Press & Blog

The song begins with a countdown: twenty-nine days until the family is together again. Kings of Leon’s “My Whole World” gives thanks for a reunion that hasn’t happened yet, and in doing so it teaches something older than the song. A spiritual reading of gratitude as a practice, not a mood: why the smallest moments teach us to be here now, how gratitude and grief share the same table, and what the word “each day” turns a feeling into.

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.

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.

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 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.

The Atlantic’s profile of Willoughby Britton documents real harm from intensive meditation. This response, drawn from the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, the Yoga Sutras, and the Eightfold Path, argues the missing ingredient isn’t caution but a suitable teacher, an ethical framework, and a community that notices when someone goes missing.

Take what you need. Andrew H. Housley on the slow, surprisingly difficult Zen practice of taking only what is required — and noticing how much is already here. Five practices for daily life: embracing the present moment, simplifying material possessions, silencing the mind's noise, non-attachment, and finding beauty in the ordinary. With wisdom from Shunryu Suzuki, Dogen, Ikkyu, and Basho. A reflection on abundance, appreciation, and what becomes shareable once you discover y

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.