FREE MIND
A Year-Long Experiment
in Letting Go of Everything
  • Eradicate suffering
  • Master time
  • End all conflict
  • Get over yourself
  • Wake up from the dream

You know some things - about how you work, about human nature, about the nature of reality. You've come to these insights over years of spiritual practice, counseling, and more workshops and trainings than you can count. Along the way, you have had profound moments where you glimpsed into the next paradigm, and made direct contact with reality. What if, instead of just visiting that paradigm from time to time, you could live there? This is your invitation.

This October, several dozen individuals like you will be converging. We will methodically deconstruct, dismantle, and let go of everything that can be let go of. We'll also play, pray, and explore the nature of reality every which way; longing for the ineffable, while belonging to each other. We need each other to get where we're headed, so this will not be one of those situations where everyone meditates in silence. It will be a collaborative adventure. Would you like to come along?

A Training in Unconditional Freedom

Free Mind is an advanced training in something most people call 'spiritual awakening', but which we prefer to think of simply as as freedom. Really, it's a kind of un-training - in all the habits, tensions, and structures that keep you from discovering how free you've always been. By clearing the foreground, you find out what's always been in the background.

We will meet, in person, over a series of 3-day, residential, intensive retreats. Our retreats will be once per month, for 8 months, beginning in October, 2026. Each weekend will go from Saturday through Monday at a beautiful, private venue in Marin Country, California. Expect lots of time outdoors in a screen-free environment with all meals provided. The group size will max out at 30 people, so you'll have plenty of opportunity to get to know your fellow travelers in depth.

More details (about dates, cost, and how to apply), will be coming soon. In the meanwhile, feel free to drop us a note with any questions, or to let us know to reserve a spot for you!

An Outline of Our Year Together
Part One

Part one of the course begins by strengthening your capacity to let go. We will systematically identify structures, tensions, and habits that you needed in previous phases of your life, but which are now obsolete, and may have been for a very long time. On the other side of all this letting go is a paradigm characterized by effortlessness, authenticity, spaciousness, surrender, and ambiguity.

Weekend 1: The End of Trying

Letting Go of Identities

The self you constructed early in life, known variously as your 'ego', 'persona', or 'identity', was formed in response to reward-and-punishment style conditioning. This kind of conditioning pits you against your own true nature in an unwinnable war. You can end the war by no longer trying to be anything you're not. This also means dropping out of society's games of approval and disapproval, and relinquishing involuntary commitments. There's a different kind of self available on the other side of this deconditioning process, one that is less strategic and more authentic.

In weekend 1, you will:

  • Learn the four stages of selfhood
  • End the war against yourself
  • Administer the antidote to shame
  • Become immune to approval and disapproval
  • Relinquish involuntary commitments
  • Learn how to embody wu wei (the Taoist principle of non-doing)
  • Clear the way for your authentic self
  • Practice relating without performing or pretending
  • Learn foundational practices we will use throughout our year together:
    • Inquiry as the master practice
    • A method for working with strong emotions to prevent spiritual bypassing
    • How to get the most out of disorientation
Weekend 2: Losing the Narrative

Letting Go of the Past

It is possible to relieve both negative and positive memories of their emotional charge. If you apply this technique methodically to your memory stores, you can efficiently clean up your entire personal history. We'll make use of this method to complete the past, exposing the imaginary nature of time as we go. Along the way, you'll make two key discoveries about the nature of memory. None of that really happened anyway, and even if it had, those memories aren't yours. Perhaps the most revolutionary implication of these two revelations is that you need no longer maintain continuity with the character from 'your' memories!

In weekend 2, you will:

  • Learn to work with healing and development in the context of liberation
  • Complete your past
  • Take memory down from its pedestal
  • Neutralize both traumatic and glorified memories
  • Revise your personal history
  • Step outside the life story narrative, creating space between you and the character you play
  • Pop the illusion of continuity
  • Start anew at the beginning of time
Weekend 3: Unbecoming

Letting Go of the Future

If you let go of the past by changing your relationship with memories, you let go of the future by changing your relationship with goals, preferences, and desires. The key to ending suffering, it turns out, is not in fulfilling desires, nor in relinquishing them, but in aligning your desires with the nature of things. When you can surrender to nature, including to your nature, life gets far more interesting. An unexpected benefit to this surrender is the end of anxiety, and of anxiety's equally-problematic siblings: anticipation, progress, and becoming.

In weekend 3, you will:

  • Gain insight into your motivations and preferences
  • Conduct the surrender experiment
  • Let go of control
  • Align your desires with nature
  • Break the prediction cycle
  • Transform anxiety into increased capacity
  • Stop waiting for anything to get better
  • Debunk the myth of becoming
  • Reach the end of time
Weekend 4: Unknowing

Letting Go of Beliefs

Everything you perceive, and everything you believe, is constrained by your working model of reality. This model, comprised of thousands of beliefs, was formed in response to repeat-and-ingrain style conditioning. As a result, it does a very poor job capturing the complex, dynamic, fickle, and multifaceted nature of reality. To get closer to that reality, you need to call your beliefs into question, learn how to orient toward the unknown, and free your mind from its conceptual prison. The result is a more flexible, responsive, open-ended, and problem-free way of experiencing the world.

In weekend 4, you will:

  • Expose your working model of reality
  • Learn the four stages of knowing
  • Inventory and deconstruct your beliefs
  • Eliminate prescriptive beliefs (commonly known as "shoulds")
  • Escape the knowledge trap
  • Open to humility and ambiguity
  • Learn the art of deconstruction
  • Unmask basic concepts as a deeper layer of belief
  • Discover the solution to every problem
  • Release epistemic tension
Part Two

Part two begins by strengthening your capacity to shift states of consciousness. We will deconstruct the basic processes by which we create the experiences of self and world. On the other side of this more radical letting go is a paradigm characterized by non-duality, surreality, non-local awareness, emptiness, and truth.

Weekend 5: Unbinding the Self

Letting Go of the Self - Part One

What we experience as the self is really a network of mental tensions. These require constant maintenance in order to persist. The previous four modules each introduced practices for releasing a particular form of mental tension. Now we're ready to put all those practices together to release the entire network of tensions that binds the self in place. To make the resulting experience of openness your default, rather than merely a temporary state, we will contrast varying states of consciousness, and learn to shift between them at will.

In weekend 5, you will:

  • Come to understand why it usually feels like something's wrong
  • Release each form of mental tension we worked with in the first half of the course
  • Dissolve the boundary around the self by unbinding subtle somatic tensions
  • Erase the distinction between self and world
  • Learn to break down states of consciousness into their constituent elements
  • Develop the capacity to shift states at will
  • Identify how frequently you are in a trance state, and learn how to pop it
  • Integrate temporary states into permanent stages
Weekend 6: Going Non-Local

Letting Go of the Self - Part Two

It's understandable that you would think you exist. Something, after all, exists. A number of clues seem to point to that something being a self: "your" self. Amongst those clues are the apparent presence of a personality, a body, and a mind. Each of these has been imagined into existence, however, and can be imagined very differently. Specifically, it is possible to break the trance that any of those phenomena exist in a location.

In weekend 6, you will:

  • Deconstruct the attentional vortexes you think of as your personality, body, and mind
  • Adopt alternative pronouns to "I"
  • Discover you are not a thing, but a process, or many processes
  • Learn to identify with the flow of life
  • Wriggle free from free will
  • Separate your sense of self from the location of your sense organs
  • Come to experience your body as a phenomenon within your mind
  • Work with the raw material from which thoughts are formed
  • Quiet your mind
  • Cultivate non-local awareness
Weekend 7: Escaping the Tyranny of Experience

Letting Go of the World

It seems very convincing that there's a world 'out there'. All you'll ever find if you go looking, however, is your experience of the world, an experience you are actively producing. The biases built into your very perceptions determine what seems real to you. Overcoming those biases requires you to examine your active role in the construction of space and time, and ultimately, to free yourself from the tyranny of experience.

In weekend 7, you will:

  • Overcome biases built into your very perceptions
  • Work with the raw material from which all experiences are formed
  • Turn the universe inside-out
  • Learn the four stages of time-orientation
  • Pop the illusion of the so-called present moment
  • Identify with the context of experience, instead of its contents
  • Discover what you are aware of that isn't an experience
  • Learn to recognize emptiness within form
Weekend 8: Holding Onto Nothing

Letting Go of Everything

When you let go of everything, nothing remains. That nothingness has been there all along, and oddly enough, you've always been aware of it. As you emerge from the trance of foreground experience, background nothingness begins to pervade every aspect of your awareness, and has practical implications for everyday life in the human dream.

In weekend 8, you will:

  • Embrace nothingness
  • Step up into a higher-order of non-duality
  • Find unconditional freedom
  • Get into a permanent relationship with the infinite
  • Discover the abundance hidden in nihilism
  • Develop a practice of true meditation
  • Learn how to live in the paradox of applied emptiness
Your Facilitators

Steve Bearman, Ph.D. has been counseling individuals and couples for over 30 years, and has trained thousands of people in the art of counseling. He studied under renegade spiritual teacher Jed McKenna, and collaborated with him to develop an online course called Letting Go of Everything. This will be Steve's first time expanding that course into an experiential, interactive, live training. "After decades of learning, I'm happy to say I finally know nothing, and I can't wait to share it with you!"

Shereef Bishay has studied with A.H. Almaas for over 20 years, and is eager to share the mode of inquiry, and way of looking at reality, that come from that body of work. He is an educator and founder of Dev Boot Camp and Learner's Guild, and currently runs Challenge Day, a transformational program for high school students. "There comes a point where the best thing you can imagine is hanging out with friends and finding out what's possible together. Let's find out how far we can go!"