Foundation

In this group, we build a solid foundation of self-love, self-worth and self-esteem from which to live your life. This is not a beginner program, though beginners are super welcome.

These interlocking exercises are a fast way of growing in many parts of life at once. They bring deepening confidence, connection, calm, and warmth into your life. With this solid, supportive foundation, we are capable of actualizing so much more of what we want. These practices return far more than the effort you put into them.

0: Community

WhatsApp · Zoom meetings

There are two venues for community in Foundation: a WhatsApp group and 2–4 Zoom meetings a month.

Zoom meetings are for troubleshooting, relating to the experiences of others, and deepening your skills with the practices. All Zoom meetings are led by Elias, who will help you work out your most stubborn questions.

We recommend making 2 meetings a month to stay connected, committed, and adequately supported. This is intensive work, and part of the practice is being vulnerable enough to share and to ask for support. Connection to others is irreplaceable.

All meetings are recorded and shared in the member area.

The WhatsApp group is where we chat about practice during the week, ask questions, share our discoveries, wins, frustrations. A member of the group will be encouraging you with daily accountability check-ins, others will be sharing their experiences with you, including a member that is familiar with the practice that will answer your technical questions.

If you can’t make a meeting, you can send in questions in this chat before the meeting to get them answered, even if you’re not present.

1: Map of Your Intentions — The Jeweled Net

The jeweled net is a life mapping exercise. It simultaneously gives us clarity on what we want to grow toward and reveals things about our orientation to life and desire that are hidden from us.

In the context of this group, we use it to create new places for our energy to redirect once we free it from the old, painful eddies through which it has been flowing.

Each thing in the map is a node in the network of your psyche (and life) as it is expressing in this moment. The things we write are our conscious desires, but an incredible amount of information comes through the map from the unconscious. It will show you what’s hard for you to want, reveal whole swathes of experience that you have been devaluing or overlooking, help you notice fixations that are cutting you off from wholeness, etc.

Polish one jewel and its shine is reflected in the others. Include new nodes in the net, and all nodes are enriched in unpredictable ways. How you do one thing is how you do many things, as you’ll learn in the document.

With everything on the page, it’s available for you to use to direct your practice over the next three months.

Keep this document. Your ability to articulate your wants will develop over these three months. Many of the things we want are just what we imagine might solve our perceived inadequacies — what will be on your net once your desires are driven by creativity and interest rather than the urge to be good enough?

Download the Jeweled Net (PDF) →

2: Reshaping Your Familial Imprints

I never cease to be amazed at the profound global effects of healing attachment wounds.

The relationships we have to our parents shape our psyches — determining our baseline self-love, our sense of safety, and our sense of deserving the things, treatment, and experiences we want to have. The list goes on.

Even when we’ve been blessed with wonderful parents, there will be missteps, misunderstandings, and uncontrollable events that affect us in less than ideal ways.

Many of us had parents that tried to give us everything they did not have, and still passed along distorted ideas about life and how people should be treated that they inherited from long lineages of suffering.

And then there are parental figures that are flatly abusive, withholding, manipulative, neglectful. The suffering this creates needs no explanation.

The tools for healing familial imprints I share in Foundation courses have done absolutely incredible things for me and for the one-on-one clients I’ve shared them with. The depth of security, felt self-love and capability that comes through as a result of even some practice often blows my mind.

Regularly, we will do one of these meditations and within a week we’ll see real changes begin to blossom in their lives — in the ease with which they say “no” or go after what they want, in the lovingness of the people they are connecting with, and many other downstream effects that can seem almost magical.

Invest yourself in this. Commit to it. It feels amazing and compounds as you go. Give yourself this love and attention.

IPF is the version we do in this first foundations course. We’ll build on this in later courses.

Main IPF instructions

I’ve used many versions of this IPF exercise, but Kirby from Two Mind Method is my favorite explainer of the concepts. His very effective Two Mind Method is what made me practice the IPF and TRE daily and in tandem.

Attachment needs to meet in the meditations

By the end of the three months, you’ll want to have done multiple deep meditations on each of these categories:

1. Felt Safety
2. Attunement
3. Support While Dysregulated
4. Expressed Delight
5. Support for Autonomy

Guided meditations

These guided meditations are useful for getting a feel for the meditation, but it’s important to start directing it yourself as soon as you know your way around — maybe after two or three tries.

1. Guided Meditation — Mother IPF
2. Guided Meditation — Father IPF

If you only do the guided meditations, your unconscious won’t have the chance to guide you where it needs you to go. The self-trust built from going in without a script and finding your way around is also important.

A process I’d recommend for those who want structure

Feel free to riff instead. Eventually we want you following your impulses rather than being faithful to a format.

1. First days

   Being held

   Start your first days by imagining being held by the mother figure and having her stare very deeply into your eyes, totally attuned and enjoying of you, both of you profoundly safe. Feel her love pouring into your eyes through her eyes and nourishing every cell in your body.

   Feel the warmth of her hands and arms and their light pressure on your skin. These are the tactile qualities to cultivate here, that and things like smell. You wouldn’t be aware of the environment anyway as a small baby.

2. Next few days

   The five attachment needs

   Spend some days creating experiences of each of the five attachment needs listed above and see how each one hits you.

   If you find one that is clearly alchemizing things, stick with it until it’s less charged. When you experience lots of relaxation or resistance in a category, you’ll know it’s a high-leverage place to hang out.

3. From then on

   Whatever is up for you that day

   When none of the five basic attachment needs are clearly needing attention, use what’s up with you that day. See what in your life is chafing you and ask: in what ways is this suffering inflamed by my orientation to it? What could I receive emotionally from my parent that would make this problem feel totally safe and okay, and maybe even nonexistent?

   Take this to the extreme — assume there really is something you could receive that would soothe your situation entirely. This goes beyond parents and maybe in the direction of deity yoga (Vajrayana) and has worked well for me.

3: Physical Release — TRE

Trauma / Tension Release Exercises

As Candace Pert, the neuroscientist who discovered the opiate receptor, said: your body is your unconscious mind.

Our resistance to allowing unresolved emotions to complete and pass shows up as tension in our bodies. Think of IBS, back pain, tight shoulders, TMJ as expressions of held emotional charge. Just as that old psychic material creates bodily pain, physical practices can release psychic suffering as well.

TRE stands for Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises, a body-based practice designed to release deep muscular tension, stress, and trauma through controlled, natural body shaking. It was developed by Dr. David Berceli in the 1990s. While working and sheltering during conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, Dr. Berceli observed how people — especially children — naturally shook or trembled when facing extreme stress and fear. He noted that animals and humans use this involuntary tremoring mechanism to discharge survival energy and release the physical contraction of the body after a threat has passed. His method uses a specific sequence of gentle movements to help the nervous system activate this discharge process and return to a calm state.

Plenty can be released on our own through practicing somatic therapies like TRE. We’ll have a certified TRE teacher guide us through the practice near the beginning of the group, and you’ll have their contact information if you have questions about your experience.

Some days you will feel profound relaxation after TRE; other days you will still be in the bumpier feelings it brings up. An ideal sequence on the days you do TRE is to start with it and then go into the IPF meditations, which allows the parent figures to resolve the spiked emotions TRE uncovers.

How TRE works, explained by its creator

A doctor with a serious nondual spiritual practice on TRE

A doctor who guides patients with trauma histories through TRE

Practice videos to follow

1. TRE Full Instructions with Dr. David Berceli
   Watch this for your first round
2. TRE Follow-Along Session with Dr. Berceli
   Watch this after your first round