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,

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

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

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.

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

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

As my thesis advisor, the anthropologist Michael Jackson,

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

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.