When I was younger, I felt guilty about every little thing: being five minutes late, saying no, disappointing people in ways I couldn’t even name. These days, I notice far less guilt in me. Not because I’ve become either a saint or a narcissist. I still make plenty of mistakes, hurt people I love, and try to repair what I’ve broken. But I keep more distance from guilt, because I’ve seen how it erodes connection. And to be honest, that terrifies me more than anything. I believ

There’s a passage in the Pali Canon where the Buddha meets King Pasenadi, who has just come from confiscating the estate of a recently deceased banker. Though immensely rich, the banker lived on cracked rice and pickle brine. You might expect the Buddha to praise such thrift, but instead he condemns the man’s miserliness: Why did he neither enjoy his wealth nor share it with others? Did he not know that you can’t take money with you when you die? We tend to be very confused a

When I was in college, a famous poet came to town, and a friend invited me to dinner with him. I liked the poet’s work, but at dinner I was appalled by his behavior. He pawed the waitress, bragged about his new home, and mocked other poets. When I later reread his poetry, I saw all the insecurity and insincerity I'd missed upon first reading. This was one of the moments that taught me that art is worthless if it isn’t backed by an examined life. The comparing mind thinks in t

I recently read a true story about Beyhan Mutlu, a Turkish man who wandered into the woods after a night of drinking and was reported missing by his family. When a search party was organized, Beyhan heard the commotion and joined the group, unaware that they were looking for him. He spent hours shouting his own name into the forest before realizing that he was the one he was looking for. “What you seek is seeking you.” Yet we keep joining search parties focused somewhere else

Thoughts are like children. In a cramped space, like a tiny New York apartment, they can sometimes seem like demons sent to torment us. But give them room, like a country hillside, and they seem harmless, even sweet. What makes our thoughts painful is not that they are unruly or outside our control, but that we lack inner spaciousness. This is why we meditate: not to attempt mind-control, but to cultivate more space within. Recently, a client said, “How am I supposed to live

Near Eagle Pass, Texas, the U.S.–Mexico border cuts across the Rio Grande. There, steel fencing, razor wire, and floating barriers attempt to hold a line against a river that has traversed borders for centuries. They have failed, tragically. Migrants continue to cross, though thousands have drowned over the decades. The boundary keeps no one safe. This is an image for how Western culture tends to think about boundaries. Our hyper-individualism and adversarial notions of right

When I was in grade school, I didn’t have a lot of friends. So like a lot of city kids, I passed the time bouncing a ball against a wall. There was a perfect one in the courtyard of our building on 171st Street, where I could hone my fastball and work out my aggression. It was perfect, until Grandma Tutu, the Puerto Rican matriarch of our building, came out and threatened to give me a pow pow on my culito if I didn’t stop making her apartment rattle. Sorry, Grandma Tutu! We s

The holidays can be so lonely for so many. Yesterday on Third Avenue, I saw a woman in a business suit curled into a fetal position on the sidewalk. A few hours later, I saw a man screaming into his backpack. I asked both if they were okay, but my words felt useless, like holding up a butterfly net against a tsunami of despair. When my grandmother died, I went through a period of wishing Christmas would pass quickly. I'd count down to January 2, when stores returned to normal

When I was ten, my mother took me to see The Nutcracker. The girl playing Clara was a family friend. I fell in love with her so hard it hurt. I’m serious. The next day my stomach felt bruised from the inside. I remember thinking: Is this what love is, feeling sick? When I was fourteen, I kissed a girl named Caroline. It was the day before Christmas Eve. We stood outside in the cold so her parents wouldn’t find out. She knew all the words to “Bleecker Street” by Simon and Garf

I’ve been thinking a lot about teenage Paul. The one who wanted so badly to be himself, yet had so little idea what that meant. In my high school guidance counselor’s office, there was a poster: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.” I loved that quote, but didn’t quite understand it. So I did what teenagers do: I reached for ready-made identities. I grew my hair long and wore shirts from Goodwill, like Chris Cornell from Soundgarden. I thought if I read enough, thought hard

As a musician, I’ve learned that there are no bad melodies, only melodies that haven’t been worked on long enough. Any collection of notes can become something beautiful with repeated listening and tweaking. It just takes attention and care to smooth out the rough edges and let the magic emerge. The same is true of anything authentic in life. Many people try to force originality through intellect alone, chasing trends and ready-made identities. These are people who won’t admi

In 2007, a Banksy mural appeared in a London train station: a simple blue rectangle bearing the words, “THE JOY OF NOT BEING SOLD ANYTHING.” A friend photographed it and sent it to me with a note. “That’s our open sky,” he said. These days, advertising seems to be everywhere. It’s no longer just Don Draper trying to sell you cigarettes. Social media turns everyday human interactions into constant promotion. And now, with AI, advertising can be personalized, predictive, and no

In 1956, a farmer in Wyoming unearthed an oil drum filled with nearly two thousand small stones, each engraved with a single Japanese character. The stones remained a mystery for 45 years, until researchers discovered they'd been carved by a Buddhist priest imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. When assembled, the stones spelled out the first six volumes of the Lotus Sutra. This story is a beautiful metaphor for our choices. It’s easy to think that a s

The other month, I was with my dear friend Sophie Redman teaching meditation to a group of Finnish people. Some of the participants were saying how dark and dreary Helsinki gets this time of year. I said, “But you must have ways of counteracting that, right? Lighting candles? Making your homes cozy?” “Not really,” one said. “We just get depressed for six months, then we’re fine.” It was a joke, but it got me thinking about how scared of darkness we are in the United States. A

My teacher says, “It only takes one moment of insight for the heart to let go. Anything more than a moment is too much.” Our tendency is to try to accelerate our growth by overthinking. So we listen to hours of podcasts in the hopes that listening will make us choose better partners. Or we talk endlessly to friends about our low self-esteem in the hopes that they’ll say something to make us think we’re worthy. But it doesn’t work that way. You can’t think your way out of suff

When I was twenty-one, I spent a spring in a small mountain town in northern India, where I met Yusuf, a poor man raising four shoeless children alone, yet also a brilliant Urdu poet. Yusuf patiently read Ghalib's poetry with me and revealed its secrets of metaphor and meter. Yet he also taught me something equally important: countless geniuses walk among us, unseen, hidden by the inequalities of this world. It’s easy to dwell on the unfairness of Yusuf’s life, but he never d

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