Intro, Overview, and Best Articles/Meditations

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I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself and give an overview of my work. So here I’ve included a quick intro, an overview of my work here on Substack, and an overview of some guided meditations I’ve made as well.

Quick Intro

Hi I’m Jude!

I’m a meditation teacher and integrative therapist. I’ve been exploring meditation and therapy for over two decades now and have written guided meditations for numerous apps (Calm, Open, Mindbloom, Fieldtrip, Othership) as well as teaching meditation over the last decade at Consciousness Explorers Club (CEC), a pluralistic meditation group founded by Jeff Warren.

I am a somewhat unconventional meditation teacher. While the core of what I teach is rooted in Mindfulness or Vipassana, I don’t favour one system or lineage; instead I’ve created a sort of synthesis of theory and practice and teach in a very pragmatic and integrative way.

This approach is reflected in my Comparative Meditation Course, which explores themes in Shamatha, Vipassana, Tantra, and Non-Dual theory and practice. Instead of diving deep into one lineage, I give a birds-eye view of the entire landscape, helping people to understand the fundamentals and big picture so they can find the practices and traditions best suited to their unique needs and interests.

I also take this integrative approach with therapy, which is fairly common. I trained in a number of modalities (Gestalt, Depth, Psychodynamic, Existential, Somatic, Humanistic, Parts Work…), have had fantastic mentors, and am always learning and reflecting on how I can improve.

On a more personal note, I grew up skateboarding and involved in arts and music scenes. I’ve been a photographer, co-founded an art gallery, and produced art and music events in my younger days. I’m currently living in Mexico City, and you’re invited to connect with me on instagram as well.

Now I am mostly focused on my private practice as a therapist and coaching and mentorships. You can read more about my experience and what I offer on my website. I am currently taking on clients, so if you’re curious about working with me, reach out.

If you want to know more details of my experience and background, I made a 40 min video discussing some of the most important teachers and mentors I’ve had over the past 20 years, and explain a bit of what I learned from each of them. This video is mostly meditation focused, and I really should do another on my therapeutic mentors as I’ve had great mentorship in that field as well.

A number of my Substack essays also have an autobiographical dimension woven in, so read on.

This Substack

My intention for this substack, at least in this phase, is to offer the wisdom and perspectives that have most stuck with me over the past 2 decades. These are the insight and strategies that I find myself explaining over and over in sessions with clients or in meditation groups and workshops.

I have grouped these into three main categories (though articles will often have elements of two or even all three). They are:

Meaning and Purpose

Meditation, Mindfulness, Awakening

Psychology and Growth

Meaning and Purpose

In this short piece Finding Meaning Together I explore one of the simplest and most important ideas that I think we all need to ask ourselves: what do you value? I expand more on this topic in Finding Ourselves in an Uncanny World, were I talk about my difficulty in making big life transitions, specifically putting myself “out there” on my YouTube channel.

I get deeper into these themes in The Paradox of Pursuing Happiness series, the first exploring happiness and meaning from the perspective of Existential Psychology and the second explores Insights from Depth Psychology.

I also wrote a post titled Understanding Growth in Psychedelic Experience (and Life in General) where I present a pragmatic framework for understanding growth and transcendence and how these relate to psychedelic experience.

Meditation, Mindfulness, and Awakening

I wrote a piece for the Consciousness Explorers Club newsletter titled Freedom From the Future where I talk about how mindfulness has change me and my life for the better. I got a lot of positive feedback from people saying this essay really impacted them, so thought I’d post this one first.

In New Horizons: Innovative Teachers of Awakening - Part 1: Shinzen Young I tell the story of my journey with meditation and encountering “awakened” teachers and how this idea of awakening and the discussion around it has evolved in recent times. I also profile my main teacher, Shinzen Young, and discuss the core ideas that impacted me.

I go on to profile two more teachers that have greatly impacted me, Daniel Ingram and Loch Kelly.

And then leading up to my Comparative Meditation Course I wrote a number of articles. First on the difference (and similarities) between Vipassana and Tantra, then I introduce Shamatha and Vipassana, Tantra, and Non-Dual practice and theory.

And if that was a little too much information for you, I decided to come back to the basics with Making Mindfulness Simple (but not too simple).

Psychology and Growth

Feel The Feelings, Rewrite The Story is perhaps the most referenced concept in my therapy practice. It gets to the heart of growth and wellbeing while addressing the problems and misconceptions that often hold people back. It’s a simple concept, with massive implications.

“We’re all a little ADHD” is me revisiting the topic that led to my first big success on YouTube (Meditation For ADHD That Actually Works!). In it I explore the pros and cons of living with ADHD (yes I have ADHD), and also how our culture itself is ADHD and that we’re probably all on the spectrum — meaning we can all benefit from applying the same principles I utilize myself and with my ADHD clients.

Getting Traction With Self-Compassion explores the importance of self-compassion with a focus on where we get stuck and how we can overcome those barriers.

Political Anxiety and Creating a Better Future explores how people change for the better and what we can do to foster understanding and cooperation in a divided world.

Be Smarter About Your New Years Resolutions explores the topic of change and how we can set ourselves up for success.

Guided Meditations

The majority of the meditations that I’ve written are up on apps like Calm, Open, Mindbloom, and Field Trip. These are mostly unaccredited, but I’m very proud of the work I’ve done, especially at Open, where I wrote over 90 practices for the Daily feature.

After my work with Open I decided to make some guided practices covering what I feel are some of the most important practices for our healing, wellbeing, and growth. This series is available on my YouTube Channel and also Insight Timer. These tracks are set to ambient music, which has been originally produced by talented friends of mine (they are credited in the descriptions).

Artwork by Ananda

These tracks are all available totally free (I’ve taken all the ads off the meditations on YouTube). If you’d like to support this work, you can become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

Here are the tracks from this series with description:

Practicing Mindfulness: Welcoming Our Experience is a fundamental introduction to the basics of mindfulness. We cultivate equanimity and the right attitude for successful meditation through the awareness and acceptance of our inner experience. You are gently guided to develop more awareness and open hearted acceptance of your inner world, leading to a greater sense of wellbeing and freedom.

Finding Rest and Ease Through a Felt Sense of Safety explores how relating to our experience in a gentle and compassionate way can bring about more rest and ease, and help to cultivate an inner sense of safety. We bring our awareness into different areas of our body to find what best works to cultivate this warm sense of safety and ease.

Cultivating Dynamic Self-Compassion explores different phrases, memories, and relational images to deepen a felt sense of compassion and then turns it around to ourselves. We continue to expand this sense through gentle self-touch, inner smile, and connecting to our inner child to deepen this appreciation and care.

Feeling: Mastery is Not Control explores how we can master our feeling not through trying to control them, but by learning to validate them and let them move through us unobstructed. We can learn to feel fully, without necessarily needing to act on or express our feelings (feeling more but being less reactive).

Values and Self-Worth: How We Measure Ourselves explores how we inevitably measure ourselves against unrealistic and superficial ideals and prompts us to contemplate what our true values are, inviting you to let go of unhealthy, unrealistic, or superficial values adopted from culture and environment.

Empowerment: Owning our Innate Power explores a felt sense of empowerment. If our needs aren’t met early in life, we may feel a sense of undeservingness. We may have been made to feel small by others trying to regain a sense of their own power. We may even have a negative association with power, thinking that it is inherently used against others. This practice allows us to reclaim a healthy sense of power, allowing what’s in the way to soften and melt, revealing our expansive and empowered nature.

Cultivating Deep Gratitude and Contentment explores the practice of contentment, which is simply not needing anything to be different in the moment. From this base of contentment we begin to cultivate gratitude, explore what we’re grateful for in different dimensions of life, and using our breath to deepen our experience.

We Are What We Repeatedly Do: Making Better Habits explores how we can let go of unhelpful habits and create new, healthy habits. We bring into awareness our habitual ways of being and compassionately reflect on what we want to let go of, and what we want to replace these old habits with. We then visualize the new habits and anchor in the feeling of acting them out, priming new neural pathways that will allow us to adopt these new ways of being.

Already Whole: Recognizing Our Innate Wholeness reveals our innate wholeness. Our unconscious mind weaves together stories and experiences, ultimately creating a sense of self. But this sense of self is limited and illusory. We explore the parts of ourselves that feel fractured or inadequate and look deeper into our truest nature, which is already and always whole.

Understanding Equanimity: A Felt Sense helps to understand equanimity, one of the most important principles in meditative practice. It's guided in a way to not just understand with our minds, but to develop a felt sense of understanding in our body. Practicing equanimity allows us to be more relaxed and at ease in any and all circumstances, leading to less inner reactivity and a sense of wellbeing and inner peace.

Practicing Equanimity: Working with Discomfort explores hot to practice equanimity with a felt sense of discomfort in our bodies. We locate some form of discomfort and bring it more into awareness and clarity, exploring the sensations in shape, size, intensity, and texture. Brining discomfort more into awareness and more into acceptance helps to fundamentally shift our relationship to discomfort; we learn to relax around it, instead of resisting or judging it, allowing our experience to be smoother and leading to a greater sense of wellbeing.

Purpose Carries You Through explores how having a sense of purpose creates resiliency and carries us through difficult times in life. We reflect on what is personally meaningful and allow that to guide the way.

Cultivate Tranquility with the Inner Smile helps to tranquility and expansive lightness through the practice of the inner smile. This is a personal favourite of mine and I tend to infuse other practices with this technique as well.

Practicing Patience: For Ourselves and Our Growth explores the practice of patience and how we can bring more awareness, understanding, and acceptance to our experience to help cultivate more patience.

Don’t Know Mind is a classic Zen meditation, where we practice being in an expansive state of not knowing, finding a quality of mind that is beyond knowing.

There’s a lot more on my YouTube channel so feel free to explore there! A great starting point might be this video on Equanimity, which I feel is one of the most important skills we can cultivate in life. You can follow that up with an intro to equanimity meditation.