The poet Wendell Berry wrote, “The world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.” We sometimes think, “It's great that my ancestors worked hard to give me this beautiful life.” But gratitude alone misses something essential: your life is FOR something. It’s not just an inheritance to spend. We don’t like this. It sounds like pressure! But when we forget that our actions shape the future, we degrade not only our planet, but life's sacredness. To be fully a

When our president was first elected in 2016, I noticed how much of his rhetoric echoed what New Age spirituality had been preaching for decades: “Protect your energy” (build a wall). “Get rid of toxic people” (deport them). “Manifest abundance” (always be winning). In many ways, he's a perfect mirror of modern self-help, much of which is obsessed with eliminating perceived threats to personal happiness. Cut out challenging people. Dismiss negative thoughts. Refuse to settle

My friend likes to joke, “Everybody thinks they give more than they get. But if that’s true, there must be some giant black hole into which all our generosity keeps disappearing.” The fact is that we’re not very good at recognizing how much we receive. But there’s another issue too: we doubt our ability to find happiness through our own actions. We forget the joy of being generous for its own sake, or the peace that comes from telling the truth, regardless of how it’s receive

Do you know the myth of Chiron? Chiron was an immortal centaur renowned for his healing powers, but he suffered a wound that, despite all his efforts, would not heal. In the end, his only escape from agony was to give up his immortality. One moral of this story is that we’re not here to heal all our wounds. We’re here to live fully before we die. The Buddha taught that whenever you see a sunrise or sunset, you should contemplate the possibility that it might be your last. In

My friend arrived at our coffee date furious with her yoga instructor. “This woman kept us in triangle pose for ten minutes while she went on and on about Viktor Frankl and how life is all about the meaning you give it. She told us how she’d decided to give her own life a positive meaning. And she NEVER ONCE mentioned that Frankl was in a concentration camp, not a communal art space in Brooklyn.” I laughed. It’s funny how Viktor Frankl gets invoked when people want to tell fl

Have you noticed how rare love songs are today? If the twentieth century celebrated the wonders of romance, the twenty-first is preoccupied with its disappointments. “Traitor.” “Vampire.” “We Can’t Be Friends.” Pop music today seems obsessed with betrayal. Of course, betrayals happen. And sure, “My Girl” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream” were just fantasies. But isn’t the idea of a perfectly toxic ex its own kind of fantasy? We’ve stopped believing in perfect lovers, but we sti

In Sumerian mythology, the goddess Inanna descends to the underworld. At each of seven gates, she must surrender an article of clothing representing her status as queen. By the time she reaches the bottom, she is totally naked and killed by the rulers of the underworld. Three days later, however, two mysterious beings restore her to life. It’s a beautiful metaphor for intimacy. We enter relationships clothed in our old ideas about what love should look like, what we should do

I knew a man from the Kanza Nation in Oklahoma who used to say that what puzzled him most about white people is that they never retire. “When our people turn fifty,” he said, “we start making sure the next generation knows how to do things, fix things, remember things. But white people hoard their knowledge as though they’re never going to die.” The Buddha often spoke about this hoarding instinct, and the importance of challenging it through cāga — a word usually translated a

Near the end of his life, Rabbi Zusya began to weep. His students were amazed. “Rabbi, why are you scared of death? You’ve lived a great life. You’ve been as pious as Abraham, as devoted as Moses.” Zusya replied, “When I stand before God, God will not ask me, ‘Zusya, why were you not Moses?’ God will ask, ‘Zusya, why were you not Zusya?’” Your life, with all its limitations, is the only place you will ever find holiness. But what does it mean to be yourself? Too often, we app

I recently came across a story about a Lakota ritual called “star feeding,” in which people who are grieving place stones representing their pain into a river. Supposedly, a 2019 Johns Hopkins study found that this ritual helped people process their trauma six times faster than conventional therapy. It’s a beautiful, poetic ritual. The problem is: there’s no evidence the Lakota ever practiced it, or that the Johns Hopkins study ever happened. There’s a deeper problem here tha

I’ve been thinking lately about entitlement, and how it runs deeper than mere psychology. You can explain anger, for example, as a reaction to being taken advantage of. You can explain grief as a reaction to loss. But entitlement isn’t necessarily a reaction to anything. It’s a way of understanding what we’re owed. Entitlement isn’t the same as privilege. The two can overlap, but entitlement goes deeper. It begins when we stop experiencing what we have as a gift and start tre

After 9/11, I remember people asking, “How are we going to rebuild the Twin Towers?” But within a month, it became clear: we weren’t. For one thing, skyscrapers are dangerous in this violent world. More importantly, you can’t deal with loss by replicating what is gone. But we do this all the time. A relationship ends, and we start swiping before we’ve even changed the sheets. We lose a job and immediately start looking for another to make us feel important again. A dream dies

Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Lately, I’ve noticed a steep rise in cynicism around relationships. Some of it no doubt comes from the collapse of old, often exploitative models. But alongside that collapse has come a very transactional view of human connection, where we keep score of what we give and others fail to return. Even the way we understand emotion has become transactional: my anger proves your wro

About fifteen years ago, someone from a science and spirituality website asked me to write exclusively for them for six months. “We’d like you to make your teachings short and daily,” they said. “That way, you’ll drive more traffic to our website and get more exposure.” I’d never heard teaching referred to as “traffic.” But since then, I’ve seen teaching become exactly that. Whether it’s universities becoming gentrifying landlords or self-help gurus making reels for clicks, t

The late poet Wendell Berry said, “The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” Not many people consciously want to be machines, but look at how we judge ourselves. The other day, I got upset because I couldn’t remember where I was three Tuesdays ago, as though the human brain were even designed for that kind of data recall. As a dharma teacher, I often hear people say, “Oh, I should medita

In the Bible, Jacob wrestles with a mysterious figure on the night before reuniting with his estranged brother Esau. Following rabbinic tradition, Rashi identifies the figure as Esau’s guardian angel and connects the Hebrew vaye’avek, “wrestled,” with a word for attachment. Jacob wrestles with what he fears until wrestling and embracing become almost indistinguishable. Then the angel tells Jacob to let go. But Jacob says no. Does life have to be such a struggle? There is cert

In Genesis 12, God tells Abraham to leave his homeland without telling him where he is going. The Hebrew lech lecha means “go to yourself.” Similarly, in the Qur’an, Abraham says, “I am going to my Lord; He will guide me” (37:99). In both accounts, the journey begins not with knowing where you’re going, but knowing you cannot stay as you are. It can be hard to leave what we’ve known as home: our parents’ world, a relationship that has protected us from change, an identity tha

Like many kids growing up in chaotic homes, I developed discipline as a way to create stability for myself. Get up. Meditate. Work out. Focus. But discipline without awareness can take you to bad places. Discipline has made me work hard for people who didn't take care of me. It has made me stay in relationships where I was the only one holding up the roof. It has made me lose sight of the bigger picture. At some point I had to admit: I have no idea where I’m going, and discip

Years ago, a man came to me with some extremely specific questions about meditation. Something felt off, so I asked him what was so important to him about these questions. “I love meditating,“ he said. “But something always gets in my way.” “Like what?” I asked. “Like this pile of laundry I haven’t done in three months,” he admitted. “Bro,” I said. “Do your laundry. That’s your first meditation instruction.” New Age culture is obsessed with the idea of “doing inner work.” But

One thing that often surprises Westerners about the Buddha’s teachings is how often he talks about regret. You’d think the Buddha would say, “Regret nothing!” But in fact, his very last words were, “Practice. Don’t later fall into regret.” Because regret isn’t something you just talk yourself out of. You can try. But to do so, you have to cut yourself off from important parts of who you are. Regret isn’t fun, but it can bring us back into alignment. If we don’t dwell on the p