My explorations into the weird and wonderful worlds of “alternative healing” began 20 years ago, with a visit to a homeopathic practitioner. My guide was Shahram, a gentle fellow who listened gravely to my challenges, asked many insightful questions, and then sent me home with a cosmic-sounding remedy: “positronium.” After a few weeks, my problems eased. Temporarily.
Since then, I’ve tried … naturopathy, osteopathy, acupuncture, yoga, chiropractic, psychedelics, astrology, Jungian “depth work,” Qi Gong, Feldenkrais, Keto diet, Gestalt therapy, Ayurveda, and a pile of other therapy styles, divination systems, and energy healers, most of whom seem to be running their own idiosyncratic software.
What I enjoy most about all this is trying to understand how a particular healer or system works – the rules, the internal coherence (if any) – and how it impacts consciousness. I’m agnostic as far as provability in a lab. Part of the medicine for these therapies seems to be the relationship between client and practitioner. They care for us and co-regulate us. They engender confidence and open our imaginations to new possibility, for our bodies to follow. Or they open our bodies to some new possibility, for our minds to follow.
The one thing I’ve stopped doing is believing that any one practitioner or modality will finally heal me. Instead, I think they either address a specific problem, offer temporary relief, or – the best of them – nudge our system along a path of slow but cumulative learning. Call it “towards equilibrium.” Life challenges and dysfunctional habits always come back. So we book another visit!
In other words, visiting healers is a practice, much like meditation is a practice. We don’t expect to meditate once and have perfect mental health. The same goes for these other modalities.
In meditation, my teacher is the silence. I can feel it working on me, trickling down, softening my certainties and fixations. Sometimes I have the uncanny sense of things reorganizing at depth – out of sight, but not, as it were, out of mind. Towards equilibrium.
Meditation, too, is a relationship. A relationship with the life we know, and the life we don’t (or can’t). We expand out, kin by kin, until we collapse into a giggling heap of paradox. Or maybe we just fall asleep.
Anyway friends: I just drafted this after a couple beers at the pub and then home wrestling with my boys! My new favorite healing practice, although it does come with the possibility of fresh injury.
For this week's meditation, we emphasize the healing silence of meditation, the way things reorganize at depth. And then we send out some love at the end, because that’s healing too.
Enjoy!
Jeff
Introducing: The Lounge
To celebrate our 50th post, we’re launching something new for the Home Base community: The Lounge, a weekly live gathering on Zoom, where we’ll listen to the week’s Home Base meditation together, and then hang out, sharing reflections, making connections, practicing being human. It’s like a book club, but for meditation. First two sessions are open to all — after that, it’ll be a special perk for paying subscribers:
Weds, June 4 at 8:30 - 9:00 PM EST
Tues, June 10 at 12 - 12:30 PM EST
Lilli will be hosting. No prep, no pressure—just come as you are. we’ll keep it casual. Comment below if you are excited to join! (an email will be sent tomorrow with links)
The Mind Bod Adventure … SQUAD!
June 8-13, 2025
Five Day In-Person Retreat, Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, New York
Rewild your meditation practice. This retreat will be at the fizzy exploratory edge of my learning and teaching. Over five days we’ll explore the endless malleability and fluidity of self and world. Sitting meditation and inquiry will alternate with periods of more active creative practice. From ceremony to movement to art and finishing in a dance party, we will become … the person we wanna dance with!!
Meditation Made Easy with Jeff & Tasha Schumann
We changed it up this week! Instead of a pod episode from Tasha’s couch, we joined
(aka Peaceful Barb) & on their podcast . Join us for this fun and down-to-earth conversation about what meditation really is. We cut through the myth and touch the living, breathing, messy practice of returning to the present.
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