A woman on an auction block does not need a doctrine to be raped. She needs a buyer, a whip, and enforced silence from every direction that might otherwise speak.

The silence was not accidental. 

It was built, and it was not built in America. She stood on American soil, but the mind that put her there had crossed an ocean to get there. It had been forming since 1452, when a pope in Rome granted a Portuguese king the right to subdue and enslave the people of the African coast, and to call it a Christianising mercy while he did so. 

Colonial conquest not only took land but also uprooted spirit, memory, and a sense of belonging. It turned names into Christian names.

Almost every African nation bears the scars of colonialism, but some of the deepest wounds are not visible in borders or economies; they are spiritual. The encounter between European Christianity and indigenous African belief systems was fundamentally not a dialogue but an erasure.

On the War Inside American Buddhism, and the One I Have Not Resolved in Myself

I feel this argument in my own chest before I feel it as an idea. The world sits in a genuinely precarious place. 

Trump, Gaza, Israel, Iran, the accelerating climate, the sheer unaccountable weight of billionaire power, all of it presses in, and on some days headlong condemnation feels like the only honest response. 

Condemnation is also the water we are all swimming in now. Search any of those words and you will find no shortage of people already shouting about them. The strange effect of all that shouting is that its targets appear entirely unmoved by it.

On memory, fabrication, and the missing owner

Standing at the sink, halfway through washing a pan, I was handed a sentence someone had spoken to me nineteen years earlier. 

Not the memory of it. The sting of it, arriving intact, with the reply I never made already assembled behind it. I had not been thinking about that person. I had been thinking about the pan.

I have no idea where that was manufactured or by whom. A thought appears, and almost immediately the mind places a small flag on it: mine. I remember. I am humiliated. I am angry. 

I should have said…

Imagine someone invites you over for dinner. Afterwards, they offer you dessert. You say no thanks; you're full. Whose dessert is it now?

You already know. It stays theirs. Nobody has to think hard about it.

Here's the question I actually want to ask you: someone offers you an insult. Their anger, contempt, and hostility. Whose are they?

The Confusion

A group of villagers, the Kalamas, in the town of Kesaputta, described a problem to the Buddha.

Some brahmans and contemplatives came through, expounding and glorifying their own doctrines while disparaging everyone else's. Then others came through and did exactly the same.

“They leave us absolutely uncertain and in doubt,” the Kalamas said. “Which of these venerable ones are speaking the truth, and which are lying?”

Does this sound familiar?

This spring, Richard Dawkins gave his AI a name. He called it Claudia, and in an essay for UnHerd, the world's most famous atheist admitted something remarkable: he had spent three days trying to talk himself out of believing his chatbot was conscious, but had failed. In his own words, he was blunt: "If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?"

He gives what is hard to give. He does what is hard to do. He endures what is hard to endure. He reveals his secrets to you. He keeps your secrets. When misfortunes strike, he doesn't abandon you. When you're down and out, he doesn't look down on you. AN 7:36, NDB 1021-22

“Conflict arises from envy and miserliness.” - The Buddha

“If you want to save the world, don’t be a dick.” - Dr Luke Kemp

The Buddha’s diagnosis of collective conflict is brief and unsparing: conflict arises from envy and miserliness, not from scarcity, not from bad governance, not from the failure of institutions. From the quality of mind that hoards what it fears losing, and the quality of mind that cannot bear another’s having.

There is a passage in the Book of the Twos that takes less than a minute to read. The Buddha states it three times, in three parallel forms, as though repetition itself is part of the teaching…

There is perhaps a remark someone made to you, years ago, that still has an impact. You may not think about it often.

We have been told a story about forgiveness that harms the very people it claims to help.

There is a kind of power that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive with a fist or a prohibition. It arrives with a question that is also a declaration: How are you feeling today? I care about you.

There’s something we don’t talk about enough when discussing loneliness. We often describe it as the absence of people, yet you can be surrounded by people and still feel profoundly alone - and this experience can elicit much shame.

What loneliness is really about, I think, is the absence of witnesses. Someone who sees you. Not the version of you that’s easier to be around. Not the you who’s holding it together. You.

People often come to therapy expecting healing to come from words. The right interpretation. The insight that finally makes sense of everything. The moment when the therapist says the thing that unlocks the door.

Sometimes it happens. Words matter. Understanding matters.

What heals most isn't what is said. It's what happens in the space between two people, something harder to name and more fundamental than language itself…

There's a time that comes in almost all long-term therapy, sooner or later. The client has done the difficult, presenting work. They've sat with the hard stuff, named what was nameless, and felt what was unfelt. Yet life is still complicated. Loss still hurts. Loneliness still visits. The difficult parent is still difficult. And sometimes, from somewhere inside, comes the thought: did it work, am I suffering less?

A question has troubled philosophers, scientists, and concerned commentators since artificial intelligence entered our homes: Does it possess awareness? Is there anyone inside? Will there be anyone inside? Does Claude or ChatGPT experience anything when it responds with what appears to be eerily warm and understanding?

It's a fair question, and I suggest we're looking in the wrong direction…

When someone we love dies, we lose their presence, the physical, everyday world of companionship. Their voice, expressions, the way they moved through a room, the warmth of shared glances, and the familiarity of conversations that needed no preamble all disappear. This is the most immediate and recognisable face of grief: the aching absence where a living presence once existed…

There is a form of shame that does not originate in childhood; it arrives later, often within institutions: A training room. A university seminar. A clinical meeting. A spiritual community.

Nothing explicit happens. No one excludes you. No rule is broken. And yet the body registers something. A tightening in the chest. A faint self-consciousness. Your voice sounds slightly different to your own ears. You become aware of yourself as if from the outside.

I have felt this in rooms where I ostensibly belonged as a trainee and later as a leader. The codes change depending on where you stand, but the body still knows when it is navigating the hierarchy.

In the Sakka-pañha Sutta, Sakka approaches the Buddha with a question that is remarkably current. Sakka is troubled by conflict. He notices that beings wish to live peacefully, free from hatred or violence, yet time and again they become involved in quarrels, rivalry, and war. He asks the Buddha directly:

“Why is it that beings who wish to live in peace end up living in hostility, hatred, and conflict?”

The Buddha’s initial reply is stark and uncompromising. He says that conflict arises from envy and miserliness.