I see some wack shit on the internet. When it comes to political and plutocratic agendas, I’ve been sanded smooth, and tend to tune it out. But when I’m exposed to self-styled experts expounding their authority on the right way to engage with spiritual practice—which I consider to be simple, conscious participation in the endless stream of experience—I bristle.

The writer is often someone who has sat retreats, romped with machine elves, and received a few transmissions. These credentials don’t relieve them of …

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and whatever is said
in the world, or forgotten,
or not said, makes a form.

The choice is simply,
I will—as mind is a finger,
pointing, as wonder
a place to be.

— Robert Creeley, from The Finger

There is a great deal of writing online about waking up. Few write about the descent. After awakening, personal work continues. For someone who no longer operates with self-reference at all, which I’d call realization, the conditioned material still renders but no longer registers as a problem. Most of us are not there yet. For most, awakening is not the end of the path but a reorientation. The view has changed, but the old material is still in the system.

It can be heartbreaking to feel utterly open, no longer scanning for threat, and then realize how deeply our roots are still tangled in escape and hurt. Survival strategies don't unwind just because we've seen their hollow core. Disowned parts reintegrate through sustained, embodied willingness to feel what we once refused. Confusing openness with the integration work that follows is one of the more common challenges. It produces people who can speak fluently about non-duality while still hiring everyone around them to carry their disowned vulnerabilities.

Scroll any meditation subreddit, and you'll find a frenzy of practitioners willing to validate or, sometimes cruelly, invalidate one another's numinous experience. Anyone who has experienced dazzling transpersonal radiance, infinitude, boundless love, or the full bloom of the ordinary knows the question that follows. Was the opening genuine? The materialist habit is to dismiss anecdote, and there is no objective source of confirmation. The question quickly runs aground.

A guiding model is that open awareness interrupts self‑absorption. As awareness becomes as familiar and real as self‑absorption, it gradually pervades it, until self‑absorption becomes unsustainable and collapses. Sometimes the collapse is for a moment, sometimes for a lifetime.

I was 21, and I sat on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean...

My senses reveled in the delicate confluence of waves, clouds, and the fragrant ocean breeze. I was transported by the elemental interplay, settling into a relaxed alertness charged with insight. The transmission had an alien quality: ‘it’s not what you think’. This simple slogan carried dramatic impact, my young mind steeped in cultural formulas and anesthetized cynicism.

Any sense of being an entity distinct from wind, waves, grass, and sky collapsed. The envelope of self-reference unwound, and I ‘saw’ the wind working in concert with the ocean in a symphony of symmetry. I was wholly available to the world.

Hui-Neng’s flag koan ‘Not the wind, not the flag; the mind is moving’ unfurled and was settled on the spot.

Another ambient utterance breezily suggested ‘you are it,’ which seemed just fine, because at that moment, I was everything. There was infinite nothing indivisibly woven with colorful, alluring, and spontaneous appearances. The notion that I was a discrete and problematic person melted, and the world oozed a profound simplicity. Two decades of tension uncoiled, sparking flowing tears and rapturous laughter.

In a scant few minutes, my life was turned inside out. The DNA of self-reference unraveled, and my protective fictions rendered transparent.

I hadn’t thought about that morning in years until Oshan Jarrow asked me about ‘oh shit’ moments for his Pivot Points podcast.

Reentry was a messy process. I had no training, no teacher, no map, and little capacity to integrate what had happened. Experiencing groundlessness felt unsustainable.

In my effort to put the pieces back together, I reverse-engineered habitual closure. Choosing inaccuracy over sanity was my boyish effort to zip back into my cocoon. The hallucinatory sense of agency and cultural membership was seductive—and for a 21-year-old, a symptom of health.

Barry Smith—if we can speak of such a person in such a state—could not long bear such a cosmic perspective, where endless waves of time flooded him with trillions of bits of experience and linear time was replaced by meaningfulness in an Everything All at Once. He certainly understood that his humanity 'was immaterial to the cosmic everything that has always been, and shall always continue to be so.' [...] Smith could no longer bear his nonlocal Superman Self that was everywhere all at once. He needed his Clark Kent ordinariness back. He wanted his precious finitude, the sense, even if illusory, that he was not everything everywhere always. - Jeffrey Kripal, Mutants and Mystics

For the next several years I worked through Campbell, Suzuki, Jung, Wilber, Zimmer, Kabat-Zinn, Hillman, the Mind & Life transcripts. Eventually I moved into the Vajrayāna philosophical literature and intensive practice. I was ravenous. Learning lexicons was intoxicating, but eventually I realized I was substituting description for experience.

Study was a brittle replacement for what had happened at the ocean, but it reinstated a self-referential center as the organizing principle. It’s funny to think that I was unconsciously trying to credential myself for a return to free fall.

What happened on the cliff was spontaneous: an awakening out of absorption in personal drama. That is the first stage, and it is the one people often write about. The subsequent steps grind forward and are usually less dramatic. Habitual patterns usually return, and even if the sense of separate self collapses entirely, our circumstances and habits will still be there. What changes is our relationship to them.

The behavioral residue is the marker. If the people around a practitioner are still being harmed by unresolved reenactment behaviors, the fruitional recognition has not yet been integrated developmentally. If we are going to live in society, if we are going to be parents, partners, teachers, or people who hope to be of any use, developmental work is not optional. The people we live with experience our behavior—not our spiritual attainments.

Each moment is interpreted by the shape of learned reactions, cultural conditioning, emotional associations built through years of repetition, and neurological memory that predicts what is safe or threatening. We may wake up, but that doesn’t mean we spontaneously become skillful. We don’t suddenly speak French or know how to design spaceships. We don’t suddenly know how to have satisfying relationships.

Experiencing the relational field as empty of essential nature does not relieve us of the obligation to act like an adult. Fruitional experience and developmental capacity often advance independently. Non-conceptual experience can stabilize, transmission capacity can be real, and attainment can be genuine, while moral self-authorship remains at the cultural baseline. Realization doesn’t retroactively audit the entitlements we inherit.

Many of us have been locked in orbit by someone whose gravitational pull is powered by bypass. I recently experienced this pattern up close: practice that was genuine and conduct that was consistently at odds with it. In the classroom, there was practical transmission; outside it, a steady pattern of overreach, reframing, and entitlement. Spiritual path language was used as a deflection. Boundary violations got reframed as misunderstandings. Unilateral decisions were recast as generosity. Professional limits got met with appeals to love and connection, as though insisting on adult agreements is a form of hostility.

What struck me was how seamlessly awakening and entitlement operated side by side. I had to admit I had abandoned myself in the presence of spiritual credentials I respected. When I stopped taking my own experience seriously, theirs started to feel more real than mine. This is one shape of spiritual bypass—not only the teacher’s, but mine too.

If you find yourself in this kind of bind, pull the location of disturbance back to yourself. Not: are they right, are they unethical, are the credentials real. Instead: what am I experiencing right now that I am trying to escape from? Then it becomes possible to respond rather than react, instead of treating someone else’s experience as more real than our own.

What the Vajrayāna traditions espouse, and what the contemporary meditation scene underplays, is that the descent is the longer and more interesting part of the path. Tantra does not engineer ideal conditions for awakening. There is no controlled environment, no fragile attainment to protect.

The path works with friction, interruption, the texture of unconditional participation in experience. Obstacles are a treasured medium. The well-rounded practitioner cultivates competence across a range of disciplines: dharma, medicine, astrology, art, writing, ritual.

Each domain puts a different kind of pressure on the path work, exposing a different layer of what we have been organizing our lives not to feel. Personal work makes it harder to blame circumstance. Interpersonal work makes it harder to blame other people. And the longer you spend in spiritual practice, the thinner the fantasy that some future enlightenment will sort everything out. Competence across disciplines is not only a matter of craftsmanship. It is an opportunity to stay in contact with enough varieties of friction that our avoidance strategies can no longer escape notice.

The metaphor I keep coming back to is making music. There is the pregnant silence, and there is the articulation of a note: its attack, register, and release. For practitioners of the absorptive paths, samādhis develop an unbound interiority that prioritizes inner experience. The encounter is one of fullness without object: ‘I am nothing’. The practitioner has stopped being armored by distraction, and the absence of defensive structures feels like a homecoming.

The Tantric ideal is to recognize appearances as the seamless expression of awareness. A move toward unconditional aliveness: the texture of breath, the weight of a lover’s words, the joy of assembling a meal. The path culminates in ‘I am everything’—the experience of that same awareness stitched into the fabric of ordinary life.

By design, the absorptive paths often do not cultivate the articulation of the note. They face away from appearance. A practitioner who has spent decades practicing jhāna may return to the world to find that playing music has not been getting any easier.

Vajrayāna traditions take the open clarity of awareness for granted as the ground and orient downward and outward from there, into the body, the senses, relationships, occupation, and craft. The methods of the inner tantras use the breath, channels, vital essences, and deities as a way to interpret the body as subtle and effulgent, and to replace out-of-date conceptions of flesh, ideas, and mind.

A phrase that intrigues me from the Ādvaita tradition is ‘This is it. This is everything,’ which sounds like a grandiose claim but in practice is a considerably more modest tool. It suggests the practitioner has stopped trying to be defined by the achievement of enlightenment. Nor do they find themselves solely defined by the messy aspects of being human.

Immediate experience can clarify that appearances and awareness are inseparable. At any moment we can lean toward the conventional self, with its preferences and consequences, or rest as an open field, free of reference point. Learning to move between these views, rather than collapse into one formula, is a craft. Reality does not change, but our perspective can.

“For instance, we need to look with our eyes to laugh,” he said, “because only when we look at things can we catch the funny edge of the world. On the other hand, when our eyes see, everything is so equal that nothing is funny.” - Carlos Castaneda

A figure that made a craft of post-awakened living is Jerry Garcia. His own opening came at Olompali Ranch in the sixties: three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, dying a few thousand times, the word ‘All’ floating into the sky before he turned into a field of wheat. He came out of it saying he had unravelled every strand of DNA in his body. His cocoon cracked, and it informed his craft.

He did not become the player he was by maintaining critical distance from traditional forms. He submitted to the rigors of the ever-shifting ground of living musical traditions. Bluegrass, folk, jazz, his devotion to the repertoire grew an improvisational style that defined his contribution to the American cultural landscape. He practiced obsessively. He mined traditional structure until new forms emerged.

Discipline requires releasing control, being a novice, sitting with incompetence and confusion, and trusting that practice will guide us into more evolved dimensions of a form. There are modes and changes, licks absorbed from a hundred records, the structural accoutrements of theory, and in the hands of someone like Garcia those left-brain coordinates become transparent inside the playing.

Excellence is what emerges when innate capacity meets sustained practice. The Greeks had a word for this: aretē. Excellence understood as a thing’s nature fully realized through skilled action—the specific fulfillment that emerges when a person is doing what they are equipped to do, with attention, over time. Aretē is the fruit of a sustained descent.

The flow that emerges in that kind of playing is recognizable to anyone who has played in a locked-in ensemble. The individual disappears into the rhythm, the melody, the silence, and the texture of the room. The experience becomes a seamless dimension of play. These flow states extend across disciplines. For some Vajrayāna students, the confluence of yogic posture, breathwork, visualization, and devotion provides deeply gratifying access not only to flow states but also to nondual experience.

Clearly, Garcia had an exceptionally fun and interesting life propelled by his commitment to community, practice, and the joy of making music with others.

What I do is basically a Yoga. It’s a discipline. I think everybody should have a discipline, it can be inward, it can be outward, it doesn’t matter. Whatever your constitution likes. It’s just a matter of having something which you can relate to and say ‘this is for me’, this is me without anything else. This is as far as I have gone along this particular line. If it’s doing pushups or breathing or meditating. It’s something you know. It’s something there’s no bullshitting about. It’s basically real and it’s ... like, having something to relate to that’s basically real is always a good thing. Every person should have something like that. - Jerry Garcia

Garcia was also an addict. He started using heroin in the mid-1970s and struggled with it, on and off, until his death twenty years later. Neither his awakening nor his craftsmanship protected him from normative human struggles. I speculate that wakefulness amplified his sensitivity to his own traumas and inspirations. His commitment to his professional craft did not seem to offer him the relief and anonymity to work through his own inner struggles. He was a human being inside a human nervous system, with everything that comes with it.

The Vajrayāna lineage figures were brewers, hunters, prostitutes, drunks, fishermen, vagabonds, and miscreants. Virūpa drank his way through a tavern and paid the bill by holding the sun in the sky. Tilopa pounded sesame seeds by day and worked as a pimp for a prostitute by night. The mahāsiddhas were not exemplars of moral propriety. Realization arose inside lives that were just as chaotic as our own. The tradition refuses to whitewash the mess. The descent does not deliver us to a perfect life. Our relationship to our human mess is what shifts.

The developmental work is cleaning up the environment of inner experiencing. Not to cure pathology, but to soften the clamor and conflict in order to have more moments of open experience. What is already the case becomes easier to notice. The success we find plying our craft makes us more motivated to refine the foundations. Fundamentals feed each other in an ascending spiral, and a practitioner who has felt this is unlikely to settle for a cerebral or disembodied substitute.

Most of us are not going to be Garcia or Tilopa. The median practitioner is usually doing personal work that has more practical implications: getting better at being a good listener, being less reactive with their kids, taking personal responsibility for their behavior. Ken Wilber’s working standard is adequacy. You do not have to be Shakespeare to use language well, or a mahāsiddha to joyfully participate in life.

Meditation students are craftspeople. We may as well take ownership of that, and do our best work. One aspect of the work is a never-ending oscillation between the fruitional view, where there is nothing to fix, and the texture of relative experience, where there is plenty to investigate and improve.

This is inoculatory medicine, taken in small doses: tolerating openness, inviting formless panic in brief bouts. If it is only one second of awareness, great! The point is to bring our intention to that experience without worrying about how sustained or deep it is, and to do it often. It probably works better than sitting for half an hour trying to achieve openness. Short bouts of practice build the capacity to stay present with the existential intensity that usually launches us into reactivity. The fruits are unglamorous. The real upgrade is becoming less afraid of our own inner life.

We are back to the central Schwartzian theme of the simultaneous reality of form and formlessness, of the finite and the infinite. This is the final lesson of Superman for Alvin Schwartz, and the final lesson of Clark Kent: “The Superman self, as you believed even then, was not something one could live in all the time. It’s a far too heightened level of the personality. Sustaining it for too long could burn one out very quickly, and possibly do the same to those around one.” - Jeffrey Kripal, Mutants and Mystics

Contemporary online spiritual culture might be defined by the engineering of bliss states, the curation of cognitive models, the cataloguing of subtle body taxonomies, and the project of fusing traditions into a master synthesis. These are all fun and worthwhile pursuits. They support inner work, create community, and provide developmental milestones and lexicons. They just won’t give rise to realization. Committing to the inherent limitations of our human experience requires no particular framework or technique. Neither does being kind toward whatever arises in the endlessly fresh stream of immediate experience.

A spiritual formula turns unease into a problem to fix, which is the old neurotic project in camouflage. Avoidance has a predictable cost: when we turn away from raw, exposed feelings, they start to seem too big to face. Our bliss and flow states become fragile, easily unspooled by the smallest challenge. Each attempt to lock in a preferable state deepens the avoidance underneath.

Chasing bliss is an addiction. The pattern of sensing, avoiding, seeking relief, briefly acquiring, and sensing again is a cycle punctuated by moments of temporary release. The cycle reinforces the hallucinatory self and its preferences, which is what we wanted to be free of when we started on the meditative path.

The descending path feels counterintuitive. We stop recoiling from contraction. We move toward our vulnerability and practice being kind to our fears. We end the project of the divided self and recognize that disowned traits are us.

I notice this loop in myself. When aliveness is in the foreground, when sensation is effervescent and the interpretive overlay of self-reference has dimmed, the impulse to cobble together theories diminishes.

When life is chaotic, the impulse to use formulas becomes nearly irresistible. I have a markdown folder full of journaled constructs. Slogans, axioms, theoretical frameworks—these feel like a way to maintain some sense of control when the immediacy of experience feels inaccessible. An effort to re-member.

Spiritual formulas can become scaffolding for a flavor of Stockholm syndrome. We get cozy with familiar settings, conflicts, sensations, thought patterns, and cultural ideas. Then a spiritual experience hits, the walls drop, and we find ourselves exposed: naked, raw.

It helps to step out of the house into the open and still have a tipi to return to. Some practitioners adapt to living outdoors, exposed to the elements full-time. They’ve surrendered the idea that a solid, separate self has value beyond being a transitional instrument. Most of us are not them. The house is a port, not a prison.

I love Grant Morrison’s commentary on post-anomalous experience: “no matter how many fluorescent realms you visit, you still have to come home, take a shit, be able to cook dinner, water the plants and, most importantly, talk to people without scaring them. When you complete any magical work, ground yourself with a good laugh, a good meal, good shag, a run or anything else that connects you with the mundane world.”

Morrison’s irreverence emphasizes the weird and amusing side of life in a register the online spiritual genre sometimes misses. Visionary experience matters less than what happens when you come home.

As Morrison walks us back to the kitchen table, another reflex angles in the opposite direction: the post‑awakening fantasy of being a cosmic savior, commissioned to rehabilitate the world. A project of cosmic significance seems to demand cosmic agency.

I know this pull firsthand. My early awakenings led me into organizations working on nuclear disarmament, ocean conservation, peacekeeping, biodynamic farming. The work was interesting and the people inspiring, and part of the allure was the grand scale. I assumed that because open experience is unlimited and unconditioned, action in the world should be too.

But relative experience is conditioned, finite, and dense with friction. Post-awakening work means acting skillfully within those constraints. The work that’s transformed me most has been close to home with friends and family, where feedback is ongoing and my shortcomings are glaringly visible. None of this is an argument against working on hard, large problems. I only argue against the fantasy that meaningful work should feel unobstructed.

I try to release any drive toward a grand destination and experience each shift as fresh and ungraspable. The interesting question for me is what I am willing to do in the world: what craft I am committed to, what action I will take, and how I can relate to my community and intimates.

I took this photo of the flags at Tashi Gomang Stupa in Crestone, the woven colors, naked and vulnerable, surrendered to wind and weather. Wholly exposed to the elements that will fade and fray them. Pulsing and breathing in harmony with the flux of the sky.

My life sometimes feels less like this effortless surrender and more …

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I. Morning Chill

Each morning I feel the familiar twinges of resistance as I gaze into the pre-dawn autumn darkness. Maybe I’ll finally take a day off. I deserve a break. The drowsiness lifts, my village of senses coheres. I lumber outside in shorts and Birkenstocks, hips stiff and knees wobbly. The climbing crash pad is waiting in the backyard. I settle onto the cushion, scantily clad and cross-legged, and immediately the cold finds me. My shoulders pull inward, retracting toward my core in search of warmth. My face aches. My eyes blaze, scanning for relief.

A pair of rabbits watch from the fence line. One hops closer, curious or indifferent. A jay lands, broadcasting its morning scolding. The rabbits stare back, unreadable. I begin with a single word: “Recognize.”

My morning nod to the Mahāsandhi teaching is to see that everything is radiant cognizance. I register not just an awareness of the freezing air on my skin or the contraction in my shoulders, but that I am woven into the whole field of phenomena. Otherwise, my resolve collapses back into recoiling from cold—fixated, tight, desperate.

I begin by moving into the first posture, Dispelling the Problems of Prana. The entire trul khor sequence will ask more than this, but the body needs to be coaxed into flow.

I see my breath materialize in the cold air, clumsily anchor my attention, and finally release into quiet with a wordless inhale. I massage the legs, rotate through the core, take sweeping leaps side to side, then trace the torso’s plumb line.

Inspiration builds. The city sleeps. Only rabbits and jays stir while the sky brightens, mottled and radiant. Gratitude surfaces for teachers who trusted me, conditions that make the contemplation possible, and friends who call me out when I’m full of shit. My warm body meets the crisp October air—half-naked, ridiculous, alive—while the ridgeline sharpens and squirrels peer from the garden.

The initial posture resolves into the next. Streams of breath retention, visualization, and movement converge, and the body begins to hum.

I slowly draw in breath, feeling it pool in my lower abdomen. The diaphragm firms. The pelvic floor engages, a subtle lock sealing the container. Inside, something flickers: a solar warmth in my midsection, faint but insistent. Lunar and solar currents threading through the side channels, an illuminated spike of red energy coaxing prana toward the centermost stalk. I imagine myself enclosed in a crystalline bubble, translucent and permeable. No fireworks yet. Just the quiet mechanics of breath and intention, milking energy from the periphery toward immolation at the core.

I hold. The retention deepens. The body begs to clench: the urge to exhale, the tightness in my chest, the flicker of panic that I’ve held too long. But I stay and open into the recoiling sensations. The prana moves. Not dramatically, but enough to feel the current shifting, the heat gathering, a coalescence builds, effort unwinds.

Then, collapse of self-sense. Hearing remains. Seeing remains. Being remains. Concepts dissolve, leaving undivided, vivid, and incandescent presence. No Peter left to marvel or file it away as progress. Just a proclamation of open experience: vast, immediate, and utterly ordinary.

Tummo

I first encountered Tummo in the early 90s, combing through Mind & Life conference transcripts for rational explanations of anomalous experiences. This led me to Herbert Benson’s 1982 Harvard study, published in Nature, documenting Tibetan monks who could raise their peripheral body temperature by up to 15°F through breath and visualization alone. Working in freezing Himalayan monasteries, Benson’s team watched monks dry cold, wet sheets with body heat—a feat that would induce hypothermia in untrained individuals.

What interested Benson wasn’t the spectacle but the mechanism: these practitioners could voluntarily trigger vasodilation, widening blood vessels and directing blood flow through focused attention. This contradicted assumptions that meditation only calmed the nervous system. Follow-up studies revealed distinct brain activation patterns during practice, and later research identified different techniques producing different thermal and neural effects.

What Benson emphasized throughout his two decades of research was that the heat generation was merely a byproduct. As he explained: “Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There’s another reality we can tap into that’s unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world.” His work demonstrated that studying these advanced forms of meditation could “uncover capacities that will help us to better treat stress-related illnesses”—validating what contemplative traditions had maintained for centuries about the mind’s capacity to influence physiological processes once thought entirely involuntary.

A 2013 study by Dr. Maria Kozhevnikov at Gebchak Nunnery in eastern Tibet (above 4,200m altitude) validated and expanded this work. Her team identified two distinct types of g-Tummo practice: Forceful Breath (FB) and Gentle Breath (GB), each producing different temperature patterns and neural correlates. The FB method, which combines intense concentration with specific isometric exercises and breath retention, showed reliable increases in axillary temperature from normal to slight or moderate fever range (up to 38.3°C), accompanied by increases in alpha, beta, and gamma brainwave activity.

The research is compelling and the monks are impressive, but framing this as exotic spectacle misses the point. Benson was interested in stress-related illness. I’m interested in something adjacent: how we invite and tolerate complex experience without falling into reactive self-soothing.

The connection isn’t abstract. Stress-related illness can emerge from unskilled efforts at self-regulation, from our unconscious attempts to dissociate from intense emotional and sensation-level experience. We reflexively withdraw from what feels intolerable—reaching for our phones, picking fights, spiritualizing discomfort, numbing out—and that withdrawal can create secondary problems. What the Tibetan monks demonstrated wasn’t superhuman physiology. It was the result of training the nervous system to remain present with intensity instead of trying to escape it—a capacity that can be developed through consistent engagement.

Most of us are working at our edge most of the time. Disciplines that expand capacity are worth investigating. What matters is whether they help us hold contradictory experience without reflexively reaching for familiar formulas or collapsing into reactivity.

My bias is practical: more moments of openness, embodiment, and relational presence contribute to both personal and societal wellness. Meditation isn’t the right fit for everyone. I’m more interested in what works than in philosophical certainty. We need adequately accurate perception to avoid costly mistakes, but no single view captures reality’s full complexity. Cultural adaptation keeps tantric methods functional instead of falling into dogma or fossilization.

Personal, interpersonal and spiritual work has to align with what actually matters: your intentions, your priorities, your life. And your life is relational. People around us unconsciously broadcast their dysregulation, which makes self-regulation and co-regulation essential skills, not optional upgrades.

I find Tummo to be a potent and underused source of stress inoculation, meditative stability, vitality, and aliveness. It’s one of the most diverse methods in Vajrayana Buddhism. The imaginative challenge of the visualization component, the embodiment-focused postures, and the dynamic, evocative quality of the breathwork offer relief from more cerebral or stillness-oriented methods. These aspects prioritize aliveness and movement over traditional seated approaches, which makes them particularly useful for practitioners who find pure concentration meditation difficult to sustain.

II. The Mechanics: What These Practices Actually Do

The monks in these studies had decades of training. But the mechanisms they activated aren’t exclusive to adepts, even if research on these advanced practices remains limited and many traditional claims remain unverified. Traditional Vajrayana restricts Tummo to advanced practitioners who’ve completed years of foundational training—the concern being that without proper stability, these practices can destabilize rather than support. That caution has merit. But researchers like Herbert Benson, Richard Davidson, and Rick Hanson—all of whom have studied Tibetan monks and yogis extensively—suggest a more accessible picture. While their test subjects were indeed experienced adepts, the physiological capacities they demonstrated may be available to anyone willing to train consistently. The data hints that even modest engagement can yield measurable benefits for nervous system regulation and stress resilience, without requiring monastic commitment.

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Live Meditation and Q&A with Peter McEwen

🎥 RSVP for a live event on Saturday, October 4 at 10 a.m. PT, where we’ll do group meditation and discuss how Tummo yoga supports widening the critical interval between stimulus and response. Through embodied yogas like Tummo, we meet our habitual patterns and contractions as workable energy, transforming clenching into clarity and open-hearted awareness.

🔥 Exploring Embodiment, Breath, and Inner Fire

Tummo Cohort enrollment is open. We’re offering two modules, rooted in the Zabmo Nangdön, a 14th‑century treatise by Rangjung Dorje on channels, winds, and inner fire, adapted for modern practice.

Guest instructor Lama Karma Justin Wall brings deep yogic and teaching experience to our instructor team.

→ If you’d like to get a feel for practice in the Tummo cohort, join our information session on Saturday, October 4 at 10 a.m. PT.

• ​Module I: Foundations (October 22 –…

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Below you'll find pith, concise, and elaborate versions of the practice instructions, roughly following a traditional Buddhist format. Feel free to leap ahead.

The practitioners I work with often carry the same paradox: they desperately want freedom from difficult emotions, yet their efforts to escape intensify the sense of contraction. They've tried therapy, meditation, positive thinking, and still find themselves besieged by patterns of panic, shame, and reactivity.

I am currently teaching a generation stage yoga course and I noticed how students could inhabit deity forms with remarkable stability, yet recoil the moment their own vulnerability surfaced. They could visualize themselves as Green Tara but couldn't stay present when panicky feelings flooded their chest. This disconnect revealed something crucial: we need to continue to build up-to-date bridges between the profound openness available in spiritual practice and the contracted states that dominate daily life.

What emerged corroborates Bruce Tift's findings in his own therapy and spiritual practice: the sensations we flee from, that raw panic beneath our emotional strategies, might actually be the texture of openness itself, filtered through a nervous system that reads groundlessness as threat. This isn't new. Buddhist teachers have pointed to this for centuries. But most contemporary approaches either bypass the body (going straight for transcendence) or stop at the body (focusing only on regulation).

I've watched many practitioners, myself included, spend years using spiritual practice as sophisticated distraction. We perfect our meditation method while sidestepping the specter of vulnerability that haunts the periphery. We speak eloquently about emptiness while constructing elaborate defenses against actually experiencing it.

This set of practices for meeting emotions and recognizing how they spontaneously liberate has been a fulcrum for me, and while I've articulated them in contemporary language, they're already embedded in the teachings of Vajrayana Buddhism. The core insights remain the same: that disturbance is the path, that you can start with just five seconds of wakefulness, and that the panic I'd been trying to dodge my entire life was actually the portal I'd been seeking.

Three Key Terms Used Throughout This Practice

Vulnerability

The embodied feelings we resist: shame, hurt, loneliness, rage, dependency, grief. Practice is to stay with these textures rather than discharge or fix them. Intimacy with vulnerability opens into formless panic, and beyond that, into open experience without reference. Vulnerability is not pathology; it is simple human experience.

Formless Panic

How openness registers to the ego process and nervous system. The raw, preverbal alarm that arises when openness is filtered through ego. It is the felt sense of groundlessness. When we feel reactive, we can check to see if we are brushing against some moment of panic that has just been touched.

Openness

The raw, nonconceptual immediacy of experience when it is not organized around protecting self and identity. Alive, vivid, referenceless, and intense.

Building Your Capacity Gradually

This practice involves staying present with difficult sensations rather than regulating them away. If you're in crisis, actively using substances, or experiencing severe mental health symptoms, please work with a professional before trying this practice.

The ability to create distance from our feelings and not feel the full force of everything is healthy. If your current coping strategies are keeping you functional and safe, there's no urgency to dismantle them. This practice is for when you're resourced enough to temporarily set aside protective strategies and meet your experience directly, not for when you're barely managing to get through the day.

Start with a few seconds of investigation and return to regulation if needed. You can return to regulation techniques like breathwork, NSDR, and movement if the practice becomes destabilizing. Having a support person aware of your practice can provide additional safety.

Note on arousal: If you’re engaging in an activity that requires arousal like a performance, sporting event, or presentation—the goal isn’t to eliminate nervous energy but rather to “get your butterflies flying in formation.” In these situations, you’re working with the arousal rather than settling it, channeling the intensity into focused attention rather than scattered reactivity.

This essay focuses on individual practice, but co-regulation is also a natural and effective approach. I will write about working with disturbance interpersonally in the coming weeks.

Why Befriend What We Fear Most?

Spiritual and therapeutic pathwork often instigates a confrontation with what we fear most. Not because reality itself is fear-producing, but because the engagement of a constructed self with nonpersonal reality will likely be experienced as a threat. The ego process—our continual self-referential activity that converts raw experience into 'me' and 'mine'—interprets referenceless nature and alive intensity as anxiety.

When your chest tightens before a difficult conversation, when sleeplessness grips you awaiting test results, when inexplicable dread washes over you in a quiet moment, these are invitations to investigate if there is a real threat.

Distress isn't pathology; it's our adaptive strategy for maintaining a stable sense of self, developed through evolution and childhood to keep us safe. The problem is that these strategies are often decades out-of-date.

Mindset, therapy, and nervous system regulation can soothe anxiety, but they can’t change the fact that we never truly know what’s next. These tools help us function, yet they don’t touch the deeper invitation: to meet uncertainty itself as a path of transformation. Practitioners committed to a spiritual or therapeutic path may find it important to commit to anxiety as an approximation of the freedom that they are trying to access via meditation, prayer, and devotion.

Anxious feelings can act as guardians at the threshold of awakened mind, requiring us to commit to them rather than escape them: training ourselves in the counterintuitive work of not abandoning our vulnerable feelings. This work feels especially difficult because it contradicts both biological wiring and cultural conditioning, which teach us to avoid rather than befriend our difficult feelings. As we acclimate to experiencing the broad spectrum of our own sensations and emotions, we learn to appreciate the experience of anxiety, explore it, feel it, and see for ourselves whether it is as much of a problem as it appears to be.

We've been sold the myth that psychological comfort is a human right, that anxiety means breakdown instead of breakthrough. What creates unnecessary suffering is our fantasy of organizing our lives around avoiding negative experience. This fantasy obscures the truth of how human experience actually works. Anxiety and grief aren't bugs in the system — they're features. When we stop running from anxiety, we discover something surprising: our avoidance solidifies the very threat we're trying to escape.

The feelings themselves carry no inherent danger; they're just sensations we don't like. But our reactions to these feelings, those outdated survival strategies that once kept us alive, now narrow the scope of our experience.

Modern practitioners almost inevitably encounter difficult states, and the process can be quite disturbing. Traditional religious practice renders disowned energies as mythic forms: obstacle makers, demons, elementals — objective entities with apparent agency. In the West, we tend to regard these patterns as symptoms, hang-ups, and persistent self-sabotaging behaviors. Since the purported goal of spiritual practice is to overcome pain and suffering, it seems skillful to have an accurate accounting of not only the modes of disturbance but also as many antidotes as possible at our disposal.

If we continue to privilege an inaccurate view of where we actually are in our developmental arc by going for cessation, transcendence, and escape, then we generate more confusion for ourselves, creating a vicious cycle that perpetuates itself.

So what's the alternative?

Rather than dismissing our anxious experiencing, we can learn to meet it directly.

Pith Instruction

When disturbance surfaces, bring attention to immediate, raw, bodily sensation — no interpretation, no story. Hang out with the vulnerability and check: do I actually need to do anything about this feeling, or can it just be here?

This method has a few distinguishing qualities:

• Sensation-level focus – Attention is placed on raw physical sensations (tightness in the chest, flutter in the belly, heat in the face) rather than on the emotions, explanations, or narratives layered on top. The body is the entry point.

• Non-conceptual presence – Instead of analyzing or trying to understand why something is happening, the practice is to just know what is happening as it is. No commentary, no resolution.

• Intimacy with disturbance – Especially when vulnerability or formless panic is present, embodied immediacy means choosing to stay in contact with those sensations instead of fleeing into distraction or compulsive strategies.

• Openness without resolution – The attitude is not to resolve or integrate contradictions, but to stay embodied with them, tolerating their intensity and letting them unfold in open awareness.

• Kindness toward experience – The orientation is unconditional friendliness toward whatever is arising in the body. Not “enduring” but relating.

Concise Aphorisms for Meeting and Metabolizing Difficult Emotions

1. Acknowledge and Invite

Recognize disturbance as normal and reorient toward what's actually happening. Stay intimate with what is, and be kind to what you find.

2. Inhabit Aliveness

Drop into sensation-level experience and stay with the body, not the story. Bathe in naked intimacy with aliveness. Fully participate in the ongoing stream of present moment experiencing.

3. Embrace and Expand

Welcome the clash of impulses, moods, and feeling textures. When activation kicks in, our perception narrows and we tend to collapse into familiar stories about our inadequacy or unworthiness. When activation distorts and narrows your perceptions, arouse the felt sense that you are worthy of connection and success. This expansion of perspective builds a capacity to tolerate mystery and uncertainty without demanding resolution.

4. Trust the Truth

Trust the body's intelligence to process what needs processing. Curb the habit of telling a story, which is an out-of-date way to give form to openness, and return to the naked experience of aliveness. Emotions spontaneously liberate without intervention.

Detailed Aphorisms for Meeting and Metabolizing Difficult Emotions. Root Verses and Commentary.

Throughout these instructions, 'disturbance' refers to any uncomfortable experience — from mild unease to intense panic. The practice remains the same regardless of intensity.

1. Recognize, reorient, and acknowledge what is. Disturbing sensations and feelings are not unexpected and are a valid part of life. This isn't about fixing yourself or pushing through discomfort, but about meeting your experience with basic friendliness. Instead of repairing or escaping, invite the difficult sensation. Even one second of willingness matters. Gently notice when reactivity, story-making, or avoidance arise. Ask: “What am I unwilling to feel right now?”

2. Embodied Immersion. Immerse yourself in the depth and richness of sensation-level experience. Eliminate unnecessary distractions. Turn off the phone. Let the feeling have room to move without interference. Work at your capacity — if the well of disturbance is too deep, step back and return later.

Start with just five or ten seconds of contact with the sensation, then rest. This isn't about heroically enduring formless panic, but building tolerance gradually, like strengthening a muscle.

Frequent, brief moments of practice are more effective than one big push to resolve everything.

Instead of analyzing or explaining what's happening, drop into the physical experience of the emotion itself. Notice bodily sensations as formless aliveness, percolating expressions of wholeness and humanity.

Drop into raw experiencing and let the waves of feeling move, sparkle, dissolve, or linger without interference.

3. Stay with the sensation, not the story. Find out if bodily sensations are formless. Stop asking "Why am I feeling this?" That narrative keeps you stuck in dysregulation. Disturbance can be understood as an encounter with formless vulnerability: raw, intense aliveness.

Uncertainty triggers vulnerable feelings: the breakup, the test results, the family conflict. Younger parts rush in to protect us from overwhelm.

The textures of sensation vary in intensity: tingling, flickering, subtle, effervescent pulses in space. When we invite, tolerate, and kindly engage with these feelings, they reveal an undulatory, vibrating presence. The tightness in your chest, the heat in your throat, and the pressure in your head are simply energies moving, not usually evidence that something is wrong.

Before a difficult conversation, you might notice tension in your throat, heat in your chest, while a flutter in your belly feels like a hovering hummingbird. Instead of spinning into stories about what will happen next, investigate if you are avoiding an emotion.

When panic or groundlessness surfaces, tolerate it as the evolutionary signal of openness and uncertainty, not as pathology, and not as a verdict on your personal worth.

• The body holds the intelligence you need for this process. Meeting disturbance is practice, not achievement or conquest.

• When self-referential commentary surfaces, recognize it as an outdated way to provide relief from intensity and gently turn attention back toward the body.

• When your mind starts spinning tales of blame, regret, or justification, gently turn attention to the sensations in the body.

• You can't be self-aggressive when your attention is in your sensations. Sensations are not self-aggressive in their nature.

Self-critical thoughts literally shut down your brain's learning centers. Curiosity about what you’re experiencing can restore spaciousness.

4. Invite contradictory experience. Allow conflicting impulses and feelings to coexist, with no fantasy of resolution. Disturbance is aliveness moving through a system that already knows how to process arousal. You're not trying to eliminate difficult emotions, but learning to remain present with them as they arise and pass. There is no need to aggressively extinguish or defeat disturbance. Instead, we can gently reintegrate disowned energies, which are us. What feels like regression is often your nervous system processing and integrating. There's no such thing as 'one step backward' in this work.

5. Turn your attention toward recognizing that you are worthy of connection and success. Relate to yourself as inherently worthy of connection and success, regardless of what you're feeling in this moment. Loving self-talk, hypnosis, or guided meditation can be helpful in establishing a better story. Your emotional experience doesn't diminish your fundamental value. When the intensity feels overwhelming, you can alternate between soothing self-talk ('I'm safe right now, this feeling will pass') and returning to sensation-level experience. This creates a gentle rhythm of engagement and comfort. Hold your sensations and upset with the same kindness as you would an upset child. Much of our behavior and many of our feelings are a reflection of our best attempt to care for ourselves, and disturbance can be an opportunity to practice unconditional kindness toward these out-of-date strategies.

Practice feeling adequately held by your life, by the world.

The more we can rest in being a mystery to ourselves, the more we can show up without needing to know who we are or how we’ll handle the next moment. As we practice tolerance and kindness toward our worst fears, the illusion of inner division begins to weaken. We can love all of ourselves, not only the parts that feel 'good.' Staying with our vulnerabilities and holding them in love, we train ourselves to be present with whatever emerges.

This practice of self-kindness builds the very brain circuits needed for resilience and flexible responding. We drop the futile project of self-abandonment and this builds real confidence in our capacity to show up fully.

6. Continue to reduce demands on your attention and emotions. For survival reasons, we’ve evolved to quickly suppress stress until it feels safe to release and work through it. This means you don't need to process everything immediately. If you're at work or in public when disturbance arises, it's fine to note it and return to it later when you have privacy and support. Allow yourself the time to respond with maturity, setting aside any youthful impulse for instant resolution. Your job isn't to fix anything. It's to not interfere with what's already happening. Let emotions follow their own timeline without rushing toward resolution. Feelings have their own rhythm and intelligence that can't be forced or hurried.

7. Give the disturbing patterns space to run their course. Ego processes tend to hurry through physiological or psychological stress cycles. Our experience shifts between biological, adult, and spiritual capacities. If you experience deep swings between anxiousness and distraction, you are likely in a fight-or-flight response. Use interventions like the physiological sigh, sensation-level awareness, and non-sleep deep rest to return to adult capacities.

Adult capacities include tolerating uncertainty and contradiction, integrating complex experience, accepting our multifaceted nature, and claiming appropriate responsibility while releasing what lies beyond our control.

Continue to distinguish between compulsive survival-level biological behavior and a genuine existential threat.

8. Self-referential commentary is an out-of-date way to give form to uncertainty. Trust the intelligence of your body. The feeling knows how to move through you when you stop micromanaging it. When we feel groundlessness, we reflexively create personal stories ('This means I'm failing,' 'Something terrible will happen') to give form to the formless. These narratives are outdated strategies. They once helped us make sense of overwhelming experience, but now they keep us from the fresh aliveness of the present moment. We can choose to tune into the freshness of present moment experience. The miracle of being aware. Trust your intuitive intelligence to process what needs processing and remain present with raw experience rather than feeding the stories your mind spins about that experience.

9. Plant and nourish the seeds of gratitude and love. The brain's ancient wiring prioritizes threat-detection over well-being. While your body processes disturbance, deliberately cultivate nourishing states. Bring to mind a personal moment of experiencing safety, kindness, competence, or groundedness, and really let the sensations of joy and resource land. Let your body register the warmth or strength of that memory for 20-30 seconds, saturating yourself in those sensations. This practice of “taking in the good” counteracts the negativity bias that would otherwise let nourishing moments pass unnoticed, building resilience in your nervous system.

Some of these supportive qualities include:

• Groundedness: the stability of someone who doesn't need to flee from any experience

• Open heart: warmth that can meet pain without withdrawing

• Alert stillness: presence that notices everything without strain

• Inner resource: confidence that does not depend on conditions changing

• Immediate responsiveness: the capacity to act skillfully without hesitation

• Fearless compassion: love that doesn't require the other to change

Notice the contrast: inhabiting your body as more spacious, more fluid, and more responsive than inhabiting the old identity.

How Avoidance Unfolds

We often long for greater freedom and spontaneity while using the same compulsive strategies that keep us bound. Over time, we've learned to step away from raw sensation, build layers of feeling on top of it, and settle into patterns that once helped us survive but now keep us cut off from immediacy. If we're interested in being intimate with life as it is, these old strategies need to be addressed rather than ignored. Even profound realization doesn't erase them, and when they go unrecognized they still shape our relationships in painful ways. Out of kindness to ourselves and others, it's worth acknowledging these strategies and meeting them directly, so our inner environment becomes clearer and more workable.

If this practice and other meditation methods are recovery, what are we recovering to? What pulls us away from the raw immediacy of being alive?

When disturbance hits — whether it’s the punch in the gut from unkind words, the cannonball of grief from a rejection letter, or the heat rising in your throat during a difficult confrontation, our first instinct is to recoil. But banishing our vulnerability transforms simple sensation into something heavier. A flutter becomes "anxiety." Heat becomes "anger." Keep resisting, and these feelings harden into strategies: fight, flee, freeze, please. These affective emotions are more patterned and behavioral than raw feelings; they usually point toward particular actions. Fear wants you to run. Anger wants you to fight. Sadness wants you to disappear. These aren't just feelings—they're marching orders from an ancient survival manual.

We rely on these affective emotions because they carry the implicit promise of protection: anger readies us to fight, fear to flee, sadness to withdraw. But if resisted, they also lock us into repetitive strategies that rarely address our actual, current situation. In this way, avoidance becomes the very center of our identity, even though it began simply as a reflex to not feel. The process is straightforward. Disturbance leads to resistance, which creates feelings. Those feelings develop into affective emotions, which drive avoidance behaviors that shape who we think we are.

The Cycle of Avoidance

When disturbance first touches us and we experience a sensation or scenario we don't like, here's my notion of what unfolds:

⊢ Aggression toward what is present — the compulsive drive to escape vulnerable experience

⊢ Feelings — raw sensation given emotional weight and meaning

⊢ Affective emotions — anger, fear, sadness organized into strategies

⊢ Avoidance behaviors — fight, flight, withdrawal, distraction

∴ Escape from raw immediacy — loss of contact with direct, embodied experience

One paradox of our pathwork is that our attempts to escape anxiety place those feelings at the center of our sense of self. Despite the tactical advantage of becoming engrossed in habits that provide relief, these strategies become the very architecture of our identity.

So how do we break this cycle? How do we meet disturbance without reinforcing the very patterns we're trying to heal? The following approach offers one way to stay present with difficult experience while building genuine resilience.

Integration: Working with These Principles Daily

In daily life, this looks like: When you notice disturbance arising—in traffic, during a difficult email, before a meeting — pause. Take ten seconds to drop from story to sensation. Feel what's here without altering it. Then continue with your day. This builds resilience through small, repeated moments of practice rather than lengthy sessions. It’s easy to approach emotional disturbance with an aggressive effort to conquer it, as if the task were to stamp it out. That kind of black-and-white stance reflects a younger psychology. The practice here is different. We’re not trying to eliminate our experience but to stay embodied and open with whatever is arising.

When patterns carry a neurotic quality, we can usually recognize them by how different it feels from openness and immediacy. With this recognition, we have the chance to respond from our adult capacities, instead of being pulled along by compulsive strategies to escape what feels disturbing. These steps are drawn from my own struggles with anxiousness, panic, and the daily disruptions of modern life. They may not be right for everyone, but they’ve been deeply helpful for me.

Uncertainties that make your stomach drop, the vulnerability that leaves you feeling exposed, the reactivity that flares when someone cuts you off in traffic — these aren't problems to solve. They're expressions of life's fundamental openness breaking through a carefully curated sense of control. From this perspective, anxiety can be seen as a natural and necessary part of our path of waking up. If we have a goal of waking up out of our familiar character dramas, it is inevitable that we will have to forge a conscious relationship to experience and feelings that we typically find threatening or overwhelming.

If we're between jobs, unsure when the next inflow of cash will come, you don't know what's coming and can't control the outcome. Depending on our mindset and personal history, that uncertainty can stir the body into high alert. What the ego reads as threat is often just openness itself registering in your nervous system.

Sometimes anxiety has an address — the phone call you're dreading, the test results arriving Tuesday. Anticipatory anxiety arises in the face of specific unknowns, like the night before a public presentation, while chronic anxiety lingers without a clear object, a constant background reaction to the openness of life itself.

The ego process, organized around stability and coherence, recognizes in that open field of potential a kind of death. So we recoil, construct, explain. This is entirely human — not pathology or a problem to eliminate. It's possible that mature practice and an ability to access our adult capacities requires us to remain embodied in anxiety's presence, gradually acclimating to openness itself.

Anxiety is an evolutionary alarm detecting pure openness — the ungraspable torrent of raw aliveness. The freefall of adult life that has no reliable handholds or reference points.

In my experience, tending to the basics builds resilience: rest, movement, nourishment, and supportive relationships. Methods like NSDR, therapy, taking in the good, or hypnosis can deepen that foundation and make inquiry into experience more sustainable.

Depending on a practitioner's history, it can be useful, though not prerequisite, to develop confidence in regulating the nervous system and tolerating a sense of well-being as they walk the path. That has certainly fortified my own practice.

Iterative exposure to this open and formless vulnerability fortifies the nervous system and our underlying psychology to tolerate what's actually true: we don't know who we are or where we're going. We can learn to tolerate the reality of being a mystery to ourselves and that the world is an unknowable and majestic energetic pattern. Spectacular in its creativity, color, and seamless exchange.

For modern spiritual practitioners, this means reframing anxiousness and panic as not some threatening 'other' but rather the fruition of self-inquiry, discipline, and finally abandonment of any formula in favor of what is immediately true. When panic arises, we can investigate: "Is this actually threatening my survival? Or is my body just doing what bodies do?" Most of us have the luxury of checking rather than reacting. We can choose conscious participation over evolutionary autopilot.

This practice isn't about perfection or achieving a state free from disturbance. It's about living in the experience of freedom while simultaneously improving the quality of our experiencing.

Each moment you stay present with what is instead of escaping into habits, you're building capacity for genuine presence.

Start small: five seconds at a time, repeated 20 times. Increase to ten seconds tomorrow. Trust the process.

The Practice in Brief

When disturbance arises:

• Notice the urge to escape into story or action

• Drop attention to the body and find the sensation

• Stay with sensation-level experience for just 5-10 seconds (small doses, not heroic endurance). Rest, then return if needed. Frequent, brief touches are better than forcing an outcome.

• Trust that your body knows how to process this energy. Our emotions are destined to be naturally liberated.

Remember: You're not trying to eliminate disturbance, but rather to change your relationship with it. Start where you are. Even one conscious breath while staying with difficult sensations and emotions builds capacity.

Every morning we wake up and reassemble the same convincing mirage: our story. We can't clearly recall the effort it took to assemble a stable identity—there were so few reference points to begin with. But now the process runs like code in the background, a set of reflexive instructions that generate the illusion of consistency. Intellectually, we may grasp that we don't actually know who we are, but the preference for a stable self grows stronger as the world organizes itself around supporting and entertaining this identity. No wonder it's hard to dissolve our breathless interest in personal dramas.

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