Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

The Spiral Path

March 27, 2023

Eh. Coffee by the harbour and a good book. Can’t be bad. I was going to slow down with the reading but a Buddhist teacher kindly gave me a copy of This Being, That Becomes: The Buddha’s Teaching on Conditionality by Dhivan Thomas Jones and I found myself gently exploring it rather than voraciously devouring […]

How we frame meditation retreats has an effect on our experience

November 4, 2022

I wonder if there’s a placebo effect on meditation retreats that helps the mind gather and calm. Equally, if you approach a silent retreat thinking, “Argh, I can’t talk or have fun for days” maybe you’ll have a bumpier start. To be clear, I think the placebo effect is something real that we should take […]

categories: essays, journeys, reflections

The Dharma of Dragonball Z

August 9, 2022

At a certain age, every weeknight my friends and I would huddle around the TV to watch a 20-minute episode of Dragonball Z on Cartoon Network. The show follows Goku and his friends as they train to become better martial artists and save the Earth from myriad alien and android threats. I don’t want to […]

categories: essays

Mindfulness of ruined worlds

September 23, 2021

Contemplating the beauty and serenity of Sable’s ruined world gave me some comfort. On one level, if and when Earth is finally desolate it might at least be peaceful, mysterious, and interesting to its surviving scavenger tribes. There’s something awe-inspiring about thinking on that timescale. Would the denizens of a post-apocalyptic world be awake to […]

Insurgent Heart

August 9, 2021

“Sati is not heavy, not harsh, not rigid. It is supple, light, invisible. It has not flavor of its own. It is uncontracted, unmanipulative attention that allows phenomena to arise and pass according to their own nature without the tethers of reactivity and control.” —Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey, Insurgent Heart There’s a fascinating dharma book available […]

categories: books