2025 KOAN SESSHIN PRELIMS

I’m heading out for sesshin today. For unavoidable reasons, this is my first sesshin since December/Rohatsu. After going every month in 2023 and nearly every other month in 2024, I feel quite out of practice! There’s always a bit of anxiety before sesshin. It’s a lot of sitting with one’s own experience, and there can be a lot of chatter as your psyche fights against the silence. My first day is always pretty terrible, but fortunately the energy of the sangha and beauty of the environment generally carries me through.

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DAODI & CHINESE HERBALISM

As part of my new thinking, writing & teaching endeavor at Whole Life Practitioner, I’m digging into some deeper research projects and building in public as I do so. I have two current focus points - PKM particularly for practitioners like me, and the future of Chinese herbalism in this wild, wild world. Each of these will take many months to explore fully - and I do worry about my staying power in the face of everything.

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I’m just signal boosting this - shared by Suzanne Pharr on Facebook. Why They’re Winning And What We Can Do About It SCOT NAKAGAWA APR 7 Authoritarians in the U.S. and around the world are clearly gaining ground rapidly. Their success has caused many to speculate about why and how they are winning, hoping to duplicate or riff on those winning strategies and tactics. In this endeavor, caution is advised, particularly around how we define “winning.

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Cleaned up my old posts, reactivated my account, and got everything set up over at my personal site. I’ve been in a process of radically reducing my use of corporate social media for a while now. For years, I was back and forth, back and forth. A few months ago, I deleted all of my Twitter accounts entirely, and started the process of moving away from Meta platforms. I still have my personal IG account, as I love cat videos & have a couple of friends who are actively posting political content that is important to me.

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