No Solitary Dharma Practitioners
A friend of mine, Ryan Rose Weaver, has a wonderful Substack, In Tending, on caregiving, creativity, and contemplative practice. We held the interview over a Google doc and talked a lot about many things (including my late mother, a queer soft butch doctor with the Appalachian sweetness of Dolly Parton). One of my favorite questions that Ryan asked was what I thought about solitary dharma practitioners.
I responded to this question in the interview and wanted to share my thoughts on that topic here because I think it’s an important one. I’ll post again when the full piece comes out!
Ryan: In what ways do you think solitary practitioners waking up impacts the world at large?
Sarah: There is really no such thing as a solitary practitioner. Everyone depends on someone else. Interdependence is one of the most profound insights of Buddhism, but because we’re so materialistic and caught up in appearances we generally don’t have strong confidence in interdependence. We assume that we must be in the world in a very visibly active way to do good and live out the Bodhisattva vow.
There’s a heritage from Abrahamic traditions that sees participation in religion as a congregational, communal activity, and so we think all dharma must be like this, and we end up elevating our cultural lens over others—including the very people who gave us these teachings. Historically and currently, there is a long-standing monastic, communal tradition in Buddhism which exists alongside the tradition of the solitary yogin and yogini (both monastic and non-monastic), and also the tradition of the ngakpa, an ordained non-monastic practitioner. There are also people who have never taken any vows, many of whom were never formally educated, who became very awake. All these ways of practicing are a skillful means for a person to recognize the nature of awareness. I don’t personally see any of these paths as being superior to the other. It really depends on what suits the person the best.
In terms of the solitary practitioner: they only appear solitary. If you are meditating and dedicating your practice to the benefit of all beings, I don’t see how it’s possible for solitary practice to reify the “I.” In my limited experience, it’s through solitude that the lonely “I” is disrupted, and an incredible connection with all phenomena can be experienced.
The web of interbeing, as Thich Nat Hahn called it, is so sensitive that someone who spends forty years in solitary retreat in a cave still has a major impact upon others. Every being who interacts with that kind of skilled, accomplished meditator will feel the benefit of that person’s clarity, and that will influence their own mind-stream, and that influence will influence others, and so on, and so on.
In a more tangible way, I’ve seen this happen in my own lineage. My teacher, Lama Justin von Bujdoss, was taught by a Nyingma monk named Pathing Rinpoche who meditated in solitary retreat in a cave for forty years before bringing the dharma to others.
Pathing Rinpoche wasn’t well-known, and he didn’t have very many students, but his life has had a huge impact on so many people. I never met Pathing Rinpoche but I would not be a practicing in this tradition without him. My teacher was hugely influenced by this person. He has a more visibly active role in the world than Pathing Rinpche did, in that he’s bringing teachings on dark retreat to the west, and setting up programs like a vajrayana Buddhist chaplaincy training program so that vajrayana practitioners can provide spiritual care for others in places like hospitals, hospices, and prisons. Pathing Rinpoche is one of the causes that someone—maybe even right now—is holding a dying person’s hand, or why someone is comforting a grieving person who has just learned about the death of a loved one. This is how that web of interbeing works. Solitude does not mean isolation.
Because Pathing Rinpoche meditated alone in a cave for forty years, he knew his own mind in a very powerful way. He has impacted more beings than we can imagine because of this. And without all the yoginis and yogins who taught and influenced him, he wouldn’t have achieved this type of awakening. They did a great service for the world by transforming their minds in solitary retreat.
Dewdrops on a spider web. Sometimes the more-than-human world shows us the web of interbeing!
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Workshop: “In Praise of Death, Decay, and Renewal”
A writing workshop at Greenspell on Wednesday, 10/22
The contemplation of decay, compost, and renewal is essential in deepening the connection between our own lives and the living world. Nature doesn’t stop in the fall. Plants go to seed, then compost themselves back into the soil so that new life can be nurtured within the earth.
We'll take a short plant walk to observe and connect with the living world while it's in a cycle of decay. Back in the studio, we'll write poems, reflections, and letters in praise to the beings who have created us through their own lives: deceased loved ones, hereditary and spiritual ancestors, and the places and stories that continue to nurture us even though they're gone.
Class will include:
a short plant walk
writing prompts
sharing of work with community
writing feedback from participants and instructor
Participants will leave with a few new pages of prose or poetry, and a deeper understanding of the cycles of decay and renewal both in their own lives and the natural world.
“The World Is Alive And Has Many Things to Tell Us”
Supporting immigrants in Chicago + Finding spiritual resilience in the living world
The purpose of dharma practice is to care for ourselves so that we can better care for others. I wrote about supporting immigrants while ICE invades Chicago and its suburbs, and how we can all find spiritual resilience in the living world, and also: the witch, the pagan, and the yogini. Read the full piece.
Email guidance on creativity, writing, & spirituality
Excited to offer email guidance and at your own pace! Send me your question along with your email address and a short bio, and I'll reply with practical guidance that is tailored just for you. The first email is free, no strings attached. If you want to keep going, the rate is $100 with a sliding scale for those who need it. Fill out this contact form to get started.
My coaching isn’t about growing your audience on Substack or anywhere else, but about getting to the writing that means the most to you—that story, that essay, that novel, that memoir, that manuscript.
What do people ask me about? Below are a few examples.
Finding spiritual meaning and purpose while editing a long manuscript.
Knowing if you’re ready to apply for an MFA program or if you need to slow down.
Writing for yourself vs. writing for publication.
Strategies on revising essays, short stories, and book-length manuscripts.
Empowering yourself after rejection or failure.
Connecting mindfulness and meditation to your creative practice, and vice versa.
Late, late summer and early fall
What I’ve loved lately
Some of this happened a while ago but I wanted to share it here…
The prairie was dry and mostly full of golden rod in early September, but then it rained and a second bloom of aster and roisin weed appeared.
My best friend Heidi came with her family to visit and we did many exciting things, but maybe the most exciting thing was was going to the beach with everyone to look for pebbles and sea glass. Also Heidi is an amazing painter and you should buy her work!
There were more monarchs this year than I’ve ever seen, both on the prairie in our backyard. This monarch and others loved the Joe-Pye weed we let grow in our bed of hostas. They visited us daily for a while.
In a summer full of apocalyptic news the monarchs reminded me of how life is capable of miraculous transformation. The exoskeleton of the monarch caterpillar splits open and sheds, and the pupa's skin takes the form of a protective jade chrysalis while its interior body liquefies. After this painful labor, it turns into a butterfly.
Digging holes, making patterns with pebbles
I did a three day meditation retreat at home in early September and much of it was in our backyard. Eventually the wildlife came to see what I was doing.
A monarch on echinacea, photo by Heidi Lowell and her superior iPhone model.
Rosin weed in the prairie, early August.
Love The Abyss You Are Made Of
On The Guru, The Friend, The Mother, The Lover, and Platonic Romance in Tibetan Buddhism
I wrote about fecund emptiness, Nietzsche vs. Lispector, the secret primacy of life, the guru, the friend, the mother, the lover, and platonic romance in Tibetan Buddhism.
Read it here
Happy to be back publishing the newsletter after a summer break! Some changes and updates are also inside.
Mini-Salon on “Feeding The Creative Well: Resetting & Re-energizing Your Writing”
Yesterday’s mini-salon with Ines Bellina focused on how to re-energize our writing as we leave summer and begin the cozy, introspective, warm apple-cider days of fall. We answered readers’ questions on how to avoid feeling overwhelmed in the middle of book-length projects and how to cope with anxiety when you enter a creative period that focuses on input rather than output.
Feeding the creative well often means allowing ourselves to enter the weird and dreamy underworld that lives under the surface of our thoughts. Something is always bubbling and alive there—we just don’t always perceive it. Fall is perfect time to attune to what’s going on below ground, and generally, a change in seasons gives us the opportunity to start new habits and fine-tune old ones.
When we feel dried up and out of ideas, or bored with our work, we first need to stop kicking ourselves for experiencing the natural ebb and flow of the creative process, and instead, nurture our imaginations.
Here are some of the strategies and resources we shared in yesterday’s mini-salon:
Take a class in your genre or in another artistic discipline to feel refreshed and supported by community.
Read a lot. Reading is necessary to writing! Find books that make you feel like you’re in third-grade and you want to stay up way past your bedtime.
You are not a creativity machine and this is not an assembly line. it really is okay to not actively produce work all of the time. Trust the process.
Go to a writing group or talk with someone about your work—and ask your peers and teacher specifically for help on whatever it is you’re stuck on. Don’t know how to end your story? Ask! Spitballing can be helpful! All writing is highly collaborative. Also, paid subscribers to the newsletter: y’all can email me a creativity or writing question, and I'll send an email or voice note back with personalized advice, suggestions, and resources.
Look at what you’re ingesting in terms of culture. Are you a fan of trashy TV and find that you’re overdoing it? What about going to literary readings, art galleries, concerts, and museums to find inspiration? You are made from what you consume.
Do you need more rest? Like the cycles of the natural world, it’s normal for us to have creative periods that involve hibernation and stillness. If you are feeling overwhelmed or dried up, or if your work has lost its spark—those might be signs that you need to enter a restorative period of creativity. Read more on How Rest Feeds Our Creative Subconscious.
More strategies and the mini-salon recording
In conversation with Adrian Baker on the “Redesigning The Dharma”podcast
Delighted to have been in convo with Adrian Baker on his podcast, Redesigning the Dharma! We talked about Eros, devotion, love, Dzogchen, pleasure, suffering, and the liberatory, vibrant nature of emptiness.
I have never been on a podcast before and felt very nervous talking about Dzogchen publicly since I’m hardly a expert, and these practices are very sacred to me, and we also held the conversation at 8pm when my brain was fried after a day of parenting and work.
Fortunately Adrian is a great podcast host and he put me at ease. I knew I would get a bunch of things wrong but participated anyway in hopes that it would inspire someone to use these incredible teachings and methods in their own life. I think I did an okay job, in spite of setting my computer’s camera way too high.
After the interview, I woke up the next morning and immediately thought of a dozen things that I could have explained better, or more clearly, or points I could have focused on. I’m so much more confident as a writer than a speaker, but I’m glad I did it. May all beings know their excellent friend, mind itself!
Lastly, I neglected to send in a headshot, and it appears that the editor used a photo of me from eight years ago for the episode’s image cover, and it is quite lovely, flowy, feminine and youthful. I’m including a more recent and more accurate headshot below :
Ekajati, Courtesy of The Himalayan Art Museum
This is a blog now.
I’ve been rethinking my newsletter, which is hosted on Substack, and shifting how I want to write in free and public formats.
This largely came about because of my own capacity as a parent caring for two young children, one of whom is under the age of five, and as a person with a day job, and a working writer who is starting two new longer projects, one of which might be a short story (or a novel? I can never tell!) the other which will hopefully turn into a book-length memoir-in-essays. Also, I listened to this great conversation between Amelia Hruby and Seth Werkheiser on the Off The Grid podcast, and became terribly nostalgic for the way we used to keep blogs, the way other people feel nostalgic about vinyl or print photo albums.
I started my Substack at the tail-end writing of a novella manuscript. Finishing a long writing project is never easy. It’s like being a groundhog digging in a tunnel of burrows. You quickly forget what the above ground looks like, you constantly feel a wall around you, and it can be stuffy and hard to breathe, even if you’re the kind of animal that likes a subterranean home. Substack felt, to me, like a way to poke my head out of the hole to see what else was going on around me. To get some fresh air and a snack.
One of my favorite things about Substack was finding other spiritually-inclined readers and writers who had passions and interests outside of spirituality, and who, like me, find reverence without humor and silliness to be a bit suffocating. I found other dharma practitioners who also like frothy podcasts and peonies in June and Mary Oliver and art at the Getty and the raunchy stand-up of Ally Wong.
The best part of Substack, as I’ve seen it, is having a supportive community of other writers and readers. It feels like you can have a kind of pen-pal communication style relationship with people, a low-key sangha created through reading and commenting and sharing posts. I always love knowing that my work has touched someone in some way. It’s a huge reason why I write. Posting a short essay each month on Substack gave me a productive, creative break from the marathon pace of finishing a novella, and it felt rewarding to have my work immediately seen and engaged with.
Also: My inner bookseller loves championing the work of writers I admire on Substack. I think this comes from being a writer in a supportive literary community like Chicago, where there is a feeling that when the tide rises, we all float up together. I’ve had way more in-depth, meaningful conversations on Substack than I ever have had on Twitter (I got off in 2020) or Instagram. I’ve met people on Substack who I genuinely think are cool and who I would have coffee with if we lived in the same place.
I felt FOMO occasionally on Substack, and I felt downright envy occasionally, but I could deal with those. I wanted subscribers but I didn’t want to woo subscribers, so I didn’t let metrics drive my writing. Losing and gaining subscribers was a test of equanimity, one always forced me to get in touch with my own sense of truth.
The one time I received over 200 likes on a post—about the 3rd Karmapa and Milarepa no less—I was a bit horrified. 100 likes was great. But 200+? What was I doing to gain so much approval? It made me suspicious.
I had, after all, set out to write about subjects the dharma world often ignores or dismisses. Sexuality, love, art, family life, creativity, and the frivolous shit that makes life enjoyable in the ever continuing pile-on of casualties of war, genocide, political chaos, and environmental catastrophe, and not to mention, the personal tragedies and hardships and petty meanesss that so many people quietly endure.
I was pretty sure I had found the internet that my Gen-X husband had so innocently enjoyed in 1998, when I was a high school student, a burgeoning Gen-Yer, at a time before we insisted on categorizing each generation with these sticky labels. The best of Substack reminds me of my teenage days lurking on the Tori Amos listserv I signed up for when I was sixteen. It was a world filled with weirdos and rebels and people who dared to trust enough their own experience of the world.
It’s an important human need: to feel seen by others, and to have the pleasure of also seeing others.
I think that this is a very natural desire that often gets lost in the way that feeling seen has been driven to online spaces, where we are both rewarded through a gamefied system of “followers,” when so many people would just like to feel seen and see others in a way that is human. More than any other platform, I think Substack has given me the pleasure of seeing others in a way that is far more genuine than most social media. That being said, I think it’s very telling that the people who read your Substack are not “readers” but labeled as “subscribers.”
Because Substack doesn’t want the experience to be about reading.
Substack is not a list-serv from the glorious wild days of the 1998 World Wide Web. It’s propelled by an algorithm, propelled by our engagement not only on how often we post a newsletter, but how often we comment on others work, how often we restack work, and how often we post on Notes. I was sort of okay with all of that.
What I wasn’t prepared to deal with was losing my attention span for actual, real, honest-to-god books and long-form essays.
As a parent of young children, reading on your phone can feel like an adult conversation at a park; you’re desperate to talk with someone who doesn’t need you to open their yogurt pouch. I read newsletters on my phone while my four-year-old daughter played in the bath, and in the car parking lot while I waited for my ten-year-old son to get out of piano lessons, and on the couch after a long day while my daughter would ask for a new kind of snack every ten minutes. The medium allowed to pause whatever I was reading, rinse the blueberries, put them in a bowl, wipe down the counter, and then continue on to an 800 word newsletter topic that usually focused on a timely but ephemeral topic that has, like art critic Dave Hickey once said, “the expiration date of a gallon milk.”
I found that I wasn’t reading as much anymore, and I couldn’t blame it on having young children. I am a reader. Fast, note-taking, ravenous. Even in the fatigue of parenting an infant (before I ever got onto Substack) I could summon up the attention to read books that will give you carpal tunnel syndrome. I read Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism when my daughter was six months old (a feat which astonishes me, I don’t know what that woman was thinking). I read the door-stopper of a book, The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow when she was a year-old, and before bed, because I’m the sort of nutty person who finds arguments about Hobbes vs. Rousseau and civilization to be kind of relaxing when they’re written for a popular audience.
Substack made me feel like I was reading, but it wasn’t wholesome, real reading. It was sugar, a high-glycemic index kind of stuff, not a well-prepared, three course, rich meal. My Goodreads list fell to the wayside. I scrolled on my phone, reading in the spared moments of parents and work, but not in the diligent way that all writers know how to read--with a pen or pencil in hand, to teach yourself how to create from what you are taking in. There’s enough research out there (Google it) which demonstrates that we don’t read as well on screens. I started noticing that when I picked up a book, I simply didn’t have the will or attention to wade in fully.
Substack likes to claim that it’s the maverick of the publishing industry, an outlet for independent voices. And this is true. Many people have discovered that--yes--they have it in them to write to an audience that wants to hear them, and this inspires them to write books. But the medium of Substack--a tiny screen in your hand--does not lend itself to the cognitive work of reading a really damn good essay with an air-tight argument, one that has been reviewed by an editor who won’t let you be lazy about transitions or sources on hearsay. It’s definitely not the medium for a literary short story that will reward you handsomely, fulsomely, but only if you pay attention.
It is a fancy blog. And that’s cool, because I like fancy blogs. But this isn’t the kind of reading I want to spend my life doing, and it’s not the kind of writing I want to spend my life doing either.
I’m not an extremist about much of anything, so I’m not deactivating my account or moving to Ghost, but I am, going to blog here more, and less there, and focus the hours I put into writing and also formatting my newsletter’s short essays into a book of fully developed essays, because that is what I’m hungry for as a reader, and that’s what makes me feel full.
What we ingest eventually becomes us--the tallow of our bones, the quantity of red blood cells, the luster of our hair.
And I want to feel mostly made from books, not newsletter posts.
“Make Your Own Writing Oracle” goes to StoryStudio Chicago on 10/29
I’m thrilled to be teaching an in-person version of the class, “Make Your Own Writing Oracle” at StoryStudio in Chicago on October 29th.
Here’s the full description with a link below:
Have a creative roadblock? Feel like you’ve used all the tricks in the bag? In this class, we’ll explore the oracles of inquiry, collage, and bibliomancy to gather inspiration for new ideas, get “unstuck” on creative projects, build more meaningful patterns in your work, and ask yourself better questions.
Oracles are not crystal balls that predict the future. They’re mirrors that clearly reflect how present conditions can change into a breadth of possibilities.
Oracles work because they create environments for us to gain deeper insight into what is already there.
You’ll leave class with an inquiry process on how to ask yourself better questions, a collage, a few new pages of writing and ideas, and a toolkit to continue the work of using oracles in future projects.
Bring your favorite book of poetry and collage supplies with you!
Screenshot and link to the class, “Make Your Own Writing Oracle”
Published essay in Tricycle, a class recording, & recent work
Excited that my piece “The Price of Practice” is now available in the 2025 summer print journal of Tricycle!
This essay was the very first post I published in my newsletter. I was pretty sure the essay would never appear anywhere else because of the subject matter—how I almost started dancing at a strip club at the age of 19 to afford to study Buddhism. I submitted the piece to Tricycle but also convinced myself that they would never ever accept it in a million years because it was too critical of Buddhist centers and also, twerking and sex and g-strings are mentioned.
Anyway, I was wrong. Super wrong. I’m so glad I was, and I’m happy that dharma is becoming more accessible and that we can talk about how it doesn’t always feel that way. I hope this piece inspires other to be fully themselves in their dharma, to leave nothing out, and to shed rigid ideas about what it means to be a spiritual person.
I’m especially grateful to all the dharma teachers out there who have gone out of their way to make these precious teachings financially accessible to middle-class and working class people.
I had a wonderful time teaching a class this June on how to “Make Your Writing Oracle.” We used inquiry, bibliomancy, and collage to make our own oracles and ask better questions of our work. These are playful and eerily insightful methods that I’ve often used to get unstuck in my writing and start new projects. I’m stoked to be teaching an in-person version of this same class at StoryStudio Chicago later in the fall.
Last May, I wrote about finishing a short novel manuscript in a piece called, “Make Art Like You’re Going to Die.” Recalling that death is inevitable always, always makes me more true to myself in my writing—and I have more fun when I’m true to myself.
I wrote a piece, “Bring Sex & Eros To Buddhism,” on how talking about healthy sexuality and partnership prevents abuse. I describe my own experience surviving rape as a college student while in a summer writing workshop, and how the elders (the professors) in that community enabled the alcoholism of the student who raped me. These similar dynamics—elders abdicating their responsibility and care for the young—occur in Buddhist sanghas with abusive teachers. And also: good sex is good for us, and we really need to take a moment to distinguish the innate goodness and pleasure of healthy sexuality from the harm of sexual violence.
In April, I wrote an essay on duende, dancing, the legacy of colonization, and the dakini in “You Can’t Control A Body That Embraces Its Own Delight: What The Dakini Knows About Transforming Pain.” Enjoying ourselves through dance and music is a way of resistance, healing, and a method to glimpse our naturally awakened mind. The vajrayana symbol of the dakini, like Federico Garcia Lorca’s concept of duende, teaches us how to “dance at the rim of the wound.”
“Make Your Own Writing Oracle” Tuesday 6/3 @ 7pm CT
I'm thrilled to be teaching a class on how to create your own writing oracle on Tuesday 6/3 at 7pm CT. This oracle is not a crystal ball that predicts that future, but a mirror into our own imaginations that reflects new possibilities for when we feel stuck, uninspired, or overwhelmed ✨ You'll learn how to use the oracles of collage and bibliomancy to get "unstuck" on creative projects, start new works, and ask yourself better questions. Bring collage supplies (or download Canva, if you're a digital babe) and bring your favorite book of poetry with you.
You'll leave class with a collage oracle, a step-by-step process on how to ask yourself better questions when you get stuck/uninspired/overwhelmed while writing, a page or two of new writing, and a process for continuing this work on your own.
Watch the class preview below and sign up here.
Writing Into Wonder & Amazement
I held a class, “Writing Into Wonder & Amazement,” with a wonderful group of people last night over Zoom. It was lovely being steeped in the numinous with others, and participants reported feeling inspired, blissed, open, and “melty” from the writing exercises, which makes me happy to hear 💗
If you’d like to view a recording of this class and others, you can become a paid subscriber of Your Wild And Radiant Mind.
Below is the graphic and you can read more about the class in this month’s newsletter.
New short fiction! Plus, a monthly mini-salon series
I’m thrilled to announce that I have new short story published in the Spring 2025 edition of EPOCH Magazine, “Rare & Precious Antiques.” It’s about animistic vampires, objects with sentimental value, antique stores, and the weirdly colonial aesthetic of the Anthro catalogue circa 2013. You can buy the PDF of the journal here.
In January, I formally changed my Substack’s name to Your Wild And Radiant Mind to reflect the creativity aspect of the newsletter and to not scare folks off with my Buddhist gothiness. (The former title was This Is All Going Away.) I also worked with a very talented designer, Ashley Siebels, to help me out with the logo design. She did a fabulous job interpreting my very vibe-y mood board suggestions to create something far better than what I could have imagined.
I started a monthly mini-salon with my friend and fellow writer, Inés Bellina, creator of The Cranky Guide. Inés tends to focus her newsletter on the practical side of writing, but on the back-end she is very woo (she’s a big fan of astrology and Tarot), and I tend to focus on the woo side of writing, but on the back-end I’m very practical. Each month, we’ll address a subject that intersects at the spiritual and the practical. Our first topic was “Screw Duality: Harnessing The Intuitive and The Practical In The Creative Process.” It was amazing to be in community with such an savvy, thoughtful group of creatives and I can’t wait to have the next salon on March 13th. You can sign up here.
The mini-salon will be held every 2nd Thursday at 12-12:40pm CT. Free subscribers to our newsletters are invited to pay-what-you-can with the suggested donation of $15, but we will gratefully accept any amount. Paid subscribers get in for free to the salons as a subscription perk and will also receive a recording.
Over the last few months, I’ve worked on my novel-in-progress and multiple seed starter essays on Buddhism, language, and creativity: Death As A Teacher, Be Useless and Love Other People, The World Is Your Oracle, Sometimes Buddhism Is Magic and Witchcraft, and Our Joy Will Be Their Downfall.
You can read my newsletter here
Recent publications, classes, and newsletter
Lots has happened since I last updated this page because I am generally pretty lazy about giving updates across the many (many!) platforms we’re all supposed to be on. But I’ve been recently reminded by Seth Werkeiser, creator of The Social Media Escape Club, that your website is not a billboard, it’s a hub. So I hope to do a quarterly update on publications, classes, and projects on here. (It feels weird to call it a blog. Are blogs still a thing?)
Anyway! All of this exciting stuff happened over the summer:
I started seeing clients for creativity and writing coaching. One of my favorite parts of teaching college is office hours—where students come talk to me in my office and I have the opportunity to give them 100% of my attention. Rather than having to think about the needs of eighteen people, I can just focus on the need’s of one person. Creativity and writing coaching is a bit like office hours. I Iove giving people creativity advice that’s personalized just for them, along with the fullness of my attention. I’m looking forward to expanding coaching next year.
Tricycle published my essay “Failure As Liberation.” It’s about growing up in a queer family, Ati Yoga, shelving my first novel, failure, “the false self,” and the liberation of writing whatever the you damn well please.
Another essay of mine, “Your Mind Is The Lover: Eros, Amor, and Mahamudra” was published in The Canelands Magazine at the University of Kentucky. You can read the original essay in The Canelands, or read a slightly abridged version of this essay which I re-titled as “How Falling In Love Teaches Us How to Meditate,” available through my newsletter.
I taught a class on Writing Into Wonder & Amazement at StoryStudio in early October. I had an awesome time teaching this class in-person and I’m stoked to be teaching an online version of it through Substack in early 2025.
Here’s the description: What makes us feel awe and wonder when we read something amazing? “The numinous” is a word often used in relation to the spiritual; it describes a tremendous experience that fills us with mystery, wonder, awe, fascination, and sometimes even terror.
Within a text, a sense of the numinous is created through an engagement with poetic language that disorients us into amazement. Although this is evoked through the medium of language, we’re left as readers with a feeling of speechlessness.
We’ll deepen our understanding of the numinous by reading writers and poets such as Clarice Lispector, Ada Limón, Ocean Vuong, and Carson McCullers. We’ll reflect upon the occasions that the numinous is most often engaged and why. Using in-class writing exercises, we’ll explore the kind of attention that separates a numinous experience from a mundane one.
Students will leave with a few pages of writing on a new or pre-existing project, ideas on how to connect to the numinous in their own work, and hopefully, a renewed sense of enchantment. This workshop is open to both prose writers and poets.
I also taught a professional development class for the staff at StoryStudio, “The Art of The High Stakes Conversation: How Goodwill, Curiosity & Integrity Resolve Conflicts.” This class offers guidance on how to resolve conflicts when there is a lot to lose and/or there is a lot emotional tension. Also: how to resolve conflicts when the stakes aren’t high but someone wants them to be.
How can you maintain a sense of integrity and calm when someone else is trying to pull your into a melodrama? We used breathing exercises, a boot-leg version of metta meditation, creative writing, and thoughtful discussion to respond to high stakes scenarios.
Says StoryStudio’s Executive Director, Jessica Keller, "Sarah provided one. of the best professional development sessions I've been a part of. This training incorporated elements that were applicable to all our staff—spanning age groups and job functions. In addition to the topic that was very needed for us, it was also a relaxed team building environment that was much needed for our hybrid staff. I'd highly recommend this or any training Sarah leads."
In the past few months, I’ve written about desire, the erotic, and spirituality, the limits and perils of secular meditation, why writing mediocre poetry helps me write better fiction, how rest feeds our creative subconscious, and why “compassion” doesn’t do it for me. You can find all these pieces in my newsletter.
Lastly, I finished another draft of my novel manuscript. I can tell the final draft is actually there, and fit feels like I’m sinking my hands into wet clay and feel some kind of treasure. And that feels good.
“Joyful Effort: Practice & Play”
New Substack post + A professional development workshop at StoryStudio
I wrote about the Buddhist concept of "joyful effort" as it relates to practice and play in writing. I also discuss the importance of ritual in my writing practice, Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule, the Sanskrit word “lila,” and Van Gogh’s mediocre (and maybe just plain bad) early drawings. I'm delighted that so many people have found this article to be encouraging!
Excerpt from “Joyful Effort: Practice & Play”
I also taught a secular version of this mindset in a professional development workshop StoryStudio, a nonprofit creative writing based in Chicago where I work as a consultant. The instructors and staff are incredibly talented and hardworking. In this hybrid online/in-person workshop, we discussed strategies on how to teach practice and play in the creative writing classroom, and why these mindsets are so important in our own writing practices.
If you’re a business or nonprofit leader who would like this training adapted for your staff, please reach out using the contact form.
Below is the description for the training:
Our most dedicated students often experience the same complaint that we feel in our own writing: this work is hard.
We should acknowledge that writing takes discipline and effort, but how can we also encourage our students to infuse their writing process with joy and playfulness? What are ways in which the time spent “warming-up” for the big game invites new possibilities, spontaneity, and surprising directions? How can we communicate to our students that writing, like any other artistic discipline, takes hours of practice? And that practice is essential to mastery?
In this professional development workshop, we’ll form our own unique pedagogies around the idea of practice and peer-share some of our favorite writing exercises to help students reframe the hard work of writing as a form of play.
Thank you to everyone who showed up, online or in-person! (And thank you program curator and author, Ananda Lima, for the photos!)
Reading at Tuesday Funk on 3/2/24 + New post on Substack
Hello world!
I’m very excited to be reading at the Hopleaf tomorrow night, 3/2/24, for the Tuesday Funk Reading Series. I love, love, love the Tuesday Funk. It is never boring! I promise to read something that will transfix and delight you—and it won’t go on for too long.
Also, I have a new post on Substack, The Antidote Is Love: Relieving Chronic Pain & Less Through Meditation. Bodies are wonderful, but damn if it doesn’t hurt to have a body sometimes. This post includes Mexica/Aztec host figurines, Tibetan Body Mandalas, somatic bliss, chronic pain, my mother’s disability, holding pain with love, and the limits of healing narratives. I hope it brings a sense of comfort and freedom.
This Is All Going Away: a Substack
I’m very excited to share my thoughts on Vajrayana Buddhism in a newsletter and not just on iPhone notes! I’ll be posting observations, short essays, and sneaky-secular Dharma once a month.
You can read and sign up for This Is All Going Away here.
Or read the About page to see if this newsletter might be for you.
My first post was definitely one that made me feel a bit more vulnerable than I expected. (A new vibe for me, since I’m used to fictionalizing my emotions and dressing them up as other people). I wrote about how, as a college student, I couldn’t afford to study Dharma at a center in my hometown, and how I nearly started dancing as a stripper to study abroad in a Buddhist country.
You can read the full essay, “What Strip Clubs Can Teach Us About Dharma,” here.
Artist in Residence at Northwestern University, Fall 2020
I just wrapped up my first quarter teaching a fiction class as an Artist in Residence at Northwestern. The students were lovely — hardworking, talented, and thoughtful. Above all, I was impressed by how they attended to each other’s work during this incredibly challenging time.
We used Thrill Me, by Benjamin Percy, as a core text. It’s an entertaining and witty guide to writing that focuses on creating suspense and tension. Percy offers easy-to-apply antidotes to some of the trappings of literary fiction (e.g. long wistful gazes out of kitchen windows, “epiphanic dew,” an overreliance on flashbacks), and he’s funny as hell.
Looking forward to teaching another class in the spring!
Love this book!
AWP Panel: Worry About It Later: Strategies to Finish What You Start, 3/5/20
An armadillo listening to Selena
With Christine Sneed, Juan Martinez, Kendra Fortmeyer, and Amy Gentry
Starting is often the easy part—it’s what comes after that’s so difficult for many writers. In this panel, we’ll discuss strategies for completing the first draft, along with our experiences of sending out and eventually publishing work that in some cases went through many drafts. We’ll also discuss how to deal with self-doubt and how to write through potential problems. Lastly, we’ll share advice about when to set a project aside.
Date: Thursday, March 5th, 2020
Time: 9am-10:15am
Place: Henry B. González Convention Center, Room 141, San Antonio, TX
