Note: As always, if you’d like to book an online appointment with me, click here or respond to this email and I will be more than happy to connect.
Hello everyone,
I hope this finds you all doing really well. I am currently offline, and will be for the next few weeks (though I will still be having my newsletters sent out while I am gone). I have taken some time to focus on my meditation practice, secluding myself for the time being, before returning to work at the beginning of June. At that point, I will be formally opening my new practice in Wilmington, Vermont, where I will be seeing clients Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. However, just because I will be back to doing in-person treatments does not mean that I will no longer be working with clients online. In fact, I plan to ramp up my online practice this summer and will have greater availability for taking new clients in that respect as well.
I will be available for online sessions on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. All of this can be booked on my new scheduling system here.
Last week I mentioned that I will also be starting to teach an online meditation class weekly. Here is the description for the class, from my website:
Before self-improvement, before striving, there is something more basic: the wisdom, clarity, and warmth of awareness itself, steady and alive.
The ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius taught that every human heart contains what he called the "sprouts of goodness" — such as compassion, a sense of right and wrong, love and wisdom — as natural and ready to grow as seeds in rich soil. But, like the famous farmer in Mencius' story who ruined his crops by yanking them upward, we often exhaust ourselves trying to force what would flourish on its own.
In this meditation series, we explore the nuances of learning to rest in the original ground of awareness — the open, fertile stillness beneath our busy minds — and discover that it already contains everything we need. We practice tending conditions rather than manufacturing results. We water roots rather than pulling at stems.
Drawing on Daoist traditions of heart-mind cultivation, Buddhist insight practices from the Theravada tradition, and the spacious, effortless methods of Tibetan Dzogchen, this class weaves together contemplative approaches that share a common trust: that awareness itself is wholesome ground, and goodness grows when we learn how to let it.
Taught by Aidan Keeva, whose training spans these living traditions, each session offers guided meditation, reflection, and simple practices for everyday life — helping you return, again and again, to the garden that was always already growing.
If you are interested, you can book for the class here.
As you can see, I am employing many naturalistic metaphors for understanding the process of meditative self-cultivation, and I have good reason to do so. Meditation is a very natural process and meditative development is not something that can be forced, but rather unfolds according to its own innate timing.
In the newsletter for next week, I will share a short piece of writing from a few years ago that explores the naturalistic metaphors of Chinese medicine and their relationship with the cultivation of de, which is often translated as virtue, or goodness.
Aidan Keeva, DACM, L. Ac.,
Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine
Note: As always, if you’d like to book an online appointment with me, click here or respond to this email and I will be more than happy to connect.