Deep

Aliveness

I'm putting together a course/community centered on Deep Aliveness. The planned structure, as it stands now, is:

  • a 6 week 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 The page below is a bit outdated, but you can sign up for more updates down there.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.

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 6 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 "balancing the right and left hemispheres.")

We'll be practicing that move across 5 domains:

Your view of what kind of person you are, what kind of world you live in, and what kind of things are possible — these are the biggest blocks people face when they start to sense that they want a bigger life.

Perspective

Emotions and desire are the primary drivers in your life. Everything that feels worth pursuing, it feels that way because of some drive in your heart. These drives can get confused, tangled, and highjacked while we go about our lives, so we’re here to tend that garden a little more intentionally and see what grows there.

Heart

“You can only respond to what you notice,” so it’s important to deepen your capacity to notice. In a way, this is what every section of the course is about, but in this section we focus specifically on this skill.

Awareness

If you want real transformation, not mere change, you have to evolve your relationship with the deepest parts of your psyche — the parts of you that are beneath language, that communicate by symbol, narrative, imagery, impressions, and deep imagination.

Symbol

Everything you experience is experienced through your body; and yet, most people feel separate from their body, like it’s a vehicle they ride around in. But if you can go from being in your body to being your body, everything changes. You find deep wells of calm, patience, and simple, obvious intuition in your day-to-day life. Everything else in this course becomes easier to integrate when you can integrate it through the body.

Embodiment

  • Trust yourself to know the answer. (But also yes, yes you should.)

Trust Your Genius