Monk Notes

Everyone and everything in life has a hidden potential. We can see this by looking at an acorn; who could imagine that within such a small acorn h...

There’s a fundamental tension in life between two internal postures: Control and surrender; agency and dependency; prudence and trust. Some people...

We often feel guilt in relationships because we feel that we don’t do enough.There always seems to be more need; more that we could do to help the...

There is a very specific reason we often avoid taking the time to reflect:When we reflect, it doesn’t feel like we’re doing anything.For many of us...

Relationships shape the person that we become. With little effort, one can come to see the many ways we have been shaped by our family of origin: o...

Generosity is directly connected to meaningCulturally, we have a strange connection to generosity. We hold up generosity as a universally positive ...

“Go with the flow” can sound like good advice when you are enjoying yourself on a gentle river, but it is terrible advice when you have lost your f...

The path to productivity — and to a fuller life — is a path of subtraction, not addition.This is the reason the lives and environments of monks are...

The dominant narrative in western culture is one of pursuing more.An unfortunate side effect to this is that we often end up with more. More stuff,...

It is rare to feel an urgency around gratitude. For most of us, it holds a steady place in the nice to have category, an aspirational quality that ...

We think of ourselves as being a monolith, a solitary individual with a particular set of values, priorities, and ways of relating to the world. Bu...

For the past two months, I’ve been tracking my time. As in, all my time. I start out my day by projecting out how I will intentionally spend each ...