Today, Carolyn joined me writing at a coffee shop – a different one than I usually go to. This place is big and airy and gorgeously appointed, full of rich dark woods and kitschy curios arranged with fastidious care. Inside, it feels like the set of a Tim Burton movie. And, rather gloriously, its big […]

This morning, sitting at a sidewalk table outside of my neighborhood coffee shop, I decided to meditate on my Guru. I don’t just mean in the internal way that devotees of Gurus are always supposed to be doing, all day long, even while stuffing kale into their blenders or breathlessly telling their wives about yet […]

In the lengthy Adi Da excerpts I’ve included below, he talks about how spiritual aspirants throughout history have often deliberately chosen to live in constrained, enclosed circumstances – not unlike our quarantine situation! – to focus and magnify their spiritual practices. To eliminate distractions. To more intensely observe the “event” of their own being. Monks […]

Here’s a passage from Adi Da Samraj: “People talk about a ‘new paradigm’ – but, all the while, they are actually being the old paradigm…There is no new paradigm until you, yourself, are Awakened…There is no new paradigm until the old paradigm is dead – ‘ground zero’. All clinging to old ideas is clinging to the old […]

“You are all consumers, consumer egos, mythological selves that…have been propagandized—as is the common case in the world presently—into being a believer in a mythological notion of the infinite importance of your own self and of the purpose of satisfying it, of experiencing this and that, indulging in this and that, and being satisfied through […]

If you’re like everyone I know, this covid-19 crisis has made you feel like that guy holding his head in that Edvard Munch painting that everyone used to have prints of on their dorm room walls. But what if we could extract some incredible benefit from our suffering? What if our misery contained, hidden within it, […]

Each morning I clamber out of the quarantine of our tiny condo, climb into our old Honda Civic, and drive the five blocks to the quarantine of my even tinier Rolfing office. What I do there now, instead of Rolfing people, is slouch in the one chair and scribble in spiral-bound notebooks for four to […]

The first time the covid-19 crisis threw me into a state of face-melting terror was at one of our local Minneapolis co-ops. It was during those very first couple of days, long before grocery stores had started limiting how many people could be inside shopping, long before masks, social distancing, or fucked up words like […]