I can now see the moon.”

— Mizuta Masahide, 17th century Japanese poet and samurai

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, I can feel a chill in the air, and I know that change is coming. (It is always coming.)

My body knows. It tries to help me by keeping one foot in the past. It remembers all the seasons of change that have come before, and braces for what’s next. It remembers, for example, when I left my first career in journalism, and moved to Seoul to teach English instead, and how that first summer monsoon season reduced my cool-girl black boots to wet rags. It also remembers moving back to the States a year later, because my brother had brain cancer, and I needed to be near him. It remembers what happened next, the grief and the confusion of it all. My body still holds everything I have lost.

My analytical mind tries to help by tugging me ten steps ahead, into the future. It’s already working down the school supply list, putting the soccer games into the schedule for the fall, searching for loose ends that have not yet been tied up. My analytical mind is trying to hang on to everything I still have.

Every time the cicadas’ song outside begins to clash with the back to school jingles on TV, I feel caught in this in-between. Between body and mind, past and future.

I wonder: How on earth am I supposed to be in the present moment? Even as a meditation teacher, I struggle with this.

But then I think back to an exchange I had long ago, with a Buddhist monk in Asia, concerning how to be present with seasons of change. About how it took years for the wisdom hidden in this exchange to land in me, until finally, it did.

I think about how it showed me that, when we believe ourselves to be crossing through some kind of borderlands, we will often look for someone, anyone else who can guide us through. Some greater authority who can soothe our fear-bodies and calm our wild minds. Someone who can tell us, finally, just what to do.

I think about how the best writers and artists and teachers often refuse to do this. Instead, they show us how to tend the ripening insights arising inside of our own lived experience, in their own sweet time.

If you too find yourself coming unstuck in time these days, may this story be of benefit to you.

May it invite you to touch grass under a tree somewhere. To savor what—and who—is still here. And to honor the timing of your own insights about how to be in the in-between—still growing, still ripening, but surely worth the wait.

Between two worlds

It was a very rainy day over fifteen years ago, the kind of day on which I might have preferred just to stay at home. At the time, I lived in a cozy one-bedroom apartment in Mok-dong, Seoul, with heated floors that I would lay upon at night, when I felt most lonely. But I only had a few more months left in Korea. I would soon be flying home to Buffalo, where my beloved younger brother was being treated for brain cancer, to participate in my brother’s care.

I was struggling to know what to do, how to be, in this in-between. So, I decided to make a pilgrimage to Hwa Gye Sa, a famous Buddhist monastery tucked high up in the mountains above the city, to find some answers.

To get to Hwa Gye Sa, I had to take two trains, and then a little mountain bus from Suyu Station, and then a steep hike up a long and winding driveway in the rain. There, I would have the opportunity to hear one of the only English-speaking Buddhist monks in Korea, Dae Bong Sunim, give a teaching talk on staying present with change.

Like many talks I’ve attended in such spaces around the world, this dharma talk took place in a room with big windows, and festive red banners hanging from the ceiling, and warm hardwood floors.

Someone had polished the floors to a gleaming sheen. Someone had lit candles along the edges of the room. Someone had neatly arranged a bowl of clear water and fresh fruit on an altar. I passed a row of pictures of wizened old elders that I did not recognize, but who looked very happy to see me.

During a dharma talk, the audience members sit on meditation cushions, or on chairs around the perimeter. The speaker offers meditation instruction to start, then gives some remarks on a topic that they’ve prepared, sometimes with more guided meditation throughout. After that, there’s a question and answer period.

The monk’s talk brought up a lot of questions for me, so I was grateful for this last part.

Picking cherries, picking peaches

During his talk, Dae Bong Sunim, an American like me, began to tell a story of a young man he knew. This man had given up his life as a ”householder” to work on a farm. The talk concerned how this man made this change, and why.

Talk of leaving home is not uncommon in Buddhist spaces. After all, it’s no secret that the Buddha himself renounced the householder life in favor of the monastic life.

However, instead of retiring to a jungle hut, as the Buddha did, this modern-day protagonist decided to embrace an itinerant life as a migrant farm worker. They would pick peaches, or cherries, as the growing seasons rolled along. They would eat the fruit they picked. Each night, they would sleep under the trees and the stars, in the grass.

“There was so much beauty in that path,” said Dae Bong Sunim.

In my vulnerable, liminal state, I found this standard Buddhist fare extra tough to swallow.

On the one hand, I could appreciate the notion of letting go of extraneous stuff in order to seek deeper truths. I’d left a lot of material possessions behind myself, when I moved to Seoul. I gave my paintings away to a friend. I gave my books to another. I loved living in a one-room apartment by myself, with nothing to cover up the heated floors besides a simple sleeping mat. I loved having lots of time alone to meditate. I felt that this life of simplicity and solitude was, in fact, changing me for the better and bringing me joy. And had I not, like the Buddha, also left behind even this, so that I could climb up this sodden mountain to find the answers I still sought?

On the other hand, I really struggled with this story, as I have long done with the historical Buddha’s story of leaving home. The Buddha’s deep-seated need to leave and to seek has always sat somewhat uncomfortably alongside the fact that other people in his family — namely, his adoptive mother and his wife — were obliged to stay and to care, raising his child in his absence. Eventually, they too are said to have reached enlightenment, even without the seeming advantage of sitting alone in the woods for years. One wonders exactly how they did that — and why their stories aren’t told in modern teaching contexts as often as his.

As a teacher, I had a full roster of students for whom I cared deeply, at a school that would gladly hire me on for the next year. I also had a little brother at back home who needed my support. As a result, I would soon be giving up even more of my material possessions and security, to be by his side. But instead of sleeping out under the stars, I’d be standing vigil by my brother’s hospital bed, while he recovered from radiation treatments and gamma knife surgery. Instead of meandering from meadow to meadow as the seasons changed, I’d be running to the pharmacy at all hours of the night. And I would be doing all of this while hunting for a job that could pay for a new apartment, because unlike temperate India, where the Buddha lived and taught, Buffalo is not the kind of place where you can safely live outside in the wintertime.

Where, I wondered, was the beauty in that path?

A question with no easy answer

During the question and answer period, I desperately wanted to ask for a different story, one that was just for me. But all I could do was pick at the edges of the monk’s story instead.

“I think it is really beautiful that this person can pick cherries on one farm, and then peaches on another farm the month after that,” I said. “But, like, how do they get the next peach-picking job? Do they have to call a few farms and figure out who’s going to have peach picking season, around the time that the cherries are going to be done? How do they deal with the transition? How do they step out of the flow of just being with the cherries in order to figure out where they’re going to pick the peaches?”

I feared Dae Bong Sunim would be taken aback by my questions. Or he’d dismiss me as yet another materialistic householder, hopelessly “attached,” obsessed with security and certainty, instead of flowing gracefully from change to change in a set of billowing saffron robes.

Instead, the tall American monk gave me a slow, mischievous grin, as he appeared to take my questions seriously.

In the pause between my question and his answer, it was as if the room and everyone in it came into sharper focus for me. He was an older guy, a big guy, with broad shoulders and a closely-cut white beard. In another life, I thought, you could see him living out his own householder path in a McMansion overlooking a Florida golf course.

Instead, here he was, in South Korea, in robes. Sitting both straight-backed and relaxed. The sum of his own choices and sacrifice. A regular person, just like me, who could not offer me any other story, any other wisdom, besides his own.

“When it’s time to pick cherries, you pick cherries,” he said finally, still smiling. “Then, when it’s time to pick peaches, you pick peaches.”

Then he leaned back, took a sip from his water glass, and waited for the next question to come.

By the time I left the building, the rain had stopped, though the path down the mountain still lay obscured in mist. I got back on the bus, and took the train back to my neighborhood. As I walked home from the station, I passed my favorite local market.

There, the staff had gotten to know me well enough that they’d slip me a free chamwae melon sometimes, when a pickup truck pulled up to deliver a bunch of the sweet-smelling yellow orbs from a faraway farm. Inside the window, one of them pointed to a carton of peaches, newly arrived, with a grin. I noticed that next to them sat a carton of cherries, perhaps the last of the season.

In that moment, I had enough money in my pocket as a householder to buy both. So I did.

I put the fruit in a bowl on my tiny kitchen counter, arranging it as if it were an altar, like the one at Hwa Gye Sa. I contemplated it in meditation. Some of it began to grew mold. Eventually, I ate the fruit that was left.

There didn’t seem to be much else I could do.

One last ride

For a while, I forgot about my brush with the American monk, and the cryptic riddle he had given me. When it’s time to pick cherries, you pick cherries. When it’s time to pick peaches, you pick peaches. About how it resisted any attempt by my fear-filled body, or my analytical mind, to peel it open, to get at the pit of it.

I didn’t know then that the answer I had been given was not an answer at all, but a kung-an, or koan. A prompt meant to unlock what Dae Bong Sunim’s teacher, Master Seung Sahn, might call “don’t-know mind.”

Some weeks later, however, I found myself attending a party on the roof of a friend in Itaewon, a neighborhood in Seoul that sat across the Han River from my own. The purpose of the gathering was to plant a rooftop garden for our friend, one we’d be free to come and visit as we pleased. On this day, the monsoon clouds of summer hung back politely, and we were able to push many kinds of seeds into the ready soil. In a few months, my friend would harvest the first of their tender fall lettuces, and wrap them around a bite of rice and bulgogi.

By then, I’d be gone.

For now, someone had opened a bottle of makgeolli, fermented rice wine, that was ready to drink. Someone else had made smoothies from the last of the frozen strawberries. And someone had carried up a big bag of just-picked omija berries.

Sometimes known as schisandra or five-taste berries, these tart red gooseberry-like fruits symbolize balance, good health and abundance in Korea. The best way to imbibe them, I had learned, was to take those berries and ferment them together with sugar for a hundred days. At the end of the hundred days, you strain out the syrup, and mix it together with bubbling seltzer, creating a cha shiwonhada, a refreshing summer tea.

“We could make omija cha!” I said, excitedly, to the person who had brought the berries.

Somebody else who knew what lay ahead reminded me, tenderly: “Ryan, you don’t have a hundred days left here.”

I thought I had made peace with the fact that I wouldn’t be there to see the fruits of our labors, that day. After all, I could eat bulgogi at home. But all of a sudden, it was as if a dam broke inside me, and the full weight of living here, in the in-between, bowled me over.

I did not have time to make the tea of everlasting luck. Everything I loved, I would lose.

I leaned over the counter in the kitchen and sobbed, as I’d never done in public before.

My friend Josh saw me crying. A curly-haired Canadian youth with wide, empathetic blue eyes, he too was leaving Korea soon, heading back home to Prince Edward Island. He told me quietly that he too felt sad to be leaving all of this behind — the friends, the roof, the recipes for cha.

For Josh, however, the beauty was never in the talking, or the thinking. It was always in the doing. So he didn’t offer me any more consoling words. Instead, as the party began to break up in the evening, he invited me to hop on the back of his motorcycle for one last ride. So I did.

We drove into Hongdae, Seoul’s answer to Williamsburg, to order our last drinks from Vinyl, a tiny hole in the wall that sold cocktails in IV bags, with a straw poking out of the top so you could take them on the go. We drank them on the street, and watched beautiful young people streaming around us to their dates and dinner destinations, remembering all the times before when we had done the same. Then we looked up at the gathering clouds in the sky, coming ever closer, readying for another big rain.

We were not ready for our last ride to end.

So we flew down the highway that abuts the Han River, a gigantic swelling reptilian thing in monsoon season, and saw the lights of the huge skyscrapers flickering back, reflected in its undulating scales.

We drank in the sight of this great protector, the river that had kept my neighborhood safe from the invading North Koreans several decades ago, when a surprise attack sliced the country in two, separating families without warning and plunging the country into a period of extended war and starvation.

We cruised over bridge after bridge. We watched elderly Koreans who had been children back then, gathered beneath the bridges now. Each one was intent on harvesting kolbangi, river snails, from its banks, as they have done since those lean and terrifying days. Even in the hardest seasons, they knew these salty-sweet morsels, hidden under the mud, could sustain them and their children.

We crawled up into the foothills of the mountains around Seoul, the same ones where I had gone looking for answers the month before. We raced faster and faster, until any thoughts of the future couldn’t keep up.

When it’s time to pick cherries, you pick cherries. When it’s time to pick peaches, you pick peaches. “Maybe this is what the monk was talking about,” I thought. “Moments like this—”

Then that thought, too, was gone.

We sped down the mountains again. The city held its arms out to us, cradled us in the palms of its gigantic, glittering hands. And we let ourselves be taken in, and taken in, and taken back in.

Staying close to what matters

Three years later, both my brother and Josh were dead.

My brother’s passing was expected. The kind of brain cancer he had was aggressive and terminal, with a life expectancy of around 12 months. The fact that Dave lived for another year after that was a miracle. We spent the time in between his diagnosis and death doing everything we could together: feasting together on a back balcony in Buffalo, swaying to music in Brooklyn, taking one last whitewater rafting trip down the Salmon in Idaho. Hidden under the mud of his imminent end, these moments of metallic salty-sweetness sustain me still.

Josh’s death was a surprise. He died doing something that he loved: trail-running in the forest, back at home in Canada. He had an unexpected heart attack, and then a fall, after which he would never again see winter.

Choosing to savor the time I had left with each of them–that was the only choice that really mattered, in the end. Not which job I took, or where I chose to live, or how.

Living here, on the other side of this kung-an, I don’t need a monk to give me the answers anymore, or validate my life path.

My lived experience has been my teacher. It continues to teach. My own story has helped me to answer the unanswerable kung-an, of how to live in the in-between.

We choose to stay close to what matters to us.

We might move from place to place, or endeavor to sit still, depending on what will best help us live the kinds of ethical, spiritual lives we don’t regret in retrospect.

We might choose to work in more stable jobs, or to leave them, so that we can stay close to what most needs our care.

We might choose to live in more permanent homes, or to leave them, so that we can create enough space in our lives to hold what most needs holding.

We might sleep under a tree, or by a hospital bed, so that we can savor the sweet things that most nourish us.

We pick what is there for the picking, knowing that one day, this season will end, and another will begin, and we are not in control of when, or how.

Through the many branches of this way of living, I have found that I can see the elusive moon of enlightenment, after all.

There is so much beauty in this path.

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Further reading

🧶 Come sit next to us!

Our next In Tending circle is coming up on Zoom on Tuesday Sept 29, at 12pm-1pm EST (11am CST/10am MST/9am PST). We’ll sit together (or stand, or walk, or drive, as the case may be). We’ll talk about how practice looks at this point in the school year, and how it may need to adapt to our present-moment care contexts. And we’ll have time for a Q&A—though really, our aim is to support you in finding the answers that are ripening and right for you. 🍒🍑

Register for the 9/29 circle

This post contains replay materials for a workshop I offered this week to the In Tending community. I imagine it as a starting point for all who come to our community hoping to learn how to care for others sustainably, without burning out.

Mindfulness for Caregivers is a workshop designed for people who spend a large part of their days keeping other people alive. This includes parents, cool aunties and grandparents. Adult children caring for elderly parents, and parents caring for adult children with disabilities. And helping professionals, such as nurses, therapists and teachers, whose care impacts the lives of other fragile humans daily, and who are also deeply impacted by that relationship.

To be clear, mindfulness for caregivers is not necessarily wildly different than mindfulness for other people. However, I am often asked as a meditation teacher how parents and caregivers can benefit from mindfulness practice even if they don’t have much time to do it—and if so, what those benefits actually are, since we don’t have time to engage in performative “wellness” that doesn’t actually ease suffering. In this workshop, we address both of these questions, discussing both ancient history and modern science as it relates to mindfulness, and then we engage in a guided, research-backed practice together.

The whole workshop replay will take you under an hour, and you can pause it at any time. I’ve offered timestamps below so that you can jump to the parts that feel most relevant to you. May the benefits, however, last you a lifetime.

Paid subscribers here at In Tending can scroll down now to access these workshop materials virtually below.

These materials allow you to do the following:

• Watch the video and follow along with the exercises. (This is a great option for folks who may wish to share this practice with a loved one who can also benefit.)

• Listen to the audio, akin to a podcast, and do the same. (Great for laundry folding marathons and those with long commutes, in my experience.)

• Read the transcript at your own pace. (Sure beats the germ-ridden magazines at the doctor’s office.)

Workshop highlights

In this workshop, you’re invited to:

• Set your own intentions for this practice

• Learn more about the history and working definitions of mindfulness

• Dive deeper into the benefits of meditation for caregivers

• Learn more about how to make trauma-informed choices to ensure your practice is workable for your nervous system

• Enjoy in a guided meditation, with a focus on cultivating clarity

• Engage in a deeper, guided self-inquiry process inspired by the work of self-compassion researcher Dr. Kristin Neff

• Hear questions and insights from other thoughtful parents and caregivers

The questions we address in this session

My favorite part of our circles is the moment that follows our meditation session, in which we ask and answer the questions we have been sitting with, together as a community. In this session, we discuss:

• How do you find the balance between effort and ease, as a parent and meditator who is often tired?

• How do you find the balance between formal vs. informal practice, when you want to practice formal sitting meditation but your schedule is inconsistent?

• How do you find the balance between “clarity” and “compassion,” especially during short practices? Do you have to choose? Which one do you focus on first?

• How do we balance cultivating stillness and tenderness with fighting injustice?

Don’t have a paid subscription yet? You can click here to view your options, and upgrade to unlock the workshop materials below.

This workshop series is available for subscribers at all levels—monthly, annual, or those in the Mentorship Program.

That said, I’ll put in a plug for the Mentorship Program as being perhaps the best deal, because it also gives you:

• A 1:1 personalized support session from me. We can use this session to help you figure out exactly how to put these insights into practice in your unique setting, in ways that work for your unique body and mind. No more fussing around with meditation apps, no more buying self-help books only to find your eyes glazing over when it comes to doing the practices, no more wondering if you’re “doing it wrong” or you’re “just bad at this.” Just actual human connection and coaching, from someone who understands how hard it is to start and sustain a meditation practice amidst a busy life.

• An all-access pass to our Workshops archive. Past paid workshops, which include both guided meditation and writing exercises, have focused on healing your relationship to your body, making our intimate relationships a place of practice, clearing space for grief and rituals of remembrance, and voicing your spiritual truth to yourself and your loved ones. You can view the archive here.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

In the meantime, may this workshop help you move closer to both personal and collective liberation. And we hope to see you at the next one!

Warmly,

Ryan

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— Rumi

Despite the beautiful weather that surrounds us now, the last few months have been difficult ones for our family. We’ve had multiple meds changes, medical procedures, and three family members in the hospital, across three different time zones. The comfortable drum beats I’ve put in place in the past to help anchor my body and mind—a daily sitting meditation practice, a regular weekly-ish post here on Substack—have given way to an extended free jazz solo. My routine changes every day. I can’t seem to write as much or as clearly as I’d like. It’s been a while since I had the time and energy for a proper sitting meditation session.

It helps me to know I’m not alone. Other caregivers in my life are in this season alongside me. After all, things like dementia diagnoses, divorce settlement drama, chronic illness flares and neurodivergent kid meltdowns don’t go on summer vacation.

(If you’re experiencing difficulties like this, I hope you’ll come sit next to us at our next caregiver support circle; more info below.)

It also helps me to remember, as a former history teacher, that the idea of a “carefree summer” is more of a modern marketing construction than a reality for the human race. Summer has historically been hard on humans, and it remains so to this day.

Consider:

• Flash floods, landslides and forest fires historically wreak the most havoc in warm weather. These threats are increasing with climate change.

• From the Neolithic age until the 1800s, infectious diseases that thrive in warm conditions killed off large swaths of the population each summer around the globe. Malaria in particular still claims the lives of many children and adults living in Africa and the Amazon basin each summer.1

• Poor air quality impacts more people when it’s warm out, particularly people living in poverty. According to studies conducted in both the U.S. and Asia, prenatal and postnatal heat exposure is associated with greater risk of childhood asthma, a condition further exacerbated by living in low-income neighborhoods with few trees.2

• Millions of children around the world, in places like Gaza and Sudan, are living in close proximity to armed conflict3. This means they’re not just out of school for summer break — they’re experiencing long-term gaps in their education, not to mention long-term food insecurity, that will shape their lives for years to come.

I don’t share these facts so that we can turn around and shame ourselves for having seemingly smaller problems. I wish for all the world’s children to be safe, to be cared for in body and mind, to feel moments of happiness, to know peace amid the ups and downs of life. I feel sad when any child, including my own, does not have this.

My point is that individual parents cannot “give” anyone a smooth and easy summer. We are parenting amid natural and man-made forces much bigger than we are. By acknowledging our interdependence with all kinds of causes and conditions we do not control, I hope we can come to feel less shame, not more.

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From summer shame to summer savoring

People in past eras have always found ways to notice and appreciate everyday summer sweetness, even amid the struggles of the season. It helps me to remember that this is true for us, too. Ancient Mesopotamians replenished their energy with fresh dates swirled together with ghee. Asian poets composed centuries of odes to the ephemeral beauty of flowers. Indigenous people in the Americas have held celebrations to mark the arrival of the wild strawberry for hundreds, if not thousands of years. They did not do this to spiritually bypass the difficulties of life, but to survive them.

When someone asks me, as a meditation teacher, whether I have any suggestions for “busy parents who only have five minutes,” I often reach for short rituals that support, in some small way, this timeless practice of savoring.

I’ve included some of my favorites below, practices that have been helping me through my own hard summer. I’ve also included scientific citations for each short practice, so that if you truly only have five minutes, you can work these rituals into your routine in ways that will actually bring real mindfulness-related benefits, and not just vague good vibes. (You can also find my suggestions here, in screenshot-friendly form.)

May what follows here help to remind you that you already have what you need, right here, to survive this hard season, and the ones to come. May it feel to you less like you’re trying something new, but coming home again. May these rituals help you take your place in a long lineage of resilient humans who have learned to make lemonade for their loved ones, over and over again, out of whatever bittersweet summer fruits this world has to offer.

Notice color

If I only have five minutes to practice mindfulness today, I often focus on gently engaging my senses.

I start by counting colors. How many blue objects around me? How many green? Often I invite my child to do this with me. Playrooms offer plenty of opportunities for noticing bright colors (one might even say too many?). But doing this on a drive together works too.

The science behind this: Attuning to what’s outside of your body versus what’s happening inside of your mind brings the prefrontal cortex—the driver in the car of your mind—back online, stopping you from feeling like you’re spiraling out of control. Done regularly, it can also reduce negative self-talk, and create the conditions for experiencing self-compassion and empathy, even in the most anxious folks.4

Attune to sound

If I’ve only got five minutes and I’m in a place where I can hear ambient noise—birds, planes, sirens, fans, doesn’t matter—I’ll attune to sound.

All sounds invite us to notice that sound is only ever happening in the present moment. Sounds arise, peak, and fall away—just like every other easeful or difficult experience in life.

The science behind this: Just like attuning to the sights around you, this practice redirects your awareness from what’s going on inside of you to what is going on outside of you, interrupting rumination. It doesn’t rely on your ability to attune to the breath, which can be helpful for many. The sounds don’t have to be special or even soothing to deliver these benefits.

That said, some research shows that choosing one’s own playlist of “soothing” sounds— “soothing” being a subjective thing for each one of us, shaped by culture and our past experiences—may lead to reductions in anxiety and stress.5

Classical music is a common choice for this. My son and I have been enjoying this kid-friendly orchestral album in particular together as we drive to his summer camp. I can confirm that it helps us both start the day with a more settled mind.

Touch grass (or sand, or wood)

If you’ve only got five minutes, connecting through touch to the earth can be grounding, whether you’re seated, lying down, or walking slowly.

Mindful walking in particular can feel much more accessible to me than sitting, particularly if I’m supervising a child at the same time. Bonus points if your feet can make direct contact with the ground, without shoes on.

The science behind this: Our feet are incredibly sensitive, with many nerve endings. Studies have shown that barefoot walking in particular (as compared with walking in sneakers) can increase brain blood flow, improve overall cognitive ability, and reduce mental fatigue and brain stress.6

Stop and smell the flowers (or the candles)

This is going to sound cliche, but stopping to smell something good that’s growing, or lighting a scented candle on a rainy day, can be a real balm.

If you’re lucky enough to have a sunny window or a small yard in which you can grow fresh herbs, you can pluck some of the leaves, and crush them together in your hands, breathing deeply.

If this isn’t possible in your situation, you can purchase a scented candle, and choose a quieter time of day to light it and breathe deeply. Or you can purchase essential oil and add it to nearby diffuser, to a warm bath, or under a pillow.

The science behind this: The benefits of lavender-based aromatherapy have been particularly well-studied here. Lavender interacts with the neurotransmitter GABA to help quiet the mind and the nervous system quickly, leading to statistically significant benefits for people suffering from conditions as varied as anxiety, insomnia, cancer, dementia, and menopause.7

Smell is also one of the best-developed senses in children,8 making this an excellent practice to do with your little ones. (My seven-year-old son loves making “potions” with me.) It’s amazing to consider that in five minutes or less, you can create a ritual that powerfully wires the scent of flowers together with the feeling of safety, calm and presence for them, in ways their little minds will remember for a long time to come.

Sip or snack on something delicious

Many folks in my community say that savoring their coffee, without distractions, is a powerful way to engage their sense of taste. They sip slow. They appreciate heat or coolness. They notice nuances of bitter and sweet, swirled together. In this way, a mundane moment becomes a moment of mindfulness, without taking extra effort or time.

Kids, too, enjoy this practice. I have fond memories of savoring every raisin and chocolate chip in a handful of trail mix alongside my mentor and friend, , when we were first testing out her Tinkergarten curriculum with toddlers in Central Park. (It was often their favorite part of the class!)

I’ve also heard from other parents here on Substack that taking a “popsicle walk” can turn a hard, hot afternoon right around. Which makes sense: it creates an opportunity to walk together (maybe even barefoot), get some fresh air, and savor the fleeting flavors of summer.

The science behind this: Stress interrupts healthy digestion, which then has numerous negative knock-on effects for the stressed-out person.9 Mindful eating, along with the other practices above, can help the body move from “fight or flight” mode to “rest and digest” mode.

Sidenote: Isn’t this mug above just the best? had two of these made just for us after our interview here, and we had such fun recently connecting with other “dharma weirdos” online here.

A few disclaimers

These “tips” are simple by design. You already knew how to do most of these, didn’t you? If so, I hope this realization helps you build a sense of trust in your own intuition and common sense—reminding you that even when things feel out of control, you may already have what you need, right here, where you are.

Short and long practices are both skillful means for meeting the moment we’re in. Engaging in formal sitting meditation, for upwards of ten minutes a day, has many benefits.10 But quick, simple, sensory practices like these can be more helpful when we’re actively spiraling. My own partner knows that when I’m really in the throes of a panic attack or a PTSD flashback, telling me to notice the things I can see, hear and touch is far more powerful than trying to talk me out of being triggered. (And yes, even as a longtime meditator and mindfulness teacher, I still have these experiences—which is why I’m so passionate about offering these skills to others here.)

It’s OK if you truly only have five minutes today. I know from experience that on certain days, five stolen moments in the bathroom—or in the car, the playroom or the hospital waiting room—is all we have. We can accept that this is the season we are in, while also knowing that like all seasons, this one will pass.

That said, it’s not OK if you “only have five minutes” to yourself for weeks, months or years at a time. Your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual needs matter too, just as much as the needs of the people around you. Your health will deteriorate just like anyone else’s if it’s not tended. If you’re in a situation where your own needs are being met by invalidation, indifference, or flat-out abuse, such that you chronically cannot get five minutes alone, you don’t need one more “parenting hack.” You need the real humans around you to extend a hand.

We’re here for you. Here at In Tending, we’ve got all kinds of guides here on topics like divesting from doing other people’s work for them, clearing space for your own creativity, working with burnout, and surviving difficult family dynamics. We’ve also offered live workshops on mindful, non-violent communication to help folks speak their needs while staying within their integrity. And we continue to meet monthly, live on Zoom, to check on each other and practice these survival skills together.

Join us at our August circle

We’ll be circling up on Zoom on Aug 12 from 12pm-1pm EST. Support for our parent/caregiver support circles comes from paid subscriptions here on Substack as well as one-off donations from attendees, but you’re under no obligation to contribute, especially if it’s your first time. We’d love to see you there.

Sign me up for the circle!

Your turn: What has been bitter about this summer for you, and what has been sweet? What small (like, under five minute) rituals help you stay centered, even when you’re short on time or energy? If you’re planning to join us at our next In Tending community gathering on 8/12, what do you hope to learn or share?

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This year, Canadian wildfires once again are sending their smoke across borders, impacting the parents in this community across a swath of thousands of miles—from New England, where I live now, to as far away as Chicagoland.

Here at In Tending, a newsletter + community for parents and caregivers where mindfulness meets messy reality, we often touch on topics like this—the ways in which big political issues are inextricably intertwined with the small, precious details of our domestic lives, and the ways in which parents process the impossible emotional weight of all that. About how to take care of our parental mental health, alongside that of our children, during moments of crisis. And about how, as my son does in the sweet-but-heartbreaking images below, to play our small part in the collective effort for liberation.

If this resonates with you, you’re in the right place. If you’re new here, be sure to click the button below to stay connected with us—you don’t have to face these things alone.

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If you’d like to connect with community in real-time, we’ll be circling up on Zoom on Aug 12 from 12pm-1pm EST. Support for our parent/caregiver support circles comes from paid subscriptions here on Substack as well as one-off donations from attendees, but you’re under no obligation to contribute, especially if it’s your first time. We’d love to see you there.

Sign up for the August circle

Yesterday, in our neighborhood, the smoke turned the sun red. The blue sky slipped behind a thick mustard-colored curtain. I’ve never seen it so dark inside of our house during the daytime.

Photos like the one above filled social media, showing iconic landmarks — the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge — all shrouded by the alarming umber clouds.

The last time climate change knocked so loudly on the door of New York, it was in the form of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which came bearing biblical floods. When I think back to this time — my first fall in NYC — I remember the sight of a hundred cars parked beneath the windows of the distillery where I worked in Industry City, submerged entirely in water.

Just before the storm, they had been unloaded, brand-new, from ships that had carried them over the ocean, and up the bay to where we sat at the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers. I remember the lights of the ownerless cars shining into the darkening waters, their horns bleating helplessly as the brackish torrents coming in from the ocean destroyed their insides. Symbols of luxury and commerce, rendered now and forever obsolete.

Now, this town is better built to handle floods. But not fire.

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We’ve been hearing for years about what fire season looks like for our friends and family out on the West Coast and in the arid Mountain West. We’ve seen the images, discussed them with concern and empathy. Now, they are here.

They are everywhere.

As much as I desperately hate that this is true — I also sense opportunity. Tens of millions of people now have more literal skin in this particular climate crisis game. History has shown us that moments like this are often what it takes to shift the Overton window around what we’ll collectively accept. These moments often precede real, often positive change.

Writing “Should we panic buy an air filter?” next to “Should we buy a new couch?” also quickly puts one’s other petty concerns in perspective. So does the understanding that those of us who still have somewhere to go to get out of the smoke are the lucky ones. Some people have lost their homes. Some First Nations people have lost their ancestral lands. Our borders, whether they are walled-off or not, can’t stop the consequences of poor political decisions made by a small minority of people from seeping into all of our lives, like smoke through our open windows.

As Earth-dwellers, this week has shown us what we all still stand to lose, if our planet is not given her rightful place on our collective priority list. It is not a welcome call to presence, per se, but perhaps it is a needed one.

As Anne Lamott writes in “Help, Thanks, Wow:”

“You won’t always get from being a brat to noticing that it is an e.e. cummings morning out the window. But some days you will. You go from being Doug or Wendy Whiner, with your psychic diverticulitis, able to eat only macaroni and cheese, to remembering “I thank You God for this most amazing / day.” You splurge on a pint basket of figs, or a pair of great socks. You begin to feel friendship with your flowering pear tree, an interspecies one-ness with it, although usually we keep these thoughts to ourselves, lest they be used against us at the commitment hearings. In fact, you are able to use the word ‘wonder’ again, even feel it , without despair that the New York literati, or your atheist friends, will find out and send you into exile.”

Until this weeks newly-acrid air rolled in, the e.e. cummings mornings of my glorious backyard were something I had been all too often taking as a given—something I could enjoy whenever I got my endless list of maternal to-dos done. Something that I had to first work hard to “earn,” through paid or unpaid labor.

The fires remind us that our place in the family of things on Earth is the given. It is our birthright. We belong here, to all of this—the warming globe, the wonder of it all. Anyone else is probably trying to sell you something.

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The fires also offer a reminder that while we all belong here, we are not all impacted equally when our Earth is in peril. Fires and smoke, I’ve learned, impact our little children more profoundly, because they actually breathe more air over the course of the day than adults do. To protect them, parents and educators—often women—have to do even more on a smoky day than we do on a clear one: keep the kids inside even if they don’t understand why, devise distractions, battle the resulting overstimulation and overwhelm for all. In this way, the maternal mental load and the macro state of our climate are interconnected.

Meanwhile, the privileged and powerful continue to fail to fix this as they move to insulate themselves, or even enrich themselves, amidst the damage.

Parents deserve to be as hot and bothered about all of the above, and to stay that way, as we are about the smoke.

For now, we have chosen to panic-buy the air filters. I put it on our to-do list, and my husband checked it off, bringing at least one small corner of our universe into balance. I made a mental note to prioritize more time outside for myself, when and if the air clears, alongside domestic to-dos like this in the future.

But this situation is not women’s work alone to manage. Nor is it men’s work. It is not the work of individuals at all.

In my rare moments of spaciousness and stillness, I often set my intention for the day as “knowing how best to play my small part in our collective liberation.”

I have no firm answers yet today. But when and if I get them, I’ll put those on my to-do list too.

Your turn: Do you live in an area where fires are rare, or common? How does this impact the way that you view the work of parenting, and/or the way you allocate your time and energy? I’d love to know.

Leave a comment

Further reading:

• If you’re looking for ways to work with the ecological grief of this moment on your meditation cushion, may I suggest this guide to metta meditation from the archives? (You may also be interested working with the anger we may feel at the irresponsible oligarchs and politicians who are creating these worsening conditions, without letting them off the hook.)

• May I also recommend the work of ? Her hopeful, humorous writing—including this week’s missive on the wildfires—always helps me feel less alone as someone who’s parenting through climate change, and she’s co-created an incredible guide for talking about “ecological grief” with kids.

• In a previous post, I wrote about the notion of mourning and re-making the real village, and about the importance of centering Indigenous history and voices in that conversation, vs. promoting different consumption habits as the cure-all of the Anthropocene. (Air filters are cool and all, but they will not save us.) This article talks about how supporting the Land Back movement can have a direct impact on combating climate change. Read about some successful case studies, and how you can be part of this effort, here.

“I’m not the ‘mindful’ type.”

“I’m skeptical of the word ‘self-care.’ This feels bigger than me.”

If you’ve had any of these thoughts when someone suggests you try meditation–then you can come sit next to me, since they’re all thoughts I’ve had myself.

And I teach meditation.

When I first started meditating, I was definitely not what you’d call the “mindful type.” I was a whiskey-swilling writer who prided myself on my snarky sense of humor, my ability to roll my own unfiltered cigarettes, and my willingness to slap any sexist dude who crossed me.

Then my little brother, my favorite person in the entire world, received a terminal cancer diagnosis. And I realized that I might need some new coping tools.

The truth is that while, yes, some people come to mindfulness because they’re generally upstanding citizens—people who find it easy to eat gobs of kale, exercise and meditate daily—these folks are in the minority.

I’ve met far more people in the mindfulness world with my kind of story: a bad divorce, an unexpected loss, an addiction that spiraled out of control.

There are a lot of us out there—and specifically, in this community—who ended up trying meditation because we’d already tried literally everything else.

Now, I’ve been meditating for almost twenty years. Over this time, I’ve noticed another very cool thing about us not-really-the-mindfulness-type types. We get into this because of our own individual pain. We hop on this bandwagon because we want something to take the edge off. A lot of self-care practices and products stop there—which should make us skeptical, because that makes them no different than the habits that plunged us into suffering in the first place.

The thing about a tradition that centers both clarity and compassion is this: you find that your suffering–this suffering that you thought made you uniquely f@#$ed, that was proof that you alone couldn’t hack this whole caregiving thing, that you’re the only one who feels ambivalent or sad sometimes about it, no matter how hard you try and how much you care–your suffering is what reconnects you to the bigger whole.

In my experience, the more you stick around in the right kind of mindfulness-adjacent spaces, doing mindfulness-adjacent things, the more you end up thinking a lot more about that collective part than you did before.1

Put another way: this practice often gets sold as a way to care for yourself a little better, but what they don’t tell you is that it is a way to care more about everything.

And then, you start wanting to do crazy things like start a newsletter and community for other people like you, so that no one has to feel as alone or weird or outsider-y as you did, when it’s their turn to try something they never thought they’d try before.

I’m not saying that if you start reading this newsletter, trying some of the practices on offer here, and hanging out with us not-really-the-mindfulness-type types, you too will be radicalized in a such a way.

A way that invites you to makes use of not just your gifts, but also your secret hurts and not-so-secret flaws, to make the world a better place.

A way that lets you be “mindful,” finally, in a way that doesn’t ask you to be anything other than what you already are.

But I’m also not NOT saying that.

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Want to learn to meditate with a bunch of not-really-the-mindfulness-type types?

We’ll be circling up on Zoom on August 12, from 12pm-1pm EST (11am CST/10am MST/9am PST). The topic for August will be Mindfulness for Parents/Caregivers—the history, the research, and the best evidence-backed practices for tired people who don’t have time or energy to waste.

Support for these circles comes from paid subscriptions here on Substack as well as one-off donations from attendees, but you’re under no obligation to contribute, especially if it’s your first time. We’d love to see you there.

Sign up for the August circle

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— Katherine May

This post contains replay materials for a workshop I offered at the Self-Worthy Summit earlier this year. This virtual summit offered an abundant cornucopia of digital resources for folks who identify as highly sensitive. (Read more about this term here.)

In this workshop, we discussed the ways in which mindfulness can benefit people who experience some degree of sensory processing sensitivity. We sensitive folks tend to have stronger-than-usual sensory experiences when it comes to sights, sounds, smells, touch, and even emotions—ours and others’. (If you know, you know.) Meditation can provide us with an experience of mental rest after an overstimulating day. It can support us with working memory and emotional regulation—key for busy caregivers. It can decrease anxiety, inflammation in the body and blood pressure.

At the same time, we normalized the fact that highly sensitive humans may also encounter unique obstacles when they first begin a meditation practice. These obstacles may be physical, emotional or both.

For example: like many other sensitive people, I have a strong sense of interoception. That means that I have a strong awareness of sensations that are unfolding inside of my body. So when I am hungry, for example, I’m really hungry, and that can be distracting. So in this workshop, I offer some guidance and trauma-informed choices to support you in this.

Like many other sensitive people, I have also received a lot of negative messages over time from others about my sensitivity. As infants and toddlers, we may have been viewed as “fussy” or “difficult” because the world was quite literally too loud, resulting in colic and tantrums. As teenagers, we may have been labeled as “vain” or “moody,” as we spent hours in our rooms trying to figure out which outfits we could wear without being so distracted by scratchy tags, or which people were safe to show our real feelings around. By the time we become adults, we have internalized these critiques. We may be sitting quietly by ourselves on the cushion, but inside, these voices boom loudly. Oh, your knees hurt when you sit cross-legged. So sensitive. Toughen up!

In my experience, if we can hold our seat as these initial, strong sensations and intense thought-patterns arise, peak and fall away, they fizzle out on their own. Over time, I have found that practicing meditation has allowed me to cultivate more equanimity and self-trust around strong body sensations: I know when it’s time to try another posture or stick it out, and I know that I won’t starve to death if I sit for five more minutes. The impact on my mental health has been perhaps more profound: I barely hear my inner critic’s voice at all anymore.

Sensitivity as a birthright

By reducing increasing self-trust and reducing self-criticism around my sensitivity on the cushion, I have found myself more able to fully embrace sensitivity as a gift. I have also learned more about the history of sensitive organisms over time, and this has helped too.

Researchers have posited that sensitivity, as a trait, is adaptive in both human and plant populations. Thousands of years ago, sensitive people might have noticed that one plant smelled a little different than another plant, for example, while others did not. Going further, they might have learned that the first plant is poisonous, while the other has medicinal properties.

Perhaps these sensitive people would then have developed a reputation as an expert forager or gardener, a medicine woman or doula. They might have even become political or religious leaders, given their ability to carefully observe the natural world, sense into the emotions of the people around them, and from there, to accurately forecast the challenges that lay ahead for their community.

Re-tuning our attention to the world and to ourselves through mindfulness returns us to this lineage. Like the wild geese in Mary Oliver’s famous poem, we learn that we too have our place in the family of things.

This workshop aims to support you in doing just that.

Paid subscribers here at In Tending can scroll down now to access these workshop materials virtually below.

These materials allow you to do the following:

• Watch the video and follow along with the exercises. (This is a great option for folks who may wish to share this practice with a loved one who can also benefit.)

• Listen to the audio, akin to a podcast, and do the same. (Great for laundry folding marathons and those with long commutes, in my experience.)

• Read the transcript at your own pace. (Sure beats the germ-ridden magazines at the doctor’s office.)

Workshop highlights

In this workshop, you’re invited to:

• Set your own intentions for this practice

• Learn more about the history and working definitions of mindfulness

• Dive deeper into the benefits of meditation for sensitive people

• Learn more about how to make trauma-informed choices to ensure your practice is workable for your nervous system

• Enjoy in a guided meditation, with a focus on cultivating clarity, compassion, and a deeper connection to the earth

• Engage in a deeper, guided self-inquiry process inspired by the work of self-compassion researcher Dr. Kristin Neff

• Receive suggestions for further reading on this topic

Don’t have a paid subscription? You can click here to view your options, and upgrade to unlock the workshop materials below.

This workshop series is available for subscribers at all levels—monthly, annual, or those in the Mentorship Program.

That said, I’ll put in a plug for the Mentorship Program as being perhaps the best deal, because it also gives you:

• A 1:1 personalized support session from me. We can use this session to help you figure out exactly how to put these insights into practice in your unique setting, in ways that work for your unique body and mind. No more fussing around with meditation apps, no more buying self-help books only to find your eyes glazing over when it comes to doing the practices, no more wondering if you’re “doing it wrong” or you’re “just bad at this.” Just actual human connection and coaching from someone who understands how hard it is to start and sustain a meditation practice amidst a busy life, and ongoing support and accountability that meets you right where you are.

• An all-access pass to our Workshops archive. You can view the archive here.

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In the meantime, may this workshop help you move closer to both personal and collective liberation. And we hope to see you at the next one!

Warmly,

Ryan

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Let’s get this out of the way right now: I am not a man. So I don’t know what it’s like to be a man who is Doing the Work.

As a woman living under patriarchy, though, I’ve certainly gathered a lot of data on what it looks like when men are not doing it. (It’s not great.)

By Doing the Work, I mean a man who is doing some or all of the following:

• Exploring the ways in which living under patriarchy has both granted him privileges women don’t have, while also robbing him of many things worth having—rich inner lives, healthy relationships (particularly with women), and a feeling of true belonging not predicated on dominating others.

• Regulating his emotions such that he does not cause harm to others through greed, aggression or negligence.

• Becoming aware of the flawed scripts handed to men about their expected role in caregiving (or lack thereof), and being willing to discard those scripts as needed.

• Being willing to admit when he’s fallen short as an ally in the past, and choosing to do better in the future, without defensiveness.

• Being intrinsically motivated to do all of the above because it will enrich his life and protect vulnerable people from harm, not because it will help him “look good” or get laid

By contrast, you can imagine that a man who is not Doing the Work is someone who’s quite frustrating to be around—even for other men.

Here at In Tending, I do not run affinity groups exclusively for men. I am also not here to convince men to Do the Work if they are reluctant to do so. That’s not my work to do. Men need to do this for each other. At the same time, I don’t gate-keep.

Unlike many mothers, the men in my life who are genuinely trying to be involved caregivers and equitable partners often tell me they have no place where they can meet likeminded peers, hear perspectives from folks who have a little more experience than they do, or mentor those who are newer to the game. People of all gender identities subscribe to this newsletter, leave thoughtful comments, attend our meditation groups, and sign up for our workshops—making it the kind of place where these connections are possible.

So, below, in honor of Father’s Day, I’ve curated a list of resources for dudes who are truly interested in doing their fair share when it comes to care. My hope is that we can widely share this list, so as to better connect men like this with one another. Because this is how we get to collective liberation.

These resources include:

• Interviews with men and nonbinary folks who are actively working on the problems that the patriarchy tends to create

• Free practices for men who are ready to explore their own relationships to burnout, grief, and their inner “parts”

I also encourage you, if you’re a man who’s reading this, to chime in down in the comments and tell us more about what brings you here. The better we can get to know you and your needs, the better we can tend to this big tent of people who care, in ways that make it more workable for all.

Leave a comment

I’m also offering a rare sale on all subscriptions here for Father’s Day—monthly, annual, and Mentorship Level (which comes with a 1:1 support session from me). So, if you have a man in your life that has said—maybe more than once?—that he should “really get into meditation sometime,” now’s the time to send him my way. Our workshop series is a great way to dip your toe in asynchronously, while our monthly meditation circles on Zoom are a good place to ask questions and meet like-minded contemplative peers who are also in the caregiving trenches.

Take me to the 25% sale

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Interviews

• On finding belonging as a trans dad, with Das Rush

  • Das has been my friend for over a decade. During that time, they’ve taken on a new name, a new set of pronouns, and started taking testosterone. Their gender transition also took place around the same time that they became a parent. During prenatal visits, at work, and out and about with their stroller, they learned firsthand how being read as a “dad” vs. a “mom” shapes your caregiving journey. As they told me when their child was born: As the non-birthing parent in a queer couple, I had less parental leave, and had to go back to work much sooner, while my wife was doing most of the early caregiving. I was feeling the intense pressure of the “breadwinner” script to perform at work and provide for my family, while my wife was breastfeeding and increasingly feeling isolated from the adult world. It was not easy to realize that we were both holding a lot and overwhelmed, because what we were holding looked so different. As someone who can view the situation from both sides, Das adds: I think awareness is everything. Especially for the non-birthing partner, and especially if you are a masculine-presenting non-birthing partner. You have to realize that the world is giving you constant messages that you don’t need to do as much. Become aware of these messages, so that you can discard them.”

• Fyütch drops the mic on the debate over Columbus Day–and on Doing the Work as a dad

  • My friend Fyütch has been educating kids about honest history through rap for years, and recently won a Grammy alongside his talented daughter Aura. He’s written countless kid-friendly raps on anti-racism and Black joy, touching on Black History Month, Earth Day, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and Kwanzaa. In short: his progressive bona fides are pretty solid. At the same time, Fyütch is honest about where he’s fallen short in the self-awareness department as a dad, and also how he’s grown. As he told me in this conversation: I had to adjust to parenting. I was selfish those first few months. I have to credit my daughter’s mom for taking the burden. I hadn’t fully adjusted to adulthood responsibilities while in pursuit of my music dreams.” I love the turns his story has taken since then: Eventually, I reached a new level of discipline as a Dad. In fact, that discipline was the focus I needed to level up my career. Now, as a full-time artist, I’ve instinctively included my daughter in my career as much as I can. She took an interest in making music, so I started taking her on the road with me during school breaks, and recording music with her for fun. Now we have a whole father-daughter album and perform together.

• Lodro Rinzler on the dance between doubting ourselves and believing we’re enough, with of The Laundry

  • In this interview, I speak with Lodro, a bestselling author, dharma teacher and girldad about what it’s been like to write a book about basic goodness while parenting a tiny person. “It’s been fascinating and heartbreaking to see my daughter, at this point, start to engage her world fully, and to have moments of unbridled confidence that she is awesome as she is. And then to come up against a situation where a kid steals her toy, where she feels awkward in a group, or whatever, and to watch that sense of doubt start to creep in. I’m like, “Oh no, it happens this young!”’ Lodro and I go on to talk about “second-arrowing,” which is the way that we maintain this miasma of self-doubt around ourselves, and sometimes our children: “The first arrow is, there is suffering that happens as part of life. The Buddha said right out the gate, there’s going to be aging and sickness and death, and all sorts of things that are going to shift under your feet, and real-world events that are suffering. They just are…. The second arrow is: there’s then suffering that we layer on top, in our own mind, that we don’t necessarily need to engage in.”

• Swapping parental guilt for curiosity and transcending the good-bad parent binary with Ash Brandin of The Gamer Educator

  • Ash’s interview offers the perfect chaser to Lodro’s—it tells you how to replace the second arrow of blame with curiosity. In my experience, screen time is a potent place of practice for this. It’s also a topic about which many moms have opinions—and one about which many dads seem to rely on moms for their opinions. Now’s your chance to change that. Ash’s excellent book, Power On, offers crystal-clear frameworks that, as the title suggests, re-empower parents to trust themselves and their kids, without self-blame. In this two-part interview series, we touch on many of those frameworks, and explore the ways in which Ash’s ideas align with best practices in the worlds of education and mindfulness research.

• Bringing compassion to avoidance, with Jeremy Mohler of Make Men Emotional Again

  • In this insightful interview, Jeremy acknowledges his own avoidant tendencies, while calling on men in particular to heal these patterns in themselves.

• Creating sanctuaries for students and teachers, with NYC educator Jonny Adler

  • Jonny, a former colleague, brings me up to date in this interview about what it’s been like to teach kids under the Trump administration, particularly those who are immigrants and who identify as queer. While sometimes teachers are discouraged from taking a political stand in their classrooms, Jonny points out that for men who truly want to protect the vulnerable, it’s important to take a stand in the streets. As he says: I believe that all of us who care about queer kids have a responsibility to advocate for them politically, especially since most LGBTQ+ kids are not old enough to participate directly in the democratic process. That means showing up for them at the ballot box, speaking out in words and actions, and applying pressure on our elected representatives.

Free Guided Practices

• A harbor for awareness

  • This guided meditation offers a beginner-friendly way to kick off a meditation practice, and a means for grounding yourself amid the chaos of caregiving. It’s my go-to “break glass in case of emergency” practice—one every new dad should have in their back pocket.

• Using RAIN meditation to work with deep grief

  • Often, I find that the men in my life are avoiding looking too closely at what the patriarchy has taken from them because they have no place or way to process the waves of grief that can arise. This practice offers a step by step invitation to explore and then nurture the feelings that can arise in this work—as well as to work with any other unprocessed grief that may be manifesting in less-healthy ways, such as overwork or addiction.

• Working with burnout, in ourselves and in the world

  • Speaking of overwork: breadwinner stress and caregiver burnout are both common complaints for the men in my life. This is a practice featuring the four elements mentioned in some of the earliest Buddhist texts. I have found this one deeply grounding and nourishing in seasons of burnout. This practice reminds us that, just like the Earth itself, we need care to give care.

• Loving-kindness practice for the ones who are hardest to love

  • This metta (loving-kindness) practice focuses on learning to extend compassion to the people that are hardest to love. It offers a way for us to work with anger without directing it outward as violence, hatred—or passive aggressive “jokes,” if you’re from New England.

• Feeling ‘of two minds?’ This meditation can broker compromise

  • This meditation, courtesy of therapist Jeremy Mohler, draws inspiration from Dick Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems framework. It invites you to engage in dialogue with your inner “parts.” These may include Managers that want you to be constantly working and striving, even when you’re exhausted; Firefighters that tell you that it’s fine to play video games all day long while your partner takes care of the grownup stuff, instead of confronting your problems head-on; and Exiles that give voice to the moments when, as a child or a vulnerable young adult, you may have been shamed for having deep feelings, getting hurt, losing a game or getting a bad grade, and crying as a result. Consider it a means for dismantling the patriarchy from the inside out.

Other resources

I also read and respect the work of these excellent writers.

• , whose work on marriage and divorce over at is among the most honest and searching I’ve read from a cis man. A must-read for men who desperately want to see themselves as “good,” but struggle with defensiveness when confronted with any evidence to the contrary.

• , who writes the newsletter , about race, masculinity, belonging, and all things Midwestern in ways I always find illuminating—and funny.

• , a writer, organizer and theologian who recently wrote movingly here about organizing other parents to keep the doors of their Boston-area school open for kids.

• , the brains behind , who has a new book out on parenting boys.

• Elliott Haspel, who covers current events in the world of care policy over at .

Your turn: Anyone you’d add to this list of resources? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Leave a comment

P.S. With Juneteenth now upon us, check out this family-friendly rap about the holiday from Fyütch, one of the rad dads featured above!

Maybe she would have demanded that we only play the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack for four straight hours. Maybe she would have cried the entire time because her favorite classmate couldn’t make it, or because her big brother tried to play with her gifts before she had a chance. Maybe she would have worn a dress with flowers on it, and twirled around our yard making wishes on dandelion clocks, too impatient to wait for the cake with candles to arrive.

My daughter herself never arrived. In our lives, she will always remain an un-granted wish, a seedling herself, a dream that disappeared when I was halfway through my second pregnancy with her, a soul that never touched down in the topside world and took root. Her ashes sit in a pot outside my doorstep. This year, we’ll add them to our garden. We will wait to see what grows next from the ashes.

I think there are many of us out there who are keeping a quiet vigil over the ashes of our prior lives, waiting this spring to see what surprises arise. In this community are many people who, I know, are riding out pregnancy losses like mine—as well as divorces, scary diagnoses, deaths in the family, and other things that have completely changed the known map of your life, in ways with which you are still reckoning.

I see you. I know you. I am you.

For you, this week, I’m offering back the first post I ever wrote here on Substack, back when I was trying to figure out what my life would look like without Saule.

In this piece, I do not use the world rainbow. Or silver lining. I do not say at least. And I decidedly do not say everything happens for a reason. I no longer believe in a life that’s divided into sad tales and happy endings anymore.

I believe in a life that moves in spirals. A life in which we visit the same stories and themes like this, again and again, experiencing more clarity and compassion as we go. I believe in writing about life the way Nina Simone sang about seasons, low and soft: turn, turn, turn. I believe in a hard-earned wisdom that unfolds its petals slowly, like a lotus—not in spite of the mud from which it grows, but from deep down inside of it.

May this piece be of benefit to you if you too are wondering what will come up out of the mud, in a rainy season. May you know that you are not alone in this wondering. I am here too. I am here because of her. And in some ways, thanks to her, I feel more here than I have ever been.

Starting again, imperfectly

When I was thirteen, I stood above a roaring rapid, a small kayak at my feet. The adults with whom I was traveling, down Utah’s San Juan River in summer, invited me to ride on their larger, sturdier boats, but something called me to try the rapid solo. I wore a lifejacket, just in case. When I emerged from the hungry mouth of the muddy, swirling gauntlet, soaked and smiling, I was different, somehow. Something inside of me had gone forever into the water, and something inside of the water had gone into me. 

When I was twenty-six, I climbed aboard a one-way flight headed for Seoul. I had given away all of my paintings, most of my books, and temporarily, my dog. (Only temporarily!) I knew no one in Asia. But I felt compelled to go. Years later, the friends I made there stood around me at my wedding. One of them officiated. Three of us wore fresh tattoos of the Red Thread – from a Korean folk story about the invisible forces of fate, in yeon, reaching out to connect us all.

When I was twenty-seven, I headed home from Seoul in summer, called to my brother’s bedside because he was stricken with brain cancer. By Christmas that year, his tumor was in remission, I had gotten together with the love of my life, and landed what I considered a dream job. Two years later, both the job and my brother were gone. Only the love remained. I flew west again, to release my brother’s ashes into another river in Utah, where we had played as children. I felt empty and hopeless as I climbed up the cliffs, out of that canyon. Once again, something inside of me had gone forever into the water, and I carried its metallic taste of change in my mouth. 

When I was twenty-eight, I began a new career as an educator. In my backpack, that first day of graduate school, I carried very little. Pencils, a notebook. A few hairs from the dog I had reclaimed. (As I promised, his abandonment was temporary!) I felt hopeful once again. At thirty-one, I left a particularly disappointing and disastrous teaching job in tears, hugging a globe I’d taken from my now-former classroom. I held the world in my hands, but wondered if I’d ever go back again. 

When I was thirty-two, I entered a surgical theatre, my two ovaries heavy as figs. I was there to undergo IVF, to build my family after years of battling endometriosis. The first time, it worked. My son is now six.

At the same time, I found a wonderful new school, where I nurtured almost 200 other kids alongside my infant son as an educator. I read them stories, and taught them how to write, and sent them off to high school. There was no better feeling than to imagine that something of me had gone into them, and something of them had forever gone into me. 

The second go-around with IVF, it appeared to work. At Christmastime in 2021, we felt the kicks of our baby girl to be, due in June. In Jan ‘22, our hopes were dashed abruptly, as I experienced a series of life-threatening complications with my second pregnancy that, in another legislative reality, might have been life-ending for me. 

Gathering my things from the hospital where the doctors saved my life, I found myself once again carrying ashes in my hands—this time, my daughter’s. We had named her Saule Marion, after the Lithuanian goddess of the sun. As the summer solstice approached, a new darkness settled over my life. I was diagnosed with PTSD. I told my beloved bosses I was taking the next school year off. We buried her ashes under a sunflower.

Something inside of me had gone into those ashes forever. I did not know then if anything else would ever come out. 

But something always does, doesn’t it? 

Now, I am starting again. Imperfectly. Here in this space, I aim to reclaim for myself, and those reading, a sense that every caregiver’s story matters, including the ones that end in ashes.

While not all of my stories here will center on this most recent loss, I do hope to break the silence around the truth of the late-term pregnancy loss experience, because it is a silence in which misguided and misogynistic American policy has been allowed to metastasize.

I do hope that as readers, we can stop these policies from continuing to oppress a population of birthing people who deserve nothing but compassion. I also hope to show that grieving people do not need to have already reached the mythical and elusive “rainbow” following loss, any loss, before we say a word about the raging storms we’ve seen, or are still surviving. 

At the same time, I want to clear a space to tell all kinds of bigger, wilder, wider stories about our lives. There are so many interesting initiations that we caregivers undergo as we age and learn, beyond the narrow confines of the love-marriage-baby-carriage narrative. I want to clear a space for us to witness and be witnessed in those initiations. A space with more room for mysteries, and miracles, that can’t be explained or predicted by five-year-plans. 

Where am I taking this? I don’t know. In looking back on every initiation I’ve personally experienced, there were never any guarantees. Only the call to take that one first terrifying step. To come in, come in, to come back in. 

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Since I began writing essays like this one, I’ve told each of these stories in greater detail. This has allowed me to hear so many other beautiful stories from folks like you.

If something here spoke to you, please feel free to come find me in the comments of one of these related essays. I’d love to hear from you.

Love and relationships

• On growing up in Utah — the good, the bad, and the Mormon-ness of it all

• On moving to Seoul, quitting smoking, and learning to meditate

• On the inspiring notion of in yeon—the red thread of destiny

Navigating tough tending seasons

• On caring for a sibling who’s dying of cancer

• On coping with infertility and endometriosis, and what it taught me

• On juggling pandemic teaching and postpartum exhaustion

Grief, trauma and healing

• On what trees taught me about grieving after babyloss

• On how the love and care of my community, a lot of EMDR, and the practice of tending a grief garden helped me heal

• How In Tending grew from the ashes

For those who have been here since this imperfect beginning (you know who you are)—thank you so much for walking alongside me during this difficult journey. For those who are just joining us now—I am so glad you’re here. May the red thread that brought us all together in this moment continue to lead us on—turn, turn, turn—into greater clarity, deeper compassion, and collective liberation.

Parents and caregivers know this truth intimately.

We are doting midwives and teachers, dementia caregivers and death doulas. This means that we are the first on the scene when it comes to the inescapable realities of embodied life: birth, illness, old age, death. We have chosen to turn toward these realities, instead of looking away. (This is why I love us.)

These embodied experiences can also feel complicated when we are reckoning with them inside of our own bodies, as well as outside of them.

I’ve written here about my own struggles in this regard: navigating endometriosis and infertility, surviving pregnancy loss and a pandemic-era postpartum period, healing from caregiver burnout, losing a beloved sibling to brain cancer, and caring for aging parents.

In this community, we also talk about the ways in which holding a marginalized identity as a caregiver can make it hard to be in a body. In my interview series, we’ve touched on what it’s like to be a woman in a society that polices our bodies in ways that don’t apply to men; a neurodivergent person (or the parent of one) in a society that doesn’t support our needs; a Black girl-dad and activist in a society that denies its racist roots; a trauma survivor in a capitalist society that doesn’t value healing; a queer and/or trans parent in a society that loves boxes and binaries; and a child of immigrants in a society that doesn’t speak their language

I’m sure those reading here can add on to this list, and I encourage you to do so in the comments if you can think of other reasons why it is hard to be in a body.

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You know what makes all of this harder? Blaming ourselves for how difficult it is.

Blaming ourselves for the fact that we don’t weigh the same as we did in high school. For pushing ourselves too far and too fast, and then having to rest for days. For being so deeply impacted by things like bright lights, loud sounds, and the suffering of others that our nervous systems find it hard to receive that rest.

As and I discussed here, blaming ourselves for our suffering, suffering that comes either from being a person in a body or being a marginalized person in a society that doesn’t support that body, is a painful form of “second-arrowing.” Meaning, it’s as though we are shot by one arrow (itishardtobeinabody) and then, instead of cleaning and dressing the wound, we stab ourselves again with a second arrow (anditsallmyfault).

What would the Buddha do?

As a longtime Buddhism practitioner and meditation teacher, I’ve been sitting for a few weeks with an early teaching of the Buddha’s called the Vitakka Santhana Sutra. While it doesn’t specifically touch on modern concerns like diet culture or anti-Blackness, it does speak to the more universal experience of working with very intense thoughts and sensations.

What makes it especially helpful to me, as a survivor of trauma as well as a trauma-informed practitioner, is that it offers choices, not One Right Way to do things. Five choices, in fact.

Conveniently, these five choices map onto the curriculum we’ve been slowly building for parents and caregivers here at In Tending. So, in this post, I’m inviting you along on the journey we’ve taken together this spring, and that I’ve taken myself alongside you on the cushion. Below, we’ll talk about five ways to work with the mind, if being in your body feels especially hard right now.

Tip #1: When you’re struggling with “thoughts connected with desire, hate and delusion,” the Buddha suggests that we “give attention to some other sign connected with what is wholesome.”

Translation: Give your mind something else to notice.

When I was growing up, my dad worked in landscaping. His advice, when it came to dealing with the kinds of pesky weeds that grow up between the stones in a path, was to simply grow something better in their place. Tired of tugging at knotweed, for example? Plant flowering phlox instead. That way, the weeds don’t have the chance to take root in the first place.

This is the essential wisdom at the heart of the Buddha’s advice. If you’re experiencing thoughts that you don’t care to be thinking–for example, noticing the same old critical narratives start to arise as you pass a mirror and notice something about your appearance that makes you feel vulnerable–you may be able to simply shift to noticing something else that is more beneficial to you.

What could you think about? Here, you have choices.

You could simply re-direct your attention to the breath. This takes practice, but over time, your brain will build this muscle, and it will come more easily.

If your mind remains talkative, you could give it a different script. For example, you could offer yourself some simple loving-kindness phrases: may I have safety, health, happiness and peace. You could also adapt these for your specific body’s situation. For example, I often offer this phrase in my classes: May my body be given care and compassion, just as it is.

Related resources:

Note: I’ll also be offering a free workshop on Mindfulness for Sensitive Humans on Sunday, May 30, as part of this weekend’s Self-Worthy Summit, featuring several brilliant Substack writers, mental health professionals, yoga teachers and more. You can register for free using my affiliate link by clicking this button:

Free tix? Sign me up!

Tip #2: If basic breath-based meditation or metta meditation don’t do the trick, you can stop to “Examine the danger in those thoughts.”

Translation: Notice how these thoughts lead to sensations, speech and action that tend to make it worse.

In my experience, when I allow my anxiety to run unchecked rather than working with it more intentionally, I’m more likely to get sucked into unproductive responses to that anxiety, such as avoidance, over-functioning, or indulging in addictions that make everything else harder.

As Pema Chodron points out in Becoming Bodhisattvas, there’s an additional opportunity cost to these kinds of distractions: they cause us to lose touch with the capacity to connect to others, and to see the other phenomena around us fully and clearly–which is the true gift of a precious human birth.

As researcher has similarly pointed out in Unwinding Anxiety, allowing ourselves to spiral takes the prefrontal cortext (PFC) offline. The PFC is like the captain of your brain. When the captain leaves the bridge, it becomes harder for you to direct your awareness, and more likely that you’ll crash into something, literally or figuratively.

I’ve been using Dr. Brewer’s book as a textbook in one of my in-person meditation groups, and my students are loving it. I’d love to get your thoughts on whether you’d find it helpful for me to develop a similar book club offering here at In Tending. (See poll below.)

In the meantime, my partner strongly recommends the Unwinding Anxiety app, which acts like a research-backed addiction coach and meditation teacher, for those moments at 3am when “just follow the breath!” sounds impossible to pull off.

Note: If you chose “I still have questions,” please feel free to put them in the comments below!

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Tip #3: If noticing the “danger” in allowing thoughts to run unchecked doesn’t stop the flow of those thoughts, you can “try to forget those thoughts… just as a man with good eyes who did not want to see forms that had come within range of sight would either shut his eyes or look away.”

Translation: If breath or self-inquiry don’t do the trick, you still have choices—you can shift your awareness to something else.

Often in my classes, people will tell me that focusing on the breath, or attuning to certain parts of their bodies, increases their agitation. If you have asthma, then it makes sense that the breath may not feel like a safe or “neutral” place for you. Similarly, if you’ve recently lost a pregnancy or had major abdominal surgery, any mention of “the belly” may evoke similar feelings of pain or panic.

In cases like this, people feel stuck not only with their intense sensations, but also stuck with the belief that meditation does not work for them. Cue the second arrowing—which looks like either “Meditation sucks!” (an arrow directed outward at anyone who suggests it) or anditsallmyfault (directed inward, which can deepen the grooves of avoidance or addiction mentioned earlier).

For this set of folks, I offer this secret third thing: find another place to place your awareness besides the breath. You’ll know it’s the right one when it feels less like you’re being tossed in the ocean of intense body-mind-sensation-thoughts, and more like you’re able to sit, composed, on the shore.

Some options that have really supported folks my classes include:

Opening the eyes and shifting attention to the visual field. One option here is to simply allow the gaze to rest on a single neutral object, such as a tree or candle. If the mind feels too jumpy for this, you can slow things down by doing a quick color scan—noticing red, orange, yellow and so on in your visual field. This has the added benefit of bringing the prefrontal cortex back online, if you’ve recently been triggered, or are feeling disassociated. I find that after this, I’m more able to direct my focus with intention.

Shifting awareness to sounds in the environment. If your environment features more ambulance sirens than sound bowls, that’s fine. Sirens, espresso machines and leaf-blowers, as annoying as they are, can often be particularly useful objects for meditation, as they mirror the way intense thoughts appear in the mind: they arise out of seemingly nowhere, they peak in intensity, and eventually, without any effort on your part, they fall away.

Shifting awareness to the soles of the feet. Sometimes this will be contraindicated–if the feet are a site of pain, or if you cannot feel sensation in the feet. But in other cases, bringing awareness down to the feet can feel less activating and more grounding than tuning into the trunk of the body. Our soles can be exquisitely sensitive, and don’t require a lot of movement to give us feedback, so this can also be interesting enough that our minds are willing to become curious again, instead of contracted.

Walking very slowly, or lying down fully on the ground, while still directing awareness to where the body meets the ground. This can feel especially good if you’ve got a patch of grass or sand nearby.

These options are not so much practices on their own as ways to make all forms of practice accessible to all. If you’ve been on Team Meditation Sucks in the past, I invite you to try them and see if they shift something for you.

Tip #4: If bringing awareness to a physical anchor isn’t helping, you can try “giving attention to stilling the thought-formation of those thoughts.”

Translation: Tend the suffering, but drop the story.

My son is the kind of kid who will bounce off the pavement like a rubber ball after a fall, but who can be completely derailed by the wrong kind of jam on his PB&J. I’ve learned that when he’s having a sensory meltdown, more talking is not the answer.

Instead, I offer my lap. I bring awareness to his experience and mine. I breathe. As his body feels my enfolding presence, calm arrives, without me having to direct it. When I sense there is space, I help him make sense of what’s happening and bring closure to the experience by naming the feelings, offering empathy, and, if needed, suggesting something that might help—without getting stuck in the story of why the meltdown occurred in the first place.

This is the essence of practices like self-compassion meditation and RAIN meditation. We practice “stilling the thought-formation of those thoughts” not by repressing them, but by shifting the focus from thoughts of Who Is Bad And Who Is To Blame (the kind of thoughts that don’t serve us) to a place of calm and closure, through care.

Related resources:

You can learn more about these practices here:

Tip #5: Still finding it hard to work with the mind? The Buddha offers this startling advice: “Crush mind with mind.”

Translation: Bring in the capital-S Self to stand up to mental bullies.

When I think about this advice, I think about all of the stories my child and my students have told me about their struggles on the playground, or in the lunchroom, with difficult people who just will not leave them alone.

I imagine the Buddha here responding to his monks’ concerns about their difficult thoughts like an exasperated 80s dad: “Well, if he’s hitting you, then you hit him right back!” As a prince raised in a culture of warriors, it’s understandable that this might have been his go-to.

As for me? I think we’ve got more options now than we did 2,500 years ago for working with bullies.

In particular, I think back to an 8th-grade English class I taught in the Bronx, and a particularly tough teen we’ll call Jaylon. Jaylon had a lot going for him: college-level reading comprehension abilities, a great sense of humor, and an admirable sense of self-confidence for someone with such a patchy mustache. The other kids looked up to him; girls wanted to impress him, boys wanted to be him. One day, I heard Jaylon grumbling audibly in the back of the classroom about the level of work I was asking them to do, and about me in particular.

“He’s insulting your class!” one kid called out. The other kids’ heads swiveled around to see what I would do.

I just smiled. “Jaylon’s allowed to have whatever thoughts he wants about my class,” I said. “And I want to remind all of us that I’m an adult, not a kid, so Jaylon having a thought or saying a thing isn’t going to hurt me.”

The kids were stunned silent. It hadn’t occurred to them that I was not part of the same social hierarchy as Jaylon, that I too would not cower in the presence of his patchy mustache.

Immediately, the temperature in the classroom seemed to drop to a more comfortable level. Kids’ heads went back down to their work. Best of all, Jaylon gave me a big smile from the back of the room. He too felt better, knowing that his big feelings were safe with me—that they couldn’t hurt me.

A few days later, he asked if he could eat his lunch with me instead of the kids in the cafeteria. He needed the break, he said, from all of their drama.

Did I “crush” Jaylon? I don’t think I did. Did I “crush mind with mind”? I think this is the essence of the teaching.

If you haven’t spent much time mediating conflicts between inner or outer bullies, you might try the following:

Explore Internal Family Systems theory. This new take on an old idea—that we contain multitudes—invites us to cultivate the ability to broker peace between our inner “parts.” To get to know our inner wise adults, our testy inner teens, our meek followers of the mind—and to create a space where all feel safe and held, with a very firm hand. (Therapist helpfully shows us how to do this here.)

Re-visit the story of the Buddha’s original enlightenment and his battles with Mara, the ultimate playground bully. I discussed this recently with and . Both offered the perspective that connecting with Mother Nature as the ultimate wise adult and benefactor can bolster us when we’re not feeling so strong on our own.

To me, it makes all the sense in the world that Mother Nature would know intuitively what to do with every sensation, every hard thought, every arrow twanging our way. She’s already seen it all. She has known birth and loss, aging and illness, clouded awareness and clear blue sky.

And really, at the end of the day, that’s all mediation is, to me. It’s a time and a place to touch in with this larger of strength and resolve that is always available to us, right here, underneath our feet. And I think any way that takes us back to this place of deep wisdom, to what the sages called yoniso—the womb, the source, the root of awareness—is a good way to go.

Related resources:

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This is true for those of us who notice a heightened sensitivity to their inner feelings and outer environments — what some researchers call “orchids.”

For us orchids, mindfulness can be a huge boon — our meditation cushions are places where we can finally reduce the stimuli around us in order to hear ourselves think. Literally.

If you are just beginning to investigate the notion of sensory processing sensitivity for yourself, or the implications of mindfulness as part of a sensitive-system self-care routine, you’re in the right place.

In this interview with my fellow sensitive human , we talk about three common areas of struggle for sensitive people, and how she’s learned to bring healing awareness to each one.

In this discussion, we also talk about:

• Self-Worthy, Kate’s upcoming free online summit for sensitive humans on May 28-30, where I’ll be appearing on Day 3 (00:02:03)

• The benefits of mindfulness for sensitive humans—beyond just “feeling calm” (00:09:18):

• How mindfulness helps sensitive folks show up in a boundaried, authentic and consistent way in our communities (00:14:03)

• How to work with a loud inner critic (common for sensitive humans!) on the cushion (00:21:01)

• Why sensitive people need what Kate calls “saturation time” after deep inner work (00:33:47)

• The mindfulness books that have given us pause recently—in a good way (00:36:04)

Read on for some transcribed highlights from our conversation!

On Self-Worthy, Kate’s summit for sensitive humans

(00:02:03) Ryan: So you’re busy organizing things for all of us highly sensitive people, so that we can feel a little bit more comfy—even though we’re talking about not being very comfy today.

I’m actually really curious to hear what you’ve been learning from other people that you’ve been interviewing and in conversation with lately. You’ve been talking to all kinds of mental health professionals—and I’m so lucky to get to be among them—and learning from this team of people, this Ocean’s Eleven group of people that you pulled together for the Self-Worthy Summit. What have you been learning? What are some things like that you would be interested in sharing from those conversations? Because I haven’t had the opportunity in my recent travels to catch up with all of them.

Kate: I mean, where do I even start? The incredible thing is how they intersect, like a a weaving. One touches on something that the other one goes deeper into. One of the speakers called it a symphony and I was like, “Yes!”

Ryan: Yes! It really feels that way! That’s how it feels! We all have a role to play!

Kate: They’re like three stanzas!

Ryan: Yeah! And do you find that they’re kind of organizing along the three themes that you have?

Kate: Yeah! … So some people in Day One (Beliefs) are really talking about their experience of learning about high sensitivity, and how they felt suddenly like everything fell into place.

Some people are talking about the cultural conditioning, from different angles and different perspectives, that impacts us, and impacts us more as highly sensitive people.

Some are breaking it down a little more, into being a highly sensitive person who is also a caretaker, or a people pleaser who tends to abandon their own needs, or even forget that they have needs.

So it’s tight, but it’s broad in a way. It goes deep, but they’re very aligned with each other. And I think if you chose any of those five [Day One speakers]… you would get a picture of of what it is like to step into the belief that it’s not our fault. Being highly sensitive is a trait that’s innate. And then culture has dumped on us all these expectations that make it really hard to accept ourselves.So that even starts the transformation of being able to accept ourselves a little more, right?

And then on Day Two (Body), we drop into the body. I love the way embodiment shows up from in different perspectives, from different speakers… Day Two is about bringing it into your nervous system. Through creativity, through forest therapy—which is lovely. And then we have a couple yoga teachers doing very simple things to connect and come home to your body and your emotional wealth.

Finally, on Day Three (Belonging), continuing that to: “How do I take this with me and carry it forward?” So much of that is about belonging. So much of that is, “How do I maintain the sense of belonging that I discovered in this summit and bring it with me?”

I loved the way you infused mindfulness and sensitivity on Day Three. It bridges that gap between practice—which we really delve into in Day Two—and going forward with belonging. Because mindfulness can be such an amazing tool. If we feel like we “don’t have time,” there’s always something we can do.

So, I’d love to ask you a question about that.

Beyond calm: the benefits of mindfulness for sensitive humans

(00:09:18)

Kate: What inspired you to teach the practices that you did [for the upcoming Self-Worthy Summit], and to go a little deeper into the roots of mindfulness?

Ryan: I think that it’s important to talk about this intersection of mindfulness and high sensitivity because we know that people who are extra sensitive, we can benefit so much from all kinds of interventions. Research has shown that people who are highly sensitive are more negatively impacted in environments that are challenging, and they’re also more able to rebound and be resilient, and to really be healed, by good interventions.

I have found that to be true of myself, in that I think that mindfulness has had potentially a disproportionate positive impact for me as a sensitive person, as I’ve practiced it. Other people might not experience those benefits.

But, it is also challenging, for reasons that I talk about, in the small talk that I’ve given for your summit.

For example, a deeply internalized, loud inner critic, that comes from our socialization, is one of those things that we might meet as highly sensitive people.

The other piece is just that our body sensations that we’re supposed to be tracking through traditional methods, like body scans, or noticing the breath—they can be really loud. And for those of us that also struggle with chronic pain, that’s not necessarily always going to be a calming experience.

And so mindfulness has been a really positive experience for me, and I’ve also had to really persevere through a lot of challenges.

I think that what has really helped me, and what I want to offer, is knowing that what mindfulness offers is so much more than just an experience of calm.

I think calm is wonderful, and I think that it’s a very effective marketing strategy for mindfulness and mindfulness adjacent offerings. But I think promises of calm really mislead people—and particularly highly sensitive people—to think that if they don’t feel calm when they’re exploring mindfulness for the first time, that there’s something wrong with them.

We’ve already gotten messages all throughout our lives that there’s something wrong with us, if we’re engaging with this thing that’s designed for the general population and it doesn’t feel good to us.

Kate: We’re not “doing it right!”

Ryan: Yes. Whereas actually, we need more tailored guidance. We need guidance that’s very aware of nervous system diversity, and that makes space for that.

So I think that your [Self-Worthy Summit] framework is really powerful, because what I’ve experienced, and what I’ve articulated in my space, is that the point—and I know that with mindfulness, we may also question whether there should be a point, but let’s just say, the thing that has motivated me to stick with mindfulness—is not: You’re going to feel calm. I think that’s not responsible advertising. My “sales pitch” is: You’re going to experience some inner clarity.

I think that what you’ve described, in terms of really understanding yourself better as a sensitive person, understanding how your nervous system works, understanding that this is a trait, that this is not a flaw—I think that that comes as part of cultivating inner clarity.

I think getting to know yourself better is more important than feeling “calm,” and being “nice,” and being pleasant, and whatever anybody else wants you to be. I think getting to know yourself fully is more important than squishing yourself into yet another box.

And so I will say mindfulness is something that has allowed me to just get to know myself, and get to know the experience of having an inner critic arise, and tell me “I’m doing it wrong,” or having a real pain arise in my body, and learning how to work with that in ways that are kind and trauma-informed, rather than forcing myself to push through—which is a very common sensitive person experience.

How mindfulness helps sensitive folks show up in community

(00:14:03)

Ryan: I would say that the other piece is that [mindfulness] helps us to show up in community. To really stand in our truth and to say, “This is how my nervous system works. This is what I need. This is how I am. This is how I can best contribute.”

Mindfulness allows us to show up to community differently, and to soften some of those patterns that you talked about. To soften patterns of people pleasing, of just trying to be whatever anybody needs us to be, and instead saying “This is what I need in order to show up as my best self—and that may not be what you need from me. But that’s how I’m choosing to show up.” I think mindfulness allows us to establish that base within ourselves, and then move forward from there.

And I think it helps too, with the piece that you mentioned, about being a caretaker in some way. Which I think of as a subset of people pleasers. Like, I don’t necessarily feel as though I need to be pleasing in every context, but we if we don’t have a plan for dinner, then please trust and believe I am stepping in, and probably over-functioning, to make sure that the people in my family get fed. I think that that is a form of people pleasing, but it’s also just about my people, and about pleasing myself.

I think that being very, very attuned to a family environment—or work environment, if you’re a helping professional, which so many of us sensitive people find ourselves becoming—there can be such attunement to what the environment needs from us that we can lose touch with our inner sensations, with our needs. I think that over time, this erodes our ability to show up in a regulated way.

And so what I end up noticing about myself, and what I’ve read in the literature about highly sensitive people, is that we sort of oscillate. We can be these almost psychically attuned, compassionate, empathic, present, nourishing humans to be around. And then, when we get depleted, because we’re so attuned to the other person that we’ve lost touch with I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I need to go to the bathroom, then all of a sudden, there’s a switch that flips, and all of a sudden, we’re dysregulated. We’re having a sensory meltdown. We are more irritable.

Kate. There’s rage, even. Burnout.

Ryan: Yes! Rage can be a part of it. Especially for those of us that are sensitive and also may have an additional element of neurodivergence, right? If you have ADHD, if you are on the autism spectrum, those can also be a really confusing part of the caregiving experience. Like, “I love these people so much—so why am I suddenly in a murderous rage?”

When something doesn’t feel right, a lot of times, it’s because we’ve just lost touch with that interoceptive awareness of our own needs. We’re well-intentioned, but we’re not necessarily well-regulated. We’re not necessarily claiming the right to take care of ourselves.

And I’ve experienced that in myself—that sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde shift. It’s eroded trust with the people for whom I care. And I don’t like that.

So truly—and I wrote a note about this the other day—the thing that keeps me on my cushion, and that keeps me accountable for my mindfulness practice, is not anything fancy. It’s not even necessarily aspirational. It’s just preventative care for my relationships. It’s helping me be more consistent, and less of a jerk to the people that I love the most.

And unfortunately that means being less of a jerk to myself—and you have articulated what a puzzle that is. How hard it is sometimes to hear, “Put on your oxygen mask first!” It’s really hard to figure out exactly where to start, in this reciprocal sort of call-and-response that we have, with our loved ones and our own needs. But I think that mindfulness offers a space for this.

The way that I describe it is being like a sit spot. I just was at the beach, and there, it’s just about getting out of the water, and toweling yourself off, and finding a place to sit and just watch for a little bit. To see: What’s happening? What’s true? Without there being a should. As in: “You should take better care of yourself. You should be more attuned.”

It’s just coming back and seeing “Well, those are some shoulds that exist—but what is actually happening? And can I just be with that?” And from that place, can I make a choice, that isn’t just my normal habitual reaction that I take?

I think that’s so powerful for highly sensitive people. Because we certainly don’t get that education from our culture. We aren’t taught how to take a break, to bring awareness to the situation, to reassess with self-compassion instead of criticism and should-ing, and then assessing where our energy needs to be.

Does all of that lead to calm? Sometimes. Does that lead to me sometimes saying, “What I need is to go in my bedroom and lock the door, and all y’all need to figure it out for the next couple of hours”? Sometimes that is where it leads.

So I would just really encourage us to release calm as the reason, or the end goal, or what we’re “supposed to be” experiencing. Because I think that the reality is much richer, and it’s more respectful of our interior landscapes when [our mindfulness practice] lets them be wild, and lets the tide be wherever it is, and it lets there be storms, and it lets there be tranquil days. When it just respects that we’re part of the landscapes that we inhabit, and we are multifaceted.

So that’s also just something that I talk about in the meditation. It’s just inviting people to come back to that connection. As you said, that connection with the earth feels really, really important. And it feels like where belonging lives for me. It’s just saying, “If the earth can have her seasons, why can’t I have my seasons? If the earth can have storms, why can’t I have storms? f the earth has seasons of rest and fallowness, why do I always have to be going? That doesn’t seem right.”

How to work with a loud inner critic on the cushion

(00:21:01)

Ryan: Last time we chatted, you gave me really good advice on self-compassion—and I have another FAQ on this that I get. I’m really curious to hear from you as an experienced teacher.

What do you do when you are bringing awareness to your patterns, and it’s hard to call in compassion for yourself? Like, if your inner critic is incredibly loud, and even as you’re finding your sit spot and seeing the sort of habit loops that you move through—how you get hooked, how you forget your body or your needs—it sounds like, “Here I am again, melting down. I didn’t take my break soon enough!”

I ask because I notice that as you’re learning about yourself as a highly sensitive person, I notice in some of the people that are doing this work that there’s a lot of clarity, and there’s not a lot of compassion.

Within mindfulness, we talk about clarity and compassion needing to be like two wings of a bird. Sometimes it feels like the clarity wing starts developing, and it’s like this huge muscle, and then the compassion wing is tiny. It’s not quite keeping up. And so I find that it’s a stumbling block. It’s hard for people to really take flight and find that sense of belonging, if they don’t have a lot of experience with giving themselves compassion for the things they notice. Like, “Yes, you do struggle when you don’t take a break—and, sometimes you won’t know when it’s time to take a break until it’s too late.”

How do you talk to yourself then, instead of saying, “Well, I’m just back on my bullshit, and I’m just irredeemable as a person?” And, how do you support other people with a loud inner critic, as they’re learning new patterns, to not be so hard on themselves, if that re-parenting and re-learning is hard?

Kate: The two wings of awareness—that is one of my favorite things about mindfulness. Awareness is not just clarity. Awareness is not just I know these things. I unpacked all this in therapy. I know my parents abandoned me. I know that I developed this coping mechanism of people pleasing from a place of survival and developmental trauma. Or whatever.

That’s the start. That’s Day One.

Day Two is grounding in your nervous system. It’s not about being calm. It’s about being regulated. And so much of that is, Let me give myself a hug right now. I am not alone—I’m one of one drop in an ocean of awareness. I am not alone—even in this particular feeling thought trait or need. I’m not alone—lots of other people have a really mean inner critic.

It’s also about, like, the most basic self-compassion stuff. Like, “What would your best friend say to you?” Or, “What would I say to my best friend? If they were vocalizing this inner critic, if they were actually saying these words to themselves—what would I say to them?” Or, “What would I say to my child? How could I be so cruel to someone I love?” And it takes practice.

And, maybe, rage. Resentment. A strong awareness. An unpacking. Realizing that, “Oh. This is generational. This is cultural. This isn’t just me. There is pain involved, and I can be upset about it.”

—you’ve got to listen to her talk. She’s a feminist. She speaks from this place of really spelling out that dynamic. How it’s the systems, many systems, that have created this, and we can be cycle breakers. How it’s hard, how there’s pain there, and I know I’m not gonna be calm. We can can get mad about it first.

But just remembering we’re not alone, I think, is the most essential part.

And when it comes to compassion, sometimes we have to just think about a little tiny baby—whether we’re thinking about compassion for others or for ourselves. Like, we’re not gonna be mean to a baby, right?

Like this puppy [in the background in Kate’s house]. The puppy’s barking, he’s being a pain in the ass, but I’m not criticizing him.

Ryan: He’s a baby, and he’s doing what babies do.

Kate: And that’s where we learned it. We learned it when we were babies. So this harshness, it’s understandable—and it really could take a step back.

That kindness balances out the clarity, like you said. It balances out the Oh my god, I’ve suddenly been awakened to all of this stuff that makes me really agitated. I can also be kind to myself. I can breathe. I can take it slow. I can take breaks.

This is why I think the nervous system regulation part of Day Two is so important in the summit. Because if we’re dysregulated, and we’re still not letting ourselves rest—like, say we go straight from people pleasing to being angry at the systems that are keeping us small—that’s a lot to take in for our nervous systems. If we go right into learning, learning, learning, and we don’t give ourselves a break of breathing and being, it’s actually harder to learn.

We need the rest to our nervous systems. We need the rest in order to embody and absorb and assimilate all that we’re taking in. So that pause, that spaciousness, literally letting it all simmer, is the best thing we can do after having all that clarity kind of awaken for us.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m reading something really awakening, really opening my eyes, I sometimes just fall asleep. Or if I’m listening to something that’s very heady, I’ll just doze off. And yes, I’m tired. You know my life is too full. But also, I need that in order to assimilate it—in order to let it become part of me. If I go straight from learning it to teaching it, or from learning it to trying to apply it in my life, it’s inauthentic. But not if I rest back and allow it to kind of wash through me.

Why sensitive people need “saturation time”

(00:33:47)

Kate: You know the RAIN protocol, right? I added an S. For satiate. Just letting it absorb. If you’re standing in the rain, just allowing it.

Ryan: Saturating, too.

Kate: Saturate! That’s the word. That’s what I added.

Ryan: I mean, I love the word satiate too.

Kate: Simmer, saturate…

Ryan: Soak it in… Man, all of these are so good.

So just saying back to you what I’m hearing from a mindfulness perspective, it sounds like, if we’re experiencing self-blame—Why am I not better? Why am I not fixing myself faster? Why am I still doing this?—it’s first Recognizing: Oh, this is self-criticism.

Acknowledging or allowing: Oh, my inner critic is here. These critical thoughts are here.

Investigating: When my inner critic is here, these are the embodied cues that let me know that I’m sort of getting possessed, instead of being my best self. I’m feeling some sort of tightness.

Then, Nurturing, like you said. Bringing in self-compassion. Wait, other people feel this too. Wait, this is structural. This is not my fault.

And then: Soothing and Saturating. Whoa, this whole thing is a new understanding for me, a new way of relating to that inner critic.

This, rather than cringing and doing whatever it tells us to do, and believing that it’s real, or even believing that other people think this about us, and treating them accordingly.

What you’re describing is profound. Profound cycle-breaking and unlearning.

And like you said, yes to mindfulness, but also like, yes to a good nap after that.

The mindfulness books that have given us pause—in a good way

(00:36:04)

Ryan: I have definitely experienced this recently in engaging with some new cycle-breaking material.

I’ve been reading Unwinding Anxiety by , where he talks about bringing awareness to habit loops.

I’ve been reading the book Are You Mad At Me? by , that’s about people pleasing—and she brings in a lot of mindfulness.

And with both of those, I’m like, “Yes! I have needed to nap so much more, as I allow this to saturate my being.”

Kate: Have you read ’s book You Belong?

Ryan: I haven’t, though I really admire her work.

Kate: I would add that to your TBR [to be read pile].

Ryan: I’m always looking for a TBR. Let’s put it in the footnotes.

What if there was nothing wrong with you?

(00:37:31)

Kate: And [after the pause], we need that moment of saying, “What would it be like if there’s nothing wrong with me? What does that feel like in my nervous system?”

Ryan: I think my inner critic has a lot of clap-backs to that.

Kate: It’s hard.

It also brings up the question of compassion towards those who we dislike or we think are actively harming this world, or us.

How do you have compassion?

Ryan: Interestingly, I interviewed recently, who just wrote a book about basic goodness, and he talks about that. About what it’s like to extend this notion that we’re all good inside, that we’re all basically good. That there’s something inside of every person that is not confused, that is not wishing to harm.

He said he gets a lot of questions about world leaders. And he shared the insight that he thinks that people are too afraid to ask about themselves: What about this unlovable part of me? And so they ask questions about the traits of people that are maybe agreed-upon targets for a lot of people, or agreed-upon examples of this or that particularly unlovable trait. What about them?

It was interesting to hear him say that people don’t usually own up to the fact that they might be asking about themselves. But he had some really thoughtful answers, about that. So I would add that to the TBR pile, too. The book is called You Are Good, You Are Enough.

And it’s a bold claim, right? It’s a really bold claim to make, that we’re all basically good. It tacks against thousands of years of religious tradition, depending on where that tradition comes from. So it sounds sweet, until you start thinking, Hmm, that’s actually pretty radical, to think that.

So I’m so grateful for the work of folks like Lodro, and for Tara Brach, who I know has been a big influence for us both in just inviting us into that hypothetical—what if there was nothing wrong with me?—and then noticing our reactivity to that. Like, that can be the practice.

It’s not calming. But it brings clarity. And it brings compassion, at the same time.

Your turn: Do you identify as “sensitive”? How does that impact how you show up in your relationships and community?

Leave a comment

More about the Selfworthy Summit, brought to you by Kate Lynch of :

As Kate shared above, she’s creating a free three-day online summit for highly sensitive people (HSPs), to support us all in learning about how to work with, not against, our nervous systems.

Here’s us on IG, talking briefly about why that’s such a needed discussion these days:

Day One focuses on Belief—and in particular, revising the way we think about ourselves and our sensitivty. The Day One lineup includes the following speakers and topics:

• : The Forces That Drive Sensitive Women to Burnout

• Angelique Foye-Fletcher: When You’ve Been Carrying Too Much for Too Long

• Bill Allen: How Highly Sensitive Men Can End Cycles of Self-Erasure

• : How Sensitive People Can Harness the Healing Power of Their True Story

• : Unshakable Self-Worth Through Your Sensitive Archetypes

Day Two focuses on Body—and in particular, allowing the information from Day One to “saturate” our being, as Kate describes above. This day also invites burned-out sensitive folks to notice in our bodies when we’re becoming overwhelmed, resentful or otherwise in need of more support. The lineup for Day Two includes:

• : Embrace The Boundaries You Need As A HSP

• Tara Jackson: Embodying Your Creative Power as an HSP

• Suzan Joy Wells: Come Home: A Body-Led Path to Self-Worth

• Erika Belanger: Trust Yourself No Matter What Emotions Arise

• : Nature, the Missing Piece for HSPs

My talk will be appearing on Day Three, which focuses on the theme of Belonging—and in particular, learning how to belong inside of your sensitive body, rather than silencing its needs and cues in order to “fit in.” I’ll be speaking on Mindfulness for Sensitive Humans, but with the caveat that the information and practices I offer are not meant to add yet another aspirational “should” to your life—but to lead you back to your body, to your best self, and to the Earth we all call home.

The Day Three lineup also includes:

• Von Lob: Stop Performing and Come Home to Yourself

• Dr. Lana Holmes: Why Adopt an Intersectional Lens as HSP?

• : Finding Meaningful Work as an HSP

• Leah Tarleton of : Tending Your Inner Landscape for Holistic Wellbeing

You can sign up for this free summit using the button below!

Register for the Selfworthy Summit

This post contains replay materials for a workshop I offered to In Tending community members recently called Mindful Communication.

In this workshop, we discussed the kinds of situations in which communication can become challenging, particularly in our families.

For example, we may have a partner who is ill or otherwise indisposed, and yet we need connection, or rest, or both. How to communicate this tactfully without triggering defensiveness?

We may be in a season in which we are deeply craving spaciousness and quiet, and yet we recognize that certain people in our lives have a need to be celebrated, or to gather together in celebration of others. How do we find a workable compromise?

Or, we may be co-parenting with someone post-separation, and figuring out how to negotiate shared expectations and schedules. How to do so diplomatically?

These are the kinds of everyday caregiving scenarios I rarely see discussed in mindfulness spaces. This is why In Tending exists.

Cooking our raw potatoes

Often, in situations in which we are interested in employing mindful communication, a rupture — or many ruptures — have already occurred. There’s a swirl of stories, emotions, and experiences of discomfort to navigate. Often, we’ve already tried our usual moves. We are struggling to stay regulated regardless, to stay within our integrity—but it’s hard.

In cases like this, we discussed an earthy simile that Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh uses to describe processing difficult feelings, and knowing when they’re ready to expressed to others:

It’s like cooking potatoes.

As Thich Nhat Hanh writes in Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames:

Your anger is a kind of potato, and you cannot eat a raw potato. Mindfulness is like the fire cooking the potatoes of anger… Anger is there, but it is being taken care of.

In this workshop, we walk through the steps of cooking the raw potatoes of our hard emotions—anger, fear, sadness, and other harbingers of unmet needs—so that the conversations we have can become a source of nourishment for our relationships, rather than a projectile that we lob at someone’s head.

Finding clarity through samatha-vipassana practice

This practice is like filling the cooking pot with water and setting it on the stove. When we take our posture, settle our bodies and gather our minds, we create a container for the contents of our minds to settle and to be contained within. As we sit, we see down through the clear water to the bottom of things. Not just our interpretations, but what can be directly experienced through the senses.

(Note: If you missed our workshop on how to engage in this basic mindfulness practice, you can access the replay here. You can also get a taste of this technique using this free guided meditation.)

Bringing warmth to the process through heart-based meditation practices

Inside the cold, clear water of this pot, our feelings, if they are especially raw, may feel solid as rocks. Inedible. Hard to penetrate. So from here, we can start to bring in a little warmth, in the form of heart-centered or compassionate mindfulness practices.

So, for example, we might work with RAIN meditation—a method in which we practice Recognizing, Acknowledging, Investigating and Nurturing our feelings.

We may engage in self-compassion practice to better discern our needs, asking ourselves, “What hurts?”

We may practice loving-kindness meditation, acknowledging that just like us, all beings want to be safe, happy and free.

When we bring in this kind of warmth on the cushion, we move from containing to cooking. Something is actually happening inside of the pot. It’s not just a settling, it’s actually a transformation of what’s inside.

(Note: If you missed our introductory workshop on these heart-centered practices, you can access the replay here. You can also try this free guided RAIN meditation here.)

Making an offering

When we are clear on the observations, feelings and needs associated with our difficult situation, then we know we’re ready to pull them out of the proverbial pot, and place our requests for others on the table.

And it may sound odd, to think of mindful communication as making an offering out of hard feelings like fear, anger or sadness. But when we invite others to witness our truth and collaborate in solutions with us, we are offering them a path back to connection. We are setting the table for a shared experience of empathy. We are inviting those with whom we are in relationship to nourish and be nourished by our ability to see and name what is, with both clarity and compassion.

This workshop aims to support you in doing just that.

Paid subscribers here at In Tending can scroll down now to access these workshop materials virtually below.

These materials allow you to do the following:

• Watch the video and follow along with the exercises. (This is a great option for folks who may wish to share this practice with a loved one who can also benefit.)

• Listen to the audio, akin to a podcast, and do the same. (Great for laundry folding marathons and those with long commutes, in my experience.)

• Read the transcript at your own pace. (Sure beats the germ-ridden magazines at the doctor’s office.)

Workshop highlights

Each of our circles follows a fairly consistent structure.

• We check in.

• We talk a bit about what we’re all experiencing, and how mindfulness can support our needs and intentions at this time.

• We meditate. I offer some gentle guidance. You get to go inward.

• There’s time for Q&A and sharing of insights.

This last part of our gatherings always offers us a great chance to talk about where mindfulness practice gets hard or complicated, particularly for us as parents/caregivers. I find that this portion of our gatherings is sometimes just as important and just as fruitful as any words I have prepared beforehand.

During the Q+A/discussion for this workshop, we talked about:

• How observing difficult caregiving scenarios as if you're behind a camera, rather than inside of the action, can reveal details and perspectives we may not have considered before

• How sometimes, when we’re trying to keep everything on the outside together as caregivers, it can be very easy to lose contact with our inner feelings and needs—and how choosing a regular meditation practice can be preventative medicine for our relationships, by preventing the burnout and blowups that can result

• How to remain in a collaborative place together, even if you know your conversation partner will not be able to meet 100% of your needs

Don’t have a paid subscription? You can click here to view your options, and upgrade to unlock the workshop materials below.

This workshop series is available for subscribers at all levels—monthly, annual, or those in the Mentorship Program.

That said, I’ll put in a plug for the Mentorship Program as being perhaps the best deal, because it also gives you:

• A 1:1 personalized support session from me. We can use this session to help you figure out exactly how to put these insights into practice in your unique setting, in ways that work for your unique body and mind. No more fussing around with meditation apps, no more buying self-help books only to find your eyes glazing over when it comes to doing the practices, no more wondering if you’re “doing it wrong” or you’re “just bad at this.” Just actual human connection and coaching from someone who understands how hard it is to start and sustain a meditation practice amidst a busy life, and ongoing support and accountability that meets you right where you are.

• An all-access pass to all future community workshops like this + all of our future expert-led workshops in 2026. You can view the full spring schedule here and the workshop archive here.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

In the meantime, may this workshop help you move closer to both personal and collective liberation. And we hope to see you at the next one!

Warmly,

Ryan

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For some people, Mother’s Day is just a nice opportunity to acknowledge care, or be acknowledged for caring.

But for others, it’s complicated.

For example:

• When we’re experiencing infertility, pregnancy loss, or other forms of uncertainty along the path to family building, Mother’s Day can feel incredibly charged.

• When we already know we won’t have kids of our own, biological or otherwise, it can be a day of grief, or it can be a day of appreciation. Either way: complicated.

• When we’re in the role of a step-parent, or have a step-parent in our lives, this day can feel awkward.

• Obviously, having a difficult relationship with your own mother can be really hard on Mother’s Day.

• Having a difficult relationship with your mother-in-law, if you’re partnered, can also complicate matters.

• Being estranged from your mother—or estranged from other family members around her—can complicate the day.

• It can feel challenging when we’re torn between two different mother figures on the same day. So people who have, for example, a biological parent and an adoptive parent who are both in their lives, or people who have two mothers in a queer family setup.

• Navigating a gender transition can be challenging at this time of year—either because it changes the way that we’re were seen by the outside world in relationship to our own parenting identity, or because our own parents are currently unable to affirm us in this identity.

If one or more of these bullet points hits home for you—my friend and I created this workshop for you.

Folks who signed up for this workshop, and/or who are participating in the Mentorship program here at In Tending, can scroll down now to access these workshop materials virtually below, which allow you to do the following:

• Watch the video and follow along with the exercises.

• Listen to the audio, akin to a podcast, and do the same.

• Read the transcript at your own pace.

In this 90-minute video session, you’ll be guided to:

• Set intentions for how this workshop can support you in this season

• Consider what “complicated” means for you — and what uncomplicated sources of joy exist alongside that

• Engage in a grounding loving-kindness meditation, tailored to the day

• Learn other tools for self-compassion, drawing on mind-body frameworks developed by teachers like Phillip Moffitt and researchers like Kristin Neff

• Create writing and/or art to express our authentic emotions about mothers and motherhood, using a poem by Ellen Bass as inspiration

• Imagine everyday ritual spaces and routines to hold, and to be held in, what feels heavy in this season

The big both/and

It can sometimes feel unfair that we have to do compassionate things like this for ourselves, when we really wanted a different caring person to care for us. We want to affirm to all who are reading that we are all are worthy of care.

And, it’s also empowering to say, “I’m not going to wait around for that person to offer care to me. I will nurture myself. I don’t need permission to do that. I will protect myself. I don’t need permission to do that. I will provide what I need for flourishing. I don’t need permission to do that. And I can ask myself how I want to grow and contribute to the collective, rather than having reductive love-marriage-baby-carriage scripts of initiation and growth imposed on me that don’t fit me or my situation. Especially by a patriarchal culture that doesn’t ultimately care about whether I reach my full human potential or not.”

If this big both/and resonates with you, know that this workshop aims to empower you to do all of the above.

Please also know that you’re also in good company, in this workshop and in this community. We hear you. We see you. Because we are you.

We’re looking forward to hearing how this goes for you in the comments.

❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹

This workshop is available for all paid subscribers, at all levels.

If you don’t have a subscription to In Tending yet, now’s a great time to grab one, as I’m running a rare flash sale:

• 20% off annual subscriptions

• Name-your-own-price Mentorship Level subscriptions

(Note: Both sales expire on Monday 5/11.)

An annual membership gets you:

• 🧶Access to all 60-min caregiver support circles. The next one is coming up on May 12 at 12pm-1pm EST on Zoom. The topic is Mindful Communication. Paid subscribers will find the link in the chat here.

• Access to replays and guided meditation materials from these circles, which you can find here in Workshops.

• Early access and discount codes for all 90-min expert-led workshops.

• The opportunity to submit questions to care experts appearing in the In Tending interview series.

• Other goodies as I get them to give, i.e. themed playlists, curated reading recommendations, and more.

Upgrade to a paid membership at 20% off

Give this as a gift to someone you love

A Mentorship program subscription gets you all of the above, plus:

• An all-access pass to all workshops in 2026, including those in the archive ($125 value) This includes workshops on Coming Home to the Body, Re-Imagining Intimacy, Re-Claiming Our Power, Clearing Space for Grief, and Tending Your Spiritual Truth.

• A 1:1 personalized support session from me ($175 value). We can use this time to co-create trauma-informed mindfulness and writing practices that are just for you. No more trying to figure it out out on your own based on books written by people who don’t look or live like you. No more trying apps and then falling off when life gets busy. No more wondering if you’re just “doing it wrong” or not cut out for this kind of thing. Just real human support for your practice, from a trauma-informed meditation teacher who Gets It.

How to access the name-your-own price option for Mentorship Level subscriptions:

1. Go to https://ryanroseweaver.substack.com/subscribe

2. Where you see the cursor appear under Mentorship Member, enter any price between $75-300.

Upgrade to a Mentorship subscription

Regardless of which option you choose, may this workshop be of benefit to you, on your path to personal and collective liberation. And we hope to see you at the next one!

Warmly,

Ryan + Lisa

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These offerings include:

🌀Our May 6 online workshop on Marking Complicated Mother’s Day

🧶 Our May 12 paid-subscriber circle on Mindful Communication

🍄 IRL offerings here in Central Mass in June and beyond (!!)

May these be of benefit to you as we welcome in this season of warmer weather, here in the Northern Hemisphere, and the bounty it has to bring.

Subscribe now

🌀For Mentorship members and a la carte ticket-holders: Our May expert-led workshop is coming up this Wednesday 5/6 at 12pm-1:30pm EST (11am CST/10am MST/9am PST)

The topic will be Marking Complicated Mother’s Day: Tools for Self Compassion.

About this workshop:

Parents and caregivers deserve a space to mark Mother’s Day in the way that feels authentic for us–especially if it’s complicated. Together, we will talk about what it means if we do not neatly fit into the boxes prescribed for women and femmes on this day. We will share our stories of struggle, estrangement, loss and everyday awkwardness. We will learn how to harness the power of both fierce and tender self-compassion practices to bring healing awareness to what feels hard about this day.

About our guest expert for this workshop:

Lisa Sibbett (she/her) is a career educator, proud auntie, and longtime meditator. She lives on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish people (Seattle, WA). Lisa is the founder of The Auntie Bulletin, a newsletter and community for people who offer meaningful care to children who are not their biological kids – also known as alloparents. Lisa’s readership includes extended biological family members, child-free chosen family members, grandparents, foster parents, godparents, step-parents, and educators, who spend significant amounts of time helping out with other people’s kids. It also includes people who have decided, after long and difficult family-building journeys, to embrace a different kind of caregiving path.

Read my interview with Lisa about why Mother’s Day is so complicated here.

During our 90 minutes together, we will:

• Set intentions for our time together and share how they relate to our current caregiving contexts

• Engage in guided, grounding, beginner-friendly meditation techniques

• Participate in expert-led interactive discussions

• Write, compose, draw or otherwise integrate the insights from our session through creative meaning-making practices

• Share our insights in community with other participants that really Get It

To access all expert-led workshops at In Tending, you can:

• Book them a la carte via Humanitix (link here)

• Bring a friend or get 50% off a single ticket if you’re a paid subscriber to In Tending — you’ll find discount codes for each workshop just past the paywall

• Get all of these for free with a Mentorship Level subscription, which functions like a 2026 season pass for all workshops, including those already in the archive, and comes with a 1:1 personalized support session from me, to help you figure out how to apply the insights from our workshop(s) together to your unique caregiving context

No prior writing or meditation experience is needed for these workshops. Recordings will be available for those who can’t join us in person.

Note: I’ve heard from folks in this community that it can be hard to find their workshop info in their inboxes. So, I’ll be marking events, emails and chat threads related to our expert-led workshops and other Mentorship level content with this emoji (🌀), in honor of the concept of opanayiko in Buddhist philosophy, which translates to “leading ever inwards toward the source.” Our goal is to create workshops with this quality—the ability to help you deepen your practice through longer meditation sessions, opportunities to write and share, and more meaningful connections with other wisdom-holders in this community.

You can read more about how the concept of opanyiko connects to some of the larger frameworks of meditation + writing practice you’ll encounter in In Tending workshops here.

🧶 For all paid subscribers: Our May circle is coming up on Tuesday 5/12 at 12pm-1pm EST!

The topic will be Mindful Communication: Navigating Challenging Conversations with Clarity and Compassion (Special Mother’s Day Edition!).

During our hour together, we will:

• Share the joys and hardships of our cargiving contexts

• Engage in guided discussion + beginner-friendly meditation

• Share insights and questions that arise in practice

• Have time to finish our coffee/lunch, maybe for the first time that week

To access our monthly circles, you can:

• Upgrade to a paid subscription, which amounts to a $7.50 monthly donation or a $75 annual donation, to support these monthly circles

• Scroll down if you’re already a paid subscriber — the Zoom registration links are just past the paywall

• Sign up to receive the link via this form — which offers other low-to-no-cost options for entry

Recordings will be made available here for those who can’t join us in person, but still want to engage in guided meditation and hear from other caregivers who Get It.

For future reference, I’ll be marking all events, emails and chat threads with paid-subscriber community info with this emoji (🧶), a nod to the Korean concept of in yeon, the red thread that connects us all. You can read more about that here.

🍄 For readers based in New England, or traveling through this summer: Come sit next to us at the Yoga Nook in Bolton, MA!

Upcoming classes in Central Mass

Sunday, 6/7 @ 11:15am EST

Sunday 7/5 @ 11:15am EST

Sunday 8/2 @ 11:15am EST

Sunday 9/6 @ 11:15am EST

All classes will be held in-studio. The drop-in rate for single classes at the Yoga Nook is $20. You can book them a la carte by visiting the schedule here. That said, you can save a bit on each one by booking a multi-class package here.

Note: For future reference. I’ll be marking events, emails and chat threads with in-person community info with this emoji (🍄) in a nod to the notion of the mycelial web. You can read more about this concept here.

P.S. Catch me at the Self-Worthy Summit May 28-30—a free event for highly sensitive humans

My friend of is pulling together a three-day slate of talented speakers who will be speaking to the experience of being a highly sensitive person, or “orchid.” It’s free of charge (for a limited time). Check out this awesome lineup! (My work will be featured on Day 3.)

Your turn: What seeds (literal or symbolic) are you planting this spring? I’d love to hear more!

Leave a comment

Paid subscribers, keep scrolling for Zoom links and discount codes. Free subscribers, you can upgrade to any paid subscription tier to see what’s past the paywall by clicking here.

Read more

Here at In Tending, we talk honestly about the things that make parenthood hard, from toddler tantrums over sippy cups to bigger questions about the world we’re handing to our young adults. We also talk a lot about reparenting ourselves, if we did not receive the mothering we needed as children. When Mother’s Day rolls around, with its pithy slogans splashed across colorful Hallmark cards—You’re the perfect mom, Mom!—it can feel like those of us in the Complicated Mother’s Day Club are being gaslighted.

Lisa Sibbett talks in her space, , about what it’s like to offer meaningful care to children, but not have one’s own biological kids. When you’re in this group (which I was, for many years, before having my son), you can feel illegible. Both Lisa and I have also experienced fertility struggles and pregnancy loss, which can add to the complicated-ness of this day.

Last year, I was thrilled when Lisa suggested we get together to talk about the results of her readers’ survey on this topic, in which Aunties told story after story about why Mother’s Day feels especially fraught for them. In addition to the complications above (infertility, pregnancy loss, being child-free not by choice), people also named navigating tension with in-laws, step-family bonds, estrangement, queer family dynamics and gender transitions as major stressors on this day.

This year, we’ve crafted a workshop designed to hold the both/and of this day for folks who may be experiencing one or more of these stressors. A confidential space where we can share what’s hard and hear about the similar struggles of others. A place where we can harness the power of both fierce and tender self-compassion practices to catalyze or continue our healing. A place where we can witness and be witnessed in this process by others who really Get It.

Here’s the deets for the workshop:

Wednesday, May 6 on Zoom

12pm - 1:30pm EDT / 11am CST / 10am MST / 9am PST

Sliding scale pricing available

If this sounds good to you, click here to save your spot:

Come sit next to us on 5/6

If you’d like to learn more about Lisa, my co-teacher for this workshop, please scroll down to read her interview with me from last year.

Ryan: Where did you grow up? What else grows there? What was it like for you to grow there?

Lisa: I grew up in a small beach town on the Salish Sea (otherwise known as Puget Sound), in the Pacific Northwest corner of the United States. At low tide, the vast tide flats are patched with colonies of sand dollars and flattened forests of eel grass. The landscape of the Salish Sea tideflats is the landscape of my soul. I am totally at home there.

Despite the idyllic landscape, I struggled socially as a kid. I always felt at home with my parents and my five siblings and our extended family, but at school I was bullied and excluded. While I still have to work through that trauma with my therapist from time to time, I’m also weirdly grateful for my social struggles as a kid, because I learned early and the hard way to make wise choices about who you befriend. By high school, I started to figure things out, and I’m still close to many of my high school friends 30 years later.

What is your earliest memory of tending another being?

I was only two when I became a big sister, but I remember being so excited. I adored my little brother, and lovingly called him “Boo Boo.” I have a memory of pushing him in the stroller on the day our dad brought him home, but I think that’s probably a manufactured memory based on a photograph. I remember comforting him whenever we’d have a babysitter – singing and hugging him and assuring him that our parents would be back soon.

What or whom have you most loved tending since?

When I was a kid, I babysat my three younger siblings, their friends, and lots of kids around town. I wriggled out of attending Sunday School by volunteering in the church nursery as often as possible. In high school, I logged many hours nannying for the family across the street, and my older brother had his first of four children. I became a godmother in my mid-20s, and have always taken that role very seriously. In my late 20s, I was a live-in caretaker for my wonderful Grandma Jean, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve also cared for other elders in my family, as well as many beloved kids. Professionally, I’ve been a teacher in one form or another for over twenty years, and in the public sphere, I’ve been involved in community organizing for almost that long. I couldn’t say which of these care roles I have loved most – all have been essential in their season.

You and I now both write newsletters that focus on the importance of care and caregivers. As noted above, focuses on “aunties” or alloparents – people who play an essential role in the care of people to whom they’re not biologically related.

Can you tell us more about how you came to be fascinated by this topic?

I’ve often had care roles in my life, but it wasn’t until I started living in co-housing and spending several hours a week with the kids in our community that I started wrestling with what my role meant. I had recently lost multiple pregnancies. When we finally let go of having kids, there was a lot of loss and grief, but it also eventually freed up space to recognize and lean into the abundant networks of care we already had. Once I knew I wasn’t going to be a mom, I was able to start thinking more deeply about what it means to be an Auntie.

The idea for The Auntie Bulletin started as a little whisper in the mind – “What if I write a newsletter about loving other people’s children?” – and almost immediately became something I had to do. When you’re out and about in the world with other people’s children – especially if they’re not technically family – you are illegible to others. People think you must be the kids’ parent, or their aunt, or their nanny; other options don’t occur to them. In the case of male Aunties – whom I suppose we can call uncles if we must 😉 – the illegibility they experience is compounded by others’ deep suspicions about what they’re even up to.

A beautiful side-effect of writing The Auntie Bulletin is that my role has become so much more legible to myself. I had not recognized how isolated I was, and then I started this newsletter, and then suddenly I was meeting all these other Aunties who had experiences like mine! And different from mine! Amazing!

This project has led to repeated perspective shifts. I realized that Aunties like me actually have a ton in common with other alloparents, including grandparents and other extended family, step-parents, foster parents, godparents, educators, and childcare providers. Then I realized that alloparents being able to talk amongst ourselves is really important, but also that we need spaces for parents and alloparents to connect and position ourselves as members of the same team. And then I realized that the conversation about care and kinship shouldn’t just be about children but also about building loving relationships with our elders and people of all generations.

The thing keeps unfolding and expanding, and there keep being more vistas to explore.

Speaking of hanging around with like-minded people — whose work do you read when you need community-tending inspiration?

There are so many amazing people writing about care today. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Atul Gawande, and adrienne maree brown are major inspirations. I loved, loved, loved Angela Garbes’s books Like a Mother and Essential Labor. And there’s a very deep bench of wise folks writing about care work here on Substack. My must-reads include , , , , , , , , and , , , , Victoria of (which is a truly amazing and comprehensive resource for caretakers of adults), and of course your friend and mine, the excellent !

Aww, shucks! That is a deep bench indeed. I’m honored to be on it.

This feels like a good time to transition to talking about Mother’s Day. I’m wondering if you had caregivers in your own childhood who influence the way you think about care now. How do you honor, or choose not to honor, that inheritance on Mother’s Day?

I was fortunate to be raised by multiple wise, compassionate, loving, wonderful women. My mom, both of my grandmothers, and some aunts were educators, and they modeled for me from the beginning how to really turn toward children, love them, and pay attention to their ideas and questions about the world.

The family I was raised in is not very oriented toward rituals and celebrations. Over the past several years, my mom and I have agreed not to give gifts to each other at all, for any holiday, and it’s an enormous relief to both of us. We prefer a call or meal together – the gift of quality time and attention.

You and I have both had experiences with loss and/or infertility, as have many members of our respective newsletter communities. It feels good to be in a healing space around that, and I think those experiences make you forever aware of how shitty Mother’s Day can feel when you’d like to be a biological parent and yet you are not. What has your mileage been like here?

Losing multiple pregnancies in rapid succession was one of the hardest seasons of my life. Right on the heels of that, my partner and I had to decide whether to pursue IVF, whether to try to adopt, or neither. So I had some hard Mothers Days there for a few years, although really it was the everyday celebrations of motherhood that were hardest for me. I remember being at a women’s gathering while I was pregnant for the second or third time in a row, not ready to tell anyone, and terrified of losing the baby (which I subsequently did). There was another pregnant woman there, several months further along than me, and everyone was talking and laughing excitedly about her coming baby. I longed to be able to say, “I’m having a baby too!” and join that sisterhood of mothers. Instead I had to sit there vibrating with anxiety and pretending to be glad.

Stuff like this happens all the time to people who are involuntarily childless – Mothers Day is just extra brutal. Something like a quarter of Auntie Bulletin readers report being unable to have children despite longing to do so, and I have heard from many who struggle with a deep ongoing sense of grief and loss.

I’m very, very fortunate that I was able to come to a place of true steadiness as a non-parent. My partner realized before I did that parenthood was not the path for us, and I was grateful one of us had finally found clarity. Over the past few years, as I’ve experienced significant worsening of symptoms of chronic illness, I’ve found that, for me, Auntie-hood is a wonderful middle path between parenting and childlessness.

How do you tend to your physical body, and your interior life, so that you can sustain all the various care commitments we’ve just discussed?

I am a full-on introvert, easily overstimulated by light, sound, people, and anything unexpected. If I don’t come home to myself and reset often, I quickly lose my ability to show up and care for others. I’m an avid lifelong fiction reader, and function best when I can curl up and read for at least a few hours every day. As my symptoms of chronic illness have gotten worse over the past few years, I’ve also found a wonderful community of chronically ill, disabled, fat, and elderly acquaintances at the pool, and regular but time-limited interactions with my water aerobics buddies are great for my mental health.

Finally, practicing meditation for many years has made the act of coming home to my body and breath a genuine refuge. Many people struggle to make meditation into a daily practice, but for me – at long last – the key was to let go of trying to do it right. Once I had super low standards for my meditation practice, it became easy-peasy. As dharma teacher Jack Kornfield has said, “You put your ass on the cushion and you take what you get.” But I don’t even put my ass on the cushion, usually – I meditate in bed.

Yes! Normalize lying-down meditation. I wish more people would.

Your turn: How are you feeling about Mother’s Day? What kinds of experiences—individual or communal—would feel really nourishing on this day?

Leave a comment

of has been a friend of In Tending for a while now. She joined us last year to talk about how mindfulness, plus parenting an “atypical kid,” helped her “get off the hamster wheel of competitive parenting.” She and I have also spoken about the ways in which mindfulness and creativity have supported us through seasons of burnout during the toddler years, and advocating for our kids during their K-12 years.

Now Kate’s back with news of a new retreat she’s running in May, to support other mothers who are battling burnout and hoping for respite around Mother’s Day. For those who can’t make it to an IRL retreat, we also discuss Kate’s online summit at the end of the month, as well as the online workshop I’m running on May 6 with of , in which we offer tools for self-compassion to those who find Mother’s Day complicated.

Join us on 5/6

In the interview that follows, Kate and I discuss:

• How Kate traded “fake fashion” for touching grass (00:05:47), and how this led to the creation of her Soft Landing retreat in the Poconos, for those who wish to opt out of a performative version of Mother’s Day (00:12:12)

• The constituencies we serve who find Mother’s Day most complicated, from those who are bereaved and estranged to those battling infertility and pregnancy loss (00:17:12)

• The need to go beyond binary narratives of motherhood (00:21:50), and how retreats can create room for this both/and (00:24:57)

• How some of the common mindfulness tools we offer for re-parenting, such as self-compassion, can come with their own complications (00:32:28)

• On calling on the Earth herself for maternal support–and also, maybe Dolly Parton (00:34:43)

• On holding space as highly sensitive leaders, and creating structures that support us too (00:45:17)

Note: Some email clients may cut off the end of this interview, so it’s best viewed in a browser. Alternatively, if you’d like to listen to the full audio, podcast-style, you can view the video or download the audio here.

How Kate traded “fake fashion” for touching grass

(00:05:47) Ryan: Kate, you are a friend of the newsletter. You and I have done podcasts together. Because really, there is such a large Venn diagram overlap in our work, where both you and I are parents to neurodivergent children, and we also work with parents. We support them with mindfulness tools. It’s just a very easy synergy with us.

You came and did an interview last year where you were talking about your own experiences with being able to touch into nature as a child, going into the fashion industry, and then kind of having this return, to coming back to the body, later on in life.

I just wanted to invite you to share anything that you would like to share about your work at this point, and how you think it can be of benefit to folks in this community who are parents and caregivers trying not to burn out in this moment–and who are looking ahead to Mother’s Day, thinking about what that could mean, in this particular season to them.

How would you connect those dots?

Kate: I could probably talk for hours about it, but there’s some developmental trauma there, and then also having that healing from the land that my parents bought when I was two. When my parents were divorced, I was six, and that has been the constant—that land has been the constant–throughout my life. We moved a lot when I was a kid, and I never really felt a sense of home except for there.

By the time I found yoga, I was already pretty burnt out, very stressed, like you said, in the fashion industry. I was still pretty young. But [yoga] gave me the courage to leave. I traveled around the world, I eventually moved to Australia, then I became a yoga teacher. I spent a lot of time outdoors, living across from the beach, a lot of time walking in the low tide pools. It’s much more lifestyle-oriented there than the way I grew up, as a creative in New York city, kind of having to be scrappy—and as a kid in New York City, really having to be scrappy. When I came back, I landed in Brooklyn, and it really felt like home, being able to go to this place in the Catskills where my dad still has that land.

[After that], for 10 years I taught yoga, and then I had my son. And I had taught a lot of prenatal [yoga] and I really thought I knew how I would raise him, what that was going to be like, the whole kit and caboodle. And he was completely different than my expectation–which is always the case, I think, when we’re raising kids, when we’re parenting separate souls. By three, he had an autism diagnosis, and he’s been diagnosed with ADHD as well. That led me to my own awareness of my own neurodiversity and specifically high sensitivity, which I really didn’t have a name for growing up.

I think there’s the challenge of raising someone who is different, and some people find grief in that. I didn’t really find grief in it. I found more wonder and awe and curiosity and kind of dove in head first. We had prayed for him, in our own way. We had wanted him so much. It was like, “Whoever it is that comes to us, just bring them on. We’re ready. We’ve got so much love.” And this is what the universe gave us.

And he’s amazing. And it was super hard. I didn’t sleep more than two hours for the first year, more than two hours at a stretch ever. And I was older, you know, I was 41 when he was born. So, complicated feelings.

About Soft Landing

(00:12:12) Kate: I think the reason that I designed this particular retreat, Soft Landing, a Mother’s Day weekend retreat for complicated feelings, is not so much about that relationship [with my son] as the one with my mom, which is harder to talk about. I have permission, but I still feel like she’s so sensitive. She knows we have a challenging relationship. She knows that I have unhealed wounds and probably always will. And Mother’s Day can get really tricky for me. There’s been several years where I’ve just wanted to opt out, honestly.

And this is not about running away or opting out, but just kind of taking ownership and doing it my own way. So I designed a retreat that I really wanted to go on. And I’m inviting people who have similar feelings–who can’t quite put it into words, or don’t need to put it into words, don’t need to even know what you’re feeling or understand it, but want to be somewhere where it’s not about being performative, and is about taking care of your own feelings and needs.

Ryan: And giving yourself, as you said, a space to even find some clarity about what they are.

Motherhood is such a big topic, and it can be so easy to pull it into these binary stories. My friend is always talking about this in ways that I find so relevant over at , where she’s saying, either there’s the narrative of “Treasure every moment” and “It’s the most sacred special job any woman could ever want or have,” or “Oh my god, we’re prisoners, this is terrible.”

Kate: Or “I’m a bad mom.”

Ryan: Right, right. So I think that having a container, that is held by somebody else, can allow you to create more open spaciousness for yourself.

Going back to the first interview that you did, there’s this quotation that really stayed with me and that feels really relevant to marking or feeling a complicated way about Mother’s Day. Here you were talking about the challenges of your own motherhood path, but I would absolutely bring in our relationships with our own mothers. You said,

“If we can’t be vulnerable and honest about these struggles, how will others know that we need help?”

I think that there’s such a beautiful connection between vulnerability and honesty—not as performative, but as connective.

You went on to say, “I have no interest in being fake. It’s exhausting. If I wanted to be inauthentic, I would have stayed in the fashion industry.”

I love that. I just feel like that captures your voice, where I always think about the notion of having both a soft front and a strong back. You’re someone who has held such tender space for me in my own parenthood journey. I came to you when I was in that place, when my son was two or three. My friend who also has a neurodivergent son calls it “their dysregulated era.” And of course, they still get dysregulated, but we’re talking about that experience of like, they’re not sleeping, or they can’t be in school, or having meltdowns that go on and on. I came to you as a bowl of Jello, asking “What do I do?” And you held such tender space for me,

But there’s also this part of you that is very strong back, and that’s very Brooklyn. That’s very, “I don’t want to be fake.” It’s just something that I appreciate about you. You’re just very multifaceted as a parent, as a space holder, as a teacher.

I think that there are those of us who are really interested in exploring all the complexities of parenting, and need that sense that we can be tough sometimes. We can leave home sometimes and be like, “You guys figure it out. I’m going on retreat. I don’t want to participate in whatever Hallmark says I’m supposed to be doing on this day.”

For whom is Mother’s Day most complicated?

(00:17:12) Ryan: And so I also just want to bring in, related to that, all of the different constituencies that are in my community, that might be in your community, and that are also in the community of a friend of mine, @ Lisa Sibbett of the Auntie Bulletin. She actually did a survey of people and what’s hard about Mother’s Day last year, and we did a series around it.

The survey results showed that grieving the loss of a parent is a huge one for Mother’s Day. I had alluded to this on Notes, but I just came back from the funeral of one of my best friend’s mother—just a sparkly, beautiful Italian matriarch who I’ve known for 25 years. Obviously the first Mother’s Day without your mother is profound in so many different ways. Regardless of what that relationship has been, now it’s shifted.

You mentioned waiting a long time for your child; I experienced infertility for years and have had some really terrible Mother’s Days that frame of time.

I’ve experienced pregnancy loss. The first Mother’s Day after a pregnancy loss is so poignant.

There are other people who have experienced uncertainty on the path to family building—everything from cancer impacting your reproductive potential to divorce.

Some people know that they’re not going to have kids of their own—for example, if they have a chronic illness that would make it very difficult to care for that child. (That’s #4 on Lisa’s own list of reasons.)

There are people who are step parents where very often it gets a little awkward, I’ve learned, in terms of step children.

Kate: Or they’re a stepchild.

Ryan: Right. The scripts aren’t as clear, and sometimes that can be a good thing, that you can write your own. And sometimes it can mean that there’s kind of a silence and an invisibility around that. Or, conversely, a lot of expectations around that, that don’t feel authentic.

If you have a difficult relationship with your own mother, obviously it’s very difficult. And that’s something that I’ve experienced. Or a difficult relationship with your mother-in-law.

Any kind of estrangement, even if it’s not from your own mother, can really be hard.

People have talked about coming from queer families with two mothers and really feeling kind of torn between.

And then people have talked about going through gender transitions that have changed the way that either they’re viewed or seen as parents, [and/or] the way that their parents relate to them, in ways that can feel really hard. There’s this movement towards authenticity that then actually shifts how people view you, in relationship to gender, because obviously the term mother is so gendered.

So those were some of the main categories of struggle or complication. And perhaps the kinds of people who might want to come and have space held for them at your retreat that’s coming up, or that might want to come and do some writing with me and Lisa this year for our now-annual Complicated Mother’s Day celebration.

I’m just wondering if there’s anything you would add to the list.

And for folks that are here live, I’m wondering if there are other categories of tension, of complication, that might come into this day.

Kate: Yeah, I would love to hear from people who are here with us live.

And I was just going to reinforce the idea of the gender binary. One of my mentors, Jacoby Ballard, who wrote A Queer Dharma, was asked by his child’s teacher at one point—and I think he was doing a lot of the caregiving work, including carrying the child and giving birth—what do we do about Father’s Day and Mother’s Day? And he said, we both celebrate both.

I love that, and I also feel like I wish it wasn’t so binary.

Going beyond binary narratives of motherhood

(00:21:50) Kate: And sometimes, the fact that it’s put in such a box of being so black and white, rather than this true gray that the relationship with mothers can be, that makes it tough to feel authentic, I think.

It feels like such a stereotype, and maybe an archetype also, but not one that I relate to as my whole self.

Each of us has different aspects. I’m actually a very loving, caring and supportive daughter who also has not completely forgiven her parents for the harms that happened. Even though I understand that they couldn’t do better, it still hurts.

Ryan: Right. It still hurts.

Kate: You know?

Ryan: Yeah.

And I do feel like sometimes, as you said, the narratives around our own parenting can get really shoved into these good-bad binaries, or this very femme-masc binary, that may not feel really relevant to us. And that makes it really difficult to see our own parents with any clarity, and to really let them be whole people, and to let the relationship be a whole relationship.

I was with a friend this weekend who was talking about this, and she said that her mantra is, “You don’t have to like everything about a person to love them.”

She was really trying to sit with that, because in the past it was like, maybe she felt as though, if she had one single tiny criticism about somebody that she loved, it meant that she was unloving, or that she didn’t love them enough, or that she viewed them as bad. And so there might be some suppression of some valid critique, or a place where more accountability is necessary, because there was a rupture and there’s a need for repair. And on the other hand, if you said that you love somebody, then there also wasn’t room for that nuance.

And so I think that it is really beautiful to just have that open space where we don’t have to choose just one story, just one narrative, just one box.

How retreats can create room for the both/and

(00:24:57) Kate: And some of the practices that I do want to explore in the retreat—even though I don’t think it’s necessary or wise to try and exploit feelings and go digging deep, but just as things come up and when we’re ready, like self-compassion practices and reparenting practices—can be really simple.

They don’t have to be so in our heads. We can move that nervous system understanding through our bodies. And that’s something that I want to do as well as being in nature, on that weekend.

Ryan: Which has a sort of mothering quality to it, too—just lying on the ground, being in the water.

Kate: Yeah.

Ryan: Can you say more? What kind of container did you need, and what kind of container have you created, for the complications around Mother’s Day?

Kate: Absolutely.

So the word that’s coming up is permission.

I’ve led several retreats at The Himalayan Institute, which is in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. So pretty convenient to people in the Northeast, and feels very remote. And it’s just gorgeous. They’re on 400 acres of wooded property, with marked hiking trails. So there’s a lot of opportunity for that immersion in nature. And I also didn’t want it to feel isolating. So permission can feel like, “You get to do whatever you want,” but there is a structure to it, because I think rhythm and structure can give us something to hold onto.

So the structure is permissive, is spacious, is open.

Ryan: And you can sleep in! That part jumped out at me.

Kate: I mean, for those who want to get the most yoga, the most physical practice, they can get up early and do a yoga practice in the Himalayan Institute’s tradition–which is pretty gentle, but does have a lot of standing poses.

What we’re doing is going to be flow-based in the morning, but very, very slow and gentle. And then in the evening after dinner, it’s meditative, it’s restorative. It’s really restorative in the true sense of the word–like a pose for 15 minutes, or savasana for 30 minutes. A lot of deep rest.

The benefit, when things can feel heavy, of doing restorative things, specifically restorative yoga–which is just like, getting into a comfortable position and lying there and making sure you’re warm and cozy, and feel nourished and nurtured, and then changing to another comfortable position and lying there–is that it does something to, not just our nervous systems, but it helps to connect [mind and body.] So many of us are kind of stuck in our heads–or as one of my students said, “Like a head in a jar.” [Yoga] connects the central to the peripheral nervous system, the head to the body, our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. And then really, we learn so much from what’s already inside us, allowing our intuition to bubble up, once we’ve let the stress melt away.

Ryan: As a retreat girlie, I would almost always rather go on a very bare-bones retreat. Give me some basic white sheets and a closed door over mimosas any day. So I really love the balance between structure and spaciousness that I’m hearing around this retreat. And that’s something that I would definitely be looking for for myself.

I also come from the Buddhist meditation retreat tradition, where there can be a lot of structure. You’re walking, you’re sitting, you’re walking, you’re sitting, you’re walking some more, you’re sitting, you’re listening, you’re eating, you’re silent, you’re walking, you’re sitting. I think that there’s absolutely a time and a place for that, and that has been really supportive to me.

But in this era of my life, I’m feeling the need for more choice. And I know that you and I both come from a trauma informed background of really prioritizing that, and prioritizing the relationship between you and you. You know what you need. Your body knows what you need. Your body will know if you need more vigorousness or more softness. Your body will know if you need more sleep or if you need a dawn walk in the woods. And so this sounds like a container where people are going to have a lot of choice.

Kate: Yeah. Agency is just one of those things that I’m going to always bring in–whether you like it or not. [Laughs] I was recently teaching a weekend, a women’s wellness weekend at Frost Valley in the Catskills, where people don’t know me. One woman called out in the middle, “Just tell us what to do!”

Ryan: Because you were giving like, the full buffet of options.

Kate: Yeah.

Ryan: That’s so funny. I’ve heard that too, when guiding in a trauma informed way–that sometimes people get decision fatigue in the middle of that kind of practice. But for other people it’s essential.

Kate: Right.

When self-compassion itself feels complicated

(00:32:28) Ryan: You touched on self-compassion, and that’s a really big part of my practice at this time of year. And that will be a big focus at the workshop that I am teaching for Complicated Mother’s Day. Tools for self-compassion. Tools for taking care of yourself in a way that you might not be able to receive from a maternal figure in your life at this time.

And I find that for me, it’s really helpful. And I have developed all kinds of ways into the practice, and visualizing different benefactors–meaning different special people in my life–that can kind of help to hold that practice. You’ve even taught me certain practices like that, like your Who’s Got Your Back practice. You’ve guided me to imagine people like this coming and putting their hands on my shoulders. And I think that that can be really empowering and healing for some of us, to be able to call in that sense of presence and of being held and protected.

But I also know from experience, and I’ve heard this from students, that it can be very confronting. It can bring up a lot of anger and grief to feel like, “Why do I have to do this for myself? I wanted this person to do it for me. Why do I have to take this on? Why is this my responsibility?”

And I think that two things can be true. It can be really empowering to say, “I’m no longer going to wait for this. I’m no longer going to wait for a quality of nurturing that is not going to come.” And there’s an acceptance in that. But there’s also a grief and an anger in that.

I’ve also sometimes invited people to imagine “A caring adult from your past, somebody who really cared for you and protected you,” and more than once I’ve had students say, “I can’t think of anybody like that.” You know?

Kate: Yeah.

Ryan: So I wonder how you support people in this. When it’s like, “I don’t actually have a lot of lived experiences with being held by humans, or even the more-than-human world. I don’t have a muscle memory to lean on, in order to evoke that inner holding, in that space.” Does that make sense?

Kate: Absolutely. And I just can’t stop thinking about the Buddha’s practice of touching the earth.

Ryan: Will you tell about that again, for folks that are unfamiliar? I love it.

Asking the Earth for help–and also, maybe Dolly Parton

(00:34:43) Kate: When Mara, who was–I wouldn’t say Buddha’s nemesis, but rather, the Buddha was Mara’s nemesis—was shooting arrows of all kinds of different negativity toward the Buddha, he was sitting under the bodhi tree. Just completely committed to getting enlightened. He’s like, “I’m not leaving until I’m enlightened. I’m just going to sit here.”

Mara shot everything he could possibly think of at the Buddha, and he just kept sitting.

The final arrow was doubt. Was self-doubt.

I know that’s a hard one for me. And the Buddha needed help. With all of the other arrows, he’d turned them into flowers, and they dropped to the ground, right? But the Buddha really needed help with this one. And he acknowledged that he needed help. And he reached out, and he touched the earth. And he asked her to reflect back his inherent goodness. And she did.

And the way Thich Nhat Hanh tells it is like, she carried a bounty of flowers and birds and animals, and she gave them to him, and spread them out before him as a gift. She brought this whole cornucopia of goodness that really reflected and mirrored his inherent goodness. And helped him stay strong. And Mara took off.

But I’ve had teachers who said, “It might not be nature for you. It might be your sister, or friend.” I tend to always start with a compassionate guide in any practice so that we have someone to lean on, and yeah, it might not be Mom, and that’s fine. Or a grandmother or ancestor. As someone assimilated so much into whiteness, it’s hard to connect with many ancestors on that spiritual level. But I can reach down and touch the Earth. I’ve got her.

And, you know, I’ve got, like, Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Ryan: I was just going to say, even fictional characters can be powerful.

And we also all have Dolly Parton.

Kate: Oh, yeah. There’s always that.

Ryan: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when she was alive.

Kate: Yeah, they’re protective.

Dragons have been great for me. Imagining a dragon circling over to protect my space has been really nurturing in a fierce compassion sort of way.

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. Or I’m thinking of Encanto, where there’s all these prickly cactuses around this beautiful girl.

Kate: I love Encanto so much. Can we get on a separate talk on Live about that?

Ryan: Let’s make a note.

Kate: I was also going to say, there’s a place called the Sound of Music Hill at the Himalayan Institute, and on Saturday afternoon, what I’ve started doing is right after lunch, we’ll do a walking meditation up to the Sound of Music Hill. And then I’ll tell that story, and we’ll think of ways we can connect to the Earth. And to ask her, what would she reflect back to us as our inherent goodness?

And then we go for a chocolate and coffee tasting at the coffee and chocolate factory that’s just right across the way.

Ryan: That sounds about right. Nature, but also chocolate.

Kate: Chocolate, and then silence in the afternoon if you want it. Or walks, or hikes, or massage. Lots of options.

Who might be ripe for retreat?

(00:39:55) Ryan: Have you noticed any sort of trends, or ways that you would categorize the people who find your retreats, and these experiences of reparenting, most fruitful?

Because I know that everyone has a mother, and everyone has some complication around that, but I do wonder if there are just particular kinds of folks where they might be the most ripe for the benefits of this practice, of this retreat, and of what you have to offer.

Kate: The feedback that I’ve had and assimilated over the years, because I’ve been doing these retreats a long time, is from people who already know me. They appreciate my kindness, my sense of humor, and my flexibility in programming and scheduling. Often they’re therapists, or other people who are really open in that way. Or they’re going through some sort of midlife cycle, or Saturn return, or something. They are not super yoga experts, but they’re open to it.

The people who have struggled with the way I teach are people who might have a ton of experience, and have a more rigid idea of the way things should be done. People who were really hoping for more headstands–or any headstands. That’s not going to happen at my retreat.

People who have come really appreciate the container that we co-create, through a process that is communal.

Ryan: What does that look like? Do you co-create norms together? Any other pieces?

Kate: It’s creating norms together, and the way that they’re stated. I usually have a couple that I am insistent on, but we add in whatever else is important to people.

And then there’s a practice that we do to really understand that even though we’re all different, and we’re having different experiences, everybody has suffering.

So it’s not too poking-the-bear. It’s still trauma-informed.

And then, giving people a lot of permission around whether they want to share, or do dyads, or do groups, or not.

I’m rigid about showing up that first night and trying to come to the sessions we have, but I also like to sit back and see what happens in the group, because it is different every time. And that’s such a joy.

Ryan: I can really relate to that as a teacher as well, where it’s like, if you create a really good, solid, safe container, then it’s much easier to sit back and just allow people to find their place in it.

Kate: And I end up not being the only teacher, because everyone has something to share, and give, and teach and speak into. And we all bring something different.

But the first retreat I ever taught, I burned myself out. So I create that spaciousness for myself as well. Because I’m giving a lot. I’m holding a lot of space. even if it doesn’t feel like a lot, it’s a lot. I’m an empath and I’m holding all the vibes at the same time, the energetics of it all.

On holding space as highly sensitive leaders

(00:45:17) Ryan: Tell me a little bit more, because I think that there are probably people in this community that are not only imagining themselves as participants in your retreat, but also a lot of people that are interested in organizing retreats like this. For themselves, for their friends, for their family members. So thinking about creating spaces for tired parents.

I also want to just surface that value of non-comparison. I am not saying that the experiences of people without living children are less valid. But I also think that parents are a population that have particular needs, that maybe actually require a little bit more work sometimes to meet, because we are very depleted.

So if you want to hold space for parents in particular, what advice do you have for us? What are the non-negotiables for meeting the needs of that population within a retreat setting? And what are the non-negotiables for meeting your own needs and making sure that you don’t overextend or like you said, sort of soak up the vibes? Because sometimes when parents kind of open that lid, and start to do mindfulness, it’s like, all kinds of things fly out. As they should. And also, sometimes that can be a lot for a space holder–speaking from personal experience.

What wisdom have you gained through that, through trial and error?

Kate: There’s certainly been errors and trials. But I also have done a lot of training, specifically trauma-informed space-holding training.

I first led workshops, and if you think of a weekend retreat, it’s four or five workshops, back to back on top of each other, without really taking much of a breath in between.So I would lead two or three hour-long workshops first, and see what comes up.

If you have a framework, start to think about how that framework could evolve into a deep dive on a weekend. Because that’s the thing I love about it. People aren’t doing other things while they’re doing this. Maybe they’re answering a couple of emails, but they’re there to do this, so it it gives more space to pay attention, to focus in.

And, go on retreat yourself. Go to places where you might like to lead a retreat, and see how it feels, see how other people are holding space.

And I’m always one to over-prepare, but I have learned from lots of trainings on leading retreats, to know what I would cut first, because it always goes faster than you expect.

The needs vs. the nice-to-haves for parent/caregiver retreats

(00:48:50) Ryan: So what are some things that you would cut, if you have this full slate of things, and maybe you’re also just seeing that your participants have a sluggish vibe, or you can tell that the pace needs to slow? And what are some things that you think you really need to keep?

For example, you’ve said that starting all together with some norms feels like a non-negotiable. What are some things where you hold them a little more loosely?

Kate: I think that I have in the past cut things like Q&As. Or “Turn and talk to someone about your experience of last night.” That can be good, and can kind of be like opening a can of worms, if one person feels a certain way and somebody else feels a different way.

There are definitely going to be times where I want like to have a discussion about whatever is coming up, and then there’s time for that. But sometimes I’ll just be like, “Okay, everybody grab three blankets and two bolsters and we’re going to do [restorative yoga]. That’s the priority.”

Ryan: Less talk-y, more sleep-y.

Kate: Yeah. And like, if you’re cold, please let me know, because I can help. If you’re uncomfortable, tell me, because I can help.

And if you can’t do that, it’s okay to get up and walk out. If you need something else, that’s restorative, to resource yourself, if it’s not this, I trust you.

Other opportunities to come together in community

(00:51:05) Ryan: So speaking of which, you have a summit coming up that really is all about building a sense of self-trust, and maybe a sense of boundaries around the self. It’s called The Self-Worthy Summit. It’s for highly sensitive people. Would you like to say a little bit about that before we sign off?

We’ll also be talking about that in a couple of weeks. I’ll be coming over to your space to do a discussion on that. Because high sensitivity is a really big topic in my newsletter audience population. We talk a lot about sensitivity in both our children and ourselves. Sometimes as a mutual discovery process, as you alluded to earlier. Sometimes they get a diagnosis, and then we realize we’ve got some of those same needs.

Kate: That’s definitely what happened. It wasn’t until I found Dr. Becky and she was talking about DFK [Deeply Feeling Kids] and I’m like, I’m a DFA [Deeply Feeling Adult]. It really made so much more sense for me.

Then I went on a deep dive, Googling, whatever, finding people who were talking about this. And that led me to the term HSP [Highly Sensitive Person]. I got like 100 on [Elaine Aron’s seminal] test. I’m an overachiever. [Laughs]

Ryan: “Not to brag, but I got 20 out of 20 on the Most Sensitive Test.”

Kate: It’s always been an issue, but it never had words. Anxiety. Highstrung. Touchy. None of the words fit.

So this is kind of the culmination of a long process of awakening into that. And it wasn’t that long ago for me, that I looked for this label or trait, and it really stuck. So I’m really grateful and appreciative.

And, are there other neurodivergences here? Maybe. I just haven’t been diagnosed. But people would say I am definitely part of the club.

And now, my yoga membership, Compassion Club, is for highly sensitive people. As I teach more and more highly sensitive people, what I find is that I can’t start with self-care. Because what gets in the way of the self-care is the [lack of] self-worth.

And that isn’t just about being a parent. There are a lot of non-parents in my memberships. But it gets really triggered, especially for moms, with that stereotype of having to “put your children first.” And then our worthiness goes down and down. We get to the point where we’re not even prioritizing ourselves at all. We’re not even on the list, much less top of the list.

So that’s where I wanted to start–with “I’ve been the bottom of the barrel of self-worth. What would I want to hear or sense in my body?”

And then: “How would I want to go forward from that?” From believing that “This is something wrong with me” to “This is something cultural that we’ve been indoctrinated with.” And experiencing that in our body on a nervous system level.

And then, belonging. “How to go forward knowing we’re not alone, and what tools do we need to be more self-trusting?”

Self-worthy is a made-up word, but really, it’s describing a highly sensitive person who really understands how this trait can be amazing, and so needed at this time in this world.

Ryan: Yes. And when you say “This culture that we’ve been indoctrinated in,” please tell me if I’m inferring correctly, just from my own lived experience as a sensitive person, that we’re in this culture right now, in this time and place, that in my understanding and in my research as a history person and history teacher, is a bit of an anomaly. In the past [and in the present!], Indigenous cultures would have wanted to discover the gifts of every person, and really would have wanted to maximize that in some way.

And we have seen that sensitivity is a trait that is not just in humans, but it’s also in animals. And really, it’s adaptive, right? If you are a sensitive person, you are literally taking in more bits of information per second than other [organisms]. You’re going to notice the differences between this patch of grass and this other patch of grass. You’re going to notice that they smell different. You’re going to notice that maybe one makes your body feel differently than the other. And you’re going to then potentially use that to become an herbalist, or a doula, or somebody who is just an expert forager. And that’s such a gift to a community.

And in this time and place, we don’t value people who are taking in that amount of information and experiencing the world with that level of nuance. Because very often in this time and place, we are so overwhelmed that it doesn’t manifest as, “Hey, I’ve got this neat talent.” It manifests in [babies] as fussiness. It manifests in toddlers as meltdowns. It manifests in our older kids as shyness or rage.

I have been a high-achieving student by day and absolute meltdown town queen at night for a very long time–or at least I was, until I started really understanding my nervous system better. I had toddler-like meltdowns well into high school, when I was taking a bunch of AP classes, then going to work, and playing sports. It was too much, but I didn’t have words for that.

So I think that our culture of really high stimulation, as well as our culture of nonstop achievement and grind, leads to a lot of negative symptoms of overwhelm in folks who are sensitive–where in a different time and place, they would have been mostly gifts, and they would have been adaptive and supportive to our communities.

So what I’m hearing you say is that this is an opportunity to really reclaim these gifts as gifts.

This is also an opportunity to touch in with common humanity, right? A key component of self-compassion is just: “Oh, other people feel this too. There’s a name for this.”

There’s also breaking-news brain science that wasn’t even part of my training as a learning specialist 10 years ago, that we’re just able to integrate now.

And as you said, the conversation about neurodivergence is just evolving at such a rapid clip that the words that we’re using now to try to get our arms around this ineffable thing–in 10 years they might be different. In 10 years, they might think that talking about “sensitivity” is like, so outdated, and there’s a new word for it.

Kate: Right, exactly.

Ryan: There are devotees and also critics of everything that we do, right? Highly sensitive people, deeply feeling kids. And for the most part, I think they’re valid critiques.

Kate: I’ve written on that too.

Ryan: Yes, you have, very courageously. I think that you and I are both people who are saying, “Let’s use this word as a key to unlock some resources that we need, while also holding this key very lightly.”

Like, it’s a finger pointing at the moon. And maybe in the future, we’ll use a different finger.

And also: we don’t want to leave anybody out. We don’t want to be pathologizing. And we don’t actually want to push this label on people who don’t actually find it very helpful. Or prevent people from getting access to the right room for them, right? If you label your kid a “deeply feeling kid,” and what they really need is resources that are specifically for children with autism, then it’s not actually that helpful. Maybe you’re not pathologizing them, but maybe you’re also preventing them from getting something that they really need, and growing skills that would help them stay safe in the world.

So, yeah, labels are so tricky. And I also think that you and I hold them very lightly, and really see them as skillful means to connect people to each other. To help people name their experiences.

And ultimately, as you said, to find a path to feeling as though these traits of mine are not weaknesses, they’re gifts. And just being able to protect our nervous systems to the degree that we can manifest them as gifts rather than feeling tortured by them.

Kate: I love that you called it skillful means. That’s like skill in action. In yoga, that goal is always guiding me.

(01:01:06): Final thoughts

Ryan: There’ll be a replay of this coming out and intending later this week.

In the meantime, Kate, we can find you at healthyhappyyoga.com.

We can find you at katelynch.substack.com.

Is there any other place where you live where you’d like for us to find you?

Kate: That’s perfect. I’d love to hear from people here. And I really appreciate you, Ryan, always. Thank you for your wonderful questions. You are the best.

Ryan: Absolutely. We’re lucky to have you as a fairy godmother to the In Tending community, and to get to pick your brain and learn from your years of experience.

Hopefully some people can actually go to your retreat–it sounds amazing.

And if you can’t get away, you can join us for our workshop around Mother’s Day.

And if neither works for you, then maybe we’ll see you at this HSP summit at the end of the May.

And we’ll be getting online to talk more about that on May 20, so please mark your calendars with this link if you’d like to join us again!

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We opened the discussion with this quotation from Roshi Joan Halifax of Upaya Monastery:

“All too often, our so-called strength comes from fear, not love; instead of having a strong back, many of us have a defended front shielding a weak spine. In other words, we walk around brittle and defensive, trying to conceal our lack of confidence.

If we strengthen our backs, metaphorically speaking, and develop a spine that’s flexible, but sturdy, then we can risk having a front that’s soft and open, representing choiceless compassion.

The place in your body where these two meet—strong back and soft front—is the brave, tender ground in which to root our caring deeply.” – Roshi Joan Halifax

This definition of compassion, what I would term wise compassion, stands in stark contrast to what the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche has called idiot compassion.

Idiot compassion is doing things for people that they can do for themselves.

Wise compassion is helping people as they have the genuine need, and as we have the genuine capacity.

Idiot compassion is saying yes to things that we know are going to hurt us in some way, just because we don’t want to be seen as '“mean.”

Wise compassion is being able to say, “I can’t do that, but what I can do is this.”

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So I want to be clear that the question we explored in this workshop was not “How can we be nicer, more yielding to others’ desires, less ‘mean’?” Because here’s the thing:

I don’t think people in this community don’t need to be nicer or kinder, necessarily. We don’t lack the desire to care about others. We are already doing that.

We need to practice making our compassion sustainable.

We need to practice making our compassion something that we can express while remaining in our integrity throughout that expression.

And sometimes, we need to practice a manifestation of compassion that carries a sword, not just a plate of cookies.

Parents and caregivers need this multifaceted form of compassion. Because our lives don’t just involve dispensing hugs and Band-Aids. In our roles as protectors of vulnerable beings, we also need to be able to:

• Notice and name injustice

• Unite with others to speak truth to power

• Gather resources and connect them with those who need it

• Motivate ourselves and others to grow

• Give honest but encouraging feedback

• Learn from mistakes

• Balance accepting what is with calling in a more compassionate possible future

In short: we need to cultivate a version of compassion that does not just help us patch ourselves and others back together while the world burns, in ways that benefit our oppressors. We need to cultivate the kind of compassion that empowers us to pull out oppression by the root.

This workshop aims to support you in doing just that.

"There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.” — Desmond Tutu

Paid subscribers here at In Tending, can scroll down now to access these workshop materials virtually below, which allow you to do the following:

• Watch the video and follow along with the exercises. (This is a great option for folks who may wish to share this practice with a loved one who can also benefit.)

• Listen to the audio, akin to a podcast, and do the same. (Great for laundry folding marathons and those with long commutes, in my experience.)

• Read the slides + transcript at your own pace. (Sure beats the germ-ridden magazines at the doctor’s office.)

Workshop highlights

Each of our circles follows a fairly consistent structure.

• We check in.

• We talk a bit about what we’re all experiencing, and how mindfulness can support our needs and intentions at this time.

• We meditate. I offer some gentle guidance. You get to go inward.

• There’s time for Q&A and sharing of insights.

This last part of our gatherings always offers us a great chance to talk about where mindfulness practice gets hard or complicated, particularly for us as parents/caregivers. We get to share and sometimes untangle the what-ifs and the wonderings that come up when we’re meditating. I find that this portion of our gatherings is sometimes just as important and just as fruitful as the practice itself.

This felt especially true for this workshop, in which we discussed some of the tender implications of this practice for our context as caregivers, i.e.:

• Balancing play and whimsy as parents with more serious concerns

• Being able to hold uncertainty and “I don’t know” alongside our other emotions as caregivers without judging ourselves

• The concept of “the warm demander” in education research and “the authoritative parent” in parenting research as exemplifying the benefits of the “Soft front, strong back” approach

If you enjoyed this replay, and want to join us live for the next one, please save the date for Mindful Communication: Navigating Challenging Conversations with Clarity and Compassion — Tuesday 5/12 at 12pm-1pm. Paid subscribers can scroll down for the registration info.

Don’t have a paid subscription? You can click here to view your options, and upgrade to unlock the workshop materials below.

This workshop series is available for subscribers at all levels—monthly, annual, or those in the Mentorship Program.

That said, I’ll put in a plug for the Mentorship Program as being perhaps the best deal, because it also gives you:

• A 1:1 personalized support session from me. We can use this session to help you figure out exactly how to put these insights into practice in your unique setting, in ways that work for your unique body and mind. No more fussing around with meditation apps, no more buying self-help books only to find your eyes glazing over when it comes to doing the practices, no more wondering if you’re “doing it wrong” or you’re “just bad at this.” Just actual human connection and coaching from someone who understands how hard it is to start and sustain a meditation practice amidst a busy life, and ongoing support and accountability that meets you right where you are.

• An all-access pass to all future community workshops like this + all of our future expert-led workshops in 2026. You can view the full spring schedule here and the workshop archive here.

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In the meantime, may this workshop help you move closer to both personal and collective liberation. And we hope to see you at the next one!

Warmly,

Ryan

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How do we connect with our own inner voice, with awe and wonder, with a sense of being connected to something bigger than ourselves? What if we feel drawn to more than one tradition or pathway when it comes to this ongoing process of inquiry? What would it look like to explore these questions in the context of non-judgmental community, rather than in solitude?

In this workshop, my co-teacher and I offer a few reasons why we think that sitting together with the big questions, and doing some writing along the way, is so important for human flourishing. Such as:

1. Writing helps you move into a meditative state. Because there is some gentle activity, some movement in writing, it can help you downshift to a slower, more contemplative pace.

2. Writing connects you to yourself. Within Buddhism, we might say that it helps you connect to basic goodness, or Buddha nature. Using the Internal Family Systems framework, we might call this connecting with your capital-S Self. Whatever you call that sixth sense inside of you that is really witnessing reality and contemplating it, rather than getting swept away in it — writing can help bring you into dialogue with that powerful entity.

3. Writing connects us to that mysterious something that we are in ongoing lifelong inquiry around. When we connect to that part of us that yearns to know, we also connect to that part of reality that resists being fully known and comprehended. We bring awareness to the things that we can’t explain, the things that we can only sense out of the corners of our eyes. In particular, in this workshop, Sarah offers us writing exercises that allow us to get out of the analytical frame of writing in which many of us are trained in school, and to write from—and even to—that more unexpected, ineffable presence.

4. Writing connects us with other seekers. Writing and being in shared writing spaces, taking writing classes—even just for fun!—connects you to other people who are also walking a contemplative path. It normalizes the fact that you’re not the only one seeking. You’re not the only one who doesn’t know. You’re not the only one who’s wondering. And it shows you many different ways to wonder that you may not have considered before.

5. Writing connects us with lineage. There have been so many mystics who have also been brilliant writers, samurais who have been poets, and monastics that have written luminous prose. We’re really lucky to have their artifacts of insight. And their existence, their continued ability to inspire, shows us that we too are capable of creating artifacts of insight that can be passed down.

6. Writing, especially poetry, allows us to weave these things together in a way that reflects our unique spiritual journeys, and the truths and tensions we have encountered along the way—not just a top-down doctrine that has been taught to us. While Sarah and I come from having read works cautioning against spiritual dilettantism, like Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (which we talk about here), my own experience has shown me that engaging rigorously with more than one spiritual tradition, honoring my encounters with the numinous in a wide variety of different places, and weaving together my own insights with these varied traditions, doesn’t automatically make me an unserious spiritual person. In fact, the more deeply and earnestly I connect with the traditions I have inherited and chosen, the more I find myself understanding what makes any good spiritual tradition worth its salt. In Pali, the term is opanayiko: leading ever inwards towards the source.

There are many possible paths to the source. Some of us were born much closer to a passable trailhead than others. The rest of us have had to find our own way through the wilderness. Writing about those journeys is an act of generosity, for those who come after us, searching for the same thing.

In this class, all we ask is that participants come with open hearts and open minds, and the intention to spend a few moments together, walking each other closer to home.

Here’s a snapshot from the workshop:

If this strikes a spiritual chord in you, then I hope you’ll join us for this replay of Tending Your Spiritual Truth.

Folks who signed up for this workshop, and/or who are participating in the Mentorship program here at In Tending, can scroll down now to access these workshop materials virtually below, which allow you to do the following:

• Watch the video and follow along with the exercises.

• Listen to the audio, akin to a podcast, and do the same.

• Read the transcript at your own pace.

In this 90-minute video session, participants are guided to:

• Set intentions for the workshop, meditating on why this title or topic feels relevant

• Considering the universal significance of experiences like awe, wonder, interconnection, and grace across spiritual traditions—what theologian Ruldoph Otto called “the numinous”

• Explore how taking a “weaving” or “braiding” approach to different traditions we are connected to allows us to honor our past selves, current rituals, and the importance of ongoing inquiry

• Use poems by writers like Li-Young Lee, Ada Limon and Mary Oliver as inspiration for our own explorations of “the numinous”

• Engage in generative writing exercises and tender-hearted sharing with other thoughtful participants

• Consider tangible ways in which we can engage children in this ongoing meaning-making

We can’t wait to hear what you think in the comments!

Don’t have a Mentorship subscription? You can click here to view your options, and upgrade to unlock the workshop materials below.

You can name your own price for the Mentorship program, which also gives you:

• A 1:1 personalized support session from me. We can use this time to co-create trauma-informed mindfulness and writing practices that are just for you, which can further support you in tapping into your inner voice, and listening to what it has to say.

• An all-access pass to all of our future workshops in 2026. This includes the next scheduled workshop in this series, Marking Complicated Mother’s Day with on May 6. It also includes access to the workshop archive, including Coming Home to the Body and Re-Imagining Intimacy, and Clearing Space for Grief.

May this workshop be of benefit on your path to personal and collective liberation. And we hope to see you at the next one!

Warmly,

Ryan + Sarah

Read more

While I really revere Buddhist teachers who lived and died before I was born, there is something really special about learning alongside a contemporary. is such a teacher. In our 20s, we both lived in NYC; I took my refuge vows at the meditation center where he taught. At that time, I was grateful for his relatable guidance on things like dating and dealing with hard bosses while Buddhist, as captured in books like The Buddha Walks Into a Bar, published in 2012.

Now, we’ve both moved up into the bucolic, hilly region that stretches from the Hudson Valley, where Lodro lives, to Central MA, where I live. We’re trying to figure out how to build community in our respective rural areas. We’re entering our sandwich generation years, caring for small children while also tending aging adults. And fortunately, once again, Lodro is out with a new book that feels just-right for the times.

Lodro’s new book is called You Are Good, You Are Enough: Free Yourself from the Trap of Doubt and Return to Basic Goodness. Basic goodness, for the uninitiated, may sound sweet and Dr. Becky-ish—aww, everyone’s good inside! But the way it’s practiced by Buddhists is also quite radical. The Buddhist notion of basic goodness is the theological opposite of the Christian notion of original sin, which is a pretty consequential difference—one Buddhist-leaning parents need to consider if their extended family members expect their babies to get baptized. (I talk about how our mixed-tradition family is processing that one below.) It also invites us to consider that the politicians we dislike, the exes who still dislike us, and society at large are actually not f***’d up, but basically good.

Yeah. I know. I too still have questions. I asked a lot of them in the interview that follows, in which Lodro and I discuss:

• What it was like for Lodro to grow up in a flourishing community of meditators

• How becoming a parent influenced Lodro’s perspective on basic goodness

• How the Buddha himself confronted self-doubt

• How a golden Buddha statue became a guiding metaphor for the book

• Wrestling with our own inner critics as parents

• Removing the “second arrow” of judging ourselves for having a hard time, especially when caring for kids and aging adults simultaneously

• How to explain basic goodness to our children

• How basic goodness can help us feel less antagonistic toward “society” …

• ….And also like more effective activists—even when we’re not able to get out in the streets

I also want to note that Lodro’s wife, , is also a meditator and author who has offered me some excellent guidance as a teacher. Please look her up too!

Note: The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. It may still be cut short by some e-mail clients, so is best viewed in a browser. Alternatively, if you’d like to listen to the full un-cut audio, you can do so here.

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Ryan: Hi, Lodro.

Lodro: Hey, thanks for having me on this thing.

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. How are you doing?

Lodro: I’m good. I am. But it’s so funny. On my very first book tour, someone invited me to do something in North Carolina, and I was like, yes, I can fit it in. I’ve got all these other plates spinning. And she was a meditation teacher. I’m a meditation teacher. And she said, it’s so interesting, us Buddhists all running around trying to get people to slow down. And I was like, I do feel a little bit like I am running around like crazy trying to get people to slow down.

But I am also slowing down, particularly now that the weather is changing and I can actually take some good fresh air outside.

Ryan: That’s very validating, because I too feel like I am running around very quickly trying to remind people to slow down.

Ryan: So you live in the Hudson Valley now, but where did you grow up?

Lodro: I’m originally from New York City. I was born and raised and we moved upstate when I was 9 years old. My mother—we’ll probably get to this—she’s a little bit older at this point, and she’s living about 20-25 minutes away from here. So we didn’t move up here solely because she’s here, but it is really helpful that we are now here.

On being raised by meditators

Ryan: What was it like for you to grow up in New York City? Particularly as the child of Buddhist meditators, which is a pretty unique experience to have there.

Lodro: Yeah, it is. I don’t have anything to compare it to, obviously, right? But I do recognize that it’s very unique that, as you mentioned, before I was even born, my parents were practicing Buddhism and meditation. So it was in the air when I was growing up, and not something that was ever pushed upon me.

But the story goes, at least this is how my mother tells it, that she found me sitting in darkness facing a wall. Other parents might have gotten creeped out by that sort of thing, but they sort of left me to my own devices.

And at dinner that night, they said, what were you doing? And I said, I was meditating. And they said, explain what that means. And I said, well, I was noticing that I was breathing, and when I got distracted, I came back and noticed that I was breathing. They’re like, yes, that’s it. So I started at a young age.

Growing up in New York City, there was a lot of Buddhist community, believe it or not. I think probably more so than where I am now, for example, in upstate New York. And it felt very vibrant that there was a supportive culture for kids meditating. And there were little meditation things for families, and things like that. So it always was just sort of part of the culture, as opposed to a thing that just my family did, which I think is really unique.

Ryan: That is really unique. And I think one of the reasons why I felt there was the need to create In Tending is that for so many of us, we live in either places that are geographically distant from cities. Or it’s just not the kind of place where there’s a critical mass of contemplative parents and caregivers who want to get together, and maybe chip in on some childcare. I would love to see that blossom into the kind of scene that you’re describing; that’s really wonderful.

Lodro: I’m a big advocate for people creating the communities that they don’t see in the world around them. And I also would go so far as to say all the writing that I do is basically, “Why isn’t anyone having this conversation. We should be having this conversation. I guess we’ll start, right? Right.”

So this has that same quality. I mean, with In Tending, people go to it—I go to it—for the types of conversations that we’re not having elsewhere. And I think it’s really beautiful what you’re building.

Ryan: Thank you so much. That’s really high praise coming from you.

I’m curious just to hear more about this community that was so supportive of kids when you were growing up. What did that look like just logistically? How did the grown-ups make it happen? What was it like to be a kid in that community?

Lodro: It was admittedly a lot of like, “Okay, the adults are going to go do the serious meditation thing in the other room. Someone’s got to stay behind and hang out with the kids.”

Michael Carroll was one of those guys who was like, “You know what, I’ll stay behind with the kids.” And very sweetly, he would take us out and do basic open awareness mindfulness stuff with the kids. Where he’d say, “What do you notice? What do you gravitate towards on the street of New York What colors do you notice? What do you see? How do you engage with your world?”My mother always jokes that that means that we basically ended up playing with trash.

Many years later, I reconnected with him. And he is such a wonderful mentor to me at this point. That was when I was 3 to 6 years old, and now I’m 43, and that’s an incredible relationship to have still. This person’s not just like, “Oh, I remember you when you were a kid, and I used to let you play with trash,” but also, “I have noticed certain things about you over these decades, and I’m going to sort of reflect them to you and see what you think.” I’m very thankful for that relationship now.

Ryan: That truly is a very singular and amazing relationship to have had.

I’m also trying to picture that trash on the street. What part of New York City was that?

Lodro: I was in the Upper East, and I think that was more Midtown at that point that people were gathering.

Ryan: Midtown East, West?

Lodro: Ryan. I was 3 to 6 years old.

Ryan: Okay, fair enough. You’re like, “I think, I think there was a park, maybe.” So I’m picturing, you know, like bagel wrappers and coffee cups.

I ask because I once taught at a very fancy private school in Midtown overlooking the park. And do you know what we were doing for fifty grand a year inside? We were playing with trash.

Lodro: No.

Ryan: We were doing “junk construction.” It’s like, a whole thing. So, you were getting the finest education that New York City could provide.

And in addition, having this wonderful elder in your life. Like, God bless the people that will stay with the kids so that the grownups can meditate, right? I think we need that ingredient, for sure, in the communities that we’re building.

Who else took care of you?

Lodro: I want to give my parents credit where it’s due, that they really raised me in this culture of—and this is a term that we’re going to keep probably coming up against today—basic goodness.

I think the meditation was helpful, but it was really these two individuals who decided, in how I relate to this child, that they are basically good, whole, complete, as is. Not my kid’s a mess, or not there’s something fundamentally wrong, or maybe we should worry about this sort of thing with the kid. If things go wrong—and they do, because kids will do stuff—it means that the kid made a mistake, not that this is a bad kid or that this kid is in need of fixing. And I think that point of view is probably the best gift that they actually gave me.

That view is the topic of this book, You Are Good, You Are Enough, which is my brand new one that I’ve been working on for a gazillion years, because it really is in my mind. Like, the thing that I have learned over the decades of meditation practice, teaching Buddhism, all of it, it all sort of boils down to this: do we regard ourselves with a sense of compassion and understanding that we are basically good? Or do we think that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us and are always chasing things to try and fix and hold that up?

I think the fact that [basic goodness] was imbued in me very young is an incredible gift, and probably the best gift I could have received.

Ryan: Absolutely. And, I’m really hearing the interplay between your family and also the community that reinforced that.

The thing that I have learned over the decades of meditation practice, teaching Buddhism, all of it, it all sort of boils down to this: do we regard ourselves with a sense of compassion and understanding that we are basically good? Or do we think that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us and are always chasing things to try and fix and hold that up? — Lodro Rinzler

Ryan: I think that many people that come to In Tending have had very different religious experiences—where their basic goodness was not affirmed, and where really, their church community made belonging very conditional on a certain way that they needed to be in the world. Like a certain gender presentation, or certain kinds of behaviors that we do and don’t engage in. Not because they’re skillful or unskillful, but because somebody long ago made up a rule about it.

[Audio note: Dogs start barking, doubting basic goodness of intruders in yard]

Lodro: So I have a friend who came to my meditation stuff and started doing classes with me, and ultimately did a teacher training with me. And he told me—he is queer—that he grew up with the message, first, that something’s very fundamentally wrong with you, that you like boys.

And then, even when he came out, there was some sense of, oh, we accept you for you, but there is still something subtle there, of like, but maybe something’s wrong or broken. Like, okay, some people are accepting me, but …dot dot dot.

When he first heard of this topic of basic goodness, the idea that actually you were born 100% whole, complete, good as-is—and then a lot of societal whispers came into your ear saying that’s not true—it radically changed his entire life. And I don’t mean to be like, this is the book that’ll change your life, but it has this quality, of that shift in view.

We don’t even realize how much we’ve bought into those stories that we’re not enough, that we’re not good enough, that we always need to do more, that we’ll never be successful, that actually if everyone knew X, Y, and Z about us, they wouldn’t invite us onto their team, be in a relationship with us, be friends with us, whatever. That is effed up that we all carry that with us. And then we also think it’s all only me that has that.

So this whole book is about how do we let go of that—what we call the trap of doubt—long enough to reconnect to that initial state of, oh yeah, I am okay as I am, and to live our life through that lens?

I think the communities that I grew up with, I think that’s really the gift that they gave to me.

Ryan: Absolutely. And now, what an amazing inheritance to give to your daughter.

How becoming a parent influenced Lodro’s perspective on basic goodness

Ryan: So now, you have a 2.5-year-old daughter. Do you feel that wanting to focus on this topic coincided with your parenthood journey at all? How has your parenthood journey informed how important this topic is to you?

Lodro: I started writing this book before my daughter was even born. And then it changed pretty radically once she was.

When a kid is born, we see the reality of basic goodness. No kid comes into this world believing that they’re not enough, that something’s broken within them. That is something that they learn. It’s been fascinating and heartbreaking to see my daughter, at this point, start to engage her world fully, and to have moments of unbridled confidence that she is awesome as she is. And then to come up against a situation where a kid steals her toy, where she feels awkward in a group, or whatever, and to watch that sense of doubt start to creep in. I’m like, “Oh no, it happens this young!” You know?

And we could do the best job we can in terms of trying to make sure this kid knows that she is basically good, and there will still be other people at work, her friends, her peers, that might and will probably undermine some of that language. And it’s terrifying, because we all go through this.

How the Buddha himself confronted self-doubt

Ryan: In your book, you talk about the fact that people have been noticing this for thousands of years, about basic goodness as obviously predating the Buddha. The Buddha didn’t invent basic goodness; he articulated it. And then the concept was articulated again and again, in different ways, as a place to come back to. As kind of a North Star within the Buddhist tradition.

You also talk about the fact that doubt has been with us, too, for a really long time. That within the story of the Buddha, doubt is even personified, as the demon Mara. And that one of the final obstacles that he had to come up against, before enlightenment, was really doubt in his own basic goodness and what he had to say, what he had to share.

So Mara is here in these big mythological stories, but also Mara is here in our playgroups, and on the playground and in interactions with teachers that maybe are not being diplomatic, or whatever. Mara is old, and also still here.

I’m curious to have you speak about that kind of duality—which eventually maybe we would transcend as Buddhists. This sort of dance between doubt and basic goodness, and how that has been talked about in Buddhist literature. I know that you are so good at making ancient sutras so relevant to us and explaining them in this very relatable way. So what has already been said about this? And where does your commentary fit into that tradition?

Lodro: That’s very kind of you.

I remember, since we were just talking about my parents, when I was young, I asked how we came to be. It was one of these very big philosophical questions for a 6-year-old. And my mother said, “Well, we were awake, and then we second-guessed ourselves, and then ignorance was born.”

I love that answer, because it is that sense of, fundamentally, we are awake. The story of the Buddha is a story of someone who discovered that wakefulness within himself. It’s not like he transcended everyday concerns and thus went to a higher state of being. He was like, Oh, I’ve been good all along. I am inherently wakeful.

At the time where the Buddha started to really understand that, he’s sitting under this tree, and [sees] Mara, who is either an actual being, or just the way that we talk about the various obstacles that come up when we actually start to address some of the things going on with us. When we start to meditate, for example. So all of a sudden, lots of versions of passion came up, and tried to take the Buddha’s mind away from this topic, and he backhanded that away very gently. And then same thing, with aggression, and different versions of that. And finally, Mara said to the Buddha, or soon-to-be Buddha, ‘Who do you think you are anyway? You think you’re worthy enough that you of all people get to wake up and become fully awake, to become a Buddha?”

It’s in that moment that the Buddha is said to have touched the ground and it literally shuddered under him. There was this sense of real confidence—that I’m inherently worthy, that I’m inherently awake, all beings are inherently awake, and it’s not just me. And Mara is like, “Okay, enough, this guy’s too much,” and fled. And that’s the moment that the Buddha was then able to see his way through the last obstacles and become fully awake.

So I think I’m talking about a very big topic of enlightenment, reconnecting to “Buddha nature.” And in the West, starting in the ‘70s, we started referring to that as basic goodness. That is a term that started with the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and then has spread wildly. Even the last two decades, you see Tibetan Buddhist teachers use it, Insight meditation teachers, Zen teachers. It’s sort of entered the common parlance for a reference to that sense of underneath all of this, we are already all complete as is.

So the duality that you’re referring to is that sense of, we could say, Mara and the Buddha. But we could also just say it’s that little voice inside us that says you’re doing this wrong or you shouldn’t have said that on that podcast.

Once we let go of that, just even for a second, we can say, “No, actually, that’s not real. What’s real right now is I’m sitting down with a friend, I’m having a meal, I’m driving my car. I can be with that.” And that can even allow us to come back to that sense of wholeness and completeness.

How a golden Buddha statue became a guiding metaphor

Lodro: I share another story in the book right at the beginning—and forgive me if people already know this one—from Thailand, where in the mid-20th century, these monastics were moving this large clay Buddha statue. And they dropped it. It actually fell, and it cracked open. They started examining the cracks, and they saw that there was some sort of glimmering happening underneath the clay. They chipped gently away at it. And they were like, “There is solid gold underneath this clay.”

It came out that centuries earlier, to protect the statue from invading tribes, it’d been covered over in clay to disguise its value. And then people over time forgot the true nature of what this thing was. And now people travel all from all over the world, to see the statue that happened to be gold all along.

That’s who we are. We’ve forgotten we are gold. We have covered ourselves in layers of focusing on our imperfections, or our flaws, or the thing that we did, where we are never going to let ourselves off the hook for whatever it is. We are taught implicitly, explicitly, that we are not enough as we are. And then we start searching outside ourselves for happiness, contentment, instead of actually saying, “Well, if I actually just let go of some of these stories, I could reveal that true golden nature underneath.” That’s what basic goodness is.

Ryan: I love the image of the golden Buddha covered over with clay—and clay that was originally put on to protect the Buddha. Because that’s what so many of our protective mechanisms are about, right? It’s about protecting something vulnerable in us.

Even our inner critics, in a sort of Internal Family Systems theory way, can be thought of as protectors. They’re trying to protect us from messing up, looking bad, hurting somebody, right?

But over time, it’s like we forget that there was anything underneath the clay. And that the clay was there, perhaps temporarily, to protect something that was vulnerable, and we might not need that anymore.

Lodro: Yes.

On wrestling with our own inner critics as parents

Ryan: You talk in particular about just wrestling with your own inner critic in ways that I found really, really relatable.

I have followed your work since I was in my 20s. And even when I was meditating, I was always still doing things in my 20s that weren’t that cool, and that I regret. And I still think about them. And you write about that too, in ways that I really appreciated.

Now that we’re parents, it also feels like there’s this inner critic voice that’s constantly monitoring the choices that we make as parents, because the stakes are higher. When we make choices, they impact this little being that is very vulnerable.

You and I also both care for aging parents, and the stakes of the decisions that we make also ripple outward to them. So even though we’re maybe older and wiser, and not making the same kinds of 20-something mistakes, there might be fewer in quantity, but the rippling effects of them, the impact of them, the consequences of them, feel bigger.

I’m wondering if you could talk about what your experience of your own inner critic, your own sort of clay has been like, as you’ve transitioned into parenthood, and how you work with it now?

Lodro: Gosh, it’s a really brilliant question. Thank you for that one. I do think that there’s a couple aspects of this.

[Dogs bark again, reminding us that pets too are part of this pile of adult responsibility.]

I think there’s a couple layers to this.

One is that sense of making peace with past versions of ourselves. Apparently every cell in this body dies, and is replaced over a period of 7 years. I think of myself as one continuous thread, but the reality of the situation is that this was two bodies ago, in our 20s. And doesn’t mean that I’m dead and reborn or anything. It’s just a sense of I need to give myself grace, and realize that I am constantly growing and understanding more and more of this world and how to be in this world as I practice and as I age.

Those two things have gone really hand in hand as someone who’s grown up meditating. The meditation, I think, has helped me start to see where my habitual ways of doing things aren’t working, and to sort of undercut some of those tendencies that aren’t, and also to strengthen the ones that are. To be honest, it goes both ways.

There’s some discernment that arises out of meditation: Here’s what I want to cultivate more of. Here’s what I want to cut down or cut out. And now that we are the age that we are, and we are taking care of older parents and also young beings, I do find that the same sort of tendencies come out. Like, when I am stressed or overwhelmed, my fuse is shorter, right? But I know that about myself at this point. So I also know—I’m gonna refer to my kid here—I’m gonna set you up with your Tonie box over here. I’m just going to step outside for a minute, and come back to the breath for a few minutes, particularly now that it’s nice out, and let the sun actually hit me. Then I’ll come back in.And now we’re going to go and try and talk you into going to music class again.

But there’s some sense of, “Oh my gosh, I know my tendencies so much better than I used to. I also know that it’s entirely within my control to make better choices.”

And I think this is an area where so many of us get stuck. For example, people will say, “I’m an anxious person,” or “I’m an angry person,” whatever their thing may be. And that becomes an identity marker that, frankly, they just buy into wholesale, as opposed to, “This is something I’m working on.”

I think just having that view throughout that “Oh no, I’m not an anxious person. I’m a basically good person who gets anxious sometimes,” it makes the whole situation so much more workable. “Oh, when my mind wanders, that means that it’s up to me. I have the choice to continue to spiral about the thing, or acknowledge the thing and come back to what’s happening right now.” There is just, again, a sort of lessening of that harm.

Because, as you noted, the impact is so much greater. The last thing I ever want is for my child to feel afraid because I snapped or something, or that my child would ever feel ignored because I’m too lost in my head to be there with her, or whatever the thing may be. I feel like I’ve been meditating for a couple decades now to train me for the demand of a being who’s like, “Please be 100% present and here with me, in an open and emotionally available way.” It’s like, okay, this is the thing I’ve been training for.

I feel like I’ve been meditating for a couple decades now to train me for the demand of a being who’s like, “Please be 100% present and here with me, in an open and emotionally available way.” — Lodro Rinzler on parenting a toddler

Lodro: I will say, because that makes me sound like I’m really good at this, I’m better at this point with my daughter than I am with my mother who has dementia, and some of the unintentional—it has to be considered unintentional, because of the dementia—abuse that I experience at her hands. She’s in sort of a late stage, and can at times be very mean and very cutting, and threaten to do things that she ultimately would never in her right mind do.

My wife says a lot of wise things. One of them is, “Our family knows how to push our buttons because they’re the ones that installed them there in the first place.” So I am walking this tightrope walk of not necessarily allowing those buttons to get pushed too deeply, or if they are, to reset them as quickly as I can, so that I don’t do anything that would ever negatively impact my mother. And then to also make sure that I’m not installing these sorts of buttons in my child. But there are often times when both of them are demanding my attention at the same time. It’s hard. It’s definitely hard. And if there’s ever a place to talk about it, it’s here on In Tending.

Ryan: Thank you for saying that. And again, it’s very validating to hear that somebody who has been meditating for literally ever finds that to be difficult.

And I share that sense that it is often much easier to touch into the basic goodness of children, in my experience—and this may not be true for everybody—than it is to touch into the basic goodness of our elders, particularly ones who are closest to us. It feels as though there’s just so many more layers of clay.

Lodro: Exactly. Thank you. That’s it. It’s the layers of clay. It’s real.

And I mean, listen, I think we just all have to be very real about these conversations. It doesn’t make us worse practitioners for admitting that at times, that cutting thing from the elder parent hurts. It’s very human. We’re all humans.

A while ago, I have a friend who is in creative directing, and he asked. “Well, what’s the brand for your book, and for you doing the new book?” I was like, “I’m just a human. I’m a very human human. There’s no brand there.”

But if you had to put a label on it, it’s that I will be entirely honest about the humanity of it all. And I can believe that I’m 100% basically good, and also challenged at times, and I don’t have to be perfect.

Ryan: And I do feel like that is something that feels as though it’s a pressure, one that people who are engaged in mindfulness then put on themselves.

If you’ve been meditating for a while and you still get hooked by these incredibly challenging things that come up in caregiving, then I find that sometimes it makes us more prone to self-criticism, because there’s this narrative that I should be better at this. I should be more mindful. I should be more compassionate.

Lodro: Right.

On removing the “second arrow” of judging ourselves for having a hard time

Ryan: I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the second arrow, because I think that’s what we’re talking about.

Lodro: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s a beautiful analogy that I find myself saying to people like a couple of times a week at this point, because so many of us struggle with this.

So, imagine going through this field and out of nowhere an arrow comes and hits you in the arm. Now, the thing objectively we know she should do is we should take the arrow out and tend to our healing. The thing that we often do instead is we say, “Who shot that arrow? I bet it was Charles. Charles has always been out to get me. It’s absolutely that person. This is totally like them. When I get back to the office, I’m going to tell everyone what a jerk Charles is.I’m going to turn everyone against him. And he can’t do this. He can’t get away with it.” And that is the second arrow.

The first arrow is there is suffering that happens as part of life. The Buddha said right out the gate, there’s going to be aging and sickness and death, and all sorts of things that are going to shift under your feet, and real-world events that are suffering. They just are. What do you do in response to that? What we often do is we give in to the second arrow.

So the first arrow is: there’s suffering as part of life. The second arrow is: there’s then suffering that we layer on top, in our own mind, that we don’t necessarily need to engage in.

We don’t need to go to that story. In fact, if we didn’t go to that story, it’d be a lot easier to pluck that arrow out and tend to our healing.

It’s the second arrow that is where a lot of us struggle. Not just, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that I lost that client,” but “Oh my God, I lost that client because I’m not good at my job, and everyone hates me. And no one’s going to want to work with me.” That’s the second arrow, right?

Ryan: Right. Yeah. That’s Mara showing up.

Lodro: Yeah. All of it. Yes.

Ryan: I think that it’s just really important to talk about that. Because I do think that when we talk about basic goodness, it’s not just a neat idea. It really is a pretty radical reframing of the way that we see harm and responsibility.

I think of the two stories as, one, the who’s bad and who’s to blame story. And again, in some religious traditions, that’s the story. And there’s a lot of discussion around who’s bad and who’s to blame, and also who’s good and who is worthy, or worthier, of the good things. And so that’s one story. And I think we’re living in that story, and we can see that from the way that children are disciplined to our carceral system.

And then there’s another story, which is: what are the needs and how can I meet them? Right? Like, so thinking, would it make more sense to pay attention to the fact that I need a doctor right now for this arrow? Or is it more important that I track down the person who shot it, or blame myself for being so eminently shootable?

I think that the shift towards what do we need and how do we meet the needs is really radical.

“So the first arrow is: there’s suffering as part of life. The second arrow is: there’s then suffering that we layer on top, in our own mind, that we don’t necessarily need to engage in.” — Lodro Rinzler

Ryan: Just to share a personal story from our family; my husband was raised Catholic, and he’s got this christening outfit—like, the whole nine yards—that has been passed down in his family forever. And his family asked us, would we like these garments? As in: are we choosing to go through that ceremony?

Being a Buddhist married to a fairly casual Catholic person, sometimes it makes sense to be like, “You know what, sure. let’s do it for the ‘gram, let’s give them some pictures.” But with this one, I’m like, “I really can’t back it.” Because the whole idea of baptism is that you’re born bad, and then you need to do these things in order to make the bad go away. And as a Buddhist, it really came back to basic goodness for me.

So I’m like, “With all due respect to your family traditions, that’s not what I believe. And that’s not the story that we’re going to tell in our home, and that’s not the reality that we’re going to raise our child in.”

And that’s a choice that we made fairly early on as parents. And I come back to that all the time.

In so many ways, the spiritual traditions of the world all point to this idea that we should be kind to ourselves and other people. And yet, without basic goodness being a bedrock part of the spiritual community, I think we can really kind of start to drift.

And that’s why I think this book is so important, because I don’t think that somebody in this era has really articulated what basic goodness is and what basic goodness isn’t. And also articulated, potentially, the objections that somebody raised in the who’s bad and who’s to blame story, through no choice of their own, would bring. “But what about this? What about this?”

Frequently asked questions—and objections—about basic goodness

Ryan: I’m curious to know what kinds of common questions you get when you say, actually, everybody’s basically good inside.

For example, I know you get a lot of questions about political leaders. I’m wondering if there are other objections that people have where they’re like, “Well, but in my special case, I am actually worthy of second arrowing. I really am terrible.”

Lodro: I haven’t found a lot of people who admit that. I think that people can be skeptical, and the way that they are skeptical about their own basic goodness is that they then say, well, what about this person?

Ryan: That’s so interesting.

Lodro: They’re trying to poke a hole somewhere, because they may not necessarily buy into the fact that they’re basically good. Sometimes it’s independent of those things, but sometimes people say, I can’t believe that my ex would be basically good. It becomes more personal, right? Right. Like, you haven’t met my ex. Like this person is really manipulative or whatever it is.

With that situation. I’m reminded of a story. It’s a horrible story, but I’ll share it.

I was on a book tour some years ago, and there’s the questions you noted I get quite frequently. At the time, it was, “What about Hitler? Hitler can’t be basically good.” Which we can get into if you want. We had some conversation about it, and I sort of said the perspective that I normally share.

On the way home, the person who was hosting me on that book tour said, “I’m so glad you said that. I don’t know if it’s relevant, but—” And she shared that she had married someone who had kids, and she also had kids, and it became a blended family. And one of her step-kids fell in with a very bad crowd in his late teenage years, and they were doing drugs, and they murdered someone. I’m basically just going towards a euphemistic version of the story because I don’t know the gory details of this, but it was gory, and sort of an unforgivable crime.

And he went to jail, and she went to visit him in jail, and found a completely closed-off human being who was not at all recognizable to her. And she had heard that thing about basic goodness. And she was like, “I don’t know, maybe not. Maybe we can just forget it. Maybe it’s something that comes and goes. Maybe it’s not always there.…but this is also my kid, and I’m going to keep coming back as much as I can.”

So she would regularly visit, and he would receive her, and It would continue on like that for some months. And then at one point, he asked about the family dog, and that was the entry point. They talked about the dog a lot. And then a couple of visits later, he asked if she could bring art supplies. He hadn’t done anything artistic in years. And she brought them, and he began painting.

And gradually—and it was still in process at the time that I was visiting— she said, “I’ve seen him come back to himself. To who this kid was, and that basic goodness that I saw before. I’m seeing it again.”

So I think of that. Because there are extreme cases, where people can get extremely confused about their basic nature. And going back to, “What about Hitler” or “What about that world-threatening politician?” It’s same sort of story. Like, this is not someone who’s doing well, folks. This is not someone who’s in touch with basic goodness and deciding to harm a lot of people. Those sorts of decisions come when we are feeling at our worst, quite frankly. When we’re so ignorant to the way that our actions are affecting others that we cause harm.

I’ve been there. You’ve been there. Like, maybe we aren’t at that scale of that world-threatening politician, but it is still similar. We can say that we feel not-good, and we are trying to make ourselves happy in ways that are not actually making anyone happy. That is something I know, something I see in others, and something I definitely see in the people that we would normally try and villainize.

So the story of this teenage kid who’s now in his 20s, it is a situation where it’s like, “It’s nice to remember that people can come back to themselves.” I’m not even going to say redeemed. I’m not going to say that this person should be forgiven. I’m just saying that they can come back to that sense of, “Oh, underneath some of these things I’ve gotten swept up in, I don’t only have to act from pain.”

Ryan: I can actually come back to something else. Yeah, absolutely.

How to explain basic goodness to our children

Ryan: And honestly, word for word, that is the description of why sometimes people do bad things that I’ve given to my 6-year-old son.

Like, if we’re talking about ICE, or if we’re seeing something in Star Wars that just doesn’t seem right. Even within Disney movies, you will see people dressed up as police who are supposed to be helpers, doing reprehensible things. And so the question is always, “Why would they do that, Mama?”

And so to me, I think it’s a much more legible, developmentally appropriate way to explain the world to a kid, to say, “Well, you know how sometimes you want more than you really need? You know how sometimes you feel really mad and you want to hit? You know how sometimes, like, you just don’t feel like being part of the solution process and you’d rather just go play Minecraft? Well, other people have those things going on inside of them too. And sometimes, they don’t have very nice mommies and daddies who are helping them learn to work with their minds, and so they just get bigger and bigger until they touch huge parts of the world.”

And I don’t know what your experience has been in talking to people about it, but even my 6-year-old seems to be able to really grasp that. Because it isn’t like, wow, this is an unimaginable evil that’s out there, right? It’s like Thich Nhat Hanh said: the real enemies of man are inside of us. They’re greed, aggression, delusion, cupidity.

And then it’s not about who’s bad and who’s to blame. It’s what’s needed? I think sometimes it’s about meeting the needs of the person that’s suffering and acting out. You brought up your aging parent—where it’s like, do we need to really get granular about why this person who is experiencing cognitive and physical decline is acting like a person who’s in cognitive and physical decline? I think we know why that is.

Lodro: Exactly.

Ryan: So it’s more about, what do we need to do? What’s needed? And I think that by shifting into that story, even if you aren’t fully in touch with that person’s basic goodness, you’re still acting out of your own, which is something.

And that’s something that we tell our son too: that we act in kind ways, not because the other person has shown us they deserve it, but because that’s the people that we’ve decided to be.

And truly, sometimes I can’t really touch into a sense that somebody deserves my kindness, but it’s who I’ve decided to be. And that feels more accessible to me. It’s a habit I’ve developed, right? If we’re Buddhists talking about habits, it’s like, well, my habit is, this is how I’m going to relate to somebody who seems like they’re really suffering.

Not always, to be clear, not always—as my husband will tell you. But if we shift into being inside of a different story, then different choices become possible for us.

Lodro: Yeah, 100%. And I think what you just said nailed that answer. We have to make it human, as opposed to something vague out there—that person, that politician, that we’ll never meet. It’s more like, “Have you ever acted out of impulse, hurt, whatever, and caused yourself harm? Yes. Have you ever done that and unintentionally harm someone else? Yes. Cool. So not same same, because the scope is different, but there is some similar come-from.” And then people start to say, “Oh, now there’s an inroad toward, if not compassion, at least understanding.”

Ryan: Yeah, right, exactly. It’s context. It’s not an excuse.

But I think the less we can be overwhelmed and confused and alienated from the actions of the people that are engaging in harm, the more we have a working theory for how these things arise, I think the more effective we can be in the world and taking action around it.

Lodro: I think that’s really the scope of it.

“Everyone is baby”

Lodro: So this book goes from, okay, I’m basically good, I can reconnect to my basic goodness, and then—well, there’s also all these other people in the world, and they’re basically good too. So there’s the people I like, and there’s the people I don’t like—which is hopefully a very small number of people.

And then this massive group of people called everyone else. The people that are riding their bikes by right now, or who I run into the grocery store, or whatever. And for them, they have the main character energy for their life. But for me, they’re a background player, right? But I treat them as all equally worthy of respect.

I think I shared at one point this piece that I wrote for the Substack that we do called The Laundry. And it was the best advice that my teacher, Kilung Rinpoche, gave me. I said, “I’m worried that when this child comes, I’m not going to be able to do long retreats and meditate as many hours a day as I currently am.” And he was like, “Uh, yeah. You’re not.” But here’s the thing, he said, and he was right: “Be attentive to baby. Just be present to baby.”

In those early months, I’d get in little bits of practice here and there, and it was like, “Okay, but now there’s this being right here, and this is the practice right now. I’m just 100% here with this being who at that point, at all communicative or communicates in different ways I’m trying to understand and make sense of—but there’s some sense of, okay, that’s the practice.”

And the more I started leaning into that practice, and the more we would be out in the world together, I’d be giving 100% attention to this being, and then there’s someone smiling at us in the other lane of the grocery store. And then all of a sudden, I find myself giving my full attention to that baby. Right? Like there’s some sort of shift that started happening of like, “Oh my gosh, all these quote-unquote strangers are also baby. Can I also recognize the goodness, and be as present as possible, with all of these beings?”

And then ultimately, society is made up of me, plus the people I like, the people I dislike, and the people I don’t know. That’s society. It’s not something massive out there. It is so human, and it’s us.

It’s us here in a mini-society on a podcast, talking about this for the Substack. It’s us, and people listening or people reading this later. They are part of this community too. They are actively caring about these issues, and they’re engaged with us. And then ideally, that then ripples into their family, or that then ripples into their care, or that then ripples into whatever work they do. And that society also is affected. So their family society, their work society, their caretaking society, whatever it is. And we all have those.

And that’s what society is. It’s a thousand bazillion little mini-societies that we’re all actively co-creating.

“We are always having an impact”

Lodro: And so there is some sense, going back a thousand questions, of trying to show up as best we can, knowing that we are always having an impact. This is the Buddhist truth of interdependence. If I came on distracted and annoyed about something from earlier, that would have a ripple effect in our conversation, and that would have a ripple effect on people listening, and so on. If I come in like, “I’m going to be fully authentic with Ryan, I’m just going to show up as open-heartedly as possible”— hopefully that then has the ripple effect in a positive way.

Ryan: Yes. And I think that feels so small and it feels so big.

Like, we were talking about how the decisions that we make in this position in our lives sometimes feel so small. I can’t tell you how many parents I talk to who are like, “I’m not out in the streets protesting and I feel like a failure as an activist,” you know? We can feel so helpless and inadequate when we are just buried in care tasks, because we’re not engaging civically the way we were in our 20s, right? Or our 30s.

And yet at the same time, there is a school of thought, and you can kind of balance the two perspectives, that every action I take as a parent right now is going to have enormous ripple effects that I cannot predict. Every decision I make, like you said, to step out and sit on the porch for 5 minutes, which I definitely did before this, for the reasons you name, can have these ripple effects.

And there’s also just that huge middle ground, between me and the political leader I deeply distrust. There’s this whole map of people that I can have a positive impact on.

And it’s almost like working a mathematical proof, where it’s like, “Well, if I’m basically good and I’m down with that, and that political leader is basically good, and I can at least experiment with that being true, then every single person in between is basically good, which means that … society is basically good?” Which is the bold claim that you make.

For me, it’s like—wow, that’s a much more manageable way to think about it, particularly as a woman, where it really does feel like society is this thing that is just pushing down on me, and all I can do is push a little back, and try not to crack. It’s like, “Oh yeah, I am part of all these societies.”

And it makes me think of adrienne maree brown talking about murmurations, and how actually as an activist, we can look to join a murmuration. Right? These sort of bubbling-up experiences of people, all at once, awakening to basic goodness—all at the same time, potentially in the same place, around the same issue. And suddenly you have Selma. You have the protests around George Floyd. You have these huge bubbling-ups that you can take part in.

And not every protest is going to be a murmuration, But I also think that it might just be knowing what murmuration you’re a part of that helps you feel as though your daily experiences of basic goodness are actually connected to something bigger—and that something bigger is going to maybe have an impact on something that feels really existentially huge, like climate change.

Ryan: So, You have 2 minutes left. Please tell me your thoughts on how basic goodness connects to questions like, how do we deal with climate change? No pressure!

Lodro: Yeah, no pressure.

I’ve made reference to throwing a stone in a pool of water, and that we don’t always see where the ripples will go. And the beautiful thing about the truth of interdependence is that we could march in the streets, we could write something politically active or positive on social media, it all has a ripple.

I think because we are in a Western society that wants to maximize productivity, we want the biggest ripple that we possibly can with the least amount of time. And I think it’s a very hard thing to do. Because, as you noted, many of us feel like, I only have so much time. I’m raising a child, I’m caring for an elder. Or there’s any number of things that take up all the other non-working hours of the day.

This push-pull is insane, don’t get me wrong. I have no idea how I have time for anything. But it starts to become, for me at least, less about what do I need to do and more how do I show up? Who do I want to be?

I once heard this described as the difference between resume and eulogy qualities. Resume qualities: here’s the things I got done, I sold this many books, or I made this many sales in Q2, or whatever your thing may be. A eulogy quality is: what do you want people to remember about you after you died? What do you want them to say? That you are a loving person, that you are kind, that you showed up and tried to make a difference.

That doesn’t get limited to going to that one march. It’s an everyday occurrence. Whoever you encounter, whether it’s someone who is on the other side of the political aisle in the grocery store, or calling your senator, it is how we show up that is going to have a ripple effect.

That’s the beautiful thing of the truth of interdependence. Just because we don’t see it all, just because there isn’t an immediate gratification, doesn’t mean that we’re constantly having having a positive impact, when we embody the qualities that we actually want to see in the world.

Ryan: Thank you for that. I think that’s a beautiful note to end on. And not only because I know you have to go—speaking of having very limited time.

Lodro: I mean, I could do this forever, but I meet with meditation students throughout the day, and I don’t want to keep them waiting either. If I’m talking about trying to be kind and generous, I should show up too for them.

Ryan: “Lodro was very punctual throughout his life.”

Lodro: That’s all I want.

Ryan: Okay, we’ll make a note.

Lodro: Though it’s probably more like, “Lodro was always one minute late.”

Ryan: Yeah, same.

Well, this was wonderful, and please do come back. And, thank you for taking the time. I can’t wait for your book to come out. Will you just tell us when it’ll be out, where it’ll be out, where we can find it? Where we can find you online?

Lodro: Yes. So You Are Good, You Are Enough— what’s the full subtitle here? Free Yourself from the Trap of Doubt and Return to Basic Goodness. It is so long, that title. I’m okay with it though.

You Are Good, You Are Enough comes out March 24th and is found wherever you get books. So you could go to bookshop.org, you could go to Barnes Noble, you could go to Amazon if you want to do that sort of It’s up to you. But if you do decide to pick it up, please feel free to reach out.

There’s lodrorinzler.com, which is probably the best place to find me. And you’ll also find free guided meditations on that page, for the book that are included there. There’s meditations in the book, and then I guide you in them if you prefer to listen to me give it.

And I’m also on Instagram as @lodrorinzler and also Facebook as LodroRinzlerSpeaks, and to some extent X and Bluesky, although perhaps less so.

If you do pick up the book, please feel free to reach out to me. I love hearing from people who engage in this work. I want to have that dialogue. It means so much to me that people still reach out from books that came out a million years ago. And it is that sense of throwing a book into the world, and this big stone falls into the pool of water, and I don’t know where the ripples will go. So if you are inspired by it, and you want to reach out to me, I would love to hear and see that ripple.

Ryan: Thank you so much. And you’re also my neighbor on Substack at The Laundry with your beautiful and amazing wife , who I really love and appreciate.

So yeah, lots of places to find you and tell you about the ripple effects that you’re having. I hope you get to hear that as a result of this book. And we’ll let you go now, with all apologies to your meditation students. You can just blame it on me. I’m bad, and I’m to blame!

Lodro: Perfect. Thank you so much.

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If this workshop title calls to you, we need to tell you two things:

1. We are so sorry for the loss that brought you here.

2. We are also so grateful that you found us.

For this workshop, I invited my friend Emily Marlowe, LCSW, PMH-C, to join me as a co-facilitator. Emily is a licensed clinical social worker based in Louisville, KY, who specializes in trauma therapy. Since then, we have both felt called to enter the world of grief work ourselves. We have co-taught around fifty of these grief education and support sessions together. The participants we have worked with have been through some of the toughest forms of trauma that exist in the modern era—medical abuse, stigmatized grief, termination for medical reasons, late pregnancy loss.

And we absolutely love what we do.

There are few things I do, in fact, that feel more impactful than this sacred work.

As Emily and I talked about in our recent interview together:

Grief is going to find expression. And it’s really just a question of what kind of expression it’s going to find.

And so that experience of being in bed for 6 months–that is grief finding its expression. And there’s also an opportunity to choose consciously how we would like for our grief to find its expression.

Sometimes I think of what we offer to participants, in terms of supporting them with creating rituals and supporting them in doing some reflective writing, I almost think of it as preventative care.

Because it is very early on in the process introducing this idea of agency. You didn’t choose this grief. Very often there’s a grappling with, “Did I cause this grief?” And we invite people to sit with that question in whatever way feels right for their particular spiritual background. But also, “What am I going to do with this grief?” … If I have this deep need to nurture, and I don’t have this living person in front of me to direct that towards, where do I direct that energy?

In this workshop, we help you to answer these questions for yourself. To set aside the time and the space to consider:

What will you do with this grief?

Where would you like to direct the energy?

These are questions only you can answer. At the same time, we also aim to provide you with as much explicit guidance, concrete examples, and warm, compassionate care as our time will allow, inside a well-held container.

In this 90-minute video session, participants are guided to:

• Set intentions for the workshop, meditating on why this title or topic feels relevant

• How to turn towards big feelings like grief with mindfulness, and without fear—rather than feeling like you’ve just been caught in a tidal wave of emotion, and there’s no boat in sight

• The science behind writing and ritual work for grief—so that you understand how to engage with these supports in ways that will actually help you heal, and that aren’t particularly woo-woo or religious

• How to slowly re-claim a sense of coherence and agency through making creative choices

A common refrain you’ll hear from Emily and I, one we’ve borrowed from our friends at RTZ Hope, is this:

Choosing is more important than doing.

Making choices that are in alignment with your current capacity and values is how you begin to heal from an experience that may have robbed you of a sense of all choice, and/or the opportunity to show up the way you wanted to show up.

So, as you move through this workshop, know that everything that we offer here is just an invitation. Please feel free to pause, breath, step away, take what you need, and leave the rest.

Here’s a snapshot from the workshop:

If this timing and framing feels supportive for you, we invite you to clear some space in your schedule, and move through Clearing Space for Grief at your own pace.

Folks who signed up for this workshop, and/or who are participating in the Mentorship program here at In Tending, can scroll down now to access these workshop materials virtually below, which allow you to do the following:

• Watch the video and follow along with the exercises.

• Listen to the audio, akin to a podcast, and do the same.

• Read the transcript at your own pace.

We can’t wait to hear what you think in the comments!

Don’t have a Mentorship subscription? You can click here to view your options, and upgrade to unlock the workshop materials below.

You can name your own price for the Mentorship program, which also gives you:

• A 1:1 personalized support session from me. We can use this time to co-create trauma-informed mindfulness and writing practices that are just for you, which can further support you in bearing witness to your grief, and calling in the kind of community that can help you to hold the hard. (Learn more about these here.)

• An all-access pass to all of our 2026 workshops. This includes the next scheduled workshops in this series, which includes Tending Your Spiritual Truth with on April 8 and Marking Complicated Mother’s Day with on May 6. It also includes access to the workshop archive, including Coming Home to the Body, Re-Imagining Intimacy, and Re-Claiming Our Power.

May this workshop be of benefit on your path to personal and collective liberation. And we hope to see you at the next one!

Warmly,

Ryan + Emily

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• A mother

• A writer

• A Buddhist meditator

• A person who’s into witchy shit

Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to run into , who instantly made me feel less alone.

Sarah’s a Southerner who was born into a Christian lineage, then raised by two queer moms. She practiced paganism in her teens. She came to Tibetan Buddhism a few years later. Now she writes a newsletter, , where she braids all of these spiritual strands together. Sarah’s work has also appeared in places like The Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, and Tricycle.

Sarah also teaches writing, as an artist-in-residence at Northwestern University, and at StoryStudio Chicago. In fact, next Wednesday 4/8 at 12pm, I’ll have the pleasure of co-teaching a workshop with Sarah called Tending Your Spiritual Truth. It’s designed especially for folks like us, and for so many people who read both of our newsletters—people who don’t fit neatly into any one particular tradition or box.

Save your spot for 4/8 here

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In our interview below, Sarah and I also talk more about the ways in which Buddhism intersects with our love for all that is wild and witchy—and how, as two life-long outsiders, we’ve both found a home in the place where these spiritual traditions come together.

Ryan: Where did you grow up? What was it like for you to grow there?

Sarah: I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s in a family with two mothers in Lexington, Kentucky. My mothers’ relationship was queer platonic—one mother identified as straight, one mother identified as bisexual. I was conceived through a sperm donation.

Needless to say, this is an unusual situation to grow up in anywhere, but in Kentucky—especially pre-marriage equality—it was weird and difficult. I did not grow up with language to explain my family or see other families like mine, and we passed as straight for safety. In elementary school, I was sheltered from homophobia, but as an adolescent, I’d hear people use the word “gay” as a pejorative. The situation felt both very invisible and unacknowledged by my parents, which added to the complexity.

One thing that always helped me was feeling deeply connected to nature. I found an experience of solace and kinship there. Central Kentucky is gorgeous. It’s filled with hidden limestone caves, cliffs, sink-holes, and underground networks of springs, and to the east you have the foothills of the Appalachian mountains and places like Red River Gorge.

Later, when I would go to college at the University of Kentucky, I found pockets of weirdness and subversion in Lexington, its long queer history, and the incredibly rich literary world of Kentucky—which includes writers like bell hooks, Wendell Barry, Barbara Kingsolver.

Now, I am beyond grateful that I did not have a normal childhood. It’s been very freeing. I had to learn to self-define in a way that I don’t think I would have if I grew up in a straight, conventional nuclear family. Because I had to always consider how others would perceive me before sharing my experience with them, I became a more flexible thinker. It made me a better reader of people. It also helped me understand how trapped we can be by unexamined concepts, heteronormativity, and group-think. So many people live in prisons of convention.

Ryan: I can strongly, strongly relate to this as a non-Mormon who grew up in a heavily LDS community in Utah. Being able to head to the desert and get away from it all, and to feel that I belonged to all of life there, was life-saving for me.

Growing up as a permanent “outsider” also taught me how to find refuge within myself, or with other like-minded folks who could mirror back to me my basic goodness. For me, this person was my paternal grandmother. Who were some of the first people who affirmed your basic goodness?

Sarah: My mother Kathleen is the most influential person in my life. She passed away in 2014, a year before my first child was born. She was extraordinary—an exceptionally warm, powerful, and determined person. She grew up very poor in the rural south, and eventually earned a Ph.D. in biology, then went to medical school at the age of 35 to become a psychiatrist. One time she received a root canal without anesthetic or laughing gas because she was able to use self-hypnosis. That’s how tough she was.

She was also incredibly sweet, in the way that so many Appalachian women are. Think about Dolly Parton’s attitude, but in the body of a queer, soft butch woman who doesn’t wear makeup.

Ryan: Holy cow. A queer butch Dolly Parton? She sounds amazing.

How did you find your way to Buddhism from there?

Sarah: My mother K. was the daughter of two ministers in the Christian Church, also known as The Disciples of Christ. We didn’t go to church very often. She would have rather gone fishing or dig around in our tomato garden. She was very aware that Christianity was telling a story about the human condition through symbolism, and I was taught not to take anything too literally. At the same time, she considered herself a devout Christian. I don’t think she ever ended a phone conversation with me without a “God bless you.” I think she was always a little confused and hurt about why I didn’t feel at home in Christianity.

But Jesus just didn’t make sense to me as a young person. As a teenager, I felt most at-home and connected to the divine in nature. So paganism made sense to me, and much of it still does—especially the energies of the seasons, and moon cycles, and not seeing the divine only as male.

In college, I did my own research, and felt duped to learn that so much of the histories of Wicca and paganism were either revivalist speculations or exaggerations. These exaggerated histories actually have a lot of truth buried in them—a lot of land-based traditions did survive imperial Christianity—but at the time, I was just super turned off.

So I arrived at Buddhism disappointed. I just felt like, I am so done with all these stories. I wanted to get at the heart of some questions I had as an angsty young person. What’s the nature of existence? And why does it seem like reality is always playing a trick on me? And what’s this feeling that I get when I’m out in the woods, just sitting there by myself, and I suddenly feel like I’m not alone but a part of something much greater than myself?

At that time, I picked up Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and I was hooked. So I started thinking of myself as a Buddhist by the age of 19.

Ryan: For those who don’t know, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche is a well-known (and some would say infamous) teacher in the Tibetan tradition, which is just one of several strands of Buddhism that have made their way to the West.

For example, there’s also Theravada Buddhism, which is practiced in countries like Sri Lanka and has been popularized by Western Vipassana teachers like Sharon Salzberg and Tara Brach. There’s also the Zen traditions of Eastern Asia, popularized by beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and dharma teachers like Suzuki Roshi. The Dalai Lama belongs to the Tibetan tradition. While they have much in common, they all have slightly different histories, flavors and forms. [Note: You can learn more about these nuances through the work of here.]

What about Tibetan Buddhism in particular makes it feel like the most congenial strand of Buddhism for you, Sarah? And are there any aspects of it that you don’t love, but are willing to accept, given the other benefits you receive from it?

Sarah: With Tibetan Buddhism, I don’t feel like I converted to another religion. I feel like I discovered a worldview that echoed an innate perspective that had already existed within myself. The tradition is colorful, beautiful, rich, brave, compassionate, wise, relational, and full of good stories and art. I love the way Tibetan Buddhism makes me feel a sense of wonder about myself, others, the natural world, and the mystery of all that I don’t know or understand. It allows me to experience whatever it is that’s happening before me in a more relaxed way, even when things are terrible. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it hard to be bored on this path. I’m often surprised here.

I don’t know of any other Buddhist tradition that embraces contradictions so well. It doesn’t seem to divide intuition from reason in the way that so many Western systems do. It embraces pluralistic forms of knowing. It can be both very simple, like Zen, or baroquely complex, like the most ornate Hindu temple.

It’s also probably the only religion I know of that recognizes its own artifice. Meaning that dharma practice is a kind of lie that tells the truth—it’s an art. The methods and path all lead to something ineffable.

Like all religions, Tibetan Buddhism has problems because it’s made up of human beings and we’re not perfect. Any religion that is highly institutionalized is going to be prone to the same corruption that we find everywhere: greed, materialism, sectarianism, and the misuse and abuse of power. Patriarchy is a gigantic problem. But there’s also reverence and respect for female Buddhas and teachers like Yeshe Tsogyal, Machig Labdron, Sera Khandro, Ani Shugsep, and Ayu Khandro.

My biggest bone to pick with western Tibetan Buddhism is that it can feel so elite. I’ve often found many sanghas (spiritual communities) to be financially inaccessible to working class and middle-class people. I don’t think that these should just be available for coastal big-city-people, or highly educated people, or upper-middle class people, or white people. Everyone should have access to these teachings if they sincerely want them. The point is to liberate beings, not to join a wealthy country club.

At the same time, we need to be generous to teachers because they work incredibly hard and we wouldn’t have our dharma practice without them. When you give dāna to a teacher, you’re not just supporting them, you’re also supporting the existence of dharma in the world. You’re supporting countless beings.

“My biggest bone to pick with western Tibetan Buddhism is that it can feel so elite. I’ve often found many sanghas to be financially inaccessible to working class and middle-class people… Everyone should have access to these teachings if they sincerely want them. The point is to liberate beings, not to join a wealthy country club.” — Sarah Kokernot

Ryan: You and I share this commitment to social justice and accessibility in the mindfulness world. How does this show up in the work you do today? How did you come to do this work?

Sarah: After college, I thought I would get a degree in public policy or urban planning, and my first job was helping to run a canvassing office for the Democratic National Committee. Shortly after that I applied to a bilingual English/Spanish teaching fellowship on a whim. I’ve been doing some form of teaching ever since. My career started in elementary education, teaching four-year-olds and then second graders. If you can teach small children, you can teach anyone, and anything.

Right now I have a teaching gig as an artist in residence at Northwestern University, and I also teach at StoryStudio, a nonprofit creative writing center where I also work as a grant writer and consultant. Additionally, I have a micro-business, coaching and consulting writers. I especially love helping writers when they feel blocked or have faced rejection.

Ryan: How do your caregiving duties intersect with this work?

Sarah: My kids are four and ten. My schedule is bonkers. I get a lot of writing and work done while my kids are either playing or watching TV.

I also have an amazing husband who is also an incredible co-parent. We do our best to split parenting equally. It doesn’t always happen, but that’s the goal. Same-sex households, like the one I grew up in, tend to divide parenting and labor more equally than straight households. I told my husband that I didn’t want to get married to a man unless he was willing to be in a lesbian relationship with me. If it wasn’t for his willingness to support my work, I’d get nothing done.

Ryan: Behind every mom-writer who is getting anything done is, ideally, a partner who is doing the work too.

I’d love to talk more about how you’ve braided together all of these strands—your writing work, your caregiving work, your meditation practice—via your Substack newsletter, . You had me at “Buddhism, but make it wild and witchy,” which is your tagline for this project. Where is the overlap between “wild,” “witchy” and “Buddhism”? Where are the tensions or contradictions, as you see them?

Sarah: The “wild” in the title is inspired by ecological approaches that believe in re-wilding ecosystems in order to restore them from human disruption and misuse. “Wild,” in this sense, reminds me of Dzogchen, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice that entails resting into open-awareness. This is sometimes called resting in “the natural state,” and I think of it sometimes as resting into this primordial, wild state. It is a lushly rich, vast, fecund state of awareness, where we release our conditioning and habits.

I don’t really see “wild” contradicting the form of Buddhism I practice. Yogins (accomplished practitioners) like Shabkar and Longchenpa instruct us to practice high in the mountains or deep in the forest. I think this instruction to go to the wild is to help us find the qualities of these places mirrored within ourselves, and ourselves mirrored in these places. The kind of freedom and awe we experience in wild places is always available to us, no matter where we are.

I chose the word “witchy” for the tagline for a few reasons. First, because it’s a silly word and so many dharma practitioners are just way too damned serious for my tastes. I hope “witchy” turns those serious people off from my work. It’s a word that acts like a protector. For years, I was a little embarrassed that I was one of those girls in high school who quietly went around thinking of herself as a witch and who felt so deeply connected with nature, but now I’m embarrassed that I was ever embarrassed. My fourteen-year-old self was actually right about a lot of things.

In fact, the “witch,” as archetype, suggests that we can find great power, clarity, and wisdom in the liminal places outside of normative society. The original Anglo-Saxon term for “witch” simply meant a wise person. You’ll notice that in folklore, a witch usually lives in the woods away from the village. Similarly, in Tibetan Buddhism, yogins and yoginis have historically practiced in liminal places such as charnel grounds, caves, and mountains. These are undesirable places for most people. But when we practice in places that feel exiled or remote, we have a vantage point that allows us to see things with greater clarity. This is true both literally and metaphorically.

My feeling is that if we can find wisdom and contentment in liminal, unwanted places, we can find wisdom and contentment anywhere. This helps us benefit others.

So it could be more accurate for me to say “Buddhism is wild and witchy.” However, I’m aware that I’m sometimes speaking to readers who are under the impression that all of dharma is a kind of purely analytical practice, without animism, magic, and intuition—all things which we tend to label as wild, witchy, and feminine.

I think it’s great that so many people have found secular Buddhism beneficial, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that this isn’t the only form of Buddhism. There’s enough room for all of us here.

Ryan: Have you encountered any texts and/or teachers that have helped you feel seen and supported in this way of practicing?

Sarah: Lama Justin von Budjoss is my primary Dzogchen teacher and he's amazing. He's also a parent with three kids of his own. Lama Lena has recordings of her teachings on her website, which are fantastic, and please make sure that you generously offer her dana, because she doesn’t charge for her teachings. I love the writing of Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, who has many great courses. Lama Tasha Schumann, who is a student of Lama Lena and Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, is also fantastic, and writes the newsletter here on Substack.

Ryan: Speaking of people who set out to practice in the wild, I’d love to get your thoughts about one of the trickiest bits of Buddhism for many practitioners: the Buddha’s own origin story, and in particular, his choice to leave his family behind in order to seek enlightenment. What do you make of this as a parent yourself, and as a fiction writer who thinks deeply about how characters’ choices impact narrative?

Sarah: It’s my understanding that among the aristocracy in ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and medieval Europe, there were rarely ever “love marriages.” Marriages were business deals between kingdoms. I am not well-educated about the Buddha’s time period in India, but given that he was a prince in a rigid, caste-based system, I doubt that the future Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, met his wife at a friend’s birthday party and then went out on a date and fell in love. Given the transactional-like nature of these marriages, I’m not sure if he would have experienced the same bonds that we do with our partners.

According to the traditional story, the realities of old age, sickness, death and loss had been hidden from the Buddha until his adulthood. He must have felt completely gaslit by that charade. So it sounds like the Buddha was compelled to leave his home because he felt a bit crazy. He realized that he was in a system that caused harm to himself and others, and that wealth and power don’t give people lasting happiness. So he defected from the status quo.

Also, I’m not sure if you’ve met a rich man on a quest for enlightenment. Some of them are lovely, but some of them can be insufferable. It might have been a relief for the Buddha’s wife to have Siddhartha gone for a few years! I’m so impatient—I probably would have kicked him out of the house myself.

Ryan: I am laughing so hard right now.

Sarah: Like, how could you really not know we are all going to get old and sick and die?

So I’m okay with him not living up to the standards of today’s ideas of a good father or a good partner. I revere him because of what he’s given the world.

What’s most important to me about Siddhartha Gautama isn’t so much him as a person, but rather this discovery of “Buddha nature,” which is the inherently awakened nature of all sentient beings. Everyone’s true nature is exactly like that of the historical Buddha. I find it highly likely that someone—perhaps many people—discovered Buddha-nature before Siddhartha did, but they didn’t have either his social stature or his ability to explain these insights to others.

Ryan: To what degree do you think leaving home, or going on retreat, is still beneficial for someone who is on this path—even for those of us who can’t or won’t leave our families for years at a time?

Sarah: For me it’s essential to go on retreat now and then, even if it’s just for a few days at home. Practicing dharma is about becoming friends with your awakened mind. You can’t do that if you don’t spend some time alone with yourself. It’s worth inconveniencing your family for a few days, because you’ll come back from the retreat as a more steady, open presence.

Ryan: That has been my experience as well. Thanks for putting words to it in this way.

Some people don’t know that within Buddhism, there are traditionally four communities of practitioners. There are male and female householders, as well as male and female monastics—monks and nuns. The rules we follow are different, even if the basic path we’re following is supposedly the same. Monastics obviously spend much more time on retreat and in meditation than we do. Do you think the householder path is harder, or easier, given this difference?

Sarah: There are obstacles in both of these paths. I’m not convinced that the monastic path is somehow easier than a household path or vice versa. It seems to me that the monastic path is a kind of skillful means for some people, meaning that there are certain people for whom a monastic life is very conducive to experiencing awakened mind. But that isn’t the case for everyone.

Ryan: Are there any ways in which you think that householders might better leverage our position in the world for collective liberation?

Sarah: Bodhichitta, or compassion, is central to dharma practice, so this makes our lives as laypeople rich with opportunity, because life in the world is both exciting and difficult. My feeling is that I probably have more disturbing emotions to work with as a layperson than if I was in a cave or nunnery somewhere—and that’s a good thing. If I can work with those disturbing emotions skillfully, I can discover their true nature, and be of benefit to others in a direct way.

That said, compassion doesn’t mean that we coddle someone harmful or tolerate someone’s bullshit. It means that we wish them to be free from suffering. That’s it. And this wish includes all the people who are irritating, cruel, or violent.

Like, forget Buddha-nature for a second and just consider the fact that the ICE agents who are hurting people were once babies. At one point they were shiny, innocent, and sweet. Something terrible must have happened to these agents, because they’ve ended up in a kind of delusion that makes them think they need to kidnap five-year-olds and shoot innocent people in order to keep our country safe. I want them to be free of that delusion, which is also causing them suffering.

I’m a naturally fiery person, so without this practice, I’d probably be consumed with anger at ICE agents right now, and that high level of rage wouldn’t do me any good. I’d probably just get heart disease or an ulcer. We can act in ways that are more skillful and effective when we’re not feeling tortured by our own emotions. So, in my experience, deeply experiencing spaciousness and compassion help us laypeople both ease our own suffering, and ease the suffering of others.

That said, I don’t ultimately make a distinction between engaged Buddhism and Buddhism that is practiced for years in solitude or the cloisters of monastic life. If you are existing, you are engaging. I think that solitary monastics are changing the world by transforming their own suffering, and it can’t be underestimated how powerful that is, or how it affects other beings.

Ryan: I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on this. In what ways do you think a solitary practitioner waking up impacts the world at large?

Sarah: There is really no such thing as a solitary practitioner. Everyone depends on someone else. Interdependence is one of the most profound insights of Buddhism. In my limited experience, it’s through solitude that the lonely “I” is disrupted, and an incredible connection with all phenomena can be experienced. If we can have confidence in that experience, we will then have a greater capacity to naturally benefit others.

Ryan: One paradox I struggle with, within the context of interdependence, is the need to respect our interconnectedness while also knowing that I can’t do other people’s work—spiritual or otherwise—for them. To believe that I can or should is to engage in what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called “idiot compassion.” How do you navigate this? How do we let other people, including our children, walk the unique and winding spiritual path that is theirs to walk, as we have walked ours—without getting in the way?

Sarah: I think idiot compassion is our desire to want to “fix” problems for people, and that idiot compassion doesn’t arise from true compassion, but from a sense of guilt, avoidance, or control.

One of the things I’ve learned from practicing Dzogchen is that we are much more capable of supporting ourselves and others through pain or confusion when we are tapped into our own openness. As Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche says, we have to be able to “host” our discomfort and suffering with love and openness before we can benefit others in this way. When we touch that stable, compassionate openness—the nature of mind—we are more likely to help people find the space in themselves to experience, release, and heal their suffering. We don’t have to abandon ourselves to benefit others, which is what happens with idiot compassion.

I think this also involves realizing the limitations of a situation. Like the Serenity Prayer, we have to have the courage to know what we can change, and the wisdom to accept what we can’t.

Ryan: So well put. I’m anticipating that it will take much, if not all, of my lifetime for me to learn to practice this skillfully.

Sarah: Same here! May it be so!

Where can people find you if they want to engage further with your work?

My website: sarahkokernot.com

My IG: @yes_like_coconut

And here on Substack at !

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