The Deep Self Design® Method
To study this method is to study yourself.
To study yourself is to know, respect, and befriend all aspects of yourself.
To know, respect, and befriend all aspects of yourself is to be liberated from conflict with yourself.
To be liberated from conflict with yourself is to live with courage, clarity, and authenticity,
and more peacefully co-create with life.*
*an homage to Eihei Dōgen
Deep Self Design® is a powerful inner science that uses multi-sensory techniques to observe, welcome, and transform internal turbulence. It’s a method of life (re)design and self-authoring—nothing special required.
We can become our own liberators.
We have everything it takes.
Deep Self Design® (DSD) is intentionally multi-sensory, and it combines five pools of knowledge for self-discovery, self-repair, and self-authoring.
Woven together, these five pools result in one potent experiential technique to move learners beyond intellect and into the terrain of the Inner World—that interior tide of thoughts, emotions, sensations, perceptions, beliefs, and stories about reality. The Inner World matters because it happens largely outside of our awareness yet directly impacts our choices, actions, behaviors, and decision-making, defining our felt sense of well-being and directing our energy and potential.
DSD shows learners how to respectfully and benevolently work with invisible data in the Inner World so we are not in our own way when it comes to designing our lives. It shows us how to become our own best friend—our greatest ally and deepest power source—co-creating with our Inner World and improving the outer world in the process.
Our Evidence-Based, Contemplative Roots
The DSD method draws from a diverse set of scientific, artistic, contemplative, and practical disciplines taught to Sun over almost two decades by exceptional and generous teachers. The method was set in motion over years of direct application and both personal and group prototyping.
After immersing in life-giving research and practices that weren’t driven by marketing, Sun, architect of the method, grew tired of the well-intended but wonky advice that proliferates in the personal-growth arena. She decided to design a life practice that offered a different vision, one of a technique that’s democratized, effective, realistic, and as elegant as possible when working with the Inner World. Sun is an autodidact and a radical pragmatist who prioritizes things that work, in real time and in real life, so the method of Deep Self Design is a clear-headed, practical antidote to theoretical, wishful, or magical-thinking methods of personal potentiation.
Precepts of the Deep Self Design® Method
If you practice Deep Self Design sincerely, good things will happen. You’ll take more creative risks. You’ll speak more authentically. You’ll be less reactive to difficult behavior, less irritated by imperfections. You’ll start to feel your needs matter and you can meet most of them. With consistency over time, you’ll internalize the Deep-Self divinity that is your birthright, and you’ll see that same worthiness in everyone you meet. In this hype-driven, distraction-loving, upside-down world, DSD is subversive and revolutionary since it is a radical act to become internally literate, emotionally honest, and self-responsible—to reclaim that personal power. We understand if this sounds a little daunting. You can go slow and turn back any time.
Choose your own adventure.
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Precepts underlying this life practice:
Our ego will never be the enemy. Deep Self Designers understand the ego to be a set of creative and functional strategic survival responses to causes and conditions that occurred as we grew up, many of which have become suboptimal in our current conditions and simply need updating.
The Inner World has natural laws (we teach them in class), and we don’t get to flout them. We do system tests to understand these laws better, and we learn to respect them in our aspiration to grow. Deep Self Design® is not a performance of exceptionalism. These natural laws apply to everyone.
We do not rigorously train in “good” habits. DSD is a long-game strategy and does not encourage behaviors that cycle and crash since they aren’t sustainable over the course of our lives. Instead, DSD reorients us from the roots up so that good habits we seek can flow naturally from there.
We do not ask DSD students to perpetually “think positive,” “look for the bright side,” or assume a regimen of positive affirmations. These are exercises in self-delusion and are minimally effective.
We do not offer useless advice like “Don’t let X get to you.” We offer practical techniques to be compassionately with whatever X is and to identify what’s happening in us when X moves into our field of awareness.
We do not ask DSD students to “stay strong” or “be fearless” when we feel fragile or afraid. This method does not see fear, or any other uncomfortable emotion, as a problem. This is information and these things are our teachers.
We do not focus on our “strengths” while attempting to banish our “weaknesses.” We support discovery of and alignment with the Inner World to make it more possible for our natural curiosity, wisdom, compassion, and creativity to lead.
There is no “tackling destructive thoughts” nor do we ask students to avoid “negative” thoughts or energies or expect you to feel guilty for having them. Doing away with “negativity” in the mind and body is impossible and not a good use of our time and effort. It also has a stance of combat that’s anathema to this practice.
DSD will not try and drive you toward a goal. “Being all that you can be” is a Western ideal and misses the point of maturing. Potentiating is a life-long practice, the fruits of which can be immediately evident, but there is no state of perfection. We do not become superhuman or forever “enlightened” and leave our messy humanity behind.
We do not ask you to simply “believe us” when it comes to the outcomes of this method. Your direct experience will be your guide, and your confidence will build based on authentic verification from your own internal system.
Sustained curiosity and radical self-compassion are the ground on which we stand. All Little Minds in you are welcome—REPEAT: ALL PARTS ARE WELCOME—so our work is to practice curiosity, respect and benevolent regard for every aspect of our being. If we insist on clinging to the belief that we’re broken and something is wrong with us and are unwilling to try, there is nowhere to go from there. We know it can feel real, but we don’t believe in your unworthiness and won’t collude with you to abandon yourself.
DSD hinges on something generally unpopular: personal responsibility. This means that we are not encouraged to blame the boss, our parents, or the world at large when things in our life are tough. The locus of responsibility is centered in us and, while we wholly respect resistance to this notion and honor it profoundly, learning to be the source of our own experience is our greatest power move. So there is no guru other than ourselves. We, alongside a community of practice, become our own hero.
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Work with us
We work with a limited number of individuals 1:1 to help them access their Deep Selves and get to know their inner world in a benevolent way. Learn more here.