The writing of Grounded Awakeness ranges from intimate examinations of ordinary human experience to questions about awakening, truth, and the possibility of liberation.

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Some pieces stay close to the movements of fear, identity, love, and relationship. Others challenge assumptions that have become deeply established in contemporary spirituality.

There is room for serious investigation, personal reflection, and the occasional pleasure of laughing at the extraordinary things human beings do to remain someone.

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There is no particular order in which the writing needs to be approached. Follow what interests you, and see where it takes you.

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Selected Writing

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You Want Liberation. But What Must It Leave Untouched?

An examination of the hidden conditions that can remain within even the most sincere search for liberation. As inquiry begins to threaten what gives life its meaning, security, and identity, the movement of self-preservation can disguise itself as discernment, responsibility, or a more mature understanding. The piece explores how our deepest attachments can come to govern what we are willing to see, and how the very pursuit of freedom can become a negotiation over what must remain untouched.

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The End of Separation in Human Contact

Much of what we call meeting another person is entangled with our own fears, needs, memories, and expectations. This piece explores what changes when that constant return to ourselves begins to fall away, and other people are no longer experienced primarily through what they offer, threaten, or confirm about us. It reveals a possibility of extraordinary intimacy and tenderness, where love and appreciation arise naturally from meeting another human being without the familiar burden of self-concern.

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Three Spiritual Identities Walk Into a Bar

A sharply observed comedy about three men who have apparently transcended the self, healed their wounds, and reached impressive levels of spiritual integration. Through their increasingly absurd encounters, the story exposes how sophisticated spiritual language can become a defense against embarrassment, vulnerability, and the discomfort of being seen. Beneath the humor lies a familiar contradiction: even the claim to have moved beyond identity can become an identity that must be protected.

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Explore the full collection of public writing

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The Corruption of Awakening (Forthcoming book)

 

How did a pursuit once directed toward liberation become something the self could understand, possess, and claim as its own?

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The Corruption of Awakening examines what has happened to awakening as it has passed through spiritual traditions, contemporary nonduality, psychological healing, and the modern marketplace of teachings and experiences.

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It follows the gradual transformation of something that once threatened the very foundations of personal identity into something that identity could accommodate, celebrate, and even use to establish its own spiritual significance.

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The book confronts the assumptions through which genuine insights become premature conclusions, and the ways an entire spiritual culture can come to affirm those conclusions without questioning what remains.

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At its heart is the question of liberation itself. What have we come to accept as freedom, and what happens when the understanding that once promised to bring the search to an end becomes one more thing we are unwilling to relinquish?

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