Press & Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

What does it mean to ask if you must evolve? A close reading of the question behind the podcast — three words and a punctuation mark that refuse to settle. Drawing on Zen Buddhism, yoga, and contemplative practice, this essay unpacks the strange grammar of personal transformation: the inherited weight of must, the shifting self of I, the optimization trap of evolve, and the small refusal hiding in the question mark itself. A meditation on identity, change, and the quiet work

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