There is a lot of talk about prevention in the physical health world. It makes sense to prevent physical health problems when possible. Does this extend to emotional health?Can we prevent emotional discomfort? Does it make sense to try? Or is it safe to “wear your heart on your sleeve”, even when the world may be

How – and why – communicate how you’re feeling with someone else? Dropping into the inner landscape and opening to what’s there…the thoughts, sensations, emotions, and beliefs that are present…and then expressing those to another person feels infinitely helpful.And it feels like something we often shy away from for any number of reasons. We’ll explore some

In this episode I speak to a listener’s question about how she can be less reactive and more patient with her mom. We explore how she can watch the reactive patterns that arise with a sense of objectivity, curious about what’s showing up rather than judgmental of it and trying to change it. We also explore

This week’s episode is a portion of a call with Kat Adamson.  Kat talks about how awareness is the essence of all things. Mostly, she talks about love. She shares her experience of the death of her partner and she discusses unconditional love and compatibility.I hope you are as impacted by this conversation as we

An inch deep and a mile wide typically describes a person with superficial knowledge of many things, but without deep knowledge of anything. A generalist, broad but shallow. Is experience an inch deep and a mile wide? In this episode, we use this phrase to explore the depths and dimensions of the felt sense, thought, emotion,

Thought says no end of things. But what does thought do? Thought does things like conclude, restate, and provide frames and contexts.What thought does is often more subtle and easy to miss than what thought says, but it’s far more valuable to see.***I will be leading two Silent Retreats in 2026. The primary retreat (hosted and

When someone says they are distracted, they are expressing an agenda or expectation for where attention should be. They are essentially saying “I’d like attention to be on this project or on my breath or on the person in front of me, but it’s somewhere else”.What would it be like to simply watch attention shift

Mary is struggling with guilt over something that happened in her relationship a few years ago.  Listen in as we explore our responsibility for feelings, societal ideas of right and wrong, honesty, and much more.

In this episode I explore how one might coach someone with chronic pain. Is chronic pain really treated the same way as anxiety, habits and depression? Can it be helped solely through the lens of what’s shared in here?I’ll discuss the impact of the word “chronic” in all suffering and how we can have impact

Is the quality and nature of present moment experience solely a function of attention? Attention is always contracting and expanding. Sometimes it’s so absorbed in me-and-my-life that all we seem to experience is a stream of me-centered ups and downs.Other times, attention seems to release or expand and experience is very different. The me-and-my-life components

In this episode I share an exchange between myself and a member of our community around her experience of anxiety.  I am pointing to What Is before summary thoughts like “I keep feeling anxiety” or “I am afraid something is wrong”. Those summary thoughts are fine – they are powerless – but they are getting all

Some thoughts, like “no matter what”, “ too late now”, “this always happens”, “I knew it”, somehow feel more true than others, don’t they? Thoughts like these have a scent of finality and certainty. They seem unquestionable. They don’t appear as thought most of the time. They appear as a description of the-way-it-is. But they are

In this episode, Lisa Natoli and I talk about identity. She shares her experience coming to identify with the simple aliveness that’s always here. We discuss the role of being in what is and exploring that in helping her see through identity with the Lisa character.  If you’d like to see more about Lisa and

When one is experiencing health anxiety, for example, and they are often sure that “this time is different”.  They are sure they are unwell, running to doctors, trying to solve health problems that don’t actually exist. It’s very simple and extremely helpful to assume the issue is anxiety first. After all, when the thinking and

Beliefs, including spiritual beliefs, are helpful to a point. Then they become decidedly unhelpful.What happens at that point? You look beyond belief.We’ll look at what it means to go beyond belief and how that’s very different from continually clinging to “better” beliefs.***The (now) annual Summer Book Club is back! Beginning in late July, I’ll be leading

What does it mean for something to feel personal? Really, the question is: what is the sense of personal? Is anything truly personal? How could it be? What if the sense of something being personal is sort of like a scent that arises along with some objects (the body, memories, emotions) but it’s nothing special or different

The title of this week’s episode is also the title of a book by Sailor Bob Adamson. This is the book we’ll be exploring in the Summer Book Club. In this episode, I share some quotes from the book that have stood out in my initial reading. As the author says, this book “is not about

Let’s talk about the experience we call anticipation. It seems like we’re looking ahead to something that’s almost certain to happen. And it seems like it’s very likely to happen the way we’re imagining it. The way it’s likely to go feels like sound logic – of course it might not happen that way, but

Shortly after I recorded last week’s episode, The Biggest Irony, someone shared an experience on one of our forums that perfectly illustrated what I was trying to express. Today’s episode shares that illustration and expands on the idea that all of our teachings, pointers and understandings have a singular benefit – presence in and as

It seems that of our learning, understanding, talking, expressing and sharing are for one thing, and one thing only: to help relax into this. Not to help relax into some abstract emotion or to make things easier “someday”. And definitely not to have an insight or see something new. It’s all so that we can melt into,