When Ajaan Suwat visited the United States, his attendants brought him to some major cities and national parks. When asked what he found...

Like most New Yorkers, I often get annoyed by people who walk more slowly than I do. I think I fancy myself to be some kind of urban...

Faith has never come to me easily. If you give me a task — meditate, wash dishes, whatever — I’m an extremely hard worker. But if you...

The Buddha compared wisdom to a royal cook. In his day, kings didn’t have “meal plans”. The royal cook had to observe which dishes the...

A friend recently reminded me that this month marks five years since the start of the pandemic. Then she told a beautiful story about a...

Some days I wake up feeling totally irrelevant. Like no one’s listening. Like no one cares. When I’m caught in this feeling, I tend to...

Humans are strange. We have so much fake swagger, and then, when no one’s looking, we let something as absurd as the number of followers...

People often ask: “If I understand my unhealthy patterns, why can’t I change them?” I reply: “Because wisdom isn’t a realization, it’s a...

One of my least favorite pieces of advice is: “If it’s not a fuck yes, it’s a fuck no!” Really? You never tried something you weren’t...

I’ve had the privilege of being a teacher for nearly all of my adult life. In recent years, though, I’ve become increasingly frustrated...

I knew a man who had a heart attack. His doctor told him, “You have to let go of some stress. If you don’t, you’re going to die.” At...

Just as someone desperate to get out of debt can easily fall prey to shady creditors, so too a mind that is desperate to solve its problems

You don’t have perfect free will, thank god. As my teacher says, having perfect free will would be like living in a vacuum: there’d be no...

There’s a part of my mind I call “Plato”. I like to imagine him as an old man feverishly writing in an attic, waiting for the world to...

A parable: Once there was a man who didn’t believe in happiness. “It’s inside you,” people said. So the man got a knife and cut a hole in...

A man came to Carl Jung, seeking help interpreting his own dreams. But the man’s account of his dreams was so complicated that Jung...

Henry Miller once said, “When you can’t create you can work.” In other words, if you’re an artist, you can’t wait for inspiration to...

When I was younger, I used to be at the center of a lot of craziness. I’d find myself stranded on the side of the road in Morocco or...

When I was younger, I liked to meditate outside, on buses or in parks. I mentioned this once to my teacher, who said, “I think you should...

I once heard a beautiful story about Lou Reed. He was at a party when someone mentioned an old R&B tune. “I love that song,” Lou said....