Posts

Returning to the Practice of Listening

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Some weeks are quieter at The Listening Room. Not silent, just quieter. Listening is not always about new discoveries, writing new pieces, or sharing. Sometimes it is about returning to the practice itself: sitting down, letting the room settle, and allowing things to arrive without urgency. In the past days I have been listening in a different way. Less searching, more receiving. Silence becoming part of the experience. The Listening Room also exists for these moments. The strength to listen is rarely discussed among men. Not the polite listening we perform in conversations while preparing our reply. Not the strategic listening used to win arguments or gain advantage. Something quieter than that Actual listening. Listening requires restraint. It requires a man to pause the reflex to fix, to dominate the conversation, or to impose certainty where uncertainty exists. It asks for steadiness. Many of the difficulties men face in relationships, work, and community are no...
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Power & Conscience: Men, Secrecy, and the Nervous System

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In male social and professional environments, certain patterns can quietly emerge when influence and authority are not paired with self-regulation. This is not about sensational headlines, sex scandals, or gossip. It is about how power interacts with the male nervous system , and what mechanisms can prevent drift into ethical compromise. Power and Internal Regulation Authority or influence activates specific neural pathways: dominance and reward circuits become highly active, often at the expense of empathy and reflective judgment. Men under sustained authority may notice: Rapid decision-making focused on outcomes rather than impact Suppression of internal feedback that would normally signal moral concern Narrowing of attention toward control, efficiency, or reward These patterns are not signs of inherent failure; they are natural neural responses that require conscious oversight. Awareness of these patterns is the first step toward maintaining ethi...
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The Walk - A Discipline For Peace

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The Buddhist Monks Walk For Peace from Texas to Washington DC ended on February 11, 2026. Two thousand three hundred miles on foot. Monks in brown robes walking highways, back roads, cities, cold mornings, long afternoons. Not protesting. Not reacting. Walking. When they returned to their temple, Hương Đạo Vipassana Bhavana Center, in Fort Worth, Texas, welcomed home by thousands, a vow was made by Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara: If you do not leave me, I will not leave you. We walk together. May you be well. May you be peaceful. A public walk that formalized an ongoing path. Peace is not a slogan. It is a discipline. It does not oppose justice. It opposes hatred. The eldest monk, eighty-one, has lived through the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War protests, and decades of unrest. He did not speak like an idealist. He spoke like a man who has seen what hatred does. Walking is prehistoric. Older than debate. Older than outrage. You place one foot in front of t...
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The Sieve Year: What Remained

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By the time the sieve year ends, there is no announcement. No ceremony, no grand unveiling. Only stillness, and the sound of what stayed. All year the currents have been sorting what belongs from what clings. Ideas, roles, habits, and alliances, shaken loose and poured through a finer mesh. The sieve does not ask for sacrifice. It asks for honesty. The structures that could not breathe have quietly dissolved. The work, the voices, even the identities that once felt essential have thinned to their essence. The efforts that relied on noise have lost their weight. Even language itself has thinned to its essence. What remains is lighter, but truer. Some things did not survive the filtering. They weren't meant to pass through. Exhausted versions of our own past, old ambitions that no longer matched your frequency, stories that mistook motion for meaning. Others endured. A phrase, a tone, a rhythm of work that still feels alive in your hands. A few names, steady t...
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When What Used to Matter Stops Mattering

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When I read a recent interview with Josh Homme, of Queens of the Stone Age, something struck me. He was talking about leaving behind what no longer serves — not in a dramatic way, not as a story of reinvention, but as a matter-of-fact reality of lived life. Things he used to care about, patterns he used to repeat, no longer held weight. And yet the next step wasn’t visible, wasn’t certain. There’s a strange place like that — where the old life feels hollow, familiar habits feel flat, and the things that used to matter simply don’t. You can’t go back. You can’t chase. You can only move forward in the quiet of your own presence. It isn’t dramatic. It isn’t heroic. It’s just real. It’s the work of noticing: this is what’s over, this is what I’ve carried long enough, and here is the space where the next thing will meet me — when it’s ready. Sometimes, the feeling is boredom. Sometimes, it’s restlessness. Sometimes, it’s that flat ache you can’t explain. That’s exactly the point. Th...
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When You Meet Someone Who Dissociates - And You Don’t Know It

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There is a particular kind of disorientation that happens when you are with someone and, without warning, the person you are speaking to is no longer there. Nothing dramatic announces it. No confession, no label. Something simply shifts. The eyes change. The posture rearranges itself. The tone of voice moves sideways. Time loses continuity. At first, you may not know what is going on. Maybe you misheard? You find yourself speaking into a space where the person you were just with no longer has access to what was happening moments before. This is not inner conflict, or mood, or defensiveness. This is dissociation. It can be quite disorienting to witness. From the outside, it may feel like this: You are suddenly alone in the room while someone else is still present. You feel responsible for continuity that no longer exists. Your body becomes alert before your mind can explain why. You experience confusion without a story to attach it to. The most destabili...
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The Body as Threshold

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If a threshold is something you cross, the body is where you feel it before you think it. Most language about thresholds talks as if they are moments: an edge, a crisis, a turning point. That is surface talk. The real threshold is somatic. It is not something you decide to cross. It is something the body signals first, long before the story catches up. For men, this is usually the part that gets skipped. What “body as threshold” actually looks like 1. The body does not announce transition. It signals it. This shows up as tension in unexpected places, fatigue or wakefulness without explanation, appetite changes, pressure or temperature shifts, or aches that are not injury but adjustment. The body is not malfunctioning. It is negotiating an internal boundary. 2. The mind wants meaning. The body wants space. Men are trained to interpret, explain, and decide. Thresholds are not about meaning. They are about capacity. Before decisions come sensations: breath restriction...
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