An hour a week for high school and college students and young adults, in Ashland or online.
Someone sat with me
When I was in college, someone sat with me every week for three years. We did not do anything dramatic. We sat. We read a little. We talked.
One week he suggested I try meditating. I was shocked at what happened. The world opened to me. I opened to me. Everything fell away.
I could not understand what had happened. I only knew I left lighter than I came. It took decades to see it. Something had been planted in me in those hours, below my knowing, and it kept growing long after I stopped going.
And I started reading. After those sittings I wanted more — more books, more questions, more of whatever had opened in me. The sitting made me hungry to learn.
That is what I am offering now. I call it sitting.
What happens in the hour
We begin with meditation. Letting go. Unwinding. Taking a breath, and then another, until the week starts to loosen from the shoulders and the chest and things are not so heavy. Until you realize: this is a moment. You are here.
Then we read. Not much. A page, sometimes a paragraph, from a book we choose together off the shelves — whatever the season brings, or whatever you are curious about that week. We read slowly, out loud, and then we stop.
Then we sit again with what was read. What moved? What stayed with you? Then we talk. School, work, love — whatever you are carrying comes with you. Nothing has to be decided before you sit down.
The book is the small part. What matters is the listening. You talk, and I listen. You learn to sit with yourself, and I stay steady beside you while you do.
The body is the first listener
You can ask a machine what any book means and have an answer in seconds. I use these tools. But an answer is not the same as being changed.
In my twenties I read Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error. He showed that we do not understand with the mind alone. The body registers meaning first — a quickening, a settling — and the mind catches up later. That idea never left me.
I lived it as a stay-at-home dad, hours at the park with a word moving under my breath. I lived it memorizing Sanskrit, sounds I carried for years before I understood them. Then one day the meaning would rise up from inside, already mine. There is a Sanskrit word for this: dhāraṇā. The holding. The carrying that does not need the remembering.
That is what slow reading does, and what silence does. It gives the body time to listen. It is what I wrote into my books, and it is what we practice when we sit.
One person, once a week
Sitting is one-on-one. Just you and me, in Ashland or online. A group has its own gifts, but this is something else: the right book at the right moment.
You get the comfortable chair, by the shelves. I sit across from you, with room between us. The hour is yours.
We meet weekly. Not because a rule says so, but because something only settles when it is returned to — the way a word carried under the breath does, the way a language does. Trust is built the same way, one week at a time, and trust is what makes room for depth. Over time, sitting once a week becomes something you carry on your own, a habit that is there when you need it. For me, that habit has been worth everything.
Sitting is not therapy. It is steadiness, attention, and a good page to sit with. If you need more than this, I will tell you.
If you are a parent
You may be reading this before your son or daughter does. That is often how it begins.
Your child does not need a diagnosis, an IEP, or a problem to solve. There is no goal to reach and no plan to follow. Call it mentorship if you like. Wanting someone steady to sit with is reason enough.
For anyone under eighteen, sessions are arranged with a parent, who knows when and where each one is. In Ashland we sit facing each other, with a good distance between us, in a room lined with books. You book the hour, and you are welcome to see the room and ask me anything before the first one. If something comes up that needs more than sitting, you will hear it from me.
I stayed home for sixteen years raising my own two, who are teenagers now. I have sat with people at the end of their lives, in hospice. And for more than a decade I have practiced Inner Space Techniques, staying beside people through some of the hardest places in their lives. The beginning of a life, the end of one, and the hard places in between. Each taught me the same thing: how to be steady with someone.
I know what it is to want someone steady in your child’s week who is not you.
Come sit
The years of high school and college were the years I was most open. They shaped who I am. If you are in those years, or finding your footing after them, come sit. If you are under eighteen, ask a parent to book it with you.
An hour a week. You do not need a reason, a goal, or anything wrong. You do not even need to know why you are coming. The carrying comes first. The knowing comes along the road behind it.