The desert had done its work. I came back from the Arizona retreat in September 2023 feeling more spacious and resolved than ever before. On the flight home to Oakland, I put my note-laden dharma book away and just sat there.
A few hours later, I walked in the door and saw that my partner, Grace, had a gift for me waiting on the kitchen table. Inside was what I, in my postretreat clarity, thought was just a very small T-shirt. It took me a long moment to realize it was a baby onesie—her way of telling me she was pregnant.
The news short-circuited my system. Joy surged through me so quickly I didn’t know where to put it. I lifted Grace into the air and we held each other, laughing and crying and repeating to one another, We’re doing this. For weeks, we floated, giddy and grateful, living through one of the most loving chapters of our relationship.
But soon, somewhere in the brain stem, a familiar voice nagged: What’s this going to mean for your freedom? For your practice? Are you about to lose what you’ve just so recently found?
After years of contemplative training, I’d finally started to let go of my need to control everything. But I couldn’t help but wonder if fatherhood would drag me back—into striving, into mental chaos, and into the frenzied sense of overwhelm I’d worked so hard to escape.
That voice got louder when the first trimester presented itself without mercy. Grace got sick—really sick. Depressed. Her back gave out. She could barely eat, barely move. Overnight, I became her full-time caretaker: cooking, cleaning, and keeping us both afloat while scrambling to move out of the 500-square-foot casita behind her mom’s house—a preview, I’d later realize, of what was to come. And with it, the spaciousness I brought home from retreat began to shrink.
And yet something held me. That something, I knew, was practice. But not the kind I started with.
***
My relationship with meditation truly began in the wreckage of early sobriety. I’d been practicing yoga for years, but when addiction nearly killed me, Buddhist-based recovery became a lifeline. I found Refuge Recovery, sat at Against the Stream, and showed up for Jack Kornfield’s Monday night talks at Spirit Rock whenever I could. That’s when the path really opened.
Later, I found the nondual traditions—Dzogchen, Mahamudra—and innovative teachers like Michael Taft, whose embodied, tantric-inflected approach cracked something open in me. It was his retreat in Arizona, just before the pregnancy news, that deepened the shift already under way and made me more receptive to what came next. These teachings didn’t ask me to fix anything, only to rest in the perfection that I already was. For someone conditioned to earn worth through achievement, that realization was nothing short of revolutionary.
Still, when we first learned Grace was pregnant, I had imagined I’d be heroic. Up at dawn with a thermos, sitting for seventy-five minutes before anyone else stirred—disciplined, radiant, determined to keep the whole awakening project on track. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who complained their life ended with kids. I’d keep growing, keep sitting, keep deepening.
The dharma was about to get very practical.
Six months later, our son was born. At first, I didn’t even know how to hold him. Not like a kettlebell. Not like a house cat. I asked the nurse approximately eleven times if I was “doing it right.” But then . . . something clicked. An intrinsic intelligence took over, something I didn’t need to learn. Thoughts fell away, and my body knew exactly what it needed to do.
That’s been the miracle of parenting: the way it yanks you out of your head and plants you firmly in life. Just like meditating, you cannot parent conceptually. You cannot think your way through a 3:00 a.m. colicky conniption. You just show up.
Every morning, I take my son on walks in the Oakland Hills, allowing Grace to catch up on sleep while the boys cruise through the neighborhood until I find an open view. I push the stroller slowly—in part because I’m savoring the moment, in part because I’m exhausted. But mostly because this is now the best part of my day. It’s quiet up here, even with the city below. The sky stretches wide. Birdsong rises from every direction. Planes descend into the bay. He babbles and coos: If bottled, they’d be the best antidepressants on the market.
Sometimes I drop into spontaneous Dzogchen-style sky gazing: just space looking at space, my son part of it all. Other times, he points at a tree with the intensity of someone who’s just discovered fire, and I find myself staring at the same tree, realizing I’m learning more about practice—and trees—than I ever could from books.
When I remember to surrender—to stop fighting it and let the moment in—there’s the joy, right there. Not in spite of the exhaustion and chaos but born of it.
In the evenings, I rock him to sleep while chanting a panoply of mantras. Avalokiteshvara’s seems to settle him the most—Om mani padme hum. I elongate each syllable slowly, letting the sound rise from deep in my heart, and eventually, the vibration seems to cradle both our nervous systems. It’s legitimately the most devotional practice I’ve ever engaged in, without incense or an altar. Just a bouncing twenty-one-pound teacher who drools on my chest and occasionally pinches my nipple (still no milk).
And yet there are plenty of moments that are decidedly not magical.
Like when he starts screaming halfway up the hill and I have to carry him, stroller and all, down the slope on my already questionable dad back. Or when I realize those walks are the only “physical fitness” I’ve had in weeks. Or when I realize I’ve been wearing the same shirt for three days.
Parenting, like practice, doesn’t care what you want. It just keeps offering the same, iterative moment, over and over, until either you go insane or get the joke.
If you’re trying to do anything other than parent—formally meditate, exercise, write, contemplate the nature of reality—it’s going to be brutal. It’s not the parenting that hurts; it’s the part of me that thinks I still have a choice. That’s where the suffering lives. But when I remember to surrender—to stop fighting it and let the moment in—there’s the joy, right there. Not in spite of the exhaustion and chaos but born of it.
That’s the tantric thread, the Vajrayana current, where nothing is rejected and everything is included. Parenting embodies this more thoroughly than any practice or retreat I’ve ever done.
Without the foundation I’ve built over the past decade, it might have felt crushing. I understand now why there’s so much fear-mongering around parenting. Without some training in letting go, it would be overwhelming. More than once, I’ve caught myself thinking: I honestly don’t know how I’d make it through this without these practices. And yet, in my experience, it’s just what’s happening—part of the flow—because the dharma has taught me to transform difficulty into intimacy. Sometimes, even bliss.
Just as I could never have imagined what this kind of recovery would feel like while caught in addiction, I could never have anticipated what parenting would be like. None of your thoughts about it prepare you. It pulls you in completely. The kind of openness I once reached for in long sits or silent retreats, I now find in the middle of the living room—on my knees, growling and laughing, wrestling like an animal with a baby boy who thinks I’m the funniest thing on earth.
It’s beyond thought, rooted in something older than words—something utterly natural. Even at 2:00 a.m., when you’re stumbling through the house, baby monitor crackling in one hand and a bottle of formula leaking down the other.
Even so, old patterns don’t dissolve overnight. That part of me that wants to optimize tries to sneak in—scheduling writing between naps, trying to squeeze in a quick sit before the next bottle, mentally calculating how many minutes of “productivity” I can extract from his afternoon sleep. Sometimes, I fall into the trap of trying to balance it all.
But the dharma keeps offering the same invitation: stay here, do less, trust this. Parenting has shown me, over and over, how much pain comes from wanting to be anywhere but directly with my boy.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, something settled in my system—something I hadn’t even known was unsettled: a quiet trust in life itself.
Fatherhood has reorganized my ambitions. More accurately put, my ambitions have changed. I dare say they have grown. Thankfully, I’d already stepped away from the chase—whatever form it took—to build a life that could hold more stillness. Without the flexibility to shape my work around this new rhythm, I’m not sure how I would’ve managed. Some days, I mourn the hours I used to spend reading three books at once, or chasing down some clever idea I was sure would change everything. But what I get in return is the relief of having finally come home to my own life—one not filtered through a screen but felt directly, with room to actually be in it.
When my son was born, the nurses all commented on how awake he looked. Not just alert but awake. I know every parent thinks their kid is special. But when we locked eyes, it was like something in me remembered him.
Now, as we celebrate his first birthday, I still witness the purity of his unconditioned state staring right back at me, calling my own awakeness forward. It’s all one continuous field of awareness, but within that field, he emerges—laughing, pointing at everything with amazement—reminding me what matters most.