Gray Smoke

Like many people, I started meditating to find peace—to quiet my wild monkey mind and detach from my racing thoughts and emotions. For a while, I thought that's what meditation was supposed to be: pushing away discomfort, observing from a distance, staying calm and collected. Then life broke me open. In the last couple of years, I went through the worst possible tragedy. My heart was shattered, and the pain was too large to push away. Trying to detach from it felt not just impossible, but wrong. Like I was betraying myself and was being inauthentic. The Practice That Changed Everything That's when I found Tonglen in Pema Chödrön's book When Things Fall Apart —which felt like the perfect title for my life at that moment. Tonglen is a Tibetan Buddhist practice that means "giving and taking," and it does something that sounds completely backwards: instead of pushing pain away, you breathe it in. On the in-breath, you take in darkness and pain. On the out-breath...

  During a moment of quiet reflection, I arrived at an unsettling truth: I create the dramas that consume my life, drawn to the intoxicating rush of emotions they provide. When one drama fades, another emerges almost instinctively. I don't push them away because these emotions make me feel alive. But I don't just cast myself as the protagonist in these dramas—I also appoint myself director. I meticulously script outcomes, orchestrate plot twists, and harbor quiet expectations that everyone around me will follow my vision. When reality inevitably deviates from this imagined screenplay, distress follows. I make adjustments, attempt corrections, but control slips through my fingers, exposing the futility of my efforts. At its core, this protagonist-director urge stems from the human mind's craving for drama's emotional vitality and control's perceived security against uncertainty. Everyone Is the Hero of Their Own Story This realization extends beyond my personal t...

Today, in the quiet sanctuary of meditation, before me sat a simple glass of sparkling water—effervescent, alive with movement, yet contained within transparent walls. As I settled into stillness, watching the ceaseless dance of bubbles rising from invisible depths to burst at the surface, a profound recognition began to unfold. Here, in this humble vessel, lay a perfect mirror of the human condition, a crystalline metaphor for the very nature of consciousness itself.       The Theater of Bubbles We are, each of us, like this sparkling water—vessels containing multiple streams of consciousness that bubble up from unknown depths. Some thoughts emerge large and commanding, demanding immediate attention like urgent emotions that overwhelm the psyche. Others remain subtle whispers, the quiet background hum of sensation that accompanies our every breath. These bubbles don't arise from a single source but from various currents of awareness, each following its own mysterious...