With a grateful and tender heart, I offer these Year End Reflections & Call to Deepen Practice.
It is a softly sunlit Autumn morning in Boston. I'm sipping matcha in a Japanese tea hut in the backyard of dharma teacher friends Bill and Susan Morgan. I can feel the ripples of a winter breeze moving through the bare tree branches outside. This structure is much like the simple hermitage I called home for many years as a Zen monk. It is the contemplative cave-of-the-moment life has gifted amidst many temporary sanctuaries during this year as a nomad.
Being without a home and being welcomed into other people’s spaces during all of 2025 has given Mark and me the immeasurable gifts of kindness, connectedness, and basic needs being met in a time of real insecurity. It’s also been challenging for a sensitive, earthy being like me to be perpetually uprooted and have to ground and reground again and again and again. I’ve lived a long distance from my comfort zone for 13 months now, alongside a full teaching schedule — continually packing and unpacking as we attend to the myriad details, questions, and complexities of rebuilding our lives.
This nomad life has also called forth in me even more fluidity, adaptability, and resiliency — wise qualities for all living beings to remember. It’s helped me to let go and surrender more devotedly to the awareness that is not bothered. This is what it looks like to meet all that arises in our lives as our practice opportunity.
This year has deepened my attunement with the psychic/spiritual displacement so many beings are experiencing now, and my compassion towards the displaced parts of me. It has strengthened my recognition of emergence as the organizing principle of Gaia, and has affirmed that clear seeing is only possible through the lens of both/and. Had we not been catapulted from our home in North Carolina, I might not be meeting my appointments each day with as much radical presence, because I’m so clear that every meeting could be our last. I would not be here in Boston at this moment in time, with new and dear friends, fresh perspective, and inquiries. Mark and I would not be dreaming into a vision that had never occurred to us before for resettling in dharma community in 2026.
I take Refuge continually in the truth that every happening we ever experience arises and connects us to and through the intricate web of interdependence. Everything we ever experience contains the full spectrum of light and shadow, luminosity and complexity, peace and paradox.
The entirety of practice, from my perspective, is the spirit of Kindness/Service/Care that comes from remembering the radical gift and responsibility of interbeing. Growing up, my parents opened up their hearts and our humble home to homeless children from Skid Row in LA. They modeled service as the most important task in life. Guided by the kindness in their hearts, they made compromises and were willing to experience discomfort and work hard to eventually help thousands of people access the basic need for stable housing.
Meeting reality — the sacred truth of our existence as it is — as a devotional practice, is where my heart lies. The heart of service is the entire point of meditation, and we include ourselves and the most unwanted parts of us in the circle of life we serve.
I don't believe we need to "save the world." The world does not need our saving, nor the qualities of urgency and polarization that accompany that assumption. The world desperately needs our care.
Thank you to everyone who has shown up in the spirit of caring and supported our slow and messy journey to recovery this year….and to everyone who has practiced with me this year — courageously, vulnerably, and joyfully.
Thank you for meeting with acceptance the many moving parts of my life — with Zoom cutting out unexpectedly, Time Zones mixed up more often, or long delays in email responses.
Thank you for meeting me with understanding and acceptance for the emergent living process of recovery from the most dramatic event of my life. Living processes need patience, respect, listening, and permission to move in ways that DO NOT often match the linear rhythm and expectation of the dominant paradigm. All life is an emergent living process. Our bodies are living processes. Our collective grief, trauma, and healing are a living process. The earth is a living process.
Luckily, I long ago became bored with the fantasy of arrival, conclusion, or destination. I became tired of seeking the polish of perfection early on in practice, and presentation has never touched my appetite as deeply as authenticity and the divine messiness of reality.
Here is my sacred rant and prayer as the year 2025 comes slowly to a close:
Alongside so many feeling powerless and choiceless, how can we let The Great Unravelling be an opportunity to unravel unkindness? How can we support each other to slow down, disarm, and remember how powerful we can be through presence, attunement, and care?
In order to remember this, we must recognize the spiritual bypassing that gets in the way of wholehearted practice. This spiritual bypassing includes:
Chasing exotic experiences as a way to escape reality
Holding spiritual practice as precious
Using meditation as a self-improvement tool
Sunshining… Trying to keep things “light”
Trying to keep practice “pretty” and pleasant rather than embrace truth
Maintaining unconsciousness about our internal biases
Grasping for conclusion, attainment, and transcendence
Using meditation to seek an “island of peace” that feeds isolation rather than interconnection
Not seeing the grave impact of capitalism on the cultures we create through practice
Not seeing the conditioned biases that keep us from real inclusivity
Not owning our projections onto authority
Putting meditation teachers — or anyone — into a box with a one dimensional label
Feeding the illusory “I” trying to perfect practice or be more mindful. (How exhausting!)
And the list goes on…
I invite you to pause and consider, with non-judgment, What is your own current version of spiritual bypassing? And what support do you need to see bypass for what it really is — a shiny distraction that pulls you away from the luminosity of who and what you really are.
I’m tired of people judging and policing each other, yes, even in the name of consciousness. I long for a world where we embrace the practice of community beyond the tribalism of shared beliefs or even shared forms of practice. I long for a time when trusting the wisdom and knowing of the 70 trillion cells of our earth bodies makes more sense to people than turning to artificial intelligence for “knowledge.” Every time we look “out there” to extract answers we disobey the direct transmission that speaks only the contemplative language of the heart.
As we meet the threshold of the new year 2026……
Let’s be more forgiving and less judgemental.
Let’s be more disarming and less antagonizing.
Let’s embrace polarity and shadow more bravely.
Let’s stop taking sides and spend more time resting in the fertile space in between.
Let’s stay present just a little longer through those messy, awkward, uncomfortable moments that are actually portals to healing.
Let’s savor the spiritual revolution of listening and attunement, remembering the mycelial network of relationship in every moment.
Let’s ask questions - of ourselves and one another - with curiosity and wonder, without grasping conclusion.
Let’s be willing to explore power dynamics together — with more kindness and less righteousness and finger-pointing.
Let’s s l o w down enough to truly restore.
Let’s celebrate our animal bodies through play, spontanaity, and the unscripted nature of eros.
Let’s meet the mystery and the human experience of not knowing with a humble and reverent heart.
Let’s pause more often to feel, sense, and recognize from our core…
THIS IS IT.
Let’s dream a more creative and life-affirming dream together.
At the start of 2025 I saw this cartoon:
“Hi, I’d like to cancel my subscription to 2025. I’ve experienced the 14-day free trial and I’m definitely not interested.
In retrospect, although humorous at the time, there was great truth to the comment! And now we’ve made it to the end of 2025. As we prepare to cross the threshold of 2026, I offer a Prayer at the end of the year, and I bow to Source… and the 5 elements that animate us.
Earth Element: Please ground us, help us sink roots more deeply into every lived moment, to know the stable nature of awareness as The Ground of Being. Help us to trust and respect the living earth that is our Home.
Fire Element: Please inspire in us embodied passion and fierce compassion. Help us recognize the wisdom of the Sacred No alongside our Yes to life. Help us listen more deeply through the instrument of our earth body, and take authorship for our lives and our part of collective imagination.
Water Element: Please help us surrender to the fluidity and flow that is natural to our earth body, comprised of 90% water. Help us to rehydrate this world of bright hard edges, bright lights, and backlit screens, so our subtle body and soft tissue can relax. Help us restore the living waters of planet Earth.
Air Element: Please help us to recognize the space between our breath, the space between our thoughts, and the sacred space that is the mycelial network of relationships.
Ethers: Please help us to respect the invisible realm and savor liminality and emptiness. Help us to listen to the invisible with more devotion and live in the reciprocity of listening and response, like a call and response in the orchestra of life. Help us embrace - with love - the non-conclusive nature of Life.
Thank you to all of my teachers…and all who practice with the Fierce Compassion Sangha. And thank you to my beloved Mark D’Aquila.
For a preview of Residential Retreats in 2026, please click here.
Thank you to Jasmine for the beautiful artwork
