Press & Blog

“Torn,” the closing track of U2’s Carnaval de Luz, is a duet with Dolly Parton and her last recorded vocal. This essay reads its lyric of a mother, a family at war, and a house divided through Buddhist ideas of compassion and attachment, and asks why the song closes an album that begins as a carnival.

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.

Loneliness is disconnection. Aloneness is something else entirely. On Trungpa, Bodhidharma in the snow, and why the spiritual path demands everything you have.

Every year on the longest day, Andrew H. Housley leads a class through 108 sun salutations — Surya Namaskar, in the Sanskrit. A polished black stone for every rep, a tide of energy nobody is generating on purpose, and the small self quieting somewhere around rep eighty. This year the summer solstice falls on June 21 — the same day as Father's Day and the International Day of Yoga, inside Men's Mental Health Month. A yoga teacher on 108, the pivot point of the year, and what t

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