UPCOMING COURSE
Building Rest Capacity Through the Holidays: A 5-Week Course
Most nervous system training happens in perfect conditions: quiet rooms, controlled environments, carefully managed schedules. Then the holiday season arrives and everything you've learned falls apart. The holidays don't care about your meditation practice.
This course takes a different approach. We use the holidays as a live testing ground for building genuine rest capacity. Family dynamics become your biofeedback. Social obligations become practice sessions. The accumulated stress of the season becomes raw material for developing real regulation skills.
Over five weeks, seven teachers will show you how to pay off what nervous system expert Jonny Miller calls “emotional debt,” the accumulated activation your body carries, while the holidays are actively happening around you. You’ll learn the difference between managing symptoms, forcing yourself to relax, and building actual capacity, teaching your nervous system what safety feels like. You’ll develop interoceptive awareness, the ability to track your internal state in real time, so you know when you’re actually resting rather than simply collapsed.
Think of it as field research. Every holiday dinner becomes data. Every overwhelming moment becomes an opportunity to practice. By January, you won't just survive the season. You'll have evidence-based protocols that work when life refuses to cooperate.
Practitioner
$300
A practical training in the physiology and practice of genuine rest. This course helps you distinguish between collapse and restoration while building nervous system capacity that persists when conditions are difficult. The holiday stress isn't avoided; it becomes your testing ground. What usually exhausts you becomes data. What once felt impossible becomes a learnable skill you can access when you need it most.
7 live teachings + 4 lab sessions
Access to The Field Discord for community dialogue, and Circle for all recorded sessions and course materials.
All materials and recordings hosted on Circle
Scholarship
$150
Scholarship tier for students and health practitioners. A practical training in the physiology and practice of genuine rest. This course helps you distinguish between collapse and restoration while building nervous system capacity that persists when conditions are difficult. The holiday stress isn't avoided; it becomes your testing ground. What usually exhausts you becomes data. What once felt impossible becomes a learnable skill you can access when you need it most.
7 live teachings + 4 lab sessions
Access to The Field Discord for community dialogue, and Circle for all recorded sessions and course materials.
All materials and recordings hosted on Circle
When you join the Deep Rest course, you enter a field of committed practitioners. These are people who aren’t just seeking tools; they are testing their lives as vessels for clarity, embodiment, and freedom.
Together, we explore how somatic practice, nervous system science, and contemplative traditions reveal where rest actually lives in the body. This course doesn't promise escape from holiday chaos. It offers concrete methods for finding genuine settledness while life continues happening around you.
We will meet the common challenges that arise for serious practitioners, including:
Overwhelm and existential intensity. Breath and visualization help expand your capacity to stay with what’s hard to hold. These practices train a nervous system that can hold charge, clarity, and contact without defaulting to collapse or dissociation.
A desire to examine identity without reinforcing the split.
This isn’t about fixing identity, or even accepting it. It’s about seeing through it. You’ll learn to work with selfhood as both method and mirage: fluid, theatrical, and usable. Something to be inhabited, not believed.
Emotional reactivity that hijacks clarity. We don’t override or analyze. We enter into relationship with embodied immediacy. These practices offer embodied, imaginal strategies for meeting difficult states with radical kindness, turning anxious feelings into doorways instead of threats.
A scattered or mechanical practice. If your practice feels fragmented or stale, this course helps you root it in a coherent, sustainable rhythm—through breath, image, and awareness. Not just impactful, but alive. Methods you can inhabit.
Science-Backed Methods for Deep Rest
Our approach integrates cutting-edge neuroscience research with contemplative practices that have been refined over centuries. We draw from multiple evidence-based protocols including Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR), which research shows can increase dopamine levels by up to 65% while reducing stress hormones like cortisol. Our teachers also incorporate targeted breathwork techniques based on polyvagal theory, which directly influence the autonomic nervous system's ability to shift between activation and rest states. Through practices ranging from jhana meditation to somatic regulation, you'll learn how different approaches work at the physiological level to help your nervous system return to baseline more efficiently after stress exposure, while building the neuroplastic changes that Rick Hanson's research shows can counteract our brain's natural negativity bias.
These individual practices gain their full power when integrated with relational awareness. Drawing on attachment theory and social neuroscience, we teach specific skills for maintaining connection while setting boundaries during challenging social situations. We understand that genuine rest isn't about achieving a particular state but about developing the flexibility to meet whatever arises with less reactivity and more choice. Each teacher brings their unique expertise, from tantric nervous system work to Mahamudra/Dzogchen practices, all chosen for their evidence base and practical applicability. The holiday season becomes our laboratory: family dynamics, social obligations, and heightened emotions reveal whether you've developed real capacity or just learned to manage symptoms. By working with disturbance rather than against it, practitioners develop a sustainable relationship with their own nervous system that supports both deep rest and full engagement with life's intensity.
Course Details
Deep Rest for the Holidays begins Saturday, November 29, 2025. This is an experiential 5-week training in building genuine rest capacity through somatic practice, nervous system regulation, and contemplative methods. Typically, we'll meet live on Zoom at 9 am PST, with recordings available for all sessions.
The schedule is sometimes irregular. Rest teachers have holiday plans too! Most course meetings will be at 9 am PST on Saturdays, with additional practice labs for group coherence and exploring what actually works for your nervous system.
All sessions are recorded and shared via the course platform. Pre-recorded tutorials and print materials accompany the live teachings.
What distinguishes our approach is the integration of Bruce Tift's revolutionary framework for working with existential intensity. Rather than treating disturbance as something to eliminate, we teach practitioners to develop a conscious, curious relationship with difficult emotions and sensations. This means learning to recognize anxiety, panic, and overwhelm as potential doorways to greater aliveness rather than problems to solve. Through Buddhist psychotherapy principles combined with somatic regulation techniques, you'll discover how to stay present with raw sensation without immediately constructing stories about what it means. This capacity to tolerate "formless vulnerability" without rushing toward resolution creates profound resilience that doesn't depend on external conditions being comfortable.
In this course, we will train to be present with immediate, embodied, sensation-level experience, aiming to cultivate more frequent moments of open-heartedness and presence. This is not about achieving a permanent state, but about refining our capacity to stay in contact—especially when the nervous system is activated or when familiar identity strategies resurface. We’ll explore how nervous system regulation can build the stability required to hold complexity without collapse and relate to intensity without retreat.
Join Us For Radiant Forms, Empty Reflections
The instruction is structured for practitioners who want a daily practice that supports open-hearted awareness and unconditional embodiment.