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What is the Do Nothing Project?

Prepare to be underwhelmed! Every Sunday night myself or a cohost guide a free 25-minute meditation on Substack Live. Our subject is a variation on nothing whatsoever.

You can read more about the Do Nothing Project here, and peruse hundreds of archived weekly meditations here.

Look forward to doing nothing in community with you!

Jeff

Watch Last Week's DNP Here

Enjoying the Do Nothing Project? Check out the Consciousness Explorers Club (CEC), a non-profit meditation adventure group that I founded over ten years ago (anniversary animation here), now run by my friend Erin Oke and a crew of dedicated volunteers. The CEC offers free guided meditations and articles, hosts its own highly exploratory online community meditation on Monday nights, and aims to be a resource for community practice groups around the world.

You might also like The Mind Bod Adventure Pod - an experiential sandbox for mind and body hosted by my friend and me.

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But how do you invite people into a spirituality-adjacent group without sounding…creepy?

When I first started meditating with friends and family, I would just say “Hey, I’m doing this ‘cause I found meditation helpful in this way (insert personal experience). Join me if you want.”

Period.

I never try to be evangelical. That puts out the wrong vibes. Plus I have no idea what somebody needs, or what practice will be most supportive for them.

In fact, if I find myself chatting with someone who’s both struggling and interested in practice, I rarely start with meditation. Instead, I try to figure out if they already have a practice, like running or knitting or gardening, something they do that’s a centre of focus and stability and even insight for them. I see if there’s a way of making that practice more deliberate. And then I widen the lens to position that practice within a larger, more transformational framework.

What do I mean by that?

Here’s my quick take on three deeply beneficial tiers of practice, each sort of blending and overlapping with the others. Many of these practices can be done with a friend or in a small group, which can amplify their effect and help us take them more seriously. (And to be clear, nothing I discuss below means there may not be other common-sense things people can do to help themselves, like sleep and nutrition and exercise and so on.)

Tier 1 - Concentration Practices

These are things that we do where we get absorbed in the action, lose track of time, and ultimately emerge refreshed, like we got a substantive break from our worries. This is not exotic intel. Many of us already do some kind of flow-like activity, such as art, sport, music, dance, yoga, nature immersion, spending time with friends, etc. The best of them use our whole attention and our whole body, which is why we can’t get the same benefits from sitting fixated in front of a computer screen or (unfortunately for me) watching ridiculous but oddly cathartic Marvel films.

I’ve written more about this kind of high-focus practice here. The main skill is concentration. Meditative concentration practices can get very settling indeed, since you are not focusing on anything stimulating; rather you’re going deeper and deeper into one-pointed silence and space.

Tier 2 - Insight Practices

You can do any of the activities above, and if you are intentional and regular about it, they will make a difference in your life. But will they get you out of a rut? Will they give you perspective or insight about your relationships, your work, the way you yourself are contributing to your challenges? (After all, a great deal of our fuckery is an inside job.)

They might. If we can get the thinking mind quiet, insights do come. They come out of the silence.

And… we can also be more direct about cultivating insight. Through a journaling practice, through intentional check-ins with a perceptive friend or therapist or psychiatrist. Through ceremony, through prayer, through dream work, through divination practices, and somatic practices, and breath practices. The main skill here is clarity.

Insight practices on their own – the constant problem-solving of our own lives – can get a bit wiggy and solipsistic if they’re not balanced with the first or third kinds of practice. In mindfulness meditation, the layers of insight keep going, from our patterns of thinking, feeling and reacting all the way down to the constructed nature of identity itself. There are plenty of descriptions of that in Buddhist and other mystical writing. It’s bonkers and paradigm-shaking.

Is it necessary for everyone to explore this “constructed nature of identity”?

This is where I probably have different ideas than most meditation teachers, certainly most Buddhist teachers. While I think everyone can benefit from getting insight into their patterns, I’ve found from years of teaching insight that the fine-grained deconstruction that mindfulness practice points to isn’t very accessible (or even interesting) to most people. Nor have I found nondual “aware of awareness” type practices to be particularly relatable (or comprehensible) to the average practitioner, as much as they have meant to me on my path. This may be a deficiency in my own teaching, but it’s what I’ve observed.

What I’m trying to say is if these two styles of practice mean nothing to you, that’s fine. I don’t think you need them. Because there’s a more important category of practice, one that gets into the same deep territory as above, but is more democratically available.

Tier 3 – Surrender and Service Practices

These are the practices of getting over yourself. Of surrendering your small clanking willful agenda and getting humble enough to listen to what life is showing you.

This is the heart of spiritual practice, whether or not you call it that. It can happen in as many ways as there are humans to inhabit those ways, from ecology to math, poetry to activism. In fact, many of the practices from the other two tiers fit naturally here, if they’re engaged in with the right curiosity and devotion and humility (dialing these up this is one way I help people boost their practice). Attention here isn’t on yourself; it’s on the world, and what’s beyond the world, beyond our ability to capture or neatly articulate. It’s on the lessons that arrive moment by moment in our exact lives. It’s on being in relationship with life.

The main skill here is equanimity, a kind of radical availability and surrender to the moment. And the more you weave in deliberate caring and appreciation practices, the more what catches you in that moment is your best human self.

In karma yoga practice, it begins with service and works backwards, showing you where your small self resists. Others find it the other way around: they begin with letting go, and find what then emerges naturally is both gratitude and a desire to give back. Not to be idealistic about it, but that is a sequence I’ve seen again and again. Often it means helping someone with something we ourselves have gone through, turning our problem into someone else’s solution.

To come back to the original point of this post… when someone comes to me who is struggling, I sometimes recommend meditation. If they’re interested in it.

And… I’m also curious about what other practices they do. If they enjoy some activity that fits under a concentration practice, then I recommend they get more intentional about making that a regular thing. I also check to see if they’re getting any feedback about their situation; we talk about what might be a good fit for them there, including – if necessary – seeking professional help. Finally, I get curious about where in their life they feel connected to something larger than themselves, and whether they can hold that direction. There is so much variation and creativity in what that can look like. Whatever practice(s) we discover here, they often become the source of both our greatest healing, and our greatest capacity.

What all this means is, once you understand how these different classes of practice work, you can then build your own from the raw material of your existing proclivities and interests. One reason I love meditation is that it’s both very simple, and it touches on all three tiers. In today’s guided practice, we explore exactly this, in a non-hierarchical and relaxed kind of way.

Thank you for your attention, and for being part of this community.

Love,
Jeff.

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Extended Version (Paid Subscribers Only)

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, June 14 at 8pm EDT. Link here. The DNP is for paid subscribers three times a month, and free for everyone the first Sunday of the month. If the cost of a subscription is not accessible to you, full scholarships are available at info@jeffwarren.org. Replays are archived on Monday morning.

• New to Home Base? We have over 75 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 60 extended meditations, over 365 meditations on YouTube, and a growing number of community practice videos. New writing, new audio meditations, and new live community gatherings happen every week.

• Home Base is best experienced on a web browser (laptop or mobile), NOT the Substack app. The app is great for finding new authors who have much to say, and, like any social media platform, it will suck out your eyeballs and, eventually, your brain. Plus the more pubs you subscribe to (they automatically offer these after you sign up), the more Substack will flood your inbox. To manage Substack emails and notifications, read this.

• Did you find me on Calm or Happier? While the meditations I made for the apps live on in perpetuity, I no longer record new meditations for them. My latest work happens here; becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support that work. If you found this meditation and post helpful, but becoming a paid subscriber isn’t an option, you can also …

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Many thanks!

Meditation for Neurodivergent Minds

June 17, 2026 at 2pm ET
Live Podcast

Next Tuesday I’m doing a live conversation with my friend and Kevin Ellerton, the publisher of Meditation Magazine, all about how neuro-sparkly humans can make practice work for them.

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“These days practice is packaged to be about individual stress relief (which isn’t a bad gateway drug), but practice is ultimately about both personal and collective liberation.”

- Sebene Selassie

“A problem well-stated is half-solved.”
- Charles Kettering

I’ve been waiting three years to write this very personal post. It’s about my own most important thing, besides my family and friends (although it’s about that, too). I guess you could say it’s about what I want to do with the rest of my life.

You might notice that Home Base has been changing. Not just the look and the organization of it (best seen on a browser, not the app), but also the sharper emphasis on community and mutual support. I’ve also been getting more intentional about my “social media strategy,” words I never imagined I would type. And today I’m launching a new personal website – one year in the making! (Thank you for vision lift-off, and for the amazing design and business architecture, check out her stuff.)

My new website does many things I’ve never done before. Among other things, it clarifies who I am and where I want to focus my energies, it makes explicit my work availability to individuals and organizations, and it offers concrete ways for people to join a grassroots movement that I think – with continued, conscious encouragement – can help change the world.

Sometimes naming a movement makes it more real. My name for this one is the democratization of mental health. There’s no one leading this movement, nor could there be. The whole point is that it is decentralized. I even hesitate to call it only a cultural movement; it feels more evolutionary than that, more biological. At its heart it is about the larger nervous system of humanity caring for its members in more deliberate ways.

I see it everywhere. The not-for-profit support group my friend Jacqui started for other parents of children with behavioral challenges. The body-doubling creative work and sharing sessions that my partner Sarah does with other writer friends who otherwise feel isolated and adrift. The rise in local men’s groups, helping participants get vulnerable and actually talk about their problems. The half-dozen WhatsApp groups started by attendees of my retreats, who meet regularly to meditate and connect. Every week I get emails from people starting different local support initiatives in schools, in hospitals, in workplaces – in their own living rooms.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. A quick survey of your own network will no doubt yield many more examples. These initiatives all share several features:

1. They’re accessible: accessible language, accessible costs (often free), accessible networks, and accessible practices.

2. They de-stigmatize mental health problems and conditions.

3. They’re generally member-led, not expert-led.

4. They involve either implicit or explicit practice (more on that below).

5. And finally: they have positive impacts on the mental and emotional and spiritual well-being of participants.

There have always been powerful group social bonds, from recovery programs to spiritual communities to sports teams. That’s not new. What’s new is the sheer volume of new small groups proliferating, the way in which they’re responsive to very specific mental health needs and local contexts, and the fact that organizers aren’t waiting for the right authority to sanction their existence. They’re just getting on with it, in a common-sense, roll-up-your-sleeves, it’s-ok-to-be-imperfect kind of way.

This isn’t trivial. It reflects a shift in the broader culture’s understanding of mental health, one we very much need at this moment.

How do you change a culture? I think it’s similar to how an individual changes their behavior.

1. Shift Understanding. You try to get clear about the flaws in the old understanding, so you can begin to view things through a more accurate and inclusive framework. In the case of mental health, the outdated way of thinking about it – the way I thought about it when I didn’t know any differently – is that mental health is an individual issue, and one you don’t need to think about until something goes wrong. Then, you go to an expert to get fixed: a therapist, or a psychiatrist, or, these days, a twenty-something shaman with a pipe full of 5-MeO-DMT. But mental health isn’t an individual problem; it’s inextricable from the health of the world around us. It’s also not a one-off fix, but an ongoing preventative practice that is inseparable from daily life. Much more to say here.
   

2. Change Behavior. Once you have an updated understanding, you need new behaviors to support that understanding. This is where practice comes in, both individual and group practice. Practices are the habits we choose. They’re about intentionally choosing where and how we place our attention, and then repeating that. The more we repeat, the more those new behaviors and ways of being are locked in. That’s what all these groups are doing, some more deliberately than others. There are certain core underlying attentional skills in any successful practice that can be known and cultivated; when they are, that practice becomes more powerful and creative and effective. I am very interested in helping people and groups do exactly this!
   

3. Build Community. Finally, to support and reinforce these new behaviors, it helps to have a community of people practising them together. We can detox in a recovery centre, but if we then return to the same environment, our unhealthy behaviors are likely to come back. The right community makes all the difference. Plus, communities are scalable: the ones I have in mind range from small friend gatherings to larger therapy groups and school classrooms all the way up to influencers building new platforms and hubs, all of them radiating a continuous signal of practice and connection and support. And so it goes, in ever-expanding concentric circles.

I think the understandings within both the theory and the practice of meditation have much to offer all of these groups. I also think there should straight-up be more meditation groups – many more, in schools and hospitals and workplaces and living rooms, all of them offering a steady rhythm of support to their families and communities. To that end, here is my updated and redesigned “Community Practice Activation Kit,” for would-be junior cult leaders everywhere:

Download the Kit

I’ll write more about this next week, but for now, consider: what might it be like to start your own small group? Maybe a friend to meditate with on Saturday mornings, or five minutes of group practice before a work meeting. It can be very sensible and grounded. A slow-motion, down-home, very sensible and grounded revolution! Would a meditator do it any other way?

Please share in the comments. I’m curious how others think of the big picture of mental and spiritual health – where do you think individuals and groups can make the largest positive impact? What are your own best hopes – and best practices – in this regard? And what role have your own communities played for you, if any? Engaging with your ideas helps me develop and expand my own, particularly around articulating a different understanding of practice and mental health. It also gives me ideas both for new community support initiatives, and for new guided practices, so we can try on these new behaviors and ways of being for ourselves. There’s so much that can be done here; having all of you be more deliberately a part of this movement is one reason I started this community in the first place.

In today’s guided meditation, we experience what it’s like to be connected in a movement of connection and care.

Happy to be here friends!

Love,
Jeff

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Extended Version (Paid Subscribers Only)

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, June 7 at 8pm EDT. Link for everyone is here. The DNP is for paid subscribers three times a month, and free for everyone the first Sunday of the month. If the cost of a subscription is out of reach, full scholarships are available at info@jeffwarren.org. Replays are archived on Monday morning.

• New to Home Base? We have over 75 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 60 extended meditations, over 365 meditations on YouTube, and a growing number of community practice videos. New writing, new audio meditations, and new live community gatherings happen every week.

• Home Base is best experienced on a web browser (laptop or mobile), NOT the Substack app. The app is great for finding new authors who have much to say, and, like any social media platform, it will suck out your eyeballs and, eventually, your brain. Plus the more pubs you subscribe to (they automatically offer these after you sign up), the more Substack will flood your inbox. To manage Substack emails and notifications, read this.

• Did you find me on Calm or Happier? While the meditations I made for the apps live on in perpetuity, I no longer record new meditations for them. My latest work happens here; becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support that work. If you found this meditation and post helpful, but becoming a paid subscriber isn’t an option, you can also…

  Buy Me A Coffee

  Many thanks!

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Home Base Hangout is one of the additional signals of support available to paid subscribers, along with customized meditation practices, and more on the way.

In this month’s Home Base Hangout, we slow down, we talk about the circus of the mind, we explore how to drive and meditate, and knit and meditate, and other things besides

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Yesterday in our monthly Home Base Hangout, one of our community members said her experience of meditating was like being in the middle of a ten-ring circus. Lists, worries, distractions, compulsions, convictions – all of these separate acts clamouring for her attention.

She dealt with it by … not dealing with it. Instead, she envisioned herself as a ring leader standing in the middle, letting all of it simply happen. Which of course, paradoxically, helped her feel less stressed and more settled.

“Standing in the middle of all of this” is actually a Pali word in Buddhism: tatramajjhattatã. How great that’s even a word! It describes a state of balanced equanimity that ultimately leads both to more grounded autonomy, and more capacity to move smoothly between perspectives.

Above is a guided meditation about being in the middle of everything, initially recorded for Dan Harris’ excellent app.

Enjoy!

Jeff

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Extended Version (Paid Subscribers Only)

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, May 31 at 8pm EDT. Link here. The DNP is for paid subscribers three times a month, and free for everyone the first Sunday of the month. If the cost of a subscription is not accessible to you, full scholarships are available at info@jeffwarren.org. Replays are archived on Monday morning.

• New to Home Base? We have over 75 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 60 extended meditations, over 365 meditations on YouTube, and a growing number of community practice videos. New writing, new audio meditations, and new live community gatherings happen every week.

• Home Base is best experienced on a web browser (laptop or mobile), NOT the Substack app. The app is great for finding new authors who have much to say, and, like any social media platform, it will suck out your eyeballs and, eventually, your brain. Plus the more pubs you subscribe to (they automatically offer these after you sign up), the more Substack will flood your inbox. To manage Substack emails and notifications, read this.

• Did you find me on Calm or Happier? While the meditations I made for the apps live on in perpetuity, I no longer record new meditations for them. My latest work happens here; becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support that work. If you found this meditation and post helpful, but becoming a paid subscriber isn’t an option, you can also …

  Buy Me A Coffee

Meditate, Relate and Creatively Self-Regulate

July 16-19, 2026
Art of Living North Carolina

This retreat is about not being the only weirdo in the room. Everyone here will be the weirdo in the room! Including your two teachers, Jeff Warren and . What unifies us is the sense that our brains are wired differently, and those differences have brought both real challenges and real creative opportunities.

More Info / Register

See All Upcoming Events Here

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Happy Friday! Had a great time teaching at Hollyhock last week - thanks to all who came. I’ve been so loving my community lately, and thought I’d share the guided practice from last month’s Home Base Hangout, for whoever needs a meditation hit this week.

In addition to our Sunday night Do Nothing Project (DNP) broadcasts, on the last Thursday of the month, many of our community regulars meet over Zoom for Home Base Hangout. It’s nice because you can see everyone’s face, and after the guided meditation, we spend 30 minutes or so having an open discussion about practice, its various challenges and insights and whatever else might be coming up. It’s just as supportive for me as it is for everyone else!

Our next Hangout will be Thursday, May 28 at 12:15pm ET. Click below to register. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you’re welcome to start a free trial and see how you like it. All Hangouts are archived on the Live Community Meditations page.

Hope to see you there!

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, May 24 at 8pm EDT. Link here. The DNP is for paid subscribers three times a month, and free for everyone the first Sunday of the month. Full scholarships are available at info@jeffwarren.org. Replays are archived on Monday morning.

• New to Home Base? We have over 75 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 60 extended meditations, over 365 meditations on YouTube, and a growing number of community practice videos. New writing, new audio meditations, and new live community gatherings happen every week.

• Home Base is best experienced on a web browser (laptop or mobile), NOT the Substack app. The app is great for finding new authors who have much to say, and, like any social media platform, it will suck out your eyeballs and, eventually, your brain. Plus the more pubs you subscribe to (they automatically offer these after you sign up for mine), the more your inbox will be flooded. To manage Substack emails and notifications, read this.

• Did you find me on Calm or Happier? While the meditations I made for the apps live on in perpetuity, I no longer record new meditations for them. My latest work happens here; becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support that work. If you found this meditation and post helpful, but becoming a paid subscriber isn’t an option, you can also …

Buy Me A Coffee

Many thanks!

Read more

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A short and sweet meditation and post this week.

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve guided a Don’t Know Mind meditation on Home Base. Adapted from Zen teachings, this is still my favourite practice for dealing with uncertainty in work, in relationship, in life. It pairs well with what I think of as the core scientific attitude, the honest skepticism of continually learning from new evidence, of staying with the open question.

A mind that seizes on certainty is, metaphorically, having a seizure. It gets rigid, and has a harder time holding new perspectives. I’ve personally found this to be true even with things like making plans. When I’ve held too tightly to a particular outcome, I haven’t actually been available for more interesting prospects that may be emerging all around.

Whenever my plans seem to be going astray, or I can’t find the answer, my mantra (if I can remember) is, “Don’t know, don’t need to know.” As a meditation practice, it’s even simpler: I repeat it every time a thought bubbles up, or a certainty, or even a perception. It’s the practice of choosing not confusion, but rather, a kind of pleasurable bogglement. It feels like floating, suspended, over the mechanics of prediction. To quote Buddhism‘s famous Diamond Sutra, by cultivating “a mind that dwells nowhere,” we may discover we can actually dwell anywhere.

But how do we know what to do, if we don’t know how it will go?

Certainty has its place, particularly in narrow domains with clear, predictable constraints – like, say, mechanical engineering. But when it comes to the broader questions of human life, it’s harder to find. Nature and culture and other sentient humanoids are complicated. By the time you take two steps towards a hoped-for scenario, that scenario often changes.

The best answer I’ve been able to figure out is the same thing most people figure out: balance setting firmer goals in the long-term with adapting to changing circumstances in the moment. I’ve also noticed that the more neediness I have to know how something will go, the less available I am to my better intuitions.

There’s nothing wrong with knowing. It’s concluding that can get us into trouble, a premature closure that cuts us off from our always-unfinished lives.

As always, I’m curious for your own takes on this. Let me know how this meditation lands for you.

Jeff

PS: Learning to identify and trust the intuitions that emerge from this open not-knowing is a different but related topic. Peter Russell just shared a nice piece on listening to our “inner teacher” here. He opens with Rumi: “There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.” I’ll be sharing a post and meditation soon on the different domains of human intuition, both where and how they enter into experience.

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Extended Version (Paid Subscribers Only)

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) is Sunday, May 17 at 8pm EDT. Link here. The DNP is for paid subscribers three times a month, and free for everyone the first Sunday of the month. Full scholarships are available, email info@jeffwarren.org.

• New to Home Base? We have over 70 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 60 extended meditations, over 365 meditations on YouTube, and a growing number of community practice videos. New writing, new audio meditations, and new DNP live community practice sessions happen every week.

• Did you find me on Calm or Happier? While the meditations I recorded for the apps live on in perpetuity, I no longer record new meditations for them. My latest work happens here; becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support that work. If you found this meditation and post helpful, but becoming a paid subscriber isn’t an option, you can also …

Buy Me A Coffee

Many thanks!

Being Human Takes Practice - New York

August 14-16, 2026
Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, NY

This retreat explores what meditation teaches us about being human. It teaches us about resistance and fixation. It teaches us about healing stuck emotions and expanding stuck views. It teaches us mercy and forgiveness, majesty and humility. It teaches us about how we relate to other people and to ourselves.

Register Here

See All Upcoming Events Here

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Our topic this week is one we’ve circled around quite a bit at Home Base. Many of us come to meditation because we’re dealing with emotional pain of some kind. The practice holds great promise: the potential to lessen our pain in the moment, and, more radically, to transform some of the deep patterns that keep us stuck in our emotional reactions in the first place.

What exactly can we expect from meditation here? What’s reasonable? Different practitioners will have different answers. I’m curious right off the bat to hear what this community has noticed for themselves in their practice – if inspired, please share in the comments.

In terms of my own thoughts, I’ll start with the work of shifting old patterns over the long-term, then I’ll get into the nuts and bolts of how that can look in the moment. Today’s guided meditation is all about that second part.

When I first began to meditate, I saw a lot of immediate gains: less anxiety, more settledness, more awareness of how I was around other people. More than that, for the first time I felt I understood some of the spiritual stuff people spoke about. I felt more intimacy with the world, had some profound experiences of inner quiet, and even had some noself-type experiences where I could really see how I was constructing both my own identity and my own suffering, from moment to moment. The effects of these insights lasted for weeks and months, and some of the understanding gained then has never gone away.

It was all pretty mindblowing, so much so that I became filled with … proselytizing zeal. I learned later this is a common stage of the meditation journey, particularly if you’re doing a lot of practice. The effects are so real, the breakthroughs so penetrating, that you can’t help annoying everyone you know with exhortations that they must immediately start meditating. In religious terms, this is known as a conversion experience. One school of Buddhism rather astutely calls this stage “The Corruptions of Insight.” The high-energy revelations of the practice are actually distorting your perception.

You think this is the new You, your new enlightened baseline. ‘I’ve arrived!’ I would stride in a distinguished manner around my neighborhood and dispense unasked for wisdom to the people. Ok I didn’t do that. But I did talk a LOT about meditation at parties. This is before I taught meditation, by the way.

Anyway, eventually the novelty passed, and my old habits began to reassert themselves. I realized I wasn’t actually fixed. If anything, I now had a clearer view of how screwed-up I was.

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