About · The Field
The Field is a modern learning space teaching the classical, lineage-based skills of working with breath, body, and attention. Students learn the craft of awareness and embodiment, meeting life as it is, with presence and kindness. Like any craft, this is built through repetition and direct contact with the material, not just by accumulating information. We attract practitioners who want to understand why a method works, and will put in the practice time to find out.
Many people, including those who have practiced for decades, carry a discrepancy between their understanding and their lived experience. Unconsciously, we avoid disturbance and vulnerability, contracting into the familiar and away from the open and uncertain. We fluctuate between stretches of spaciousness and stretches where we can't relax into what is, and the inability to relax becomes its own micro-cycle of self-aggression and closure. What we're after, eventually, is to dissolve the compulsion to resolve experience into a tidy spiritual paradise.
Closing the gap between understanding and lived experience is the work. Most approaches take one piece of this: commercial mindfulness teaches you to calm down; therapy explains the patterns you formed long ago; nervous-system work regulates symptoms. Each helps, and each offers temporary relief, but we work differently.
The Field draws on three domains: psychological understanding, embodied practice, and the recognition of fundamental awareness. Different moments call for different responses — sometimes psychological, sometimes somatic, and sometimes a matter of resting in open awareness — and the skill is meeting the moment with the right approach.
We don't promise transcendence or peace of mind. We build tolerance for groundlessness, and a widening capacity to stay intimate with instability, vulnerability, and contradiction without spinning the story about it. The aim is not a calmer state, but more of what you can stay with. States pass; capacity remains. That capacity changes what happens downstream: creative work, relationships, and how you meet difficulty.
Most of the people who find us aren't in crisis.
They're competent, often quite far along in their practice, and interested in closing the gap between what they understand intellectually and what their immediate experience reveals. Our coaching and courses are shaped for practitioners balancing the dizzying array of work and family commitments that modern life demands. They aren't looking to renounce the world — they want to meet it more intimately.
Personal work begins by examining the vulnerabilities triggered by recurring patterns of experience that reinforce a self-sense and keep us entranced by reactive loops. The challenge is to stay present and embodied during disturbance without constructing a narrative, interpreting experience prematurely, or feeding unnecessary drama. We learn to sit with intensity and let it move through us, waiting until the reactivity passes before choosing how to respond.
Interpersonal work brings how we relate up to date with who we actually are now, rather than who we were many years ago. Strategies for connection, protection, and expression formed early in life and served us once, but most are now out of date. The work is to notice when we're avoiding, pretending to be confused, or withdrawing, and build the capacity to choose differently in the moment.
Spiritual work is the practice of returning to the immediate stream of experience, over and over, to discover that each moment is fresh, complete, and wonderfully ordinary. We aren't seeking mystical experience; we're stripping away interpretation, conceptual overlay, and fixation in order to meet experience as it is.
Peter McEwen · Founder
I began practicing at twenty-one and have been at it for over thirty years, primarily in the Tibetan Buddhist lineages. My root teachers are Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, Lama Pema Dorje Rinpoche, Tulku Orgyen P'huntsok, and Bhaka Tulku. For years I've worked with my mentor Bruce Tift, a psychotherapist with forty years of clinical practice, on the integration of contemplative work and Western psychology.
Before founding The Field in 2016, I spent two decades in technology and international development at LinkedIn, Microsoft, Pivotal, the United Nations, and several startups. I'm not interested in teaching meditation as an escape from that kind of life; I teach it as the same investigation conducted on a different surface.
For thirty years I've watched the same move from every angle — we organize our lives, quietly and persistently, around the avoidance of one core vulnerability: engagement with present, noninterpretive experience.
The practices I teach build the capacity to stay present with intensity, contradiction, and groundlessness, without dissociation or formula. What remains when the struggle relaxes isn't transcendence. It's the ordinary freedom of a person who has stopped needing reality to be different, and from there, the willingness to put something into the world that reflects one's actual values.
“We live in a society where convenings, virtual and otherwise, for practitioners, scholars, and scientists are critical. To see The Field pulling together this kind of community is exciting, and I'm glad to be part of it. It's an exciting endeavor, and I'm eager to see how it blossoms and grows.”
“Peter has a kind and generous teaching style. He has studied with traditional teachers, and manages to translate the practices for Westerners while preserving their essence.”
“Strong recommendation for Peter — he's based, and a highly accomplished practitioner.”
“Connecting with Peter has opened new doors and enriched my 35 year practice. His love and respect for the Vajrayana is magnetizing.”
“Peter McEwen helps those who are new to Vajrayana practices understand the ancient practice through an accessible modern lens, without diluting the teachings. A rare and precious gift!”
“The world needs more people like Peter — broadly and deeply trained, able to present esoteric knowledge in a practical way, and teaching from a perspective of compassionate presence. Thank you for your work!”
“He has succeeded in making a very complex and rich subject accessible. A thoughtful and approachable teacher. Highly recommended.”
“A humorous, knowledgeable, and creative teacher. He knows the whole path and can guide you beautifully, blending tradition with modernity.”
“This practice has expedited my capacity to perceive, produce, and circulate energy in my system, and improved my ability to see through the discursive veil of my thoughts and the raw impulses of my emotions … to a great openness which is also intimately present, where my troubled mind can rest — and I am better able to practice compassion, in peace.”
“My first real touch with the wildness of Vajrayana — my biggest impression is the teacher rather than the teachings! Peter is open and direct about staying on the level of the individual student, and also kind and generous with his time.”
“A solid practitioner — very pragmatic, with a personable, approachable teaching style. He's the real deal.”
“One of the most insightful, germane, and potent Vajrayana teachings I've ever received. Peter is the real deal — pragmatic, with a personable, approachable style.”
A daily practice that supports open-hearted awareness and unconditional embodiment.