All writings
Start with the anchor essay if you have twenty minutes. Otherwise, pick a category. Each piece is short enough to finish over a cup of tea, apart from the two longer ones.
Notes from a working captain who took refuge fifteen years ago.
Twelve years in command of 50-metre motoryachts, one Atlantic under sextant, one delivery through a piracy-affected corridor, and fifteen years inside a lineage that has held it all steady. A working captain's plain account.
Read →
The teacher who gave me my name.
To my teacher, with whom I took refuge in September 2011.
Read →
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.
Read →
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.
Read →
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.
Read →
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.
Read →
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.
Read →
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.
Read →
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.
Read →