Articles

The State Within: A Year in the Free State Project

Introduction
In August of 2016 I moved to New Hampshire for the Free State Project, and the year I spent there destroyed me, I was anihilated and reborn many times. In this experience I saw the transmutation and meditation practices I’d commited to for 6 months had profoundly impacted my intrinsic strength in response to what became the worst situation of my adult life. It is in this transformation that I came to a fundamental understanding of the kinds of skills, priorities and values that freestaters absolutely need for this movement to be successful.
Continue reading “The State Within: A Year in the Free State Project”

The Alchemy Meditation

Presence | Recognition | Acceptance | Dedication | Playfulness | Gratitude

“So this is a basic tonglen logic: When you feel the discomfort, have the thought: ‘Other people feel this.’ And then if you want to take it a rather dramatic step further, you can say, ‘May we all be free of this’…And the most dramatic and probably most difficult step is to say: ‘Since I’m feeling this anyway, may I be feeling it so all others could be free of it.'” – Pema Chödrön on Tonglen meditation


 Continue reading “The Alchemy Meditation”

Awaken Through Homelessness

“Home is where the heart is.”

Home is not in the world somewhere. It is cultivated within you. If you build a home in the world, attachments and aversion to it must be abandoned, before the roots of home can take hold in your heart. This is called awakening through homelessness- a manifesto of taking on the transparent reality of nature, to recognize the nature of reality.

Home within rests on your consciousness embracing of the present moment. To refuse the temptation of a false house or safe space is to dedicate to the experience of homelessness, until the true home of presence and acceptance arises from within.

To put it otherwise, you will be groundless in your vulnerability until you accept vulnerability as true ground.