Hi, I’m Jeff.

I make meditation accessible, in order to help people live more connected and fulfilled lives. 

I’ve taught meditation to distractible teens, suspicious journalists, virtuoso popstars, burned-out doctors, formerly incarcerated youth, and every conceivable demographic of freethinker, including squirmy six-year old kids. I try to do this in a way that’s rigorous, clear and adventurous. 

My guided meditations reach millions through the Ten Percent Happier and Calm apps. I’m the author of The Head Trip, and founder of the non-profit The Consciousness Explorers Club. You can existentially loiter with me on Sunday nights at the Do Nothing Project, and adventure with me through every kind of practice at the Mind Bod Adventure Pod. 

I’m also the co-author of the best-selling Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. Writing that book led to another unexpected specialty, which is speaking openly about how meditation has – and hasn’t – helped with my own mental health challenges, from ADHD to bipolar disorder to various flavors of moody agonizing. 

I am passionate about the democratization of mental health, and the intersection of neurodiversity and creative practice.

What is this Substack all about?

Home Base is my studio for building and sharing meditations. Each week, I write about the baffle-wonder-challenge of somehow existing. This is accompanied by a short guided audio meditation on the same theme.

Like a home base in meditation, Home Base is meant to be a comfortable place you can return to again and again. A place to pause, and settle, and check in – just click play ⏯. The meditations are also meant to be happily pilfered and incorporated into your own work, whether you’re a therapist, teacher, social worker, doctor, nurse, community activist, parent, healer, writer, artist, or all-purpose layabout of consciousness.

This publication is also my home base. A place to develop my thinking and teaching. A place to ground myself in the twin practices of writing and guiding meditation. And a place to connect to my community. 

My manager pointed this out. Her name is Lilli. She is my externalized prefrontal cortex, running around New York somewhere. She encouraged me to start this Substack, and she is always right (she appreciates me memorializing this in public). 

Meditation and practice have both saved my life, and given me a life worth living. The living I make as a profession, but also the day-to-day living I experience as a human. I’m here for it now, willingly. For a long time I wasn’t. I have paid attention to the ways I wasn’t. I have sent my journalistic curiosity into my own learning and healing. I have taken notes. 

I don’t think everyone needs to meditate, and I’d never try to convince anyone to. But I do think everyone can benefit from knowing the skills that underlie meditation, because they live at the headwaters of mental, emotional and spiritual health. They’re that fundamental. When you understand the skills, then you can begin to more deliberately apply them in other practices, and other areas of your life. And when that happens – when the skills begin to wake up in your body – then your life will change.

We need change. You look around the planet and your blood freezes. To me, the biggest good news story of our time is the movement to come back to our humanity. Meditation is part of it, yet there are countless other tributaries, from the explosion of mindfulness and trauma-informed somatic therapies, to the ecology and disability rights and racial justice movements, to the renaissance in Indigenous wisdom and leadership, and even the new openness to more intuitive and spiritual ways of knowing, particularly among younger folks. 

This collective movement is a kind of coming home to ourselves. Coming out of our unconsciousness, and seeing the sacredness that’s already right here, all around. 

Deep practice spreads. It’s the good virus: slow, cumulative, powerful – transmitted through “the silent sermon of your pores,” to quote my old teacher Shinzen Young. 

That’s what Home Base is all about. Except less manifesto-y, and with more jokes.

Join me!

The Details

To support others, I need support. That’s how the good virus works! By subscribing and joining this community, you’re helping a ton.

All free subscribers receive:

• Weekly dose of writing reflection & exclusive audio meditations.

• Access to the entire archive of past posts and meditations. 

• Ability to comment on posts and connect with others in the Home Base community.

• Extras like longer articles, interviews with smart people and who-knows-what. 

Paid subscribers receive all of the above plus:

• Exclusive subscriber-only posts featuring extended meditations.

• The ability to join sporadic real conversations with Jeff via Zoom.

• Access to Hey Jeff, where occasionally I write a meditation crafted in response to a paid subscriber's letter.

• Most importantly: a way for people who appreciate my work to directly support me, so I can keep both Home Base going, as well as my various pro bono initiatives like the Do Nothing Project, and the Mind Bod Adventure Pod, and the Consciousness Explorers Club.

If you’d like access to everything and a paid subscription is out of reach, email us at info@jeffwarren.org. We do scholarships!

THANK YOU for your attention. 

And welcome home.

Jeff