My clients often feel they need to “catch me up” on the details of their lives. I let them share as much as they want, but honestly, I see their stories about their jobs, relationships, and apartments as only a small part of who they truly are. I’ll often say: Can you slow down and feel your words? You're not just the facts of your life. You’re also the awareness you bring to them. But identifying with awareness is hard in a world seduced by “content” — that godawful word soc

In Zen, they talk a lot about the importance of being sincere, of giving yourself fully and whole-heartedly to whatever you do. When you’re cooking, you just cook. You don’t try to be a Michelin-star chef. You pour love and care into the food. When you’re speaking, you just speak. You don’t try to sound smart or spiritual. And when you’re meditating, you just sit. You don’t aim for altered states. You use yourself up fully, so no residue of identity or intellect remains. That

Ajaan Chah compared life to a glass. If someone gives you a glass, you might think your task is to keep the glass from breaking. But you can’t, because it’s in its nature of glass to break. If it doesn’t break now, it will break later. Peace, then, comes not from trying to hold things together, but from seeing a broken glass already in an unbroken one. But we so often make peace a performance. We project calm even when we’re hurting, because showing disturbance feels like fai

I recently read an article that made an interesting distinction between emotional literacy and emotional health. Today, we’re more fluent in the language of feeling than ever. We can identify and analyze our emotions better than previous generations, but that doesn’t mean we’re happier. Because emotional health is not just a matter of awareness, but of being able to work skillfully with what we feel. The Buddha would say that what we lack is equanimity: the ability to meet sh

In Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin writes, “Anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” Baldwin understood that the persistence of racism in America stems largely from white people’s refusal to confront their own history of slavery and genocide. It’s not just the crime itself, but the myth of innocence, that allows the crime to continue. This is not just an issue of racial justice. The general l

People often ask, “What do you do, Paul? Like, what kind of coaching do you specialize in?” It’s hard to answer, because I’ve never really related to the word coaching, though I’ve studied and practiced it for a decade. Coaching sounds like I’m trying to make someone perform better at something, which I'm not. I see myself more as a guide. I help people envision their lives as a path, then I help them walk it. Ultimately, I help people listen to their own inner guidance. Ther

There’s a Japanese myth of the sun goddess Amaterasu, who, after being wounded in battle, hides in a cave, plunging the world into darkness. The gods eventually lure her out, not with words, but by holding up a mirror so she can see her own brilliance. In this way, they say, the world was restored to light. We have all been wounded, and in response, have hidden parts of our light. The criticized artist who no longer creates. The curious child who, once mocked, stops asking qu

What does it mean to feel truly seen? Sometimes I ask my clients, “What would you like me to see in you?” They’re usually baffled by my question. Because as much as we want to feel seen by others, we often don’t know how to see ourselves. We live in an American Idol-culture where “being seen” is confused with being best. We know what it means to be picked from a crowd, but that kind of recognition is unsustainable. If your significance is based on someone else’s insignificanc

Heidi Priebe said, “To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.” If you love a person through the years, you’ll love many different people, with different faces, bodies, outlooks, and dreams. That’s how it is. We often get scared when the people we love change. We think, “This isn’t what I signed up for!” But what did you sign up for exactly? Love makes us grow and grow beyond each other. Even if your roots stay entwined with anot

I once met a man with a very strong meditation practice: he could sit late into the night, his face glowing with quiet joy. As I got to know him better, I was surprised to learn he’d been diagnosed with severe ADHD. A doctor had told him, “You’ll always have bad concentration. Get used to it.” But in meditation, he discovered something remarkable: “I don’t concentrate badly,” he told me. “I concentrate differently. And when I find something that captures my imagination, I can

When I was eight, my mother didn't let me have candy. One day on the school bus, a girl had this huge bag of gummy worms. I was sure she'd share if I asked nicely, but she refused. Enraged, I snatched a worm and ate it in front of her. She started to cry, and something broke inside me. At that moment, I realized, in my child's way, that harm is not subjective. I had hurt someone, and it couldn't be undone. We're all born with an innate sense of what causes harm, yet we quickl

I'm writing from the Sabina countryside in Italy, a place full of contradictions for me. Some painful things happened here when I was a child, yet this land has always been good to me. Here, my feelings quickly change into their opposites. The boy in me aches with loneliness — then suddenly, his tears turn to joy in the golden sun. Being here makes it easier for me to understand what the Buddha meant about the inconstancy of conditioned experience. We cling to pleasure, statu

Ajaan Chah compared wisdom to a spider guarding a web. When a fly makes contact with the web, the spider pounces on it and winds it up in thread. But otherwise, the spider just sits. In the same way, wisdom is not only a matter of thinking about your problems, but just as importantly, knowing when NOT to think. When to simply sit. So many issues arise because we fear the pause between one action and the next. We rush to fill each gap with overscheduling, overthinking future s

There’s a Hasidic story about a poor rabbi who kept dreaming of a treasure buried beneath a bridge in Prague. So the rabbi traveled there, only to find the bridge guarded by a soldier who laughed at the rabbi's tale. “If I believed my dreams,” the soldier said, “I’d follow the one I had last night and dig for gold beneath the stove of a man named Levi ben Yitzhak.” The rabbi’s heart leapt up — that was his name! He rushed home, dug beneath his own stove, and found a treasure

“Everyone wishes to be loved,” James Baldwin wrote, “but in the event, nearly no one can bear it.” We all long for deep connection and adoration, yet we often want to be admired only through our masks. And when those masks slip, we can act brutally: lashing out, hiding, or hurting those we claim to love — anything to avoid being seen. Baldwin saw this terror of being loved as the root of racism. The white man hates the Black man, the Westerner the immigrant, because in this O

Clarity is a practice. People sometimes think clarity strikes at random, like lightning. But our ability to know what we want and how to get it mainly depends on the small actions we take — and don’t take — throughout the day. The Buddha said the mind is like a pool: when it’s still, you can see straight to its bottom. But when you ruffle the surface of the water with desire, aversion, or delusion, the water becomes impossible to see through. For example, you might want thing

Back in college, I lived with some guys in a pretty filthy “dude house.” The kitchen had a dim, brownish light that barely illuminated the corners. I figured the bulb was weak — maybe 35 watts at best. But when I finally climbed up to change it, I saw it was actually 100 watts, just caked with years of grime. After a good scrub, the whole room lit up, revealing everything that had been there all along, for better and worse. The Buddha said that the human mind is luminous. Eac

There’s an old English legend about a king who was tired of his courtiers’ constant flattery. They thought he was so great that even the...

Franz Fanon wrote: “Man is a yes. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to...

In the Buddha’s teachings, there are many stories of gods who fall from heaven because they lose their mindfulness. These tales have a...