The Great Updraft

I share my five keys to being happy – the five components of my life that make me feel alive and that my life is worth living. If you feel bored, unfulfilled or lacking verve, you might like to cultivate one or more of these areas. Two Bonus Keys: https://deep-psychology.com/purposeful-life/

Today I’m going to talk about the deepest spiritual experience I ever had, which was the first time I took acid, and which forever destroyed my scientific dogmas about God. I’m going to share my insights into what God really is, from a non-biblical, non-dogmatic, mystical, embodied, directly apprehended perspective.

Today I share the story of my 2nd acid trip, how it helped me unearth and reintegrate an enormous personal shadow, and the insights I gained into our repressed side. If you’re not sure what the shadow is, I talk about it in my latest article called the symptoms of repressed anger. And let me tell you, REALLY seeing the shadow turned my inside out, for the better, and I can never go back to my prev...

Yes, the title is right: I’m committing to doing a meditation streak, doing not 10, not 30, not 60, not 100, but 1000 consecutive days of meditation. When I shared this with my meditation students, I think they thought I was a bit crazy. And it does seem a bit crazy. I’ve never met anyone who has done such a long daily streak. I’m sure there are many people, but I’ve never met anyone who’s done an...

Let’s talk about manifesting, debunk the BS behind it, and talk about how to really make your dreams come true. I kinda cringe when I hear people talking about manifesting. When they do, I get the impression they’re either trying to sell me something, or have never really achieved anything in their life. BUT behind the strange, woo-woo, pseudoscientific explanations, there is a very real, observab...

Today, we talk about personality masks. Often our most salient character traits are a facade erected to conceal who we really are behind it. Learn to accurately judge and interpret people, stop taking things personally, create emotional distance, and get ultra-useful intel on yourself and others.

Let’s talk about the spiritual ego and how to dismantle it. Rather than viewing the spiritual ego as a single kind of personality, I see it as a phenomenon that shows up as different characters, as subpersonalities, as mini-egos that hijack Truth to serve their own ends, thus distorting pure spiritual wisdom. I’ve come across six types in my time, and here are my quirky names for them: the Theoris...

Today we talk about six ways that modern society screws you up, and my six solutions to these issues. On the surface these might seem quite simple, but in combination they aspects are deadly and slowly rot away our ability to be happy and lead fulfilling lives. These tentacles reach down into all aspects of our psychology, our habits, and our view of what life is all about.

We have an extraordinary amount of luxury available to us, luxury that our parents and grandparents’ generation couldn’t imagine. And it’s all available very quickly and for very little money. You might think this makes you happy, but it actually slowly ruins your life. You’re being manipulated and exploited by media and marketeers, and it’s making you miserable. Learn how stimulation and comfort...

Today we talk about spiritual abuse: how to see the warning signs in teachers, why it happens, and how to lead a healthy spiritual life. This is based on my personal experiences as a teacher, meeting other teachers, and my 10-year meditation journey.

I explore persistence, failure and success, with no script. I open up and share the challenges I've faced this week, month and year so far. I hope you take away some lessons on success, failure and persistence.

Let’s discuss and practice choiceless awareness, a particular meditation state in which we give up control of our attention. This is also a meditation practice in its own right, and we’ll look at a couple of varieties of it. Skip to 11:30 for the guided meditation! I often see choiceless awareness talked about as a philosophy or doctrine. But to me it’s much more immediate than that. It’s a first-...

Let’s talk about walking meditation, how to practice it, why we practice it, and the obstacles involved. If you do meditation for some time, you’ll naturally begin to bring it into everyday life, and walking meditation is a powerful way to systematise this process. In my local classes I teach it from day one to accompany our sitting work. My students discover that it’s possible to meditate wheneve...

Limiting beliefs are disempowering views you have about yourself. You tend to strongly hold on to them, and they persistently prevent you from changing. Holding one is like being hypnotised by yourself, by your own mind. They trip you up, paralyse you, stop you in your tracks, and you don't even realise it. Today we talk about the 5 most common limiting beliefs and how they’re destroying your life...

Welcome to this 5-minute sleep meditation, guided by Ross Edwards BSc DipBSoM. I suggest you do this lying down with a pillow under your head, keeping the body symmetrical. My accompanying post (link below) includes this free audio along with tips on how to get the most from it. This is perfect for both beginner meditators, who can get a taste of mindfulness meditation, and for experienced meditat...

I've been practicing meditation consistently for nearly a decade and now teach dozens of meditators every week. What I've found is that we tend to come into meditation with all sorts of misconceptions. These misconceptions are unhelpful and even damaging. They jeopardise our efforts to establish a regular practice and start seeing its power. Use these three simple tips to plant the seeds of a matu...

MIND is my bespoke 10-week programme that empowers you to bring mindfulness into your day-to-day and have it transform how you face life’s challenges, overcome your blocks, and gain greater authenticity and fulfilment. You not only learn essential mindfulness techniques – you learn how to adapt them to your own needs for maximum personal growth. You start incorporating them into your daily life as...

Jean Gebser's work on the structures of consciousness illuminates the deep emergent structures of human psychology and how they play out in culture, society, religion, science and systems of meaning across human history, back to time immemorial. This is psychoactive philosophy. We're not analysing these structures of consciousness as separate entities far removed from them. We're steeped in these...

Ken Wilber ’s Four Quadrants sound nice in the abstract, but how do we apply them in practice? Let's discuss some of the on-the-ground applications of this theory, with a focus on our wellbeing, values, desires, and our developmental journey. By doing so we see the power of Ken Wilber's Four Quadrants and can begin applying them to find greater balance in our lives. Keep in mind one principle for...

We tend to emphasise some perspectives over others. When we do this, we’re blind, we’re biased. We’re not seeing the full picture, the fullness and complexity of life, and we create weak explanations and weak solutions. What if we could go beyond all this dichotomising and reductionism to a complete picture of reality? Enter The Four Quadrants. In his Integral Theory, Ken Wilber proposes his Four...

Let’s talk about the Pygmalion Effect and the self-fulfilling prophecy. The beauty of these concepts is that they reveal the power of thought, belief and emotion. We’re creators, and our primary medium is our imagination. And though we tend to abuse this power and create like drunkards, it’s possible to retrain ourselves to get our mind working in our favour. We look at common examples of this eff...

Often we see personal development as a sea of people disagreeing and giving advice that seems to be completely disconnected or even contradictory. But it doesn't have to be that way! I show you that all of personal development is really arranged in a series of layers that address different levels of our wellbeing. These are not so much stepping stones as repeating themes, each of which builds on t...

The levels of human consciousness in career. What are they? And how do we embody the highest ones, transforming ourselves and our career lives to the benefit of all?– What Are The Levels of Human Consciousness? Levels of complexity, a series of operating systems, each including the prior one but improving on it in crucial ways.– What Do They Mean For Our Career? The higher the levels we embody in...

Let’s talk about a powerful concept that I’ve discovered after years of working hard on my personal growth and mastering different subjects , from maths to languages to meditation to writing. This is my  Law of Proportional Reward , and it applies to all areas of personal growth, whether it’s career, relationships, finances, spirituality, or indeed learning. It even explains our levels of fulfilme...

If you’re struggling to get things done in life, you spend money on a whim, binge eat, binge drink and are always looking for that next high, check out this video. You cannot flourish in life without self-control. Here I share the secrets of SELF-CONTROL and the crucial role it plays in your self-transformation. I'm going to help you overcome those dog-like desires for good. In this video you'll l...