¶ Welcome, Michael's Approach, and Community
Welcome to Deconstructing Yourself, the podcast for meta-modern mutants interested in meditation, awakening. Vudryana, Tantra, Zen, The Muppet Show, Predictive Processing, Psychedelics, Non Duality, Consciousness Hacking. And a whole bunch more. My name is Michael Taft, your host on the podcast, and in this episode, I'm being interviewed by Pranab Satya.
Pranab Sacharanandan is the founder of Attention Copilot, a service that brings meditative presence into the act of work itself, helping people to go from stuckness to flow in real time. Pranub is a longtime student of myself, a facilitator at Journey, and an early hire at the Technology startup.
This episode is unusual because it's actually an interview Pranub did with me for his podcast. In it, he asked me to introduce my meditation techniques and talk about my stack model and just other elements of my system. And so I thought this would make a great episode for the deconstructing yourself audience as well. And so without further ado, here you have it. Hey Michael! Hey, how's it going, Pranab? So good to see you.
Good. I'm good. I'm excited to do this with you. Me too. Inspired by a lot of your podcast with Jake Orthmeen, where you went on the deep end of things around different aspects of non-duality and sort of the goals of the path. And this is gonna be more of an introductory type podcast. I've been following your work and learning from you since probably twenty nineteen. Yeah, it's been a while.
Yeah, it's been a long time. I think I've sort of been in the waters of all the podcasts and everything, but I think it's been since twenty nineteen since you've done sort of a more introductory type thing. Sweet, let's hop right in. Awesome. I think a lot of students have come to your meditations after doing apps like Waking Up, maybe even Headspace. They've read books like The Mind Illuminated, maybe they've been on Twitter and Meditation Twitter.
They've done a Gwenka retreat or a journey retreat. What makes those kind of students meditate with you afterwards? Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. One is that I'm used to working with those kinds of students and so I know how to speak that language and can show them some stuff that those traditions aren't showing them. So it's like Not only am I providing something that they want, but am providing it with an adapter kit. Here's how this works for the language you're used to.
Or in the language that you're used to. So that's one Another one is that a lot of the stuff I'm teaching, if you do it in a tradition like a Buddhist Vajrana tradition or whatever, you're going to need a lot of preliminaries and a lot of initiations and it's actually you might
take ten years before you start learning the stuff that you wanna learn. And I'm not doing any of that, so that's a big advantage as well. And then there's just some people who For whatever reason, Shin Zhen, one of my teachers and I think one of your teachers as well, right, always said that there's just the added value of kind of who likes how you present.
In some ways it's not that I'm teaching anything different, but there's just the language I use or the way I'm talking about it that for whatever reason some people vibe with. Nice. And what would you say is the best sort of way to see how your meditations fit in with sort of the meditation ecosystem and Twenty six.
I don't know. You tell me. Uh the best I understand it is kind of what I just said. I think that there are people who number one want to be introduced from a certain direction that is not the Vipassana Theravada Buddhist direction, even though I understand that direction and practiced that a lot for a long time. They they want more of the non dual direction, more of the tantric or Vajrana direction.
And as far as I know, there are very, very few people willing to teach that outside of a tradition. The only other main group I know is Charlie Albury and Evolving Ground. And they're still in Zoggen, but still rogue enough that it's very accessible and what they're doing is wonderful, by the way.
¶ Finding a Place Outside Traditional Meditation
and I really enjoy their material to the extent that I've gotten into it. But the meditation ecosystem, as you put it, the booty industrial complex doesn't really have much room for people who are kind of like outside of a particular religious thing, especially if you get I'll just use a pejorative term, if you get kind of above basic mindfulness, you're pretty much gonna be in a thing.
Now I've always been of this attitude where I'm kind of outside of traditions while still deeply respecting the traditions and getting into them to learn. But Shinzhen Young really, even though he is Buddhist and teaching Buddhism, he's very ecumenical. And so really reinforced that part of my personality with a lot of teaching. And so where do I fit in? It's almost like if you don't fit in anywhere, you'll fit in with what I'm teaching. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And that's exactly what brought me to your sets back in twenty nineteen. When I lived in San Francisco, I was window shopping at a bunch of different places and They were interesting, but some felt maybe a little bit too rigid. And I think when I got to Ursits at San Francisco Dharma Collective back in the day. They just felt very refreshing. It was like, oh, cool. I can like the intellectual part of my brain was sort of like, oh, I like this. And I was actually just getting.
into deeper, more open sits than I ever had before from sort of the more non dual way of teaching even back then. And I like how you're very metasystematic. Like I think Part of the value of being in Sangha with all the people through the courses and retreats is everyone just has a different background. Like everyone's just got a lot of different practice experience or across many different lineages.
And I just think that's quite rare. And you're able to sort of work with people depending on where they are because of this sort of structural view of where things go while also respecting the the individual lineages and traditions. Yeah, I really do respect them and feel deeply grateful to them and all that. So it's not about, well, throw this all out at all. But I think that it's very hard for people these days
to I'll use this word submit to a tradition in that way that is sort of traditional. And I'll just throw in Keegan levels there and all kinds of stuff that where the problems come up. So you can do it for a while and I recommend you do it for a while, but eventually you will find yourself unable to do what's being asked of you probably. And some of that's good, you know, you're being challenged, you're having to get outside your comfort zone. You're having to step outside what your ego might be.
cool with doing and all that's good, but then there's another part of it that is just not necessary. Yeah. And I think that comes across I think both your style and sort of the breadth of experience comes across in your podcast.
Where there's just so many interesting people. I think I've listened to probably not all but most of the episodes and it's fun talking about it with friends and finding community through that of just seeing sort of the breadth of Dharma and breadth of modern meditation there is.
And with that too, I think you also have a depth. You sort of aren't afraid to talk about the deep end of practice and where things can go. I think if people are especially interested, they can go into your podcast with with Jake about that or with other teachers like Harish. But sort of curious how you sort of view in maybe more beginner language, where practice can go. Like what is sort of a goal that people could have on if they want to take this far more deeply.
¶ The Transformative Potential of Deep Practice
Well I think that the traditional goals, most of them, are real. You really can live a life where there's much less suffering, where the angst and the contractedness and the fragility and the trauma are just greatly, greatly, greatly reduced. And the sense of being connected and in tune and flowing with experience, even if it's very difficult experience.
can improve to a level that is kind of hard to believe. It's radically improvable. And I'll just put it that way. The sense of I'm a separate atomized, bashed upon, under siege, victim of circumstance just completely or almost completely fades and eventually vanishes. It's not so much, oh, now I'm a this, it's more like this open, connected, alive, vibrant flow of experience just keeps unfolding in a way that is amazing.
And so that's some, let's say, poetic language in the direction of where that goes. Yeah. Yeah. And I think a practical example of that that's sort of to me has been Something that is been a reminder that you've mentioned on retreat a couple of times. Is the meditation student you've had really intense chronic pain? Something around needing, you know, high dose opiate use and how that shifted. But I'm curious if you could just share that story to whatever extent. Makes sense.
Sure. So one of the things that Shinzhen taught me is how to work with people in chronic pain and using some pretty hardcore techniques. And so one of the people from the Shenzhen world came to me to get individual guidance on that. And this person had sciatica. Okay, sciatica. You've met people with sciatica, no big deal, but it can be A very big deal. It can be the intensest pain you can possibly imagine, and it's always there. 24 hours a day. You can't get away from it.
And so when I first started working with this person, they couldn't lay in a bed to go to sleep. They were permanently in a reclining, like easy boy chair that was packed with bags of ice. So imagine your lazy boy is just packed with ice. You have to keep having a a friend or someone get bags of ice and then you lay on those. Now, you'd think, okay, that sounds like pretty bad pain, but it's just ice. But this was what they were doing after already having a morphine pump.
permanently implanted in their body. So that's how much pain they were in after being continuously on morphine. So imagine how much pain that is and the level of motivation that that would provide to do something about it. And so when I first started working with them because they were on that much morphine and in that much pain, they almost couldn't follow the simplest instructions like follow your breath was kind of too hard. Because they're very befuddled with all the morphine.
But little by little we worked on it, little by little we worked on it and they started seeing that it was making a difference. And you know, when you're in that much pain, you might as well spend every minute meditating. Every minute that you can, you're just meditating'cause you're just laying there in agony anyway. And so after more than a year of this, they were finding immense relief.
In this meditation. And as you can imagine, this person has no reason to kid themselves, right? It's like this isn't something, oh, I'm talking myself into imagining I'm feeling relief or something. No way. This is Serious they needed real relief. And the meditation gave them real relief. And so they became very, very good at it and actually reduced their morphine quite a bit.
And eventually at this point has passed away. But that was a real eye opener for me,'cause I knew it could do that and I knew I had worked with some pain successfully, but I didn't realize it could be that powerful with pain. And of course, these techniques were developed thousands of years ago when there weren't many painkillers available. You couldn't just go get some meds.
these were developed to be useful to people in the everyday and they really are. So it's interesting in this light, in the light of stories like that, to recognize that the pain center in your brain is the same for physical pain as emotional pain. Most of us aren't dealing with that much physical pain, thankfully. But you know, as you get older you do have more and more and more physical pain, and maybe some people are, but practically everyone is dealing with that level of emotional pain.
And here we are at the beginning of 2026. Get ready for a lot more emotional pain, like more than you are imagining. But the techniques work exactly the same and have the same power to alleviate the suffering, you know, the same power to help emotional suffering just impact us way, way, way less. And so that's kind of the
getting from negative numbers to zero part of meditation. Then there's the now we're gonna go into positive numbers, which I know you teach with journey and so on. You know, like let's start having some really powerful positive experiences too. And of course there's all that end of it as well, which is equally effective. Yeah, that's a really powerful story. I think what I like about that is I think it just makes it very clear.
there is possibility for progression in practice. You know, there is possibility for depth. There's possibility for this thing to unfold in ways that you just can't really No. And at the same time, there's sort of a light map that you can kind of look at. Which brings me to the question around how you view the ways meditation can progress. If you think of your stack model in terms of in hacking the stack parlance.
And curious if you could just talk about that, how you view sort of the arc of practice for someone, maybe even with this person or in general, when someone's starting and what it looks like to go quote unquote deeper into practice.
¶ Hacking the Stack: From Samadhi to Openness
Right, sure. So at first the main thing is just getting some samadhi going, right? Getting some ability to pay attention. This is crucial and it's fundamental in You can't really do it without it. On the other hand, getting some basic attention going isn't that hard. These days the hardest thing is just all the attention destroying apps we have. And so you may have to go on a social media fast or something to really get your samadhi going.
And the minute you go back on social media it will get wrecked, you know. So it's important to guard your attention a little bit. But beyond that, getting the basic capacity to pay attention. is I think for most people utterly achievable. And so that's the beginning. You gotta be able to have some level of samadhi. That said, you don't have to do it in any particular way. You can do it in very surprising ways, like dancing or singing, or doing mantras, or doing visualizations, or
lots of other stuff besides watching your breath, you know. So there are many, many, many, many, many ways to get some stability of attention happening. Once that's there, then you want to use the stability of attention to begin deconstructing your experience, right? My whole world is called deconstructing yourself for a reason, because the main important part of the path is deconstructing experience.
that's where the stack model comes in. Once you've got some samadhi, once you've got some ability to pay attention, then we point that attention towards various aspects of sensory experience. and start to deconstruct them. And we don't deconstruct them in an intellectual manner. We're not trying to figure them out or somehow see what they're made of in some kind of third person model. we are deconstructing them experientially. And so do you want me to go into the model itself at this point?
Yeah. So if people want to go even deeper, you have a course coming up called Hacking the Stack starting January twenty twenty six. You had a six hour workshop thing. I'm not sure if people can still access it, but They can. Yeah. It's there as a playlist on YouTube. Nice. Yeah, so you have the twenty nineteen one, twenty twenty four one. But just for like a couple minutes, what is the stack model and how is it useful?
Right. So it's useful because it will get you from having basic attention to being able to contact emptiness and maybe even deep emptiness, which is another way of saying deep openness, deep ava availability, deep spaciousness, which is where all that equanimity and ability to not suffer as much comes in, right? So it gets you from The shallow end to the deep end. That's what it's made to do. And it's called the stack model simply because it's a stack, it's a layer cape.
And the levels of the layer cake are sort of the initial way we encounter things, which I call the conceptual level, because most people in our society never encounter anything directly, they encounter the idea of it. Even when we're talking about feeling into our body sensation, we're thinking about body sensation and having ideas about body sensation rather than feeling it. So that's level one is conceptual.
Then we go down to the first level of the cake where stuff really starts to get interesting. This is one of those cakes with icing at various levels. And so there's some icing already when we go into level two, which is called the phenomenological level or the phenomenal level. And this is where we go from my ideas about, let's say, the feeling in my pectoral muscle. To actually getting into the characteristics, the qualia, right? And so it's a very different way of encountering our body.
We're not thinking of mechanics or plumbing or wiring diagrams or none of that. You're just feeling it. And so it's qualia, right? So you might say, Oh My pectoral muscle feels a little heavy and maybe this one part is a little tight and crampy and this other part feels kind of warm and smooth and this one other part I can feel that's a little pulled or something.
And so you just start getting into qualia language. And of course you're not doing the meditation linguistically, you're doing it experientially. I just have to talk about it in words. But notice that's a big difference between thinking about your muscle and just feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling. That's a big number one. You will be meditating now if you can do that.
And for a lot of people it's easy. And for some, if you're very particularly stuck in your head, super rational, super mental, it can take a little while to let go of that and really start just getting into experience. I'm always gonna make my pitch for the humanities. This is where the humanities are really important. They teach you qualia.
And the new version of the humanities where new in as in the last thirty years, where you think all literature is about Marxist economics or something, is just doesn't help. That's not what we're talking about. It's like, no, things can feel certain ways. Human beings have experiences, get into the qualia of the experience. So that's the second level. And that's actually a big deal. and doing things like going to museums and listening to orchestras and getting into literature.
And poetry and dance and stuff can really help because it reminds you how to use your senses instead of just your rational mind. So that's layer two, the f the phenomenal or phenomenological or qualia level. And then layer three is where things start to get into the deep end, and that is once your samadhi gets deep, deep, deep, you're tracking a lot of different qualia all at once.
because your mind can stay focused enough that all these different things are happening, let's say, in your bacterial muscle. And a a shift starts to happen where instead of conceptualizing each of these qualia as different and separate and having these various characteristics. The main thing that starts to be clear and obvious and sort of in your face is that It's all changing, changing, changing, changing, changing. And so this changingness is super interesting and becomes prominent and
It's also unifying. Here's all these different qualia. They're in the phenomenological level, they're different. Oh, this is tension and this is size and this is Felt sense of weight, and here's temperature. Those are all different dimensions. But when you start getting into the changingness,
they all are unified in the dimension of changingness,'cause they're all changing. And so I call that level the flux level. Shinzung calls it flow, Either way you could just say the delta or the change level where everything's changed, change, change, change, change. And this is where you start getting into a much deeper samadhi, the simplification of everything into just total change and observing that change becomes
Very absorbing. It's also really interesting because it deconstructs your mental ideas about how the world is put together. Because watching everything change, change, change, you realize you can't find the boundary of a sensation. No sensation is actually separate from another sensation in any way that you can locate. every single property of every sensation is continuously changing. So in what sense is it ever the same sensation? Because no part of it is ever the same.
And your whole idea that I'm meditating on a particular thing is completely, utterly just an idea. And so it starts to melt your brain in very deep ways. And that leads to openness. You start noticing that within all this change. there's a tremendous amount of space. It's the only way you can say it. It's a felt experience. It's not literal space, but it's a feeling of a lot of room, a lot of openness, a lot of kind of like uh maneuver ground, right? It's just very big.
And within that, it's also very awake, and that whatever's changing and arising, all this experience stuff, is happening against this background of just. A lot of space and a lot of awakeness. And that's the last level of the stack that we hack uh is this openness. Now there's places to go beyond that, but this is vipassna, right? This is technical vipassana.
Now, if you, for example, are Gawenka meditator and you want me to say vipassana, no, I'm saying vipassna, because we're talking about emptiness and spaciousness, not about the three marks. But of course they're very, very similar. But what's interesting is when we do it in the stack, we're doing it not just in body sensation.
We're doing it in our emotions, we're doing it in our thoughts. So the four parts of mindfulness, we're doing those all at once essentially. And then even in external sight, external sound, all that. So we're deconstructing all of experience into openness and awareness, right? And so that's where the stack model goes to. So it can take you from being a very, very beginning meditator all the way into rather deep experiences.
of openness, emptiness, what an early meditator, uh early Buddhist would call no self, things like that. That's awesome. Thank you. And I I have a few reflections. I think one, it's just deeply practical as a framework. You can do it. It's practiceable, yes. Yeah. It's practisable and it shows how it's all continuous'cause sometimes people hear about these like those cool experiences and these cool experiences, but how does it all fit together? And this kind of gives a map to how it all
fits, you know. And yeah, to me I think over the arc of years you can see where your sits become closer and closer or kind of move more gravity wise down the stack. Yes. It also sort of explains, you know, sometimes people say, Oh, running is my meditation or dance is my meditation and it can be, like it really can get people to that level two of sensation experience.
But meditation is one of the f almost probably not exclusively, but it's one of the things that really has the view of levels three and four, of getting into that emptiness, of getting into the the real deconstruction. Yes. Yeah, and so if you get a taste of that then you can bring those things into your movement or into your acting or whatever and it actually becomes an even deeper meditation. You can bring it into your rock climbing or your biking or whatever.
Yeah. And we'll I wanna get back into that, bookmarking that for reversing the stack of what it looks like to bring that sort of depth back into daily life, activity and and even into concept. But just going back into sort of In my mind, when you shared the stack model, it s sort of feels like a y axis and then you know, applying it to body sensations and then other sense gates and
internal, external emotions, boundary. That's where Vaskay mind goes and that you kinda get into that's sort of the X axis of learning just the fundamental the posthina move, the emptiness move going downwards, and then applying that to maybe different areas or verticals or sense gates. I'm not sure exactly the right way to frame it. using the hacking the stack concept to go down to spaciousness, openness in every different sensecape. Yep. If you can do that and reliably people do get there,
Even if you only can do it a little tiny bit, it's a big deal. It starts to really change things and it's quite achievable. Yeah, and I think another way to ground this is when people talk about feeling present or feeling in flow, oftentimes the deeper you are experientially down the stack, the more presence, openness, flow you'll just feel. And it just feels really good. That's kind of the definition. Yep. Yep.
¶ Integrating Practice and Navigating Resources
Cool. And I'm curious if you look at your sets in the last two, three years at Olembic, there's a lot of mantra, there's a lot of, you know, chanting, there's some visualization stuff, there's some interesting like deity yoga things. How does that fit into all this stuff? Well, as I said at the very beginning, you gotta have a little bit of samadhi. And most people walking into a meditation class after work and driving through traffic and all that, they're not anywhere near samadhi.
And what is samadhi again? Like a short explanation. Attention, being able to have stability of attention. There are so many different ways, so many different ways to get into a good amount of attention. many of which are there in all the non dual traditions. They're there in nondual Shavatancha, they're there in Dzogchen, there's there there in Mahamudra. All of these techniques are very normal in those situations.
But I also find that different people react differently. So some of these are gonna help this person and some of these are gonna help that type of person, this other type of person. I'm very ecumenical that way. I wanna help everyone get
into it. And so I found when I was being much more rigid and like, oh, you have to follow your breath, or oh, you have to feel this is the only way to smothi, that that wasn't serving people. Plus it's no fun. Plus why not use all these other techniques that are traditional and
I'm not afraid of the woo. It's like, okay, bring it on. Um, who cares if it's bringing you into a deeper sense of attention, a deeper sense of presence, allowing you to get into the meditation, great. Use it, use it, use it. But Beyond all that, it all comes down to the proof is in the pudding. And what I found is leading meditations like that, it is much more effective. Many more people are finding it much more effective. So I'm like, that works. And that's what I care about. What works.
Awesome. Yeah. What I like is from the sort of mindful geek days to the twenty nineteen, twenty twenty days to now, there's sort of an arc to the guided meditations like the hundreds you have on YouTube. And it's really interesting to see for someone to sort of dive in. It's like, oh man, what do I do? Where do I start? Uh and I think it is tricky to orient, but hopefully this podcast is sort of a way that they can orient towards that.
Part of the thing is just dive in and do it. These guided meditations on YouTube are always to the whole world, but also to a room of people where there's brand new meditators on day one, as well as people who've been meditating for twenty years. all of those people are in the room. And so I'm doing a thing of remixing a lot of different techniques to work for people at very different levels and throwing in this and tossing in that.
And so just go with it and you'll learn a lot. And then if you want to start to get systematic then there's lots of systematic teaching available out there, not only my stuff but many people's. So that's available when you feel like getting a little more into the nitty gritty. Yeah. That's awesome. And how can someone, if they're like, cool, this sounds good
What do I do now? How do I get deeper in? What's the best way you recommend someone engage or interact with your work? Let's say maybe not a pure beginner, but just they've done a bit. Yeah, it depends on where you're at. If you feel like you wanna start at the beginning, then do hacking the stack. If you feel like you kind of already understand like if you've done a lot of Goanka retreats, you've got enough
Vipassana, I'll call it Vipassana skills to do vast skymind. It's still gonna be challenging'cause I'm going to use your skills in a whole bunch of ways. You probably haven't been using them. So a lot of people go into Vas Sky Mind one and then there's all the Tantra courses if you want to get into the pranayama and all the visualization and all that.
Which is not necessary, but it's actually for a lot of people really, really helpful, really powerful. Even the people who aren't that into it end up taking some things from those gorges and using'em'cause they're so effective. So you start at hacking the stack and I'm gonna add a lot more courses coming up. It's just a matter of having enough time to get the materials together, but there's gonna be a lot of ways to dig in like
shorter courses, weekend courses. Another thing I really recommend people do is that is very cheap and very accessible is one of my online retreats. which usually are like four days long and don't cost very much. And you're there with a lot of support and me and TAs and people to talk to and it really kinda get you up to at least cruising speed pretty quickly.
Nice. What I like doing and one thing I'll add in addition to all that is just doing meditations with friends, like doing your meditations with friends. I've done a lot of that over the last two or three years in Austin where I lived. And it's great. We just sort of can really dive in and there's nothing that beats saga, especially if someone doesn't live in Berkeley, California.
That's right. Sangha is everything and it's one of the I think most beautiful and effective and heartwarming parts of my teaching world is that we help people get connected to other people and then those connections last. And so in any class you're gonna take with me, you're gonna get put in a pod and have the option of talking with anyone. And I'm originally from Michigan. There probably was zero meditation available when I was there.
and it's like that kind of like Midwest isolation, no one knows what I'm talking about or interested in. is suddenly relieved when you're in a group of people who all want to talk about that and actually know a a lot about it. This is one of my favorite things about the Deconstructing Yourself Sangha is It's not like I'm the guru and everyone else is a little worshipful follower. It's like quite the opposite. And these people are smart and know a lot and want to talk about it. Would you agree?
Oh, I love joining retreats. I feel really sad that I've missed most of them the last year just'cause of time constraints, but they're a blast. They're life changing and just some of the most fun I've had. It's one of the things about the in-person retreats is we allow people to talk at meals. And so you're getting to interact with fifty people who are all super into what you're into. So it's great. Yeah.
Well, this has been wonderful, Michael. I think there's a lot more we could talk about. The role of energy and pranayama and all the cool Vajrayana Tantra stuff. the some of the historical basis with Hindu Shaivatantra, Buddhist Vajrayana. Why do people talk at your retreats and what is Vipassana and how is that different than Vipassana? and A whole lot more, but I think we can save that for another day. Let's save it for another day. I'd love to do this again.
Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks, Brunab.
¶ Episode Conclusion and Retreat Information
That's it for this episode of Deconstructing Yourself. If you're interested in the topics we discuss on the Deconstructing Yourself podcast and want to go deeper into your own meditation practice, then I'd like to tell you about an upcoming meditation retreat I'll be leading this May. From the 24th to the 31st. I'll be teaching an eight-day residential practice retreat at Mount Madonna Center in the hills of Northern California.
This deconstructing yourself summer retreat is designed for practitioners interested in deepening their spiritual practice, particularly through non-dual meditation. The days will include guided meditations with me, periods of silent sitting with the entire group, and exploration of non-dual techniques and concepts in teaching sections. I'll also be meeting with each of you individually for a private interview and there will be a lot of highly experienced TAs as well.
Help you with your practice. It will also feature a meditative movement practice each day facilitated by my good friend Laura Ward. If you're looking to dedicate eight days to intensive practice in a supportive environment, alongside other sincere practitioners and surrounded by redwoods, deer, turkeys, ravens, frogs, and a gorgeous sky, I encourage you to consider joining us.
You can find all the details and register at deconstructingyourself.org. Just follow the link to the retreat information page. I truly look forward to practicing together with you. and the entire deconstructing yourself Sangha this May at Mount Madonna. See ya there. If you enjoyed the podcast, please recommend it to a friend or talk about it on social media. Doing that helps it find its way to more people who might be interested.
If you're moved to support the podcast, you can do that by contributing to the production costs on my Patreon page. That's at patreon.com slash Michael Tav. The money goes to support the recording, production, and bandwidth costs of this program, which are substantial. By contributing to Patreon, you're making it possible for me to continue to create and share these conversations as often as possible.
A special perk for high-level contributors is a monthly or even bi-monthly event with me on Zoom, where you can ask me any meditation questions you have. I deeply appreciate your support. I also have a number of free resources for you beginning with my YouTube channel. There are hundreds of hours of free guided meditations and videos there, so if you're interested, that's quite a large resource and offer it to you completely free.
The channel address on YouTube is m. or you can just search my I encourage you to subscribe to the channel and join me each week for a new video. And of course there's the deconstructingyourself.com website itself, which has articles, interviews, and more about meditation going back over 12 years at this point. So be sure to check that out. Beyond these free options, I also have a number of paid online courses to help you grow and develop in your spiritual practice.
You can find out about those either by signing up for my email list at deconstructingyourself.com slash signup or at the site deconstructingyourself.org. I look forward to seeing you in class. The Deconstructing Yourself podcast has always had excellent sound, which is the result of an amazing audio engineer and amazing human being.
named Steven McNamara. He's an all things audio person with many decades of experience in producing music and spoken word audio. If you're interested you can contact him at his website, yogitar.com. That's Y-O-G-I-T-A-R.com. Music on the Deconstructing Yourself podcast is a track by Peter Baumann entitled Crossing the Abyss from his album Machines of Desire. Thank you for listening.
