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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Goodpods has named Must I Evolve? among the top meditation and Buddhist podcasts on its platform — a quiet recognition for a show built around a single private question: must I evolve? Andrew H. Housley reflects on the strange experience of being heard, the isolation of making creative work, and what it means when a question you couldn't stop asking yourself turns out to be one that other people are sitting with too. On evolution, inquiry, and the small signals that come back

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

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.