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 buoyant edition of our monthly Home Base Hangout, Jeff chats about his teacher, Shinzen Young and Vipassana as an approach to meditation, and then guides a practice on noticing craving and aversion. After we chat a bit about the mechanics of mindfulness versus concentration, and about how to titrate with emotional pain, and what it feels like to be a “meditation failure,” then just lots of gratitude around being in community and being able to explore these teachings together. Good times!

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Hey friends,

Do you like my clickbait title? Kind of serious about it. I just got back from a four-day meditation retreat at Big Bear Retreat Center east of Los Angeles — not teaching, but as a grateful participant. It’s a beautiful alpine spot with tall trees that smelled of butterscotch and were called “Jeffrey pines” (I’m a dork for these ham-handed synchronicities) and even an icing of snow on the final night. With the craziness of my parenting life, I’m only able to get to a retreat once a year, and thanks to my generous partner, Sarah, this was my window. It always rejuvenates my practice. Since returning, I’ve definitely been calmer and less reactive with my kids. We’ll see how long it lasts!

OK, let’s get to the teaching, and then I’ll guide a practice around it.

The retreat was called “Coming Home to Our Senses,” with teacher cadre Trudy Goodman, Gullu Singh, Lienchi Tran and Gabrielle Hammond. It was a Buddhist vipassana retreat, which means the emphasis was on a mindfulness-style continuous noticing of present-moment sensory experience. Instead of just focusing on the breath or a sound or whatever you might ordinarily choose for a home base, you maintain a kind of halo of awareness around the whole experience. By that I mean you aren’t just aware of the breath, you are aware that you’re aware of the breath. So there’s a kind of metacognition operating. What’s more, you’re also training yourself to become aware of the various subtle and not-so-subtle flavors of interference that, as you sit, or walk, or eat, or do anything, inevitably come between you and what you’re trying to be aware of.

In Buddhist-speak, participants were guided to tune into craving, or aversion, or delusion: the “three poisons” of Buddhism, said to be at the root of much of our human suffering and unskillful behavior. So “craving” is a kind of shorthand for our grabby, greedy attachments, our urges to lock down life’s good stuff. “Aversion” is the opposite: all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways we push away or recoil from things we don’t like, states of anger and hatred and ill-will and the urge to destroy. Not that you need to be perfect, but this stuff does very obviously mess with your sanity. And that leads directly to “delusion”: ignorance or confusion about the deep role craving and aversion play in our stresses and agonies, and – deeper still – not realizing that all this suffering is based on a kind of optical illusion of our separateness that doesn’t hold up under prolonged meditative scrutiny.

Whoops, veered into religious territory there! Sorry.

Funny thing about that. Faith is a central part of Buddhism, just like it is in any belief system. In this case, to discover the power of awareness, to begin to trust that there is something to learn here about craving and aversion – well, it helps to have a little faith. Meditation proponents often say “look for yourself and find out,” as though it were a purely empirical science. That’s not wrong. But it’s also not the full picture. It helps to have confidence first, before you look. In fact, the more confident you are that there’s something to discover, the more likely you’ll be to discover it. We’re not dealing with objective reality (whatever that is). We’re dealing with the mind, and the mind is what opens or closes us to experience in the first place!

In Buddhism, this confidence is called “Right View.” It’s one of the necessary steps for all this to be effective. It’s trusting that just being aware has its own kind of power, even if the effects are subtle at first. It’s trusting that if you notice your craving or aversion in real time, the intensity of your stresses will diminish. As this happens, confidence in the view grows, reinforcing and deepening the benefits, creating even more motivation, and so on – exactly the kind of positive feedback loop a successful practice depends on.

Here’s what often happens for me. I’ll guide a practice after, so you can see how it goes down for you.

1. I start all spaced out or agitated or whatever and I choose the breath to pay attention to and, over time, my mind gets a little more settled. That can take a while! You see why it’s helpful to go on multiple-day retreats. Fortunately, the practice is scalable, so even a bit of settling can lead to a bit of insight.

2. I experience the sudden relief of realizing all I need to do (forever) is just be aware of what’s here. Breathing and knowing I’m breathing. Daydreaming and knowing I’m daydreaming. Coming back. Tiring and knowing I’m tired. I don’t have to change anything. Just slow down and notice what exact thing is here. In walking meditation, I take a step and notice my foot on the ground and I’m with that vertical experience. Meditating on the breath, I notice the soft quality of the breath. And then…

3. Suddenly, I’m not fully doing that anymore. Some subtle craving or aversion has also entered my experience. I’ve become a little bit bored and I kind of want to daydream or think about something to escape that boredom. Or I’m walking and I start to half-fixate on the random crack in the pavement five steps ahead, where I’m planning to turn around. Whatever it is. Something comes between me and the moment being just fine, all on its own.

4. And…I notice it. I notice my little clutch of wanting. Or my disdainful push of aversion. Or some way I’m getting ahead of myself and I want to be getting ahead of myself. I don’t try to change it. I just notice, and go, “Oh, interesting.” And in the noticing, the push/pull of it often drops away. And then I’m more fully back in the present, and I realize there was never a problem in the first place. It was all in my mind. I still might be uncomfortable, or bored, but now it’s not a problem. It’s just part of what’s happening.

You can have this insight in the most profound way, and in the most ordinary way. A growing realization can begin to dawn: “How much of my time has been spent being owned by these endless cravings and aversions?’ It’s like waking up out of a dream.

It’s enormously powerful in the moment, and it’s enormously powerful as you begin to apply the insight looking backwards over your life.

For myself, I think about how I get so fixated on a particular outcome, especially when parenting. I can drop the fixation and still get my kids to school on time, except now with a lot less screaming. Or I notice my aversion to something my partner is doing. But it’s not my partner‘s fault. Nothing is anyone’s fault, at least not in our typical Western individualistic blame-assigning way. Because nobody is doing anything. It’s all just causes and conditions playing out. Those causes and conditions can change, but in this moment, things are how they are, because … that’s how they are!

So I just accept it and start again from there. And everything is so much easier and more sane and more pleasant from this place. And, to reassure you diehard Type-A busybodies (of which I am one), this also seems to be a more effective place from which to get concrete stuff done.

None of this is new, of course. You’ve read it or thought about it a hundred times. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t still an incredibly powerful teaching!

Do the practice for yourself, and let me know in the comments how you like it. Next week, we’ll explore how to use the practice in the context of strong emotions, and how that all goes down.

Appreciate you, friends. Thanks for letting me get all Buddhist-y on you. And thank you to my excellent retreat teachers.

Jeff

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A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) is Sunday, May 3 at 8pm EDT. Link here. The first DNP of every month is free for everyone.

• 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 DNP live community practice sessions happen every week.

• Did you find me on Calm or Happier? While the meditations I recorded for these 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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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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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, April 30 at 12:15pm ET, over Zoom. The first half is a guided meditation; the second an opportunity to share about your practice – its latest challenges, insights, and opportunities. It’s a place to be honest and curious, to see each other’s faces and learn from each other’s experiences. Expect low-key conviviality, the occasional epiphany, and the normalization of … not much happening!

Click on the button below to register. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you can start a free trial below. If you miss it, all sessions are archived for paid subscribers under “Community Practice.” Hope to see you there!

Big News for Toronto Meditators: The CEC is Back!

After 6 years of hosting our weekly Monday meditations online-only, The Consciousness Explorers Club is returning to in-person weekly community sits in Toronto. Starting on Monday May 4th 2026, the CEC’s new home will be St Stephen in the Fields church at 103 Bellevue Ave at the north end of Kensington Market (where it all began 15 years ago!).

For our faraway friends: worry not! The Monday meditations will also continue on Zoom. We are excited to join our global and local worlds for contemplative exploration and community sharing. Final details will be shared in the next CEC newsletter, sign up here:

Visit the CEC

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) is Sunday, April 26 at 8pm EDT. Link here. *NOTE: This next DNP is only for paid subscribers. We are experimenting with having the DNP be for paid subscribers three times a month, and free for everyone the first Sunday of the month. Full scholarships are available for anyone who asks – email info@jeffwarren.org. ​​For those who miss it, replays of the latest DNP are available Monday morning, in the “Community Practice” section of the site.

• 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. Keep in mind: by far the best way to experience Home Base is on your laptop browser, NOT the Substack app.

• 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!

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Jeff: [creepy voice] “My friend. Open your heart, and let us venture together into the landscape of profound inner transformation.”

Friend: “What are you, my white sha-manh? Did you just get back from Peru? Is this the part where you tell me all the answers and take all my money?”

Jeff: [shaking head sadly] “Your ego is strong today. But you are not your thoughts. It is time to silence your mind, and learn who you really are.”

Friend: “Wait – is this the junior cult leader’s guide to beginner meditation?”

My friends: Welcome to the Junior Cult Leader’s Guide to Beginner Meditation! Also welcome to our new Substack publication day – Thursdays – some midweek practice support to balance Sunday night’s Do Nothing Project broadcast.

The background for today’s post is a friend who’s currently having a hard time. My friend is the best. He’s got a booming laugh and a bouncy, bigger-than-life personality – like Tigger from Winnie-the-Poo, if Winnie-the-Poo had a background in degenerate dance-floor shenanigans.

Except now his bigger-than-life personality is being crushed. All these pressures – job, family, home, illness – are landing all at once, and he can’t seem to get out from under any of it. Friends have rallied around, but he still feels stuck and hopeless and increasingly isolated. I’ve been worried about him.

A few weeks ago I offered to teach him meditation. He’s never really meditated. He always figured he was “too ADHD” to do it. Plus, you know, meditation vibes can be gross. That whiff of knowing superiority that pervades so many spiritual scenes, the measured self-importance — I have to admit, he has a point. “Wait, aren’t you supposed to have less ego?” he laughs. It’s all so ridiculous that he can’t stop cracking up long enough to try the actual practice. (You see why I love him.)

Once I convinced him that I was the cult leader he’d been waiting for, we meditated together. He liked it. He says it’s helping. I made him a recording of my golden voice, imparting wisdom like nectar dripping onto his forehead. He gave me all his money, and I no longer return his calls. (Just kidding.)

All of it got me thinking about my favorite subject: accessibility. Is there a way to present meditation that is so grounded, so not a big deal, that people’s natural skepticism and/or lofty expectations are immediately disarmed, and they find themselves just going ahead and trying the damn practice – and maybe even benefiting from it?

I have no idea! But I made a meditation about this anyway – the same one I made for my friend – that you can share with would-be meditators in your life, and / or use for your own junior culty purposes. I am also sharing here some of my own common-sense principles for keeping practice accessible. Here they are:

Before Meditation - Manage Expectations

1. A Realistic Why. Many possible reasons to meditate. I like starting with something grounded: a training to help us find more sanity and okayness in the moment.

2. Don’t Make It a Big Deal. You already know how to sit and exist. You’ve done it before – on park benches and fire escapes and wharfs and that one time outside your high school formal when you sat and smoked a cigarette on the cement stoop and nothing needed to be any different than it was. Anytime you’ve found yourself sitting somewhere, not doing much, but also not wanting to be anywhere else. That’s the beginning of it (and some would say the end of it, too). No need to make it into a thing that you have to get “right.” Most of it is just sitting, existing and being a body.

3. Expect the Mind to Still Churn. You’re not trying to stop the mind. Instead, all you’re doing is choosing a simple thing in the present moment to hang out with that isn’t your worries. It can be imperfect. You can drift away and come back. My old teacher Shinzen says, “There is only so much real estate in consciousness.” By paying more attention to this one thing, you have less attention for anything else, a.k.a. the usual mental chatterbox. These small ratio-changes shift the sum total of your experience. They can give you a feeling of more space, of comparative relief. Thinking itself is not a problem; noticing that thinking is happening is actually another way to make room in the mind, because now you’re no longer embedded in one all-consuming thought pattern. Again, these small ratio-changes can make a palpable difference.

4. It Doesn’t Have to Be Long. Five minutes can help. So can one-minute! Start small and work your way up if you’re into it. Many benefit from 10 minutes a day, and others find 15–30 is their sweet spot.

During Meditation - A Few Simple Instructions

5. Set a Timer, or Use a Guided Practice. An intentional period of time that’s already pre-set, so you can press start and not have to think about it until the dinger goes.

6. Get Comfortable. You want to be relaxed, but also alert. Tension in the body leads to tension in the mind, so it’s worth it taking a minute to organize yourself accordingly. You can be on a couch, a chair, even lying on the ground (so long as you don’t fall asleep; sit up if you feel yourself dozing), or slowly moving. Eyes can be open or closed – again, whatever’s comfortable.

7. Choose Something to Notice. A basic sensation or sound to hang out with for a bit. You’ll notice plenty of other stuff too – again, not a problem.

8. Pretend Not Doing Anything is Lowkey Enjoyable. Maybe you’re getting absorbed by the sound or sensation, or maybe you’re not. Regardless, pretend there’s something kind of satisfying about noticing your breath, or sound, or simply … not doing anything. In fact, instead of being impatient with it, or bored with it, pretend not doing anything is exactly what you want to be doing. Remind yourself: “Oh wait, this is actually the point right here!” Not to get anywhere special, but to relate to this moment (of not much happening) as being fine all on its own. Find something pleasurable in your delinquency.

9. Pretend You’re a Statue in a Forest. This is optional. Or maybe you’re a big tree. Or a mountain. Pretend you’re 5,000 years old. Sunshine, rain, snow. Still you sit. Bird droppings, the screeches of monkeys. Still you sit.

10. Finish with Gratitude. Also optional, but good for cultivating those healthy prosocial vibes. Near the end, take a minute to find some simple thing to appreciate. Doesn’t have to be dramatic. Could be a sense of settledness, or the thought of someone you love, or the feeling of sun on your arm.

And that’s it!

Now go venture into the landscape of profound inner transformation.

Love,

Jeff

PS- If you’re a beginner and want more short, no-nonsense meditations, check out “I Don’t Have Time To Meditate Toolkit (Vol. 1)”, and also this list of relatively easy meditations.

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Extended Version (Paid Subscribers Only)

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) is Sunday, April 19 at 8pm EDT. Link here. *NOTE: This DNP is only for paid subscribers. We are experimenting with having the DNP be for paid subscribers three times a month, and free for everyone the first Sunday of the month. Full scholarships are available for anyone who asks – email info@jeffwarren.org. ​​For those who miss it, replays of the latest DNP are available from Monday morning onward, in the “Community Sits” section of the site.

• 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. Keep in mind: by far the best way to experience Home Base is on your laptop browser, NOT the Substack app.

• 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!

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For the full post with other quick-hit meditations, see here.

For the full post with other quick-hit meditations, see here.

The full post with other quick-hit meditations is here.

Happy Friday! I want this Substack to be a steady rhythm of support for your practice. With my live Do Nothing Project on Sunday nights, it seems to make sense to spread that signal out, and have this meditation / post come out earlier in the week, on Wednesdays or Thursdays. Let me know in the Comments if you have a strong preference either way

Another aspiration for this Substack is to create a (mostly) free library of meditations for every kind of human challenge and opportunity. Since the challenges and opportunities of being human are, well, infinite, this library … will never stop growing! I also want to make sure I have a mix of meditation lengths. For this post, I’m including three short meditations that can be done on the fly, all archived individually under a new column “Quick Meditations.” If you’re hankering for something longer, the “Archive” has piles of 10 - 15 minute meditations, the “Extended Meditations” column has meditations from 15 - 25 minutes, and the full Do Nothing Project Archive on YouTube has hundreds of 35 minute meditations.

So here are some quick hits. Each of these also has a stand-alone post in the Quick Meditations section.

I made this meditation for Happier ages ago; they’re letting me re-post it here. It’s a simple practice that I still use to shift my disposition anytime I’m feeling uptight or contracted:

- The Most Basic Meditation

The next is called Ten Good Breaths. Very simple, just what it sounds like. Also one of the first meditations I ever recorded for an app - over ten years ago now – you can hear it in my fresh nasal newbie voice:

- 10 Good Breaths

The last one is a short version of a meditation I originally made for Home Base – here. It’s about finding an enjoyable rhythm wherever you incline your attention: in the breath, a phrase, or a visualization. Something to help you get a bit absorbed, and reset the moment.

- Rhythm

All right! Have a great week. Check out the notes section below for some new changes to the Do Nothing Project.

Love,
Jeff.

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A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) is Sunday, April 12 at 8pm EDT. Link here. *NOTE: This DNP is only for paid subscribers. For the next while, the DNP will be for paid subscribers three times a month, and free for everyone the first Sunday of the month. Full scholarships are available for anyone who asks – 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!

Meditation, Movement, Mystery – British Columbia

May 13-17, 2026
Hollyhock Cortes Island, BC

This will be a different kind of retreat offering. Less structured, more room for silence and spontaneity. The idea is to make space for some of the more personalized movements of practice that come through when we really listen. Two good friends will be joining me. Scott Davis is a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner and yoga & movement genius – he will help us connect to our bodies. And Kalen Colson is a nature-based therapist – they will help us connect to the land.

More Info / Register

See All Upcoming Events Here

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For this week’s guided meditation, scroll to end of post

Hey everyone

It’s personal self-disclosure day! File under a new section called “True Stories from Jeff’s Always Changing, Sometimes Messed-Up Life.” In this post I talk a lot about my bipolar – something I speak about less than my ADHD, maybe because there’s more stigma, but also I think because my bipolar overlaps and interacts with my ADHD in ways that make it harder to describe.

This is also Part Two of a post on burnout, and what we can do about it. In Part One we entered the spa. In Part Two – the meditation below – we get curious about how we might mitigate some of our challenges in the first place.

All of this is part of a broader inquiry into how I think neurodiversity as a concept and a movement can be helpful to everyone, wherever you may find yourself on the various spectra of being human. In a nutshell: it’s a movement that aims to increase our mind-body literacy into the actual way we are, versus some ideal of how we should be. The clearer we get about this, the more we may be able to reconfigure our lives in more intelligent and energy-efficient ways. This can lead to more interpersonal smoothness and understanding, and free us up to express our gifts and strengths with more creativity and intentionality. God knows the world needs that.

To make this more concrete, I thought I’d share two longish examples from my own life; one from work, one from family. Then I guide a practice to help you explore some of the same terrain in your own mind and life.

How understanding my wiring helped with my creative work

Before I was a meditation teacher, I was a journalist. Back then – we’re talking 20 years ago now – I thought being accomplished meant writing rigorous, non-fiction books about important subjects. I managed to write one of these, and then spent ten years floundering around trying to write a sequel. At various times that sequel was about 1. Dreaming; 2. Psychedelics; 3. Animal Consciousness (particularly whales, I love whales); and 4. Enlightenment. Because, you know, when you get high you realize whales are enlightened. Ha! Honestly I can’t even remember now how one idea led to the other, so random and deranged was my writing process. Eventually, eventually, in that slow way of reluctant life-learning, I realized there was a fundamental mismatch between my creative ambitions, over here, and somewhere over there, my actual creative abilities.

With my particular presentation of ADHD, I toggle between two very different attentional styles. The first is hyper-distractibility, where I skip quickly from subject to subject. The second is hyper-focus, where I obsess about a single subject for hours, and the next day forget what I was doing and often have little interest in it when I do remember. 😆 Interestingly, meditation has tuned me into a third form of attention: an open availability to the present that is neither distracted nor fixated. When I’m more consistent with my practice, I still experience both distractibility and fixation, but I can generally choose whether I want to follow them. And sometimes I do – they each have their place as creative tools.

But that wasn’t my point – see, ADHD in action! My point is that in general, my mind has trouble systematically working through a single subject, the way a longer book treatment might demand.

So duh, stop trying to write those kinds of books, Jeff!

Yes, except figuring that out meant figuring out my own damn self. Or at least part of myself. Until you’re presented with the possibility that difference exists, you may never even know to look. I didn’t. Until I did. Some of it happened just through beating my head against a wall long enough that I finally got some insight. I also got perspective by reading other people’s descriptions of ADHD in various books and blogs. And finally, I worked with a great ADHD coach for a couple years; she helped me begin to implement what I was learning into the actual way I organized my work and life. The process took a long time, and is ongoing.

Today, there’s a more natural fit between my work and how I’m wired. I get to be in the moment with people, and speak spontaneously about what’s happening in that moment – the perfect use of my ADHDness. I get to write lots of short pieces that loop around the same subject, without ever feeling like I need to entomb myself inside some fake conclusion about the nature of, well, anything. I also get to own a learning process that’s more spiral than linear, where each circuit of the neighborhood reveals a new aspect and, sometimes, a more fundamental layer. (This is also true of writing and guiding meditations, by the way, where you spiral around and around the same insights, revealing – at best – ever-more subtle and fundamental layers.) Finally, if the changeability of ADHD and bipolar are part of what makes them so challenging, it’s also given me empathy for and perspective on a wide range of mental health conditions. Cause I’ve been there! Human internal variation turns out to be a big neighborhood, filled with many fascinating characters, all poised to potentially turn their lead into gold, fingers crossed.

And that brings me to an example from my family life – this one is more about my bipolar than my ADHD.

Cue the paywall!

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“What will meditation do for you? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Probably something in between. It's worth a try.”

- Kelly Kelbel

Hi Friends -

Can meditation help with a cancer diagnosis? It can definitely help mitigate some of the discomfort from treatment. And for some, it can change their experience of the whole ordeal.

That’s our subject in this week’s “Real People, Real Practice” post, featuring a body scan by my friend Kelly Kelbel (the second of two “embodiment” practices she made – the first is here). I met Kelly and her partner, Tony, at one of my retreats a few years back. At the time, she had just finished dose-dense chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation, as well as new specialty medications for a rare and aggressive disease, Inflammatory Breast Cancer. Her journey was harrowing. Not just the treatments, but also the poor care she received at the beginning, the dismissals from various medical professionals who underplayed or misunderstood her symptoms. She had to trust her own instincts and advocate for herself, until eventually she found a team of oncologists in Boston who got her the right diagnosis and treatment plan.

Kelly made this guided practice for folks with breast cancer, although, as she notes, you don’t have to have cancer for it to be supportive. I share some of Kelly’s words about how meditation has specifically helped her below.

That help – that care – has already propagated outward. Tony, a musician, made her a gorgeous song “for comfort and uplift”: Treatment 1. Kelly wanted to share that feeling and connection, so she began to write and record meditations for others in similar situations. Her Substack newsletter – Chemo Sessions – was born. Please subscribe to Kelly’s publication if you know anyone facing cancer, or if you just want to support her work. “The idea,” says Kelly, “is that people could go into their infusions with a companion, read some words from people who have been through chemo treatments, and do a guided meditation.”

What’s helped you during your own health crisis? Maybe a specific form of meditation, or something else entirely. Share thoughts in the comments if inspired. Our aim has always been for the comments section to be its own resource, a place to swap stories and practices and connect to a community of fellow caring humanoids.

“Real People, Real Practice” is a regular column where I make a custom guided meditation in response to someone’s curiosity or situation. You can submit a request here, I’m going to start doing more of these. And sometimes, someone else – like Kelly – has a practice so perfect that I couldn’t possibly improve on it!

Jeff: Kelly, can you summarize how meditation has helped you?

Kelly: I feel like meditation has saved me. How dramatic! I wasn’t drowning, and aside from this really aggressive cancer diagnosis, I was fine. Except I was stuck in serious ruminating thoughts, always replaying conversations or rehearsing potential interactions. I could not get out of my head. And I questioned my worth and value as a human. And I was somehow very aware of my body while being totally dissociated. I used to wake up and go to the to-do list in my head. What I would accomplish, what I would produce. I didn’t feel happy even though I had a really beautiful life. I felt busy, like I was always working toward something to be appreciated later.

Now, I wake up with a lightness. Is this happiness? I wonder. I think I’m actually smiling, too, and all because of my aliveness. It’s so simple and so fucking hard, too. Meditation has helped me grieve so much loss while holding gratitude for so much beauty. It has helped me make sense of the sorrow and expanded my appreciation for joy. Meditation invites me to think more clearly, less obsessively. I will say that I am less productive. There is something about facing my fears, facing my death, that actually got me to pause, to slow down. If you are talking with me, I’m now in the room with you, listening with my body. It takes more time and heart to listen like this, to live like this.

I started meditating with your intro to meditation course on the Calm app, and the ease of it got me to do it. After a few weeks, on the way to chemo, my partner Tony noticed that I was different. He asked how, why, what was happening. Cancer created anxiety in me that I hadn’t experienced before. Meditation created equanimity, and that was new to me, too. My current meditation practice is focused on embodiment, on finding home inside my own body, deeply inspired by the book The Wakeful Body by Willa Blythe Baker and also by the teachings of Sebene Selassie. A phrase came to me in a recent meditation when distracted that I now use daily: Return to my body.

Jeff: Friends, I hope Kelly’s words and practice can be a support, whatever your situation. I don’t think we all need to meditate in this life, or even to meditate when things get hard. But I do think everyone can benefit from some kind of deliberate practice. Some way to interrupt the narrow convictions of the mind, and come into direct contact with the broader landscape of the present moment.

It’s always amazing and mysterious to me what people find there / here. I’ve heard many describe a similar pattern: through illness or life challenge or the death of a loved one, through the practice of accepting what’s here, people find support and perspective and even transformation in ways they could never have imagined. Sometimes that acceptance is forced on them. Other times, through grace, it just happens. Maybe both are a kind of grace.

Thank you Kelly for your creativity and care. If you live in the Asheville area and are curious to meditate with Kelly, Tony and her community, check out Kelly’s Experimental Meditation Club at the excellent AyurPrana Listening Room.

Let’s meditate!

Jeff

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Celebrating Our Neurotic Attachments – CEC Meditation

Monday March 30, 2026, 7:30pm EST
Online via Zoom

I’m bored by my enlightened disdain for my attachments. For years I’ve tried to unfix from my worldly neuroses. It hasn’t worked. So I’ve decided to celebrate them instead. In this meditation, we celebrate our neurotic attachments so fully that they float off us – sigh – like liberated ghosts on their way to a sparsely-attended poetry reading in Heaven.

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