A SPIRITUAL ANTHROPOLOGIST
Amanda Dollinger has spent much of her life feeling simultaneously immersed in humanity and slightly outside of it.
Raised unconventionally by two very different people, she eventually emerged into the wider world feeling a little like an alien encountering Earth for the first time: watching how people behave, what they believe, what they fear, what they love, and the strange little psychological and social agreements that hold human life together.
Somehow, people kept inviting her in. They confided in her. Included her. Told her things. Somewhere along the way, the outsider became an undercover observer of the very species she belonged to.
She calls herself a spiritual anthropologist.
For as long as she can remember, Mandy has lived inside two experiences at once: playing the human role completely, while carrying the persistent knowing that the human experience contains us, but does not need to limit us.
“The human experience holds us, but it doesn’t need to limit us.”
MANDY // FIELD NOTES
That idea became the signal underneath everything you see here.
A PLACE TO REMEMBER
Meditate with Mandy began because Mandy wanted somewhere that felt like home.
She had spent years sharing pieces of this world through YouTube, meditation, writing and other corners of the internet, and discovered that thousands of other people recognized something in it too.
So she opened the doors wider.
This is a place for people to remember their origins as something deeper than a résumé, identity, body, role, failure, success, era, geography or single lifetime.
It is especially intended for the people who have always felt a little out of place: artists, wanderers, outsiders, mystics, skeptics with suspiciously mystical tendencies, and people who somehow see the world from 30,000 feet and one millimeter away at the same time.
People who walk the razor’s edge between apparent opposites. People looking for the place where those opposites meet.
“I created this place because I needed a place that felt like home to me.”
MANDY // FIELD NOTES
THE PRACTICE
At the center of Mandy’s work is meditation.
Not meditation as a spiritual Xanax. Not something to pop in an emergency and abandon once the crisis passes.
A practice. A relationship. A way of knowing something so deeply that it begins changing how you live.
Mandy believes meditation can bring us toward one great truth beneath nearly everything:
“You are so very worthy of love. Always more and never less.”
MANDY // FIELD NOTES
And beneath even that: all is well.
The name Amanda, in one of life’s better coincidences, means worthy of love. Helping other people remember the same thing has gradually revealed itself as the work nearest to her heart.
SCIENCE, MAGIC & THE MIDDLE PLACE
Mandy has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from USC, a professional background in branding and communication, and is a certified meditation teacher through the Davidji Meditation Academy.
She is also interested in things that are considerably harder to put on a résumé.
She thinks of herself as a spiritual scientist: hypothesize, experiment, observe, integrate. Try a practice. Enter a different state. Introduce a new energy. See what happens. Note what is revealed.
CORPUS CALLOSUM: the band connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. Also a useful metaphor for what Mandy seems to be doing here: mysticism and empiricism, body and spirit, alien and human, 30,000 feet and one millimeter, held together long enough to see what they have to tell one another.
To her, life is already a spiritual experience whether someone describes it through mysticism, magic and the occult or through science, logic and observable fact. Mystery lives in both.
You do not have to believe in aliens, yogic miracles or levitation to benefit from meditation. Mandy claims to have seen, felt and experienced things she can only describe as magic, but doesn’t claim to have the ultimate definition of what “magic” is.
Everyone gets their own path.
“There are as many paths to enlightenment as there are individual human beings living at any given moment.”
MANDY // FIELD NOTES
SHE HAS, IN FACT, LIVED ON EARTH
For all the cosmic language around here, Mandy has not spent her life floating serenely six inches above the floor.
She has worked jobs, built and forfeited careers, been bruised, broken-hearted, cried, sweat, and chased social approval. She’s battled illness, sat in loneliness, experimented with just about every playbook (and substance).
“My destiny is here in the weird, and I am learning to love it.”
MANDY // FIELD NOTES
In addition to her own life experience, keen sensitivity often left her feeling the struggles, and even the hidden pain, of others.
With time and patience, each hurdle and setback has revealed a deeper purpose and passion.
FIELD NOTE: She has, by her own account, “raw dogged the physical” her whole life.
WHAT LIVES HERE
Meditate with Mandy is a growing archive of guided meditations, philosophical transmissions, meditation instruction, writing, mystical inquiry, humor, beauty and support for the nervous system.
For the esoterically inclined, Mandy considers the site itself an energetic artifact: a particular consciousness programmed, with intention, into the words, images, interactions and pixels that make up this world.
For everyone else, it can simply be a weird and lovely website.
Your experience is yours to define.
WHO IS THIS FOR?
Everyone is welcome.
The signal tends to travel especially well toward people who have wondered whether they arrived in the wrong era, the wrong place, or the wrong version of reality.
Folks who feel whole, and yet somehow know that they, and perhaps the world, have only seen a fraction of themself.
Folks interested in unity without uniformity. Those who are willing to consider that two completely contradictory truths may both contain something profoundly, critically real. Folks who wonder at existence with very large eyes.
And those ready to allow themselves to be loved exactly as they are.
SIGNAL ORIGINLos Angeles, California
EARTH NAMEAmanda Dollinger
KNOWN ALIASESMandy · Neighborhood Mystic · Spiritual Anthropologist
PRIMARY RESEARCH INTERESTWhat happens when a human being remembers who they are?
MISSION STATUSOngoing
THE LEGACY
There are many things Mandy hopes to make in this lifetime.
This is the one she most hopes to leave behind.
A body of work pointing toward remembrance:
You are worthy of love. You are not alone. Humanity can help one another. Underneath all of the noise, something in You remains powerful and whole. And that, perhaps, You came here carrying far more of Yourself than You have remembered yet. Perhaps…You are already complete.
May all beings be free.