Welcome Home.
Hi, I’m Jeff.
I make meditation accessible, in order to help people live more connected and fulfilled lives. Also, I make jokes.
I am passionate about the democratization of mental health, and the intersection of neurodiversity and creative practice. I try to speak honestly 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’m the co-author, with Dan Harris, of the best-selling Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, and the cohost, with Tasha Schumann, of The Mind Bod Adventure Pod. I’ve taught meditation to distractible teens, suspicious journalists, virtuoso pop stars, 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 and clear and adventurous.
Although I no longer work for the apps, my guided meditations continue to reach millions through both Happier and Calm (where my “Daily Trip” is still on heavy rotation). This Substack is the best place to support my ongoing work.
What is this Substack all about?
Home Base is a community of continual learning and practice. When you subscribe, you enter a steady rhythm of support in the form of short written reflections on how practice can help, new weekly guided audio meditations, and live weekly and monthly community practice sessions.
When I talk about the democratization of mental health, I mean de-stigmatizing mental, emotional and spiritual challenges, removing barriers to finding local and virtual support, and empowering people to share peer-to-peer practices. I believe most mental health care is preventative, and can happen through a mix of committed practice, community encouragement, and well-timed jokes at our own expense. Especially my expense.
I encourage everyone – therapists, teachers, parents, social workers, activists, policy makers, doctors, artists, and assorted layabouts – to pilfer all my ideas and adapt them to their own work and life.
What's your deal as a meditation teacher?
I have a down-to-earth take on practice and applying practice in challenging real life situations. I have to. I'm an often overwhelmed parent of two small kids with intense brains. I was one of those kids, and then one of those adults, who somehow managed to survive years of reckless thrashings and near-death experiences. My survival is due to my unusual luck, and to my practices: formal sitting, short meditations on the fly, general contemplative and attentional principles, movement practices, therapy interventions, art and ceremony and communication practices, and more. I try to integrate all of this learning into my teaching.
Neurodivergent people often talk about their “special interests.” My special interest is consciousness. Twenty years ago I published a book about neuroscience and subjective experience, and I am still obsessed with learning everything about the mind. I never get bored of making and guiding meditations, because there’s always more to learn, and there’s always some fascinating way to customize an insight or a technique to suit someone’s unique situation (Dan Harris calls me “The Meditation MacGyver”).
Neurodiversity points to the width of the mind; contemplative practice to its depth. That’s the space I work and play in.
What type of meditation do you teach?
My biggest influence is an 80-year old Buddhist teacher named Shinzen Young. Shinzen argues that certain basic attentional skills underlie mindfulness (concentration, clarity and equanimity), and that these skills live at the headwaters of mental, emotional and spiritual health. I agree, and that’s where I start. I create and borrow and remix and guide many kinds of meditation techniques, and enjoy the challenge of adapting them to different people and contexts. And … I always come back to the skills.
Why does all this matter?
I think the culture needs an upgrade in how it thinks about mental health. When I was younger, my paradigm for all this was: you’re born, you coast, and, if your brains get scrambled, you find an expert to fix you.
Not only is that passive and disempowering, it’s also not a realistic take on how minds and bodies work. Experts have their place, but most of the day-to-day work of staying mentally and emotionally and spiritually fit is on us. In this sense, mental health is a lot like physical health. It involves understanding, it involves deliberate practice to support healthy behaviors, and ideally it involves communities of mutual support. Home Base tries to be all these. Just like a homebase in meditation, it’s a place you come back to again and again.
Building communities that care about all of this is one way the culture will change. Lots and lots of communities, doing their own thing in their own weird ways, preferably without me. Hence my free “Community Practice Activation Kit,” and my emphasis on seeding local amateur practice groups.
As far as where all this leads, my short hand-way of thinking about that is the “One Big Nervous System.” At its best, dedicated practice leads to a lived understanding that we’re all part of one interconnected system, and that we all have specialist roles to play within that system to keep it running smoothly.
So come be part of that.
The Details
I offer two tiers of practice support: free and paid.
Free subscribers receive:
One or two written posts on practice and mental & spiritual health per month.
One or two new audio meditations per month.
Access to the archive of past Home Base posts and meditations.
Ability to comment on free posts.
Access to “Do Nothing Project” Community Practice broadcast on the first Sunday night of the month
Paid subscribers receive all of the above, plus:
One or two additional written posts per month.
One or two additional new audio meditations per month.
Exclusive subscriber-only extended meditations.
Three additional live Sunday night “Do Nothing Project” Community Practice broadcasts per month.
Access to our monthly live Home Base Hangouts, a community gathering and practice workshop with me over Zoom.
Access to “Real People, Real Practice,” a regular column where I make customized meditations based on your submitted requests.
Most importantly: a way for people who appreciate my work to directly offer support, so my team and I (see below) can keep Home Base running.
If you’d like access to everything and a paid subscription is out of reach, email us at info@jeffwarren.org for a scholarship. You can also just …
THANK YOU for your attention!
Jeff
