About me

I’m Jason Faulkner. I’m a breathwork and meditation teacher, community builder, traveler, father, and lifelong student of consciousness.

I didn’t come to this work because I had everything figured out. I came to it because I wanted to feel better, understand myself more deeply, and figure out how to actually enjoy being alive.

Over the years, I’ve explored a lot of different practices, philosophies and traditions. Some of the tools and technologies that have had the biggest impact on my life are breathwork, meditation, yoga, mantra, psychedelics, nature, travel and community.

And they really fucking work. 🙏🌿🍄✨

The Practice

I’m interested in spirituality that you can actually use.

Meditation has taught me how to sit with myself. Breathwork has shown me how much we hold in the body. Psychedelics have challenged the way I understand consciousness. Yoga, mantra and Eastern philosophy have given me frameworks for living with greater awareness. Nature continually brings me back to what is real.

But none of these things mean very much to me if they don't change how we live.

Can I be more present in my life and relationships?
Can I respond instead of react?
Can I let go of some of the bullshit I've been carrying around?
Can I give and receive more love?
Can I enjoy my life while I'm actually living it?

That’s the practice.

Changing the Patterns

One of the things that fascinates me most is how much of our experience is shaped by patterns.

As adults, we can spend enormous amounts of time in beta-dominant, thinking-oriented states—planning, analyzing, remembering, worrying and trying to solve the next problem. The same thoughts and emotional reactions can begin running again and again until they become familiar loops.

And our brains aren't naturally designed to make happiness the priority. Human beings evolved to pay attention to threat, danger and what might go wrong. Psychologists call this our negativity bias. It was incredibly useful when survival depended on noticing the predator in the bushes. It can be less useful when you're lying in bed at 2:00am replaying a conversation from three days ago.

The beautiful thing is that these patterns aren't necessarily permanent.

The brain retains the capacity to change through neuroplasticity. Meditation, breathwork, mantra, time in nature and, in appropriate contexts, psychedelics can interrupt our ordinary patterns of attention and perception. Psychedelics in particular are being studied for their effects on neural plasticity, while meditation and other contemplative practices can help us develop new ways of relating to our thoughts.

For me, this isn't about never having another negative thought.

It's about realizing that you don't have to believe every thought you have.

We can learn to recognize a pattern, create some space around it and begin choosing a different response.

Do that enough times and the way you experience your life can begin to change.

Let Reality Be Reality

This idea also connects deeply with Daoism and its emphasis on living in harmony with the natural movement of life rather than constantly fighting against it.

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.
Don’t resist them—that only creates sorrow.
Let reality be reality.
Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” - Lao Zi

So much suffering comes from the distance between what is happening and what we think should be happening.

Meditation, breathwork and psychedelics have all helped me experience moments where that resistance becomes quieter. You stop trying to control everything. You stop arguing with reality.

And for a moment, you just are.

From Old Dirty Boston to Something Deeper

For years, people knew me through Old Dirty Boston.

What started as a media project became a community and eventually gave me a platform to bring people together in real life.

As my own life changed, what I wanted to do with that platform changed too.

I became increasingly interested in meditation, breathwork, consciousness, psychedelics and the wisdom traditions that humans have used for thousands of years to understand themselves.

Eventually, I stopped wanting to simply talk about these things.

I wanted to create places where people could experience them.

Community

Over the past few years, I’ve brought together thousands of people for breathwork, meditation, yoga, sound, workshops, conversations and other consciousness-based practices.

What I’ve discovered is that the technique is only part of it.

Something powerful happens when people put their phones away, sit down together, breathe together, travel together, eat together, laugh together and occasionally do something completely outside their comfort zone.

We need community.

A lot of what I do now is simply create the conditions for that to happen.

Travel, Retreats & Psychedelics

Some things are difficult to discover while living the exact same day over and over again.

Travel interrupts the pattern.

That’s one reason retreats have become an important part of my work. I bring people into beautiful places where we can slow down and combine meditation, breathwork, nature, ceremony, culture, good food, adventure and genuine human connection.

I’m also deeply interested in psychedelics—not as an escape from ordinary life, but as one of many tools humans have used to explore consciousness, healing, spirituality and our relationship with nature.

I approach this space with curiosity and respect, particularly for the cultures and traditions that have carried these practices long before the modern psychedelic movement existed.

The experience itself isn't the destination.

The question is what happens when you come home.

Can you take what you experienced in meditation, on retreat, in nature or in an altered state and actually bring some of it into your Tuesday morning?

That's where the work gets interesting.