasant and interesting, and a big part of what led me to decide to sign up for a retreat (just 6 days!) in late april that is all about the practice of mahamudra.

studying

the last few days of retreat, i decided to allow myself to start transitioning out of retreat. or, more accurately put, i ran out of steam and had no option but to start transitioning out of retreat. staying in retreat mode for this long, all on my own, took a heroic effort. it was kind of like doing reps of pushups until failure, except it took 3 weeks instead of 3 minutes. so i kept the silent container, and still practiced 3-5 hours a day, but i allowed myself to start journaling and reading the rest of the time.

born of my growing interest in non-dual practices, i essentially binge read most of reggie ray’s two-book series on tibetan buddhism: “Indestructible Truth” and “Secret of the Vajra World.” i also talked endlessly with claude about all my tibetan buddhism questions along the way. i have a much clearer understanding now of the history of the dharma in tibet, how all the different schools came into being and the main differences between them, and how the giant repertoire of mahayana and vajrayana practices are organized.

i also got incredibly fascinated with some finer points of philosophy that are still being debated amongst the different schools to this day, but this post is long enough without getting into that here!

i also spent some time journaling about what really matters to me in my practice, in my life, and my feelings about seeking partnership.

closing

i closed the retreat with the same ritual i used to open it - circumambulating my house 7 times while holding incense and chanting “om mani padme hum.”

i’m grateful to have had the opportunity to spend this time becoming so intimate with life, with this body and this mind, with this sky, these hills, these trees. it is beyond my purview to adjudicate my practice, or to ask to receive anything more or different than i have. it is not for me to claim any victory or understanding or surety — only to cultivate the conditions for compassion and wisdom to arise as best as i know how, and to leave the results to be what they will.

may all beings be happy

AMA

i invite you to ask me anything about this retreat or retreat practice in general, in comments! i’ll answer them in a future post

i offer coaching in dharma practice, meditation practice, emotional integration, and attachment healing. feel free to book a free intro call here: https://savvycal.com/danielbrottman/intro-call

we talked about my background with meditation practice, the value of retreat practice, the cultivation of sila (morality) in general and as it relates to teaching and coaching, ideal parent figure, core transformation, building a sustainable meditation habit, and then i lead a short guided meditation at the end.

enjoy!

i offer coaching in dharma practice, meditation practice, emotional integration, and attachment healing. feel free to book a free intro call here: https://savvycal.com/danielbrottman/intro-call

(in the evening, i will chant a comparatively much newer text from thailand, the “verses of sharing and aspiration,” which begins with the phenomenally faith-fortifying line: “through the goodness that arises from my practice.”)

i love the heart sutra for its radical nature, it’s simultaneous enumeration of and evacuation of buddhist doctrine, the paradox it embodies, it’s concision, the energy it rouses, its elucidation of emptiness, and its great mantra. but no translation i’d ever come across felt quite right to me. there were always bits and pieces i liked better from this or that other translation.

so, in a fit of hubris, drawing upon the translations of red pine, edward conze, the kuan um zen school, thich nhat hanh, kazuaki tanahashi, some others, and in detailed consultation with claude, gemini, and chatgpt about specific lines of sanskrit, i’ve created a new rendition!

this translation is not intended to be the most scholastically accurate one, but it is still as doctrinally correct as my modest understanding allows. the other priorities i’ve done my best to balance in this translation are poetic clarity and impact, usefulness as a chanting text, legibility to me personally, and faithfulness to the original language.

🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷🪷

the heart sutra

Avalokitesvara bodhisattva,
deeply practicing wisdom beyond wisdom,
perceives that all components of experience are empty of independent existence
and is freed from all suffering and distress.

O Shariputra,
form is not other than emptiness,
emptiness is not other than form.
Form is emptiness,
emptiness is form.
The same is true of valence, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.

O Shariputra,
all things are empty;
they are not born or destroyed,
they are not tainted or pure,
they do not increase or decrease.
Therefore there is no form, no valence,
no perceptions, no mental formations, and no consciousness.
No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind;
no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind;
no consciousness of sensory realms from eye to mind.
No ignorance, no end of ignorance;
no old age and death, no end of old age and death.
No suffering, no arising, no cessation, and no path;
no wisdom and no attainment.

With nothing to attain,
the bodhisattva embodies wisdom beyond wisdom
and lives without walls of the mind.
Without walls of the mind there is no fear.
Far beyond all views and delusions,
they realize nirvana.

All buddhas of the past, present, and future
attain unsurpassable complete perfect enlightenment
by practicing wisdom beyond wisdom.

Therefore know the mantra of wisdom beyond wisdom,
the great mantra,
luminous, unequalled, and supreme,
which relieves all suffering,
and is true, not false.
Set forth the mantra of wisdom beyond wisdom!
Set forth the mantra:

GATÉ, GATÉ, PARAGATÉ, PARASAMGATÉ, BODHI! SVAHA!

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nerding out about specific bits

the process of creating this translation was REALLY fun and also brought up many questions that have been wonderful to engage with. i can well imagine that my personal rendition of the heart sutra may undergo a revision at some point in the future to reflect a new state of my sensibilities and understanding. if anyone else wants to use this translation and finds it helpful that is of course wonderful, but my main goal has been to create a version of the heart sutra that i personally wanted to use.

so this may or may not be interesting to others, but here’s some of the spots i gave a lot of thought to, and why i landed on the word choices i did, for now!

perceives that all components of experience are empty of independent existence

here i already deviate from the original text, which would be more literally “perceives that all five skandhas are empty.” some translations include some nod to what the skandhas are empty of, like “empty of inherent self-existence.” i felt including empty of “independent existence” is correct and a helpful orientation for the rest of the sutra.

my big change here was rendering “all five skandhas” as “all components of experience.” to me, this is pointing at the same thing, and hits harder than activating buddhist-analysis-brain by referencing the particular number of categories the buddha laid out, or by using the sanskrit “skandhas” or a clunky english word like “aggregates.” i also felt that given we are about to list the 5 skandhas in the next stanza, nothing is really being lost.

The same is true of valence, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.

my pet peeve is how all of the standard translations of “vedana” are terrible. vedana refers to the quality of all sense impressions to be experienced as either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. valence is a 20th century word, and its original context is a bit different, but i feel it is the closest match we have for vedana. usual translations like “feeling” or “sensation” seem awful to me, as they carry many other more common meanings in english.

all things are empty;

more literal would be “all dharmas are marked by emptiness” or “…are characterized by emptiness.”

“dharmas” is more of a technical term in buddhism meaning something like all conditioned phenomena, but “all things” is so natural in english and hits me harder.

i decided on simply “are empty” rather than marked or characterized also in large part because it makes the point more clearly. one could argue this is somehow overstating the case, that emptiness as a concept isn’t being sufficiently hedged as something that is, itself, empty, but i’m not so worried about that. later parts of the sutra effectively pull the rug out from emptiness in other ways (like saying emptiness means there’s nothing to attain, but then turning right around to say all buddhas attain unsurpassable perfect complete enlightenment).

i think the more the phrases can be direct, as long as they are still doctrinally defensible, they will penetrate my body and mind more, as texts for chanting.

Therefore there is no form, no valence,

this is another spot i debated a lot - the original includes the word “śūnyatāyāṃ” - “sunyata” being the word for emptiness, and the “-yam” suffix putting it in the locative case. according to my professor of sanskrit (claude sonnet 4.5), this means it could be more literally translated as “Therefore, in emptiness, there is no…” or “with regard to emptiness,” “from the perspective of emptiness,” etc.

some translations use “in emptiness,” which i understand now that i looked up what the locative case is, but on its own always felt very confusing to me. i considered “with regard to emptiness,” “seeing emptiness,” “understanding emptiness,” “through emptiness,” and similar variations, but many of them felt either too clunky or not quite the correct meaning.

when chanting, i don’t want to have to be chanting one set of words but reminding myself in my head “oh, what i actually mean by these words is…”. as much as possible, i want the words to be direct and intuitive. i tried simply removing the qualifying word from this phrase and found the resulting sentence wonderfully direct, like it was socking me right in the delusion ;P

again here, i could be accused of overstating emptiness as some kind of reality or philosophical doctrine. i think the fact that the stanza begins by saying all things are empty makes it feel clear to me that all of these negations that follow are implied to be from the standpoint of emptiness, so it works for me. still, i’ll admit to continuing to feel a bit conflicted about this one!

With nothing to attain,
the bodhisattva embodies wisdom beyond wisdom
and lives without walls of the mind.
Without walls of the mind there is no fear.

“embodies” was my original idea, not taken from anyone else or suggested by an LLM, and i feel great about it. common and more literal translations here are things like “relies upon” or “dwells in.” “embodies” is a bit of a new age choice perhaps, and is admittedly a slight change of meaning, but it makes so much sense to me and feels clearer. prajna paramitra (“perfection of wisdom,” or “wisdom beyond wisdom,” as i’ve borrowed it from tanahashi) sounds less like an external resource of some kind, and more like simply what the bodhisattva is.

“walls of the mind” comes from red pine’s translation and i instantly loved it. somehow it touches my heart and is very evocative of my experience. “without walls of the mind there is no fear” is incredibly direct, and really rouses my faith, devotion, and energy.

GATÉ, GATÉ, PARAGATÉ, PARASAMGATÉ, BODHI! SVAHA!

like most translations, i feel it’s far and away better to leave the mantra untranslated. i just want to share a point i learned from milo north burn that i love about the mantra (milo, please correct me if i’m remembering your teaching inaccurately).

the piece i already knew was that one of the buddha’s names for himself, “tathāgata” is something of a pun that can mean “the one thus gone” or “the one thus come,” depending on if the central “ā” is considered only part of the first half (tathā + gata), or considered an elision, and part of both halves (tathā + āgata).

if i’m recalling a dharma talk i heard 2 years ago correctly, what i learned from milo is that since “gaté” is from the same word (in the closely related language of sanskrit, not pāli), we can think of the mantra as carrying this double meaning, too.

the optional “ā” isn’t around anymore, so i wanted to check with LLMs if this is linguistically defensible. the answer is it’s a bit of a stretch, but maybe? claude thinks because gaté is again in the locative form, we could think of it either as “gone” or as “gone there” or “being there” or “present at.”

i’d love to talk to an actual sanskritist about the question one day, but for now this reading fits my understanding of the sutra, and seems to wonderfully encapsulate the paradox of non-duality, while also being a practice instruction. i can read the first half of the mantra as either “GONE, GONE, GONE BEYOND, GONE COMPLETELY BEYOND” or as “HERE, HERE, BEYOND HERE, COMPLETELY BEYOND HERE.”

one more little anecdote - “svaha” has no direct translation, but is a ritual exclamation used to end mantras. some try to translate it with “so be it!” or “hail!” the first time i ever heard of this mantra, i asked my friends who i was with what it meant. one of them started with a standard translation “gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, awakening-” and then another friend interrupted joyously - “HALLELUJAH!” i’ve always liked this rendering :).

with nothing to attain, may all beings embody wisdom beyond wisdom, live without walls of the mind, and thus have no fear!

i offer coaching in dharma practice, meditation practice, emotional integration, and attachment healing. feel free to book a free intro call here: https://savvycal.com/danielbrottman/intro-call

it feels kind of like a birthday gift i’m giving myself actually, setting aside all this time to rest in the deepest way i know how to. it’s also a gift all my students/clients are giving me, by allowing the time away from meeting with them. and a gift my friends and family give me, by their well wishes and holding me in their hearts as i practice.

skadeep

i’m going to begin my retreat this coming monday, feb 2nd, and the plan is to continue for 21 full days, exiting on the morning of feb 23rd. i did some at-home retreats like this in the early years of covid, but it’s been a little while. i’ve also done retreats this long and longer before, but never one this long on my own, at home.

of course, the thing about a home retreat is it’s all up to me to keep the container. when i go to a center like IMS, the container is being supported by the building, the teachers, the fact that i traveled to get there, all the other yogis practicing, the lack of access to my devices. here at home, i’ll have the option to pretty easily stop being on retreat any time i want. and maybe i’ll end up finishing the retreat early, but right now, 3 weeks is sounding great.

practicing at home has a lot of advantages too, though. for one thing, it sure is cheaper! and the timing is as convenient as could be, fitting into my calendar exactly when works best for me.

there are practice advantages too. the flipside to a less strict container is that i get lots and lots and lots of freedom to shape the retreat how i want. while a schedule can often be supportive for yogis on retreat, especially if they are new to silent retreat practice, i’m also really looking forward to the flexibility of days and weeks of practice with no schedule. just wake up whenever i wake up. sit however long i want to sit. walk however long i want to walk. lie down however long i want to lie down. wash, rinse, repeat. i’m going to keep a 7:30am sit with my roommates which will be a nice bit of community and structure, and i’ll probably keep my meal times mostly consistent, but otherwise i get to respond to the natural energetic currents of my day.

dinglyplii

and i’m excited to practice whatever techniques i want. i don’t know for sure yet what the focus of my retreat will end up being, or if a clear one will even emerge. probably over the first several days, this will clarify. at some point or other, i’m sure to do at least some of all of the following: shamatha on the breath and body, noting practice, insight ways of looking a la rob burbea, metta, metta-jhana, compassion, do-nothing, core transformation, ideal parent figure protocol.

i do think there’s probably value in having something of a main focus, but what i’ve found for myself on retreat is that this can be a difficult thing to force to happen. the times when i’ve tried (“i’m gonna do breath counting all day!” or “i’m gonna keep the metta phrases going all day!” for days or weeks) i’ve always spun out.

one time when this happened at the 3-month IMS retreat i attended in 2022, my teacher guy armstrong shared with me some wisdom from joseph goldstein. joseph apparently had said that the most important priority on long retreat was just to keep the mind in balance. it would tip out of balance now and then, but still we could learn to keep it mostly in balance.

the term made intuitive sense to me and guy didn’t need to explain it further, but here i might say that keeping the mind “in balance” on retreat might mean something like: generally in wholesome mindstates, or practicing skillfully with unwholesome mindstates, in touch with faith in oneself and with faith in dharma practice, not falling into some sort of extra layers of delusion.

anyway, i found this a super freeing piece of advice. i realized it didn’t matter if i had metta phrases going like a laser beam in my mind all day long, it mattered how well i was tending to my mind and my wellbeing. i started developing a more natural style of being on retreat, which was just doing whatever type of meditation practice i wanted whenever i wanted, in service of my wellbeing.

there’s still value in smaller commitments so the mind isn’t just totally at the whim of every passing moment of boredom or indecision. i’ll often decide something like “ok, for this hour i’m doing breath meditation.” but the overarching strategy is more like i have this great big canvas of silence for days on end, and i get to play around in it however i like. i can work with the mind’s interests and conditions, rather than trying to force them into a plan.

it’s possible this isn’t the most direct way towards certain kinds of specific contemplative goals, but i think it’s the most organic. i think it makes my practice include a wider set of virtues as well: the virtues of self-determination and discernment, of playfulness and curiosity and experimentation, the cultivation of joy and fun. it’s a relaxing of the technic approach that attempts to control an outcome, and an embrace of grace, silence, and intuition.

and although i still at times will struggle with the meditative hindrance of skeptical doubt, i feel less worried about my practice “not working” than i ever used to. as my teacher tempel smith told me when i asked what kind of practice i should do on that same 3 month retreat, “just know when you’re breathing in and when you’re breathing out. you can’t miss the dharma. it’s like running into the side of a barn.”

boop boop

and man i’m tired - there’s a kind of rest i’ve only ever tasted in life from meditation retreats. my last silent retreat was just one week long, last april (2025). it was wonderful, at boundless refuge (still accepting participants for their upcoming spring retreat! spaces available on dana (pay-what-you-can!)), and the clearest example i’ve had yet on retreat of how much trusting myself to practice however i want can pay off.

it was rejuvenating and restful in the way only a silent retreat can be, but the rest from one week of retreat only lasts me so long! by fall of last year, i was starting to feel really hungry again for a retreat, and for a longer one in particular. the last time i did a retreat longer than a week was spring of 2024. i’m hoping this upcoming retreat will keep nourishing me through the rest of the year. maybe 3 weeks every february will become a tradition?

it’s been a BIG year for me. i’ve crisscrossed the country several times by car, i’ve done months of intensive attachment repair work, i’ve gone quite deep with some very powerful psychedelic medicines, and i set up my career as a meditation teacher and emotional integration coach. also i was super heartbroken a couple months ago.

i can feel how much my system wants to integrate all of this. wants to let it settle, wants to nourish it night and day with the nectar of undistracted loving awareness, wants to let it mature into a man who is more deeply himself, more free, and more at peace.

aaaahhhhjjfn

may this period of practice be of great benefit to all beings, to all of my friends and family, to all those i serve, and to me

may goodness pour forth from our bodies and our hearts like a waterfall

i offer coaching in dharma practice, meditation practice, emotional integration, and attachment healing. feel free to book a free intro call here: https://savvycal.com/danielbrottman/intro-call

we can do both of these things (the surfacing and the corrective emotional experiencing) in a couple ways.

ideal parent figure protocol

one central technique is called “ideal parent figure protocol” (IPF), which is a meditation/visualization exercise in which one imagines being a child with a different set of parents than our actual parents. and these ideal parents have basically infinite capacity for us, moreso than any actual human being could.

they’re perfectly safe and will always protect us. they’re completely attuned to us, sensing what’s going on inside us and curious to learn more about our experience. they know exactly how to comfort and soothe us. they delight in the simple fact of our existence, without us having to do or be anything. and they are a secure base from which we can explore ourselves and the world around us.

in a session, i might guide someone in this practice, giving cues, troubleshooting difficulties that arise, customizing the practice to a person’s specific experience, and simply helping hold the container of the exercise.

often times, simply imagining receiving these qualities from ideal parents brings up a lot of our attachment wounding. we might implicitly distrust or be afraid of our imagined ideal parents for example, and then we get to see how completely skillfully they allow us to be just as we are - giving us as much space as we need without abandoning us, understanding our fear completely and not taking it personally, etc. this gives our attachment system a new data point - “oh, maybe it’s ok to have this authentic reaction! it doesn’t mean i’ll be attacked or abandoned.”

attachment alchemy

IPF is a whole technique in itself, but i’ve also found for my own journey and learned from my teachers that it can be really helpful to surface the emotional material and have the corrective experience from not just an imagined being, but a living breathing person. in this way of working, the coach is themself basically providing many of the qualities of the ideal parents.

the nice thing is that as adults, we can practice going into that frame of relating without actually getting confused that this is a practice/healing container - a role the coach is filling for this period of time. much of what i’ve learned about how to do this comes from chloe good’s method, which she calls “attachment alchemy.”

here, the guide (coach) holds space for and helps the explorer (client) feel into either whatever material is present for them there in the moment, or a particular trailhead that the explorer wants to examine. if the explorer already knows how to surface their own material, the main thing the guide is providing is just attuned and caring attention, which already makes a big difference. but often times it can be difficult to access our own material, so a skilled guide can give useful prompting to help surface whatever parts are wanting attention.

at this stage it can often also look like parts work - for example, working with protectors that are ashamed or angry, validating that it’s ok for them to feel this way.

when the initial emotions around a topic have been surfaced and the client can feel to some degree that those emotions are welcome, they’re ok, then the question usually is “is there something early about this? does it remind me of something or someone?” and often a memory, or even just a felt sense of something young, will arise, and we get to bring the corrective emotional experience to that young place in us where the pattern first formed.

there’s some various other skills and techniques that go into this attachment alchemy way of working too - physical things like pushing or pulling on a stick or the desk or a wall, really taps into primal stuff in the body (”i want you!” or “i don’t want you!”). embodied anger expression can be so helpful too, like being witnessed in pummeling a pillow, letting out screams, or again pushing on a wall, or wringing out a rag.

it can also be really wonderful to practice speaking directly FROM a part. so rather than “i have a part that’s afraid,” we actually allow that young part to have our voice, and say something like “i’m scared you’ll leave me,” or “what if you get mad at me,” etc. it can also be great to ask the guide for a specific thing the part wants to hear, like “tell me you don’t need me to take care of you,” or “can you tell me you won’t go away if i’m sad?” and then to hear the guide fulfilling that request. often times our young parts need to hear something like that several times to start to believe it.

and attachment alchemy also includes IPF. we can have the guide there holding the ideal parent qualities as well as the imaginal ideal parents present to support the explorer. it’s a fluid practice of feeling into how best to support someone’s process of being resourced enough to surface and transform the old patterns.

customizing the container

ultimately, what i’ve found both as a client and as a coach myself is that every relationship of two people in those roles looks a little different. and especially over time, the coach and client learn how best to work together, for the benefit of the client.

over time, we get enough repetitions of corrective emotional experiences on deep enough patterns that we can start to see the world differently than before.

what do we stand to gain from practicing attachment healing?

chloe good describes 5 vectors of moving from insecure to secure attachment that this work helps facilitate.

1) shutdown -> expression

there’s all kinds of ways we tend to learn it’s not safe to allow our authentic expression of ideas and emotions to come out into the open. this practice helps us see we can actually show and express what’s really going on for us.

2) isolation -> relational support

isolation is the classic avoidant pattern of “i have to be completely independent and self sufficient.” learning to trust that we can take in support from our relationships brings us much more resource in life, and also makes our relationships much closer.

3) nourishment barrier -> able to receive nourishment

it’s common that we learned to put up barriers to receiving physical, emotional, conceptual, and energetic nourishment from those close to us. this might be because it wasn’t safe to do so, or we couldn’t rely on nourishment always being there and wanted to avoid disappointment. we can still protect ourselves when needed, but being able to receive nourishment from others also helps us be more resourced in our lives, and have closer relationships.

4) blended -> unblended with parts

this is more or less the same as what IFS means by saying we become “Self-led.” it means that when we have thoughts or emotions arise that are coming from a triggered or contracted place, we are able to see them clearly and hold them in the wisdom and compassion of our own inner wise adult, rather than completely believing their stories.

5) collapse -> internal structure

collapse is related to anxious attachment. it’s when we can’t hold ourselves, and fall into the view that we need someone else to fix or save or validate us. internal structure helps us stay unblended with parts, it provides a place for us to actually receive nourishment from others when available, and it allows us to give ourselves our own nourishment as much as possible.

the plug 😁

of course i have to share here that i offer attachment coaching!

attachment healing work is one of the three main ways i work with people, along with meditation and dharma coaching, and parts work via core transformation. to learn more about this, see my previous substack post.

may all beings be well! and may all human nervous systems have secure attachment if that's what they want!

book a free intro call with me to see if we’re a good fit to practice together! https://savvycal.com/danielbrottman/intro-call

when i left rochester NY in august of 2024 to start traveling the country, i had a lot of big questions. i didn’t know what kind of community i wanted to live in, what kinds of practices i wanted to focus on, or what kind of work i wanted to offer the world.

i’ve been in boulder living with friends for a few months now, and i have clarity about what practices this time in my life calls for. and over the past year, i’ve taught two cohorts of my 8-week meditation fundamentals course. it’s become clear to me that supporting people in their meditation practice and emotional integration is something that i care about, that i enjoy, that matters, and that i have something valuable to offer here.

with this in mind, i’m excited to share that i’m offering meditation and emotional integration coaching sessions now, in packages of 12 sessions! i believe this format will help those who choose to practice with me have more momentum, and orient with more clarity towards bigger goals.

fundamentally, what i want to help people with is becoming more authentically themselves, more free and at ease in their relationships and with whatever conditions life brings up, more at peace within themselves, and more effortlessly in the flow of all of life’s creativity. i believe this project has deep value as an end in and of itself, and also that it is an important part of moving towards the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

the main ways i work with people are:

1. as a meditation and dharma coach

2. as an attachment healing coach (using ideal parent figure meditation and relational practices)

3. as a core transformation coach (parts work)

i don’t need to use each of these frames with everyone. i’m happy to focus on any of them that feel most alive for a given person.

if you are at all interested in practicing together, please send me a message, or book a free call with me! i’m happy to talk with anyone to explore your goals and desires, determine if we’re a good fit, and customize the container to best suit you. you can email me at danielbrottman@gmail.com, or book an intro call at https://savvycal.com/danielbrottman/intro-call. i have space for around 10-15 people.

money matters

i’ve given a lot of thought towards how to handle the intersection of payment and this work as skillfully as i can. naturally, i want to be as non-coercive as possible in my offering, trusting in the wisdom of any given person to determine for themself if it’s worth working together. i also want this work to be accessible to anyone who wants to engage with it, and i believe in making the dharma in particular available to everyone.

this is now my full time work (with the exception of a bit of music teaching and gigs on the side), and i’d like to be able to support myself, and maybe support a family one day.

here’s the system i’ve come up with: my default ask per hour session is $150, with a sliding scale down to $50/session, as needed. i will *also* offer coaching on a dana model (pay what you want or are able to, even if that’s $0).

in order to keep this sustainable, i’m setting aside room in my schedule for 4 dana-based sessions per week, and asking people taking this option to book sessions once a month. additionally, all of my group programs (such as the program focused on sila and integration i am planning for march) will continue to have an option to attend on dana. and, of course, anyone is always free to write to me with questions about dharma or emotional integration practice, and i will respond as able.

a little bit on my background

i’ve been meditating for 12 years, including over 7 months of intensive silent retreat practice. i’ve met regularly with my primary dharma teacher, tempel smith, since 2019, and he is encouraging of me sharing the dharma in this way. i’ve completed a year long teacher training program through Inward Bound Mindfulness and taught several group meditation classes.

in the past year, i have been practicing ideal parent figure meditation regularly, receiving IPF sessions ~weekly from amanda ngo, and completed chloe good’s 4-month program “attachment alchemy,” which was designed to teach its participants how to give and receive attachment repair sessions. i will also be continuing to study with chloe in the coming year, for my own personal journey as well as for continued support as a practitioner of her method. both amanda and chloe have been encouraging of me offering attachment work.

i’ve been studying core transformation and practicing it with myself and clients for the past several months. i'll be finishing the official CT foundations training program this week, and taking the advanced training program later this year.

i’ve now given over 250 coaching calls, focusing on meditation coaching, attachment healing, and parts work.

a few messages and testimonials

(all shared with permission)

if you are at all interested in working together, please do reach out to connect!

i’d love to see if we’re a good fit. find a time to talk with me here: https://savvycal.com/danielbrottman/intro-call

over the course of some 40 minutes this morning, i went through many layers of relief, deepening, shaking, crying, to arrive at a core state of cosmic love, which then propagated back up the whole chain.

i started with a part that didn't want to feel vulnerable. starting to follow its intended outcome chain, we found its desires:
-> “leave me alone,” i want to be ok
-> comfort
-> to be with people

and then i had a second part strongly objecting to being with people, such that it couldn’t even let the first part imagine what it would be like to do that. we ended up following this second part’s desires all the way down:
-> don't want them to hurt me
-> to be able to love them
-> to be loved back
-> relief
-> playfulness
-> silliness
-> wide smile, rolling around on the floor, easy connection
-> happiness
-> peace
-> beingness
-> dissolution (or death)
-> an even deeper peace
-> cosmic love (core state)

the feeling of profundity increased noticeably in the last 5 or 6 layers, and i already felt quite deep in the psyche several layers before that. this method is a very effective way to go deep quickly. it's also, i would say, very gentle, because it is following the gradient of authentic desire.

and as a parts work modality, just like IFS, we never need to override ANY objecting part. they are all welcome to the party, and learning to hear, empathize, thank, and respect all of them is one of the great benefits of a good parts work method.

i had a number other parts object at various times. each time we checked to see if we needed to switch to them (as we did early in the process as noted above), or if they were ok with us staying with the same part, which they usually were, once acknowledged and noted.

some of the objecting parts that arose (and that ideally i’ll be able to give a whole session of their own to, in time):
-sadness
-embarassment
-i'm afraid i'm doing it wrong
-cranky/grumpy about the protocol
-resistance to love cracking open happiness
-self judgement

once reaching the core state, the next phase is to ask the part, "when you already have this core state as a way of being, how does it radiate through, enrich, or transform" each item above it on the outcome chain, one by one. largely this is a somatic and energetic process, but sometimes clear concepts arise intuitively as well. such as:

• the peace that immediately preceded the cosmic love - i saw it was the same as the love

• the dissolution or death - any aspect of this that was a craving for non-existence, i saw fade away

• the desire to be loved back - i saw that the other's love and my own essence are of the same nature. it's just love loving love

• my desire to love others - i saw that whatever love i do or don't feel for others is unrelated to my deepest nature or my worth — these are immutable. the love is not "mine" or a reflection of me, it comes from the deeper cosmic place

• the not wanting to be hurt - i saw that this core state of love is something that cannot possibly be hurt

i was guided (and then took a turn guiding) as part of the official core transformation practice training group, which meets once weekly. i was very grateful to get to practice with others who have been working with this method much longer than me.

i asked about how to help integrate this experience into my life, into my responses and behaviors, etc. they said there’s not much else to do, that the process of integration continues to happen on its own in the subconscious, and just to keep doing self-guided and other-guided CT sessions.

i'm grateful to be able to keep studying this method, keep practicing it on my own, keep receiving it from others, and keep offering it to others.

may all beings be at ease. may all beings feel the connection to their deepest natures, to bedrock peace, to bedrock love, immutable and all pervasive.

i do my best to meet them fully where they are, while also staying in touch with the deep nature we both share, which is fundamentally caring, wise, beautiful, and good. i try to offer the most valuable things i have: my attention, my curiosity, my good will, my nervous system, and everything i’ve ever learned about meditation, dharma, emotions, and living.

i have a lot to learn. i feel both my expertise and naïveté on many calls. the type of work we’re engaged in tends to be quite non-linear, is often about planting seeds that will slowly grow over years, and resists easy metrics. and to top it off, grasping for achievement is usually counter-productive. at the same time, parts of me long for clarity that i’m doing well, i’m making a difference, and of course students want to feel that their investment and effort is worthwhile, too.

one reassuring metric is that it’s very common for students to thank me at the end of calls in a way that feels sincere, and express that they enjoyed our practice or discussion together, and found it helpful. yay! as i continue doing this work, i’ll be looking to refine my concepts of what it is that i can be of help with, what our goals might be of working together, and how to have a clearer sense of if i’m delivering.

skillz

meanwhile, i’m continuing to learn and practice many things in the hours when i’m not actively giving coaching calls.

the four-month program i’m in on attachment healing has a few more weeks remaining, and has given me a huge range of new tools. among these are practices of anger expression, accessing vulnerable child parts and moving or speaking directly from them to get their needs met, relying on the imaginal ideal parent figures to provide resource and support, allowing both anxious and avoidant parts to be fully met, and being willing to look at whatever relational dynamic is up that keeps me from feeling safe to be in my authenticity, and keeps me feeling separated from the people i’m around.

i’m continuing to give and receive sessions around attachment themes, and starting to get to deeper and deeper material. every session is like a little psychedelic trip, including the parts that can fear and resist going in, the strange bliss of being deep in it, and the relief and sense of connectedness on the other side. i’m also engaging with a new-to-me plant medicine that is especially good for working with the root chakra type stuff that is central to attachment healing: safety, fundamental goodness, right to exist, etc.

i read the textbook on motivational interviewing and have been practicing that skillset with clients and friends. MI is this incredible set of ideas and orientations that help a practitioner listen and reflect back to a person their own desires, motivations, and ingenuity around behavior change. my initial interest in the technique was to support me in helping people establish a regular meditation habit, but it’s also just broadly applicable as an orientation in almost any coaching conversation. there are some trainings for this online i hope to take in the future for more practice and feedback.

i’m becoming a bit obsessed with core transformation as a psychological modality. it’s a way of doing parts work that is based around following the authentic desire of whatever part we are interested in integrating, which very much fits with my existing approach to things. there’s more to it than this, but the basic mechanism is pretty simple:

1. get in touch (somatically, emotionally, mentally) with a part that seems to be producing an unwanted behavior, feeling, or response. recognize it has a good intention for you, even if you don’t know what it is yet

2. ask the part what it wants, and let yourself imagine experiencing that outcome fully

3. ask, if this part fully had the intended outcome, what would that let it have that’s even more important? (the answer comes from the sense in the body, not so much from the mind or logic)

4. repeat step 3 until you reach a core state, which is a state that has no further deeper purpose. this is usually something like “beingness,” “inner peace,” “love,” “ok-ness,” or “oneness.”

5. bring the experience of this core state all the way up the outcome chain, letting it transform or enrich each step, until we reach the initial feeling, behavior, or response

6. some other steps i won’t go into detail that help include other objecting parts, and help the core state permeate your being more fully

many times, there are parts of us that decided or learned at a young age that they had to take up some crude strategy in order to get our needs met, such as always judging ourselves and others harshly, or turning to addictive behaviors. when the parts see they can live from the wellspring of these deep states without the maladaptive strategies, the need to enact them dissipates.

i’ll probably write more about this in the future, but for now if you are interested in learning more or trying this out yourself, i recommend the core transformation book, or this video which takes you through the exercise.

i’ve already been practicing this modality with myself and in guiding some students, but there’s a lot of training programs available from the folks who created CT that i am very interested in taking as well.

zooming out a bit

it’s like working on a huge huge puzzle. how much structure vs spontaneity should i bring to sessions? how do the 239865987234 psychological and spiritual modalities and philosophies interact with each other, and a person’s goals and desires? how can i tell if i’m helping someone in a transformative way? how do all of my own psychological materials and growth edges interact with whatever is happening for the person i’m on a call with? what is the scope of the type of work i am capable of offering, and the scope of what i want to offer? how do i regulate and replenish myself so that i can be at my best for each call? how can i stay connected to the spirit of generosity as a fundamental principle while also making an income? how can i get the word out about what i’m offering in a way that’s clear but not reductive? what is the deepest good i can do with these skills?

luckily i have found some support in working with these questions from a few places. one is a course i’m taking from dharmamoon all about the business of teaching meditation. i was shocked such a course exists but have found it to be very interesting and full of resources.

another is a group of friends from twitter who are in similar positions in their coaching careers to mine — we’ll be meeting a handful of times in the coming months to talk through some of these questions and support each other.

and, very excitingly, i’ve also joined another group of friends meeting monthly who are all meditation teachers. i think i am far and away the least experienced teacher in the group, so i’m especially delighted to be there.

this week in calls, i got to guide people in meditation live and respond to what was happening in their experience, i got to share practical ideas and tips around various elements of practice, i got to help people orient skillfully to their goals and behaviors, i got to be with people in their emotions and explore their parts’ core desires, and i got to connect with people from some of the deeper reaches of my own spiritual practice.

i’m really grateful to have my work cut out for me in such an enriching way. there’s so much here for me to sink my teeth into, and it seems like really valuable work to be doing. i feel honored by the trust people are placing in me, and i feel a sacredness in the opportunity to live up to the responsibility as best as i can.

i offer individual support for meditation practice, attachment repair, and emotional integration! please feel welcome to book a call with me via savvycal

if you wish to financially support my life and efforts, i gratefully invite you to contribute via my patreon account

one of the many reasons i think spending time in nature and observing natural systems is SO DAMN USEFUL is that the structures and processes we see there are incredibly analogous to those of the mind

so anyway this is why the game of psychological cleanup feels like it could be infinite - there are so many little branches everywhere. perhaps wayyy down at the bottom are, eg, the 10 fetters, which is why for some it is so effective to try just cutting to the chase

but a) even if you do have some really significant shift in those baseline confusions, there are still a hell of a lot of branches above them and it takes time for it all to propagate up the tree, and

b) for some, the conditions just don’t seem to be ideal for starting out going right to the root. there might be too much attachment trauma in the way, or just not enough desire to motivate the kind of intense inquiry that can be required

(on the other hand, sometimes people have so much trauma that it seems like the *only* way for their system to find its way out is to go all the way down to the core, leading to some awakening type experience. hardly a sure path, though, and then the traumas will still want to be healed)

also, perhaps, c) the things that are at the root are so far beyond being describable in words that even with really powerful frameworks or techniques like direct self inquiry, koan practice, jhana-vipassana etc, it’s hard to know where the “bottom” truly lies

as in all things i think “want over should” is so useful here. right now my want is not pointing me at practice with say, vipassana and noticing the 3 marks, or self inquiry practices, or pure do-nothing practice, or pushing the edges of my 5meo-dmt practice

these are all amazing types of practice and i’ve benefitted from them a ton, and i do hope conditions allow me to return to focusing on them eventually. but my “want,” my place of resonance and excitement, is on attachment material, psychological trailheads,

the stuff that’s so deep it feels at the core of the human’s needs (am i loved? am i good? am i safe? can i be me?), rather than the stuff that’s even deeper than that (what is time and space? what is subject and object? whence comes dukkha?)

in other words, using romeo’s model, i did a boatload of traditional early buddhist meditation, and it has created excellent conditions for integration, esp of the attachment healing variety. or put another way - integration feels like my current bottleneck

and i believe the innate intelligence of my system knows this, and that’s why this attachment stuff feels so damn exciting and good to me right now. attachment healing and therapy-type-stuff also forms the bridge to sila (ethics), skillful relationships, and outer work such as business, politics, etc

i’ve always felt like the distinction between psychology and dharma practice was iffy at best. maybe one day i’ll have some profound enlightenment-grade stuff happen and i’ll be like oh actually nvm they’re quite distinct. we’ll see. others more awake than me have written about this

probably it’s something hilariously less tangible and less understandable than that, like psychology and awakening are kind of both contiguous and discontiguous at the same time

at any rate, it feels pretty clear to me that for lots of the path, they go hand in hand, and attending to them both is probably the organic path of development for many or even most people.

realizing that this is how i feel has also shifted my self concept around what i have to offer others. why would i limit my offering strictly to meditation when i have always been deeply interested in integration as well, and never moreso than recently?

thinking of myself as an inner work guide, or perhaps as an inner work guide and meditation teacher, feels very exciting and alive to me. i’ve recently started exploring working with people in this broader capacity and i’d like to continue doing so

i love attachment healing work, it feels so goddamn good. it’s actually brought some of the best feelings i’ve ever had. it’s so rich with meaning. and i think a ton of people get into meditation practice bc they want the fruits of attachment healing anyway. and to be clear, classic meditation practices are awesome fuel for attachment healing imo. but we can include that lens from the beginning, and why not

i already feel i have a lot of skill in doing this work with others, and at the same time i’m really excited to keep growing and to keep gaining important skills. right now i’m learning more every day and week from chloe spencer and amanda, and from working with people

in the future, chloe is doing the program i’m in now but with an extra emphasis on training practitioners, which i’m hoping to take, because she has more wholistic experience in this than anyone i know

i also talked with amanda today about working with her not just for my own attachment material, but also getting her help as i continue practice offering attachment healing to others, and i’m super excited about that because amanda is fucking phenomenal

i also would very much like to get some additional formal training in working with trauma (even though i think that’s what i’m already doing) - rn david treleaven’s programs are on my radar, but i could look around more too

thanks for joining me for this ramble!

may you be well, cared for, protected, safe, may you know you are loved, may your authenticity be cherished by all as the gift it is

please consider giving any amount to my FUNDRAISER to support the many students in my upcoming meditation class who are attending on a significant scholarship! your generosity effing rules and is greatly appreciated and makes the world go round!

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-daniels-meditation-scholarship-fund

i thought a fun way to write about the experience would be by sharing and expanding upon some of the tweets that it produced in the days after getting internet again, so let’s give that a go

BUT WAIT - first i want to invite you once again to check out the gofundme page for the meditation fundamentals scholarship fund! you can see that page here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-daniels-meditation-scholarship-fund and read my previous substack post about it here.

so far we’ve raised enough money to cover 5 of the 8 students who are in the highest scholarship bracket for the class. i am grateful to have my time supported in teaching younger meditation students who don’t yet have their own income! thank you so much for any support you can give.

one of my teachers/guides has a great essay in which she describes healing as taking place when there is a meeting, a witnessing and being cared for of our suffering parts. that meeting can be from oneself, it can be from the imagined other (as in ideal parent figure practice), or it can be from the manifest other, such as an actual friend, therapist, or partner, who literally witnesses you. all of these converge on what might be called the divine, or awake awareness, or rigpa, or our true nature.

trees are cool because they are kind of both manifest and imagined - i get to hug the tree and really feel it! it’s really there, really in my arms, really holding me. and from there i get to imagine its care for me, and feel my love for it, my relief in being held and seen. imagining touch is an extremely important component of my practice of ideal parent figure, so it can be nice to have an actual living being who’s always available for hugs.

my attachment healing work (with the above mentioned coach as well as chloe good and spencer jacobson) has been opening up into a dimension that feels more like energy work than anything else. to be sure, it also involves vulnerability practice, emotional fluidity, keen mindfulness and concentration, recalling memories, using words.

but in my deepest sessions (which are becoming more common!), all of that is in service of getting to a place where the subtle (or not so subtle) energies of the body are leading the way. it feels as if frozen pain that usually is stored deep in the tissues is allowed to surface, when there is enough mindfulness, curiosity, and resourced attention in the system.

i learned from chloe that there’s sort of a two step process here: for many of us, even just learning to access this deep material (deep grief, fear, rage, etc) and feel it at all is huge progress. but eventually in order to start to really change patterns, that material also has to be met and seen and loved (as described in the previous section of this essay).

what i’ve found is that when i touch some of the deepest material i’ve seen yet, the kind of thing that feels like “there’s no way this is from my own childhood, this shit has got to be inherited from millenia of jewish ancestors being persecuted,” it calls on an incredible energy from all directions — from my self, from my coach, from imaginal deities and angels, from the air, from awareness itself. that much energy is needed to actually move the trauma. and the experience of this is astoundingly rich, deep, glorious. i could call it pleasurable, which is true, but it has some whole other dimension to it. another phrase that came to mind for it was being

what a gift. how strange, it should come from such pain.

(this one has nothing to do with love or attachment, there was just a rooster on the property and i liked hearing it every morning)

what is my body saying when i hug? can i hug without needing something from you? can my body truly communicate my care and affection for you? can i be deeply attuned to the subtle information from your body as i hug you? can i come into any hug with an open heart? can i honor the aliveness of where our particular relationship is at right now, in this moment, with this hug? can i honor my own boundaries with this hug? can i let this hug go when its natural life has ended, but no sooner?

when i have entered certain altered states in my practice, i have been astounded at the tenderness and innocence of the heart. it is an extremely vulnerable thing.

try placing a hand or two on your heart and whispering the below words, out loud or inwardly. try navigating your mindstate to a place that matches the words, a place that could really feel them. direct them towards yourself, towards your heart, towards the layer of your being that has been at your center since you were a newborn.

“oh sweet one, oh beautiful one, oh sweet sweet sweet one, i am here, i am here, i’ve got you, oh sweet beautiful one, i’m here, i’m here, i’ve got you, i’ve got you, i’ve got you, oh my sweet beautiful one, oh my dear one, i’m here, i’m here, i’m here”

there is no amount of gentleness, no amount of care, no amount of tenderness, that is too much for our precious hearts. infinite tenderness. the heart of every human, i believe, is like this, beneath the layers of protection.

for some time now i’ve loved eyegazing as a practice. back at zen mountain monastery, some friends and i made a practice of sitting in meditation for a good 30 minutes, facing each other, maintaining eye contact. that practice rocks, and calls upon a lot of vulnerability, but i’ve found that when these moments happen spontaneously in the context of loving friendship, they’re even more powerful.

it can really make me squirm — seeing care in the eyes of someone i know and love, care that’s directed at me, unflinchingly. but then i can relax and just look back. maybe i look back with grief. maybe with curiosity or disbelief. maybe with care of my own. being loved in the midst of genuine expression is at the core of attachment healing, and it feels amazing.

a good question to ask oneself. and a good mantra for practicing the response!

i’m reminded of a quote from the dipa ma biography. jack kornfield gives this description of her:

“She would smile when people walked in the room, and there was this outpouring of welcoming lovingkindness. It didn’t matter who came in, or what circumstances, or what they had to say: that level was irrelevant to her. What was important was simply that here was another person to be loved.”

i believe i wrote this tweet after stopping at a gas station on the road trip home from retreat, and realizing there was nothing stopping me from beaming love at the other customers and cashier. this doesn’t have to be done in an obvious or sappy way, it’s just a feeling in the heart, a kindness in the eyes. sometimes people call this “stealth metta.” how wonderful: here is another person to be loved.

i listened to like the first 1/5th of the audio book of “love yourself like your life depends on it” by kamal ravikant recently, and it was well worth it just for this extremely simple practice the author self-discovered and recommends: repeat the phrase “i love myself” in your head as often as you can remember.

repeating phrases of lovingkindness is an oft-taught and ancient form of meditation practice, but somehow i had never tried it with this particular phrase. and what phrase could be more direct!

as a meditation practice, i found it wonderfully efficient at guiding me to whatever blockages to self love were present, and massaging them. as a practice throughout the day, i was astounded how often i would remember the phrase, and then say it in my head, and then notice: “ah! i forgot! i was thinking i was bad, unloveable, again!”

fascinatingly, even seemingly unrelated situations respond to this. being aggravated by traffic, or technology, or other people. checking: do i love myself? ah, let’s bring loving myself back in! all the sudden, my external aggravations melt.

(nothing to add here)

my system seems to be very sensitive to when i feel misattuned to. if *i* think that someone *else* thinks they understand me when *i* think they actually don’t, i get angry and defensive. and after all, no matter how well we know someone, aren’t they always a mystery to us? aren’t we always still a mystery to ourselves? so i think the loving gaze, for whatever quality of seeing the subject it has, also incorporates this not knowing, this wanting to see.

thanks for reading. may you be happy, at peace, cared for, loved, free, alive.

if you enjoy my writing and want to support my ability to teach meditation practice for more free hearts, please do consider supporting the scholarship fund for my upcoming class! any amount really helps and is truly appreciated. https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-daniels-meditation-scholarship-fund

i offer donation-based support for meditation practice! please feel welcome to book a call with me via savvycal

1. i’m using skills i’ve been intensively developing for over a decade, and it would be cool for my expertise and energy to be valued

2. i straight up just need to have enough money for living expenses (and further development, ideally)

3. meditation instructions and the teachings of the buddhadharma are priceless, invaluable, and are most skillfully viewed as the birthright of all human beings, to be denied to absolutely no one who wants to learn. my heart will not countenance denying anyone assistance i can offer, as long as i can do so while still caring for my own needs

4. many people who are interested in my course are students, in their 20s, and don’t have much money to offer. having started meditation practice myself when i was around 20 years old, this feels like the perfect time for them to be receiving the support i can give

5. running this course is close to full-time work (due largely to my decision to include weekly one-on-one support with each participant), so it’s not possible for me to make much money by other means while engaged in teaching it

my ideal amount of financial contribution per student is $750, which you could think of as them giving $50 per group session and per individual session. i think this is a good deal! at the same time, it’s an amount that’s out of reach for a number of students who might really benefit from learning to meditate.

in order to help balance the scales, i’ve created the

which you can see for yourself here!

as of time of writing, i launched the gofundme page for the scholarship fund about 24 hours ago, and 10 supporters have already donated, totaling over a thousand dollars. i am so excited to be able to tell the students of my class that there is a wider circle of people supporting us, people who really believe in what we’re doing here.

i’ve set a goal of $7,500, which you could think of as fully supporting 6 full scholarships, 4 half-scholarships, and 8 quarter-scholarships. but even if we reach the initial goal of $3,000, that will be a huge benefit to allowing more students to receive deep and meaningful support for their practice, and my ability to continue to be of service.

i’ve started having zoom calls with some of the people who’ve signed up for my course, especially those who have asked for the highest level of financial support. i asked them to set up a call with me so i could touch base with them about how much, if any, financial contribution they can give, and to make sure they have a sense of commitment and motivation to learning to practice meditation with me.

invariably, they express sincere gratitude for being able to take this course despite their financial hardship, they are excited for the course to begin and the benefits it may bring them, and they want to give me as much as they can, even if it’s not much.

i really hope i’m able to help them plant a seed of practice that may one day turn into a mighty tree. that i’m able to pass on the gift of a freer heart that this practice has given to me.

the practice of generosity is often understood to be one of the foundations of buddhist teaching, a wholesome action that inclines the mind towards absolute freedom. the buddha of the pāḷi canon is recorded as saying:

If beings knew, as I know, the result of giving and sharing, they would not eat without having given, nor would they allow the stain of miserliness to obsess them and take root in their minds. Even if it were their last morsel, their last mouthful, they would not eat without having shared it, if there were someone to share it with. (iti 1.26)

i try to give whenever i am asked. i wish i could give a thousand dollars whenever i am asked, but i can’t, so i often give 5 dollars, or even less. even giving a very small amount of money helps my heart stay open to those in need of help, helps grow my sense of compassion and interconnection, and helps remind me of my deepest, most beautiful nature.

i ask you to contribute to this scholarship fund because i want to offer my time and energy to meditation students, with the objective of their deep wellbeing and freedom, and i need help in order to do so. and i invite you to contribute, whether you can give a full scholarship’s worth or less than a dollar, as a practice of generosity that helps connect our hearts.

whether or not you give to this fund, i recommend the practice of allowing yourself to give as little as you need to in order to be able to give as often as possible.

once more so you can’t miss it 😉: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-daniels-meditation-scholarship-fund

Subscribe now

i offer donation-based support for meditation practice! please feel welcome to book a call with me via savvycal

please reach out to me if you have any questions about taking this course, and also please feel free to share it with anyone you think might be interested!

all of the following text in the main body of this post, as well as the form to sign up for the class, can be found here.

why practice meditation?

meditation allows us to practice the fundamental actions of consciousness that help us in our lives. just as a musician can practice their scales and an athlete can practice their throw, we can practice kindness and self-compassion, we can practice wholehearted presence and undivided attention, we can practice inner strength and inner peace. we also learn a tremendous amount about ourselves and reality along the way.

this practice has transformed my life in beautiful ways i never would have thought possible. this isn't to say meditation has solved my every problem, turned me into a saint, or given me a perfect psychology – far from it – but it is still absolutely true. for more on this topic, see my essay “what is meditation good for and what is it not good for?”

course description

this course is designed to help you have a daily practice that is enjoyable, interesting, and beneficial. it's suitable for total beginners as well as those who already have some experience.

the teaching philosophy of this class is to focus on the fundamental principles common to all meditation, offer a variety of techniques to help you discover what suits you best, and provide the individual support that is invaluable in learning a new skill.

we'll have eight 90-minute group sessions (one per week) which will primarily include:

• live guided meditations
• short talks on our current topics
• practice reports and Q&A

the course also includes seven 45-minute one-on-one coaching sessions (or fewer if preferred). these are for:

• working through obstacles to establishing a daily practice habit
• choosing a practice technique focus
• addressing practice questions
• posture support
• personalized guided meditations (recorded for you)
• social meditation
• support for difficult emotional material arising in your practice or life

between sessions, you'll have access to a library of guided meditations, written summaries of each class, a group chat, and the option to text me for further support.

schedule: Saturdays at 10am PST / 1pm EST
dates: Oct 18, 25, Nov 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, Dec 6
(all classes will be recorded, so it's fine to miss some, or even all, and watch later)

curriculum

week 1 – body scanning, physical relaxation, trauma-sensitivity
week 2 – working with emotions, cultivating compassion
week 3 – mindfulness of breathing, cultivating samādhi (collectedness of mind)
week 4 – mettā (lovingkindness)
week 5 – open awareness and noting
week 6 – cultivating adhiṭṭhāna (wise commitment), recognizing the five hindrances
week 7 – investigating vedanā (pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral experience), practicing mindfulness in daily life
week 8 – keeping practice alive, enjoyable, and supported after class

supporting this course

in order to balance the needs of my livelihood with my wish for this course to fundamentally be a gift, i am offering four options:

Standard Rate: give $750. this figure accounts for market rates as well as my experience and the value of this course.

Benefactor Rate: give anything between $750 and $1500. i am deeply grateful for any extra support you can offer!

Supported Rate: give anything between $300 and $750, with my gratitude for your discernment and contribution.

Open-Door Rate: if you wish to be in this class and $300 would keep you from doing so, please know that the opportunity to help you is more important to me than how much money you have to offer. book a call with me and we'll figure out something together. i'm happy to offer you up to a full scholarship if needed.

to send me money for this course, use either Venmo (@Daniel-Brottman) or PayPal (danielbrottman@gmail.com). please either send payment when you submit this form, or contact me to discuss other options.

who’s teaching?

i've been practicing meditation for 12 years. in that time, i have studied with respected teachers (mostly from the insight meditation tradition), spent over 7 months on silent meditation retreats, read and listened widely on meditation and the dharma, and been trained to teach by Inward Bound Mindfulness. several of my teachers have encouraged my desire to teach, and i've now given over 150 one-on-one meditation coaching calls and taught several group classes. i've also explored and practiced a number of other inner-work modalities that inform my teaching. for an expanded version of my story, you can read this essay.

while i'm still a relatively new teacher, i feel confident in my ability to help meditation students based on the clear positive feedback i've received -- check out these testimonials. for more on my teaching philosophy, see this essay.

to explore if working with me and taking this course is a good fit for you, or to talk about money or anything else, you may book a call with me. i can also be reached by email at danielbrottman@gmail.com, on twitter @danielbrottman, or by text at 847-651-0707.

thanks for reading! if you are interested in practicing meditation with me, i’d love to get to work with you and to see you in the class. once again, if you can think of anyone who may be interested in this class, please help me spread the word. and the link to sign up for the class is here.

i offer donation-based support for meditation practice! please feel welcome to book a call with me via savvycal

if you wish to financially support my life and efforts, i gratefully invite you to contribute via my patreon account

in the first several years of my meditation practice, i absolutely devoured episodes of the 10% happier podcast. i encountered so many ideas about meditation and buddhism there for the first time. i was learning from books in those years too, but i think i really got my first pass at an education in all this from the dozens (hundreds?) of interviews i listened to with meditation teachers of all stripes.

especially in the early years before i had enough confidence in the practice to create steady daily motivation, listening to dan harris (the interviewer) speaking with a teacher about some aspect of practice or some way of approaching the dharma would really fire me up. i’ve actually suggested this to students many times: find some media about meditation you enjoy taking in, and let it help fill your motivation stores.

and more than just the topics discussed, i often also really admired the guests. i admired the grounded and alive energy they tended to exude, i admired their intellect and conversational fluency, i admired their seeming mastery over the material and their depth of experience with the practice. they gave me examples of people who had dedicated their lives to practice and their vocations to helping others through the vehicle of the dharma.

a few friends have interviewed me for podcasts before - i think this is the 5th time i’ve had the opportunity. it feels like a practice in itself, now! in a recorded conversation, these are the things i’m trying to practice:

1. show up as authentically as i can, staying true to my real moment-to-moment experience as i’m able

2. let go of any desire to control my image, to sound cooler or smarter or wiser than i actually am — and at the same time, to not make myself small or self-deprecate

3. speak primarily from what i have seen to be true in my own experience and exploration, rather than regurgitate views based on what others say or what traditions say

4. connect as authentically as i can with whoever is interviewing me. have a real conversation based in genuine interest and care

5. speak coherently! enjoy the game of microsecond sub-verbal decisions about how to organize my thoughts as they come spilling out of my mouth

i felt really good about how i showed up for this conversation with sophia, and that’s in no small part thanks to her wonderful skill as an interviewer. also, if you watch the youtube version, you’ll see how much she meticulously edited out my long pauses, my “um”s and my “like”s. (i’m running into the filler-words problem a lot as i make tiktoks, too! perhaps a new realm to practice in!)

if you want to listen to the podcast rather than watch, it’s also available on spotify:

last but not least, i might as well use this blog post to share about some of the many other wonderful podcasts on dharma and dharma-adjacent topics i have enjoyed over the years!

• insight hour with joseph goldstein - this one’s admittedly not so much a podcast as much as a bunch of dharma talks thrown into a podcast feed, but it is well well worth listening to. joseph’s talks are very engaging, and in this podcast feed he covers all the fundamentals of the insight / early buddhist tradition

• deconstructing yourself with michael taft - i can’t be certain but i think this is probably the most well-known meditation podcast amongst deep-end dharma nerds. michael taft is an incredibly knowledgable practitioner and teacher himself, and he has on top notch guests

• natural awakening with wystan bryant-scott - wystan is a good friend of mine, a deep practitioner, and someone who seems to delight in learning deeply from and about all three major meditative buddhist traditions (theravada, zen, vajrayana). he interviews friends, practitioners, and scholars

• teaching meditation with tucker peck and upasaka upali - it felt like my birthday when i first learned there was a whole podcast interviewing meditation teachers about teaching meditation! i particularly loved the interviews with michael taft and shinzen young

• 10% happier - mentioned above, this interview show hosted by dan harris is a wonderful meditation podcast for a general audience, which is not to say it doesn’t also contain quite a bit of depth and immense value. over the years, the guest list has expanded beyond just meditation practitioners

• the art of accomplishment - this one is not about dharma or meditation per se, but features an incredible clarity and power regarding emotional intelligence. i have friends for whom the ideas in this podcast are central to their entire spiritual practice (as several of the ideas are to mine, as well)

• the attunement podcast - actually two of those friends are samek and harry who started this podcast a few months ago. i love how courageous, whole-hearted, and smart both of them are

• simply always awake - angelo dillulo is a teacher who gives very clear guidance and descriptions of the process of awakening, largely through direct inquiry methods. many of the podcast episodes are short (5-15min) solo episodes where he expands upon one topic, and there are also some longer interview episodes

• effortless mindfulness with loch kelly - i’ve only listened to a bit of this one but if you want to hear from a well known teacher putting dzogchen/mahamudra type practices into plain english, this could be of interest to you

• emerge: making sense of what’s next with daniel thorson - off the air now but with a huge library of interviews, this podcast is less about classical buddhist meditation per se, and more about metamodernist thought, soulmaking dharma, human development, meaning, etc., but coming the frame of someone with a deep dharma practice

• heal by dr. sarah marshall - sarah is a friend of mine and superstar naturopathic doctor and plant medicine practitioner. she interviews a wide range of guests on related topics

• the metagame with daniel kazandjian (there’s always another daniel….) - daniel is an excellent interviewer and seems to have a knack for finding incredible guests. i recommend the episodes with daniel thorson, and romeo stevens

• mind & life - practitioner and neuroscientist wendy hasenkamp interviews others in the field of contemplative science. they are often deep practitioners themselves, and engaged in the fascinating task of 3rd person and objective measurements of the inherently 1st person and subjective craft of dharma

• reach truth podcast - of his podcast, tasshin writes: “people are sacred, conversations are worship.” tasshin follows his curiosity with every guest, and he always seems to be curios about good and beautiful things. there is an enormous wealth of interesting people here

• the one inside: an internal family systems podcast - it’s been years since i listened to this one but i remember it being good, and if you want to do a deep dive on IFS via podcast it’s worth knowing about

• tantra illuminated with dr. christopher wallis - christopher wallis is a scholar and practitioner of non-dual shaiva tantra, a tradition that converges on tantric buddhism’s aims in many ways, but is also extremely distinct

  ---

thanks so much! let me know if you give the podcast a listen!

i offer donation-based support for meditation practice! please feel welcome to book a call with me via savvycal

if you wish to financially support my life and efforts, i gratefully invite you to contribute via my patreon account

fear, to me, can be one of the most difficult mind states to navigate. it can absolutely become unbalanced and keep me frozen, stop me from growing, healing, or understanding. but fear, itself, i would not call categorically unskillful – it can carry dearly important information about the presence of danger.

i've been swapping in another word recently in the litany – despair. despair the mind-killer, the little death that brings obliteration. despair, which i will face, allow to pass over me and through me, so that the cavernous and pure light of compassion may meet it entirely.

despair is basically born of the meditative hindrance of doubt, where the mind vacillates between courses of action and fails to commit to any. i choose the word despair to capture the emotional tone and characteristics of doubt that has grown large and cancerous, doubt that has secured endorsement from the ego structure as being true. doubt says (to me) “maybe i'm not able to love, maybe i'm not able to grow and be free, maybe i'm not able to help.” despair says “of course not. nothing will ever change. there is no hope.”

despair in colorado

i attended a 5-day retreat recently led by heidi priebe, tony shawcross, and lindsay st antoine, called “the attachment intensive.” it was an excellently held container in which we learned about and discussed conceptual frameworks of attachment theory (especially something called the dynamic maturational model of attachment), practiced partner and small group exercises designed to highlight and grow psychological muscles related to attachment wounding, and were supported by powerful coaching in the tradition of what's called “radical honesty” in finding our edges around true and authentic embodied and verbal expression.

on the first day, we were guided in a simple visualization meditation intended to help us meet and welcome different parts of ourselves to the retreat. in the imagined “house” of our mind, we opened a door to find the room where the inner skeptic lived – i found him alive and well, judgements at the ready, his room well-furnished. after some time, we left this room and moved to another, the room of the one who hopes.

i saw, or felt, a being cowering and terrified. hard for me to even look at. the room bare and cold, the lighting harsh. i feel now and felt then: embarrassed, deeply sad, and even angry.

for several months before this, i had been, off and on, observing and doing my best to work with some flavor of depression that had surfaced in my bodymind. here, in this exercise, i was able to identify a component of it that i hadn't seen clearly before, and one that felt central: hopelessness. despair. “of course not.” “nothing will ever change.”

i don't quite know how to describe how deep this belief can go, how totalizingly it can shape my perception of life, but i imagine many readers are familiar with it in their own experience. it is the mind-killer. it is the little death that brings obliteration. interestingly, i had an intuition recognizing it as distinctly opposite to the sense of wonder and possibility that can arise in classic psychedelic experiences. i could sense that there was something painful (or feared to be painful) required in cracking it open, revealing the tender heart beneath it that hopes, that believes.

bodhisattvas of compassion

the rest of the first day was ok, but it was also horrible. the surface layers of my psyche were managing well enough, but deeper in my body was cynicism, anti-social feeling, sulking.

how fortunate i was that my friend caspian was also attending the retreat. caspian reintroduced me to hope in two important ways. the first way was simply by their presence, their own connection to buddha-nature, the fruits of their own practice shining through every moment. caspian was able to listen to me with what registered in my system as compassion and equanimity. the compassion communicates “i care, i understand, your welfare matters to me,” and the equanimity communicates “this is not a problem, you are not a problem. even in your distress, you are ok, and i am ok.”

the second way began when they asked me “what’s your relationship with quan yin like?”

i’ve had a slowly growing relationship with quan yin (an archetypal figure of compassion in mahayana buddhism) for a few months. in my practice of ideal parent figure protocol, i sometimes call upon her presence to help me feel what it would be like to be cared for by a being with infinite understanding, limitless patience, and endless compassion (qualities that are hard to come by from an actual human psyche). i had recently experimented a few times by meditating with the sanksrit mantra associated with her - om mani padme hum.

caspian told me about how much quan yin means to them, about their recent pilgrimage to the largest quan yin statue in the united states (72 feet tall, in sugar land TX), and fetched from their bag one of their quan yin statues.

i held the statue in my hands and felt my heart cracking open. caspian started singing the mantra and i had to ask them to stop, because it was actually too strong for me, more energy flow than i was able to handle. the most i was able to do was silently mouth the words of the mantra. (i’m reminded of once in an ayahuasca ceremony when i was in a difficult place, and the song keeper entreated me to sing. as soon as half a syllable escaped my lips i felt a rush of energy in my body become unstuck and begin to liberate itself. the song keeper saw this and said “el canto es medicina, ¿no?” (“the singing is medicine, no?”))

this quan yin stands atop a dragon, able to quell even the fiercest of dragons’ tempests. caspian told me they would often have this particular quan yin statue with them on screen in zoom sessions with their therapy clients. as is often the case with bodhisattvas, caspian saw an opportunity for generosity and took it — gifting me the statue to keep.

i made a practice of chanting with the statue morning and night, and keeping quan yin with me throughout the day, in my mind, as much as possible.

too often (and perfectly understandably), a human reaction to suffering goes like this:

1. a person suffers

2. another person notices and might try to understand. knowingly or unknowingly, they are filtering the suffering through questions like “is your suffering reasonable? are you suffering the right amount given your situation? do you deserve my care and understanding? is it safe for me to love you in this?”

3. if it seems good enough, perhaps care and understanding are offered, but they are conditional. if not, perhaps only pity is offered, or indifference, or outright cruelty

quan yin’s algorithm is much simpler:

1. i am suffering

2. quan yin only asks “is it literally anything?” and it definitionally is

3. she responds with complete understanding and care

throughout the day, when i noticed any contraction in my body, especially the hopelessness and despair i had recently come to identify more easily, i would picture quan yin’s face in my mind, and hear her mantra. i would imagine her care and understanding washing over me and through me, until i felt a characteristic drop in my chest, and the feeling of relief, and a small grief that feels like love.

despair “knows” i and the world are both broken and unloveable, and compassion proves it wrong. all is not broken, it is understood. all is not wretched, it is loved.

epilogue

i attended a wedding this weekend. it was like a 3-day festival with many of my favorite people, all gathered to celebrate how two of our friends love each other so much that they wanted to resolve in front of all their close relationships to be with each other and take care of each other until their last breaths. the land was stunning. we recited the metta sutta during their ceremony. i tended the fire in the sauna all weekend. i felt connected and valued. i got to dance with music and dance with bodies. i took a long walk with a friend. i had a little [1st great substance] and some [2nd great substance] and then maybe a bit too much [3rd great substance] (not all at the same time ;P). i had some really, really nice cuddles. i made some new friends. i got to talk to people i’ve admired for a long time. i was barefoot in the rain, in the mud, in the grass, on the rocks. i felt my social anxiety and i felt quan yin’s compassion.

may all beings enjoy such times in their lives

i offer donation-based support for meditation practice! please feel welcome to book a call with me via savvycal

if you wish to financially support my life and efforts, i gratefully invite you to contribute via my patreon account

this memory came to mind just now as i was contemplating structuring this blog post week by week, telling you what happened at this event and then that one and the next one etc. i found the memory much more alive and interesting than regurgitating my calendar, so i went with that

i sense, at times, a sort of discontinuity in the energy body, along my upper back. from the psyche, it seems to be a manifestation of insecurity and unsuredness, which could degrade into depression or bitterness, if met with habitual inattentiveness and collapse. but what feels intoxicatingly right, in response, is anger. anger is not cruelty or ill will, it is clarity, especially in the face of harm. it is backbone, spine — exactly the place that feels hollowed out in the energy body. i can feel energy moving up into this place, filling the back, bringing the spine into existence. it feels delicious

i love hating being fake

i’ve started caring less about hiding what really wants to happen on my face. when one of my habits kicks in with some tone of voice or some subtle facial expression that is more about trying to control or manage what happens around me rather than expressing what’s real for me, the discontinuity hits me like torqued metal in my chest and i let the grimace on my face rip. my back contracts and my shoulders squeeze. i catch the pain quick and feel all its juicy goodness before it has time to settle into my deep tissues where it tries to hide from the light of awareness in order to fester and develop into walls around my heart. not today, satan

“the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life” (adyashanti)

arjuna on the battlefield

to leave no stone of pain unturned, to be a bodhisattva unto oneself (roger thisdell) and all beings, attuned to pain of all sizes and across all realms

travelogue update in brief:

i spent 4 weeks at earthdance in MA, where i got to dance, play piano, sing, cook, clean, [redacted], hold and be held

i’m heading west now again, and will arrive in boulder colorado for the month of august. i’ll be attending a weeklong intensive on attachment healing led by heidi priebe and staying with good friends. i’ll then be beginning a 4-month program with chloe good and spencer jacobson also focused on attachment healing. i’ll be in california most of september, and then there’s some options for october i’m still sorting through

look at this DERPY, DERPY BOY. i love him

i offer donation-based support for meditation practice! please feel welcome to book a call with me via savvycal

if you wish to financially support my life and efforts, i gratefully invite you to contribute via my patreon account

ah ok - this ifs/relational practice/dance/meditative technique/bodywork/psychedelic medicine etc etc has whisked away the cream off the top (maybe quite profoundly, and deeply!), and now, here, again, is my deep pain. the anger that promises only eternal hellfire. the loneliness that categorically refuses consolation. the hole where wailing comes from, so vast it terrifies me to peer in.

now begins the patient work. the long game. the infinite tenderness. the unknowing. the prayer.

sit with me