Meditation Starting Points

For: "I want to start a real practice today, beginner-safe, with the right lineage."

1. California Yoga Center — New to Yoga

The studio Jacob explicitly recommends. Mountain View, CA. Iyengar lineage. His father's first teacher teaches there.

"One of the best places to study in the world is in Mountain View. It's called the California Yoga Center. It's a very famous yoga studio. I love it. I go frequently."

If you're in the Bay Area, this is the answer. If you're elsewhere, look for an Iyengar-certified studio near you — the precision-and-alignment lineage matters more than the studio brand.

See Iyengar Yoga for why this lineage specifically.

2. The qigong position

Already covered in Life Upgrade Onboarding and on its own page: Qigong (Arms-Up Position). Repeating here because it's a real meditation starting point — the position itself is a meditation, not a warmup for one.

Seven minutes. Hands at eyebrow level, soft. Tongue on the roof of the mouth. See what happens.

3. Reframe of the basic skill

Before sitting, read Meditation as Channeling Power — Jacob's reframe of the standard "snap back when your mind wanders" instruction. It changes what you're doing during the wandering. The reframe is the difference between meditation feeling like a chore and meditation feeling like discovery.

What's not on this list

A note on what Jacob did not send to David Mao:

No specific apps (Headspace, Calm, Waking Up, etc.)
No specific guided-meditation teachers
No "10-day Vipassana" recommendation
No psychedelic suggestions

Not because those don't have value, but because they aren't part of Jacob's first-recommendations set. His on-ramps are: studio (yoga), book (Religiousness in Yoga), and a single physical position (qigong arms-up). Embodied first; apps later if at all.

After this cluster

You're past onboarding. From here, the next moves depend on what you encounter in your own practice. The wiki itself becomes a reference rather than a tour — search for whatever shows up.