Last Saturday, we had the privilege of hosting Awakin Call with Jeff Warren.

“We are here to learn from each other, to share our various neurotic life strategies in a safe space, so we can then laugh uproariously at them together, in a spirit of dumbfounded incredulity.” – Jeff Warren Jeff Warren came to meditation by chance, while working as a journalist and writing a book which went on to be named one of the Top 10 Books about Consciousness in The Guardian. He has since founded a global and local community of persons seeking greater understanding of their minds and bodies through various traditions and therapeutic modalities. From a pluralistic, creative approach to crafting one’s own practice grows a community of student-teachers—both their own and one another’s. With a heart-warming, eccentric peppering of humor, Jeff Warren always reminds us that there’s a practice out there for everyone—including the initially most incredulous.

We'll post the transcript of the call soon, but till then, some of the nuggets that stood out from the call ...

• On his personal journey to more awakened consciousness:
  • Jeff said he “was pretty disregulated as a teen”, and this carried through into university. In his second year of college, while “messing around and playing football,” he fell down from a tree and broke his neck in two places. It was a “turning point” in his life. He described that the event “changed my consciousness and opened me up to things that I hadn't experienced since a kid.” He considers that moment the beginning of his adulthood. “My whole mind changed in a profound way after the accident.” And yet the event also led to a “resurgence of the ADD [attention deficit disorder] I had had as a kid, and which I had started getting a handle on as teen. The accident opened it up again. My mind became more associative and free-wheeling after that.” He said it was hard after the accident for his mind to go in a straight line, and his school work suffered. “I had to learn a whole new way of processing. It also freed up creativity in a certain kind of way, since it was hard to do more linear tasks after that, and I had to figure out how to work with those constraints.”
  • Like many young adults, Jeff was very itinerant in his 20s, living in different cities with adventure. And also typically, he experienced lots of challenges, “but I didn't take time to see what they were. I didn't have language to talk about it so soldiered on.” So his neck injury, along with many other incidents of physical injury/trauma he had as a teen and young adult, became stored in his body, he later realized. “Any big injury, that stays in your body when you have physical trauma. When the body gets traumatized, unless there's a healthy way of metabolizing fight or flight, the injuries stay in the body and create challenges in the nervous system – leading to chronic reactivity, anger, freeze patterns. And this can happen not just from physical trauma -- also from developmental trauma.” “Trauma is not even really the right word – it an be more accessible to think of it as a nervous system going through shocks in development – be they emotional, physical etc shocks. A healthy nervous system can integrate shocks, but for many of us, they are not integrated healthily, so our systems have complex trapped shocks.” He explained that “meditation can help work through that stuff, but working with a trauma-focused therapist can also help. Now I'm learning to finally let this energy go.”
• On attention deficit disorder (ADD): Jeff found in his time working in journalism the kind of structure that helped him with his ADD. But then he left a structured job to write Head Trip. “That was challenging because if you have ADD it's hard to write 500 page book.” After that, he realized he needed structure to contain his ADD energies, “but I had none – and no way to create structure because I had ADD.”
• On meditation in its multiple forms: “It's really through training the mind that we open ourselves up to larger possibilities and fulfillment. I started formally practicing in 2003 when writing Head Trip.” Jeff started going to various meditation retreats and teachers, trying many different techniques and seeking the underlying commonalities of the various methods. “I was absorbing everything I could. I found in the activity of meditation something very healing and beautiful – less for what I was able to get to (I found it challenging to be concentrated) – but it was by being in community with people trying to grapple in that way sincerely that I found satisfaction.” Jeff also found that meditation works differently for each nervous system. Breath is not interesting to some people – so you have to find another attentional object – perhaps sound, or an object around you, or movement – that works for each person’s nervous system. Eventually, “I was able to find a technique that was able to work for me, even with ADD. The key to meditating for someone with attentional issues -- finding what is inherently interesting to you.” Some people need help to customize a practice to work with their unique challenges. Jeff saw the importance of proving a space for multiple solutions to emerge for multiple kinds of temperaments. He wanted to create a space to focus on “what is unique to us individually but also to discuss what is shared.”
• On the significance of community: “What was really helping was finding people in my social communities who were having similar challenges.” Jeff kept a journal of what he was learning so he could help others. “That gave my life meaning – it helped turn suffering into something that's meaningful.” The combination of meditation and trying to use material to help other people, eventually led him to create the Consciousness Explorers Club (CEC) “and the unique culture of teaching that we have there.”
• “Every time I learn something it gives me another tool to help other people.”
• On the Consciousness Explorers’ Club and peer learning/teaching: People and friends began to come by and meditate together, sharing techniques and talking about it. “There was no teaching at the beginning. We were just exploring together. More and more people would come – eventually I began leading sits. Around that time Shinzen [my teacher] encouraged me to teach. I resisted it. I had emotional disregulation. I had to get over it. But I was open about being a flawed teacher. I stayed within constraints of what was honest and true for me.” Jeff also decided to honor the community as a teacher. “Others' responses enhanced the culture.” The CEC became a “space for multiple solutions to emerge for multiple kinds of temperaments.”
• Pluralism of spiritual experience: Jeff believes strongly in the pluralistic nature of finding one's particular path in exploring consciousness and spirituality (there are as many paths as there are people). At the same time, there are many synergies and confluences among all these paths – and thus ways in which we can walk together and support one another in community. “The one and the many - there's both something shared and something distinct in our experience, always. That proportion shifts person to person. Getting wisdom in a practice means that you're learning from your own experience.” Jeff created a culture in CEC where there was always “focus on what was unique to us individually but also what was shared.”
• On service: Jeff noted that “a lot of meaning comes into life when you can connect your gifts with other people's challenges. We often have half of this down – expressing my creative gifts is deeply fulfilling. And the other half of helping people in whatever domain is deeply fulfilling. People often do those things separately. But if you can combine them, then you're in the stream of something beautiful – by using your creativity and gifts in service to others.” The key to this is finding what has integrity for your particular circumstance. “Service includes a very broad range of possibilities – it’s not always about running a food bank or doing Doctors without Borders.” He noted that with meditation practice, “as we get more centered in ourselves (more present, as our trauma/challenge/afflictive emotions start to clear), we find a natural sense of compassion and intimacy and caring. And just through doing the practice and being in that kind of space, we start to be in service to those around us.” And just by being more compassionate, we start to activate a more service-oriented way in whatever we do (from our job, etc.). Sometimes service may “flow to more overt activism. But sometimes it doesn't. You always have to do that with balance of self-care. You can't over-exert in service end and burn out.” It’s important “to treat yourself with as much care as you treat others -- so have a sane assessment of what you can do – how can I give back based on my network, job, etc.? So we don't martyr ourselves.” He noted that most religious traditions (and even the nonprofit world) have desire to "save" people.
• On the influence of William James: Jeff was very influenced by William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. He noted it was the first text from a Protestant/Christian perspective that started championing actual experience as where spirituality lives. Spirituality is “not a question about believing objective claims of reality. It's something very personal. It's real as an experience.” He was also greatly moved by James’ essay “Will to Believe”, which helped him realize that we are “empowered to choose what we think will be most healing as a belief system,” and that “faith is the most rational thing you can do as a human being.” It helped him to counteract the “secular pinhead” who “tries to convince me that their pathetic view of the chimpanzee brain” is correct.

Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!