About.

What are we doing here?

It’s so narrow, there’s nowhere to land. It’s so broad, you can’t fall off. It’s not good or bad, old or new, big or small, yours or mine. It has no inside or outside, no beginning or end, no life or death. It can’t be lost or gained and it doesn’t change or remain the same. See it directly by asking sincerely, with the eyes of a newborn baby, “What is this?” But don’t go groping for an answer. It’s nearer than the question. The feeling in your fingers and toes already knows.

Nonduality is not a view

Nonduality points to no fundamental view of reality. It’s not a matter of arriving at a good and correct understanding of how things really are, and it’s not about avoiding views altogether either. We abandon an exaggerated sense of their reality, freeing views to rise and fall according to their function.

No view can tell us how to respond to every situation. Grief has its own reality and function. So do anger, tenderness, discernment, and the need to establish a boundary.

Nonduality does not flatten these distinctions or make our human lives irrelevant. It frees the wisdom of discrimination to function without requiring us to build a world out of them. It’s as simple as meeting and responding to the matter at hand.

Why does this matter?

We suffer when a view becomes rigid and persists beyond its function. We mistake an interpretation for reality, organize ourselves around it, and struggle against whatever does not fit.

Seeing through that structure can bring a profound sense of freedom. But an initial recognition does not necessarily resolve everything. Old emotional patterns continue. Habitual ways of relating persist. Insight itself can harden into a position. Our spirituality can become another way of avoiding what we don’t want to feel.

The purpose of this work is not to maintain a special state or replace one system of belief with a subtler one. It is to become intimate with our lives and look closely at what’s happening now beyond our habitual ways of seeing. Where is there rigidity? What is being resisted? What becomes apparent when we stop trying to correct experience?

Awakening is not separate from how we meet grief, conflict, relationship, work, and the ordinary demands of being human. The places where we remain divided against ourselves still have to be met.

How we work

I work with people at different stages of awakening, from initial realization through integration and embodiment, including the places we get stuck along the way.

The work is energetic and direct, with an emphasis on looking closely at what is actually happening rather than applying a fixed framework.

Initial awakening. We find an approach that fits how your mind works, whether through direct pointing, inquiry, koan practice, or another route.

Integration and embodiment. Insight does not reach every part of a life at once. We work with the places where old patterns, emotional reactivity, and habitual ways of relating persist.

Deep-stage realization. As more obvious fixations fall away, subtler forms can become apparent. We may work with fixation in the absolute, a subtle sense of self or agency, and nihilistic tendencies.

Sticking points. A practice stops working, insight feels incomplete, or you get stuck somewhere you can’t quite see through. We look at what is actually happening and work from there.

No fixed method

My style is direct pointing informed by years of Zen training. I’m ordained in the Sōtō Zen tradition and authorized to teach within it, and I’ve also trained for years in Rinzai-style koan practice. Although Zen has deeply shaped how I work, I don’t view awakening as belonging to Zen or to any particular method.

Teachers apply expedients as the situation demands. When one person hears “True Self,” he’s liable to think of gaining something. When another hears “no self,” she’s liable to think of losing something. When they hear “it’s not a thing,” they’re liable to form a concept of something that’s not a thing and try to get hold of that.

Thought is not a way of getting hold of it, and there is no other way of getting hold of it. How can this be grasped? General principles and definitive conclusions won’t do.

Why I offer this work

I’ve come to see that my well-being is not separate from everyone else’s. Understanding how much of the pain passed on to me was inherited from those who could not fully feel their own, I feel a deep commitment not to neglect this human heart, to continue to soften, and to support others on the path.