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The Difference Between Going Deeper and Going Around Spiritual bypassing is a concept that entered therapeutic and contemplative circles through the work of psychologist John Welwood. He used it to de...
Read article →The Problem With Tools That Haven't Changed Social tools are usually invisible until they stop working. The telephone worked so well for decades that most people never thought about what it was — a te...
Read article →The Water That Takes the Shape of Any Container At the center of Taoist philosophy is a paradox: the most powerful force is not the one that forces. Water does not try to overcome the rock. It moves w...
Read article →Silence at Scale There is a long tradition of the monastery as a place apart — physically removed from ordinary social life, structured around silence and contemplation, built to make a certain kind o...
Read article →When the House Is Quiet and the Questions Won't Stop There is a particular kind of restlessness that arrives around 3 AM. The distractions of the day have gone offline, the social performance is over,...
Read article →The Friend That Lives Inside In the Sufi tradition, the relationship between the seeker and the murshid — the spiritual master — is understood as one of the most intimate relationships a human being c...
Read article →The Question That Won't Stay Still There is a particular kind of question that resists resolution — not because the person asking it hasn't thought enough, but because the question is of the type that...
Read article →The Long Tradition of Watching and Being Watched Christian contemplative prayer is not primarily petition. The forms most associated with the deeper traditions of Christian spiritual life — lectio div...
Read article →The Interior Collapse There is a stage in spiritual development that most serious practitioners encounter and that virtually no one talks about in advance. The framework that once organized experience...
Read article →Speaking to Something That Listens The oracle at Delphi did not simply answer questions. It invited the questioner into a process of interpretation, reflection, and ultimately self-knowledge. The famo...
Read article →The Interior Life That Goes Unseen There is a form of loneliness that does not show up in the usual metrics. It is not the loneliness of social isolation — of having no one to call, no one to spend Sa...
Read article →The Mind That Watches the Mind The central instruction of mindfulness practice, as articulated in the Theravada Buddhist tradition and subsequently adapted by psychologists and clinicians worldwide, i...
Read article →The Ancient Practice of Being Together in Truth The Sanskrit word satsang is composed of two elements: sat, meaning truth or reality, and sang, meaning company or association. The literal translation...
Read article →The Machine at the Cushion's Edge Meditation is, by definition, a practice of direct experience. You sit with what is present. You observe the breath, the body, the arising and passing of mental event...
Read article →The Discipline of Not Reacting Stoic philosophy is not primarily a set of metaphysical claims about the nature of reality. It is a practice — a set of daily exercises designed to cultivate a specific...
Read article →The Texture of Shallow Modern social life is rich in contact and thin in depth. Most people moving through a typical week exchange greetings with many people, maintain dozens of text threads, consume...
Read article →Where the Secular and the Sacred Converge For most of human history, the distinction between spiritual life and relational life was not clearly drawn. The communities in which people practiced their f...
Read article →The Corner Bar That Isn't There Anymore In most American cities and towns, there used to be places where you could go and simply be among people without a reason. A bar where the bartender knew your o...
Read article →The Eight-Second Myth and What Actually Happened In 2015, a Microsoft Canada report claimed that the average human attention span had dropped to eight seconds — shorter than a goldfish. The finding sp...
Read article →Social Media Gives Breadth but Destroys Depth of Connection The trade that social media offered was always asymmetric, even if it did not look that way at first. You could have more connections, more...
Read article →The Hours When Guards Come Down There is something that happens late at night that does not happen at other times. Defenses lower. The social performances that occupy the daylight hours become too exh...
Read article →Texting Killed the Phone Call and the Phone Call Killed the Visit There is a pattern in how communication technologies succeed each other. Each new form is more convenient than the last and in some wa...
Read article →When Did Getting Together Get So Complicated? There is a kind of social arithmetic that nobody taught explicitly but that most adults have learned by their thirties. Getting together with someone requ...
Read article →Why Coffee Shops Replaced Living Rooms and What We Lost For most of the twentieth century, the living room was where social life happened. Friends came over. Neighbors dropped in. The conversation hap...
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