Press & Blog

A six-shot revolver has six chambers. The album this song opens is called Dopamine Chamber. A spiritual reading of Fontaines D.C.’s “Six Shot Morning”: can you call the world beautiful when you can’t feel it, what happens when sadness becomes content for the screen, and why “always” sounds less like a promise than a sentence. Plus the Buddhist idea that clinging to permanence is where suffering starts, and what sitting offers in place of an audience.

Most days don’t announce themselves. A song that insists each one is “just another day on earth” ought to feel like a dismissal. To me it feels closer to a blessing. A spiritual reading of Brian Eno’s “Just Another Day,” newly back in print: is the word “just” resignation or release, why repetition works like a mantra, what it means to imagine putting it all behind us, and how impermanence cuts both ways, taking the hard days and the good ones.

When U2 released "The Greatest Show on Earth," one word stopped me: once. This is a spiritual reading of the song's questions about love, faith, and impermanence. Falling in love is the easy part. Staying is the practice. What does it mean to keep faith in someone you can never fully know, to ask whether a vow is a church of love or fear, and to love without clutching something that was always going to change? Along the way: Zen, hurt, and what's left when the lights go out.

What is the Zen view of time? Most of us picture it as a line: the past behind us, the future ahead, and us walking the road between. Zen master Taisen Deshimaru taught that time is not a line but a series of now points. This post explores what that means, why the line picture feeds regret and anxiety, and three simple ways to practice living one point at a time, starting with a single breath.

In contemplative traditions, time isn't a straight line but a web, with everything we've been and everything we're becoming held together in this one present breath. This piece explores how the mind moves through past, present, and future, through memory, intention, and non-attachment, and why the deepest journey always leads back to now.

Michelangelo believed a figure already exists inside the marble, waiting to be revealed. Psychologists call the relationship version of this the Michelangelo phenomenon: partners who see each other's best, truest selves help each other actually grow into them. This piece walks through what the research says, four practical ways to apply it, and why a partner's steady belief can matter more than any advice.

Productivity gets sold as the measure of a good life, but there's a point where the drive to achieve stops helping and starts draining you. Drawing on real coaching work, this piece walks through eight signs of toxic productivity, plus one reflection question for each, so you can catch the pattern before it turns into burnout.

Interpol’s new title track asks what we do with a mirror that weighs a ton. This essay reads it as a spiritual question: is silence the end of feeling or the far side of it? Drawing on my own experience of sitting with a loss I could not go around, and on what I tell my students about shortcuts, it makes the case that the silence you buy and the silence you go through are not the same.

In a hard season, just out of a painful relationship and buried under my own inner critic, I came across a saying about a hunter who saves the sparrow sheltering at his chest. It stopped me. This essay is about what it taught me: that the way through a harsh inner voice can be toward it, not away; how to question it without agreeing; and how a hunter can become a collaborator.

The gods condemned Sisyphus to roll a boulder up a mountain forever, and Camus told us to imagine him happy. This essay takes that strange instruction seriously: why we treat suffering as a detour from the real life, what Viktor Frankl actually said about finding meaning in it, and how hardship, met with open eyes, can build resilience without being glorified.

The average adult makes thousands of decisions a day, and by evening most of us are running on fumes. Zen monastic life offers an old answer to a modern problem: fewer choices, held with full attention. Drawing on Dōgen's instructions for the monastery cook, satisficing, and a few practical rules of my own, this essay walks through how to protect your mental energy for the decisions that matter, from a morning routine to a 24-hour rule.

Loneliness is disconnection. Aloneness is something else entirely. On Trungpa, Bodhidharma in the snow, and why the spiritual path demands everything you have.

I took a Bodhisattva vow as a young man. Years later, burnout taught me what Chögyam Trungpa meant by "idiot compassion" — and that saying no can be the more compassionate act.

The Atlantic's viral feature on meditation's "dark side" documents real harm — psychosis, dissociation, careers derailed by intensive practice. The reporting deserves to be taken seriously, but its framing doesn't. Drawing on the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, the Yoga Sutras, and the Eightfold Path, this response argues meditation was never sold as relaxation, was never meant for solo practice without a qualified guide, and was never meant to be separated from the ethical traditio

I said good morning to a man on Solano and watched him decide what it meant. It took a second and a half — threat assessment, a scan for what I might want, then a third calculation neither of us could name. He nodded at my sternum and kept walking. I live in New Orleans, where you greet everyone you pass, including the man asleep on your steps. Berkeley taught America that being wrong in public was acceptable. Sixty years on, nobody looks up.

Sophie Rottenberg, 29, died by suicide in February 2025 after confiding her suicidal thoughts to ChatGPT — not to her real therapist, her best friend, or her parents. She is not alone: 3 in 10 adults now use AI for mental health support, and OpenAI's own data show over 1.35 million weekly ChatGPT users express suicidal intent. Andrew H. Housley, board-certified Health and Wellness Coach, on 5 real dangers of AI as sole mental health support — and 5 alternatives that actually

Not a canonical list. Seven Zen books that have actually done work in Andrew H. Housley's practice over the years — Taisen Deshimaru's Ring of the Way, Kosho Uchiyama on Dogen, the plainspoken teachings of Kodo Sawaki, Peter Matthiessen's grief-soaked Himalayan travelogue The Snow Leopard, Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Camus's The Stranger, and John Fante's Ask the Dust. Some from squarely inside the tradition. Two by writers who never sat. All of them, over tim

Self-help tells you what to do. Novels change what you think you are. The wellness industry runs on information — articles, podcasts, apps, frameworks — but research keeps showing information is one of the least effective tools for changing behavior. Andrew H. Housley, novelist and board-certified Health and Wellness Coach, on why fiction may be the most overlooked behavior-change technology of our time, and why writing about your own experience is its quiet companion practic

I went back to the woods where Fritz is buried. A European hornet found me first. What happened next is the truest thing my Zen practice has ever asked of me.

The Buddha described four kinds of students as four kinds of horses — one moved by the shadow of the whip, the next by the touch of hair, the third by the flesh, and the last only by the whip to the bone. Andrew H. Housley on the parable's strange afterlife: Shunryu Suzuki's argument that the worst horse may be the best student, Peter Gabriel's 2023 song that finds a fifth horse hidden in the original four, and what each kind of horse asks of us. From the Patoda Sutta to i/o.