What might enlightenment actually heal?
Therapy asks whether you can feel safe with other people. This book asks whether you can feel safe simply existing.
Read it while it’s being written, and help shape it. Browse the chapters.
Can You Feel Safe Just Being?
A central part of therapy is healing the inner child, the part of us that learned how safe it was to feel and express our emotions with others.
Deeper than that, in the preverbal phase of life, before there was even a “you”, our sense of being was already learning whether existence itself was safe. That learning sits beneath our attachment to people and beneath our stories about childhood.
When being itself doesn’t feel safe, a self grows on top of the wound to manage it: the one that keeps seeking, controlling, and never quite settles. What the traditions have called illusory, this book explains as a chronic defense mechanism.
Many people have seen through this self to some degree, in therapy or on the cushion, and still carry a faint unease they can’t explain and can’t quite get to. I believe that’s because the fuel behind the illusion is never dealt with: the wound it was built to manage.
Existential Safety traces where this comes from, and gives you a clear map and a grounded practice for healing it.
A bow to the wisdom traditions of the East
Their understanding of suffering and peace is what made this map possible. The framework describes their territory in new language; it doesn't claim to have found it.
Existential Attachment Safety Theory
Where the wound forms — in the earliest relationship with existence itself — how it lives in the body's affective system, and the defense mechanisms that create the illusory self.
Existential Affective Safety Training
The traditions have always worked with the body's affective tone to reach safety. Explained here through physiology and psychology, enlightenment starts to make sense: a wound that heals, an illusory self no longer needed.
The book, chapter by chapter
One chapter a week by email, before the final version is published. Read the first chapters, and if they land, tell me what works and what doesn't. That goes into the book.
Start reading →The practice app
The Deeply Safe app lets you hear your own heartbeat while you sit. It carries the practices from the book. Coming soon to iPhone and Android.
About the app →The Deeply Safe community
A small online practice community based on the book and the EAST framework, with weekly live circles led by me. Meet fellow practitioners interested in this perspective on enlightenment, and help shape the book, the app and the community.
Come into the room →Work with me
I help my clients navigate the waters between their meditative journey and the emotional and relational side of life. Psychologist and long-time practitioner, I know both shores from the inside and hope to be of service to whichever one you need help with.
Work with me →Stay in touch
Everything I write goes out from one place: the chapters as they go up, shorter pieces in between, and the news when the app or the book is released.