If you don't know how to get out of your own way, the practice of releasing all effort may be wild new country replete with opportunity.

We work our asses off to have these enlightenment experiences and then what? What does practice look like on the other side of seeing that you are indistinguishable from the rest of the universe, and the Avatar of our "self" was never actually there in the first place? Oddly, it comes down to satisfaction. If we can ask ourselves if we want anything in any given moment to be different, and for the answer to be consistently "no", then it really doesn't matter what kind of practice we have. As far as I can tell, this type of mind will inevitably realize the same kinds of things that our great Mystics have always pointed to.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) seems to overlap with Zen in one very significant and helpful way: it provides a system for disidentifying from our own challenging emotions and becoming merely aware of them. The surprising part is that we become unburdened by that which we simply notice, versus that which we "are". In the end, it seems increasingly true to me that the less "self" is present (and the more the contents of experience can just do whatever they're doing) the lighter and freer we're going to feel.

For whatever reason, early in my practice I really had a hard time complying with the instruction to always sit straight while meditating. My thinking mind could form all kinds of arguments against it and so I wanted to practice meditation in all these different positions. But as my practice has matured a little, I'm seeing more clearly that the structure in traditional seated meditation plays an important role for supporting some of the more advanced states that can be encountered in meditation.

In the first written Zen document, the Hsin Hsin Ming - a Zen Master warns us that the greatest mistake is to pursue Mind (nirvana/enlightenment) with the thinking mind. In the shadow of this statement lurks a direct pointing to a meditative technique which we can use to open us up to glimpse the infinite.

How we think about our meditation practice can actually get in the way of true meditation. The ability to discard the identity of the "meditator" and to really just continually come back to just paying attention is the antidote to struggling to meditate consistently.

Our starving ancestors used to spend days chasing antelope across the fertile crescent. Their hanger served them well enough to get us to where we are today, and so I'm not so sure we should want to turn our backs on this evolutionary gift.

I've been spending time with ChatGPT trying to rebuild a 1989 computer game. During the process, AI and I have accidentally produced a hero paint brush. And with this hero paintbrush, I unlocked an uncertainty epiphany.

Considering the possibility that our thoughts are totally inconsequential can offer utter release from being implicated by them. At first, thoughts are like a finger tracing a line in water. As we practice, thoughts become more like a snake uncoiling and slithering away. As our practice matures, thoughts become like thieves breaking into an empty house. By giving those thieves nothing to steal, we rob them before they rob us.

Despite the obvious fact that we will always experience setbacks in our day to day lives, we tend to have some underlying expectation that "one day" things will be just the way we want them. How do we free ourselves from this fantasy and engage directly with the freedom already available in on this bumpy ride of life?