About Mettagroup
The Keys to Lasting Change
Founded by George Haas in 2003 and named the ‘Best Online Buddhist Meditation’ by Los Angeles Magazine in 2011, Mettagroup uses Vipassana, or Insight meditation, as a way to help students live a meaningful life. Drawing from 2500-year-old Buddhist teachings and John Bowlby's Attachment Theory, the Mettagroup techniques serve as a model of how to connect with other people, and how to be completely yourself in relationships with others and with work.
Our 3 Pillar Approach
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With this pillar, we educate about attachment theory, and support our clients with installing a secure functioning model.
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Exploration is the pursuit of anything that one finds authentically meaningful to them. As part of this pillar, we teach mentalizing and emotional regulation skills, which are rooted in a meditative approach.
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Are you interested in truly being collaborative, committed, and reliable in relationships? With this pillar, we teach the skills for skillful collaboration in any type of relationship - familial, platonic, romantic and professional. When you can collaborative skillfully, you can receive the support needed in order to fully explore in life.
Where Attachment Theory and Meditation Meet
Understanding attachment theory is the easiest mind blow, and here’s why.
Once you’ve gained an understanding of the concepts and differences between attachment styles, the difficulties you have in past relationships all start to make sense.
We combine the two ingredients of attachment and meditation. With meditation, we offer specific types of practices that guide in the attachment repair process. We then pair that with a psycho-educational approach to attachment theory. This winning combination is what has helped hundreds of our students (including myself) earn secure attachment and end so many of the patterns that once held us back.
Oftentimes, my students can’t believe they’ve waited so long to make these connections.
But the good news is, it’s not too late!
The seemingly unchangeable conditions that many people experience in their lives are actually changeable.
Healing is possible, and 90% of our clients see radical shifts within 3 years.
Our Meditation Approach
Commonly referred to as "mindfulness," Vipassanā meditation is focused on living more peacefully, compassionately and wisely. Derived from the Theravada school of Buddhism, the techniques are widely acknowledged as effective ways to manage pain, stress, compulsiveness and are often used in conjunction with psychotherapy.
The Vision, The Path
Retain the self,
but act differently in the world
No need to ‘get rid of’ who you are. Self-experience stays the same, but the choices you make are different. You start automatically acting secure. You no longer feel the low self-esteem anymore. You’re still YOU, but you’re performing in high esteem ways. You’re just doing the high functioning thing, and it’s seamless. You just make the better choice automatically, without conscious decision-making. Effortless, automatic.
Emotional support
reliably on-hand
The waves crash at times on the path of attachment repair, so we want to meet those waves with preparation, equanimity and grace. We at Mettagroup are here to support you in navigating all that may come up as you shift behavior, learn these new skills and integrate the changes arising in your self-identity and your life around you.
Learn how to do the things you’ve always wanted to do, but didn’t believe you could do.
We’ve arrived at the bitter sweet part of attachment repair. During this process, there can come a time when you uncover the moments that have come and gone (and that are not coming back); the swaths of life unlived. Insight can sometimes introduce sorrow, which is a natural experience on the path to uncovering and claiming your meaningful life. We help you navigate and process the sorrow that arises from building the capacity to change behaviors and to recognize that you were in your own way for so long.
Earn secure attachment and live your meaningful life now (not later)
What do we mean by ‘secure attachment’? Secure people know how to communicate their needs, collaborate skillfully in relationship, receive support and give support to others, enjoy intimacy, as well as be authentic. Not only that, but they can set healthy boundaries, regulate their emotions and take meaningful risks in life (i.e. explore!) Earned security gives you the inner foundation to not only clarify what your meaningful life entails, but to fully GO for it. Unblocked, on purpose, and courageous.
Meet the Founding Teacher
George Haas,
Founding Teacher
Welcome! I’m glad you’re here. I’m George Haas, Founding Teacher of Mettagroup, an organization committed to helping people heal their attachment injury, be more secure and live a truly meaningful life.
I had a lot of difficulties in my early life, and there was no way to get people to help me with them.
Today, my main drive in offering the Meditation x Attachment program series is simple…
It’s payback. Not the revenge-type. My mission today is to pay it forward, honoring the people who helped me save my life.
Over the last 40 years, I have accumulated this knowledge about how to heal attachment injury (through both learning and experience). My mission in this program (and at Metttagroup at large) is to share this blueprint in a distilled, manageable way so that people don’t need to go through years of confusion and suffering like I did.
Within just 150 sessions, studies show that you can go from insecure attachment to securely attached. That’s profound, swift results (we’re talking ~ 3 years). I spent most of my life (5 decades) exhaustively exploring all the wrong paths, so it’s my true honor to share what’s worked for me and hundreds of my clients, with long-lasting and life-enhancing effects.
The Journey Here
From New York to Los Angeles
George moved to Los Angeles from New York to work in film and photography in 1992, when he started practicing Vipassana at Ordinary Dharma in Venice, and studying Buddhist texts extensively.
From Meditation Student to Teacher
In 1998 he began study with his current teacher, Shinzen Young, at Vipassana Support International, where he is now a senior facilitator.
He began teaching meditation in 2000, founded Mettagroup in 2003, and became an empowered teacher through Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society, where he taught from 2007 to 2016.
Along with his daily Morning Meditation and full schedule of one-on-one students, he continues to teach weekly classes and intensives in Los Angeles, and offer day-long, weekend and extended retreats around the country.
Recognized Artist
George Haas is an artist with works in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, the Library of Congress, MoMA and the American Irish Historical Society. George Haas studied film, photography, and sculpture at Columbia College and The Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York.
His photographs have appeared in numerous exhibitions, including The School of Art Institute of Chicago, The Bergman Gallery, The Soho Photo Gallery and Club 57. His photographic and written work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Village Voice, Seventeen, Detour, NME, and Spy Magazine. His stage work has been performed in New York, Boston and Chicago, including No Entiendes and Doris and Inez Speak the Truth. He wrote and directed the feature film Friends and Lovers, starring Robert Downey, Jr., Stephen Baldwin and Claudia Schiffer, distributed by Lion's Gate Films. Photographs from this series have been added to the permanent collection of American Photographers at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C and to The Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
How George found his way to attachment repair
He began his own path with a period of lightweight spiritual seeking (and heavy-duty drug and alcohol use).
George got sober through 12-step recovery at the age of 24. In 1978 he embarked on a serious exploration of the eleventh step of the Twelve-Step tradition, working primarily with concentration to reduce the anxiety of living sober.
Subsequently, he began walking the Red Road (traditional Native American spiritual practices) and reading Buddhist texts in the 1980s to help make sense of the mounting AIDS crisis.
How George found his way to attachment repair
“With 40 years of sobriety and over 30 years of psycho-therapy, I found myself in a place where the old patterns that I developed in my crap childhood were still there, resiliently holding on tight. I found that the ordinary unhappiness of life was too much.”
That’s when I committed to a new way.
I discovered meditation and attachment theory, and the rest is history.
-George Haas
What Makes Us Different
What We Are
Meditation-centered.
Get ready to engage formal meditation practice across all our programs and services.
Fast and efficient.
Studies show that within 40-150 private sessions, you can go from insecure to earned secure attachment.
We teach about collaborative relationships.
Mutually supportive, reliable and willing to meet the needs of others (while getting your needs met, too)
Committed to long-term, sustainable shifts.
Not only that, but these shifts become automatic and seamless: the fabric of your new life.
What We Are Not
We do not teach how to have
transactional relationships.
If you’re interested in continuing down this road, this isn’t the right support system for you.
This is not a therapeutic program, or a substitute for therapy
but rather is a meditation training. If you’re looking for therapy, this isn’t it. Please seek it elsewhere.
A generic mindfulness program or app.
We teach industrial-strengthened, targeted meditation techniques to directly support you with healing your attachment disturbances and earning secure attachment.
“I'm better than I've ever been.”
“I just want to share, that it's been six years, a big journey, a big journey. But guess what? I've earned secure. Today I found out that I've earned secure. I know a lot of you won't know what that means, but some of you might. I got my attachment assessment inventory back today and I'm secure. I'm better than I've ever been.”
-Sia, Pop Star
The Mettagroup Track
Meditation x Attachment | Level One
Fundamentals of Attachment Theory and the 3 Pillar Approach
Meditation x Attachment | Level Two
Mentalizing and collaborative relationships
Meditation x Attachment | Level Three
How to earn security for insecure or disorganized people
Meditation x Attachment | Level Four
How earned secure people can develop their exploration
Meditation x Attachment | Level Five
Renegotiating relationships (romantic, professional, familial or platonic)
A Note On Teaching
“I try to embody the characteristics that I find helpful in a teacher when I teach myself. What may not be obvious is that I teach irreverently. This comes from making sense out of the world while growing up in a household where the façade presented to the outside was so different from what went on inside. Along the way that dissonance created an extreme sensitivity to the negative side of what Gregory Bateson et al. so eloquently dubbed the double-bind (two conflicting demands, neither of which can be ignored nor escaped).
Imagine the profound shift in consciousness I experienced through the insight that a double-bind is not always malevolent. That my hard-won sensitivity could be put to good use in meditation, clearing away the distortions of my lose-lose view which had until then prevented me from experiencing the world the way it is. (Think of the kōan by Zen Master Hakuin—a benevolent double-bind—”Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?”)
Do not get me wrong. I am not a Zen practitioner. When I began sitting Vipassanā twenty years ago at Ordinary Dharma the locus was the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hahn (the last of my approach/ abandonment episodes). I found the overlay of Zen “harshness” unhelpful, even in its tempered form. I am not a Tibetan practitioner, I find the elaborate ritual unhelpful.
I practice what we call in the West “Vipassanā,” or “Insight Meditation,” in a distinctly North American form. Most of my training has been with Shinzen Young and I advocate his approach. I am a senior facilitator at Vipassanā Support International, Shinzen’s retreat organizing entity.
I love the teachings of Mahasi Sayadaw, and use the map in his manual Progress of Insight in my teaching. I am a linear thinker and prefer a systems approach. I am also dyslexic and prone to obscure connections.
I believe in the power of kindness to transform our perception of the world from a cold brutish place that justifies a closed mind into a warm loving one where we live with a wide-open heart. Half of what I teach is how to be kind, how to develop compassion so you can empathically connect with the people around you and, through that connection, deepen the meaning in your life.
I am an enlightenment-oriented teacher. I mean that I think that conventional classical enlightenment (at least stream-entry) in this lifetime is a worthwhile goal for your meditation practice and completely doable. You might be thinking if he got all of that from Shinzen and Mahasi why not just go to the source? Study with Shinzen, find somebody who studied with Mahasi (1904-1982) and study with them (I encourage that). There is a whole world of skilled meditation teachers and traditions out there available to you. Pick the teacher and the teaching you can connect to. You know if you can connect by trying to connect.”
- George Haas, Founder of Mettagroup
