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...

The Architecture of Misplaced Seeking In the chambers of our consciousness, we stand between two sources of understanding: the mirror of inner contemplation and the window of external validation . This represents perhaps the most fundamental confusion of our age— our tendency to mistake the window for the mirror, seeking in others' validation what can only be discovered within ourselves, our authentic pupose. . Viktor Frankl identified three channels through which meaning flows: creative contribution, authentic connection, and attitudinal choice. Yet we have transformed these sacred channels into mere conduits for external affirmation, rather than finding internal joy. Creative Contribution: When Work Becomes Performance The confusion between mirror and window manifests clearly in our relationship to work. We craft presentations not to serve truth but to garner praise, write not to express insights but to accumulate likes. We tend to transforms our creative energy into performa...

The Search for Meaning: Our Universal Quest   The quest for meaning defines human existence. Beyond mere survival, we seek significance—something that transforms our fleeting lives into purposeful journeys. Like rivers seeking their natural path to the ocean, we flow toward what gives our lives depth and purpose. This search manifests through creative expression, genuine connection, or philosophical contemplation, but its essence remains constant: we hunger for confirmation that our lives matter.  Viktor Frankl, having survived Nazi concentration camps, observed that "Those who have a 'why' to live can bear almost any 'how'"—an insight echoed earlier by Nietzsche. Meaning provides not just direction but sustenance; it nourishes the human spirit when all else fails, much as a river nourishes everything along its banks. Meaning Creates Value: The Foundation of Worth   This search for meaning directly generates our sense of value. Through meaning, mundane tasks...

A philosophical exploration of how our perspectives shape what we call real, and why our attachment to opinion may be our greatest barrier to wisdom The Subjective Nature of Reality That each of us perceives reality differently is both intuitive and profound. Consider the analogy of a game: a player on the field is immersed in the action, their attention narrowed to their immediate role—scoring a goal or defending a position. Their reality is visceral, intense, and focused on the moment. Meanwhile, a spectator in the stands sees the broader picture—the movement of all players, the strategy unfolding—but misses the sweat, pressure, and split-second decisions felt by those on the field. Neither perspective is "wrong," but neither is complete either.   Reality is actually a mosaic, not a monolith. There's no single, central reality that captures the entirety of an experience. Instead, reality emerges as a composite of individual viewpoints, each shaped by where we stand—...

  “The bad news is that you are in a free-fall and you do not have a parachute. The good news is, there is no ground.” (This is my third part of my explorations with free-fall. The first article discuss about the fluidity of the groundless and the second article delves into Living in the Now) In the groundless presence, we lack fixed truths or stable foundations, yet we are not alone. We fall alongside others, each of us navigating the same uncertainty. How, then, do we interact in this boundless descent? The answer lies in embracing uncertainty, dismantling barriers, fostering symbiotic growth, adapting to life’s rhythms, and acting with care rather than expectation. In this shared free-fall, our connections with others become the threads that weave meaning into the chaos. Embracing Uncertainty: Trust Over Control For the last 50 years, we’ve tried to master the world around us, bending nature to our will. We’ve squeezed it into laboratories, controlling every variab...

The bad news is that you are in a free-fall and you do not have a parachute. The good news is, there is no ground.” (This is the second part of my explorations with free-fall. The last article discuss about the fluidity of the groundless ) Some remain captive to past traumas, while others — like many of us — live in perpetual preparation for imagined futures. We become planners, strategists, and worriers, constantly adjusting our present actions to avoid potential pitfalls ahead. The past, with its accumulated wounds, triumphs, and lessons, often functions as more than memory — it becomes a template, a prediction engine for what might come. But this approach fundamentally misunderstands time. The past is a sunk cost, a story already written. The future is a story not yet written and unforeseeable. It offers no guarantees about tomorrow and too often distorts our experience of today. We have traded the vibrant, immediate experience of free-fall for the illusion of control...

  Consider the recent discourse surrounding asteroid 2025_CA2, which nearly missed Earth on February 18, 2025. While the mathematical probability of a catastrophic impact remains vanishingly small (0.00000015% as the last asteroid hit was 66 million years back), our media fixates on this celestial visitor with remarkable intensity. The evolution of climate discourse presents a particularly illuminating case study. The narrative progression from 1970s global cooling predictions to contemporary climate change debates reveals less about atmospheric science than it does about our society’s remarkable capacity for transforming environmental data into existential narrative. The globalization of local phenomena creates an interesting cognitive dissonance: a century ago, a flood in Dubai would have remained a local tragedy; today, it becomes interwoven with California’s drought in a grand tapestry of climate anxiety because of interconnectedness due to technology. In Washin...