Overview

The intention of this guide is first and foremost to be pragmatic and meaningful for students.

Specifically, this guide has been created for practitioners:

1. Seeking support for meditation and practices on a path of awakening; especially one of integral dharma that includes waking up, cleaning up, growing up, and showing up.

2. Intending to integrate the ongoing fruits of practice with life;

3. Holding the goal of practice to be engaged, embodied, and responsive in life and the world;

3. Attentively embracing the immediacy of life as the prime source to inform why we practice and what we choose to practice as our response.

This guide favors skillful means (upaya) over technical, philosophical precision and accuracy, while neither seeking to avoid this precision altogether. The reason for this is that to fully and elegantly address all of the contemplative and philosophical assumptions and assertions this guide would unnecessarily bog down the usability of it for practitioners looking for support.

That being said, you will find flexible, orienting assertions about reality and the human experience in this guide, but again primarily in the hopes that it will be of some benefit it helping you deepen into the intimacy of your own experience and life, not to be fixated on the explanations themselves.

‘Assertions’ here means: orienting stakes put in the ground to provide both a foundation and guiding waypoints for practice and life.

‘Flexible’ here means: while these assertions are expressed as relatively stable and persistent truths in our experience, they are not all-encompassing, absolutely unchanging, and utterly definitive. This intentionally and necessarily avoids falling into traps of the narrow, exclusive, rigidity of absolutism, and the flailing, deconstructionism of relativism. Said again, positively: flexible and orientating.

You may take this guide in whole or in pieces, as suits you. Make good use of this guide whether you are a student of mine or other teachers (or both). Use this guide in conjunction with other practice guides to provide yourself with a more robust, informed practical foundation.

More than anything, read and reference this guide by working with what is most intuitively, and immediately relevant to you in any given moment or phase or your life and practice.