“The times are urgent, let us slow down” - Dr. Bayo Akomolafe

Lots of intensity and anxiety out there ahead of next Tuesday’s midterm elections in the US. Real worry about the future of the country, about the rising cost of living, about ICE detentions and deportations and the war in Iran and the environmental toll of unregulated AI data centres and on and on. And that’s just the US – imagine living in Gaza, or the Ukraine, or the Sudan, where a steady rate of drone strikes kills innocent citizens.

What practices can help us handle all of this? How do we think about the line between supporting ourselves and supporting others? Too much of one, and we risk quietism and self-involvement. Too much of the other risks burnout and escalation.

This is the subject of a profound conversation and I had on our latest episode of , with the activist and nonviolence educator .

The Mind Bod Adventure Pod

We Belong to Each Other: Activism in Hard Times | Kazu Haga

Hi Mind Bod Squad…

Listen now

3 days ago · 13 likes · 8 comments · Tasha Schumann, Jeff Warren, and Kazu Haga

This week on Home Base I’m featuring Kazu’s 13-minute guided practice from that episode, because it is so good, and so needed. It’s about getting below the urgencies of the mind to be with the wisdom of the body, which communicates via sensations and intuitions. And it’s about recognizing our own capacity to stay with challenging situations, so we then have more resources for our work in the world, including the critical work of social change.

I encourage you to listen to the full episode, which spirals into deeper and broader themes as it progresses, from individual practice all the way to collective movement. The Mind Bod Adventure Pod is intended to be a different kind of experience. We take listeners into specific short practices, and then afterwards we model how practice changes the conversation. Listeners have their own experiences and learning.

This is particularly relevant for a conversation about practice and social change. The “slow down” Dr. Bayo Akomolafe refers to in his opening quote is “not a function of speed,” but “of deepening our awareness and noticing who’s in the room.” It helps us know where to direct our attention and energy in the face of so many clamouring inputs.

My takeaway for all activists and caregivers: slow down, get humble, and find your school of fish.

Good luck this week friends, wherever in the wide world you find yourself. Grateful for this community, and grateful for the work of Kazu Haga and his peers. More and more educators and practitioners are living at the intersection of nonviolent activism and personal practice. This movement gives me hope.

Love,
Jeff

PS - Each week we also make extended versions of the meditations. If you’ve never tried one and want a bit more time to drop in and down, click below.

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Extended Meditation

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, November 1 at 8pm EDT. Link here. Live DNPs are for paid subscribers three times a month, and free for everyone the first Sunday of the month. Numberless scholarships are available at info@jeffwarren.org. All replays are archived Monday mornings and available free on Home Base and YouTube.

• New to Home Base? We have over 100 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 80 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 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!

THIS WEEK ON THE MIND BOD ADVENTURE POD

This week we’re hanging with Kazu Haga, a nonviolence trainer, restorative justice practitioner, and author of Healing Resistance and Fierce Vulnerability. Kazu’s work weaves together spiritual practice, healing, and social change. It’s work that lives between two truths. There is real injustice in the world, and it has to be stopped. And the people causing it still belong to us. Kazu advocates for both truths, and has a refreshingly broad sense of what counts as activism: a movement as varied as an ecosystem, where singing, parenting, and teaching people to breathe all have their place.

Listen Now

Where Meditation Leads, In-Person Toronto Event

Northern District Library, 40 Orchard View Blvd - and online too
November 29, 2026, 1 - 4pm

For my Toronto friends, I’m doing a rare in-person afternoon event on Sunday November 29 from 1 - 4pm. Would love to see you there. It’s a fundraiser for The Consciousness Explorers Club, a not-for-profit with the mission of making meditation and personal growth practices accessible to all. The event is being offered on a “pay what you’re able to” model; you can also join online via zoom.

Our subject: Where does meditation practice lead? Over the course of this three-hour session, I’ll lead practices and discussion about the different ways meditation can help us drop under the turbulent surface layer of mind and circumstance, into the deeper stream of respectful relationship and right action.

Learn More / Register Here

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.

The next Home Base Hangout with Jeff and community will be Thursday, October 29 at 12:15pm ET, over Zoom. First half is a guided meditation from Jeff; the second half is an opportunity to share about your practice – its latest challenges, insights, and opportunities. Expect low-key conviviality, the occasional epiphany, and the normalization of … not much happening.

Click link at bottom. If you miss it, all sessions are archived under “Community Practice.” If you want to attend but a paid subscription is out of reach, just email info@jeffwaren.org. Hope to see you there!

PS - Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out our Home Base Community Survey. I want Home Base to make a real difference in people’s lives, while keeping it easy-going and affordable. For this, your feedback and responses have been very helpful. We'll keep the survey open for one more week. If you haven't already, please fill it out to help Joe, Mylene, Sarah, and I identify which parts of Home Base you find most supportive, what you’d like to see more or less of, and what simple, practical changes might make these offerings even more accessible, powerful, and connected.

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, October 25 at 8pm EDT. Link here. Replays are archived Monday mornings on Home Base and YouTube.

• New to Home Base? We have over 85 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 65 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. 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!

Where Meditation Leads, In-Person Toronto Event

Northern District Library, 40 Orchard View Blvd - and online too
November 29, 2026, 1 - 4pm

For my Toronto friends, I’m doing a rare in-person afternoon event on Sunday November 19 from 1 - 4pm. Would love to see you there. It’s for a good cause: a fundraiser for The Consciousness Explorers Club, a not-for-profit with the mission of making meditation and personal growth practices accessible to all. It’s being offered on a “pay what you’re able to” model; you can also join online via zoom.

Our subject: Where does meditation practice lead? Maybe you can tell ME! Over the course of this three-hour session, I’ll lead practices and discussion about the different ways meditation can help us drop under the turbulent surface layer of mind (and circumstance) into the deeper stream of life just happening.

Learn More / Register Here

Read more

Read more

Here’s a framework I play with a lot. It’s related to Tibetan views of the mind, and Zen views, and Advaita (“nondual”) Vedanta views. I feel especially connected to it today ‘cause I just read a fine little book by Darryl Bailey called, ambitiously, A Summary of Existence, which the author has generously made available free on his website. So props to Darryl for the most recent inspiration.

I’ll try to present the framing in simple language. Then I recommend you do the guided meditation – which plays with this same theme – and see what happens. If it feels like a relief, if it feels like it’s directing you to something important, then it could be meditation to repeat, and a view to explore more intentionally, in your own way.

So here’s the view: Existence in the moment is simply and always a single, indivisible movement, happening effortlessly all on its own.

Leaves turn perfectly in the wind, sounds slide past, light changes on the ground. There’s no stickiness. All of it is immediate and clear and it all happens without you needing to control or manage any of it. And there’s no need to call it anything or define it, because no words can capture the totality of everything that’s changing. In this sense it’s always unformed, with no distinct boundaries, and no objects that lock in separate from you and your participation in the moment.

The view asks: what if this is all that is ever really happening, for everyone? What if there were no deeper “awakening” to get to other than this direct and completely obvious experience?

Sitting, moving, breathing as part of it. Thinking and feeling as part of it. Noticing when you get hooked into a belief that things should be different. Recognizing that, too, as part of the same movement, and not a problem. Not trying to stay anywhere comfortable, or get away when things are uncomfortable. Feeling connected, feeling isolated. Acting on some impulses, not acting on others. Even remembering and forgetting.

Coming back as often as you can to this framing, letting the generosity of it move out and more and more of your experience. Darryl: “There is never anything other than this unformed undefined event just doing what it does.”

That’s the view, itself a kind of non-meditation meditation instruction. I find peace in it, and a more immediate connection to my life. I can’t really say why. Let’s meditate and see how it is for you.

Love,
Jeff

Share

Extended Meditation

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, October 18 at 8pm EDT. Link here. Replays are archived Monday mornings on Home Base and YouTube.

• New to Home Base? We have over 80 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 65 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 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!

THIS WEEK ON THE MIND BOD ADVENTURE POD

This week we’re hanging with the legendary Sam Bercholz: refugee kid turned founder of Shambhala Publications, the prolific dharma press behind many of the books on your shelf. Sam calls himself irreverent but totally orthodox, and you can see where he got both. His new book Rude Awakenings: An Unconventional Guide to the Buddhist Path is great fun, and so is this conversation. We start with his hilarious bio, and soon go into a jaunty exploration of mind and reality.

Listen Now

Being Human Takes Practice - North Carolina

October 23-25, 2026
Art of Living Retreat Center, Boone, NC

I’m on the road this week, hosting a “Meditation Party” this weekend with Sebene and Dan at Omega in upstate New York (also available online), then down to Art of Living next weekend to teach my annual “Being Human Takes Practice” weekend in North Carolina. Come find me if you’re close by!

Learn More / Register Here

See All Upcoming Events Here

I love this community. Real grateful for this, for you, for the whole freaking weird mystery of this and all situations.

Keeping it breezy this week. A few months ago, Dan asked me to make a meditation to pair with his Ten Percent Happier episode on marijuana: the science, the promise, the perils, and so on.

The subject of psychoactive substances – both their recreational and ceremonial value – is fascinating. Cannabis is legal in Canada. I like this. Stoners are a largely peaceable cohort, more so than drunkards. The odd spliff can be fun for spiritual insights and refreshed dance-floor confidence – we forget all the ways we once danced badly, and find creative new ways to dance badly. Important not to be attached to those insights and experiences, though, since the fruit of the practice is mostly found in our ever-ordinary, ever-extraordinary, everyday life.

Within Buddhism, of course, there’s a prohibition around mind-altering substances. Intoxication – aka “the Poison Path” – can create carelessness and moral turpitude and distortion and addiction. Different intoxicants wreak different kinds of havoc on different nervous systems. Do your research, friends.

That caveat out of the way … life is nuanced and surprising and tends to defy rigid human-imposed rules, however well-meaning. I like Bob Thurman’s line about Dzogchen: “Every teaching is the great perfection for someone.” (Thank you, ). There are plenty of intelligent and sensitive practitioners who get healing and insight from their use of cannabis and other plant medicines.

So. This meditation is a rocking buzzy body flow practice for stoners, psychonauts, and other lovers of luxury. You do not have to be high to do it. I don’t meditate high. Why would I? I’d rather be dancing. But others do. They say it sensitizes them to their body in a way that’s enjoyable and beneficial. In fact a couple years ago Tasha and I had a hilarious conversation with the Buddhist teacher and psychonaut Will Johnson all about this.

And speaking of the podcast, our latest episode with Jan Winhall is one of our best: deep belly laughs and terrific insight into the healing process. A healing process, by the way, that happens to be perfectly commensurate with what’s described in many shamanic traditions.

Many paths up the mountain. The question is, once you get up there, can your practice help you with the inevitable climb (plummet!) back down? Thank you, meditation – still my favourite medicine.

That’s it for this week, friends. Stay safe.

Jeff

PS - I’ll mention the survey again … I passionately want Home Base to make a real difference in people’s lives, while keeping it easy-going and affordable. For this, I need your feedback. Please fill out this super short survey to help Joe, Mylene, Sarah and I identify which parts of Home Base you find most supportive, what you’d like to see more or less of, and what simple practical changes might make these offerings even more accessible, powerful, and connected. Honestly, it’s the most thrilling and satisfying puzzle I can imagine working on: how can we, using our existing modest resources and community connections, help as many people as possible (including myself) live more fulfilled and caring and engaged lives? Practice is my small part of the answer. Feel free to share how YOU think about this, either in the survey, or in the comments below. ❤️

Share

Extended Meditation

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, October 11 at 8pm EDT. Link here. Replays are archived Monday mornings on Home Base and YouTube.

• New to Home Base? We have over 80 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 65 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 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!

THIS WEEK ON THE MIND BOD ADVENTURE POD

This week on the Mind Bod Pod, we’re hanging with Jan Winhall — psychotherapist, nervous-system nerd, and … drumroll … Jeff’s former therapist! As Jeff puts it, she once helped dig him out of a “mental health sinkhole.” Now she’s on the other side of the mic. THIS IS A PARTICULARLY FUN AND HELPFUL EPISODE; PLEASE COMMENT ON THE MIND BOD SITE IF YOU AGREE.

Listen Now

Where Meditation Leads, In-Person Toronto Event

Northern District Library, 40 Orchard View Blvd - also online
November 29, 2026, 1 - 4pm

For all my Toronto friends, I’m doing a rare in-person afternoon teaching event on Sunday November 19 from 1 - 4pm. Would love to see you there. It’s for a good cause: a fundraiser for The Consciousness Explorers Club , a not-for-profit with the mission of making meditation and personal growth practices accessible to all. It’s being offered on a “pay what you’re able to” model; you can also join online via zoom.

Our subject: Where does meditation practice lead? Maybe you can tell ME! Over the course of this three-hour session, I'll lead practices and discussion about the different ways meditation can help us drop under the turbulent surface layer of mind (and circumstance) into the deeper stream of life just happening.

Learn More / Register Here

Read more

Being human takes practice.

The video below was recorded live at my Being Human Takes Practice retreat at the Omega Institute on Sunday August 16, 2026. (Next one is happening Oct 23 - 25, 2026, in North Carolina.) The 18-minute introductory teaching connects some of the mystical and practical themes I’ve been writing about over the past few weeks. The meditation afterwards – call it “Towards Availability” - can then clear the mind of all that verbiage, a vertical drop into some get-humble, surrender-to-the-mystery type goodness. The full version of the meditation is in the video below; a shorter edited version is at the top. I hope it’s supportive!

Love,
Jeff

Read more

I love you! The End, Jeff

A friend recently asked: “You use the phrase ‘hold the direction’ a lot. What does that mean, practically speaking?”

Jesus wept. I’ve rewritten this post three times, and it keeps getting longer. I keep trying to explain what it means, practically speaking, to hold the direction, to stay with the practice of meditation … and I keep veering helplessly into trippy descriptions of space. Space is apparently an aspiration for me. It may not be for you. So: buyer beware.

My challenge here is to combine a practical take on what it means to stay with the practice with an overview of some of the fascinating (and mystical-sounding) ways our habit patterns get worked through, if we do, in fact, stay with it. This is because as you go deeper, the nature of what you’re staying with changes. You go from simply staying with a practice, to staying with specific direction of lived experience.

Let’s explore. (And, if at any time the verbiage gets to be too much, then you can declutter your mind with the guided practice!)

“Hold the direction,” my teacher Shinzen Young told me at a meditation retreat many years ago. My mind had gone quiet. I could feel a column of stillness up through the centre of my body, and then it was everywhere. I knew I was that stillness, amidst even the most gripping of life circumstances. “Hold the direction,” he said.

I tried. I tried to hold the direction, to hold on to that freedom. But after a few days, it faded. My struggles came back. The moment moved on, to wherever I was now. That’s what life does.

Rewind. In its simplest sense, “hold the direction” means doing our best to stay with the practice. Despite all of the urgencies clamouring for our attention, we aspire to more sanity or groundedness or enjoyment – whatever we’re after. So we find ten or twenty or thirty minutes to sit. As we do, as we slow down, a bit of space appears.

Not all the time, and not a lot of space. But enough. A little more breathing room, and a little more thinking room, too. This space I’m talking about is not different in kind from the space of clear reasoning, even if it’s sometimes framed as its opposite. In neurobiology, the prefrontal cortex is considered an extra circuit of connectivity between stimulus and response. An evolved capacity to pull back from knee-jerk reactions and take time to weigh options and listen to other perspectives. (That is, for those humans who actually use their prefrontal cortices. 🤯)

Meditation builds on this. It expands the space between stimulus and response. And it begins to include and clarify more elusive stimuli inside that space. We see subtle forms of reactivity and bias and contraction that we didn’t realize were motivating us, and we no longer automatically act on them. We still get lost in our conditioned patterns (a lot), but as we get more stability and clarity, we often find we can catch them sooner.

That’s the primary meaning of “hold the direction.” The next sense is beginning to notice what we come back to. We notice what it feels like to have more space, more equanimity, more sanity. We notice the effect of the practice in our bodies, the ease or composure. We notice the comparative settling in our minds. And we appreciate these small changes. It’s like we’re refining our personal palette to include more delicate flavours of fulfillment and reward, more regard for simple good things.

The more we notice and appreciate this expanded baseline, the more we hold this direction, the easier it is to find our way back. Neurons that fire together, wire together. Related capacities can also be trained: more compassion, more gratitude, more focus. All this gets extra powerful when it aligns with personal values like courage, presence, patience, caring, service, and so on. They aren’t just nice ideals, they’re embodied qualities we can both feel and aspire to. We are allowed to aspire to beautiful things. In fact, we want that sense of purpose to animate our practice – that’s also what it means to hold the direction.

This is a pretty good summary of my first ten years of meditation. In fits and starts, I held the direction. And in fits and starts, I began to notice and appreciate more space and ease and gratitude, as well as more empathy for my own and other’s challenges.

All of which is more than enough.

And … It keeps going. Because that’s how attention works. Whatever we point our attention to becomes, over time, more real and more elaborated. The athlete who trains high levels of coordination; the professional naturalist who can instantly identify dozens of plant species based on tiny differences in colour and shape. The longer we pay attention, the more new subtleties and details emerge. What we pay attention to fills up our lives.

So be careful. If we only pay attention to ourselves – to our problems, our accomplishments, our possessions, our deficiencies – then that’s all we’ll be able to see. It will fill up our world. It once threatened to fill up mine. Every human has to come to their own realization around how claustrophobic – or not – that is for them.

I have a pretty liberal definition of “spiritual.” I think spiritual means paying attention to something that isn’t our worries, for so long and with such full-bodied devotion and curiosity, that eventually it opens up and we start to live there. It – whatever “it” is – begins to show us its mysteries. And the heart of that mystery – as reported by generations of practitioners, all around the world – is that we’re part of something larger and more all-encompassing that we previously realized. My guess is we can find that understanding in pretty much any direction, eventually.

What are we paying attention to in meditation? Lots of things. One recurring motif is paying attention to spaciousness itself. As we focus on the space around and all through us, that space can become bigger and more generous. On the flipside, the stuff that comes up in that space – defensiveness, compulsions, habit patterns – can become less gripping. Not evenly, but as a general trend. Powerful reactions and emotions can happen and then whoosh right through, like ghosts. Neither suppressed nor acted on, they don’t latch. Which does not mean we don’t feel their passing. God: do we ever. Sometimes it seems like I’m feeling the whole truth of the thing, its entire impermanence, from top to bottom. The poignancy can be heartbreaking. Because of practice, I feel more now than I ever have. And, unquestionably, I suffer less, because I no longer drag it out the way I once did.

One contemplative neuroscientist I know thinks these changes are related to “extinction learning:” old patterns are not erased; rather, the brain learns new safer associations that inhibit the old response. I’m not sure that quite gets at it, though – it feels more mysterious. Because there also seems to be a cumulative effect. As each pattern is worked out, it feels easier to work out the next one. In Indian philosophy, the belief is that the practitioner is freeing themselves from all conditioned patterns. “No karma,” say the yogis.

What direction is the meditator holding now?

It’s less a holding, now, than a being. They are being space. Being awareness. Being equanimous. Being this way is something the practitioner can notice and appreciate (but not cling to), and in the noticing and appreciating, the capacity to be more that way is reinforced. Sometimes when I meditate it feels like I’m so surrendered and loose in both mind and body that I’m empty and transparent. Another friend calls it “burning clean.” My old teacher Shinzen calls it “the taste of purification.”

This is where meditation instructions to notice yourself as that open empty space of awareness may start to make sense. Thoughts and sensory percepts come and go – effortlessly, without clinging or coagulation – but the space they dance in stays the same. That space is alive, says the Dzogchen teacher, and it is you.

Experiencing things in this way can be a profound relief. Space can’t be hurt by hard feelings or situations any more than the open sky can be scratched by a passing cloud. It’s like “Ohmigod, I’m actually going to be ok.” This shitshow of hurt and alienation and fear is not actually my fate, however many nineteenth-century novels I may have read in college. The knees shake with gratitude. As resistance falls away, so does so much secondary suffering. By returning again and again to this understanding, our sense of what’s possible can begin to shift.

I’ve focussed on the purification aspect, or what’s taken away. I could have equally focused on what’s revealed: connectivity, luminosity, spontaneity, intimacy, creativity, love, aliveness. Some practitioners (much further along than me) say they even experience time and space differently, more as properties of human cognition than of the world “out there.” As the warp and weft of regular consciousness changes, various conventional pieties about the nature of self and world also change.

What does “hold the direction” mean now?

It means the same thing now as it did when we started. It means coming back to practice. It means paying more attention to good things, including – if they emerge, if they feel right to you – transcendent properties not found in the senses. And it means paying less attention on what creates grasping and alienation and misery.

The reason I feel a bit conflicted about describing all this space stuff isn’t only because I know this direction won’t interest everyone. It’s also because if it does interest someone, then the description itself can be misleading. It turns subtle shifts into special Things that someone then imagines they either have or don’t have. But it’s not like that. All the above can be true for someone in a low-key way, without them ever fetishizing it, or even experiencing it as unusual. That’s because for most people, meditative change is a gradual, lifelong process we live inside. Unless we can jump between our pre-meditation nervous systems and our 20-years-of-practice-later nervous system, we never notice a big contrast. And even if we do have some experience that feels important – like I had on that Shinzen retreat – the peak subsides. We can never revisit any previous moment. Each moment is unique. That’s what’s so profound about them.

I’ve had many meaningful spiritual experiences over the years. Some pass in moments, others over weeks and months. But I always come back down. At some point I realized that wanting to get back to some previous state was making me miserable. It was also all about me, and paying attention to myself just wasn’t that interesting. On the other hand, wanting to keep growing and learning, wanting to continue to move deeper into mystery and love and service – whatever that may look like – that feels like a direction worth staying with.

Practically speaking, then, “hold the direction” means aspiring – in an open-ended way – to something beautiful in our relationship with life. It means noticing and appreciating how practice is deepening in our actual unique experience, not anyone else’s. And it means staying with what our experience has shown us to be true, independent of changing conditions.

At some point, if we practice with enough confidence and patience and curiosity, we may even discover we’re no longer holding the direction at all. The direction is holding us. It’s moving us towards a freedom that’s innate to who we are, a freedom often experienced as something that doesn’t change. Unshakable truth. We’re allowed to aim for that.

Here’s a meditation about holding the direction, edited from Thursday’s live Home Base Hangout (full 25-minute version here). I appreciate this community so much. We aim for good things together.

Love,

Jeff

Share

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, September 27 at 8pm EDT. Link here. Replays are archived Monday mornings on Home Base and YouTube.

• New to Home Base? We have over 80 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 65 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. 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’m not paid to 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!

Where Meditation Leads

Northern District Library, Toronto and online via Zoom
Sunday, November 29, 1-4 pm ET

Where does meditation practice lead? Over the course of this afternoon retreat, Jeff will lead practices and discussion into how meditation can help us drop from the turbulent surface layer of mind and circumstance, into the deeper stream of life just happening. This kind of awareness is both ordinary and sacred, and available to anyone at any time.

Learn More / Register Here

See All Upcoming Events Here

Read more

The next Home Base Hangout with Jeff and community will be Thursday, September 24 at 12:15pm ET, over Zoom. Come if you’ve never been! It’s good to see everyone’s faces. First half is a guided meditation from Jeff; the second half is an opportunity to share about your practice – its latest challenges, insights, and opportunities. Expect low-key conviviality, the occasional epiphany, and the normalization of … not much happening.

Click link at bottom. If you miss it, all sessions are archived under “Community Practice.” If you want to attend but a paid subscription is out of reach, no problem. Email info@jeffwaren.org for access, forever. Hope to see you there!

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, September 20 at 8pm EDT. Link here. Replays are archived Monday mornings on Home Base and YouTube.

• New to Home Base? We have over 85 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 65 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. 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’m no longer paid to 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!

THIS WEEK ON THE MIND BOD ADVENTURE POD

This week we’re hanging with Michael Uebel, psychotherapist, researcher, longtime mindfulness teacher for military veterans, and author of Seeds of Equanimity: Knowing and Being. How did we all meet? Michael sent Jeff an email that said something like, “I hear you’re obsessed with equanimity… so am I!” Jeff read the new book and could not put it down. So here we are, nerding out about equanimity. There’s a LOT more to it that you might think!

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Meditation and Mystery

Big Bear Retreat Center, California, USA
February 17-21, 2027

My first-ever retreat in California – just east of LA – is happening in mid-February. Most people who meditate can describe how — sit, breathe, repeat. Fewer say why, or how the practice is supposed to follow them out the door and into the rest of the day. That gap is where Meditation and Mystery begins.

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I hope it’s relevant for you too. In the meantime, pease wish Sarah and I:

1. Healthy boundaries

2. Oceans of equanimity

3. Maybe also a couple miracle behavioural interventions? How the heck do these kid things work anyway? Where’s the *#@$#% manual?!
   
   Jeff

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A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, September 13 at 8pm EDT. Link here. Replays are archived Monday mornings on Home Base and YouTube.

• New to Home Base? We have over 80 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 65 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. 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’m no longer paid to 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!

Being Human Takes Practice - North Carolina

Art of Living Retreat Center, North Carolina
October 23-25, 2026

A retreat on what meditation teaches us about being human. We explore resistance and fixation, stuck emotions and stuck views. We explore awe, humility, connection and mystery. The aim is for everyone to leave the weekend with a clearer sense of why they practice, and a more intimate feel for the many strange and beautiful ways to move deeper into life.

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