Upcoming Events

Live Event:

True Freedom vs Imagined Freedom

October 16, 2025  6:30 – 8:15 pm PST

Where: 962 Evergreen Ct. Sebastopol (directions below).

You keep longing for freedom. Not casually, but with the quiet urgency of someone who senses that something essential is missing. This hunger isn’t for novelty or escape—it’s for wholeness. So… you follow the trail: teachings, practices, glimpses, frameworks. But what you often encounter is not freedom itself, but the mind’s rendering of it—a conceptual image, a future state, a promise contingent on getting everything just right.

This was made vividly clear to me during a recent meditation retreat in New York. I arrived with expectations—of deep silence, community, and spaciousness. Instead, I got sick mid-way through – with headaches, congestion, and fatigue. I slept twelve hours a night and spent most of the retreat alone in my room, apart from the group. And yet, in that unexpected solitude, something began to shift.

I felt enough comfort and care to allow for a quiet intimacy with “what is.” The retreat ceased to be what I thought it was supposed to be. It became a living inquiry into presence—not as a concept, but as a felt reality. Disappointment was there. So was physical pain. But they were no longer obstacles.  They were all part of the unfolding.

And what became unmistakably clear was this: I do not have actual agency over the reality of my experience. Despite my best efforts to direct life in a wholesome way—avoiding viruses, planning carefully—the unfolding of what happens to David, well… is a mystery. The advanced practice, if we can call it that, is not in controlling outcomes, but in cultivating the capacity to meet them.  What is it to be established in presence, and to be intimate with everything that arises from that ground? Resistance, in any form, is a fight against reality—and it is futile.

Resistance is where the distortion of freedom begins. The mind substitutes freedom with an ideal: the absence of suffering, uninterrupted peace, a stillness immune to life’s friction. And then it measures your present state against that ideal. You begin resisting what’s here, not because it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t match the projection.

But what if freedom isn’t a state to attain? What if it’s not a feeling at all? What if it’s simply the absence of resistance to what is—whether what is feels exquisite or excruciating?

The retreat deepened this understanding. It revealed how preconceived ideas—about healing, about spiritual progress, about what “should” happen—are often the very barriers to presence. Preferences still arise, of course. They’re part of how we navigate. But they don’t need to be complicated by thought. Much of our true knowing happens in the immediacy of the moment, before the mind intervenes.

This doesn’t exclude the necessity of thought-based planning. Life demands it. But how often does your daily plan unfold exactly as imagined? How often does the mind’s out-picturing of future events match the reality that arrives?

When the pursuit quiets, something else begins to emerge. It’s not a grand revelation or a permanent transcendence. Instead, a subtle intimacy with the moment unfolds —unfiltered and uncurated. Pain, doubt, silence, ordinariness are all permitted. All are included.

It doesn’t resemble the mind’s version of freedom. But there’s a stillness in no longer needing reality to conform, a sacred coherence in meeting life without division.

And then, without striving, something opens. Not a destination. Not a perfected state. But a recognition. A return—not to a place, but to what you’ve always been.

You keep longing for freedom. Not casually, but with the quiet urgency of someone who senses that something essential is missing. This hunger isn’t for novelty or escape—it’s for wholeness. So… you follow the trail: teachings, practices, glimpses, frameworks. But what you often encounter is not freedom itself, but the mind’s rendering of it—a conceptual image, a future state, a promise contingent on getting everything just right.

This was made vividly clear to me during a recent meditation retreat in New York. I arrived with expectations—of deep silence, community, and spaciousness. Instead, I got sick mid-way through – with headaches, congestion, and fatigue. I slept twelve hours a night and spent most of the retreat alone in my room, apart from the group. And yet, in that unexpected solitude, something began to shift.

I felt enough comfort and care to allow for a quiet intimacy with “what is.” The retreat ceased to be what I thought it was supposed to be. It became a living inquiry into presence—not as a concept, but as a felt reality. Disappointment was there. So was physical pain. But they were no longer obstacles.  They were all part of the unfolding.

And what became unmistakably clear was this: I do not have actual agency over the reality of my experience. Despite my best efforts to direct life in a wholesome way—avoiding viruses, planning carefully—the unfolding of what happens to David, well… is a mystery. The advanced practice, if we can call it that, is not in controlling outcomes, but in cultivating the capacity to meet them.  What is it to be established in presence, and to be intimate with everything that arises from that ground? Resistance, in any form, is a fight against reality—and it is futile.

Resistance is where the distortion of freedom begins. The mind substitutes freedom with an ideal: the absence of suffering, uninterrupted peace, a stillness immune to life’s friction. And then it measures your present state against that ideal. You begin resisting what’s here, not because it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t match the projection.

But what if freedom isn’t a state to attain? What if it’s not a feeling at all? What if it’s simply the absence of resistance to what is—whether what is feels exquisite or excruciating?

The retreat deepened this understanding. It revealed how preconceived ideas—about healing, about spiritual progress, about what “should” happen—are often the very barriers to presence. Preferences still arise, of course. They’re part of how we navigate. But they don’t need to be complicated by thought. Much of our true knowing happens in the immediacy of the moment, before the mind intervenes.

This doesn’t exclude the necessity of thought-based planning. Life demands it. But how often does your daily plan unfold exactly as imagined? How often does the mind’s out-picturing of future events match the reality that arrives?

When the pursuit quiets, something else begins to emerge. It’s not a grand revelation or a permanent transcendence. Instead, a subtle intimacy where the moment unfolds —unfiltered and uncurated. Pain, doubt, silence, ordinariness are all permitted. All are included.

It doesn’t resemble the mind’s version of freedom. But there’s a stillness in no longer needing reality to conform, a sacred coherence in meeting life without division.

And then, without striving, something opens. Not a destination. Not a perfected state. But a recognition. A return—not to a place, but to what you’ve always been.

If you are interested in exploring this further, please come join us Live, Thursday, October 16 at 962 Evergreen Ct. Sebastopol (directions below) 

I hope you can make it!

Cost: By donation (donation basket at the event)

Directions: Turn East across from Fircrest Market on Redwood Ave. Keep heading east though you will end up making a left on Cedar and a quick right onto Evergreen Ave. The road ends looking at the Laguna. It is the last mobile home on the right (blue – green). Please come in the sliding glass door on the south side.

Questions: Please reply to this email or call/ text at (707) 695-0043.