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David P. Cook is an author, teacher, and founder of ShadowLight Institute. His work brings together intensive Vipassana practice, Jungian depth psychology, and somatic awareness to explore the territory between understanding ourselves and actually changing. His first book, Sit With It, introduces the Shadow Integration Technique. He lives in Sausalito, California.

After losing his father at eight and his mother at sixteen, David P. Cook entered adulthood carrying a grief he did not yet know how to meet. At nineteen he became a professional ballroom dancer and teacher, the beginning of a teaching life that would slowly move from movement into the inner life.

What followed was more than a decade of intensive Vipassana practice, including more than twenty silent retreats, alongside years of study in Jungian depth psychology and somatic work. Out of that meeting came the Shadow Integration Technique, a body-first practice for turning toward the parts of ourselves we have learned to avoid.

He is the founder of ShadowLight Institute, which offers private work, cohorts, and retreats. His first book, Sit With It: The Shadow Integration Technique, publishes January 1, 2027, the first in a planned four-book series tracing four postures of practice: sitting, standing, walking, and surrendering.

He lives in Sausalito, California.

David P. Cook lost his father when he was eight. His mother died when he was sixteen. He entered adulthood carrying a grief he did not yet know how to meet, and did what many of us do with what we cannot face. He moved.

At nineteen he became a professional ballroom dancer and teacher. It was a life built on motion, and for a long time the motion worked. What followed was years of genuine searching, through achievement, through relationships, through psychology, through meditation. Each opened something. None of it was enough. What he was carrying had a deeper address than understanding alone could reach.

The turning point came not from a new insight but from a new willingness: to stop running from what he felt. To sit with it. To discover that the thing he had spent his life avoiding was not the enemy he had imagined.

That discovery became a practice. The practice became a method. The method became a life.

At the center of the work is Vipassana. More than a decade of intensive practice, including more than twenty silent retreats, taught him to meet experience at the level of sensation. Alongside it, Jungian depth psychology gave him a language for the shadow, the parts of ourselves we suppress, deny, or project onto others, and somatic work grounded it in the body. From the meeting of those streams came the Shadow Integration Technique.

Today he is the founder of ShadowLight Institute, which offers private work, small cohorts, and immersive retreats. His first book, Sit With It: The Shadow Integration Technique, publishes January 1, 2027, the first in a planned four-book series exploring four postures of practice: sitting, standing, walking, and surrendering.

He lives in Sausalito, California.