Unifying Mind
Living our lives focused in the moment empowers us to respond to situations with cultivated awareness and purpose.
This training represents Dan’s own system for meditative living, influenced by his personal self-work and investigation of mind, martial arts training, and studies in yoga and psychology. This practice of unifying mind doesn’t require familiarity with any specific tradition or many psychological terms. Unifying Mind builds understanding from the ground up, focusing on the mental and emotional processes that occur as we move through our day. Through cultivation of self-awareness, this system enables people to approach life in a more focused and grounded way, less affected by bias, reactivity, and social programming.
The training consists of:
- 4 written modules including over 30 lessons.
- 2 guided meditations that invite us to explore aspects of our conscious experience.
- Practice exercises around everyday situations where these practices can be applied, such as noticing what we are aware of at key points in the day, watching how our attention moves around between our senses, or challenging ourselves to keep our attention where we want it. Most exercises can fit into your day without setting aside extra time.
- An invitation to participate in the group forum.
The mind becoming scattered and conflicted is one of the leading causes of self-sabotage in our lives. Throughout our lives, our thoughts, emotions, and external conditioning become assumptions and beliefs. Without actively moderating our mind, these thoughts become increasingly chaotic and begin to permeate our subconscious mind. In this state, it is very easy to settle into everyday habits that cause us to lose sight of our personal callings, live out negative reactive patterns in relationships, and settle for a life that we aren’t actively choosing. Concentration, focus, attention and awareness work together to empower us to make intentional choices. Living our lives focused in the moment empowers us to respond to situations with cultivated awareness and purpose. The unified mind greatly enhances meditation practices, overall wellbeing, and becomes the “engine” of meditative living.
Awareness and attention to our own states of mind are baselines for meditative living. Different aspects of mind activate at different times and condition our mind with distinct impressions. Understanding our mental modes (patterns like Relaxed & Confident Dan, Zen Dan, Professor Dan or Frustrated Parent Dan) allow for better understanding of our mind states and their functions. This informs how we need to work with them to maximize their benefit in our lives, and reduce the tendency to deny or punish aspects of our own mind.
With enough awareness, we can shift our focus without feeling stress or distress in our independent mind systems through conscious decisions on where our attention goes. Concentration is a further refinement of focus; it is an elevated state of consciousness similar to flow state. When we can apply meditative concentration in our daily lives, we experience a flourishing life simply because we know ourselves so well we can respond to each moment skillfully from a place of self-knowledge.
Please note, all of YTML’s practices assume a baseline of mental health that is reasonably stable. Our trainings can support other forms of therapy and be used in tandem, but a baseline of functional mental health is necessary for deep meditative living.
This training is included in an active YourTurn membership, or for $99 to access the training modules for 1 year.
Practice with Others!
We strongly encouraging moving through this process with friends, family, coworkers, neighbors… anyone that’s interested! We believe so strongly in the power of community to strengthen our practice that we will give everyone who wants to sign up together 50% off this course. All you have to do is submit the below form and our registrar will e-mail your group a code for 50% off!
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