Santa Elena, 2025

It’s 4:00pm and the sun is hesitant to emerge, hiding behind insisting clouds.

Today I’m feeling like pu’erh. A new box sits quietly on the table. I run my hands along its contour and open slowly the sticker with the ring finger. Lifting the lid, the room is filled by the aroma of a forest in autumn, I can almost hear the crunch of the red leaves on the ground.

Subscribe now

Vancouver, 2014

My friends beautiful yellow house is in East Van. We go there once a week to catch up. They have two daughters. The house is surrounded by big maple trees that color the porch in hues of yellow, ochre, red. The other houses around are also filled with family life, I see bicycles, barbecues, hoses, mom vans, balls. We bring the best wine. Yet, there’s something that feels foreign. Everyone around me seemed to know what they were becoming.

Santa Elena, 2025

My breath has fallen short, my belly expands to give rise to more air as I continue to open the bag with leaves. I turn my gaze towards the content and perceive the shape of the leaves. They look like little dry roots, patiently waiting for their turn to give themselves to the hot water, unfurling the decades they have tasted time. Harvested in 1981, it’s a little older than me. The first time I tried it was in the desert, but not the Sahara, the desert of Nevada that welcomes thousands of adventurous people for a week of creative freedom at a place they call Burning Man.

Black Rock City, 2024

He fixes his wide-rim burgundy hat which is filled with small trinkets on it.. feathers, poems, crystals, small lanterns, tiny tea bottles, and other curiosities he finds along the way. The water is hot, the tea is in the pot. He pours the first infusion over the leaves and lets it go. A few seconds, the water is discarded. Then he pours again. In between drops, a complicit gaze finds my eyes. He pours the small cups, we slurp to chill the water before it reaches our throat. Suddenly, I leave the desert to enter the depth of a forest.

Santa Elena, 2025

I slurp, carefully, not to miss any taste notes. It smells like a cabinet I haven’t opened in a long time. Simple flavors show up: dried leaves, soil, mushrooms, rain. An entire ecosystem enters my mouth and I can only close my eyes to surrender to the presence of a flavor that has length. I lit the fire before and the brass is keeping my feet warm.

In China, while this tea was slowly fermenting under nobody’s watch, I was arriving in this world. It didn’t know it was becoming something. Neither did I. The future doesn’t need my help. It is already, surely, becoming me.

I lift the cup and take another sip. A gust of clarity caresses my cheek, this leaf and my mouth have been traveling toward this encounter all along. Without trying, without knowing, two lines running in parallel finally converge.

Share

This is the third essay of this month’s The Artist theme of The Undoing series. If you have been following I think you might already get a sense of what I’m exploring this month. We’ll end this month with an essay on celibacy and crativity.

You can see the previous essays below and you’re welcome to read all the series on The Undoing page.

Mazunte, Oaxaca. Day 6. December 2024.

My body is electrified, every cell vibrating, pulsing with an inexplicable life.

Two hours of meditation. Connecting with the breath, with the heart, with the heartbeat. Negotiating with thoughts, dissolving ideas and concepts. And then, suddenly — nothing.

Empty. Spaciousness. Stillness.

In a lagoon of silence, my spirit swims. The mind in pause. Peace.

Thoughts begin to arrive softly, gently. They come in clarity, with certainty.

I don’t chase them away. I let them in.

My hands reach for my pen, my eyes half closed. Words pour. I breathe a quiet breath, a sensual sigh that gives me chills.

Eternity. I never want this moment to end.

My hand can’t stop writing. Where are these words coming from?

The bell is invited. I have been sitting for more than four hours, yet I am showered in adrenaline. People start standing up to leave the room. I don’t want to move.

Subscribe now

…

After years of denying its existence, I met God for the first time in Mazunte. It spoke to me through the soft golden light of the afternoon, in the delicate shape of the bougainvilleas surrounding the shala, in the sound of the waves breaking on the shore, in the way the stars slowly appear in the sky.

Even then I resisted the name of God. But what other word could I use to describe that energy moving through me, leaving traces of vitality — a shapeless, ineffable presence, endless, vast, and ever-present source of beauty?

I tasted that sweet nectar and could not resist indulging.

Then came the desert.

Wherever I turn my gaze, there is a perfect image. It is as if I am drawing with my eyes the silhouette of the dunes — intact, as though no one had ever walked them. The relentless blue of the sky and a few clouds crossing the infinite completed the scene. It is pointless to try to capture this immensity with a camera; each time I raise it to shoot, the moment disappears. I hear the crunching sound of my footsteps and the wind moving through my clothes. The voices that once irritated me also belong to this perfection.

I stop for a moment, unable to decide where to look. The horizon. The sand. The clouds.

The wind erases our tracks with infinite patience. Hours later, no trace of our passing remains.

Back in the mountains, I stripped away schedules. I felt no urge to create or to share, least of all that. Ideas poured endlessly, like a waterfall after a night’s rain.

I filled my days with slowness, staying as still as I could — so still that sometimes I could feel my body rocking with my own heartbeat. But the mountains did not offer what the silence in Mazunte or the desert had given me. That almost tangible taste of God.

I went to find it in the monastery again. Perhaps if I go away for three months I can speak to it face to face, I thought.

Each morning the ground was covered in frost. The sun’s rays, so subtle, touched the frozen water and scattered glimmers that looked like small stars within the reach of my hand. I remember seeing that same glimmer in the mountain dew just outside my balcony — but if I tried to touch it, it would vanish.

The sky painted itself in pastels — pinks, blues, greens, oranges. Birds floated silently in the distance, tracing patterns without precise form. It was like watching them surrender to the wind, using their feathers as a weathervane.

Some mornings I wondered where God had gone. Why, just when we had met, it disappeared. I searched in deserts, seas, rivers, mountains, monasteries, and silences.

All I could see were the seductive shadows the sun cast at any hour of the day.

Had it not been God who had dictated to me, with such precise grace, the verses of Mazunte?

One morning in May, seventeen months later, I read back those words written in my journal.

Oh god!… the sweet nectar of a fruit that cannot be eaten.

Share

I would love to. hear from you! I think this essay wrote itself, I had no intention in going in this direction but these words wanted to be written, and in a way I think this is hinting to my next post on celibacy and desire. I know you’re there, and I’m happy.

You can read the previous post here:

And follow all The Undoing series essays here or subscribe so they get to your inbox.

Subscribe now

We had finished lunch and were walking to wash our dishes.

Nick has been going to Plum Village for decades. He’s from London, makes films, and has the particular quality of someone who had sat with himself long enough that he no longer needed to perform ease. We had been having a conversation over lunch but as we walked to wash our dishes the conversation stopped and neither of us hurried to restart it.

It was the kind of silence that didn’t ask for anything. The path, the other practitioners ahead of us, the afternoon light. We weren’t filling the space. We were simply walking through it.

As we walked, a thought surfaced:

You know, there are hundreds of people here and somehow I always end up seeing the same ten people.

I said it out loud, the way you say things when you’re not talking to someone, you’re just thinking into the air. Nick didn’t answer immediately. Then he just asked:

Isn’t that your perception?

We kept walking.

Subscribe now

…

The question landed right away but it took the remaining steps to the tea house, the ritual of the dish station, the warm cup afterward, to move through me slowly, the way water moves through stone, not breaking anything, just finding the shape of what’s already there.

Because of course it was my perception.

The monastery was full of people. Hundreds of practitioners from every country, every background, every reason for being there. They were at every meal, in every walking meditation, in every dharma sharing circle. They were everywhere.

And I had organized them, without knowing it, into ten. The ones my eyes went to. The ones my mind had already decided were interesting, or familiar, or safe. Everything else had become background, not necessarily invisible, but unregistered. Present but unseen.

The mind goes to what it knows. And then it calls that the world.

…

Several weeks later, I published the essay about anger (On Anger and Pride). When I wrote it, I said something I had never said before: that anger lives in me, and that it has lived in me since I was a child.

I took my mom for lunch some days later. We shared a long conversation as she had read that essay and was wondering how I was doing. She enjoys asking me questions that make me refine my own questions.

I told her I thought I was finally seeing the anger not as something to fix or hide, but as another emotion, one that has always accompanied me.

I told her the people that frustrated me were still frustrating. The situations that wore me down hadn’t changed. Nothing outside had moved but somehow I felt that, for the first time, I was able to hold all that.

She listened. Well into the meal, when our glasses were empty and the dessert was over, she said: that shift is you arriving at your own truth.

Then she threw a quote from the Bible with a smirk. Half to herself, half to me. La verdad os hará libres. The truth shall set you free.

A long unexpected exhale relieved the tension on my shoulders. My body light.

Does knowing the limits of my perception make me free?

…

Nick and I sat for a while with other practitioners, talking about small things, getting to know one another. I don’t think I told him what his question had done in that moment because I didn’t know either it would be a thread I would pull up to this moment.

A question asked without agenda in April. A mother quoting scripture over lunch in May. The same recognition arriving through different doors.

Share

Beginning a new phase of The Undoing series. This month I’m exploring the rise of the Artist questioning perception, truth, celibacy, creativity, time, and other topics.

Last month I shared about archetypes dismantling my notion of self. You’re welcome to read the previous essays in The Undoing series page.

Leave a comment

It’s easier to feel compassion towards someone who’s crying than towards someone who’s yelling, yet sadness and anger are two equally important emotions.

I come from a lineage of angry people. The masculine side acting from its patriarchal, controlling, machista place for several generations. Although my male lineage is partly an enigma to me. We never knew anything about my grandfather on my mother’s side, and I may have seen my grandfather on my father’s side once or twice in my entire childhood.

But the women — now that is a fierce lineage. I’ll talk more about this someday, but with a history of men who abandon, who mistreat, who betray, there is a generational rage I didn’t escape.

Subscribe now

I remember one hot, sunny day in Barranquilla, after many weeks of rehearsals in extracurricular dance classes, we finally had our performance in front of parents and family, a chance to show what we had worked so hard on. I must have been around 10, and the other kids were similar ages. We had practiced and practiced a choreography that, in my child’s opinion, was very simple, and I couldn’t understand why some of the girls in the class kept getting it wrong.

In any case, on the day of the performance — in our black one-piece leotards, high ponytails with red ribbons holding our hair, and dance shoes — we set out to show our skills. Everything was going well until we reached a moment where we had to turn right, and the same girls who always made mistakes did it again and turned left. That threw the whole class into confusion. I got worked up and surely yelled that it wasn’t that way, and I got so angry that I walked off the floor and sat in the bleachers with my arms crossed and a furious pout on my face. That memory has never left me.

As a teenager I had full-blown battles with my dad, senseless arguments. They called me Margot — from amargada, bitter — and I recognized in myself the same visible, destructive anger I saw in my paternal lineage. And then, as an adult, I recognized the invisible, silent anger disguised as pride on my maternal’s side.

By inheritance and by lived experience, rage runs through my veins.

…

Years later, as a dysfunctional adult in the workplace, I started connecting the dots of my own behavior. The simplest things would make me angry, like someone failing to deliver something at exactly the moment they’d announced. I would even surprise myself angry for no apparent reason.

The thing is, it took me many years of study, practices, therapies, and all kinds of personal work to realize that what I was carrying was a generational rage embedded in my chest. I saw it explicitly in that conversation I had with the hotel manager at Zunya (Becoming Nobody), and I also saw it silently — with its loud pride — in that revelatory thought about the Climate retreats (Losing Interest in the World).

So when I went into my hermit period, one of my preoccupations was being able to extinguish that anger — to catch it before it surfaced and put it back somewhere hidden where no one could see it. What shame it would be if someone noticed.

What I hadn’t recognized at that moment was that anger directed inward is depression. In the spiral of silence I had entered, I was carrying all my rage inward with me, and it was converting itself into exhaustion, bitterness, and a kind of internal dimming.

I wasn’t only cooling down with the mountain temperature. I was putting out my own fire.

At the monastery during the Rains Retreat, I realized that irritation — that emotional response that lives just below the threshold of full anger — was one of my most recurring emotions. I felt it rising whenever a comment from a sister or a lay practitioner sparked thoughts of contempt in me. In my body it felt like fire in my hands and in my chest.

Being in a space of active practice and concentration, I was able to go in and investigate that irritation. For the first time I could tell people I was irritated without having to slam doors or throw phones, simply recognizing its presence, and having others make space for it, allowed me to understand it.

That is what Thay always says: to be able to hold anger like a baby who needs compassion and care. To give it space to exist.

But here I was still missing a piece. Because just giving it space felt incomplete to me. That energy is already in me, observing it alone doesn’t dissolve its impulse. So what if the fire that ignites the rage could be transmuted into something else, and I could actually create from it?

You have to know how to inhabit your own darkness, to know the places in yourself that frighten you, allow them to exist, and integrate them. Clarissa Pinkola Estés says in Women Who Run With the Wolves, that she hasn’t met a wild woman without rage, but this wildness shouldn’t be sublimated but rather channeled.

I can’t justify generational anger by throwing it at people. There is a line between feeling anger and expressing it for yourself — a moment of intensity, an act of fiery self-expression. Something else entirely is feeling anger and expelling it at others, because that is a way of offloading your responsibility.

One afternoon at home, in one of those moments of deep stillness where you hear yourself more clearly, I got an answer I hadn’t expected: give the rage voice and movement. Don’t let it eat you from the inside. Only then can you live in grace.

Just as silence is not the absence of sound, inner peace is not the absence of strong emotions.

Sometimes we underestimate our capacity to hold the paradox, to allow strong emotions to live in us, while also having a deep sense of inner peace. I’m starting to understand that and lately it feels less like something to survive, and more like fuel. If the women of my family survived what they survived with that same rage, I’m sure I can use some of that too.

Share

This is the fourth essay from The Undoing series. This is also the closing of the first month in the series, which talks about the rising of The Meditator.

Next week you'll receive a new essay in your inbox, shall you choose to subscribe. The following month I’ll be exploring on the rising of The Artist.

In this series I'm exploring what happens when spiritual practice actually works — not in the comfortable, self-improving way, but in the way that takes things from you. And occasionally, gives something back.

See the previous essays here:

Leave a comment

I woke up one day sweating, heart racing.

I had just had a dream. I was in a car full of people. My ex-boyfriend sat in the front, chatting with another girl while the others looked at me. I looked back and Gaia, my dog, was sitting there in the shape of a little girl. My ex crashed the car and somehow I was outside the car, people looking at me, expecting me to do something. I grabbed Gaia and started running. I ran into the forest and kept running until I couldn’t be seen.

The alarm went off.
— extract from a journal entry in 2022.

Subscribe now

…

When I moved to the mountain in 2024 I was longing for a cozy refuge where I could study, practice, and be silent. The community I moved into seemed like the perfect balance between solitude and company. I was afraid of the cold but something called me to be there. I had spent two years moving around looking for something I couldn’t name, so understandably I couldn’t feel at home anywhere.

My days were very simple. I would wake up with the sunrise, sit on the cushion for a 30 minute meditation, then read a book or listen to a dharma talk, make breakfast and sit at the computer to freelance for the projects I had. Then I would wrap up, make dinner, light the fire, listen to music, and call it a day. I wasn’t entirely fulfilled, but I wasn’t miserable at all. Just nothing extraordinary seemed to be happening in my life.

I kept traveling to the monastery to produce the Climate retreats, and each time a retreat, a new inquiry would manifest. I had attended/organized about seven retreats at this point, almost like binge-watching Plum Village in a matter of two years. It was starting to get a little tiring.

I met Thay from an interview he did with Oprah decades ago. I was researching the great teachers of our times still alive when I found that video.

“Are you always this content and peaceful?” asked Oprah.
“This is my training, this is my practice,” said Thich Nhat Hanh.

Those were the opening questions by Oprah. I sensed a personal question in her way of asking, as though she was trying to determine whether a peace like the one Thay emanated was truly possible, perhaps with a touch of longing beneath it. Maybe I was projecting. In my last months at Zunya I was carrying an anxiety that no amount of yoga, kundalini, or kirtan could ease my nervous system.

I was captured by the softness and tenderness of this monk as he answered every question with graceful attention. Even when I could tell the video was heavily edited to eliminate any gaps, I could still feel the silence in his demeanor.

Since the moment of this encounter, I developed a profound connection with his teachings. At first I was delighted by the academic input that my mind was receiving, but every time I sat in the hall to receive the Dharma, a question would continue to emerge.

Who am I?

…

Every day was different, and within each day, my heart felt grateful for all the blessings, while also a bit broken, undulating between presence and grasping.

I was grasping at an identity I couldn’t sustain anymore. Although the Climate retreats were a beautiful work, something in me felt heavy. Did I just want to prove to the world that I could still do something impactful after leaving Zunya? Not just impactful, but categorically more important?

I felt the pressure of performance in front of all the eyes looking at me, and a deep desire to leave everything behind to answer that question.

I was losing my patience with the retreats, the feeling that I was not going anywhere, stuck in the loop of a movie I had already watched. One day, after a particularly difficult production in Costa Rica with the Climate retreats that left us exhausted, I had a thought that broke the glass: “This wouldn’t have happened if I had been handling it instead of her.”

A sharp stomach cramp twisted through my abdomen and brought me to the floor. There she was again, the woman I had run away from at Zunya. The same desire for control and admiration but with fancier spiritual language.

Some weeks later, Gaia, my dogter, ran away from home escaping the fireworks. She was lost for four long days, during which I could do nothing but look for her. The pages of my diary were filled with the anguish of having lost her forever. I imagined the scene of her departure, her last glance; I could feel her fear, and I blamed myself for not having paid enough attention to her suffering. I was completely consumed by that episode.

“That which you are afraid to lose controls you”. I saw it so clearly.

I was not free.

My job with the retreats ended soon after that. The doors of my home slowly began to close. The world began fading behind the curtains. I kept a project running, mostly so my parents wouldn’t ask too many questions.

I stopped making things with people. Not because I had nothing to offer. I was afraid of what I would do with the offering. The praise, the recognition, the addiction of being needed. I had seen the desires of my mind. I didn’t trust myself near them anymore.

I surrendered to the depth of my own mystery. Forgetting every day what life was like before that time, not interested in being seen by the world. Sometimes there was sadness, holding an unnamed pressure on the chest. Some others a recognition of the pain as a passing thought like a gust of wind.

The days were filled with slowness, like welcoming a soft grace I had forgotten along the way. When my body would tense up because something wasn’t happening exactly as I thought it would, I taught myself to let go, repeating to myself: it’s okay, you can trust.

My journal became witness to my days:

An abundant table with my neighbors sharing the simplicity of togetherness was enough of a plan. The edges between who I was and who I would become began to fade, and I saw myself balancing in the thin line of the in-between, the fragility of that moment.

Carl Jung had a name for this, enantiodromia, the moment when things begin to turn into their opposite. When the ego loosens its grip but the self has not yet found solid ground. I didn’t know I was going through that. I felt content in the discovery of this self.

And I liked her, away in the mountains seemed like a safe place to be. I had dreamed this exact move, two years before I made it.

Free from anyone’s expectations, I took refuge in the forest. Not out of purity, perhaps, but because I no longer trusted the part of me that came alive under applause.

A peek into the future. A blank page. Where is the road? I forgot to ask for directions on how to navigate this liminal space. Looking for a lifeline to hold on to, but seeing instead the abyss of time.

But time no longer mattered. It was just the twelve hundred heartbeats of a hummingbird passing by while onions sizzled in the pan.

…

I might have been out of sight from many, but I couldn’t escape my own gaze. There is a particular danger in getting too comfortable with simplicity.

The old life knows exactly when to knock.

A distant memory of a woman walking the streets of New York, producing campaigns for Cadillac, would ambush the silence. I would feel the pull of her, her certainty, her momentum. But on a second look: who was she, really? What drove her? A Cadillac, of course, and a very nice one that could park itself. But it was never really hers after all.

Was my drive also consumed by the flames? Was it taken away so I could sit and enjoy tea?

I asked my teachers. They wouldn’t know. How could they, if I didn’t know what I was truly asking.

Thay’s words would resonate in my mind: “Finding the truth is not the same as finding happiness. One aspires to see the truth, but once seen, one cannot avoid suffering. Otherwise, one has seen nothing.”

One morning, I woke up with a question:

Which version of me felt freer? The one with the Cadillac or the hermit in the mountain?

Neither, I would come to realize.

That evening, the mountain looked ordinary again. Wet wood. Cold air slipping through the windows. A dog barking somewhere far away. I made tea and watched the fire collapse into embers.

Leave a comment

This is the third essay from The Undoing series. Next week you'll receive a new essay in your inbox, shall you choose to subscribe. In this series I’m exploring what happens when spiritual practice actually works, not in the comfortable, self-improving way, but in the way that takes things from you.

First and second essays:

The room was a circle of strangers sitting very still.

It was 2022, Plum Village, and Sister Dinh Nghiem was doing something I had never quite watched anyone do before: she was making tea. That was all. And yet the room — full of young people who had come, like me, from noise — had gone completely quiet.

She warmed the pot first. The sound of water. Then she placed the leaves inside. Then more water — poured slowly, deliberately — then drained. Then poured again. Then she waited. Then she served.

I had been drinking tea for seven years by then, ever since I left coffee behind. I had developed what I thought of as a taste for it. I had opinions about varieties. I owned several different kinds. And watching this nun in her brown robes, I understood, with some embarrassment, that I had never actually made tea in my life. I had heated water. I had steeped things. But I had never been with it the way she was with it.

Subscribe now

She told us about Thay — Thich Nhat Hanh — and how he took his tea. How all of his students had a practice around it. How tea, for them, was not a beverage but a form of attention.

I sat there in the circle feeling something I can only describe as an open invitation. Not from the sister, exactly. From the act itself.

I didn’t run out and buy a gongfu set or start researching the precise temperature at which a silver needle should be steeped. What opened here first was a door of curiosity that led me into a whole new universe.

What I started doing was simple: I began serving tea. For others when they came. For myself when I was alone. Not “making tea” in the way I used to, which meant filling the kettle and waiting for the click. But serving it — attending to each step the way the sister had, with the same concentration she had brought to what was, after all, just hot water and dried leaves.

In the act of tending the leaves, my mind, that was going in a thousand directions, slowed down. My emotions that felt so urgent, became quieter. My attention had something to follow. The warming of the pot. The unfolding of the leaf. The first rinse, cloudy and quick. The second pour, when the color begins. I noticed I could hold on to this sequence when everything else was falling apart.

There is grief that I have taken to tea. Mornings when something heavy woke with me and I couldn’t just sit on a cushion to close my eyes to meditate. I have taken anxiety to tea. The kind that runs ahead of everything, rehearsing futures that may never arrive. I have taken loneliness to it, and the particular sadness of not knowing what to want anymore.

Sister Dinh Nghiem didn’t say any of this. She just made tea. She made that seemingly mundane moment beautiful. She made it matter, sacred.

When I sit with tea, I sit with what is. The peaceful feeling of contemplation alongside the rushing mind that still wants to solve and understand everything. Through the cadence of the making tea, I have given movement to strong emotions that feel stuck in my body. When I wait for the tea to steep – which I have never timed the steeping precisely, I rather feel into it–, I trust the process of time. With no urgency, nowhere to go, nothing to do; just being there with it. Only later did I understand why Temperance (XIV) carries water between two cups.

That simple teaching of the sister became one of the most important ones for my process of unbecoming, slowly, without spilling. I didn't know it then. I was too busy learning the art of tea.

Share

This is the second essay from The Undoing. Next, I'll write about the rise of The Meditator in me — the beautiful dance of finding a teacher, what breaks with that, and what happens when you lose the drive entirely.

You can read the first essay here:

Leave a comment

At the end of 2020, I was boarding a plane to go somewhere — I can’t recall where — when I received a very unexpected phone call from D, a trickster I had met a couple of years back during an event I had co-designed and produced in Oaxaca, Mexico.

By the time the call ended, my heart was racing. There was something in his invitation, that without knowing exactly why, felt true.

He asked me to attend a virtual presentation of the project and to take some days to decide if I wanted to join him. Before the call even finished, I went to the room where my boyfriend was making music and I told him without hesitation: we are moving to Costa Rica. Between excited and clueless, he followed my enthusiasm. We had recently moved to Tulum with many expectations, but some decisions do not pass through thought, sometimes you just know with a rare clarity.

We packed our lives again and weeks later, we had landed in the jungle of Costa Rica to start life anew.

Subscribe now

…

D’s project was called Zunya. It was everything I wanted: community, nature, a kind of natural luxury, a food garden, people building something together. I became a co-creator, designing experiences, shaping gatherings, building community, curating the artist residency.

I lived fifty meters from the beach. I had a pool, a loving partner. I learned to surf. I wore the same three clothes. I woke up to howling monkeys throwing mangos onto my roof.

I was barefoot, tanned, connected, alive.

The team had arrived from different walks of life, and it seemed that we were all dreaming the same dream. For a long year we created at a pace we thought unstoppable. D’s leadership was charming, seducing. He invited us to dream beyond time and space, to have our gaze pointing toward infinite. He made us feel we were redefining the rules of the game.

Our team was set on track to conquer the hospitality world. We were making it happen.

I was feeling on top of the world, intoxicated by ambition.

And then, Icarus.

Too close to the sun, we burned. Oh gosh, did we burn.

The team started to fracture. Fights and disagreements ensued everywhere. Everyone pointing fingers, fault-finding, mistrusting. It became a toxic environment, a slow erosion. There are certain dynamics that bring out parts of me I don’t like — and I had found one. It wasn’t just an external situation, that same charming archetype I was seduced by before, now held up a mirror and what I saw was not poetry. Shadows, ego, attachments, desires, arrogance, pride. It was my close encounter with the Tarot’s devil archetype.

I remember one moment so vividly. I walked into Zunya and saw that the hotel manager had used some of the decorations I used for my events for something I had nothing to do with. By then, everything felt charged, territorial. I told her she had no right to use my things. That she needed to return everything, intact, and ask me first. How could she take credit for her event with a set up I had designed for my own?

As I spoke, something in me stepped aside and watched. I could hear myself, but I didn’t recognize who was speaking. It’s embarrassing to remember. I really disliked who I had become.

I was floating in my pool one day, looking at the palm trees upside down, when I surprised myself with the question: I have everything I dreamed, then why do I feel so miserable?

On paper, my life was perfect. In reality, I was in hell.

It took me months to see this. To accept that perhaps it was the end. That the dream was over or maybe not over but no longer true.

Leaving was an act of necessity. Like stepping out of a room where the air had become too dense to breathe.

…

That last plane out of Costa Rica took off with a quiet sorrow. My heart was broken. I was burnt out. Angry, even. How could something I had dreamed so vividly — something that had felt so aligned — dissolve like that?

This was the beginning of 2022. After leaving Zunya (which no longer exists), I had no direction, no clear place to go. I decided to gift myself a 3-month sabbatical, which turned into a year and a half. I spent the time visiting friends, trying to find a spark of excitement or a full yes on where to go next. My relationship had also ended.

I had a white canvas and no desire to paint.

By mid-2023, I landed in Medellín, still burnt out, still upset, but I thought I was ready for a new beginning. Of course, life, with its dark sense of humor, had other plans. Everything I tried wouldn’t stick. Projects, places to live, ideas, lovers… everything arose and fell without trying too much.

I felt turning in a spiral, but I now see it was going inwards. Every time closer and closer to my inner self, and further and further away from the world. Even the things that once felt meaningful and honorable, like organizing climate retreats around the world with Plum Village and Christiana Figures, felt empty.

At the end of 2024, another trickster lover came into my life to deliver the final blow. I disengaged after that. Any attempts to show up to the world were short-lived. The only constant in my life was my practice, which I went all in on: reading, writing, journaling, meditating, sitting in my garden contemplating the clouds, and making tea.

I left everything and went inward. Santa Elena, my beloved mountain home, swallowed me. The cold colded me. I snuggled in blankets by the fire. I withdrew from romantic relationships. I entered a year of celibacy, intentionally. I disappeared from social channels, every now and then posting something as an attempt to show I was still there but without the performance.

Some mornings, I would sit with my tea until it went cold, with nowhere to go and no one to be. I couldn’t tell if I was resting or disappearing.

I became nothing and nobody.

This is the first essay of the series The Undoing. For the next three months, I’ll be relating the story of the past six years of my life as an attempt to make sense of the process I’ve been in, and that somehow I feel is coming to an end.

Nothing spectacular, just my honest truth.

Grab some tea, stay a while.
I’m happy you are there.

Leave a comment

I am not sure I know how to write this.

Which is perhaps exactly why I need to.

Something has been happening to me — slowly, then all at once, the way these things tend to go. A long retreat. Teachings that refused to let me stay comfortable. A practice that kept asking more than I thought I had to give. The begining of a romantic glimmer that never was. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the person I thought I was — the one with drive, with direction, with a clear sense of what mattered — slowly stopped showing up.

I have been waiting for her to return. I don’t think she’s coming back. At least not in the same way as before.

This series — The Undoing — is my attempt to write honestly about what that is like. Not from the other side of it, where things resolve and the lesson becomes clear. From inside it, where it is still uncertain and sometimes frightening and occasionally, unexpectedly, free.

Over the next three months I will be writing about losing the self that practice dismantles. About silence, and what it costs. About finding a teacher and what broke open when I did. About what truly matters when almost everything you thought mattered has fallen away.

Between those essays there will be tea — because there is always tea. Because the ritual of leaves and water and attention is the one thing that has stayed steady through all of this. Because sometimes the most honest thing you can do is sit down, make something simple, and pay attention.

I don’t know where this ends. I’m writing to find out.

If you are someone who has felt that your practice has cracked you open — or someone spiritually curious but somehow lost — or someone who woke up one day and couldn’t remember what they were moving toward: this is for you. We are, I think, often the same person.

A small note on commitment. Committing to things — especially open-ended, ongoing things — has always been hard for me. The idea of an everlasting blog, of promising I will always show up, has kept me from showing up at all. So this series is my answer to that. Not a forever promise. A finite one. Twelve essays, three months, one step at a time. Small enough to be real. I know how to do that. This is my first step toward embracing commitment.

Welcome to The Undoing.

A chapter that feels that is ending. May the renewal energy of the Spring accompany us along the way.

I’m glad you’re here.

Essay 1 begins May 5th.

Subscribe now

Today I went to a yoga class after a long time. A few weeks ago I started working my muscles, thinking my body would appreciate a bit more strength—especially considering I turn forty this year (how did that even happen, my gosh!). So I focused on those trainings, and today, feeling my body asking for space and elasticity, I felt the call to return to the mat.

My investigative work on my mind never lets up, and I extend it to my body as well. I’ve been able to observe that the effort I’ve been putting into strengthening my muscle mass was taking away from my elasticity, and while I was doing the asanas (the postures), several teachings about effort and space came to mind.

Once, a teacher, while we were holding a somewhat complex posture, asked: the effort you’re putting into this posture— is it helping you open more space, or is it contracting your body?

I think that’s one of those lessons I took with me for life, to apply to everything. I immediately asked myself the same question about all aspects of my life, especially my personal relationships. Was that attempt to maintain a relationship I had been doubting for years worth the effort I was investing in it? It turned out it wasn’t. There are efforts that don’t open anything—they simply empty you (and your bank account too).

The Q’ero people, an Andean community that inhabits the Apus of Peru, have a concept that doesn’t translate easily because it is not just a word, but a way of life.

Ayni

It is often translated as “reciprocity,” but it goes far beyond that. It is the idea that everything is in relationship with everything, constantly—that every movement generates other movements. And when one is in Ayni, one enters into a fluid relationship with energy, with continuous movement. It is like stepping into the constant flow of life’s current.

Entering this movement requires effort. But it is not an effort that drains vitality—on the contrary, it is one that adds Prana to your life. Because being in Ayni is not about forcing or pushing things to flow, but about participating in their movement.

My friend Ana María would say that the right question is not what do I want to create, but what wants to be created through me—and I think she’s right.

The question we ask matters. The compass of intuition responds to it. Ask poorly and it points into emptiness. Ask from within the flow and you are already in it.

In Taoism it is said that the Tao never does anything, and yet through it all things are done. That is the essence of Wu Wei, or effortless action. It’s not that nothing should be done, but that action should not create friction.

When we practice asanas in yoga, we are also focused on our breath. Breath is an intimate form of reciprocity with life: when we inhale, we receive; when we exhale, we offer. Each breath as we move is a way of aligning with the flow and allowing ourselves to surrender to it.

When we move, we are not in competition with ourselves. There is no need to think about how much effort to put into a posture, but whether that effort contracts the body or expands it. Whether it creates resistance, or moves like water finding its way with each breath. If we are not breathing properly, we are misaligned, and the posture will feel heavy.

The same happens when I write. There are days when I force the words and the page feels heavy, contracted. And there are days when I simply sit and something moves through me, as if I had stepped into a river. So it is not a matter of thinking about what is gained or lost with a movement I am generating, but of understanding that when action is held in balance, it does not take anything from you—it circulates you.

Understanding this with the mind is not easy, but we can feel it in the body. When we are in flow, the body softens, and even when we move through difficult circumstances, we can navigate them more easily—like water encountering rocks along the way, simply sliding around them.

When the breath is cut, the body knows before the mind. The posture becomes rigid, isolated. But when the breath flows, the whole body participates, and effort no longer feels like effort.

Then I know I am inhabiting the movement—
and something in me stops pushing, and begins to accompany.

Most of the time our bodies are in one place and our minds are somewhere else entirely. A few days ago I had a conversation with a friend while she was giving me a new hairdo. It’s usually our brief moment to catch up on life.

When I sat down in the chair, I noticed something immediately. Her face looked pale, her eyes tired, and her posture slightly slouched. It was clear she was going through something difficult. I asked how she was doing.

She told me that in the past few weeks she had been experiencing terrible migraines, something she has battled more often than she would like. Because it is a recurring condition, she has learned to structure parts of her life around it. But she mentioned something that caught my attention.

Although the migraines are painful and exhausting, she sometimes feels a strange sense of relief during them.

When she said that, I understood what she meant. Not because I experience migraines, but because the last time I felt an intense physical pain I noticed that my mind could not be anywhere else except in the pain itself. And although that experience wasn’t pleasant, it brought a kind of unavoidable presence.

When the body hurts, attention has nowhere else to go.

What research says about attention

This made me think of a study by Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert that I came across recently, titled “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,”1 published in the journal Science in 2010.

The researchers created an iPhone app2 that randomly asked thousands of participants three simple questions throughout their day:

What are you doing right now?
How happy do you feel?
Is your mind focused on the activity or wandering elsewhere?

The results were striking. People’s minds were wandering about 47% of the time.

In other words, nearly half of our waking lives are spent mentally somewhere other than where our bodies are.

Even more interesting: people reported being less happy when their minds were wandering, regardless of what they were doing. Even when the activity itself wasn’t particularly enjoyable, participants were still happier when their attention was fully present.

This suggests something simple but powerful. Our level of happiness may depend less on what we are doing and more on where our attention is.

Pain forces attention back into the body, but what my friend revealed was something subtler.

We often think that happiness comes from changing our minds and the circumstances that surround us, when in fact it may come more from changing the quality of attention we bring to the raw experience of the present moment.

Meaning, when we are truly present for whatever it is that is happening, without judging or wishing it differently, we can arrive at a true moment of happiness. We begin to experience what is actually happening instead of what we think about what is happening. And this brings a sense of ease.

How to practice this in daily life

Please don’t go hurting yourself intentionally. Pain was simply an example. The good news is that there are much gentler ways to experience the same kind of presence.

For example, when you sit quietly and observe the breath, what you are witnessing is precisely what the study measured: the moment when attention slips away, and the moment when it returns.

This is what you practice in meditation, not not-thinking but observing how you are thinking. You bring the attention back to something immediate: the breath, the body, the senses, or simply awareness itself3.

Leave a comment

A trainable skill

The important thing to understand is that this is a skill and you can train it.

One day at Plum Village monastery I stopped Brother Thien Chi to share a story. What I intended to say briefly turned into a full dharma (drama) sharing on my side, complete with tears and everything. Because of our conversation he missed the Walking Meditation.

When I finished crying, I apologized for making him miss that meditation practice. He smiled and said something I still keep with me: “Don’t worry. Everything is a meditation here.”

I laughed when he said it, but it also revealed something profound.

Any moment of your life — regardless of what you are doing — can become an opportunity to train your attention.

This is why we call it a practice. I have said this countless times and will continue to repeat it. Not because we are praying to Buddha, Allah, Krishna, or Jesus, but because we are training our minds to wander a little less and to be present a little more.

Bringing mind and body closer together

A few days after that conversation, I thought about my friend again. Not about her migraines, but about that small moment of honesty — the way she paused, noticed something true about herself, and said it out loud.

That pause was its own kind of presence.

If you would like for your body to live in close proximity to your mind, the invitation is simple: Train your attention4.

You can begin anywhere: while breathing, walking, washing dishes, or drinking tea. Every time you notice the mind has wandered and you gently bring it back, you shorten the distance between where your body is and where your mind has gone.

Over time, that distance becomes smaller. And life begins to happen exactly where you are.

It’s been three weeks since I arrived home, and integration has not been easy.

Maybe you already know that I spent three months on retreat in a monastery, followed by three weeks in Morocco leading a retreat in the desert. In total, I was away for almost four months.

I thought that coming back would simply be that—coming back. Finding my rhythm again, settling into my home, slowly integrating what I had experienced. The usual.

But that has not been the case. At all.

When I was at the monastery, I could sense that something in me had changed, though I couldn’t quite name what it was. Now that I am back, it feels less like I changed and more like everything around my life is rearranging itself.

My plans, my priorities, the way I see things—even the configuration of my life. It is as if an invisible hand is reorganizing the pieces. And I did not feel prepared for it.

Last week I found myself spiraling through strong emotions: doubt, questions, unexpected waves of negative thinking. Each day seemed to bring a new mental challenge, thoughts of fear appearing in the mind.

My thoughts felt fragmented. My understanding felt stale. I realized I was trying to understand the mind with the mind itself until I noticed I was stuck again in a loop.

The strange thing is that I do not feel lost.
I know exactly where I am.

It feels like the compass of my life is being recalibrated. I’m assimilating a new reality and it feels disorienting.

At the same time, I cannot pretend that the state of the world does not affect me. Perhaps many people are feeling a similar atmosphere of uncertainty right now. There is a lot of fear circulating in the air. Some days ago I could feel it clearly in my own body.

Fear about the direction the world seems to be moving in. Fear about how quickly our lives could change, not only because impermanence is the nature of things, but because of forces like power, greed, and the human tendency toward domination.

One of the foundational principles of Hermetic thought says: as within, so without. I reversed the order in the title because I first saw it outside.

It is unsettling to recognize that the same forces we observe playing out in the world also exist inside our own minds. Of course, I do not consider myself in the same place as the leaders who dominate headlines. But if I look honestly, I can still recognize the seeds of fear, control, and protection moving through me as well, just expressed in smaller, subtler ways.

And yet, alongside that fear, there is something else.

Another voice in me that can see the fear arise. It recognizes the mind trying to cling to a story about the future, trying to secure what feels fragile or precious. That voice understands where fear comes from, but it does not entirely believe it.

So I find myself living in two places at once.

One part of me worries about the world, about the fragility of the structures we rely on, about how my own life might change. Another part of me feels unexpectedly calm—almost peaceful enough to face whatever may come.

Holding both at the same time is confusing. And it has required something simple but demanding: returning again and again to the present moment. To breathing. To the small discipline of practice, which gives me a place to stand while everything else seems to be shifting.

And as I was trying to make sense of everything that is moving in me, I also noticed that the chaos in my mind felt dirty, unclean. And when I looked around, I sensed the same disorganization in my surroundings.

The Hermetic principle states that your inner world—thoughts, emotions, and beliefs—directly mirrors and creates your outer, physical reality. It is a law of correspondence suggesting that to change external circumstances, one must first alter their internal state.

If this principle holds, then bringing order, care, love, and compassion to my inner and outer life is already a way to change the world. So I thought: since I don’t know what else to do, I can begin to clean. Literally.

Starting with my bedroom. Each day, a different part of the house until everything is in order again. The same with my digital life—photos, folders, Google Drive, banks, emails. Just a small portion every day. Cleaning with full awareness that this is what I am doing.

Same with my mind. Instead of trying to make sense of every fearful or chaotic thought that arises, I gently breath into it. I remind myself I am in this body and I activate my senses to return to now.

If life right now feels like chaos, I can patiently begin to organize it.
One breath at a time.

To act from love and not FOR love. To look honestly at my actions and ask where they are truly coming from. To recognize with tenderness if there is fear in them.

And perhaps, if each of us can do that—if we can see ourselves clearly and take responsibility for the seeds we are cultivating inside of us—then this quiet work may be one of the most meaningful things we can offer back to the world in these moments of perceived uncertainty and fear.

Do not underestimate the power of a small action. Nature reminds us of this constantly: everything begins with a tiny, silent seed beneath the earth. And with time, that small life becomes an entire forest.

I know how challenging it can be to keep the momentum going once we’re back home. All the beautiful insights and clarity we gained during the retreat — whether it’s a curated immersive experience or a simple weekend of disconnection — slowly begin to fade, and our attempts to maintain them can feel frustrating.

That happens to all of us, whether we are experienced practitioners or just beginning on our spiritual journey, because a retreat lowers stimulation and gives our nervous system a sense of safety.

Even after four months in a monastery and leading a retreat in the desert, I too feel that I’m forgetting many of the things that felt important there. However, over the years I’ve learned that integration is less about intensity and more about continuity.

Subscribe now

When we go on a retreat of any kind, we intentionally step away from our routines to create space in our lives. That space helps us build perspective and take distance from the daily rush.

When we create space in our lives and minds, the tension in our bodies begins to dissolve and we become more receptive. We shorten the distance between our minds and our bodies, and in that shortening, we recover something that easily scatters when we are pulled in many directions: our inner wisdom.

This is why retreats often bring a sense of relaxation and ease. They can even feel transformational. A good facilitator creates the conditions for your own insights to arise. And that alone helps us remember what we had forgotten.

What felt effortless on retreat was supported by a shared schedule, silence, group practice, and limited distractions. We experience heightened clarity, emotional openness, and renewed intention.

At home, that architecture dissolves, life resumes and we return to our routines and habits, and our nervous system tightens again. Our minds are busy with distractions and without even noticing, we fall back into familiar patterns. The afterglow fades. This is when we think: I lost it.

The desire to keep the momentum going, clinging to the revelations we had, can bring a kind of post-retreat blues. It helps to remember that the afterglow is a temporary state created by a safe and structured environment. It was never meant to last forever.

Insight fades because the conditions that allowed it to emerge are no longer present, not because it wasn’t real.

This is when the real work begins.

Life is constantly moving. We have moments of profound introspection and moments that are simply ordinary. The real gift is learning how to integrate the depth of awareness into ordinary moments. To find joy in the simple things, to meet the mundane with an open heart.

Insights are glimmers that open our perception, but integration is what make it real, embodied, and it requires certain discipline.

Here’s the trick: we don’t have to radically change everything in our lives. We can simply introduce subtle variations that are easy to do and that bring pleasure. Pleasure is key.

For example, notice how much time you dedicate to noise: visual, verbal, digital, physical and try to reduce it.
Keep one daily ritual from the retreat.
Protect at least thirty minutes of device-free time.
Maintain one rhythm that supports your nervous system.
Trust the subtlety of that transformation.

You don’t need to remember every detailed thought you had during the retreat, only the essential is important. So ask yourself: what is one thing you want to remember from the experience you lived?

As Rumi wrote:

“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.”

Start there. Let the rest unfold.

Share

Note:

These are some just basic practices you can easily incorporate at home. If you are interested in learning more in depth practices so you can cultivate your insights and nurture your growth, feel free to email me to: mindfulimmersions@gmail.com or send a message below.

After four months on the road, I came home this week. I have to confess I felt some resistance. I wanted to stay where I was, in Morocco, to escape the cold and remain with the sun. I think what I felt was a quiet fear of returning to my place and not feeling it mine.

I had my days of rest in Ouarzazate, where my only certainty was arriving on time for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And even then, I was late. The rest of the time I read, wrote, learned to play the harmonica, slept, and wondered whether I should be doing something more productive. My host, Jean Pierre, made me feel at home; even his family made me feel part of it. Choosing to board the departing plane required my entire will.

But now that I am home, I am happy to have returned.

My heart did not come back complete.
Parts of it remained elsewhere, with other people.
Perhaps my heart came back expanded, holding more places than it once did.
My heart no longer fits inside the previous version of itself.

Rumi says it like this:

“A strange passion is moving in my head.
My heart has become a bird which searches in the sky.
Every part of me goes in different directions.
Is it really so that the one I love is Everywhere?”

Rumi is not always speaking of lovers; he is speaking of love. When he asks, Is it really so that the one I love is everywhere? I hear him wondering whether it is possible to love in all directions at once; whether the heart can beat across multiple territories.

But I know nothing about love. Only what I read in poems.

I cannot help that the desert stirs love in me. So vast and expansive it cannot be held. A man of the desert reminded me that this landscape keeps you humble.

Humble before the powerful vastness of what we cannot predict.
Humble before natural rhythms and the will of God.

What is God, and why do you mention?
What do I know what God is. I only know he knows more than I do.

Everything I have to say will be said.
For now, these pirouettes.

It must be the jet lag.

It feels incredible that three months have already passed. Before coming, I had given my friends a kind of trailer preview of how I imagined this visit would be. First, I would arrive uncomfortable, questioning why I had left the comfort of my home to be here. Then, little by little, those thorns would begin to soften, and pleasure and joy would emerge. And finally, I would love this place so much that saying goodbye would be difficult.

Well—what do you think? That is exactly how it has been. At least in part.

I arrived at this retreat with two questions. The first: whether my seed of monastic aspiration was present and wanted to be tended. The second: if that seed was not there, I wanted to understand how a place like this monastery functions and sustains itself, in order to nourish an idea I have been gestating for several years now—opening a practice center in Colombia.

Both questions have found their answers. Today I understand clearly that I do not have a monastic aspiration. I love and enjoy the life I have designed, and I consciously choose to be a committed practitioner in the worldly world. At the same time, I have learned the visible and invisible details that make possible the functioning of a system as complex and effective as this monastery. For those practical reasons alone, my time here would already be a success.

And yet, as we know—or as you might imagine—practicality is not a preferred choice in the monastery. Sometimes there are detours that seem unnecessary to reach a point, but that circling is an essential part of the learning, because the point is not to arrive, but to walk the path and learn directly from it.

Subscribe now

A Temporary Refuge

Something similar happens with our emotions. Since we cannot command the mind, “heal this now that you’ve already seen it,” we must move step by step, walking through different facets of our afflictions in order to feel them and understand them.

Today I am experiencing a true cocktail of emotions. Nostalgia, anticipation, attachment, fear, joy, gratitude—and a few others—have come to visit my home, and I have opened the door for them to have tea. Each one brings a message as a gift, and I sit down to listen to them, even when I don’t fully understand them. I prefer this to closing the door and keeping them out for fear of what they might have to say.

I have also learned where to invite them to sit. I ask nostalgia to settle near the window, so it can observe the landscape. I seat fear by the fire, so it can feel welcomed. I put on music for joy, so it can enjoy itself. I ask anticipation to peel oranges in the kitchen, so it can stay occupied in the present moment. In this way, I give each one space and a place. This doesn’t prevent one of them from overflowing and taking center stage, but with calm, I can invite it back to its seat.

My home is more a temporary refuge than a permanent residence. These emotions, as guests, do not belong to me. Not even irritation, which has been staying here for years and which I have finally been able to invite out of its room so it can interact with joy and gratitude. With that, I hope compassion will want to visit more often.

But who am I to decide who may come and who may not? Emotions knock on the door, and if I don’t open, they insist and disturb the others. I am nothing more than the hostess, and like any good hostess, I want my guests to feel comfortable—but not so comfortable that they forget this is not their permanent home. Sometimes it is enough to remember that everything here is temporary, and that welcoming is not the same as holding on.

Closing the Rains Retreat

I still can’t fully imagine the effects this retreat will have. I have seen myself here every day, observed how my understanding and my practice have evolved in this context, but I haven’t yet seen myself outside of it.

On Sunday, during the Dharma talk shared by Phap Huu, he reminded us of something that touched my heart deeply. He spoke of how Thich Nhat Hanh, after enduring so much suffering as an exile, had to search deep within himself for a way to feel at home within. From that search, this great dream we now know as Plum Village was born—his great masterpiece.

The first people to arrive at Plum Village more than 40 years ago were refugees from the Vietnam War. And Phap Huu skillfully grounded that teaching in our present time. Those of us sitting here today may not be refugees from an armed war, but in some way, we too are seeking refuge. We are refugees from the violence of the mainstream, from a way of life that we have normalized.

We see it in how we communicate, often reactive and defensive; in how we present ourselves, pushed to produce, to prove, to perform; in how we inhabit time, always scarce, always late; in how we mistreat our bodies, the earth, and one another, often without being aware of it. A subtle violence that wears us down, hardens us, and separates us.

Here, in Plum Village, we find a serene space where we relearn another way of being alive. A way that is more loving, gentle, tender, and caring not as an abstract ideal, but as a living practice. We aspire for what we cultivate here to travel with us wherever we go; that we may become embodied witnesses in any space we find ourselves; that these seeds of peace may spread, and that many beings—not only human—may benefit from this commitment we have entered into. A task that honors, that humanizes, that reminds us of the infinite possibility of love. I feel deeply grateful to every sister and every practitioner who made this experience possible.

I leave feeling moved, inspired, and expanded. There is still a path ahead and work to be done. But in each step, I find the peace, strength, and love I need to take the next one. I feel that I am not the same as the one who arrived, but I am not someone entirely different either.

The World Outside

My next step is Morocco. I will cross the desert in silence once again, but this time accompanied by monks from Plum Village and a group of practitioner friends, with mindfulness as the anchor of the experience. The desert has this quality: it strips away, it orders, it returns us to what is essential. That is why it moves me so deeply—because it brings together two territories that have lived within me for a long time: spirituality and the desert.

After that, I will return to my beloved mountain, to the home that awaits me with the fireplace lit, to land once again in my everyday life and relearn who I am there. Each return is different. The body comes back, but something in the gaze is no longer the same.

Life is a constant learning, a journey with no return that does not always lead us along gentle paths. Sometimes it offers luminous landscapes; other times, it takes us down narrow streets that demand attention, patience, and courage. Perhaps it is not about arriving quickly or avoiding the curves, but about learning to walk with presence, even when the direction is not entirely clear. In the end, the journey does not only lead us to a destination—it teaches us, step by step, that the path itself is also the destination.

Share

Thank you for accompanying me this far. I will share more soon about the desert journey and about life after the monastery—where the path leads me next and what surprises it holds.

With love, me.

Leave a comment

Several years ago, I was one of those people who made long lists of things I wanted to accomplish the following year: financial goals, work goals, project goals, experiences to have. And the truth is, they worked very well for me, because I put all my attention into achieving them. But I never paid attention to—or took stock of—my being, my emotional health, or my inner goals.

Sometimes, when the new year arrives, we worry about the future, about what is going to happen, about having clarity on where we are headed. And we become stressed when that clarity doesn’t appear. Uncertainty consumes us; we drown in anticipation.

We often forget that life is a succession of “nows.” That’s why we speak of the “eternal present”: because it is always the present, always now. So if we work with and nourish the present, we are already nourishing the future. The future is now.

Aaaaand yet, since we still enjoy making plans, resolutions, lists, visualizations, and all the rest, here I propose a different way of approaching them—so that these New Year’s resolutions become something we can cultivate right now, in this present moment, and allow them to bear fruit in the next present.

You can make it a ritual: light a candel, prepare some tea, put a soft playlist and light your favorite incense. Or any version of this where you feel spoiled by yourself.

Connecting with Your Aspirations

This is a practice I learned here at the monastery. It is inspired by the practice of Beginning Anew, which is designed to restore communication that has broken down with another person. In another post, at another time, I can share more about it if you’d like. For now, using that practice as a foundation, here are the steps.

1. Acknowledge what has blossomed
Write down all the things that went well in 2025. Take stock—month by month if you like, or more generally—of all the beautiful things that happened in your life. You can start with the tangible: a project, an activation, an achievement, a gain. This is usually the easiest part, so don’t linger too long here in order to move on to what matters most: how you felt.
What emotions were present in your life in 2025? Which ones made you feel good? Which ones helped you move through difficult moments?

2. Appreciate yourself for the effort
Take a few minutes to notice and appreciate yourself for all the effort you put in, even when you felt like giving up. Appreciate your courage and your willingness to take responsibility for your emotions and to move through the crises that arose.
This is not something we do often. We forget to thank ourselves—not only for having made it through, but even more so for having tried.

3. Regrets as teachers
As you write, you will likely notice things that didn’t go so well—situations that could have been different, or moments when you now see you might have acted another way. This is also important, because it gives us the opportunity to keep practicing self-improvement and to observe ourselves honestly in our shortcomings.
There may have been moments when certain emotions blossomed in overwhelming ways, leading to misunderstandings with others. Without looking for external blame, here we can observe what those moments taught us about ourselves.

4. Write your emotional aspirations
After looking at yourself through your achievements and your setbacks, you can ask: what emotional aspirations do I have for this new cycle?
Perhaps you realized that tending a garden brings you mental peace, and you want to look for other activities or opportunities where you can continue cultivating that peace. Or maybe you noticed that even though you achieved the job you had been seeking, you entered an emotional crisis that destabilized you, inviting you to reconsider other paths. It’s not about clinging to the emotions we label as “good” and rejecting the “bad” ones, but about honestly and fearlessly recognizing where we are and what we want to cultivate in our lives—choosing environments that can truly support our emotional aspirations for a thriving mental health.

5. Follow your curiosity
Perhaps you’ve already noticed which things make your heart beat faster and which emotions you would like to invite into your life more often. That can give you clues about where your curiosity is leaning.
Many people say we should follow our passion, but for me—and I believe it was Elizabeth Gilbert who first articulated this—it’s better to follow curiosity, because it opens unexpected doors.
Maybe you always wanted to learn how to make Moroccan tajine, took an Arabic cooking course, and discovered that what truly fascinates you is learning about spices. We never know where the doors we open through curiosity will lead us. Dare to explore.

This is the list I made for myself this year, and I hope it’s useful to you. Please try it at home. And if you do, let me know how the process was for you, or if any questions came up along the way.

I’m sending you a big hug from the final week of the Rains Retreat here at the monastery.

I’ll see you next week to share about this closing chapter.
Thank you for being here.

Thank you to the friends who reached out with a loving word after I mentioned last week that I was going through a storm. It’s truly heartwarming to know that you’re there. It makes me happy.

I’m writing this on a Monday morning, our day of rest, called Lazy Day. Winter gave us a break, and we had a few days of gentle temperatures, which made the emotional load feel lighter.

I’d love to share with you how I’ve been practicing this week to navigate the storm.

[Warning: you may try this at home without adult supervision.]

How did I get here?

At the beginning of the Rains Retreat, while going around the circle and listening to the sharings of the other retreatants, I felt lucky. I wasn’t here because of a specific deep suffering I wanted to take care of; rather, I wanted to dive deeper into the contents of my mind and strengthen my solidity. After a few weeks, I sat in meditation and asked my ancestors and guides to show me what I was ready to transform.

I thought some deep sadness might surface, but instead I encountered an emotion that has accompanied me for as long as I can remember: annoyance.

In these past days, we’ve been talking about how our minds can take us to hell or heaven realms, and I saw—clear as the sun without a single cloud—what a trip to the hell realm meant. I noticed how tightly my jaw was holding. Fault-finding everywhere. Nothing felt right. Nothing was enough. After a few days, I realized I had arrived somewhere important, perhaps somewhere vulnerable that hadn’t yet felt safe.

Ask and you shall receive.

How to practice when the mind is not a loving place

Several weeks ago, in one of the Dharma talks, the teacher said: when your body is not well, you can take refuge in your mind. When your mind is not well, you can take refuge in your body. When neither your body nor your mind feels stable, you can take refuge in your community (this part I inquired later on).

Because the storm was in my mind, I stopped asking it for answers. I turned instead toward my body, which is healthy and strong.

This is how I’ve been practicing with it, in three simple steps.

1. Know where you are

Sometimes we walk through a forest without a clear path. When it feels like we’ve been walking in circles, it’s a good moment to stop, look at the map, and notice where we are and which direction we’re facing.

It’s the same with our emotional map. First, we need to understand where we are before we can go anywhere. Often, I sense that something is wrong and rush to fix it, without pausing to ask what is actually here.

The emotion that surfaces first is often just an alert, a sign that something larger is hiding underneath. We might feel sad, lonely, angry, or irritated. Whatever it is, we begin by holding that emotion, making space for it, and gently inquiring into what it is bringing without expecting immediate answers.

2. Go back to the basics

We have six sense organs, which in Buddhism are called the six consciousnesses. Going back to the basics means bringing our attention to the senses. When the mind is loud, the senses become teachers, always speaking in the present tense.

We pay attention to what we hear, what we touch, what we taste, what we see, what we smell, and what we think.

Although this sounds simple, for me it requires all my energy. Instead of moving by default, I begin to walk slowly. I grow quiet. I rest. I avoid interactions so I can pay attention to the movements of my body. When I walk, I observe how my foot moves, the muscles engaging with each step, my breathing, my rushing mind. When I eat, I try not to make a sound with the fork and the plate, paying attention instead to textures, flavors, and how eating feels in my body.

I keep returning to myself, to where I am, bringing attention to what is present in the moment, what I can notice, and how it affects me.

3. Recognize the depth of simplicity

Moving like this, I couldn’t rehearse conversations or plan ahead. My mind had no space to multitask. Naturally, silence appeared.

I know I’m doing this on purpose, so there is effort, but it isn’t laborious. It’s the effort of experimentation. I feel like a scientist of my own mind, testing an experiment to see what happens. I enjoy the process.

I remember the teaching: “When we are eating, we are just eating. When we are walking, we are just walking.” This is the thing about Plum Village practice—it’s so simple.

So simple it can be annoying, I have to admit. When I’m working through something deep, I almost want complex concepts to keep my mind occupied. But the teachers always return with something as simple as, “Breathing in, I am aware that I am breathing in.”

This was part of my annoyance until one day I asked myself: do I actually know what this means? That question brought me back to my senses. And wow.

I’m happy to report that my findings in this small empirical research were astonishing: When I was breathing, I was just breathing. And more than that, I was ENJOYING my breath.

Despite the storm, and the places my mind wanted to take me, I was enjoying my steps. I was enjoying the taste of food. I was enjoying the quiet that began to settle in my mind.

A mountain learning how to weather storms

This doesn’t mean the irritation is gone, or that I’m cured and ready to skip ahead to the part where I write a bestselling book. I haven’t even seen its roots yet. It simply means I’m soothing my mind, making it a more hospitable place while strong emotions pass through. I’m making space for them—giving them air—letting them be without forcing transformation or drowning in them.

Yesterday, in meditation, I sat with a restless mind. I watched the scenes play out like a movie. I placed my hands on my lap and gently pressed, reminding myself that I was here, sitting. As soon as I did, I felt solid, like a mountain. Unshakable. Firm. Peace flowed through my body. I was at ease.

Sitting there, I realized I didn’t need to win against my mind. This wasn’t a battle. I’m not at war. I’m learning to sit beside my mind to laugh with it, cry with it, and rejoice with it.

That, for now, feels like enough.

Share

You may try it at home too. In your own way. See what happens and please report back your findings.

Leave a comment

But I’d like to offer this Rumi poem from This Day I Cannot Say.

Last night, alone with a wise elder, I said,
Please, do not hold back from telling me
any secrets about this universe.

Leaning near, he spoke into my ear,
Some things cannot be told
or understood, only seen
and lived within.
– RUMI

I asked the universe, and it’s giving me what I asked for in ways that have surprised me. I don’t yet know how to say what I want to say, but I know that we can know without words.

For now, I’m going to take care of this headache.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

In my previous post, Gardening Our Minds, I spoke about learning to identify the flowers and the weeds that live in the garden of our mind. This time, I want to go deeper into understanding what a weed truly is, because we often think of the “negative” traits of our personality—being temperamental or sharp with our words. But in reality, those are the easiest and most superficial to recognize because they accompany us in daily life, and others often give us feedback about them.

I’m speaking about traits like inherited patterns, automatic responses, or ancient fears, the ones we can only see when we pause, and that reveal themselves in subtle ways.

Subscribe now

At Plum Village, we pause whatever we’re doing every time we hear the bell. This sound invites us back to our breath and to check in with ourselves. The day unfolds from pause to pause. Each time we begin a workshop, a class, working meditation, or anything else, we pause with a bell or a song.

We also pause before every meal, and sitting down to eat becomes a meditation in itself. I had never experienced this before in any practice center or retreat. The first time I encountered it was here in Plum Village.

The practice is simple. Once your plate is served, you sit down and recite the Five Contemplations: you become aware that this food is a gift from the universe, you allow yourself to be worthy of receiving it, you consciously choose that it becomes part of you and you of it, you aspire that through this meal you can contribute to a dignified life for all sentient beings, and you hope that your impact on climate change remains minimal.

Then, calmly, you take your first bite and place your utensil back on the plate while you chew in silence. In this way, bite after bite, you begin perceiving textures and subtle flavors. It feels like magic: you can sense the splendor of each ingredient and appreciate the luxury of enjoying this meal in tranquility.

You don’t have to be in a monastery to practice this. You can do it at home, at a restaurant, at work, on a park bench, or anywhere you sit down to eat.

But why am I talking about eating slowly?

Because it was through this practice that I discovered I have food anxiety. It is incredibly subtle, almost imperceptible. One day, while standing in the buffet line, I observed in the silence of the pause that I felt afraid that by the time my turn came, there wouldn’t be food left.

Mealtimes here are close together, and even if I skipped one, I have enough snacks in my room, so I wouldn’t be hungry. But even though my mind knows this, my body activates its protective alarms, and I serve myself with a trace of anxiety.

Last Sunday, I was at a formal lunch during a mindfulness day, when the whole community—neighbors, visitors, practitioners, families—comes together to share the practice. Those lunches are long and boring for me.

At one point, I found myself lost in the complaints my mind was creating, and when I noticed it, I laughed. In that moment of awareness, an unexpected image appeared: I imagined what would happen if my father were there. I thought he probably wouldn’t like it at all; likely feeling frustrated, lost, and uncomfortable, holding a warm plate of food in his hands without being allowed to eat it right away.

I turned my gaze toward the entrance and visualized him walking in, looking for a chair. A little clumsy and out of place, me showing him where to go and what to do. I told him to stay calm, that everything was alright, that the food would taste just as good when it was finally time to eat. It was such a tender scene that it brought tears to my eyes; even now as I write, the emotion resurfaces.

I had noticed this anxiety before. I recognize it when I arrive at a restaurant and find it closed, or when there is food on the center table during a gathering and I eat non-stop whatever is in front of me.

I honestly don’t know exactly where it comes from, because I never lacked a plate of food at home. At most, my grandmother sometimes made me finish my plate before leaving the table. Despite the financial difficulties my family experienced, we never went hungry. I know I didn’t experience hunger directly, at least not in that way.

Still, this scene opened my eyes, and now I can see. Pausing and staying in silence helps us look tenderly at what we have received from other hands. If we never pause within the constant movement of daily life, we miss the chance to notice which habits we carry that do not belong to us.

I was able to see weeds with deep roots that are not mine, yet I can still do the work of clearing them, not only for myself but for my ancestors and my descendants.

Now, when I observe my mind creating stories around food, I speak directly to my ancestors and tell them that we are going to eat calmly, that there is no need to fear because abundance is in front of us. I show them foods they may have never known; I share my favorites with them.

Since that lunch, I began a practice of eating for my lineage.

I eat for those who did not have the luck I had;
I eat for those who went to sleep hungry;
I eat for those who suffered and struggled to put food on the table.

I eat with gratitude for my entire lineage—ascending, descending, and lateral—who needs to reconcile with abundance and release the mindset of scarcity. I eat as an act of freedom, of conscious choice, and of healing.

In the end, each mindful bite is another weed removed, a flower planted.

And just as I used to shout in the hide-and-seek game I played as a child, to win the round:

For me and for everyone!

Bon appétit.

Share

I wrote this post first in Spanish because in my native language I can access emotional memories I cannot access in my second language. If you can read in Spanish, I invite you to read that one.

Have you identified any of these weeds for yourself? Let me know here!

Leave a comment

ANNOUNCEMENT

The sisters of Lower Hamlet are offering a retreat called Calming The Fearful Mind to raise funds to build their new home after a fire devastated their building and all their belongings. Please join this retreat and share it with friends, it’s a great opportunity to practice from home!

The weather has shifted on this side of the world, and the cold has settled in. We wake around 5 a.m. for morning sitting, when the sky is still dark. Facing the cold at that hour isn’t easy, but I cherish the quiet walk under a cloak of stars. As the sun rises, the first light reveals a thin layer of frost resting over the grass. A soft shimmer that brings an unexpected calm to the landscape, painting everything in pastel colors.

Subscribe now

Sister Lang Nghiem, one of my favorite Dharma teachers but who’s not here this season, once told me a story about a time she was sitting in meditation in her mother’s garden. When she opened her eyes, a snake was right in front of her. Unsure whether to move or stay still, she remembered the teaching Knowing The Better Way to Catch a Snake.

I wasn’t familiar with sutras or teachings back then, so I thought the Buddha was literally teaching how to catch a snake. Summarized, she explained that if you try to catch a poisonous snake by the tail, it can quickly turn around and bite you. You must be skillful and use a fork to hold it closer to the head so you can stay safe.

Of course, this sutra isn’t about snakes. It’s about how to approach teachings: not too literally, not too loosely, not too seriously, not too casually. Meaning, not to have attachment to the teachings, especially if we don’t yet understand them.

I didn’t think much about that story at the time, but it resurfaced unexpectedly last week when my “rotation job” was at the Happy Farm. I was assigned to compost and to weed the garden. I realized I had never truly done gardening work before; I don’t like getting my clean clothes dirty, a very princess-like trait I’m befriending. Walking there, I could hear my mind building stories about why this rotation was the worst. But I kept gently dismantling each story, reminding myself of the beauty of the morning and the peaceful energy of the garden.

Once I began weeding, something softened. At first, I pulled weeds quickly, not knowing what I was doing. Helena, one of the farm volunteers, came over to show me that some weeds have deep roots and require tools for loosening the soil first. Those were the most satisfying to remove. They asked for intention and patience.

That simple moment with Helena opened a door, and Brother Phuong Can later walked right through it. In a recent dharma talk –a teaching offered by the monastic brothers and sisters– he said something that struck me: we are not the bosses of our minds and bodies. We cannot order them to heal now, or to change instantly. We are only gardeners.

Our mind is a garden of many seeds. Some are beautiful flowers, some are stubborn weeds. A garden needs tending: watering, nourishing, gently removing what harms, patiently encouraging what wants to grow. We want all the flowers to bloom at the same time. We want our garden to be perfect and beautiful, but no garden is like that. No mind is either.

I recognized myself immediately in that “bossy nature,” wanting to pull out every weed in my consciousness at the same time, imagining they could all be treated equally. But, just like in the Happy Farm, some habits are deeply rooted. They require patience, skillfulness, and time. Their transformation is often so subtle that only we can feel it. Others around us may not notice at all. And that’s okay, because even if they can’t see it, we can feel it, and that’s all we need.

I’m learning to approach the snake with gentle awareness. Learning the right tools for caring for my inner landscape, guiding it slowly toward peace without forcing it into the shape of a perfectly raked Zen garden, because my inner terrain has exuberant and unruly tropical flowers too. I’m simply tending to what is alive in me, making it a kinder place to dwell each day.

And when people seem confused about my life choices, wondering what I’m doing in a monastery or whether I’m trying to change who I am, I can just smile and say:

I’m not changing anything; pretty much same same… but different.

Share

Thank you for being there. Is there anything of what I’m sharing resonating with you? Let me know if that is the case!

Leave a comment

For now, I’ll leave you with a poem that has been accompanying me before sleep and that opens a gentle doorway into presence.

Subscribe now

THIS WE HAVE NOW

This we have now
is not imagination.

This is not
grief or joy.

Not a judging state,
or an elation,
or sadness.

Those come
and go.

This is the presence
that doesn’t.

It’s dawn, Husam,
here in the splendor of coral,
inside the Friend, the simple truth
of what Hallaj said.

What else could human beings want?

When grapes turn to wine,
they’re wanting
this.

When the nightsky pours by,
it’s really a crowd of beggars,
and they all want some of this!

This
that we are now
created the body, cell by cell,
like bees building a honeycomb.

The human body and the universe
grew from this, not this
from the universe and the human body.

– RUMI

Gracias por estar ahí <3

Leave a comment