Living in Jefflandia has been a privilege and delight, my friend. I can feel the roots rooting and tendrils reaching even farther. You are such an embodiment of care for both the one and the many.
Jeff, I feel as though in this post you bring together all of you—quirky, smart, aware, fun, vulnerable, beautiful. I love the heightened focus on community, mental health awareness, and accessibility. I’m staying along for the ride. 🙏❤️
Wow Jeff! I'm just blown away by the generosity of this. So much wisdom here. I think our Peace of Mind curriculum is a version of this for how to teach mindfulness to kids. We don't want to gate-keep it while also making sure that people get that teaching kids is different than teaching adults. We try to keep it as low cost and barrier-free as possible. Your Kit is a tremendous resource. You are truly such a treasure! Thank you, thank you!
Thank you for the kind words old friend and thank you for your years of amazing work. I’m still learning from you all the time how to bring this practice into my parenting. I have a long way to go … 😂
Jeff, the post and meditation are overflowing with generosity, kindness, and wisdom. 🙏
There is so much to respond to, but in this moment I offer you your own words— ‘keep going’. Hearing that simple phrase in many of your meditations has helped me stay on the cushion day after day.
I am so grateful to you and our community and offer my love to everyone who is here. ❤️
Reading this, I felt something click into place — and honestly, something lift.
I'm at the very beginning of something — a website, a book, a purpose that's taken 63 years to fully surface. I've been working with a guide through the book and the platform-building, and I've felt the pressure to have it all figured out and launched in weeks. Then you mentioned this website has been a year in the making. That one sentence did something for me.
Because I've been watching you from the outside for a long time — through Calm, through different access points, through years of following your work anonymously. I've seen this evolution. I know how long the becoming has actually taken. And somehow that makes the permission feel real: Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will my website be — and that's not failure, that's just how meaningful things get made.
As for the mission itself: my whole life I've carried both suffering and the hard-won wisdom of moving through it, and I'm finally turning toward using that — not from a position of "I have it figured out," but from the understanding that when complex trauma is addressed, something fundamental shifts. You stop operating on top of all this unresolved material and start actually living.
That's the gift I want to offer. And seeing it named as part of a larger movement — decentralized, member-led, rooted in practice and community — makes the whole thing feel less like a personal project and more like belonging to something already in motion.
That is a gift you can offer the world, Kelly, for sure. I’d love to read it. I can also relate to some of that journey, transforming your suffering into support for someone else. Cheering you the whole way!
And if it’s any additional consolation, the phrase “the democratization of mental health” popped into my head in 2019. I had a chat with Dan about it, trying to articulate what it was. It’s taken me seven years to write about it in any substantive way, and I still don’t feel perfectly clear. These things sometimes have long gestation periods. It’s like your understanding has to catch up with reality, and vice versa!
You are not alone there! It's good to know I'm not the only pregnant elephant out here! What you said about the catching up is so true. I started writing this book in 2018. Yet, there was more living and integration needed before I could finish. It never stops though does it? The understanding, reality, new normal, next onion layer, understanding, reality...
I love seeing this message from you, Jeff! And I applaud your more personal, integrated flavor you’ve been cultivating! I teach high school theology, and in just the tiny bit of meditation I’ve introduced my students to, I have seen big positives!! They turn like flowers toward the sun ! Even just a moment of stillness and a few breaths before class bring them a calm and orientation toward self-awareness that they articulate to me as being so helpful. Growing mental health is for EVERYONE! Thank you for your great work!
So great and uplifting, Jeff. Just the idea that I can zoom with my dear friend struggling and meditate or meet her in the park and just sit on yoga mats in the grass and do nothing at all - this reminder it doesn’t have to be so hard/complex, because really, it isn’t.
We ARE thinking the culture’s thoughts and priorities and I don’t want to keep carrying all that shit anymore.
Love the meditation. Thank you so much. Big hugs 🙏🏽💜
I am so grateful to be a member of this community!
I started meditating about 18 months ago and the practice has had a profound affect in my life and in lives of whoever I come into contact with.
I am more connected with myself and I can connect more meaningfully and more freely with others.
I am more patient with myself so I can be graceful with others.
I am more compassionate with myself so I can be more caring and understanding to and of others.
I am spending more time in the present so I am more available to whatever is happening around me.
Meditation is a life improving practice.
Jeff, I participated in your Being Human Takes Practice retreat last November in North Carolina. There, I became aware of how important community is. Afterward, I could not find a community where I live so I started building one at work like you recommended. We are just a start-up, a small group of people getting together after work once a month to connect, meditate, reflect and share. It took a lot of courage for me to reach out and I am so glad I did because we are forming authentic, meaningful bonds around the practice.
Stephanie this is amazing. I am so happy you’re doing that at work and to hear that it’s already been helpful. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
And your experience of how meditation has supported you is so clear and articulate. It’s basic sanity training, right? Training and how to be human. I think that training can happen in many contexts that don’t need to look like formal seated practice. And … in my mind, a certain amount of practice in stillness is still the most elemental vehicle for it.
Anyway, keep up the great work, and keep me in the loop around everything that’s happening. Maybe I’ll see you down in North Carolina again.
I've been sitting with both pieces, and the line I keep returning to is that mental health is "inextricable from the health of the world around us." That's the whole thing for me.
I came to this backwards. I lived in the burnout first: Emergency services, then classrooms. Then I went and researched the why and the how of it, formally, with instruments and sample sizes. And only after all that did I start to see what the real triggers were. Not the individual who couldn't cope. The system that kept producing people who couldn't cope, and then asked them to cope harder.
So when the post names the environment and then turns toward the individual (shift your understanding, change your behavior, build your community), I want to add one move underneath the three. Not instead of practice and community. Beneath them. Redesign the thing doing the grinding. The group that meets to meditate before the staff meeting is good. The staff meeting that doesn't need to be survived is better. Both, not either. Otherwise practice becomes one more task the individual carries: meditate so you can tolerate the conditions, breathe so you can absorb the load.
The other thread is your honesty in the second piece, that the fine-grained practices don't land for most people. As an autistic, ADHD reader, I'd say it lands differently, not less. "Sit with the silence" is not neutral for every nervous system; for some of us the silence is louder than the room. I've had to build practice for my brain rather than receive it as given. A bell at random intervals to interrupt hyperfocus, because the instruction to "gently return" assumes a return I can't always find on my own.
Which is the same point twice. The practice has to be built from the actual material of the people in it, wiring included. We don't get well alone, and we don't get well on top of a structure that's still grinding. We have to learn to interbe better: the practice, the community, and the conditions, held as one thing.
Beautifully said Chris, I agree with every word. I so appreciate that you spent some time thinking about it and responded so thoughtfully.
In fact, you gave me an idea for a post, something I have wanted to write about for a while. In terms of the change understanding, change behavior, build community piece, although I don’t say it, in my mind when I talk about changing behaviour and the role of practice, I’m also thinking about practises of changing the world. Thinking practices, activism practices, communication practices, all of it. I think it’s all a practice. I think these practises can and should be made more explicit within the meditation context. That’s definitely something you hear a lot in engaged Buddhist circles. In fact, our old motto at the CEC was “meditate, celebrate, activate“ where the activate piece was all about practises of giving back and helping people workshop what that could look like for them, how to find your groove based on your interests and creative gifts and networks and circumstances.
Anyway, excited to try to make that more explicit in the model I’ve been laying out.
I also like your point about different practices landing differently in different nervous systems. Could not agree more. That’s why I like to offer many ways into the mystery. My teacherly way of thinking about it is basically: stream entry then mystery. Something gets you in the stream, after that, who can say where the path leads and how it deepens? Human attention is so idiosyncratic and creative. Look at anything long enough, it will start to open. In this sense, every nervous system is a lineage in waiting.
Chris and Jeff, this is a wonderful conversation that speaks to the complexities and nuance of our individual experiences. Since our internal tuning is unique, there can be no universal ‘best way’ to be present or ‘best way’ to respond to what arises day to day. But the underlying systems and cultures are built with the expectation that we will sublimate our differences and integrate into them seamlessly.
The magic of finding our way through this with grace and contentment happens as if by chance. We have an experience, a conversation, a seemingly random encounter at the very moment when we are open to it, and it changes everything.
Many people have been numbed into exhaustion by societal expectations and are unaware that a different experience is even possible. So my hope is that on occasion, some small thing I say or do in a chance encounter might begin to make things shift for another person.
The new website looks amazing, and thanks for the refresh of the activation kit, too! Our little meditation community is growing and adapting and evolving now, and it feels like a good time to go back and reflect on your guidance on building community. I'm pulled in a lot of different directions right now, but your community here always feels like one I can come back to without feeling guilty for missing a week or two (or sometimes more), which is a spirit I'm trying to bring to our local group as well.
Just fabulous - from Annie all the way over in Australia. Love the concept, website and meditation. A true gift to the world thank you and can’t wait to be part of it
Wow. Jeff, you are the Gutenberg of our times. Thank you for the vision, selflessness, and generosity of thought. I have some practical questions about implementation that I am still noodling over, but for now, just a note of gratitude. Your contagious passion about how we wrestle with, connect over, and celebrate—all the good and ick of— the human condition is deeply inspiriting. 🌻
Thanks Varda - a huge compliment coming from YOU! I have some practical questions too. Part of my rationale for putting this out there is to get good critical feedback so I can get a better sense of best practices.
I think the main thing for me is I don’t want anyone to go out there and try to convince anyone else to meditate. That to my mind is exactly the wrong way to think about it and to go about it.
What’s most interesting to me in all of this is the idea of helping to seed - and then support - a grassroots group that responds to some existing local context or scene, where some form of practice either already exists or is primed to exist … and then using either meditation itself, or the skills / insights of meditation to amplify that signal, and thus increase that group and that practice’s effectiveness.
Anyway, more to explore, looking forward to our chat!
Hi, I just joined the community today. I have only recently found out that I am neurodivergent, and also take a medication for depression. I have had difficulty finding a meditation or yoga community I feel comfortable practicing with because they have been very critical of taking medications to support mental health. I am beyond encouraged to see this community support neurodivergence and be so inclusive. I am grateful for finding it. Thank you, Jeff!
Great to have you here, Julie! I wrote a piece about medication and meditation somewhere on the Substack, something I have strong feelings about. Nice to have your neurodivergent vibes in the mix. 😍
This is a great post. And I also feel called out, because I tried to start a local meditation group very recently and it lasted for only 5 months because I couldn’t get the word out far enough. I have little to no meditation network among friends which makes me sad. It also seemed like people couldn’t figure out how to make the time to come in person to do nothing (despite how much I rave about it). It was fun while it lasted but it was also a bit defeating. Your post is still inspiring! I just need to open up more and hopefully find more meditators in my area.
Super interesting Jess. I love you tried it and I’m sorry it didn’t work out. Sometimes it’s easier to start with a remote friend or two. Where I live right now I actually don’t offer anything locally, for various reasons it just doesn’t feel like the right thing. But I do sit virtually with a couple different friends in the mornings, and of course I have my offerings to this community on Sunday nights (and sometimes I sit with the CEC on Monday nights). Sometimes a virtual community is the main way it can work - both in terms of joining existing offerings (of which there are so many these days), and / or having an informal meditation hangout every week set up with a friend or two. When I’m low energy, I might bail on going somewhere in person, but still make a virtual meeting.
In terms of local in person stuff, I wonder if there are other interesting area things going on, that are an opportunity to practice some of the same skills, just in a different way. Writing groups, yoga groups, that kind of thing.
I am SO here for this cult, I mean, community! The new website is spectacular. What an amazing resource. Thank you for all you offer. Love you Jeff
Thanks Seb. I love you too. ❤️❤️❤️
Same here Sebene!
Living in Jefflandia has been a privilege and delight, my friend. I can feel the roots rooting and tendrils reaching even farther. You are such an embodiment of care for both the one and the many.
Cristy you are the best! Thank you.
I highly encourage people check out her work so beautiful:
https://cristyleeduce.com
Jeff, I feel as though in this post you bring together all of you—quirky, smart, aware, fun, vulnerable, beautiful. I love the heightened focus on community, mental health awareness, and accessibility. I’m staying along for the ride. 🙏❤️
Thank you, Steven - and welcome to Substack!
Wow Jeff! I'm just blown away by the generosity of this. So much wisdom here. I think our Peace of Mind curriculum is a version of this for how to teach mindfulness to kids. We don't want to gate-keep it while also making sure that people get that teaching kids is different than teaching adults. We try to keep it as low cost and barrier-free as possible. Your Kit is a tremendous resource. You are truly such a treasure! Thank you, thank you!
Under your Peace of Mind curriculum is exactly that. I’ve shared it with so many people. I’d like to share it here again:
Teachpeaceofmind.org
Thank you for the kind words old friend and thank you for your years of amazing work. I’m still learning from you all the time how to bring this practice into my parenting. I have a long way to go … 😂
Thank you, Jeff! I've learned so much from you. Just like you said we're all doing it together. It's a beautiful thing.
Jeff, the post and meditation are overflowing with generosity, kindness, and wisdom. 🙏
There is so much to respond to, but in this moment I offer you your own words— ‘keep going’. Hearing that simple phrase in many of your meditations has helped me stay on the cushion day after day.
I am so grateful to you and our community and offer my love to everyone who is here. ❤️
Tamar!! Thank you friend. Now that I got this launch out of the way, I can work on your customized sound meditation, for the mystic in all of us…
I’m curious to hear what emerges…. and patient.
“Keep going”…most encouraging two words in the English language! And you say it well, Jeff…such calm encouragement!
Disclaimer: meaty response follows
Reading this, I felt something click into place — and honestly, something lift.
I'm at the very beginning of something — a website, a book, a purpose that's taken 63 years to fully surface. I've been working with a guide through the book and the platform-building, and I've felt the pressure to have it all figured out and launched in weeks. Then you mentioned this website has been a year in the making. That one sentence did something for me.
Because I've been watching you from the outside for a long time — through Calm, through different access points, through years of following your work anonymously. I've seen this evolution. I know how long the becoming has actually taken. And somehow that makes the permission feel real: Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will my website be — and that's not failure, that's just how meaningful things get made.
As for the mission itself: my whole life I've carried both suffering and the hard-won wisdom of moving through it, and I'm finally turning toward using that — not from a position of "I have it figured out," but from the understanding that when complex trauma is addressed, something fundamental shifts. You stop operating on top of all this unresolved material and start actually living.
That's the gift I want to offer. And seeing it named as part of a larger movement — decentralized, member-led, rooted in practice and community — makes the whole thing feel less like a personal project and more like belonging to something already in motion.
Grateful for this.
That is a gift you can offer the world, Kelly, for sure. I’d love to read it. I can also relate to some of that journey, transforming your suffering into support for someone else. Cheering you the whole way!
And if it’s any additional consolation, the phrase “the democratization of mental health” popped into my head in 2019. I had a chat with Dan about it, trying to articulate what it was. It’s taken me seven years to write about it in any substantive way, and I still don’t feel perfectly clear. These things sometimes have long gestation periods. It’s like your understanding has to catch up with reality, and vice versa!
(And I still find it hard to be patient 🤣)
You are not alone there! It's good to know I'm not the only pregnant elephant out here! What you said about the catching up is so true. I started writing this book in 2018. Yet, there was more living and integration needed before I could finish. It never stops though does it? The understanding, reality, new normal, next onion layer, understanding, reality...
Wow, Kelly. I’m speechless. I need to digest your message and then I’m gonna respond more.
I love seeing this message from you, Jeff! And I applaud your more personal, integrated flavor you’ve been cultivating! I teach high school theology, and in just the tiny bit of meditation I’ve introduced my students to, I have seen big positives!! They turn like flowers toward the sun ! Even just a moment of stillness and a few breaths before class bring them a calm and orientation toward self-awareness that they articulate to me as being so helpful. Growing mental health is for EVERYONE! Thank you for your great work!
“ they turn like flowers towards the sun”. ❤️ thank you, Beth. I love hearing how you’re using meditation in the classroom, so inspiring!
So great and uplifting, Jeff. Just the idea that I can zoom with my dear friend struggling and meditate or meet her in the park and just sit on yoga mats in the grass and do nothing at all - this reminder it doesn’t have to be so hard/complex, because really, it isn’t.
We ARE thinking the culture’s thoughts and priorities and I don’t want to keep carrying all that shit anymore.
Love the meditation. Thank you so much. Big hugs 🙏🏽💜
OK, please share with me how that goes Malaya, that’s exactly what I’m talking about!
Will do Jeff…hope to meet up with my friend soon. Take care.
I am so grateful to be a member of this community!
I started meditating about 18 months ago and the practice has had a profound affect in my life and in lives of whoever I come into contact with.
I am more connected with myself and I can connect more meaningfully and more freely with others.
I am more patient with myself so I can be graceful with others.
I am more compassionate with myself so I can be more caring and understanding to and of others.
I am spending more time in the present so I am more available to whatever is happening around me.
Meditation is a life improving practice.
Jeff, I participated in your Being Human Takes Practice retreat last November in North Carolina. There, I became aware of how important community is. Afterward, I could not find a community where I live so I started building one at work like you recommended. We are just a start-up, a small group of people getting together after work once a month to connect, meditate, reflect and share. It took a lot of courage for me to reach out and I am so glad I did because we are forming authentic, meaningful bonds around the practice.
Stephanie this is amazing. I am so happy you’re doing that at work and to hear that it’s already been helpful. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
And your experience of how meditation has supported you is so clear and articulate. It’s basic sanity training, right? Training and how to be human. I think that training can happen in many contexts that don’t need to look like formal seated practice. And … in my mind, a certain amount of practice in stillness is still the most elemental vehicle for it.
Anyway, keep up the great work, and keep me in the loop around everything that’s happening. Maybe I’ll see you down in North Carolina again.
Jeff,
I've been sitting with both pieces, and the line I keep returning to is that mental health is "inextricable from the health of the world around us." That's the whole thing for me.
I came to this backwards. I lived in the burnout first: Emergency services, then classrooms. Then I went and researched the why and the how of it, formally, with instruments and sample sizes. And only after all that did I start to see what the real triggers were. Not the individual who couldn't cope. The system that kept producing people who couldn't cope, and then asked them to cope harder.
So when the post names the environment and then turns toward the individual (shift your understanding, change your behavior, build your community), I want to add one move underneath the three. Not instead of practice and community. Beneath them. Redesign the thing doing the grinding. The group that meets to meditate before the staff meeting is good. The staff meeting that doesn't need to be survived is better. Both, not either. Otherwise practice becomes one more task the individual carries: meditate so you can tolerate the conditions, breathe so you can absorb the load.
The other thread is your honesty in the second piece, that the fine-grained practices don't land for most people. As an autistic, ADHD reader, I'd say it lands differently, not less. "Sit with the silence" is not neutral for every nervous system; for some of us the silence is louder than the room. I've had to build practice for my brain rather than receive it as given. A bell at random intervals to interrupt hyperfocus, because the instruction to "gently return" assumes a return I can't always find on my own.
Which is the same point twice. The practice has to be built from the actual material of the people in it, wiring included. We don't get well alone, and we don't get well on top of a structure that's still grinding. We have to learn to interbe better: the practice, the community, and the conditions, held as one thing.
Beautifully said Chris, I agree with every word. I so appreciate that you spent some time thinking about it and responded so thoughtfully.
In fact, you gave me an idea for a post, something I have wanted to write about for a while. In terms of the change understanding, change behavior, build community piece, although I don’t say it, in my mind when I talk about changing behaviour and the role of practice, I’m also thinking about practises of changing the world. Thinking practices, activism practices, communication practices, all of it. I think it’s all a practice. I think these practises can and should be made more explicit within the meditation context. That’s definitely something you hear a lot in engaged Buddhist circles. In fact, our old motto at the CEC was “meditate, celebrate, activate“ where the activate piece was all about practises of giving back and helping people workshop what that could look like for them, how to find your groove based on your interests and creative gifts and networks and circumstances.
Anyway, excited to try to make that more explicit in the model I’ve been laying out.
I also like your point about different practices landing differently in different nervous systems. Could not agree more. That’s why I like to offer many ways into the mystery. My teacherly way of thinking about it is basically: stream entry then mystery. Something gets you in the stream, after that, who can say where the path leads and how it deepens? Human attention is so idiosyncratic and creative. Look at anything long enough, it will start to open. In this sense, every nervous system is a lineage in waiting.
Chris and Jeff, this is a wonderful conversation that speaks to the complexities and nuance of our individual experiences. Since our internal tuning is unique, there can be no universal ‘best way’ to be present or ‘best way’ to respond to what arises day to day. But the underlying systems and cultures are built with the expectation that we will sublimate our differences and integrate into them seamlessly.
The magic of finding our way through this with grace and contentment happens as if by chance. We have an experience, a conversation, a seemingly random encounter at the very moment when we are open to it, and it changes everything.
Many people have been numbed into exhaustion by societal expectations and are unaware that a different experience is even possible. So my hope is that on occasion, some small thing I say or do in a chance encounter might begin to make things shift for another person.
Grateful to be part of this community.
The new website looks amazing, and thanks for the refresh of the activation kit, too! Our little meditation community is growing and adapting and evolving now, and it feels like a good time to go back and reflect on your guidance on building community. I'm pulled in a lot of different directions right now, but your community here always feels like one I can come back to without feeling guilty for missing a week or two (or sometimes more), which is a spirit I'm trying to bring to our local group as well.
Thanks, Lori, curious to hear a little more about your experience with your local group. We should jump on a call sometime. ❤️
Fair warning — it’s hard to shut me up once I get started talking about it. 😆
Ha!
Just fabulous - from Annie all the way over in Australia. Love the concept, website and meditation. A true gift to the world thank you and can’t wait to be part of it
Good to have you here , Annie from Australia!
Wow. Jeff, you are the Gutenberg of our times. Thank you for the vision, selflessness, and generosity of thought. I have some practical questions about implementation that I am still noodling over, but for now, just a note of gratitude. Your contagious passion about how we wrestle with, connect over, and celebrate—all the good and ick of— the human condition is deeply inspiriting. 🌻
Thanks Varda - a huge compliment coming from YOU! I have some practical questions too. Part of my rationale for putting this out there is to get good critical feedback so I can get a better sense of best practices.
I think the main thing for me is I don’t want anyone to go out there and try to convince anyone else to meditate. That to my mind is exactly the wrong way to think about it and to go about it.
What’s most interesting to me in all of this is the idea of helping to seed - and then support - a grassroots group that responds to some existing local context or scene, where some form of practice either already exists or is primed to exist … and then using either meditation itself, or the skills / insights of meditation to amplify that signal, and thus increase that group and that practice’s effectiveness.
Anyway, more to explore, looking forward to our chat!
Holy balls that was lovely.
"we think we're thinking our thoughts but often we're thinking the culture's thoughts" #warrenwisdom
And I agree, the website is awesome!
Actually, that is a direct quote from my friend Sebene Selassie. I wish I could put attributions inside a meditation.🤣
Hmm… #sagesebene? Haha
Hi, I just joined the community today. I have only recently found out that I am neurodivergent, and also take a medication for depression. I have had difficulty finding a meditation or yoga community I feel comfortable practicing with because they have been very critical of taking medications to support mental health. I am beyond encouraged to see this community support neurodivergence and be so inclusive. I am grateful for finding it. Thank you, Jeff!
Great to have you here, Julie! I wrote a piece about medication and meditation somewhere on the Substack, something I have strong feelings about. Nice to have your neurodivergent vibes in the mix. 😍
This is a great post. And I also feel called out, because I tried to start a local meditation group very recently and it lasted for only 5 months because I couldn’t get the word out far enough. I have little to no meditation network among friends which makes me sad. It also seemed like people couldn’t figure out how to make the time to come in person to do nothing (despite how much I rave about it). It was fun while it lasted but it was also a bit defeating. Your post is still inspiring! I just need to open up more and hopefully find more meditators in my area.
Super interesting Jess. I love you tried it and I’m sorry it didn’t work out. Sometimes it’s easier to start with a remote friend or two. Where I live right now I actually don’t offer anything locally, for various reasons it just doesn’t feel like the right thing. But I do sit virtually with a couple different friends in the mornings, and of course I have my offerings to this community on Sunday nights (and sometimes I sit with the CEC on Monday nights). Sometimes a virtual community is the main way it can work - both in terms of joining existing offerings (of which there are so many these days), and / or having an informal meditation hangout every week set up with a friend or two. When I’m low energy, I might bail on going somewhere in person, but still make a virtual meeting.
In terms of local in person stuff, I wonder if there are other interesting area things going on, that are an opportunity to practice some of the same skills, just in a different way. Writing groups, yoga groups, that kind of thing.