Conversations with Depth Practitioners: Stephen Josephs
Jonathan Foust
How has your meditation practice shifted and changed since you first took it up? Please join this conversation with Stephen Josephs, who shares how his mediation has evolved over 60 years of daily practice. As one of the leaders in the Kundalini Yoga tradition at it’s peak in the west, Stephen was a devoted practitioner in what he calls the ‘fire practices,’ willful and powerful practices that can dramatically change one’s state. But after many years of dedicated effort, the fire started to go out. His practice evolved into what he calls the ‘water practices’ -...
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The 8 Fold Path 8: The Collected Mind: How Concentration Opens the Door to Freedom
Jonathan Foust
This talk explores the culminating factor of the Eightfold Path—Right Concentration—and the profound power of a steady, unified mind. In a world of constant distraction and fragmented attention, we investigate how deep focus becomes a gateway to inner stillness, clarity, and freedom. Drawing from classical Buddhist teachings and lived experience, this talk reveals how training attention is not just about meditation, but about reclaiming the depth, presence, and aliveness of your entire life. You’ll learn how to strengthen and stabilize attention through practical, time-tested...
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Retreat #5: All Roads Lead to Now
Jonathan Foust
This talk explores the movement from doing to being—from the disciplined application of effort to the natural ease of presence. After training attention, stabilizing the mind, and refining investigation, there comes a threshold where practice no longer adds anything, but begins to let go of itself. Through stories, humor, and classical teachings, we’ll examine how effort serves us and how clinging to it can quietly become another form of tension. We’ll explore how investigation matures into direct seeing, how awareness can rest without collapsing into dullness, and how the deepest...
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Retreat Talk #4: Let’s Just Cut to the Chase, Shall We?
Jonathan Foust
This talk explores what remains when we stop circling around the edges of practice and face the deepest truths directly. With humor, candor, and a willingness to take the red pill, we’ll look at the three characteristics the Buddha pointed to—impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self—and how they shape every human life whether we like it or not. We’ll explore how the heart breaks open in the face of change, how our wounds often become the source of our gifts, and how the self we work so hard to protect may be far less solid than we imagine. This is a talk about reality, about...
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An Earth Day Invitation: Take Your Practice Outside With Heidi Schuttenberg
Jonathan Foust
The best meditation hall has no walls. This talk explores how nature cultivates focus, non-judgment, and belonging, and how mindfulness can help us stay engaged with the world's pain without burning out. Bio: With 25 years of Vipassana practice and a day job in international marine conservation, Heidi Schuttenberg, PhD brings both deep personal inquiry and real-world urgency to her teaching. She mentors in Jonathan Foust's Year of Living Mindfully and is dedicated to making applied mindfulness available to those on the front lines environmental conservation and social...
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The Eightfold Path 7: Seeing Clearly to Live Fully
Jonathan Foust
This talk explores Wise Awareness as the art of seeing life clearly enough to actually live it. So much of human regret comes not from dramatic mistakes, but from drifting through our days half-awake—disconnected from our bodies, driven by unseen reactions, caught in mental weather, and estranged from what matters most. Drawing on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, we’ll explore awareness of body, feeling tone, mind, and the deeper patterns of dharma as direct doorways to freedom. Wise awareness is not passive observation; it is precise, embodied, liberating seeing that brings us back to...
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Retreat Talk #3: Working with the Hindrances as a Path to Awakening, with Heidi Schuttenberg
Jonathan Foust
The third talk in a weeklong meditation retreat, with Heidi Schuttenberg. Our unwelcome visitors are guides to our freedom. This talk explores the Buddha's five hindrances and offers practical tools for meeting them with compassion, curiosity, and even gratitude. With 25 years of Vipassana practice and a day job in international marine conservation, Heidi Schuttenberg, PhD brings both deep personal inquiry and real-world urgency to her teaching. She mentors in Jonathan Foust's Year of Living Mindfully and is dedicated to making applied mindfulness available to those on the front...
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Retreat Talk #2: The Alchemy of Difficulty: Turning Reactivity into Freedom
Jonathan Foust
The second talk in a weeklong retreat. We often assume insight arises from calm, clarity, or deep concentration. But in truth, it is often born in the very moments we want to escape. This talk invites a radical reframe: what if restlessness, doubt, and emotional turbulence are not problems to solve—but the precise conditions for awakening? Together, we’ll explore how mindful investigation transforms reactivity into understanding, and how even the most difficult inner states can become gateways to freedom. Through practical instruction and reflection, you’ll explore how to...
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Retreat Talk #1: Coming Home to the Body, with Lynn Teo
Jonathan Foust
This is the first talk of a weeklong retreat in 2026. Lynn Teo starts by exploring various ways to resource the nervous system to support the capacity to be present to the moment's direct experience. Then, we investigate what mindfulness is and how mindfulness of the body supports present moment awareness. Lynn Teo has been teaching embodied movement and meditation for over 25 years. Deeply grateful to her teachers, she now teaches in the Insight (Vipassana) Tradition and is a Dharma teacher with Open Door Meditation Community in Portland, Maine. A deep believer in Sangha...
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The Eightfold Path, Part 6: How to Do without Overdoing
Jonathan Foust
This talk explores Right Effort as one of the most misunderstood elements of the Eightfold Path—revealing how much of our suffering comes not from a lack of effort, but from pushing, striving, and forcing ourselves in ways that create inner violence. Drawing on classical Buddhist teachings and everyday experience, the talk reframes effort as a form of care rather than willpower, inviting a wiser relationship to energy, discipline, and motivation in meditation and daily life. You’ll learn how to recognize when effort has tipped into strain, how to stop feeding unhelpful mental...
info_outlineHow has your meditation practice shifted and changed since you first took it up?
Please join this conversation with Stephen Josephs, who shares how his mediation has evolved over 60 years of daily practice.
As one of the leaders in the Kundalini Yoga tradition at it’s peak in the west, Stephen was a devoted practitioner in what he calls the ‘fire practices,’ willful and powerful practices that can dramatically change one’s state.
But after many years of dedicated effort, the fire started to go out. His practice evolved into what he calls the ‘water practices’ - techniques and attentional strategies that are more about dissolving the sense of a separate self.
In this conversation he shares some of the essential elements of the water practices and we explore that gnarly question: What it is that is actually dissolving?
You’ll come away with some key insights from a depth practitioner and a taste of how the dissolving practices might be of benefit to you.
With over 60 years of daily meditation practice, Stephen Josephs, Ed.D., brings a wealth of wisdom to his work. His expertise spans a diverse array of mind-body systems—including yoga, tai chi, and qigong—as well as specialized training in NLP, psychodrama, and body-centered psychotherapy. This breadth of experience fosters an open-hearted approach that helps students quickly realize the benefits of mindfulness. For the past 40 years, Stephen has focused on leadership development, integrating meditation as a core pillar for executive growth. He is also the co-author of Leadership Agility, a definitive study on how leaders mature and expand their capacity to lead.
For more information and to reach out to Stephen: https://www.stephenjosephs.com/
Teachers and Resources:
Connierae Andreas and Core Transformation: https://conniraeandreas.com/
Dr. Les Fehmi and Open Focus: https://openfocus.com/home/
Bruce Frantzis https://www.energyarts.com/about/