Life in the Loop: Essays on OCD

Every day, I feel all kinds of things I don’t want to feel, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to invent rules and guidelines in the hopes that I won’t have to feel them again.

As my thesis advisor, the anthropologist Michael Jackson,

(My teacher, Lee Ray, was one of his students.)

Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, to be enlightened is to be free of obsessions.

It’s certainly true that meditation practitioners often identify less and less with their thoughts over time. But this tends to be a byproduct of practice; as soon as we start treating it like a prize to be won, it whisps away.

Dorje Khyung Dzhong, a retreat center in a remote area of southern Colorado. DKD

Within our sangha, many of us joke that we’ve each come to Buddhism after trying everything else.

I conceived of that talent as a kind of unblemished possibility, a perfect potential energy that would one day find expression in grand and noble ways.

Like that tagline from Girls: almost getting it kind of together. But never quite.