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.”