Press & Blog

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.