Paul Weinfield

Others Were Here Before You

Paul Weinfield — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:31:29 GMT

The philosopher John Locke defended the right to private property by arguing that, if a man puts his labor into an empty piece of land, he naturally owns that land. Unfortunately, the main example Locke used was the European “discovery” of the New World, which he knew very well was already settled by indigenous people.

It’s a good reminder that when folks start throwing around words like “mine” or “property,” they’re usually rewriting history to make it seem as though others weren’t there before them. But someone else was always there before you.

Modern psychology teaches us that we each possess one mind to do with what we choose. So we say things like, “Just make up your mind!” But if you really look at your mind, you’ll see it’s neither one nor completely yours. Most thoughts and feelings arise outside your control.

As Ajaan Lee said, the mind is more like a digestive tract, in which many different organisms co-exist. The best that can be hoped for is that they co-exist in harmony.

What this means, then, is that happiness is not about ownership, but about relationship. Your happiness depends, first, on the people you associate with, but also with the relationships you have with the parts of your mind you might not like.

You might not like the angry or insecure parts of you, but you can’t simply evict these tenants. They were there before you, and they’ll fight to keep their place. But you can understand and learn to live in peace with them.

So make it a practice, when you enter a room or place or moment, to remind yourself, “Others were here before me.” Try to leave each time and space better than it was given to you. This is how we learn that we’re not alive simply to gobble up our individual pieces of the planet. We’re here to live in tune with what started long before we came around.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.

https://www.paulweinfieldcoaching.com

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Everybody Is A Star

Paul Weinfield — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:08:06 GMT

What does it mean to feel truly seen? Sometimes I ask my clients, “What would you like me to see in you?” They’re usually baffled by my question. Because as much as we want to feel seen by others, we often don’t know how to see ourselves.

We live in an American Idol-culture where “being seen” is confused with being best. We know what it means to be picked from a crowd, but that kind of recognition is unsustainable. If your significance is based on someone else’s insignificance, you’re always going to be paranoid that someone’s trying to take what you’ve got.

Everybody is a star. The lights in the sky don’t compete or even call attention to themselves. They simply shine, and shining, are beautiful. You aren’t talented because you’re more talented. You aren’t loved because you’re more loved. Those are just ways we dim our lights.

If you look at the stars, you’ll also realize that most of them are no longer there. In the same way, most of what we’re recognized for in this life has nothing to do with us. Your physical beauty or status are mostly the result of what came about long ago — before your birth, even. A lot of the good you do won’t come to fruition till after you’re dead.

Realizing this ought to make you disenchanted with chasing praise and fame. Focus instead on what you’re doing right now, and see the goodness in it yourself.

Practice generosity, for example, and reflect on the good you’ve done. You’ll notice that, after a few moments, your mind resists focusing. Remind yourself that, if it’s so hard for you to see your own goodness, how’s anyone else going to?

We all need to be seen by others too. But we can’t wait for people to give what they don’t want to. We don’t have much time. As the Italian poet said,

Everyone’s alone
At the center of the universe
Pierced by a ray of sunlight
And then suddenly it’s evening.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.

https://www.paulweinfieldcoaching.com

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Clean Your House

Paul Weinfield — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:39:34 GMT

Rumi tells a story of a saint who knew what his visitors needed without ever having to be told. If a visitor lacked a particular amount of money, the saint would give him exactly that sum. When asked how he knew, the saint replied, “I have swept the house of my heart clean of both good and evil, so whatever else passes through it is immediately recognizable.”

Rumi then develops the metaphor: when you see a date palm reflected in clear water, he says, you know the tree isn’t actually in the water. It comes from somewhere else. Likewise, when a heart is clear, another person’s inner state can appear within it without being mistaken for one’s own.

In my coaching practice, I’ve learned to resist immediately trying to help my clients. Of course, I want to help them eventually. But if I move too quickly, the “good” in my own house can get in the way. I start listening for the problem I can solve instead of hearing the person in front of me. And that is the most important thing: to remember that the person in front of me is not my idea of them.

Ajaan Chah often taught in much the same way. Let go even of what you think is good, he would say. Not because good motives are always suspect, but because our attachment to them can make it harder to see what’s really here.

In other words: be generous, but don’t become attached to your idea of what generosity should look like. Be kind, but don’t let your idea of kindness keep you from saying hard truths. Help when you can, but don’t let your desire to help keep you from pure, open listening.

So clean your house. Literally, as well as metaphorically. Make space around the things you think you need, even the good ones. Learn not to see simplicity as boring. A perfectly empty house isn’t the goal, either — that idea itself is just more clutter. We empty our physical and mental houses to make them hospitable. And don’t worry: there will be plenty of visitors. Greet them all with curiosity, a wide smile, and a mind of infinite space.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.

https://www.paulweinfieldcoaching.com

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Each Of Us Has One Person

Paul Weinfield — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:05:00 GMT

There’s an old Norwegian fairy tale called “The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body,” in which a prince rescues a princess held captive by a giant. The giant’s heart is located outside his body, inside an egg on a faraway island. The prince finds the egg, crushes it, the giant dies, and the prince and princess live happily ever after.

People say we live in a selfish world, but that’s not exactly true. Much of what we call selfishness comes from having our hearts located outside our bodies: in our phones, the next thing we hope to buy, the latest outrage. We think compassion must mean caring less about ourselves, but often it’s the opposite: when we bring our attention inside, consideration for others becomes more natural.

A friend of mine says, “When you no longer need to belong or be seen, you are free.” I’ve spent a lot of my life grappling with the feeling that I don’t belong or am not seen. And belonging and being seen ARE needs, to some extent.

But when we need these things everywhere we go, we place our hearts outside our bodies. At its extreme, the need to belong everywhere is conquest: This place must be mine, too. At its extreme, the need to be seen everywhere is narcissism: Everyone must recognize me.

What matters most is that you belong to yourself, that you see yourself. As Ajaan Suwat used to say, “Each of us has one person.” You’ve been given yourself to look after, and your first responsibility is to attend to that person.

You are going to go places where you absolutely do not belong. Just make sure you’re not a stranger to yourself. You are going to find yourself in places where you are invisible. Just make sure you’re not invisible to yourself.

Attending to ourselves doesn’t mean obsessively curating the story of our lives. Often, the story is how we abandon ourselves. Attending to ourselves means bringing awareness to this body — breath, sensation, emotion — and vowing to keep company with whatever we find there.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.

https://www.paulweinfieldcoaching.com

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You Can Be Too Open

Paul Weinfield — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:01:21 GMT

A client of mine recently went on a retreat where the facilitators asked participants to share something traumatic they’d been through. My client didn’t feel particularly safe, so she said she’d like to pass. But the others kept pressuring her. At one point, they started chanting, “Op-en up! Op-en up!” like a mob at the Colosseum. She stormed out of the room. I told her I was proud of her.

There are so many things wrong with what happened to her. But the story also exposes a persistent misunderstanding about healing. For over a century, Western culture has been fascinated by a “pressure-cooker” model of the human psyche: that we’re unhappy simply because we hold too much inside. And there’s some truth to this. We can’t heal what we don’t bring awareness to.

But healing isn’t just about hitting the piñata of our hearts until our emotions explode all over the floor. It’s also about the slower work of learning to relate to ourselves with more kindness. And overriding our inner protectors isn’t kind.

Sometimes the voice that says, “I don’t want to talk about this” isn’t simply resistance to healing. Sometimes, listening to it is the healing: learning that we’re allowed to have boundaries, that we don’t owe everyone — including ourselves — immediate access to everything within us.

The Buddha once used the metaphor of a salt crystal. If you put the salt crystal in a small glass of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But put the crystal in a wide river and you barely taste it. In other words, we suffer not just because of what happened to us, but because of the way we’ve learned to hold it.

I’ve never met a human being whose pain came only from not being open enough. In fact, you can be too open, especially when openness comes from the belief that you’re broken or bad and need to rip out the rotten thing inside you. Notice how you are relating to yourself. Start there, and what you’re ready to say and who you want to say it to will fall into place.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.

https://www.paulweinfieldcoaching.com

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The Beginning Is Near

Paul Weinfield — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:01:08 GMT

Someone recently made a video compiling all the times The Atlantic ran a headline beginning with “The End of”: The End of Men. The End of Human Rights. The End of High-School English. On and on.

Of course, we are witnessing the end of important institutions. But apocalypticism is also a great way to manipulate people: it seizes their attention, keeps them reactive, and feeds the capitalist fantasy of disposability — the idea that things simply go “away” because we’ve declared them obsolete.

People often come to my coaching practice because they feel something important has ended: their youth, a relationship, an old sense of how to live. And they’re right. Something is ending. But focusing on what’s ending can also protect us from opening to what’s beginning, which can be scarier. What’s beginning is unknown, unpracticed, and more vulnerable to disappointment.

I’m a fan of Francis Weller’s work on grief, and I do think many of our problems come from failing to mourn loss properly. But the pop-psych world has become too quick to treat every difficult transition as grief. Sometimes what we call grief is actually fear of having to change.

When a partner leaves, we may focus on the loss partly because we don’t want to face who we were already becoming without them. When we lose a job, we may dwell on what was taken from us rather than face the frightening question of what we want now.

Real grief honors what has passed while making room for what might come next. Fear of change, on the other hand, tries to keep the past from passing.

Beginning again requires a certain rebelliousness. At some point you have to seize that right for yourself. No one can cross that threshold for you.

The beginning is so near. But you have to claim it.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.

https://www.paulweinfieldcoaching.com

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Be Cool, Man

Paul Weinfield — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 14:49:21 GMT

My friend was recently ranting about how no one is “cool” anymore. At first, her use of the word bothered me: it sounded like a high school popularity contest. But the more I thought about it, the more I agreed. Meta glasses secretly filming women. AI-generated vocals. Bots running people’s Hinge profiles. Who knew the future would be so uncool?

At forty-eight, I’m well aware that I might not get what younger people are into. But there’s a difference between changing tastes and a culture increasingly devoted to outsourcing the difficult parts of being human. It doesn’t matter whether I like Doechii. That’s taste. But I feel like I’m constantly being asked to applaud someone for the mountain his robot climbed instead of him.

The other night I went to an “installation” where a guy sat onstage with a guitar he didn’t play while an AI-generated soundtrack and light show played around him. I honestly didn’t know how to respond. “Nice prompt you typed into Suno?” “Cool hardware you bought from the Apple Store?”

What is cool, anyway? I’m no expert, but maybe cool is what remains when you can’t outsource difficulty. I once bought a self-portrait in Oaxaca painted by a blind boy. I knew a woman in Marrakech who let herself be cast out of her family in order to study literature. I think people who tell the truth about their feelings and risk rejection are pretty cool.

I’ve known some meditation masters in my time, and what’s cool about them is their ability to create beautiful, happy states of mind out of almost nothing. During Hurricane Sandy, my meditation teacher stayed alone in his apartment for a week without power. When I finally found him in the dark, he greeted me with a huge smile and said, “I’ve got some batteries if you want to listen to the radio with me, Paul.”

You have no idea how much you can create with what little you have. You’re way cooler than you think, man.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.

https://www.paulweinfieldcoaching.com

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Occupy Your Body

Paul Weinfield — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:27:14 GMT

Leonard Cohen once said that he supported a certain kind of “race-ism.” He wasn’t defending racism, of course. He meant that when people know who they are — their own race and culture — they are more capable of respecting other races and cultures. It made me think of Resmaa Menakem’s argument that white supremacy has roots in white people’s own unrecognized histories of European violence.

But understanding who you are isn’t just about historical research. It also lives in your body. We know that trauma can travel across generations through postures, reactions, and physical habits. But your body also holds ancestral gifts: rhythms of self-soothing, gestures of love and belonging, ways of moving together through grief and celebration. This, too, is your inheritance.

The Buddha tells a story about a quail who wanders into an open field and is caught by a hawk. “You only caught me because I wandered into the field,” the quail says. So the hawk puts the quail down and tries again. This time, the quail hides behind a rock and the hawk smashes his beak on the stone. In the same way, the Buddha says, when you wander into the field of compulsive thinking, suffering carries you off. But if you keep your awareness in your body, you’re on home ground.

But then the Buddha says something remarkable: he calls the body “your ancestral homeland.” Because mindfulness of the body isn’t just stress relief. You’re returning to capacities refined over generations: the endurance to keep going, the vigilance to sense danger, the ability to soften when danger has passed. This is your rightful territory, where you can take refuge.

Back in 2011, Occupy Wall Street protested the power of financial interests over our lives. Something similar has happened to our bodies, which have been occupied by advertising, algorithms, beauty standards, political identities, and other people’s ideas about who we are.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Occupy your body. Reclaim your ancestral homeland.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.

https://www.paulweinfieldcoaching.com

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Fewer Interventions, Please

Paul Weinfield — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:50:32 GMT

When I was eight, I asked my father for vegetable soup. He said, “There’s minestrone in the kitchen.” But I didn’t want minestrone. I wanted vegetable soup. After failing to convince me that they were the same thing, my father gave up, heated the minestrone, and served it to me as vegetable soup. I devoured it happily … until later, I found the can mark…

You Belong

Paul Weinfield — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:44:13 GMT

My mother told me how, as a child, she was bullied for not being “Jewish enough.” Despite being the child of Holocaust survivors, she had a Catholic mother who dressed her in Austrian dirndls. For this, the Jewish kids at her Manhattan school picked on her mercilessly.

I grew up targeted from both directions: kids at my Catholic high school threw pennie…

There's Always A Way Back

Paul Weinfield — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:43:47 GMT

The Buddha said that every evening, when you see the sun set, you should reflect: “What if this is the last sunset I ever see?” But he also said: No matter how long you’ve been lost, if you can come into the present moment for just an instant before you die, that would be worth a great deal.

In other words, the spiritual path isn’t like a path through th…

Beware of Zentertainment

Paul Weinfield — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:02:02 GMT

I always ask my clients what they’d like to get out of a session with me. Often, they reply: “Clarity.”

It sounds nice, but I’ve learned to push them to ask for more. Because settling for clarity can be part of a pattern of gazing at our lives without changing anything. Analyses, interpretations, and theories can become opiates that numb our pain and put…

Respect The Closed Doors

Paul Weinfield — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:20:45 GMT

Every so often, I see someone argue that travel is a colonial practice. There’s truth in this critique, but I worry that our awareness of inequality can become a way of protecting ourselves from having to see our own place within it.

Ideally, travel means going to places where people may rightly be suspicious of you, and discovering, in the midst of that…

The Self Is A Relationship

Paul Weinfield — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:01:59 GMT

I recently heard a quote attributed to August Wilson: “The first job of an artist is to survive.” I don’t think it means simply that you have to pay rent before you write. I think it means that an artist has to make sure the artist within survives.

It’s surprisingly easy to kill that person. You become so busy managing life that you stop creating it. You…

Healed People Heal People

Paul Weinfield — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 02:00:30 GMT

There’s a Buddhist story of two acrobats, male and female. The female acrobat was standing on the male acrobat’s shoulders when the male acrobat looked up and said, “You take care of me and I’ll take care of you.”

The female acrobat replied, “No, you take care of yourself, I’ll take care of myself, and in that way we’ll get along.”

They got into an argu…

May Your Wishes Be Few

Paul Weinfield — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:02:54 GMT

Years back, I rode the train home from a long silent meditation retreat with an older man I deeply admired. There’s always an awkwardness after so much silence, but at one point he turned and asked, “So what are you excited about these days?”

The floodgates opened. I told him all about my band, my travels, my girlfriend.

Eventually I realized how long I’d…

Organization Isn't Everything

Paul Weinfield — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:02:34 GMT

The painter Edgar Degas, who also wrote poetry, once complained to his friend, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, that he had plenty of ideas for poems but couldn’t seem to write them. Mallarmé replied, “But my dear Degas, poems aren’t made with ideas, but with words.”

It’s a useful story for our age of AI, when people seem to think the role of humans is simply…

Don't Start None, Won't Be None

Paul Weinfield — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:36:24 GMT

There’s a Russian story of a frog and scorpion. The frog says to the scorpion, “Climb on my back and I’ll carry you across the river. Just please don’t sting me.” Midway across the river, however, the scorpion stings the frog and they both start to drown. “Why would you do that?” the frog asks. “Because I’m a scorpion,” the scorpion replies. “That’s wha…

Think On Purpose

Paul Weinfield — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:01:03 GMT

I see Pema Chödrön is getting dragged again, this time for her appearance on The Ezra Klein Show. The criticism goes something like this: Chödrön and Klein present Buddhist meditation as a way of accepting oppression rather than resisting it.

I find these critiques tiring. First, they’re based on a caricature: that Chödrön believes people should simply s…

Just Ask

Paul Weinfield — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:03:06 GMT

The Talmud says, “A shy person cannot learn.” The word translated as “shy” doesn’t mean introverted; it means ashamed to ask a question. Children ask questions all day long. Adults often apologize before asking one. We associate questions with being ignorant or being a burden.

Once, when I was in coaching school, a student raised his hand and said, “What…