I’ve been reading a lot of Pema Chödrön’s writings about tonglen practice lately. One quotation of hers keeps sticking with me: Tonglen practice (and all meditation practice) is not about later, when you get it all together and you’re this person you really respect. You may be the most violent person in the world—that’s a fine place to start. That’s a very rich place to start—juicy, smelly. You might be the most depressed person in the world, the most addicted person in the…

Happy Sunday, friends! I finished up my clinicals on Friday, and life is good. I’ve also got the cold/malaise situation that I typically develop at the end of a busy semester, so I’m taking this afternoon off to rest and drink tea. While I’ve been too tired to do much, I haven’t been too tired to bake, and I’ve got a delicious new snack cake recipe coming to you tomorrow—and some great article links for next weekend. For today, so much love. xo

This was one of those weeks in which nothing, big or small, went according to plan. From travel delays and disastrous commutes to missed deadlines and forgotten emails, it all felt like a mess. Funnily enough, I was OK with it. It’s funny only because I don’t typically handle curveballs well. Anything that reinforces my lack of control tends to addle me at best, freak me out at worst. This week, though, the rarest of things happened, which is that I greeted all…

It hasn’t been a smooth season for me as far as body image goes. I started grappling with dysmorphia back in the fall. The discomfort has quieted down since then, but it hasn’t gone away. The last few months are the most consistently uncomfortable I’ve felt in my body in a good many years. I’ve been feeling the sensations without acting on them when it comes to my food intake—in fact, with the demands of the DI (commuting, lots of hours on my…

Happy December, friends! It’s been a somewhat rocky entrance to the month for me, as the past week was full of personal unrest. I slipped into patterns of behavior that feel like me at my worst—stuff so old and habitual and frustrating to me that I don’t even want to write about it. Here’s the interesting news: I’ve somehow managed to regard a bunch of varied relapses—relapses in thought patterns and compulsive behaviors—with an unusually compassionate and non-judgmental gaze. This wasn’t a conscious…

Now that my post-bacc is years behind me (I’m realizing as I write this that I began it in 2010, which is nuts), it’s very easy to tell an elegant story of adversity being channeled into growth, or about the benefits of experiencing rejection. I’ve been aware for a long time that I was probably spared a life that wouldn’t have been right for me when I didn’t get into medical school, but the passage of time has made it easy to forget…

My next door neighbor—I’ll call him Glen—passed away recently. I’m not sure when. I’d known he wasn’t well for a long time, based on our passing encounters and the haunting sound of his cough echoing through the hallway we shared late at night. For the past few months I suspected things might have taken a turn, since I didn’t see or hear him. But I didn’t know for sure that he was gone until my management company started gutting the kitchen in his apartment…