Cultivating awakening, healing, and embodiment in a dedicated, simple, and formal practice, like meditation, makes it both easier to explore your experience more deeply, and to give you extra power to integrate insights, realizations, and fundamental changes more thoroughly in your life. As such, I make use of formal practices like meditation as needed.

It’s important to note that we can work with whatever practices you currently find helpful, and we’ll add new practices intuitively as needed, as we work together. That being said, I have consistently found that most of us will gravitate to certain flavors of practices to help us explore our experience and life more deeply. Below you’ll find an overview of these core practice areas. As you read, take note and see if anything comes up as being important to you.

When we leave the meditation cushion, we apply what we discover in our formal practice to our daily life. And in turn our life experiences gift us with real time opportunities to awaken at deeper and more embodied levels. In this way you leave nothing in between the cushion and your life.

Core Practices:
Timeless Wisdom, Modern Life

The core practices of Awakening in Life provide simple, accessible, and powerful methods to awaken: to be with things as they are, in natural presence; to hold ourselves and life as a burning question; and to become lived answers through inquiry, awakened action, and trust.

The core practices are:

• Settle. Centering, clearing, relaxing.
• Being. Letting go, non-doing.
• Listen. Opening awareness, receiving and noticing effortlessly.
• Inquire. Revealing fundamental mysteries of reality in experience.
• Respond. Cultivating natural, intuitive response to life.
• Trust. Letting go into courage and fearlessness.

All of these practices are held in the practice of Embodiment: grounding and rooting our experiences into the body, our home in this life, and outwardly into our life.

Each of these practices represents a facet of awakening, and work both sequentially, and in a circular, non-linear fashion. They are both practices and capacities.

You can rely on the structure of these practices to help gradually deepen your experience in a clear, simple way. You can also access these practices and experiences at will, whenever they feel appropriate and needed in your life.

The goal of these core practices is to provide you flexible, immediately accessible and applicable methods of awakening for both your formal practice and your life.

What is practice?

Awakening practice can be experienced and understood in (at least) three ways:

1. Practice.
   Something we come back to and repeat over and over in order to learn a particular skill and improve our ability to use that skill.In awakening, this can look like practicing the skill of settling, listening, etc.
2. Cultivation.
   We cultivate experiences in our practice, like tending a garden.We realize that this is something that requires nourishing, attention, and care, and awakening is a process that continually unfolds over time, and keeps deeper, and has fruition.
3. Experimentation.
   We let go into a sense of not-knowing which allows us to experience true discovery.With no expectations, we are open to anything happening in our practice. We are investigating and being radically open. Through this experimenting we discover what might easily go unnoticed.

The core practices of Awakening in Life embrace all three of these flavors of practice. Depending on where you are in your path or your experience today, you might choose to look at your practice in one of these three ways, whichever one seems most helpful.

Explore the first core practice of settling.