Deep Aliveness

You don’t actually want to be perfect — you just want to be Alive.

To be alive is to have the capacity to change, to evolve, to transform and adapt and respond to life as it happens. Living on the default path, you lose that capacity; in a thousand tiny ways, you lose your innate responsiveness to reality, and you start to get stuck. You stop feeling like you’re living your life, and start feeling like life is just happening around you.

I’ve been working with people for years to help them recover their aliveness, and we’ve found that a handful of things tend to reliably work. In Deep Aliveness, I’m putting that handful of things into the simplest, most direct and accessible package I know how to present. (I’ll admit, the follow-up to Deep Aliveness gets weirder, but we can worry about that another day.)

Right now, I’m running small beta cohorts of Deep Aliveness mini-intensives. Below you’ll find some bullet points that should help you decide if it sounds like it’s for you.

To oversimplify way too much stuff: your body, your heart, your nervous system, your energy body, your brain… everything about you can either be open, or closed. When a part of you is closed, it’s unable to change. Think of any part of you that’s closed as being read-only; you can’t change what’s in there.

You can only heal as deeply as you can open. You can only change as deeply as you can open.

The way the modern world works, we get stuck closed and shut-down states more than anyone else who’s ever been alive. Some of the more notable ways we get closed include:

  • Nervous system hyper-activation and/or shut-down

  • Left-hemisphere capture: getting stuck in the narrow, linear, rational mind, with little access to vast awareness or holistic intuition.

  • Disembodiment: having only cursory access to our subtle, multidimensional field of sensory experience

  • Emaciated & disenchanted worldviews: being fed a view where only what can be measured and touched is real, and everything else is varying degrees of unreal

  • Disconnection: whether disconnection from friends, family, nature, the sacred, or the values you’d like to live by — the thousand thousand ways you are cut off from your interdependence with everything else in the world.

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A lot of the ways people try to initiate change in their lives, it amounts to a process where they get sick of being closed, they get impatient and reckless and start blasting open everything they can, hoping it will knock something loose. This is… generally not the best idea. For a few reasons.

First off, your defense mechanisms exist to keep you from changing; they exist to keep your system closed when it’s not safe to open. When you pry things open, those defense mechanisms are apt to slam things shut again pretty quickly and pretty dramatically.

Secondly, if your defense mechanisms don’t slam your system closed, that’s likely because you’ve found a way to override them and keep things open even though it feels unsafe to do so. Congratulations, that’s no easy feat. But it’s also not such a great idea.

Neither of the above is an ideal solution because of our third point: the purpose of opening up is only partly to release what’s stuck, to let go of the patterns that don’t work anymore. The other purpose is to replace those patterns with better ones. This is a process that takes time, experimentation, and discernment.

You can’t just pick a random way to re-pattern your system, and (this is key) you can’t choose the new pattern while you’re standing inside your old ones. Anything that you decide in advance is just going to be a trauma response from your old, stuck patterns.

What this all shakes out to is this: if you blast your system open and it closes back up quickly, you might succeed in emptying some of your old patterns, but there will be a cost. Your defense mechanisms will close up too fast to do any real re-patterning, and those defenses are likely to be even tighter now than they were before, making them harder to coax open again.

And if you manage to keep your defense mechanisms suppressed, so that you can keep your system open to change for the long, experimental time that it takes to find and practice new patterns — you’re also leaving yourself open to whatever random crap you happen to come across. I think we’ve all met someone who, for example, kept themselves blasted open on psychedelics for months or years, and ended up letting in every half-baked conspiracy theory in the world alongside a lot of, admittedly pretty delightful love-and-light-and-friendship-and-joy patterns.

In short, forcing yourself open doesn’t work. Not for the type of natural, organic unfolding that we’re looking for; not in this process of becoming who you are, who your system will naturally grow towards being, like a tree branching naturally upward. If you want to follow the stream of creation, unfolding into who you can feel yourself needing to become, the gentle way is, in fact, the fast way.

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Deep Aliveness Semi-Intensive

In Deep Aliveness, we aren’t teaching a technique or a path so much as we’re teaching a stance — a mode of being you can bring with you everywhere in life.

That said, this stance is cultivated with a series of techniques — mostly, these involve somatic resonance, spacious awareness, and subtle sensory attunement. Don’t worry — they’re a lot more simple and direct than they sound.

Braided together, these types of awareness increasingly lead towards a stance where "life, the world, and action seem to us, on the whole, luminous — interesting — appetizing,” as Teilhard de Chardin put it. They synergize with one another into a gentle but increasingly effective way of dissolving blockages, and creating the flexibility in the system needed to easily open and close ever-deeper layers of your being, as appropriate.

(Note: In Deep Aliveness, our work is on this stance that allows more and more softening and opening in the many layers of your system — we don’t work on the re-patterning yet, or at least only in very particular and gentle ways. I may add more re-patterning later, but for now, it’s complex and individualized enough work that I only do it one on one with Waytending clients.)

Semi-Intensive Details

In the first couple cohorts, I’ll be working on details, things may move and flow depending on how the room responds to a given section. But in general, the following details should apply:

  • 7 virtual meetings over the course of 3 weeks (3 meetings per week for the first 2 weeks, then 1 integration meeting late in the 3rd week)

  • The meetings will generally follow a pattern of beginning with 5-15 minutes of introduction and theory, followed by 30-60 minutes of practice, finishing with check-ins and questions.

  • Exercises and suggestions for daily-life practice will be given after sessions.

  • Cost: $525, with a couple financial aid spots available.

  • Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays @ 6pm PST

    • (June 15-17, 22-24, 29)