Meditation Coaching & Guidance
Meeting life through awareness itself
A Living Field of Practice
In this space, meditation is an invitation to recognize what's already here.
Awareness is already present. Life is already unfolding. Each breath, each sound, each flicker of sensation is aliveness revealing itself.
A seamless field—awareness and experience arising together, moment by moment
Sometimes it feels calm. Sometimes restless. Sometimes radiant with meaning. Always intimate. Always alive.
This is meditation: the recognition that meets itself.
Doorways of Practice
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This working integrates meditation guidance with Aletheia Unfolding, a comprehensive approach to depth-oriented transformation that works across psychological, somatic, emotional, relational, and spiritual dimensions.
The spectrum of the 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.
Aletheia Unfolding when meditation intersects with deeper transformational processes.
Nondual coaching when recognition and stabilization of nondual awareness becomes the focus. We work directly with what obscures clarity and support the embodiment of nondual presence.
[Read more about nondual coaching]
Most people find themselves moving between all three modes, discovering that meditation deepens personal work and personal work softens obstacles to practice.
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A space for cultivating presence through direct, experience-based instruction
This work focuses on the craft of meditation itself, without the broader integrative frame of my meditation coaching offering.
Sessions stay close to the immediacy of practice: refining technique, clarifying intention, and attuning to the living texture of meditation as it’s actually happening.
Guidance draws from multiple contemplative lineages, held in a contemporary, post-traditional spirit.
You’ll receive clear instruction, feedback, and suggestions for deepening continuity between meditation and everyday life.
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Discerning your authentic path
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 might 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
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 . 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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Spontaneous presence explores how insight and recognition express in the flow of living. Here, meditation no longer feels like something we do but as life moving in its own rhythm – speaking, acting, and creating through us.
Instead of managing experience, we allow awareness to respond directly to what is. Expression becomes effortless: gestures, words, and choices arise as natural extensions of presence.
Spontaneity practice can begin at any stage. For some, it means experimenting with letting speech, movement, or thought unfold without control. For others, especially when nondual presence has become familiar, it becomes the art of allowing expression to ripen into spontaneity.
As practice matures, the boundary between meditation and ordinary activity softens. In this way, realization expresses as embodied participation – life living itself with wisdom and effortless grace.
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Generative presence works with the creative intelligence of awareness itself. While many practices deconstruct experience to reveal its open, fluid nature, generative presence listens for what wants to be born from that openness.
Here, imagination becomes a mode of participation through which meaning, beauty, and possibility take form. We engage images, symbols, and felt resonances as living presences shaping how the world reveals itself.
Through imaginal and soulmaking practice, perception deepens: colors glow, gestures carry significance, ordinary scenes whisper their own myths. We begin to see that how we attend quietly co-creates the world we inhabit.
Generative presence moves fluidly between deconstructive clarity and creative participation. It doesn’t replace insight; it completes it. Having seen through the patterns of mind, we now collaborate with reality’s unfolding, allowing beauty and significance to bloom through us.
Being becomes world-making.
The Contemplative Dimension
What begins as cultivating attention gradually unveils the ground of awareness, the open field in which all experience unfolds. From there, practice and life begin to speak the same language: presence, intimacy, participation.
This, to me, is spiritual unfoldment. As stillness ripens into clarity, and clarity into embodied care, realization expresses itself through every facet of being: thought and feeling, relationship and work, ethics and creativity.
If you're drawn to exploring this contemplative dimension more deeply, see spiritual unfoldment.
An Integrative Approach
This work bridges contemplative wisdom with developmental depth:
Unfoldment – Meditation as the natural movement of presence expressing itself through your life, not a self-improvement project.
Whole-being approach – Psychological, emotional, somatic, and spiritual dimensions develop together, each deepening and balancing the others.
Full practice arc – Guidance through the entire spectrum of practice, including spontaneous and generative presence, dimensions rarely illuminated in contemporary teaching.
Psychologically attuned – Meeting protective parts, emotions, and relational patterns with skill and compassion as they arise in practice.
Embodied integration – Allowing insights to mature and reshape how you live, relate, work, and move through the world.
Clear, grounded instruction – Instruction is precise and experiential, informed by educational best practices. While some traditions cultivate ambiguity as a doorway to insight, contemporary practitioners often benefit more from transparency and clear guidance.
Integrative fluidity – Moving gracefully between practice and inquiry, structure and emergence, effort and ease, following what your unfolding most needs.
Experience-led – Your own immediacy becomes the teacher; the work unfolds from what reveals itself moment by moment.
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.
