PRESS & MEDIA
Everything you need
to book David.
BIOGRAPHY
SHORT
~50 words
David P. Cook is the author of Sit With It and the founder of ShadowLight Institute. A transformational teacher with thirty-five years of practice and twenty-one Vipassana silent retreats, he teaches the Shadow Integration Technique to people who have done the thinking and are ready to do the work. He lives in Sausalito, California.
MEDIUM
~150 words
After losing his father at eight and his mother at sixteen, David P. Cook spent the next thirty-five years learning what it actually takes to heal. Not from the outside — from the inside.
Through twenty-one Vipassana silent retreats, decades of Jungian depth work, and somatic embodiment practice, he developed what would become the Shadow Integration Technique: a body-first method for meeting the parts of yourself you have been running from.
He is the founder of ShadowLight Institute, which offers coaching, cohorts, and retreats. His first book, Sit With It: The Shadow Integration Technique, publishes January 1, 2027. Three more books follow in a series that maps to the four fundamental postures of a practitioner's life.
He lives in Sausalito, California.
LONG
~300 words
David P. Cook lost his father at eight years old. His mother was murdered when he was sixteen. He entered adulthood carrying weight that most people spend their lives trying not to look at directly.
What followed was not a clean recovery story. It was three decades of genuine searching — through achievement, through relationships, through psychology, through meditation. Each thing helped. None of it was enough. The wound had a deeper address than any of these approaches 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.
Today, David is the founder of ShadowLight Institute, which offers one-on-one coaching, small cohorts, and immersive retreats rooted in the Shadow Integration Technique — a body-first approach to shadow work that draws from Vipassana meditation, Jungian depth psychology, somatic embodiment, and neuroscience.
His first book, Sit With It: The Shadow Integration Technique, publishes January 1, 2027. It is the first in a four-book series — Sit With It, Stand In It, Walk As It, and Surrender — mapping the full arc of a practitioner's life from first meeting the shadow to final dissolution.
He has completed twenty-one ten-day Vipassana silent retreats. He has been a practitioner, not a student of practice, for more than thirty-five years.
He lives in Sausalito, California.
TOPICS
What David talks about.
Why insight alone doesn't create change
Most approaches to inner work stop at understanding. David explains why insight is necessary but not sufficient — and what has to happen at the body level for a pattern to actually dissolve.
The shadow is not what you think
Jungian shadow work is widely misunderstood. David brings precision to the concept: what the shadow actually is, how it forms, why it drives behavior invisibly, and what it means to genuinely integrate it.
What Vipassana taught me that therapy couldn't
After decades in both traditions, David speaks to what meditation reveals that talk therapy often misses — and why the body, not the mind, is the primary address for healing emotional charge.
Stop running. Start arriving.
The central teaching of Sit With It: the thing you have been avoiding is not the enemy you imagine. What happens when you finally turn toward it, and why presence is the practice, not a byproduct of it.
BOOKING
To book David for a podcast, event, or media appearance
Reach out directly. He reads every message.
DAVID@SHADOWLIGHTINSTITUTE.COM