An End to High-Priced Spiritual Workshops

I know many of you already follow me on X, and that’s my main platform, so you might already be aware that I’ve started fundraising for a new spiritual center. But for those of you that only haunt the Substack halls these days, I wanted to make sure you also got the news:

The center is called Nameless Mountain, it’s in Boulder, CO, and it's focused on spiritual maturity rather than enlightenment. Everyone else is trying to help you wake up, because that’s where the ego and the money are at. We’re trying to find the few who are interested in cleaning up, growing up and showing up, and making sure they have a place of their own.

Nameless Mountain will be Dharma-based, but open to people of all (and no) faiths. I’m the executive director, and the board of directors are Charlie Awbery of Evolving Ground, Wystan Bryant-Scott, Caroline Morrison and Leela Henderson.

The biggest reason I have for opening Nameless Mountain is to make high-quality psychological training available to people at scale, on a by-donation basis. No more $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 trainings to learn to regulate the nervous system or learn basic relationship skills. We’re going to teach people how to do this for free, and we’re going to teach people how to teach other people to do this for free.

And we’re going to do it all in a way that respects people’s current religion and culture. If Christians and Jews and atheists don’t mind learning what Buddhists and SBNRs have learned, we want to share it, and we want to learn from them too. No one is strong-armed into believing something that isn’t right for them, no one is made to feel lesser or inferior because of their faith.
There’s no reason that virtues which used to be freely transmitted as part of our culture should now be separate and hidden inside exorbitantly priced workshops and retreats. There’s no reason our culture should be in this bad of shape. Our elders, the holders of our culture’s wisdom, have been very unwise for the last half century. They dismantled religion and now sell it back to people piecemeal. Even mysticism has been commodified and sold. This is essentially spiritual fracking.

We want to put wisdom back together again. And we want to see a contemplative renaissance bloom in the United States, across faiths and regions. That’s what we mean when we say “We are here to renew the sacred.”

The main offering of Nameless Mountain is called Repertoire, and it’s built on the same model of participatory education we used for Fight Wise. From a strong base of Dharma and contemplative skill, we help people to dig deep and find the individual problems that make it hard for them to stand on their own two feet, trust themselves and be present in their life. And then we have them re-enact their patterns in a safe environment with others, so they can learn to do something new. We are going to do this, online and in-person, EVERY SINGLE WEEK. It will be by donation, and no one will be turned away.
When we raise enough money, we are going to add a second weekly workshop called Repair, which will work on a similar model, but for emotional issues, including trauma and attachment wounding.

Of course we’ll also offer retreats and workshops for people who want to dive deep, or need specialized training. Of course they’ll cost money. But we’ll never gatekeep information and training that can help people live a good life behind an unaffordable barrier.

We’re trying to raise $50,000 to cover this year’s expenses. If you’d like to help us bring high-quality, professional-level psychological training to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, please donate here:

https://givebutter.com/c/nameless-mountain-inaugural