Meditation, being one of the oldest contemplative practices, helps us turn inwards. Turning inwards helps us understand the nature of our minds better, deepens our self-awareness, brings us closer to some form of internal freedom, and, hopefully, equips us with the tools to overcome daily humanely challenges a bit better.
Using the metaphor of an armada of vehicles, our guest today playfully describes the different forms of contemplative practices, he writes, “We have the Yogic fire-breathing Namaste monster truck…the spooky Zen hover craft…a Sufi flying carpet…a Catholic chain of bubble campers…and the boring Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction delivery vans.”
In this episode, we navigate the fraught territory of consciousness and meditation with Jeff Warren. Jeff is the Author of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics along with Mr 10% Happier Dan Harris. He also wrote The Head Trip, a guidebook to waking, sleeping and dreaming. We decided to take a stab at some “deep end” questions that relate to practice. Jeff tells us what it has been like for him since coming out publicly about his personal struggles with ADD and bi-polar. He also shares his personal vision for the future of mental health. At the very end, he leaves us with a beautiful 10 minute guided mediation.
Highlights:
- Exploring Consciousness
- Meditation Practice
- Experiences of Awakening
- Democratizing Mindfulness Education
Resources:
- Consciousness Explorers Club
- Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris and Jeff Warren and Carlye Adler
- Shinzen Young
- Joe Rogan Experience with Dan Harris and Jeff Warren
- Community Practice Activation Kit
Listen:
Where do you feel it? Poem inspired by this episode:
Full Transcript
Adrian
Jeff, welcome to the show.
Jeff Warren
Thanks for having me guys.
Thal
Thank you.
Adrian
Yeah, we were thinking maybe to start off, we’d love to hear what sparked your curiosity to explore consciousness and that’s something that we both share as far as, a passion and interest. What comes to mind as far as early experiences that might have sparked that in you?
Jeff Warren
Yeah, I mean it was sort of always there. Um, as far as I can remember. I mean I think I was telling somebody about this the other day. I remember vividly being a young kid and laying in my bed and trying to understand the concept of infinity and trying to understand the concept that my mind was trying to understand infinity and then as I try and notice what that was like and getting these strange kinds of, um, experiences were just vertigo experiences. And now I know because of having done a lot of practice that I was tapping into certain kinds of qualities or spaces, but I had no, of course way to think about or talk about it. I just would do that. And it seemed normal. Um, and then I remember times that I would try to do it then it wouldn’t have that there’d be a contrast. Things that had happened before weren’t happening. Things that I kind of wanted to have happen actually. And be like, oh yeah, that was cool. It was like, I found a way to get myself high and uh, without even knowing anything about this because I was a little kid. I would try to get back there and it would be different and I would say, well, what was different? Why is that different now? And so that was sort of like an ongoing thing without being too, you know, it wasn’t, there was nothing really precocious about it. It was just kind of this like it was the same way kids will like choke themselves out, which I also would do and go unconscious and just notice the weird delays in time. And um, and then as early as a young teenager I remember reading an Omni article on lucid dreaming. Omni, if you don’t know, was an extremely cool kind of psychedelic science, popular magazine from the eighties, probably started earlier than that. There hasn’t been a kind of magazine since then, like I quite like it, but it had a whole feature on lucid dreaming and how to do it. And I remember like really working hard at trying to make that happen and had some success. Um, and so that was, you know, and there’s other things I could say, like other kinds of, the most meaningful thing is sometimes you go into a practice now just like sometimes you walk around during the day and you remember a dream you had not even from last night, like from a year ago. Have you had that experience?
Adrian
Oh yeah.
Thal
Yes.
Jeff Warren
So it similarly in practice, sometimes I’ll be meditating and I’ll suddenly go back now remember an insight experience I had for many, many years ago and recently I remembered this really profound experience. I must have been like, I don’t even know, like seven or eight where I suddenly got this whole insight into suffering where I was realizing that I was just doing some kind of mundane habit that I, something I was just doing. It was like I was responding to a situation and I always kinda responding again in the same way, in a way that I thought was kind of funny, but I had this sudden incredibly sobering understanding that if I kept doing this, this will become my character. And then from there I went into this whole thing around, oh my God, that’s true for everybody all the time. We’re on this little like, you know, uh, wheel we’re going around around this little like and we’re just deepening these grooves. And I remember being, like really shocked and kind of like scared about that realization because I could see that some of the things I was in were not that healthy. And that was “whoa” I still think about that.
Thal
So you were dabbling in altered states from a very young age.
Jeff Warren
Yeah. Altered states and both the kind of energetic high expansion type, but also the more the deeper, um, deeper I would say ones that have to do more with being and more fundamental kind of questions. In retrospect, I can see they were there and why wouldn’t they be there? They’re there for everyone all the time. That’s part of cool things about existing, uh, but yeah, they were on my radar. And then, um, and then, you know, you go into like a narrowing and your late teenage years where I just was interested in sex, drugs and rock and roll and although that included transcendence and explorations and the journey goes on from there. And I can tell you more about the story, but, that’s a good start. Anyway.
Thal
When did you learn about meditation?
Jeff Warren
Well, a little later. I was researching a book on consciousness. So it was on waking, sleeping and dreaming and kind of trying to understand my mind because that was really one of the, through lines. And of course I knew about meditation before and I’ve done a lot of yoga practices and I’ve done different kinds of ceremonies and things, but I’d never really had a formal practice. So for that, this is back in about 2003. I went to my first retreat then, like that was my first week long retreat. And then of course everything changed because now you understand that, oh, these aren’t just academic questions, not that I didn’t know that before, but you know, you could say there’s a theory of dreaming and there’s actually having dreams and notice what’s going on. But my academic interest in consciousness and meditation took a big turn there because I could start to see that this was the place where I would be getting really the perspective of my direct experience that I was looking for.
Thal
Learning meditation and introducing meditation in your life in a way solidified your dabbling in altered states when you were younger and like the mystical experiences and deeper questions of life.
Jeff Warren
No question. Yeah, it gave me a framework to think about it. I mean, there are many frameworks to think about those kinds of experiences. I was familiar with some of them general mystical frameworks, but it gave me, you know, a kind of experiential map that I’ve found helpful. I mean, so that’s a whole story. You know, there, there’s kind of this, as you probably no doubt know, there’s kind of this very interesting and rich, ongoing kind of conversation or dialectic between our ideas and concepts and maps of what’s happening and our understanding from an intellectual point of view and our lived experience. And they’re both really important that, you know, often people, um, in the direct experience, spiritual world, they can be down on the maps and the concepts for many good reasons. But what I have found in my experience is that a good map, a good concept, a good take on something from a teacher or some kind of interest, some very thoughtful observer will allow me to see in my own experience, in a new way and sometimes move me more deep and deeply into experience. And then in turn, as I go into my experience, I’m able to refresh my concepts with what is the lived reality of this. So there’s a continual back and forth where you’re… and eventually I think one of the goals you can say is that the two converge and converge and converge until our model or understanding of what’s happening is directly mapped perfectly onto our actual lived experience. And that’s one way to talk about your practice.
Thal
Yes, it’s definitely all about the lived experience because we can all get lost in the theory and the books. And, and so how did you start teaching meditation?
Jeff Warren
Yeah. Well maybe I’ll just say one last thing to finish that last thought because you just made me think of something. The continuing interest in maps is really healthy. Uh, the continuing incept in those interests in those frameworks is really, can really enrich that lived experience. And so my progression as a practitioner was that I, I had, um, first sort of my teacher, Shinzen giving me a whole model or a map or way of working than kind of being really interested in the progress of insight and how that worked to use a different map or model and an ongoing like that. Every time I would go into a new map, it would give me a new way to explore, a new way to understand it. So there is continual rich back…They’re both awesome. That’s what I wanted to say. Um, yeah.
Adrian
What was it about Shinzen’s specific framework that really resonated with you? It sounded like that one in particular as a map became very useful to you as an explorer.
Jeff Warren
Yeah. Well, what was interesting with Shinzen is that he only, he doesn’t really have a map in terms of where the thing goes. He has a very rough map of like it, you know, a general thing that goes more and more into mystery and his particular kind of “God” is emptiness – impermanence. That’s the altar he worships at. And that’s where he lives, so that’s the thing he’s pointing you to. What was radical about him for me, was the way he broke down the skills of what is involved in a practice. Like what a successful meditation practice needs to go deep. What are the actual skills you’re building, like the concentration, clarity, equanimity. Those were his focus. So that really became my thing for me that I’ve now run with because I think of that as, okay, how can I apply that to all practices when I meet someone who’s a successful movement practitioner, psychotherapeutic practitioner or depth psychologist or you know, Shaman, whatever it is, how our concentration, clarity and equanimity is showing up and what else is there because not to be reductive about it, what are the other skills that may be there? And that he gave me that way of thinking about it, which I probably had a little bit already because I haven’t written a book on consciousness and I always interested in, but that made it. Or you can also find those skills in your direct experience. So that’s my focus as a teacher is not on any vehicle or anyone form or anyone technique. Even it’s more like, okay, how is equanimity showing up right now? What is the nature of that, uh, and how to help them understand that and then help them find more and more of it and then merging with the other skills. So that was his genius. I mean, people don’t often think of him for that. He’s got his whole map and his, he’s got a whole grid of techniques that he’s really proud of that are really cool, but for me to concentration clarity, equanimity part that was like… Because he could talk about it, how, how it led, how each of those skills lead to deeper and deeper into the path in a way that no one had ever articulated for me. And it was like, oh my gosh, this is like the, this is the good stuff here. I mean this is the thing I needed to hear
Adrian
After digging into the archives of some of your articles, I remember reading, an analogy you made with those parts and you refer to, I think it was a car, it was a car analogy. I don’t know if you can help remind me the particulars because it was really helpful in seeing how different parts of the vehicle were those specific core practices?
Jeff Warren
Yeah. So that’s the way it’s a metaphor of just kind of vehicle versus parts that. My metaphor was that like, you know, you can just picture, you know, Mad Max, the open desert and all of these vehicles cruising through the desert and there’s like the yoga-Namaste, a monster truck with the big fire breathing Pranayama people in the back and then there’s the kind of boring MBSR delivery van. Then there’s like the Vipassana, you know, a body scan, vibratory impermanence wave that’s floating over here. And the, the, you know, all the different vehicle you can think in. Each vehicle is a different technique or different form like. And they would include not just meditation vehicles from Zen and Buddhism and into practice, but Nondual vehicles, but also movement practices and Pranayama practices and artistic practices, humanistic practices. I mean in psychotherapeutic practices. I mean all of these practices you can think of all the world’s ways in which they’ve tried to start with this basic recognition that living is a training and that practice is being deliberate about that training, about how you want to live and here’s the armada. And so people get confused. They’re like, “well, which vehicle should I get in?” Because it’s overwhelming. You know, you’re, you’ve got like there’s thousands of vehicles and my whole thing is, well, it’s not so much the vehicles important and wonderful and beautiful and there’s a lot about the specifics of each vehicle which are important to understand and wonderful to learn. But in so far as any vehicle is going to make it through the desert, it’s always going to have certain parts that are the universal. So the. That’s the analogy I would say is the concentration is always going to be there. And that’s really the steering system. Every vehicle has a steering system, you know, you’re going to need, you need to have the capacity to hold the direction to devote your attention and some direction and not being blown out in 50 directions. So that single pointed quality of concentration and devotion is always going to be there. There was always going to be an equanimity component, which is sort of like the grease in the engine and all the parts. That’s what allows things to move fluidly. Equanimity being the smoothness, the ability to open to the actual moment to accept what’s going on, you know, you will. There is no way you can deepen in any practice and not have that. It’s just impossible. Um, you know, maybe there’s someone that can point me to an exception. I’ve never, I’ve yet to hear it. I’d love to hear one. Sorry for the reckless generalizing, but this has been my life as an explorer that I’m always looking. I’m so, I would say those two are the absolute for sure needed. There’s a clarity piece that I think is sort of an optional one. It’s related to the awareness piece to how deliberately aware you’re becoming. It’s like the windshield. Um, many, many practices have it definitely Vipassana. Definitely Nondual practices, defitely certain Yogic practices. Some don’t have a deliberate emphasis on it, but it’s a byproduct that you become more aware. You start to become aware of more and more stuff. But there are lots of practice that don’t emphasize the awareness and that’s often where you have the problems. Like people have these shadows that they don’t ever bother looking at. They developed the freedom from the equanimity and the concentration level a lot of power, a lot of freedom, but they don’t see the way that they’re basically fucking up stuff around them because they had these big shadows. They’re just, they, you know, it’s a real problem in this, as you know, in the spiritual path. So I think the clarity piece should be part of it and that clarity and awareness piece. So those are three. And then I would say there’s a friendliness piece too, which is just like, “I hope you’re developing compassion”. [laughing] I really hope so. And it’s a muscle and other muscle group. And I would say it’s sort of like the, um, I dunno, I haven’t figured out the metaphor for what that is. Maybe it’s the, maybe it’s the perfume around your vehicle, maybe…
Adrian
It’s the tunes, the music!
Jeff Warren
Nice dude! Some Bob Marley on the stereo or maybe it’s something loving and it puts people in a warm space. And that comes spontaneously, of course, from a practice. The reason it’s not deliberate is that a lot of practice, it just emerges, you know, that’s what happens when the heart is opened. It starts to just come from your own contact with our own being in a way. But then of course, lots of practices deliberately cultivated within every tradition. You know, and that’s, and I think it’s a good idea.
Thal
As a fellow explorer, I do agree with you. It’s so hard not to get, not distracted, but to get that, attracted to other forms of practices and not just focus on one type. So my question is how do you balance? Because I know I’ve struggled with that where I was like, “am I just, you know, a Jack of all trades?” I’m doing all these things and not going deep into one practice, but in retrospect from my own experience, I know that I was doing a lot of spiritual bypassing when I was focusing on just one practice and when I introduced psychotherapy in my life as a spiritual practice, more than just exploring my own mental health issues, that’s when things were like completely exploded in my face. So I dunno. Yeah..
Jeff Warren
Great question. I mean, it’s the million dollar question, um, and it’s so important and I can tell you my personal answer, but ultimately this idea that you choose one thing and stay with it, uh, is somehow always the right thing is not true. It’s really about the individual has to understand what’s right for them. For a lot of people it is really important to just choose one thing and to have that commitment. And I would say certainly when you’re doing your practice, it’s important to have that one pointed commitment to be developing that capacity for devotion and concentration. But for other people, they’re able to explore different techniques and find synergies. Find that there’s a lot of complementarities it doesn’t confuse or overwhelm them and make things more complex. Um, uh, or more overly complicated. I would say the way that I’ve dealt with the ADD question, which is kind of what you’re asking, you know, isn’t that all just a bit ADD? The answer is: yes. [laughing] And the way I’ve dealt with it is it’s through exactly what I’ve been describing. When I realized that it doesn’t matter what practice I do, I’m always cultivating equanimity. There’s a move I can do in my body, I can show, I can guide you guys through it. Right now, there’s a move I do a in my body to make sure that I’m equanimous. There’s a move I do that ensures that I’m at least being concentrated. There’s a move I do that’s around being aware and being clear. Those are the skills that are always getting built. Those are my vehicles in a weird way, even though the parts so I can go into different practices and, and basically approached them as a mindfulness practice of like, okay, I’m just being aware of the things I’m training for it.
Adrian
Since you brought it up, we wanted to actually ask you about, you know, you came out recently on Dan’s podcast and talked about your ADD and in your personal struggle as a meditation teacher, I mean that, you know, that for us is really important because it’s easy, at least for me, I feel like it’s easy to walk around and carry this persona even as a meditator that you somehow have all your shit figured out and that your internal landscapes are all clean and you you’re always, in bliss states. But clearly it’s not the case. Could you share a little bit about how your relationship to ADD or your experience of it, if it’s changed at all since talking about it more and more openly?
Jeff Warren
Yeah. Great question. Well, it has changed my relationship to, it has changed. It’s not just the ADD, it’s the, I have ADD, I also have a lot of emotional intensity and dysregulation and I had a bipolar diagnosis a year ago, which was kind of a surprise, but also not a surprise. Um, and that just means like big spikes, you know, where I have a lot of energy. Even you could feel it when I’m in this conversation, I get excited about something. It’s like, here we go and that can lead into sort of hypomanic states and then there’s a crash crash where I’m exhausted and really despairing. So first of all, it takes a while to see clearly your own struggles. Like I’ve always known about the ADD, I’ve kind of known about the ups, but I didn’t really have the perspective on the ups and downs and until it’s still an ongoing thing. I learned new things about myself and the challenge is can you be honest, even with that, you know, when there’s so much expectation from people for the people that who are teaching them to somehow be, like you said, totally perfect and you internalize all these assumptions and ideals and so the experience of writing a book with Dan, the Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics book and going on the Joe Rogan podcast and talking about it was quite liberating because it was sorta like, now I’m just going to admit it. This is what I. I had kind of talked about it before and I’ve always tried to be a really an honest teacher that way, but like I said, I had sort of secret pockets of shame about it that I didn’t know I was holding back. So it kind of just put it all out there. It was very liberating, you know, and because what you realize is you’re not going to change fundamental ways in which how you are, you know, or maybe will very, very slowly. You’re always… All of us… It takes a long time to be able to live outside of conditioning and those conditions are gonna be a big part of your life for most of your life. And uh, the rough arc of those conditions is not going to change in a huge way. Certain parts will change. Like there’s aspects of my challenges that are due to physical trauma and other things that are, as I learned to discharge that energy, I’ll be able to.. Definitely the ups and the highs and lows and my bipolar thing will start to shrink and they’ve already started to definitely the ADD can start to come into more regulation. So there are ways in which we can begin to modify it, but I’ll always be someone who is sensitive who has ups and downs. Who’s a little bit scattered. Who’s creative. That’s part of the…And so kind of the journey is like just oh yeah, the adult quality of accepting that and not needing to be any different. And then then learning how to work with it. Like, given that I’m already like this and I know I don’t have to now put on myself all the shit about how I am somehow supposed to be different and it’s like I know what I’m doing, what I’m not good at doing. You know what I need? I had to get an assistant to help me with organizational stuff. I have a life coach. I just hired, helped me with organizational stuff. You know, you’ve got to put the environmental things in that are gonna that are gonna help you. And so that this process has really allowed me to do that. That’s one answer but there’s an even deeper answer, which is… The thing is, all the way through the struggle of it, I’ve been paying attention. What works, what doesn’t work from using these practices? So I’ve learned a lot about how to use mindfulness to change my relationship to the energies and back off and not feed them. So I can really early on, just like I did in this podcast, “oh, I’m tracking, I’m starting to go up, I back off like I’m back in. All right, now take a breath out, I let it pass” and then in the same way I can start to learn to do that with the down energies, which are harder because they’re gnarly. So what’s our job here? It’s to teach your suffering. Teach your healing and then I can bring that to my teachings. So I’m really focused on that. Like how can I… what do I do day to day that helps them with it and then how can I pay that forward?
Thal
That’s awesome. I mean, as a student of transpersonal psychology I can tell you that in many ways mainstream psychology uses labels, which are important, but they can be limiting and you can see how a lot of your creativity comes from those intense emotions. And that’s okay.
Jeff Warren
It’s okay. But it’s a pain in the ass. [laughing]
Thal
It is. I know from personal experience.
Jeff Warren
How do you work with it?
Thal
Same thing. I’m just, you know, more practice is what’s helping for me. My bypassing was through books for a long time as you can see. Yeah. So practice is very important. That’s all I can say.
Jeff Warren
How do you metabolize? Do you have energies that you work with are really challenging?
Thal
Um, anger, lots of anger.
Jeff Warren
How do you transmute it? What’s your alchemical process?
Thal
You know, what? I actually just dive deep into it and just, it takes me back to certain moments in my life. Like certain scenarios and I just lived through that moment and just, you know, sort of comfort myself through that moment and it just like .. [explode], that charge just goes away. And, um, and when I revisit that moment at a later date it’s like, “why was I that angry?” So, yeah.
Jeff Warren
Interesting.
Thal
Yeah. So we’d like to go into more mystical questions. Um, you know, the word even mysticism and the word spirituality. A lot of people are like, oooh. What do they mean to you?
Jeff Warren
Uh, I mean there are about questions of being and belonging. They’re the fundamental questions of that “here we are,” you know, some people from the philosophical would call them existential questions. We get busy with life and we get busy with the kind of operational side of life and many of us forget that actually we’re inside this enormous mystery. We don’t know how we got here. I mean really got here we can have all the explanations we want about biology and physics and, but which has all legitimate and wonderful, but there’s a larger mystery of why there is something in the first place and why there’s, it feels like something to be alive and what is the nature of awareness and what is the relationship between how we’re aware and the world around us and each other. And um, these are very, very, very fundamental questions. And for some people they never fall off the map. They never, they never fall off the kind of table of concerns, you know, you may get preoccupied with your life, but it’s sort like life still has this existential highlight or under it where you’re just a little bit wondering about the periphery that the big questions, the big questions. And so that was for me, they never fell off the table. Like when I was a kid, I was interested in them and I just stayed interested and eventually I realized, oh wow. Because I was an atheist at the time because I thought I didn’t have a way to understand that there was something soulful about spirituality or religion. I just heard the bad, the negative side of it, and saw the negative side. So I didn’t know. I thought the only way into this inquiry was through philosophy. I didn’t know you could actually feel into the inquiry. So I would say mysticism and spirituality are attempts to feel, to directly experienced the mystery, the these fundamental questions of being. And what we learn is that these aren’t just academic questions, that the way we feel into them, the orientations we make in our own experience change what we begin to understand about the nature of that mystery, the nature of our being, the beingness, whatever you want to call it, and that there are always going to be mystery there, but that certain parts of that mystery can start to be resolved in a very interesting way. Like the question of who we are, which we think of as, oh, this academic question, and actually you can know who you are, you there is an answer to that. It’s an ongoing answer, but it gets more and more deep and more and more vivid. The responses to that. So that would be how I would describe, uh, what mysticism is. Ohh – just got stung by a small bee. “Hello. Don’t forget the mystery” [laughing] Actually it wasn’t a sting. Just a little…
Adrian
That’s awesome. Jeff, I’d love to hear you talk about, um, just along the lines of different experiences of the nature of mind and you hear people bring terms up like ‘nonduality’ or ‘nondual states’ and the experience of it not so much, you know, finding a universal definition, but just what can you share about that, from talking to others and having personal experiences about specific states we can have that changes your concept of who you are. I mean the experience of who you are. Not the definition of it.
Jeff Warren
Yes. I mean, I can talk a lot about, this is my favorite subject. Um, it’s kind of like where to start, uh, because as someone who wrote about consciousness and was a journalist about it, I was interested in this from the beginning. And so I spent many years interviewing teachers and practitioners about these subjects, but also many years exploring on my own, so I have both a kind of intellectual understanding of what it is that I could speak to and that intellectual understanding is never completed. I’m always dissatisfied with it because I know it barely even points to what the thing is and I’m always updating it because there’s a continual process of seeing, oh, I was sort of naive about that. Or I can see how my early questions around. We’re really kind of more naive and as I get more experienced I get more sober around it. Um, but then I have my, I’m more comfortable even I would say talking about my own experience and my own experience is, first of all, I consider myself to be still very early in the path. And I have people in my life and teachers I admire who are very, very, very deep in what I would call a more non dual state. Meaning they, so this is where it gets already. You’re trying to define it, meaning they are in a vivid relationship with the big picture, the big picture of who they are, the big picture of their own life. Um, sometimes that’s experienced through emptiness, through a sense that they, there’s a kind of emptiness all around them that is both who they are and continually refreshing them. Sometimes it’s experienced through a more of a sense of unity, um, where, and that there’s unity in these things too. So the analogy is the classic analogy that I like that fits with my own experience is this idea of a crystal. So there’s a crystal and we go around and around the crystal, which is our own being. And we’ve, we polished different facets of the crystal. So every time, and you’re continually making a pass around the crystal. You polish this facet. And one facet is this facet of emptiness. And it’s possible the emptiness facet as somehow more privileged or deeper, more fundamental than all the others. That’s possible. And then you have the facet of unity of just like, which is, which can be. There’s different facets of the facet of unity. It can be just that there’s no inner activation and you’re so completely open to the world there’s only the world. That’s a more accessible end of it. But there are also ends of it where you literally feel yourself to be everything you’re looking at and it’s looking back at you, which my teacher Shinzen has. That’s another facet that unity. Um, there are other facets, like a spacious facet, which is one that I have a lot. There’s a kind of love or a heartbreak intimacy like, “oh!” [laughing] You know that one? Just like, “oh my God, the sacredness!”. Which is a spaciousness and the unity and an emptiness and the love. And it’s like, oh my God. So there’s these different facets that come to the floor. And for me as a practitioner, I would fall into one of these facets, uh, at a meditation retreat or in a ceremony, and I would think, oh my God, this, now this is it, this is the thing. I now know what they’re talking about. I’m here now. And then two things happened. One, to me, they’re like, oh shit. So I would just, it would fade. Sometime, you know, this, sometimes it would fade. It almost immediately started to fade after a few hours. Sometimes it would fade after a few weeks. I mean I had experiences of being deep and kind of space, this spacey, but open, spacious, intimate thing for weeks sometimes preceded by something dramatic. Sometimes I just kind of gradually got there and I would be in it for awhile and then it would just fade out. That’s one thing that would happen. It would fade. But then what would happen is I would suddenly reify that thing and I’d be trying to get back to it. And it took me years to realize that, oh, that was just one facet, because the next time I got back to it, it wasn’t that it was something else. It was a different facet.
Thal
And different and maybe better!
Jeff Warren
Exactly. And often it was like, oh no, this is the real one. It’s just this was just a shadowy version of this much more real one, which now is hopefully gonna be here for a longer time. I never think that now now is my teacher Shinzen and say the small self always comes back. The small self. I mean that you would want to use that language. But the relative world, the contraction and the conditioning, it comes back. And. But what I’ve noticed over the years, and so the only thing what I can say is most true, but my experience is that I feel like it’s on a, it’s easier to find all the time, more and more that I still forget. But then as soon as just talking about right now, it’s very immediate for me. It’s, it’s there as a feeling. I don’t have to, I can’t even. There’s no words, it’s like a direction. I can feel this. It’s like a, a kind of a charge in my experience, a fullness and kind of Ooh Yeah. And it’s very centering too. That’s there and it’s there more and more when I want it. And I, I had a long, for many years I reified this particular kind of cessation experience I thought you needed to have that would officially bring me into stream entry because I was into the models of stream entry. I was in the progress of insight. Shinzen is super into stream entry. Pragmatic Dharma’s into stream entry. You know, Daniel Mingram all these people, whatever. I was like, “yeah, I’m going to get stream entry!” And I’m going to have this experience of stream entry, which is going to be a cessation. I’m going to go through the emptiness door, the impermanence door as opposed to the suffering door which is really the door I was going through again and again and I like this door! But it really fucking hurts. But I’m like, but that’s the door out going through. And what I didn’t realize at the time was that people go through that kind of a door, have a particular kind of brain, you know, they, they’re like kind of Aspergers-ey flavoured nerds who tend to be really good at concentration and really good at clarity and they get the kind of… Disappear. And so I was trying to make that happen, but I was to add to get the, to get that to happen because I just didn’t have a good enough concentration. And so it took me years to just stop to get wise and to stop trying to get enlightened and stop trying to get stream entry and stop trying to compare myself to anybody else and just embrace the fact that I have no clue where I am on any map. Uh, I know I’m technically in the stream in the sense that like the stream of my practice and the stream of my experiences now just taking me places, like I don’t have to do anything. It just happens whether I want to or not. Um, and so I still practice deliberately, but I can feel the momentum. It’s like, Woo Hoo, you know. And sometimes I wish it wasn’t there because it’s not going to be through walls sometimes, like Bam, Bam, Bam. It’s like, it’s like a train that’s just going forward now. And sometimes you’re smashing through big dry brushes, full of thorns and sometimes you’re in these great views and other times you’re like, it’s not going through a wall or running over somebody. Not Quite. So that’s, hopefully that’s some, those are some models. In some ways you’re talking about it. There’s probably lots more I could say. I don’t even know why I said that, but that’s what I said.
Adrian
Yeah. I mean, I’m, I’m sitting here listening and I wonder for those that don’t normally geek out on or maybe even non-meditators, you know, is there something in these experiences that’s worth sharing? About maybe why it might be useful or, you know, sort of bring it to a practical level. Um, because I, you know..
Jeff Warren
I love it.
Adrian
I’m with you. I mean, we both would geek out and want to have all these rich experiences. But how do we bring it back to the real world? And what’s the point?
Thal
Right.
Jeff Warren
Awesome question. Thank you for bringing us back to the real world. I will say this is the real world, by the way. This is the real, real world as you know. Um, so okay. This is my also my interest. This is my interest is continually making this real and trying to ground this in practical, real world stuff. So I always, so thanks for bringing me back. I always end up in this place and then I think well, okay, how can I bring it around? So let me think. Um, uh, a couple things come to mind. Um, you said your podcast is about the crisis of meaning in our lives, uh, the crisis of meaning in our culture. I also agree there is a crisis of meaning. Um, it’s important that everybody asks themselves at some point in their life what is meaningful to me, not as an academic inquiry, but what am I doing? How am I being when a sense of meaning suffuses my experience. Because I guarantee that when that sense of meaning suffuses your experience, you are most of service to the world around you, almost always, and you are most in your gifts, your most in your being in some way. Um, that’s what I’m talking about. These practices bring us into that relationship with our lives. Every time another facet on that diamond is meaning that is literally a facet on a diamond. So anytime you are experiencing something meaningful, you are polishing that. You are in that space. So what I would want to say is I make it sound as esoteric because as soon as the words come out of my mouth, it becomes a thing that we reify and think, oh, this is happening to that guy over there. But it was just my lived experience and it’s your lived experience right now. If in this conversation I said something that you just sort of went, “Huh, wait a second”. In that moment you’re touching that diamond. It’s right there in your life. You’re either going to accidentally find this out or you’re going to start to get deliberate about how to touch it more often, but if you’re not getting deliberate about how to touch it. Why are you here? Because everything is about that. When you’re, when you’re telling someone you love them, when you’re caring for a child, when you’re doing social justice work, you are touching that diamond. You can do it in a way you could do it without realizing you’re touching it or you can be deliberate about it and make it a deliberate practice. And then all good flows from there. So it’s, we’re all rivers go. It’s, we’re all rivers begin.
Adrian
Beautiful. Awesome. Yeah, we’ve been hitting on this, but I, I also want to hear a little bit about just the various process of awakening, you know. Not as a singular experience but just, you know, awakening from… Awakening insinuates that something was asleep. So if you can touch on.. like you mentioned, there are many paths and many practices, but these experiences seem universal and it sounds like people have these common overlaps in the experiences of awakening when it comes to consciousness.
Jeff Warren
Yeah. So I think a lot about this and I think, I guess if I had to describe it as the most in the most generous, meta, universal way, that would embrace all traditions and cultures. I would say there’s a process in human life, which is kind of like a second… It’s kind of like a process of puberty that you go through, but it’s like a second kind of puberty period. Uh, but that happens more to fully formed adults. And that is a process of waking up to your bigger self. A larger wholeness, um, of understanding that you’re intimately connected to the world around you and you are part of it and not you’re waking up to that not as an academic idea, but as a lived experience of feeling that connection and that intimacy. And some people don’t even talk about it in the sense that it’s just what’s happening. And they would say, yeah, that’s sort of happened to me, but they didn’t need to make a big deal of it or call it awakening or, and they didn’t really notice. It was just a very gradual thing. So that’s how I often think about it, as practices accelerating the aging gracefully gradient. If you’re aging well in life, you’re going to go that direction anyway. And your grandparents know people like this or are people like this, you know your teachers, your mentors, you know, doctors, accountants whatever. There’s a way of aging where you’re just taking your own stuff a little less seriously and letting your borders be a little more porous. So that’s a process. Now that process can go very. It’s sort of like a hockey stick. We can start to move into that process, but there is definitely a depth dimension to that process where it can get very, very, very deep, hardcore or I wouldn’t say hardcore, but very serious spiritual practice as a way of accelerating that hockey stick. And getting really clear about the deeper end of where it can lead. As they’re doing that, sometimes the movement is very gradual the whole time and it’s like slowly boiling a frog, you know, you don’t… There’s very little contrast sometimes are discontinuous jumps were all of a sudden there’s a lot of contrast. So that’s what a lot of the maps are trying to get you to have a discontinuous jump where there’s a noticeable before and after. That’s what a cessation is. It’s what the classic path moments in Buddhism or you know, a big Nondual moment like in an Advaita traditional, “oh wow now I’ve had an awakening”. I realize it’s an awakening because you’re waking up to a previous level of sleepiness, but there’s always a, there’s always a previous level and a level of being more awake. And sometimes the problem is someone has a big jump and then they go, wow, that was it. I was asleep. Now I’m awake. But they don’t realize is there a lot more awakenings to come. They’re like small awakenings to show you that actually weren’t as awake as you thought you were. I don’t know if it ever ends, like there’s always… Because you’re, you’re, as you’re living, you’re, you’re accumulating veils, you’re accumulating kind of confusions and your awakening them to them at the same time and I don’t have enough experience directly myself to know if he ever get to someplace that is more permanently awake. I do know that having interviewed teachers, some teachers say especially the Nondual types “no, that’s it. You’re there”. Not Me, them. And maybe they are. And then other teachers who seem very there say no, “I’m never always there”. And I don’t know myself, I just feel like I’m always in process, but I will say I feel like I’m still low down on the hockey stick. Not to put a hierarchy in it, but I recognize people who really have deep experience and I know I have a certain depth of experience, but I, I also like, you know, there’s a lot I don’t know yet, so I’m just kind of giving you the report from what I know so far.
Thal
It’s like an ever expanding circle. I was actually just talking about that with you yesterday is that sometimes I go through, sometimes I think it’s the same experience, but I realize no, it feels like…A lot of my experiences are around nature and I’m like, it’s the same tree, but I feel a different depths now and they’re like, it’s like you’re shedding a light on a different spot in your psyche or something. I don’t know. It’s hard to put it in language..
Jeff Warren
I get it. Keep going. Whatever you’re doing is the right practice. Because you’re describing something very…. In different ways, people talk about that, so there’s the continual polishing of the mirror of awakening or the or the crystal. There’s the sense of the journey going around and you take another pass and it gets deeper. In the traditional way of conceiving the four path model of awakening within Theravada Buddhism, the idea is that you go around these cycles of like effort, breakthrough, challenge, integration, effort, breakthrough type challenge, integration, and you go around them again and again and then it and after a while you’re like, Oh God, I’ve been here before. I’ve been here before I here again here again, after a while there’s a shift and then next time you go around it you’re going around it at a higher level of a layer or a level of integration. It’s a new path moment. That’s when you move from first path to second path for example, or for a second about the third path. I know it sounds like a video game. It’s ridiculous, but that is how actually some people think of it for better or for worse, but the insight is more like what you’re pointing to that we go around and around and it seems like we, we seem like, oh, this is it. This is now we understand it, or this is how it is. And then there’s something that changes and now we’re at a deeper level of getting it and now all of a sudden, wow, now you know you’re in. And that’s really important to notice because that’s what you can. That shows you that you’re moving in this direction and, by the way, there’s one big caveat or I should say are big thing. I should’ve said at the beginning, which is that none of these experiences necessarily are the thing to look for in your practice in life.
Thal
And that’s important to mention. Yes.
Jeff Warren
It’s super important. What matters is, are you, are you more in your life, you know, are you growing in the way you want to grow? Are you more connected to your friends, your whoever, like don’t chase these experiences and the experiences themselves, are they just come and go the litmus test of any successful practices always are you growing in the way you want to grow in a very reasonable, practical way? Are you more present, more loving, more available, and you should have a litmus. You should have an idea in your head of an intention around what it is you want for your life and that’s kind of a feedback loop that you’re using.
Thal
Absolutely. And that’s again, it’s about bringing it back to the practical in the “real world.”
Jeff Warren
Totally.
Adrian
That’s awesome. Jeff. Yeah. I’m just being mindful of time. Maybe like 10 minutes left and I’d love also touch on society, you know, mindfulness in society. So outside of the individual, but looking the collective reasons why it’s important to have individual practices. I read in one of your articles, you talked about the democratization of mental health and I’d love to hear your vision of this because it sounds like it’s linked to your role as a teacher and empowering students to develop their own skills and tools to take control of their mental wellbeing.
Jeff Warren
Yeah. Well thank you for asking that. That is my absolute passion and it’s sort of like where that’s the my learning edge right now as a teacher or even kind of think about yourself as a practitioner. So my whole thing is to actually dissolve the difference between practitioner and teacher and actually even beyond that to dissolve the difference between practitioner, teacher and just regular human. That I, I kind of want to say that being a teacher, I wish it was a better word for it is really the ultimate human thing to be. Um, and that the more we realize that, uh, and that it’s not exotic and that although there are, there are definitely people who have more and less experience in so far as we can be honest about our own challenges in who we are, we are in the role of a teacher at that moment and that our own practice is the ultimate creative thing to discover and then to share. So that’s my vision and I’m, and I’m just trying to learn to articulate it, you know, in the progression of my from practitioner to teach her to more experienced teacher. I started out just about learning the skills. What was I doing? I got good at teaching the skills to other people and that’s Kinda like the consolidated back end of my moving process, that is Jeff. Um, and that’s now beginning to support me to be able to do with the front end, which is, oh, actually the next layer out is this larger service to all, to all and this empowerment to make everybody a teacher to, to remove this idea that somehow this teacher is special. Uh, and to see that in the way I just described, when we are in a place of honesty about who we are and where we’re at, we’re in that role and that I want to be able to teach people what is the basic stuff around mental, spiritual, emotional health that everyone should know in the same way that everyone has to know the basics of healthy nutrition and the basics of good exercise. So that’s my thing. Now it’s like, okay, what are those things and how do I do that? How do I impart that in a way that’s responsible and safe and respects the, you know, the, I mean the fraught territory of mental, emotional health, which is serious, but at the same time, if we get too worried about the fraught territory of it, then we, we just, we then we leave the territory only for specialists and we don’t have enough specialists to go around and talk about the world today. There’s a crisis and mental health. There are teen suicide rates are through the roof. There are people with major technology addictions like shit is just like there’s an environmental crisis in the external world. There’s an inner environmental crisis where everything is coming apart and we need to put all hands on deck so we don’t have time to get it perfect and it’s important to have an amateur guide than they have no guide at all and so I’m all about putting myself on the line by saying that and trying to create programs and empower people. It’s true I’m an empowerment teacher. “Do it!” So I have the free community resources on the CEC website that I just wrote that are all about empowering people to startup practice groups. I have a workshop I’m doing now that I’m just starting to do with a friend of mine that’s about teaching like what are the okay over the weekend, what can I teach that I think is most important for people? And then I get them to iterate, learning, figuring out a practice to share and guiding others and then, and getting a feel for what that looks like. And then always with the understanding that the person in front of you is a different nervous system in. And you have to also be always teaching that pluralism in that respect for their own teacherness, you know?
Adrian
Yeah. We’ll definitely share a lot of those links in the show notes for people that want to get involved and are equally excited about this. Um, you, you talked about teens. Actually, I’m curious to hear your experience teaching young adults, you know, who are going through a ton of life transition I imagined. And what is that like, you know, bringing in the practice to the youth and you know, the next generation of leaders?
Jeff Warren
Uh… You gave me goosebumps thinking about it. It’s the greatest like, um… Oh, it’s the greatest honor and privilege of my life because you see kids at this moment in life where it’s about to go off the rails and all of a sudden it turns the corner. And um, and you just see their life change right in front of you and it’s not anything you’re even doing something they’re doing and it mostly comes from sharing and talking and check in with each other and being in a safe place where the armor can come off and it’s like a overwhelming, uh, sometimes it’s such a privilege and I just, I could just be there as a fly on the wall. It’s the most humbling experience too because, you know, it’s my biggest teacher, because I’m learning in those contexts. They teach me to be more honest about who I am and they show me the privilege of just holding the space of not being the guy with the answers or some special teacher. I’m just the wallpaper. And it’s that humility is like, you can’t even. It’s priceless, you know? So, uh..
Adrian
That’s really special. Thank you for sharing that.
Jeff Warren
And it’s amazing, you know, because you see like, it’s not even that they’re doing tons of meditation. It’s more like you’re continually bringing the principles of openness and you’re creating a space where those are such high values that they start to get into the sharing with each other more and more real and honest and you know, that’s where all the healing comes. It’s not so much for the sitting. The sitting is good too, but it’s really just that. And you can’t put too much sitting into a teenager treat. They got too much juice. You don’t want them to be sitting all the time is not good for a teenager.
Adrian
Jeff, would you mind actually leading us through a bit of a closing meditation who we thought it’d be nice to leave our listeners as well. Maybe you can do a quick close.
Jeff Warren
I’d love to. Thank you for asking me. Can I do like a 10 minute practice?
Adrian
Yeah, that’d be great.
Thal
That would be amazing.
Jeff Warren
So what about… I had this idea of what a nice dark with the equanimity principle, the principle that’s there and every vehicle and every um, and try to tune people into that quality because that’s the one thing I want people to be able to remember. Um, and then I kind of go, I’ll go a little bit into the concentration principle. This principle, devoting yourself and learning how to bring your resources together. Um, and there’s a principle simplicity in that that’s so important. And then, and then finish it with a kind of love or compassion principal. So just three principles, exploring three principles, how they might show up in a sitting practice or in moment to moment.
Thal
Perfect.
Jeff Warren
And if you’re driving, don’t do this practice. Or do it in a very light way. Just connect to the spirit of it. Make your driving, make your cars and sights and sounds around you of driving the practice. Just in case we don’t want to have a 10 car pileup. That would be, that would not be good. Whoops. [laughing]
Okay. So you can start by if you like having your eyes kind of open at half mast or closed. It’s really about where you feel comfortable, what makes you feel kind of comfortable, because that’s what we’re aiming for here and I like to start with just a couple of breath, kind of indicate to my body, mind and meditation starting, so breathing in on the inhale, breeding out on the exhale, softening the face and the jaw. Not exhale is like the relaxation, the downward motion, and because I was all stirred up and activated, they’re talking about stuff I was interested in. I can feel there’s a lot of energy and agitation in my system. There might be some in years, so as we breathe out, just imagine you’re kind of like a snowglobe. All that snow is settling in your head and breathing out. As you breathe out, the sediment starts to come down. Let’s explore this first principle, principle of equanimity. This is a principle of opening. It’s about being available to what’s actually happening in experience and there’s a palpable feeling of it. There’s a kind of palpable sense of it we might get. Then often we get it in relationship to something so I to ask you to see if in relationship to my voice, see if you can imagine my voice is just a sound wave that’s floating right through you, so if there’s any bracing, any subtle way in which you’re braced against my voice or you’re kind of tense through the front of your body, seeing if you could just let go of that and open your body through the front of your body opening so that you’re welcoming not only my voice, but all any ambient sounds and where you’re listening. You’re welcoming your own many sensations in your body, even your own thoughts. It’s like you’re kind of letting go and there’s this sort of settling back and letting everything else just come forward and be there and you’re not interfering with it. That tiny adjustment, that whatever it is you just did there, that’s the thing to notice this thing of like there’s only one thing to learn here. It’s like that. Do this all the time. Every moment of the day stopped and let go and breathe and just let yourself come more fully into the present, not fighting with in subtle ways with what’s around you, what’s moving through you. It feels like openness for me. It feels like not being uptight, so the next principle is the principle of commitment, devotion, concentration, simplicity. They’re all ways of talking about the similar thing, which is that we choose something in our experience. Maybe it’s the feeling of the breath or the sense of our whole body just sitting here sense of the whole container of everything. Maybe it sounds so. The the, the thing we devote ourselves to, it can be very wide, could be everything or be very narrow. Just the sensation of breathing at the nose or in the belly and we see if we can get. If we can notice the softest subtlest part, whatever that is that we want to devote ourselves to and we let our thoughts be in the background as best we can. We see if we can as an experiment. Can you bring all qualities of your attention to they all converge on this one juicy thing and what are the keys to this is to find the softest part, the subtlest part, to get curious about that curiosity builds or awareness or discernment or clarity, and there is this delicacy and attention. Can you let your breath slow down, just naturally get very still and very delicately to you into the softest part of the sensation, even if it’s the big quote, “sensation of your own being”. And let the face be soft, no strain. As we get close to the end of this little mini meditation, maybe even let a small smile sort of crack on your lips because the last piece here is about appreciation. It’s about love, about caring, starting with your own experience. Can you smile in a way that’s appreciative of whatever sensations, whatever is going on like you’re your own care or giver your own mother or father secretly delighted by the sensations and feelings, even the hard ones. No, not at the smile. Expand and the kindness of friendliness overflow into images or thoughts that people that you know. If you’re close to mentors, old teachers and grandmothers, pets and animals, friends see you. Breathe, eating and your respect as a key to breathe it into your heart. I’m breathing out your care. Breathing in your, your gratitude for these connections, the sweetness. This is, these are them. These are the people. This is what showed up in your life. Breathing in your thanks. Breathing out your care, sending them your love, your respect and appreciation, and this is the net piece. This idea that we’re in this interconnected web through time and space connected through generations. We breathe in energy through that, that Web, that net, breathing it into our hearts, gathering in that energy is strength as support and then breathing out your own care and respect back through that same network, giving away the blessings of this short practice, not holding onto it for yourself, but sharing the wealth. Thank you. I’ll just bow down to you guys. If I had a bell I’d ring it. There’s a little short practice for you.
Adrian
It was an honour and a pleasure.
Thal
Thank you.
Jeff Warren
Thank you.