I just got back from retreat. It is to my great benefit that I’ve returned not to Los Angeles but to Brandeis-Bardin, the mountain-bound retreat campus where my future-rabbi wife, Ariel is working this summer. So I got a retreat within a retreat, and I have another week and a half to process and reintegrate (while doing my day job) before the real return happens.

A great deal came up for me on the retreat — both in intimately personal and more communal or religious areas — and I intend to write up a full report. But right now, it’s the small actions that feel most important to supporting the deep work on which I just spent a week. Thirty minutes of morning sitting practice has felt pretty natural, but I’ve been thinking I need some more social and intellectual support systems to round it out. Hence, this blog.

Welcome to Grind Well. It’ll be a daily-ish blog about my daily-ish practice of mindfulness meditation, which I’ve learned from a mixture of Jewish and Buddhist sources and teachers, and which I’ve at least tried to maintain for the latter third of my approximately 31 years of life.

While I’ve written plenty about mindfulness before, I’m launching this project now both to recommit myself to disciplined practice and to explore new dimensions of it.

Through this blog, I seek community with the wide world of contemplative practitioners out there, as well as to understand my own practice better by thinking aloud. I think this is about as long as the posts will ever get. Talk to you very soon!