Contemplative Meditation
& Presence Teaching
Most modern meditation instruction reduce it to stress management or teach to technique, whether from a lineage or a textbook.
This work is about something more fundamental. Meditation taught here is a philosophy and practice of presence: not emptying the mind or achieving a state, but returning to awareness itself, with compassion and openness rather than force. From that ground, steadiness and clarity emerge organically, and the subtler arts of contemplation, consciousness, nonlocal awareness, and inquiry become genuinely accessible.
These are private sessions, uniquely adapted to where you are, for practitioners ready to go deeper. Available online and in-person in NYC.
What we can work with:
Mindfulness & Compassionate Presence: At the core is presence, returning to awareness itself, with compassion as the ground rather than a technique layered on top. This is where capacity stretches. Meditation is importantly not the point of meditation.
Contemplation & Spiritual Inquiry: Beyond mindfulness lies the art of contemplation: self-inquiry, disidentification, centering prayer, and practices that move toward direct knowing rather than knowledge about. This is where the deeper register of coherence becomes available.
Consciousness & Expanded States: Meditation can open profound states and experiences like nonlocal awareness, loving presence, subtle perception. Anchored in contemplative wisdom, compassionate presence, and the capacity to hold paradox, these become genuine thresholds. But without that ground, they become distraction at best, destabilizing at worst.
Breath & Nervous System: Breathing patterns often hold us in heightened states without our awareness. Retraining the breath settles the body-mind, with meditative clarity as a natural effect: functional breathing woven with embodied contemplative practice.
Meet your guide
Susan Reis, SEP DARe PLC CH is a meditation and presence teacher based in New York City, working at the intersection of contemplative wisdom, embodied nervous system science, and depth-based self-development. Her approach is non-dogmatic, rooted in direct heart-based experience as genuinely contemplative rather than traditional ritual alone, teaching meditation as a practice of strengthening inner presence over dissociation. She is trained in mindfulness meditation, primordial sound meditation, compassion-based resilience training, Christian Contemplative practice, and functional breathwork, and is completing an MS in Applied Neuroscience. She shares this work broadly, including as a trauma-informed meditation teacher at Rikers Island and as a hospice volunteer and end-of-life companion, and works with individuals online and in-person in NYC, individually and in small groups.
Learn more here.