Bringing back Chris for first time since five years ago. Since then, his last book got big, as we briefly discussed. We started talking about meditation and at a high level, framed the conversation to come on how the mind works, outside our control, though we don’t notice. More framing: we talk about intention and action, meaning and purpose. The topic of his new book How to Calm Your Mind[…] Keep reading →

Bringing back Chris for first time since five years ago. Since then, his last book got big, as we briefly discussed. We started talking about meditation and at a high level, framed the conversation to come on how the mind works, outside our control, though we don’t notice. More framing: we talk about intention and action, meaning and purpose. The topic of his new book How to Calm Your Mind[…] Keep reading →

David Robert Loy is a professor, writer, and Zen teacher in the Sanbo Zen tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism. He is a prolific author, whose essays and books have been translated into many languages. His articles appear regularly in the pages of major journals such as Tikkun and Buddhist magazines including Tricycle, Lion’s Roar, and Buddhadharma, as well as in a variety of scholarly journals. Many of his writings, as[…] Keep reading →

My letter to the New Yorker’s editor in September led to a reporter, Zach Helfand, visiting and writing a story on me. They published it today (including spotlighting it, see below): Off the Grid in the Big City: It begins, “Josh Spodek disconnected the circuit breaker in his apartment, and now—thanks to solar-powered vegan stew—his carbon footprint is about that of three house cats.“ Along with the New Yorker piece,[…] Keep reading →

I told a friend how sometimes when I wake up before the alarm I get my best ideas. Most of the time I don’t write them down, figuring if they’re important enough, I’ll remember them when I wake up for the day. I learned the habit of not trying to save everything during my first silent meditation retreat. They don’t let attendees bring anything to write with. At first I[…] Keep reading →

Carl Erik Fisher, M.D., is an addiction psychiatrist, bioethics scholar, and author. He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he studies and teaches law, ethics, and policy relating to psychiatry and neuroscience, especially issues related to substance use disorders and other addictive behaviors. He is the author of the nonfiction book The Urge: Our History of Addiction, an intellectual and cultural history of addiction, interwoven[…] Keep reading →

Different people define middle age differently, but having just turned 51 I think I’m in it by all definitions. Physical My first sense of my body physically declining came in my early thirties, when my potential to compete in ultimate began to decline. Before then, I always felt motivation to practice since I knew the next year my potential would be higher. After then, no matter how much I practiced,[…] Keep reading →

While writing up a longer piece on my experiment going off the grid, I looked up when I bought the solar panels and battery. Going through my old records, I think I only bought five or ten things besides food in about a year or so, all from Craigslist or thrift stores, used. I don’t keep meticulous records, so I may have missed some things. Going backward, a couple weeks[…] Keep reading →

Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I remember people saying about visiting places of natural beauty, from campgrounds to local parks to national parks, beaches, and so on: “Leave it better than you found it.” “Take only pictures, leave only footsteps.” Today, every place possible in America has litter. I saw litter at every stop of the forty-eight hour train ride from Los Angeles to Houston, where we would[…] Keep reading →