Meditation Guidance & Coaching
Meditation coaching and guidance in Sydney and online—integrating mindfulness, insight meditation, nondual awareness, and developmental depth.
Meditation as a Living Practice
Meditation is often framed as the ultimate self-improvement project, promising to calm your restless mind, transcend your ego, and perhaps even deliver enlightenment.
But anyone who practices soon discovers that trying to quiet the mind is like trying to smooth water with your palm.
What if meditation is simply about getting real?
Notice what's true in this moment. Perhaps there's curiosity. Excitement. Restlessness. Boredom.
Can you feel the difference between reading about presence and actually being present right now? Sometimes what you find feels calm. Sometimes uncomfortable. Sometimes radiant with meaning. Always intimate. Always revealing something true.
Meditation, in its essence, isn't something you do. It's what remains when you stop trying to add or subtract anything from this moment. Nothing requires less effort than being what you already are.
This understanding shapes everything we explore together. The practices serve as doorways, but what they reveal is already here—your innate resourcefulness, your capacity to meet life as it is, your deeper nature that needs no improvement.
Offerings
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This working integrates expert meditation guidance with Aletheia Coaching, a comprehensive approach to depth-oriented transformation that works across psychological, somatic, emotional, relational, and spiritual dimensions.
The spectrum of work:
The coaching naturally moves between three modes based on what's most alive:
Meditation guidance when you need focused support with technique, practice challenges, or deepening specific capacities.
Developmental coaching when meditation intersects with deeper transformational processes. Here we draw on the full range of Aletheia Coaching.
Nondual coaching when recognition and stabilization of nondual awareness becomes the focus. We work directly with what obscures clarity and suppor the embodiment of nondual presence.
Most people find themselves moving between all three modes, discovering that meditation deepens personal work and personal work softens obstacles to practice.
[Read more about developmental coaching]
[Read more about nondual coaching]
What this creates:
Sessions responsive to your actual edge—whether that's meditation technique, integration, or nondual recognition
Working with impediments to both practice and broader unfoldment
Supporting the natural reinforcement between contemplative depth and embodied transformation
Harvesting insights from the cushion and translating them into how you live, relate, and work
Embodying essential qualities—love, strength, courage, clarity, peace—that emerge naturally through presence
Creating conditions where realization naturally permeates your whole life
For whom:
Those who sense that meditation and personal development aren't separate journeys
Practitioners experiencing plateaus that stem from treating spiritual and psychological work as distinct
Anyone drawn to guidance that honors both contemplative depth and the full complexity of being human
Format:
An ongoing coaching relationship with flexible sessions that weave together meditation guidance and Aletheia Coaching methods as your unfolding requires.
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Mindfulness Coaching offers structured support using Shinzen Young’s Unified Mindfulness (UM) system. This approach provides precise, systematic training in mindfulness skills.
Working within this focused framework, we develop your capacity to work skillfully with all aspects of experience, cultivating presence and natural responsiveness in all situations.
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Meditation represents a significant investment—potentially thousands of hours over decades, retreats, teachings, and deep personal exploration. Yet many people navigate this territory without a clear sense of the vastly different paths available or how to discern what truly serves their unfolding.
You might discover you've been practicing approaches designed for monastics when your calling is toward worldly integration. You may be following techniques that emphasize transcendence when your development asks for embodiment. Some find themselves striving toward awakening when healing the personal self is the necessary ground.
Or perhaps you're moving from tradition to tradition, teacher to teacher, hoping the next approach will finally unlock what you're seeking. While exploration is natural, the question becomes: when is your seeking an expression of wholeness discovering itself, and when has it become a pattern preventing the very settling you long for?
Most meditation teachers naturally share what transformed them. Few will help you understand when their approach might not serve you, or guide you through the broader landscape with genuine discernment.
This consultation offers what I wish I had when I started: a spacious exploration of contemplative territory that honors both the richness of different traditions and your capacity for wise navigation.
What we'll explore:
Understanding the territory
What genuinely draws you to meditation and what you hope it might offer
Philosophical foundations of different approaches and where they naturally lead
Major traditions and techniques—their gifts and particular orientations
The distinction between renunciative and embodied paths
Finding your way
Developing discernment around teachers and communities
Different models of spiritual authority—from autonomous inquiry to devotional relationship
Sensing when to commit deeply versus continuing to explore
Bridging the gap between what teachings promise and what actually unfolds
Integration and realism
How different approaches work with psychology, relationships, and daily life
Creating a realistic picture of what meditative development involves
Sensing together a personalized approach that honors your authentic calling
For whom:
Anyone drawn to sincere practice who wants thoughtful reflection before investing significant time and energy
Those who've explored different approaches but feel uncertain about which direction truly serves
People sensing their current practice or teaching relationship might not be fully aligned with their path
Anyone wanting to understand the broader contemplative landscape—its diverse offerings, orientations, and potential pitfalls
Experienced practitioners exploring whether their current approach continues to serve their unfolding
Format:
Single 75-minute session, either in-person or online (AU$250). Designed to provide clarity and inspiration for your contemplative journey, whether you're just beginning or sensing a new direction.
This moment, already complete. Why add meditation? Yet here we are, words dissolving into the vastness they pretend to describe.
Movements of Practice
Our work draws from five complementary styles of meditation practice. While they naturally build upon each other, your practice might move between them non-linearly based on what serves your current unfolding.
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Mindfulness meditation trains the natural capacities of attention that support well-being and responsiveness. In the Unified Mindfulness approach, we cultivate three core skills: concentration (focusing where you choose), sensory clarity (tracking experience in real time), and equanimity (allowing experience without interference).
[Read more about mindfulness meditation]
Calm-Staying (Shamatha) develops sustained collectedness and stillness through the classical Nine Stages of Maitreya (a.k.a. the Elephant Path). Shamata emphasizes the qualities of stillness, relaxation, and vividness, nurturing the stable ground from which deep insight can naturally unfold.
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Insight meditation investigates how the mind constructs what we take to be solid, stable, and separate. As we learn to recognise the open, fluid, relational nature of experience, a deeper sense of freedom and interconnection emerges.
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Nondual meditation invites recognition of awareness itself as naturally luminous, self-knowing, and undivided. Through practices for recognizing nondual presence, we discover that awareness and experience are inseparable, and learn to live from this recognition in daily life.
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As meditation practice develops, a natural question arises: how do the insights of practice express themselves in daily life? Spontaneity practices address this bridge, cultivating a way of functioning where awareness itself becomes the guiding intelligence, free from the constant management of a separate “doer.”
Spontaneity practices can be entered at different points. In one approach, they are available from the very beginning: anyone can experiment with techniques with that let speech, movement, or creativity arise on their own. In another approach, they become especially relevant when someone has direct access to nondual presence—and is drawn to explore how that naturally expresses in daily life. In both cases, the emphasis is on releasing the compulsion to control expression and discovering how responsiveness, authenticity, and care can unfold from presence itself.
With continued practice, deliberate technique gradually gives way to seamless integration. The boundary between formal practice and daily life softens as functioning arises directly from presence rather than from self-conscious oversight.
This maturation builds confidence in the natural intelligence that emerges when we trust awareness itself. The sense of “I am doing” shifts into “doing is happening.” Practice then expresses as embodied engagement with the world—an easeful participation in life where realization naturally shows up as authenticity, care, and service.
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Soulmaking practices work with the imaginal realm to cultivate meaning, beauty, depth, and sacredness. Rather than deconstructing experience, soulmaking practices enrich perception, revealing layers of beauty and significance that naturally inspire reverence and creative engagement with life.
Through practices like imaginal journeying and working with archetypepal energies, we develop the capacity to see the world as ensouled—rich with significance, beauty, and mystery. This movement recognises that the soul’s capacity for meaning is as essential as the mind's capacity for insight and the heart’s capacity for love and compassion.
A Contemporary Approach
This work bridges contemplative wisdom with developmental depth in ways rarely found elsewhere:
Unfolding orientation: Working with meditation as your innate capacity for presence seeking expression, not a self-improvement project.
Supporting whole-being development: Psychological maturity, emotional integration, somatic awareness, relational capacity, and spiritual realization unfolding together, each deepening the others.
Integrative approach: Meeting you where you are and fluidly moving between practice and inquiry, structure and emergence, effort and grace.
Psychologically attuned: Working skillfully with protective parts, emotional wounds, and relational patterns that surface as your practice unfolds. This is where contemplative depth meets the complexity of being human.
Support for integration and embodiment: Allowing insights to reshape how you live, relate, work, and move through the world—contemplative depth expressing itself in daily life.
Following direct experience: Your immediate experience guides the work, not dogma or predetermined frameworks. We respond to what's actually arising rather than imposing stages or models.
Working together
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I'm Marcel, a meditation teacher and Aletheia coach specializing in the integration of contemplative practice with depth-oriented personal development.
My work bridges multiple dimensions. I'm a certified Unified Mindfulness teacher, hold a Diploma in Mindfulness and Compassion Teaching from Insight Meditation Institute, and am completing training in Loch Kelly’s in Effortless Mindfulness approach.
As an Aletheia Coaching practitioner, I bring comprehensive training in working with various dimensions of development. This allows me to work fluidly between meditation guidance and the deeper psychological, emotional, and relational dimensions that shape how realization actually unfolds in a human life.
I have nearly 15 years of meditation experience. My current practice is rooted in the Mahamudra, Dzogchen, and Planetary Dharma traditions.
I bring precision, care, and attunement to this work. Whether we're developing mindfulness skills, meeting a protective part with compassion, or resting in natural awareness, the invitation is the same: to discover what's ready to unfold in your lourney.
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Introductory session – AU$80 (50 min)
A one-time, low-cost session designed to be immediately useful. You’ll learn a technique tailored to your current situation, receive initial guidance for your practice, and get a felt sense of how we might work together.Meditation coaching – AU$200 per session (60 min)
Ongoing one-to-one work integrating meditation guidance with Aletheia coaching.Meditation guidance – AU$160 per session (50 min)
Focused sessions for refining your meditation practice: personalized instruction, technique adjustments, and Q&A.Meditation landscape orientation – AU$250 (75 min)
A deep-dive consultation for discerning your overall direction, clarifying your path across traditions, goals, and next steps.Small group coaching – price depends on format
Small group containers (2–6 people) for those drawn to explore practice in community. These spaces combine meditation instruction, guided practice, shared inquiry, and Q&A.Financial accessibility:
If you are genuinely called to this work but face financial constraints, feel free to reach to discuss sliding scale options.
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You’re free to pause coaching or shift structure at any time. Group formats typically run as defined journeys (e.g., 6 weeks), with the option to continue if the group wishes.
Of course, meditation coaching only makes sense if you can commit to consistent practice while we’re working together. If this is not possible, consider developmental coaching instead.
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Online via Zoom (available globally)
In-person in Sydney:
Freshwater Wellness Centre (Northern Beaches)
Outdoor sessions (around Manly)
Other locations might be possible by arrangement
Questions and answers
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Apps and books have much value. They make meditation accessible, teach useful techniques, and provide inspiration for practice. Many people benefit significantly from them, and some go very far with self-guided practice.
In meditation, the most significant development happens through working skillfully with what actually arises in your practice. This kind of learning is fundamentally relational and embodied.
Most people meditate from the level of their everyday self with egoic goals, anxieties, and habitual ways of relating to experience. There's nothing wrong with this—it's essential to functioning in the world. But when your meditation practice is run by the part of you that wants to achieve, the part that needs to get it right, or the part that is impatient to see tangible benefits, practice often stays at a surface level. Meditation becomes another self-improvement project rather than a gateway to deeper presence.
When you encounter boredom, restlessness, doubt, or disappointment, the everyday self naturally interpret these as problems or signs of failure. But this is actually the path itself, invitations to meet your experience from a deeper place.
Working with a guide provides something fundamentally different: a combination of technical depth, breadth, and relational learning that creates conditions for genuine transformation.
Ready to start your journey?
If you're curious about this work or sensing that a meditation practice wants to deepen, you're welcome to book a short exploratory conversation. There's no cost. Just a space to connect, ask questions, and sense what might be supportive.
