Press & Blog

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.

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

Six methods for getting unstuck when the page won't move — and one quiet truth: the block breaks not when you have a brilliant idea, but when you stop requiring one.

Time is the most precious of all our commodities — and the only one you can't buy back.

Our culture hides the dying from the living and calls death a failure. Ram Dass called it the culminating adventure. On the spiritual work of making peace with what we can't control.