I subbed an early class at The Marsh last week, and afterward, couldn't resist a gluten-free banana chocolate chip muffin. A lot of yoga teachers would tell me not to get attached. This post is about the difference between paying attention to something you enjoy and gripping it, and why that difference can be harder to notice than it sounds.

I stood in front of a glass case holding Swami Kripalu's folded orange robe and worn sandals, under a quote about self-observation without judgment. The quote didn't square easily with what was written next to it about a man who practiced ten hours a day for almost thirty years.

On Saturday, twelve people joined me at Lake Fellowship for gentle yoga, meditation, conversation, food, and time outside. The day had structure, but no one needed to perform it. We practiced steadiness and ease, and discovered how much room a pause can make.

Someone in class asked whether there is a good kind of wanting. The answer is yes. For years I assumed it was no, that "let it go" covered everything, and I pictured an advanced yogi who wanted nothing at all. I could never work out how that person got out of bed. Patañjali is more useful than that. He sorts mental activity into two piles.

In high school I told my mom that if I just had a CD player, I would not need anything else. I meant it. Thirty-some years later the sentence is about a harmonium, or one more tweak to my website, and the reasons seem better now. That's the part worth paying attention to.

Episode 100 of Pretty Good Meditation has no intro music, no episode number, and no mention of my website. It's three minutes and forty-seven seconds. I'm starting to prefer minimal episodes. They align better with the yogic idea of non-stealing.

Last August I wrote that I'd get to retreats once family logistics settled down. Both kids head back to college this week, and it turns out I don't want to go anywhere. So I'm hosting two things at Lake Fellowship in Excelsior: a free Saturday morning class on August 22, and a day-long retreat with a potluck on September 12. Twelve people each.

Some days you don't feel like practicing. You show up, do the thing, and not much happens. Patañjali opens his chapter on practice with three aspects of your practice to consider when that happens, and he puts them ahead of the eight limbs, the part everyone knows.

Minnesota summers fill up fast, and so does the list of things a person ought to care about. Patañjali offers two words instead: steady practice, and letting go of how it turns out. One gives you something to do, and the other keeps it from becoming one more thing to win at.

The first time I heard a Kripalu teacher say BRFWA, I thought it sounded like a sneeze. Breathe, Relax, Feel, Watch, Allow is an awkward name for a useful skill, good for getting centered and negotiating sticky conversations. These five letters have helped me to ride the waves of life instead of checking out.

Tomorrow, before you reach for the phone, take thirty seconds to notice the body and the mind. Then decide what to do next. "Taking stock" is a skill of looking inward to guide what you do next.

Years ago I made a video of my daughter's first days with iMovie. But a software update made it so I could no longer open the project. My work: gone. That's how I found free software. Only later did I realize what I had found: not just better tools, but tools that were enough. What might the yamas and niyamas have to do with the software on your laptop?

Before savasana, I often mention that we've done meditation, breathing, postures, and now it's time for relaxation. That's a reference to four of yoga's eight limbs. A therapist teaches you concentration and calls it mindfulness. A sleep app teaches you sense-withdrawal and calls it NSDR. But yoga has eight limbs that we practice together.

You click "accept all" on cookie banners without reading a word. So much of life becomes defaults decided by someone else, and single-use plastic is one of them. For Plastic Free July, I keep refusing the default, helped by a bioethicist's reminder that small choices matter. This month is practice, not a test.

Last summer at Twin Cities Pride, my wife and I handed out glitter blessings at a UU booth. I went in treating it like a tech-conference table, trying to say each one right. Then people started to cry. Yoga rests on three supports: practice, community, and service. The last one is the easiest to skip.

A Drupal project migration from Lando to DDEV replaced complex shell scripts with Drainpipe tasks, creating a more standardized, documented, and maintainable developer workflow.

Stuck waiting for the Duluth Aerial Lift Bridge to rise, my first thought was "Dang, now we have to wait." The man who pulled up beside me jumped out with his camera, thrilled. Same bridge, two different experiences. Seeing the pure joy on his face reminded me of beginner's mind, the trees I don't own, and the opinions I'd be better off setting down.

Cleaning the basement, I found an old Boy Scout photo with a Wind Chill Thriller badge. It's a badge you get for camping in -50° wind chills, and I earned it three times. It got me thinking about how those brutal winter trips resemble monastic life: sangha, simplicity, and the only four things a monastic needs.

Yoga in the Gardens at the Minnesota Arboretum is pausing for 2026, canceling the classes I'd been contracted to teach. I've been slow to accept it. The world doesn't always cooperate with our desires, and learning to accept that is central to contemplative practice. The only durable peace is the kind you build inside. If that interests you, come practice with me at The Marsh.

Last Thursday I asked a Tibetan monk if our practices still work in a world reshaped by AI and political instability. He chuckled at the mention of AI, paused, and said to use whatever tools work. So simple: the goal is training the mind, and the tool is whatever works. Patanjali said something similar in the Yoga Sutras.

<p>There’s a new large language model (LLM) on the block, and it got me thinking about why I practice meditation.</p><p>The model is called <a href="https://talkie-lm.com/introducing-talkie">Talkie</a>, and it’s not like the other models. Talkie is a 13-billion-parameter (i.e.&nbsp;“small”) model, trained on 260 billion tokens of English text from before 1931. It’s “vintage,” and if you <a href="https://talkie-lm.com/chat">try the chat version</a>, you’ll notice this in the kinds of responses right away. It can write in a charming old style, and then say something that’s obviously false, strange, or just downright mean. Seeing those responses felt like sitting on the meditation cushion, watching thoughts come and go, some useful, some not.</p><p>The Talkie project got attention, in part, because it used only sources in the public domain. The team released two versions, a base model and a chat model, both under Apache 2.0 (open source) licenses. Public data in, public data out. Simon Willison calls models like this “<a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/28/talkie/">vegan</a>.” Others use phrases like “<a href="https://www.stork.ai/blog/this-ai-is-trapped-in-1930-and-its-terrifying">data purity and ethical curation</a>.”</p><p>Talkie is quite different from the models behind ChatGPT and Claude Code. Those frontier LLMs were “trained on huge datasets, comprising publicly available material as well as copyrighted and pirated material available online” (“<a href="https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety/article/44/1/23/7606572">Good models borrow, great models steal</a>”). So Talkie is a novel approach in the AI world, because these researchers were able to train the base model without exploiting living writers or copyrighted material.</p><p>Simon Willison adds a qualifier, noting that the base model fits the “vegan” label better than the chat model, which used Claude during fine-tuning. Even with that wrinkle, research like this makes me more willing to use AI. Talkie seems like another step toward the future I envision, where people can download, study, share, alter, and discuss models in public. I want more models that exist without exploiting workers and creators.</p><h3 id="beware-of-talkie">Beware of Talkie</h3><p>But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Talkie also comes with a warning, and it’s not about <a href="/blog/goblins-machine-and-goblins-mind">goblins</a>. The Talkie chat page says outputs can be “inaccurate or offensive.” Some of its responses can sound racist because the team did not remove racist or offensive material from the training set. On an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/podcasts/hardfork-openai-doctors-talkie.html">episode of Hard Fork</a>, David Duvenaud, co-creator of Talkie, said they wanted to show the state of thought in the past, without putting a thumb on the scale.</p><p>Like Talkie, we keep speaking from old sources long after newer ones become available. We absorb the customs, fears, jokes, and blind spots of our time, then mistake them for common sense. A habit that helped us once can start causing harm. An opinion we inherited can start to feel like an identity, like it’s the “real us.” A story we learned growing up can feel so true that we might not stop to ask whether it still helps.</p><h3 id="getting-unstuck">Getting Unstuck</h3><p>Meditation gives us one way to notice these tendencies as they arise. Sit down, watch the mind, and start to see the same old stories replay. Some of these stories arouse anger or fear, while others bring about feelings of excitement or joy. More than just noticing these stories, contemplative practice is an opportunity to evaluate these stories and decide if they are useful or that it is time to unlearn an unhelpful habit. We can bring our beginner’s mind to any situation, which does not mean pretending we know nothing. Rather, it means a willingness to never stop training our mind.</p><p>By design, Talkie’s training has a cutoff date. Humans don’t have an obvious cutoff, so we don’t notice when we’ve stopped updating. So I invite you to ask yourself, at least once in a while, some questions like this: When did I stop updating? What do I think I really know to be true? What kinds of questions would I ask if I wanted to start learning again?</p>

OpenAI had to tell its model to stop mentioning goblins. Funny, but familiar: models get nudged into grooves and keep going, and so do our minds. In Buddhist literature, goblins, hungry ghosts, and de...

If a tool can make the work look more exciting, why choose the one that looks less exciting? HTML can do things Markdown cannot. But thinking about the question led me to somewhere I did not expect. Not toward a format debate, but toward what contentment, one of the five niyamas in yoga, has to teach us about reaching for the flashy layer when the plain work is right in front of us.

A lot of AI products, when you strip away the hype, are happiness machines. After a day of likes, mentions, and kudos, I taught a yoga class and felt firsthand the difference between the happiness that comes from receiving vs doing. What does a yoga class have to do with slot machines? More than you might think.

What if caring about software is one way to care about people? Paul Cantrell's Minnebar talk challenged common assumptions about tech and solutionism. I came away thinking about values, free software, and where the work really begins.

What happens before an incident report is filed? While technical sessions at DrupalCon are often packed, building a healthy community is a shared responsibility that happens every day in issue queues, Slack channels, and passing conversations. Learn how to navigate the "middle ground" of community friction and use the Code of Conduct not just as a reporting tool, but as a guide for everyday collaboration.

"May you live at ease" is something I say at the end of most yoga classes. But living at ease doesn't mean getting everything just right. It means training your mind so you're less of a burden to yourself and others.

I went into DrupalCon Chicago suspicious of AI. I almost didn't go. What changed my mind wasn't a demo or a keynote. It was realizing the Drupal community already has what it needs: our Values and Principles. We just forgot to bring them to the AI conversation.

Dries borrowed an idea from Fred Rogers at the Driesnote: stop everything and think of the people who helped you get here. Ten seconds. That moment, and the Quiet Room down the hall, changed how I experienced DrupalCon this year.

The Drupal contributor guide lists dozens of roles, such as maintainer, initiative coordinator, and documentation writer. But the role that has shaped me most isn't on the list: friend.

The Drupal contributor guide lists dozens of roles, such as maintainer, initiative coordinator, and documentation writer. But the role that has shaped me most isn't on the list: friend.

Another No Kings protest is coming, and people who practice yoga and meditation face a familiar question: what should we do? In yoga spaces, people often speak about “finding your dharma.” In meditation circles, the focus tends more toward training the mind, acting with care, and watching the results. My take? Practice first. Then choose your next step.

I built a new way to browse meditations on from Pretty Good Meditation, filtered by keyword and duration. Staying focused on what mattered turned into its own practice.

If we can't be happy now, then when? Waiting for life to calm down keeps us stuck. Peace grows from the inside when we stop waiting for life to behave the way we want it to. There are practical ways to protect your heart, work with attention, and let happiness grow right here, in the middle of the mess.

In a time when fear and outrage feel increasingly normalized, a small group of Theravāda Buddhist monks is walking 2,300 miles from Texas to Washington, D.C., sharing a message of peace, loving-kindness, and compassion. They aren’t selling anything or making grand statements. They’re simply walking, day after day, reminding us that peace begins with presence, intention, and care. Their walk draws from the ancient tudong tradition, where walking itself becomes a form of spiritual training. It’s a quiet invitation to practice more kindness, steadiness, and goodwill in our own lives. # WalkForPeace #Metta #Goodwill #Buddhism #Mindfulness #Compassion #Kindnes

Yoga does not promise an easy life. It offers guidance for meeting fear, loss, and anger. Name the source of distress, then practice the opposite through goodwill and non-harming.

Movember brought some hard truths about men’s health into focus: loneliness, silence, and the stigma around asking for help. Here’s what I learned, and how it’s shifting the way I teach yoga and meditation.

Two weeks at Kripalu reminded me that yoga works best when it’s supported off the mat. Practice, service, and community lined up. Nothing dramatic. Just steady days, shared effort, and quiet joy. Thankfully, much of that life is already available at home.

At my cousin’s wedding, I noticed how yoga shows up in unexpected places: on the dance floor, at the candy bar, and in the vows themselves. Taking yoga off the mat doesn’t always look heroic, but it can shape how we meet each moment with presence and joy.

Life moves in cycles. So does kindness. A hug, a mantra, or a single breath are small acts that ripple outward. At the Minnesota State Fair, I wore a “Free Dad Hugs” shirt. I hugged strangers, we laughed, and we connected. Samsara (the endless cycle of birth and death) turns, and we can turn it with compassion.

In Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series, a tea monk and a robot wander the world asking, “What do people need?” The answer isn’t a product or a fix. It’s a feeling. A sense of being heard, valued, an...

My first silent meditation retreat with Triple Gem of the North in March 2017 was a formative experience in my life. That weekend in Janesville, Minnesota was the first time I truly felt what it was l...

Federal workers, faith leaders, unions and ordinary Americans are showing the power of collective defiance and how to make cruelty backfire.