Meditation Coaching & Guidance

Meditation as a Living Practice

Meditation is often framed as the ultimate self-improvement project, promising to calm your restless mind, transcend difficult emotions, perhaps even deliver enlightenment.

But anyone who practices soon discovers: trying to quiet the mind is like smoothing water with your palm. Even the most profound states come and go like weather.

What if meditation is simply about getting real?

Notice what's true in this moment.

Perhaps there's longing. Wonder. Restlessness. Boredom. A sense that you're reading these words while your mind wanders elsewhere.

Whatever is here, we can gently turn toward it—exactly as it is. We listen. We explore. We let it be.

Sometimes experience feels calm. Sometimes uncomfortable. Sometimes radiant with meaning. Always intimate. Always revealing itself.

Nothing requires less effort than simply being what you already are.

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.

Offerings

  • Your meditation practice and the rest of your life are part of the same unfolding.

    This offering integrates expert meditation guidance with Aletheia Coaching, an approach for supporting ever-deepening psychological, somatic, emotional, and spiritual unfoldment.

    What it involves:

    • An ongoing engagement that weaves together expert meditation guidance and developmental coaching

    • Sessions that respond to your current edge, whether that's formal practice, emotional integration, or life application

    • Supporting the natural reinforcement between meditation practice, personal growth, psychological wholeness, and embodiment

    • Harvesting insights from formal practice and bridging them into daily life

    • Working with patterns and impediments that hinder both meditation and broader unfoldment

    • Exploring how spiritual unfoldment applies across personal, cultural, social, and systemic dimensions for full embodiment

    • Creating conditions where awakening naturally flows through your life, relationships, and beyond

    For whom:

    • Those who sense that meditation and personal development aren't separate journeys and want integrated support for both

    • Practitioners experiencing plateaus or challenges that stem from the artificial separation between "spiritual" and "psychological" work

    Format:

    A coaching relationship featuring flexible sessions that combine meditation guidance, developmental coaching, and integration strategies.

  • Nondual Coaching works directly with the recognition and embodiment of nondual presence.

    This work moves beyond technique and practice toward direct pointing and recognition. We work with whatever blocks the natural unfolding of awakening, whether that's subtle identifications, emotional contractions, or habitual patterns that maintain the illusion of separation.

    Nondual Coaching involves:

    • Nondual inquiry

    • Working through the blockages that obscure deeper realization

    • Supporting the integration of nondual recognition into daily life

    • Navigating the territory of awakening, including both openings and challenges

    • Supporting the embodiment of awakening rather than just temporary experiences

    • Working with the dance between effort and grace in the deepest practices

    For whom:

    Those interested in estalishing coaching relationship specifically focused on nondual work.

    Format:

    Extended engagement with sessions focused on direct recognition work and embodiment of realisation.

  • Mindfulness Coaching offers structured support using Shinzen Young’s Unified Mindfulness (UM) system, oriented towards cultivating comprehensive well-being through mindful awareness. This approach provides precise, systematic training in mindfulness skills that enhance various dimensions of life.

    Working within this focused framework, we develop your capacity to work skillfully with all aspects of experience, cultivating equanimity and natural responsiveness in all situations.

    The UM system also accommodates cover the deepest depths of meditation practice, making it suitable for practitioners of all levels.

    What it involves:

    • Systematic training in the Unified Mindfulness system

    • Aligning your practice with meaningful personal goals

    • Developing concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity as fundamental life skills

    • Learning to work skillfully with all aspects of experience, such as body sensations, thoughts and emotions

    • Working with challenges that arise in your practice

    • Applying mindfulness techniques to specific life challenges, opportunities, and goals

    • Building a sustainable and effective daily practice that supports ongoing well-being

    • Integrating mindfulness into daily life, work, relationships, and creative endeavors

    For whom:

    • Invididuals wishing to apply mindfulness to support specific life goals, such as managing stress and anxiety or deepening relationships

    • Those drawn to a systematic, well-researched approach to mindfulness development

    • People wanting to develop specific skills in attention, emotional regulation, and stress management

    • Anyone interested in the practical benefits of mindfulness without necessarily pursuing deeper spiritual territory

    • Advanced meditators interested in the deeper aspects of the UM system

    Format:

    Structured program or ongoing coaching within the Unified Mindfulness framework.

  • Meditation represents a significant investment of time and energy —potentially thousands of hours over decades, retreats, teachings, and deep personal exploration. Yet many people find themselves navigating this territory without a clear sense of the vastly different paths available or how to discern what truly serves their unique unfolding.

    You might discover you’ve been practicing approaches designed for monastics when your deeper calling is toward integration with worldly life. You may be following techniques that emphasise transcendence and detachment, when what your development truly asks for is emotional intimacy and embodiment. Some find themselves striving toward awakening when healing and integrating the personal self is the necessary ground.

    You might find yourself moving from tradition to tradition, teacher to teacher, always sensing that the next approach will finally unlock what you're seeking. While exploration is natural and valuable, the question becomes: when is your spiritual exploration an expression of wholeness discovering itself, and when has it become a pattern of seeking that prevents the very settling you long for?

    Meditation teachers naturally share what inspired and transformed them. Most won’t tell you when their approach might not be right for you, or help you understand the broader landscape.

    This consultation offers what I wish I had when I started: a spacious exploration of the contemplative territory that honours both the richness of different traditions and your capacity for wise discernment in navigating them.

    What it involves:

    • Exploring what genuinely draws you to meditation practice and what you hope it might offer

    • Understanding the philosophical foundations of different approaches and their natural directions

    • Discerning between renunciative and embodied paths, and sensing which serves your authentic development

    • Reviewing major traditions and techniques with appreciation for their gifts and recognition of their particular orientations

    • Developing discernment around teachers and communities

    • Understanding different models of spiritual authority, from autonomous inquiry to devotional relationship, and what aligns with your path

    • Sensing when it might be time to commit more deeply to a particular approach rather than continue exploring

    • Bridging the gap between what teachings offer and what might actually unfold in your practice

    • Understanding how different approaches work with psychology, relationships, and the fullness of life

    • Creating a realistic and inspiring picture of what meditative development and spiritual unfoldment can involve

    • Sensing together a personalised approach that honors both your authentic calling and the wisdom of established traditions

    For whom:

    • Anyone drawn to meditation as a sincere practice who wants thoughtful guidance before investing significant time and energy

    • Those who have explored different approaches but feel uncertain about which direction truly serves their development

    • People who find themselves moving between traditions and teachers, sensing it might be time to settle more deeply into one approach

    • People sensing that their current practice or teaching relationship might not be fully aligned with their authentic path

    • Anyone wanting to understand the broader contemplative landscape with its diverse offerings, orientations, and potential pitfalls

    • Experienced practitioners feeling called to explore whether their current approach continues to serve their unfolding

    Format:

    Single 60-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 in your practice.

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.

  • Mindfulness approaches meditation as the training of attentional skills that enhance your well-being and capacity to work with any life situation. We focus on developing three core capacities: concentration (ability to focus on what you choose), sensory clarity (ability to track and explore experience in real-time), and equanimity (ability to allow experience without interference).

    We learn to work skillfully with different aspects of experience, such as body sensations, emotions, and thoughts. As you develop mindful awareness, you enhance your ability to detect details and untangle experience, discovering how this can both take the edge off challenging experiencs and deepen your fulfillment.

    Calm Staying (also known as Shamatha) develops sustained collectedness and inner stillness through the classical Nine Stages of Maitreya, also known as the Elephant Path. Following the traditional progression, this movement cultivates the ability to calm the mind and rest in stillness, creating the stability necessary for deeper investigation and recognition.

  • Insight meditation, also known as Vipassana or Vipashyana, investigates the nature of experience itself, revealing how the mind constructs what we take to be solid, stable, and separate. This style of practice can be approached through multiple frameworks that complement and deepen each other.

    From the perspective of Unified Mindfulness, insight emerges through refining our concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity. As these attentional skills deepen, we explore how sensory experience naturally exhibits qualities of flux, spaciousness, and spontaneity. With practice, experience appears less solid, separate, and ordinary and more open, flowing, and extraordinary.

    From Mahayana and later Buddhist perspectives, insight unfolds through ways of looking that illuminate the emptiness of all experience—everything is fundamentally without fixed, separate, or inherent existence. The practice systematically deconstructs our conceptual frameworks, revealing the open and spacious quality of phenomena. We might say there are only verbs in experience, not nouns.

    Together, these approaches converge. One works through training attentional skills; the other, through training the view. As we learn to see through conceptual overlays and the constructed self, a profound sense of relief can emerge, opening up new ways of being that are liberated and fulfilling.

  • Essence practices are designed to point directly to what some traditions call awake awareness—a mode of experience that can be recognised as fundamentally spacious, boundaryless, centreless, effortless, natural, clear, and undisturbed. It reveals itself as inherently lucid and luminous; the field of knowing itself, already here. Awake awareness is beyond conceptual grasp, but it can be known directly, even if only momentarily.

    Taking the perspective of traditional and contemporary lineages such as Mahamudra and Planetary Dharma, awake awareness naturally unveils dimensions of love and radical wholeness. Artificial boundaries between self and world naturally dissolve, revealing an interconnected field of bright, warm, loving presence. This recognition often awakens a profound tenderness toward all experience and a sense of fundamental completeness.

    While essence practice is strongly associated with pointing out and view-based practices, we can also approach it from the perspective of Unified Mindfulness, which emphasises skill development.

  • When your practice develops, a natural question arises: how do the insights and realisations from your meditation practice express themselves in daily life? Spontaneity practices explore this bridge between insight and living, cultivating a way of functioning where awareness operates without the constraints of a separate doer.

    This stage of practice works with both the wisdom of effortless expression and the compassion of skillful, appropriate response arising from presence. Drawing from wisdom traditions that emphasize effortless action—such as the Daoist principle of Wu Wei (actionless action)—this style of practice cultivates the capacity to act and express authentically from a mature level of practice.

    This style of practice has different entry points, depending on where you are in your meditation journey. One can jump straight here from a foundation of mindfulness, working with techniques that invite spontaneous expression and the integration of natural responsiveness in daily life. We explore how appropriate action emerges when we release the need to manage and control our expression. This spontaneity includes both personal authenticity and ethical responsiveness to the needs of others.

    In non-meditation, there are no techniques; instead, natural functioning arises spontaneously from nondual presence itself. This includes allowing spontaneous communication and creative response to arise while remaining sensitive to what serves the larger whole. The distinction between formal practice and daily life begins to dissolve as awareness learns to function naturally without self-conscious management.

    This movement develops confidence in the natural intelligence that operates when we trust life's capacity for self-organisation, moving from "I am doing" to "doing is happening" through embodied engagement with the world. As realisation deepens, this spontaneous functioning naturally includes caring and being in service of whole.

  • 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.

Meditation for the Metamodern Era

This work bridges contemplative wisdom with developmental exploration in ways rarely found elsewhere:

  • Natural unfolding: Working with meditation as your natural capacity for presence seeking deeper expression. Realisation arises through allowing rather than striving.

  • Whole-being approach: Supporting your growth as a whole person—psychological, emotional, somatic, relational, and spiritual dimensions working together.

  • Integrative methodology: Meeting you where you are and fluidly working with skill-based and recognition-based approaches.

  • Psychologically informed: Working skillfully with psychological and emotional blockages rather than expecting meditation alone to resolve all difficulties.

  • Embodied wisdom: Allowing insights to blossom into new ways of being, acting, relating, working, and moving through the world.

  • Direct experience: Your immediate experience guides the work, not dogma or predetermined frameworks

Working together

  • Introductory Session

    You can begin with a single introductory session. This session is designed to be accessible, grounded, and immediately useful, whether or not you continue with ongoing work. You’ll learn a technique that will stay evergreen.

    One-to-One Coaching

    For those seeking individualised support, one-to-one sessions offer tailored guidance, integration, and attunement.

    One-to-one coaching typically involves meeting bi-weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly, depending on the focus. Custom arrangements such as solo retreat supervision and occasional check-ins are possible.

    Small Group Coaching

    I offer small group containers (2–6 people) for those drawn to explore practice in community. These spaces combine meditation instructions, guided practice, shared inquiry, and Q&A.

    • Introductory session (45–60 min): AU$75

    • Meditation Landscape Orientation (75 min): AU$250

    • One-to-one coaching (60 min): from AU$200/session

    • Small group format: varies by theme and structure

  • You’re free to pause 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.

  • 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

  • If you feel a genuine call to this work but face financial constraints, reach out. We can explore what's possible together.

Questions and answers

  • Coaching is a collaborative partnership that supports your personal and professional development. Unlike therapy, which often focuses on healing the past, or consulting, which provides expert advice, coaching creates a space to unlock meaningful growth and navigate life’s complexities with more wisdom, resourcefulness, and creativity.

    In a coaching relationship, we work together to deepen your self-awareness, expand your perspectives, and help you discover fresh ways to approach challenges.

    Coaching is not:

    • Giving advice or telling you what to do

    • Sharing expertise from personal experience

    • Problem-solving on your behalf

    • Providing therapy or counselling

    • Analysing past events to heal trauma

    • Following rigid systems or formulas

  • While both coaching and therapy can support personal growth, they serve different purposes.

    Therapy is essential for:

    • Addressing mental health conditions

    • Working through trauma

    • Managing serious addiction

    • Processing significant emotional burdens

    Clinical applications are outside the scope of coaching.

    Coaching is appropriate for:

    • Cultivating emotional intelligence

    • Exploring meaning and purpose

    • Deepening qualities such as presence, wisdom, and compassion

    • Aligning actions with your deeepest values and aspirations

    • Discovering fresh and creative ways to navigate life’s complexities

    • Cultivating happiness and well-being

    In principle, therapy can also support these same goals. You might be drawn to coaching because:

    • The collaborative and less formal nature of the coaching relationship resonates

    • You want to explicitly focus on development

    • The methodology used by the coach appeals

    • The coach has a specific skillset that aligns with your needs

    • The coaching container feels right for your current journey

  • Many people invest in books, courses, and programs for personal development. While these resources provide valuable knowledge and insights, there's often a gap between understanding concepts intellectually and embodying real change in your life - what's known as the "knowing-doing gap."

    Coaching offers something fundamentally different from self-study:

    • Skilled support in working with what's emerging in real-time

    • Help in recognising and working with parts of yourself that may resist change

    • Guidance in moving from intellectual understanding to embodied knowing

    • Partnership in following threads of development that may be hard to navigate alone

    • Support in staying with and deepening into challenging experiences that you might otherwise avoid

    Beyond these practical benefits, the coaching relationship provides a unique space where fundamental psychological needs can be met in fresh ways:

    • Being truly seen and understood

    • Feeling "I'm not alone in this"

    • Experiencing your impact and capability

    • Being constructively challenged to grow

    • Discovering who you uniquely are

    • Having your experience deeply acknowledged

    Your sense of self, others, and the world unfolds through relationship. Since life itself happens in relationship - with others, with work, with challenges - real development often needs a space where new possibilities can emerge through genuine human connection. The coaching relationship provides this space, offering both practical guidance and the conditions for natural growth to emerge.

    Many clients find they make breakthroughs in coaching conversations that hadn't occurred despite years of self-study and courses. This is because the unique conditions of the coaching relationship support deeper insight and 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.