It was Fall 2020 - in the middle of the Covid pandemic lockdown - that, to my surprise, I felt the most free. After the end of an important relationship nine months prior, I had been compelled to dive deeply into my own trauma healing work. Slowly, and somehow all at once, I began living into a spiritual realization that brought decades of practice into new and profound clarity. In the process, I connected the dots between my emotional healing, Buddhist spiritual insight, and sustainable activism in the world. Interestingly enough, the connective tissue was a uniquely powerful and unconditional form of self-compassion.

At least, that’s one short story of how I came to be the author of “The Dharma of Healing: the path of liberation from stress, pain, and trauma.” But, believe me, the road was not straightforward from there. The draft table of contents I had sketched in my notebook on a picnic bench on a sunny afternoon in 2020 had a lot of empty space that needed time to discover itself. But sure enough, as I continued to teach meditation and run my native plant nursery, the words spilled out in fits and starts onto a surprising 336 pages with 39 guided meditations. In June of 2025, the project finally became published by Shambhala Publications.

Finding the meeting place between emotional healing, spiritual insight, and engagement was an inquiry I had held for decades, more or less consciously. I had been a sensitive young adult, keenly curious about the natural world, distrusting of ways I saw societies perpetuate harm. After having the great fortune of being introduced to the Dharma at age 15, it didn’t take much observation of the world to see that the root of the crises I saw around me were within each of us. If we could change the way we perceived and related to ourselves, we could transform the suffering into grace. Of course, I had to test this theory myself first, and let me be the first to say - it was a lot harder than I thought. 

From high school onward, I followed the Dharma trail through Insight Meditation, Zen, and Tibetan doorways. I engaged in sustainability education and non-profit management. And, despite myself, at about the age of 28, I found myself sitting in a therapist's office having to try to figure out my own emotional life. I really had thought meditation could solve everything, but at that time in my life, I was racked with emotional and physical tension. With a sense of inner shame, I surrendered to the fact that I needed a new approach. The approaches I stumbled into were Somatic Experiencing and Internal Family Systems theory - and, in time, they really opened me up.

My eventually discovery, which had somehow seemed to elude me and so many other meditators, was that my unhealed psychological wounds blocked my capacity to access and sustain the spiritual insights that the Dharma had revealed. I would apply my spiritual stories and insights to the pain, but low and behold, my pain didn’t need enlightenment - it needed heart-felt care; it needed love. And the world with all its problems I was so intent on solving didn’t actually need my anxious desperation to fix it - it actually just needed the same. So, I had to reorient myself around a self-compassion practice that combined my meditative experiences, my new therapeutic discoveries, and my need to help others.

Somewhere in this process, four sentences began to crystallize in my heart. “I see you. I understand you. I care about you. And, I’m here to support you.” And they stuck. They became magic words for me. Together, they formed the perfect blend of wisdom and compassion, and when said in succession, brought about the most true compassion I’d known. Moreover, they met each of my deepest needs - to be seen, understood, cared for, and supported - and in their embrace, my afflictive emotions melted. And as I softened, a deeper innate presence could once again shine through. And when it did, it radiated the essence of those four sentences right back to me and through me in a silent and spacious way.

As I cycled through these phrases in my own heart, I imagined I was turning a big wheel, and that in each turning of that wheel, the healing penetrated deeper and wider. The healing started with my every-day surface level ups and downs, deepened into the depth of my early trauma, widened into the realms of my family and culture, and eventually released into a loving presence beyond myself. Then, as I moved through the world and got triggered, the cycle started back over again and again and again.

As I went through these four turnings of the wheel over and over, they began to merge. They began to fall in love with each other. And from this love, at the center of the wheel was a brilliant jewel. It was my heart, or the heart in some universal and timeless way, totally connected and totally sovereign. The world of form and the world of the formless had reunited in a sacred bond, and a most special type of joy spilled over. The essential activity of the universe was making love - what an absolutely miraculous thing!

But as all things do, my life changed and went on and lived experience kept changing. It was hard to lose the vibrancy of that deep seeing. But as I juggled jobs and relationships, I decided I would write. As I did, the strands of insight I’d gathered in myself for decades were slowly woven into a single cloth - raggedy at first, but refined over time into something soft and strong and coherent. The book is for everyone, but I realize now I wrote it mostly for me.

As if to hammer that point home to me, it was only a few weeks after finishing a final draft of the book that I went on a personal, month-long wilderness meditation retreat. During it, I got a heat injury, which led to many months of insomnia, anxiety, nerve pain, and more. I was humbled to the core, to say the least. But somewhere deep in the throes of it, I remembered I had written some instructions down for situations like this! I self-printed a copy of my (at that time forthcoming) book and read it again and again, practicing the meditations with fervor for my own healing. I guess before I started teaching to wider audiences, I needed to know for myself just how hard things could be, and just how crucial compassion actually is.

As I read and slowly recovered, I remembered something essential: the message we rarely receive is that healing never ends. Believe me, I know - it’s a total buzzkill. But really, it’s not supposed to end; it was never designed that way. If we’re sincere, it just deepens and widens and includes more and more with more and more grace. As soon as we think we’re done, or strive after the finish line, we’ve only hurt ourselves by stopping growing. Surely enough, we wobble off-balance and life knocks us onto our butt. Maybe instead the ending is actually something different. Maybe it arises amidst our lives when we finally gain the courage and resilience to not need the path, nor the suffering to end. Maybe it comes when we can learn to enjoy caring for our and others' pain so deeply that we not only keep showing up for our lives through sickness, old age, and death, but maybe even commit to keep coming back again and again until all sentient beings know peace. I hear there’s a name for those beings: “Bodhisattvas.”

In case you were wondering, I don’t claim to be one. I’m in training, you could say. I’m just placing one foot in front of the other, one breath after the next, one phrase followed by another with my hand on my heart. Fortunately, I know I’m not turning this wheel of healing alone. I’m turning away alongside so many others - my fellow Sangha members, the ancestors of all spiritual lineages, the beings of the natural world, even the start and the galaxies. It’s a sweet, painful, and sometimes bewildering celebration of what it means to be embodied in this self-aware universe. So, now, we turn to you and we all welcome you aboard.