My counseling books are now open for fall. I have three openings for new clients. If you'd like to schedule a free 30 minute intro session, send me a DM! About my practice: I blend Zen, martial philosophy, psychoeducation and contemplative practice to help people: - Develop their courage - Understand themselves - Deepen their practice & presence - Skillfully meet life's difficulties - Overcome challenges - Connect with rich sources of meaning and joy I would be honored to work with you. Send me a DM and we'll set up a call.

Look at this sky

the only purpose to have a big number is to free you to attack whatever it is you are called to with your whole being. anything else is slow suicide

promise me you will go outside and look at her

i love this by being.kinzer on ig

One day we will look back on the current paradigm of infinite permissiveness and see how many lives we ruined, how many communities we destroyed, how many good and decent things never got off the ground because we didn't have the balls to tell people no

It only takes a few moments of introspection to become aware of the vast, yawning emptiness that abides at the center of your heart. Every adult feels it. Most of us experience it as the pain of grief, and do anything we can to avoid feeling it. This is because postmodern people, enamored of the frigid faith of scientific rationalism and its dead, mechanistic world, experience the void as a loss. It feels like a hole in the heart, a raw wound that can only be temporarily soothed by sex, drugs, conformity, and most recently, the bright stimuli of our screens. The void has a place in our collective history that we perceive as the death of God, the death of external meaning. And it has a place in the emotional body that we perceive as an infinitely cold yearning where the thrum of life used to be. A darkness that, at some indeterminate point in the fog of the past, swallowed our creativity, joy and spontaneity, and left us a slave to the passions that afford a moment of mercy. But this is not the only way to experience the void, or to interpret it. If you stay with the sensations of this vast nothingness, this powerful yearning, for long enough - painful and fearful as it may be - you start to get to know it. It begins to change. Whether via meditation, yoga, prayer or simple creative work, with enough gentle attention, you start to realize that this hole in you is not *only* a point of departure. It's also where everything in existence comes from. Every thought, idea, feeling, inspiration that channels through you comes from that void, persists for a time, and returns to it. This is the living, infinite process that Christians call creatio ex nihilo, or "creation from nothing". The nothingness, which Buddhists call Dharmakaya, and which the Chinese name Dao - is in fact the great ground of Being, that from which your ego came, and to which it will return. And that ground, that eternal context, that patient, quiet, generative space held for all the suffering and beauty and drama of creation - that will outlive you. It will continue on, as it always has. That is the part of you, the fundamental part of you, that is beyond death. It is the Great Self that beholds every moment of your life with unfathomable love. In other words, that hole at the center of your being is not what the absence of God feels like. It's precisely the feeling of God's presence.

Meditation absolutely can give you a sense of fundamental OKness, whilst the rest of your behavioural-motivation system goes more or less untouched. You absolutely can use it to continue pursuing our society’s default consumerist-hedonist-materialist goals with more ease and less grabbiness. You can do all this without ever examining the underlying desires, motivations, values, intents, behaviours, and ethics that originally put all the grabbiness in motion. Doing so can be a worthwhile goal in its own right and help people live much happier lives. That’s all great. But to think this is the fundamental goal of Buddhadharma is drastically wide of the mark. Then to think this is actually a *more advanced* view than what Buddhadharma is driving at represents levels of hubris rarely seen outside 21st century Bay Area culture. The thing is, contrary to what the QT’d post below says, none of this is what the actual “advanced meditators” who dedicated their lives full time to nothing but spiritual practice for decades report (ie those who founded and have preserved the traditions). Such people for thousands of years have reported that there are much deeper layers to practice, where one’s entire system of intent, motivation, desire, values, ethics and behavioural tendencies get utterly transformed. It’s not just a case of continuing to live by Californian consumerist-materialist values but being less grabby-grab whilst you go about it. It’s ultimately about having insights that fundamentally shape your entire view of what is desirable, what is valuable, what the good looks like, how you should behave, how you should treat others, what is worth wanting, what your fundamental identity is and even what life and death themselves are, as well as what lies beyond death. There’s a reason why the Buddha didn’t just return to his awesome pleasure palace after his enlightenment and simply get back to consuming experiences but with less grabby grabness or with a “fundamental OKness” whilst he did it. @corbindreams - I don’t mean to be disrespectful to you. You’re a talented writer and I enjoy some of your writing on meditation. Some of your descriptions of the phenomenology of meditation - including some in this post - are illuminating. But what you are describing here is absolutely not the end point of the Buddhist project(s), much less a more advanced distillation of it.

The most magnetic person is a walking contradiction. Someone who forgives easily but simultaneously holds incredibly high standards for themselves and those around them. Shameless and goofy, yet deeply disciplined. This type of person will either inspire others to become more themselves or will trigger those who still deny their own desires.

Most men don’t understand female relational aggression. It is subtle yet vicious. There is always plausible deniability. The aggressor in a mean girl dynamic will always play the victim and deny any wrongdoing. She will trash another woman behind her back, make up lies, actively work to turn people against her and destroy her social reputation, all while maintaining the facade of being the nice good girl. It’s a very subtle and insidious form of DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Every woman I know dealt with this growing up. Some women never grow out of it and operate this way into adulthood. Seeing even a hint of it in another woman is enough for me to avoid them like the plague.

It's really a shame that the social sciences are such a quagmire of fraudulent left wing wish-casting, it unfairly tarnishes the entire concept Human nature is real and predictable, it's possible to study it to make predictions about the world Only if you're honest though

"For many men...reaching out feels like neediness, and neediness can trigger shame. So defenses like isolation of affect, intellectualization, and compulsive self-reliance do their quiet work, cordoning off the emotional life while family and work become the only sanctioned outlets."

people who are consistently, seriously joyful and grateful in a way that does not involve repression or spiritual bypassing are rare and precious

Almost everyone wants to accommodate disabled people. We have hearts, and their plight could/will be ours one day This "disability" "activism" is not about helping the disabled. It's about socially terrorizing others into denying reality and validating a delusional worldview.

Spend one year pouring your heart out to a robot and you'll notice Spend two years and your family will notice Three years and everyone will notice

looking back a year ago, it feels insane that I used to discuss personal/meaning-making stuff with an llm i now physically recoil thinking about it the epistemic risks of outsourcing meaning-making for too long to an obsequious, non-personally aligned model, are undertheorized

It’s so odd how the road to mental/emotional health seems to BOTH be “Allow yourself to feel your feelings” AND “Tell yourself to STFU and go to bed/get to work”

One of my all-time favorites. (From C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves)

Men don't need a fuckboy era. You only need to fuck around until you realize that a woman's love won't fill that hole in your soul. If you absolutely have to learn this the hard way, this is how you do it consciously and ethically: 1. Be completely, 100% forthright with every woman. Never deceive someone into bed, even a little. Understand upfront that you will make many spoken and even written agreements that will be superseded when one or the other of you catches feelings. The moment you sense she wants more and you don't, break things off respectfully. Understand that by undertaking this, you will inevitably hurt people and get hurt yourself. This comes with the territory. 2. Fall in love with every single woman you take to bed. Under no circumstances can you numb yourself to the actual, real attachment happening during "casual" sex. Every single woman you bed will break your heart, at least a little. The morning after, meditate the night you spent with her for at least half an hour. Let the entire thing, from the passion to the heartbreak, completely sink into your bones. 3. Do not bring women home on work nights or normal weekends. Long weekends, vacations, and holidays only. Addendum: only fuck when you're sober. You need to be fully present for it. 4. Become extremely attuned to women's body language, especially in bed. If you get a hint of a nonverbal no, or even pick up on some tension or discomfort, stop what you're doing and check in. With the right woman you may not need to do this, but you are being a fuckboy, purposefully sleeping with the wrong ones. It is incumbent upon you to limit collateral damage to the most tender part of their (and your) psyche. 5. You need to be able to thought stop your horniness without complaint or resentment, even if you are in the middle of sex. You can train this by edging yourself every day for a half hour, for a month. Send the energy to your heart chakra instead of ejaculating. 6. No matter how rudely, badly or disrespectfully a woman treats you in the course of your conscious fuckboy era, don't ever retaliate, take it to heart, or hate one you've slept with. You are a psychocartographer mapping the spiritual space governed by Aphrodite. The pain is just as important and instructive as the pleasure. If you get an STD, this is also a lesson. 7. If you knock her up, congratulations, Dad. If you follow all of the above and keep your whole heart wide open, you will discover the spiritual truth about sex quickly, with a minimum of damage to yourself and others, and possibly make a few treasures Don Juan memories along the way. You can reminisce on these wistfully, once you've settled down with someone good, which are now thoroughly prepared to do.