Two days ago, I sat in a café near my house after dropping off my eldest at day camp. I opened the Dropbox folder that’s been accumulating our open mic meditations – here – and found friend and community member Varda’s “When You’ve Lost Your Shit.”
Did the practice.
Got emotional.
Her practice was about what to do after you’ve screwed up with your kids, or your coworker, or any situation where “you didn’t catch the big feelings in time, and they spilled over in a big way.” The timing couldn’t have been better. The night before, I’d yelled at my son, fuming at something he did. I love him more than anything, and … parenthood can be challenging. As I was losing control, I could hear the same tone in my voice that my dad would use with me. Like his heart was slamming shut. My son: cut off, an innocent six-year-old, just doing the best he can. Even after I apologized, I felt doomed to repeat the pattern indefinitely. That story was still with me the next morning.
Varda said to imagine capturing any unhelpful feelings and judgments in air bubbles, and then “blowing them out with each exhale.” When I do this, she says, “these air bubbles can just bob around me and coexist with me peacefully as I meditate.” Something about the instruction helped. My bubbles floated out, opening a clearing for self-compassion. Varda helped me remember the human under my dad-ness: a (mostly) innocent fifty-five year-old also doing the best he can. Have a listen:
The feeling of someone else taking care of me is … complicated. Maybe it is for you, too. It’s kind of unexpected, like I never realized I needed it. Or like I don’t quite believe I deserve it. It can go deep. Letting care in is a big part of what meditation practice is about.
I’ve felt this a lot these past weeks as I’ve listened to the different meditations that subscribers sent in during the community takeover, which began with Joe’s meditation three weeks ago. Strangers and near-strangers and new friends reaching out to each other across time and space. How amazing that this can happen. There’s effort in making a meditation, and there’s effort in thinking through the structure and what real thing you might share. There’s effort in overcoming self-consciousness and imposter syndrome. But I’m not sure caring itself takes effort. Caring is as natural as breathing. It just gets covered over by our inner contractions, our exhaustion, our conditioned limitations.
The practice of meditation can help both with letting care in, and with sending it out. So can the practice of being in community. And so can the practice of actually guiding a meditation – if doing so speaks to you. My teacher Shinzen Young used to say the practice makes teachers of us all, but only a few will ever make that teaching explicit. For most practitioners, the “teaching” is in the way the practice changes us, the increase in openness or presence in our bodies and – ideally – our relationships. In Shinzen’s words, this kind of teaching happens through “the silent sermon of our pores.”
When I first began meditating, I was quite tortured and stuck in my head. The people around me were more like props in my own internal dramas than real human beings. Twenty-five years later, the biggest change in my experience of sitting with others – as a teacher, as a student, as a friend – is I now feel I’m sitting with humans. The character in people’s voices and faces reflect back to me my own humanity, a thing I once questioned. I now know that I could not be here without you.
So thank you. Thank you all for your support these past few weeks, your care for me and for this community. Thank you, Joe, for coming up with the idea in the first place, for your own guidance, and - not least - your sound engineering wizardry.
Gratitude can be hard to put into words. So I made a meditation about it. Just click play above; extended version below.
Good to be home!
Jeff
A few quick notes—
The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, August 30 at 8pm EDT. Link here. Replays are archived Monday mornings on Home Base and YouTube.
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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 …
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.
