"Just read The Power of Now", they said.
"Just try a 10-day retreat", they said.
Now, you can't ignore the impermanence of life and it's 50/50 whether you'll have another kundalini awakening on the train. You can see this spiritual stuff has no off-switch and you want support.
What I do
- I partner with people as a contemplative guide, pointing to the deepest truth of this moment and seeing through the dream of separation. This is for those who are—through choice or otherwise—pursuing the journey sometimes known as awakening or enlightenment. Along the way, there are many confusing and contrasting messages. I help people make sense of what’s happening to them and deepen their insight, drawing on my own engagement with various traditions and the process of awakening itself over the last 15+ years.
How having a guide helps
- Reading 100s of books and watching 1000s of YouTube videos is helpful, but speaking with someone about your particular struggles is the most effective way to move deeper.
- This journey is often a lonely and solitary one; an intoxicating yet confusing ride of insights, energies and awakenings. Being able to speak clearly about what’s happening for you right now can be a powerful catalyst.
- Having a solid practice funnelled through limiting beliefs about what awakening is or what you need to do can leave you feeling confused and burned out. The tool of meditation is powerful. But a skilful conversation can remake our sense of what it means to practice at all.
- Past a certain point, most people hit a wall following one or two practices. I can help you refine your practices to better release reactivity and tension from the body.
Who I work with
- People feeling washed out after extensive Vipassana practice.
- Those with a solid practice and maybe even some awakenings under their belt, but who feel that things have stalled.
- Those looking to balance their meditation practice with a more varied ecology of practices.
Why me?
- Unlike many meditation guides, I am also a trained transformative coach. Coaching is a powerful way of unhooking the beliefs and ideas that keep us (apparently) locked out of this undivided reality.
- I learned the hard way: bypassing, fixating on awakenings, getting stuck in emptiness, repressing emotions, trying to meditate it all away, spiritualising poor mental health, dissociating, side-stepping trauma, following unquestioned beliefs and ignoring my own needs and boundaries.
- I am confident teaching both inquisitive, effortful practices and more open, heart-based approaches. I draw inspiration from traditions as varied as Burmese vipassana to Christian mysticism.
- I’m not here to tell you how it is. But we can explore this unfolding reality together and see what comes up.
About me
- I was drawn to spirituality at a young age, for reasons that I did not understand. I did the practices and things started to happen. Quite quickly. I went deep into the Vipassana / Insight Meditation tradition via Daniel Ingram’s book Mastering the Core Teaching of the Buddha and the wider Pragmatic Dharma scene. Later, I explored Western wisdom traditions (particularly Magia), alongside self-inquiry, “non-meditation”, devotional practice and heart work, which helped me counter a long-standing sense of inadequacy that insight meditation did not touch.
- I spent the next decade trying to understand what was happening to me whilst working in Tech, building companies, struggling with mental health, running ultramarathons and plenty more in between.
- Later in the journey, I came to appreciate the importance of somatic work in releasing deeply held, unconscious reactivity and trauma in the body. I found meditation was powerful and transformative, but that my energetics and body were out-of-whack.
- Some teachers I’ve found most useful have been Alan Chapman, Rob Burbea, Adyashanti, Peter Kingsley, A H Almaas, Joan Tollifson, Suzanne Chang, Angelo Dillulo, Peter Brown and a bunch of Zen patriarchs.
My approach
- My relationship with each person is different, depending on their background and current struggles. I do not have a fixed program or Best Method that I inflict on people.
- I don’t work from a particular tradition. I mix pointers to an already-present wholeness alongside strategic practical advice. I like helping people return to a living intimacy with just what’s happening.
- I believe developing fluency in both emptiness and fullness practices helps prevent fixation on one aspect or the other.
- Alongside your daily practices, we can inquire into the beliefs and assumptions underlying the journey: beyond practice and progress to our very ideas of time, life and being itself. Meditation alone does not always expose these beliefs.
Psssst! If you are looking for support on practical matters like career, relationships or personal effectiveness, visit my main coaching page.