Deep
Aliveness
I'm putting together a course/community centered on Deep Aliveness. The planned structure, as it stands now, is:
a 5 week, practice-based course, exploring some of the most fundamental entryways into aliveness, followed by
a 3 week project period, where each person chooses a low-stakes project in their life; a project they can take on without caring if it goes well or poorly, your whole focus on approaching it from a place of aliveness — followed by
the rest of the year in community membership, ideally with crews and events to help everyone come together, share their experiments in aliveness, keep each other on-track, and continue practicing with materials in the community vault.
The hope is that we can step away from the usual failure mode of aliveness-encouraging practices like meditation, where the skill is built on the meditation cushion, and then... stays pretty much on the meditation cushion.
We want to build capacity not just on the cushion, but in relationships, at work, on walks, in hobbies, everywhere. We want more aliveness from more people in more contexts more of the time. And I'm hoping together we can figure out the best ways to make that happen.
I've been having a rough time lately, so the work has been slower than I'd hoped, but more information should be coming soon. The page below is a bit outdated, but you can sign up for more updates down there.
If you have ideas for what you'd love to see from a course or community like this, I'd love to hear them — in the comments on Substack, in Twitter DMs, or wherever else you want to get in contact.
Sign Up
We’re rebuilding Deep Aliveness after the first beta run; if you want to be updated on the next cohort, sign up here. (If you want more info, keep scrolling)
YOU'RE GOING TO BECOME WHO YOU ARE
Why wait?
Take a break from all the all the lives you've been told to live - explore aliveness on your own terms
Train Trustworthy Gut Instincts
Don’t just trust your gut,
We're all a little out of practice - but that doesn't have to be forever.
Recover Spontaneous Natural Intelligence
Don’t just think with your head,
There's more to intelligence than linear cognition - deepen into embodied cognition, environmental cognition, heartful mythopoetic cognition... remember how to think with your whole being, not just as an isolated head.
Don’t just live by rote,
Be a Live Player
Flex the courage and discernment you need to do things you've never done before - to do things no one has ever done before.
Course Info
Deep Aliveness is a 5 week cohort, followed by a 3-week project to practice bringing Deep Aliveness into your life, followed by a year of access to the community and further resources to continue the journey.
The course is divided into 5 topic areas, and each of those topics is organized to allow different depths of study. If you want to dip in and spend 1 hour on a section, there are materials for that. If you want to spend a full year deep-diving into only that section and ignoring the others, there are materials for that.
What's important is that you find the parts of the course that spark your interest and curiosity, and you explore them as deeply as you want, while the community and weekly meetings provide you support and scaffolding.
Sign Up
We’re rebuilding Deep Aliveness after the first beta run; if you want to be updated on the next cohort, sign up here. (If you want more info, keep scrolling)
The 5 Sections
The center of the course really comes down to a single move:
waking up spontaneous natural intelligence, and aligning it with our systematic, everyday mind.
(If you're a McGilchrist fan, you might refer to this as "uniting the right and left hemispheres.")
We'll be practicing that move across 5 domains:
Every experience takes place in the body, but most people have gotten too distant from that experience to fully be with their own lives. We aim to change that.
Soma
Spacious open awareness is one of the best routes into spontaneous experience (or “Right Hemisphere mode”), and it takes on even more depth when explored with embodied awareness.
Space
Each of us has our own emotional knots, patterns, neuroses — and each of us has a deep love and will to smooth out those knots and connect with the lives and worlds around us. That becomes increasingly possible when we work with the heart form a place of embodied spaciousness
Heart
Integrity means many things, and we’re calling on all of them here — but especially a sense of structural integrity. Does your experience hold together, or are you regularly fragmented? Are you moving towards wholeness, or are many parts of you split off from one another?
Integrity
It’s one thing to have access to the wholeness of your embodied, spacious, wholehearted experience — it’s another skill to reliably tap into that access and be present with it.
Presence
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Trust yourself to know the answer. (But also yes, yes you should.)