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’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.
My guided meditations reach millions through the apps Happier and Calm (where I write the “Daily Trip” series). Over three million people have listened to my 30-day “Mindfulness for Beginners” course on Calm, which is bananas to me. I’m also the author of The Head Trip, and co-author, with
, of the best-selling Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. In 2011, I started the Toronto-based non-profit The Consciousness Explorers Club.You can existentially loiter with me every Sunday night at my free Do Nothing Project broadcast, adventure with
and I through every kind of practice at , and hang with me in-person at these retreats and events.What is this Substack all about?
Home Base is my studio for building and sharing meditations. I write posts about the baffle-wonder-challenge of somehow existing, 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, community activist, parent, healer, artist, or all-purpose layabout of consciousness.
This publication is also my home base. It’s a place to ground myself in the twin practices of writing and guiding meditation. And it’s a place to connect directly with my community (after years spent hidden behind app paywalls, like a lonely Rapunzel). All this is Lilli’s idea, by the way. Lilli is my externalized prefrontal cortex, running around New York somewhere. She does the actual organization of this publication, is always right, and appreciates me memorializing this in public.
What's your deal as a meditation teacher?
My deal is I'm screwed up and meditate anyway. I'm an overwhelmed parent of two small children. I’m intensely neurodivergent, have lots of trauma, and somehow survived years of reckless partying and thrashings and ridiculous near-death experiences. My survival is due to my unusual luck, and, I believe, to my practices: formal sitting, mini-meditations on the fly, general meditation principles, movement practices, therapy interventions, art and communication practices, and more. I try to integrate ‘be-wild, screw-up, meditate-anyway’ type insights 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 endlessly obsessed with learning everything about the mind. I use my ADHD-powered curiosity and my bipolar-powered creativity to make meditations about all of this. I never get bored of making and guiding meditations, because there’s always more to learn, and there’s always some cool way to customize an insight or a technique to suit someone’s unique real life 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 like to play around 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, so 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 situations and contexts. And … I always come back to the skills.
I list additional lineage influences – from somatic psychotherapy to humanistic traditions – here.
Why does all this matter?
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. What’s clear is life is hard and the planet is struggling. I think the rising popularity of meditation is part of our collective healing. So is the explosion of trauma-informed somatic therapies, the maturation of environmental activism, the disability rights and racial justice movements, the renaissance of Indigenous wisdom and leadership, the increase in queer visibility and non-binary gender fluidity, and the general openness to more intuitive and spiritual (and psychedelic!) ways of knowing. All these are part of a movement to come out of our unconsciousness, and recognize and protect the sacredness of life that’s already right here. To know ourselves, and come home to ourselves.
Deep practice spreads, through the simple act of practice itself. It’s the good virus: slow, cumulative, powerful – transmitted through “the silent sermon of your pores,” to quote Shinzen.
That’s what Home Base is all about. Except less manifesto-y and more disorganized.
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:
Written reflections & exclusive audio meditations, about three per month.
Access to the archive of past Home Base posts and meditations.
Ability to comment on posts and connect with others in the Home Base community.
Paid subscribers receive all of the above plus:
Exclusive subscriber-only posts featuring extended meditations.
The ability to join Home Base Hangouts: monthly real conversations with Jeff via Zoom.
Access to Hey Jeff, where I write meditations crafted in response to a subscriber's letter.
Most importantly: a way for people who appreciate my work to directly offer support, so we can keep both Home Base running, as well as my various pro bono initiatives like the Do Nothing Project, 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. Happy to offer a subscription, no questions asked.
THANK YOU for your attention.
Jeff