Inner work for real life.
The Middle is a weekly in-person gathering in LA for people who feel the pull to grow, to heal, or simply to slow down.
There’s a part of you that knows there’s more.
You’re handling your life.
The emails get answered. The errands get done. The meetings happen. The dishes eventually get washed. We keep showing up for work, friends, family, relationships, responsibilities, and all the little things that make up a full life.
But underneath that, there’s a part of us that quietly wants to slow down. To listen. To get quiet enough to hear ourselves again. To come into more connection with ourselves and others in meaningful ways.
There may also be a deeper part of you that is asking for some attention.
Maybe you’re moving through a hard season. Maybe you’re trying to grow out of old patterns, craving more real connection, or maybe you feel a desire to live your life with more presence, more courage, more compassion.
The Middle is a place to make room for that.
A weekly pause and recharge in the middle of a full life.
It's a space to step out of the rush, do the kind of inner work that's hard to do on your own, and return to your life clearer and more alive.
Think of it like a weekly service for people who don’t do church.
People come for different reasons. Some are in pain and want help finding their way through it. Some are looking for real connection. And some feel a pull toward something more spiritual, or a deeper relationship with themselves. Whichever one is yours, this is for you.
Each week, we explore something useful for everyday life: how to stay present, how to move through hard emotions, how to have the conversation you’ve been avoiding, how to relate to yourself with more kindness, how to keep your heart open in the middle of real life.
Part Meditation
·
Part Real Conversation
·
Part Connection
·
Part Practice
·
Part Meditation · Part Real Conversation · Part Connection · Part Practice ·
This is for you if you want to…
-
Slow Down
Step out of the rush and hear yourself again.
-
Cultivate Connection
Be in meaningful conversation with others.
-
Live With More Clarity
Meet your life with presence, courage, and compassion.
-
Work Through Challenges
Learn tools for navigating where you feel stuck or ready for change.
So much of what weighs on us doesn't come from what happens in life, but from how we treat ourselves when it does.
Most of us are quietly hard on ourselves. Most of us are quick to criticize ourselves, quick to apply undue pressure, quick to hold onto old beliefs about where we fall short. Those beliefs tend to settle in beneath our awareness, running the ship of our lives without us ever really noticing.
The work we do in the Middle begins with bringing these patterns of self-relating into the light, and then learning to meet whatever we find internally with more kindness than we're used to offering ourselves. That shift, from self-criticism toward self-compassion, is where much of our freedom and experience of fulfillment begins. It changes how we move through our own lives, and it changes how we show up for the people in them.
-
You don’t have to leave your life to do this.
There's an old idea that this kind of inner work means stepping away from the world — going off to an ashram in the mountains to leave it all behind. And that can be beautiful. For some people, it's exactly right.
But it isn't the life most of us have chosen. Most of us still want the long dinners with friends, the new relationship, the work that means something, the late nights, the slow mornings, the full and messy and alive life of a city like LA.
So the real question is, how we do this inner work while staying right in the middle of our lives?
How do we keep our hearts open while dating, working, parenting, grieving, changing, and trying to become who we really are?
We’ve come to believe that life itself — with all its chaos and beauty — is the real curriculum for our growth.
Learning to use your actual life as the ground of your growth we believe is the path of self-mastery. And it's a whole lot easier alongside other people doing the same.
The Middle is a place to grow, to heal, and to come home to yourself — without having to step away from the life you’re already living.
One gathering a week to step out of the rush, go inward, and come back to your life more awake than you left it.
About Lee
I’ve been drawn to inner work for as long as I can remember. I was a sensitive kid. I felt a lot, noticed a lot, and had spiritual experiences from a young age that shaped how I saw myself and the world.
But alongside that sensitivity, I also carried a lot of fear.
For most of my twenties, I struggled with anxiety and a kind of existential dread that was hard to explain to other people. On the outside, I seemed fine. But inside, I was often terrified, overwhelmed, anxious, and at times, I was genuinely unsure how I was going to keep going.
While a lot of people my age around me seemed to be building their lives, I spent years doing the slow, unglamorous work of healing. It was one of the hardest times of my life. But I was committed to it. I sensed that the only only way out was through.
-
A lot helped me find my way – good teachers, good guides, years of practice. And the thing that changed me most was learning how to be kinder to myself.
Not how to fix myself. Not how to become some better, more spiritual version of myself. But how to question the belief that I was broken in the first place. What healed was the belief that there was something in me that needed to be fixed.
Over time, I began to discover something underneath all the fear and self-judgment – it was a sense of wholeness. Something steady, alive, and beautiful that had been there all along.
And the more I came to see that in myself, the more I began to see it in other people. And I sensed that my job was to realize that wholeness in my life.
That’s the heart of my work now: helping people see that they are not broken, that they are already whole, and that love is not something they have to earn by becoming perfect.
The Middle comes from that understanding.
It’s a space to slow down, listen to ourselves, be in honest conversation with other people, and practice bringing more presence, courage, and compassion into real life.
Join Us In-person, In LA
One gathering a week to step out of the rush, go inward, and come back to your life more awake than you left it.