I Expanded My Awareness and All I Got Was This Substack

This substack is about meditation, my journey towards a long standing practice ultimately becoming a meditation teacher, and my experiences teaching. The journey will blow up (or at least ignore) the stereotypes and make what otherwise might be intimidating things accessible to anyone willing to look past their biases and throw existing meditation experiences aside.

What comes to mind when you think "meditation teacher"? In fact, try it. Close your eyes and allow your mind to surface an image of meditation teacher. I'll wait...

Ok. What did it look like? Was it an old wise man with a long grey beard? Was it a spiritual guru with prayer beads? A monk with a shaved head in traditional robes? (Or maybe an image of Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi?!?! Gandalf!?!)

As cool as all those images are, they likely don't look like me.

I'm a very busy corporate executive in high tech and father of two young amazing kids. I spend any free time volunteering as a firearms safety and self defense instructor, and yep, teaching meditation.

Like many people, my path to meditation was not a straight line. Over the years, I struggled to understand and manage an overactive nervous system, one that often left me feeling defensive, negative, and stressed out. Four years ago, I connected the dots between the fear in my nervous system and my struggle to control my weight. I spent a year focused on my own well being and ultimately lost, and have kept off, over 70 pounds without the assistance of any medications. (read more about my full story on deepmentalrest.com/about)

So things are going well in my practice, why create a substack? Well. I know there are many other people out there like me. Productivity obsessed, goal oriented, driven professionals who live in a fight or flight mode. Ever activate your fight or flight mode simply from reading an email subject line? Yep. Me too.

So what holds YOU back from exploring meditation as a way to fundamentally improve your life? First, let's clear up a few things:

• There is no need to sit on the floor in uncomfortable positions. Get comfortable
• There is no need to try and clear your mind of thoughts. Let it flow
• Not in a quiet place, free from distractions? No worries
• There's no need to adopt any particular religious beliefs. Be Yourself

Goals for this Substack

On this substack I plan to:

• Share my personal story in hopes that it Inspire others to take a similar journey
• Share insights with other meditators and my students based on my experiences and studies on all things meditation

WITHOUT some of the things that make these things inaccessible to many people like me who need them:

• No pretention. I will stick as much as possible to a conversational tone, not a literary or poetic one.
• No zen master attitude. (As much as possible with subject matter born from a rich spiritual tradition.) It's impossible and actually not productive to avoid spirituality with meditation, but we'll keep the guru talk and "zen master" attitude out.
• No AI slop. So much out there these days is AI generated junk created to fill pages and get views. So much so it almost feels rebellious and authentic to read bad writing. I can certainly do that. :-) (see below for my commitment to you for how I'll use AI on this substack)
• No Implicit biases. Meditation forums are filled with advice and experiences that are heavily biased to a particular tradition or experience WITHOUT making that explicit. Everyone has biases but I'll do my best to be explicit on where I'm giving advice based on my views, or experiences with my chosen technique versus facts. Making it clear when things are unique to the particular technique I use and teach, and what applies to any kind of meditation.
• No marketing slop. No claims or dependencies on paid research. I'll try to limit any hype or marketing of meditation, and my classes teaching it to benefits I've personally experienced, or those from reports of my students and others I know personally and can vouch for. Any mention of claims about the benefits of meditation will include sources so you can read that research and decide for yourself.

Use of AI on this Substack

For the purposes of transparency, here's how AI will be used on this substack:

• Images / illustrations - it's so much faster and cheaper to generate an image to illustrate a concept than pay for the rights to use stock images out there. Where possible I will just use lofi photos taken from my phone but where needed, I may generate other images and illustrations to make things clear when topics can benefit from unique illustrations that are easy to create with AI tools.
• Brainstorming and researching - AI is super useful for giving feedback on post ideas and helping to synthesize research from various sources when I ask it to and feed it the right context. Information received from AI will be treated as suspect and validated but I will for sure continue using it as an automated research tool.
• Summarizing for subtitles - Sometimes it's hard to boil down long complex topics into a good title and subtitle that makes it easy for you to understand what a post is about without investing the time to read it. AI is super helpful at reading my posts and suggesting better titles and description text to make this easier on you.

But, I will NOT use AI to generate actual post content... and where AI generated content appears (because for example, i'm writing about AI generated content...), I will footnote it accordingly in full transparency. That's going to mean bad grammar, run-on or fragmented sentences. Incorrect punctuation.. Potentially saying something with 100 words that could have been said with 10.

But hey, it will be a real person. Sharing real things, just as they would at a coffee shop with you.

Read more about me and my story at deepmentalrest.com and feel free subscribe on Substack to come along this journey with me.

-Clint January 1st 2026