Today we’d like to introduce you to Joe Cadiff.
Hi Joe, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
The path I’m on today as a spiritual teacher and conscious human development coach began during my freshman year of college, when I experienced the first real glimpse of spiritual awakening. I grew up in Los Angeles following a familiar script for success—excel in school, get recruited to a top East Coast college, major in economics, and head to Wall Street. But halfway through that first year, something cracked open inside me. The life I was building suddenly felt empty, mechanical, and strangely devoid of meaning.
For the first time, I took the success blinders off and let myself wonder: Who am I? What is life really about? Is there something deeper beneath the surface of all this relentless striving?
Then, one weekend on a trip to Boston with some football teammates, I had a life-altering shift in perception. For a moment, I was connected to a dimension of my being that felt vast, free, and full of the deepest love I had ever known. It was just a glimpse, a shimmer of light through the clouds, but it changed everything. I knew I had to understand this reality I’d touched.
The only problem: this awakening took place in the midst of the college party scene. I had no teacher, no framework, no path. So, like many young people who encounter the sacred without guidance, I stumbled into a period of Hunter Thompson-esque, substance-driven “mysticism,” desperately trying to recreate the experience and break through into some final moment of transcendence. Predictably, it sent me spiraling downward into collapse.
My rock-bottom moment came at age 20. I’d burned my life down far enough that I finally saw the truth: I wasn’t going to find what I longed for through substances or altered states. In that moment of collapse, by some grace, my ego cracked open just enough for the clear and unadorned light of my innate goodness to shine through. It was humble, simple, unmistakably pure. And I suddenly knew exactly what to do: stop following the frantic voice of the ego and follow the guidance of this quiet inner goodness. It felt like coming home to my real, unfabricated self.
Within days, inspired by an Esquire article about a nightclub bouncer who meditated before his shifts (yep, that was my intro to meditation), I committed to a daily meditation and yoga practice and that was it. That simple decision sparked a 13-year journey into the experiential study of the mind, the heart, consciousness, human development, and spiritual awakening.
As I threw myself into practice, layers of confusion and suffering began to dissolve, replaced by clarity, joy, and purpose. I immersed myself in meditation, Buddhism, Hinduism, yoga, comparative mysticism, psychology, and all things conscious human development. I realized that this inner freedom and awakening wasn’t just possible—it was our birthright and who we really are.
So I made it my life’s path.
I returned to school with renewed purpose and wrote my undergraduate thesis on comparative mysticism and developmental psychology. I trained at a Vedic ashram and became a yoga and meditation teacher. After graduation, I traveled throughout the U.S. on pilgrimage, visiting major Buddhist retreat centers, then traveled to Spain to study the Abrahamic mystical traditions of Andalusia and walked the Camino de Santiago.
When I returned to LA after these travels, I felt called to explore acting as another avenue for understanding human nature and the limits of inner freedom, self-mastery, and authentic expression. But after coming to a moment of deep satisfaction and completion in that endeavor, I returned to my spiritual studies, earning a Master’s in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University. The program took me to India and Nepal two years in a row where I studied the Vedic, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, learned Tibetan and Sanskrit, and practiced in monasteries, retreat centers, and sacred sites like Bodh Gaya, the place of the Buddha’s enlightenment.
During my second journey to Nepal, I realized I didn’t want to just study more about awakening through a PhD program—I wanted to experience it as deeply as possible. I had already witnessed the incredible efficacy of the practice in my own life and figured, why not take this as far as it can go? Why not devote myself to the practice at the Olympic level of the greatest masters of the past who reached the pinnacles of contemplative insight? A passionate conviction arose in me that this was how I could most profoundly benefit the world—by immersing myself heart and mind in single-pointed practice and then sharing the fruit of that journey with others.
Following this aspiration, I applied to the Center for Contemplative Research and was selected as one of just 14 individuals worldwide to enter their long-term meditation retreat program—a collaborative project between seasoned contemplatives and consciousness scientists, endorsed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
After four years of intensive retreat in the mountains of Colorado, I knew in my heart I had found what I was looking for and that it was time to return home. Today, I’m back in Los Angeles, integrating what I learned and sharing it through spiritual teaching, coaching, and supporting others on their journey toward clarity, freedom, and awakening.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
This question cracks me up! I’m pretty sure the only ones who’ve had a smooth road are babies just before they leave the womb—then bam! The challenges begin!
In my own life, the road has been anything but smooth. My path has been shaped by challenges as much as by triumphs, and it’s the challenges that have often brought about the greatest insights and transformation. My early adult years involved a lot of confusion, disillusionment, and the painful unraveling of identities I’d spent my whole life building. Hitting rock bottom at 20 was one of the hardest experiences I’ve ever faced, but it was also the turning point that redirected me toward what was real and of lasting significance.
Long-term retreat brought its own kind of difficulty. Choosing to leave behind family, friends, career opportunities, and the familiar comforts and norms of modern life required unshakable conviction in the transformative power and import of deep contemplative practice. As for the retreat itself, when you remove all distractions and sit alone with your mind for months and years, everything you’ve avoided (or never even known was there)—fear, shame, grief, old wounds, stubborn conditioning—rises to the surface. There’s nowhere to hide and there’s no anesthesia in this psycho-spiritual purging of the heart.
But facing those layers of myself brought forth new dimensions of strength, compassion, and understanding of what it is to be human. Most importantly, it revealed—beyond all doubt—that who we really are is not limited by these inner knots of painful emotions and destructive thought patterns. Our real self is timeless, boundless, loving awareness—an open field of shimmering possibility and creativity that supports and suffuses all life. This is who we really are, and this deepest part of ourselves is always present, always guiding us on our journey. Knowing this in the depth of our being brings great peace, trust, and joy.
So, as I see it now, life’s struggles are not obstacles but invitations—each challenge is a chance to see through our limitations and wake up to the brilliance of our true nature. When we catch on to this, we begin meeting everything that arises—the good times and the bad—with poise, resilience, and a joyful enthusiasm to use all that life throws at us as grist for the mill of awakening.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Today my work centers on helping people discover the inner freedom, clarity, and joy that I believe is available to every human being.
I do this through three main avenues:
1. The Hill Street Center for Spirituality & Wellness (Santa Monica)
I offer weekly teachings and meditation instruction rooted in the Bodhisattva, Vajrayana, and Dzogchen traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, with the intention to make these teachings accessible to everyone and directly applicable to our daily lives. I seek to draw out the universal spiritual themes found in these teachings and foster experiential interfaith understanding. The end goal is always the same: awaken to the freedom, joy, and immense love of our divine nature and live as an expression of that divinity in the world.
2. Wide Awake Life Coaching
As the Head Male Coach, I work with teens and young men, as well as their families, to build emotional resilience, purpose, self-awareness, and inner strength. My approach blends ancient contemplative wisdom, modern psychology, and peak-performance coaching.
3. Freedom Coaching & Spiritual Guidance
This is for adults seeking deep transformation. I meet people where they are in their journey and guide them step-by-step, in a deeply personal process, to dissolving the roots of their suffering and dis-ease and awakening to real freedom and fulfillment in every area of life.
At the core, my mission is simple:
Help people rediscover the unshakable goodness, freedom, and love already within them—and support them in living from that place fully, courageously, and joyfully.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
I remember being a happy, light-hearted kid who always wanted to find where the fun was happening—and occasionally caused a bit of mischief. My kindergarten teacher nicknamed me “Mr. Electric!” But I also remember a reflective side. My parents love to tell a story from when we lived in New York City and used to walk through the park to get to school in first and second grade. Apparently, I’d lag about ten paces behind, just taking everything in and getting lost in thought. Who knows what was going on in there!
I also have a distinct memory from around age 11, sitting in the back seat of my mom’s car thinking, “I’ve heard monks can stop their thoughts—can that actually be done?” I decided to try it right then and quickly came to what felt like a definitive conclusion: “Nope! Not possible.”
As I got older, I loved music, theater, and sports. By high school, football had become my obsession, and I set my sights on getting recruited to play in college. Still, I never lost my creative side—I sang with the school Chamber Singers and brought my love of performance into our annual football skit nights during training camp (I’ve never laughed so hard in my life!).
Maybe the best image of who I was in high school is me, football team captain, taking off his helmet to sing the national anthem with the Chamber Singers, and then running back onto the field to play middle linebacker. I guess that sums it up!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/jcadiff
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joecadiff
Image Credits
Taiki Green (black and white shot, shot in front of house, meditation cushion black shirt shot w/ brown background, teaching photo black shirt, running jean shirt photo)
