A six-week transmission on arriving. On the willingness to stop pretending the old ways still fit. This is the first gate every student walks through, and the one most often walked through twice.
Gate One is not about learning something new. It is about unlearning the posture of needing to have it figured out. For six weeks we sit together—really sit—with the honest state of things. The body that is tired. The schedule that no longer serves. The quiet voice that has been asking, for some time, what this is all for.
Doc and Sarah Jane hold this gate the way a good threshold is held: firmly, without drama, with a hand on your shoulder as you cross. You do not need to be ready. You only need to be willing.
Each week opens with a transmission—a live forty-minute teaching—followed by guided practice and a small-group integration circle. The work between sessions is simple but not easy. A daily fifteen-minute sit. A single written reflection. One conversation you have been putting off.
The gate unfolds in a rhythm the body recognizes: orientation, contact, practice, teaching, integration, and a closing that leaves you prepared for Gate Two.
The opening transmission establishes the ground. We set the container, meet the cohort, and begin the central practice of attending to what is actually here.
A direct pointing to the nature of awareness itself. Short teaching, long silence. A session many students return to repeatedly over the months that follow.
Guided somatic practice—grounding, tracking sensation, and the forms of subtle attention that translate teaching into embodied understanding.
A full live transmission on the role of pain in the contemplative life. How to sit with what cannot be fixed. How to stop treating difficulty as a problem to solve.
Bringing the work off the cushion. Conversations with a difficult person. Eating a meal. Moving through a day you would normally rush through.
A final integration circle. What has shifted. What remains. A preview of Gate Two and guidance on whether to continue now or allow time to settle.
Six live transmissions with Doc and Sarah JaneTuesdays, 7–9pm ET. Recordings provided.
Small-group integration circlesGroups of 6 meet weekly between sessions.
Written curriculum and practice guidesDelivered as a bound PDF companion.
Three guided audio practicesOriginal recordings, yours to keep.
One 30-minute private sit with a teacherScheduled in week four or five.
Continuing access to the cohort circleA private space that remains open after the gate closes.
These are the same materials students receive in Week One. We offer them openly because the work should not be gatekept.
Doc has been teaching contemplative practice for more than thirty years, much of that quietly, from a small room in a small town. He is the author of three books on the integration of practice and ordinary life, and the founder of SageWork.
His approach is deliberately unadorned. He teaches the way a good woodworker teaches: by showing you how to hold the tool, then watching carefully as you try it yourself.
Sarah Jane came to this work through the body first. A movement teacher by training, she spent a decade translating contemplative practice into forms that actual humans, with actual knees and actual schedules, could sustain.
She leads the somatic and integration arms of each gate. Her particular gift is making the subtle work feel accessible without ever making it feel small.
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