biography · · 3 min read
My Teacher
The teacher who gave me my name.
To my teacher, with whom I took refuge in September 2011.
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✦ Anchor essay
Reading Buddha's Words on Watch
Notes from a working captain who took refuge fifteen years ago.
Read the essay →Yenten Dorje
Notes from a working captain in the Longchen Nyingtik lineage.
Everything here is offered freely, with the aspiration that some phrase may be useful to one being on the path. Nothing on this site substitutes for a teacher or for the primary texts — it is only a set of signposts.
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lineage · · 6 min read
The Dzogchen Lineage I Follow
From the Buddha to the teacher who gave me my name.
The lineage I follow — from the Buddha down to the teacher who gave me my name.
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practice · · 8 min read
Practice in a Working Life
How the tradition survives contact with a job, a rotation, and a phone.
Notes from a lay practitioner in a working life — what I got wrong for years trying to practise like a monk on a ship, and the four sutrayana habits that actually hold up under real conditions at sea.
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teaching · · 4 min read
Why You Need a Teacher
What apps give, and what they cannot.
A note on the difference between meditation as a wellness product and Buddhism as a transmission tradition — and why one of them needs a living human being. Sutrayana level; general across schools.
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teaching · · 4 min read
What Ngöndro Is
The preliminary practice of the Nyingma path — informational, not instruction.
A short description of Ngöndro — the preliminary training of the Nyingma school — its shape, its six accumulations as taught in this lineage, and why the tradition places it first.
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practice · · 5 min read
Three Ways With a Hard Emotion
Suppress, discharge, or watch — the third one is the one the tradition teaches.
On the three usual responses to a difficult emotion and what changes when you take the third path. Sutrayana framing from Śāntideva and standard vipassanā, with a scene from the chief-officer years on a Caribbean charter.
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practice · · 4 min read
Ten Minutes Before Anything Else
A morning sit that has survived every kind of week.
A ten-minute morning structure — posture, four reflections, breath, aspiration, dedication — that held up through years of full-time seasons in Fort Lauderdale and Genoa, a pandemic, and now rotation.
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reading · · 5 min read
What Is on My Shelf
A reading list in the order I would suggest starting.
The Buddhist books actually on my shelf, in a rough order of usefulness for someone beginning — primary texts, biographical texture, and a small piece of critical scholarship for the outside view.
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