Life in the Loop: Essays on OCD

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.

my exposure exercises felt too much like the rest of my life – yet another arena in which I was perpetually trying to improve myself, to get away from my experience in the here and now.

As my thesis advisor, the anthropologist Michael Jackson,

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

But over these last few days, I haven’t had the energy to do those sorts of things. And as I’ve considered them, I’ve often felt repelled by the sheer transparency of my strategies, of my desire to do anything but spend time alone. In Buddhist terms, I’ve felt revulsion at the way my mind is constantly grasping after something – something solid, so

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

OCD is built on the premise that control is possible, and that there’s someone there

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

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