Six years on the razor’s edge: on surviving the fire, building an internal sanctuary, and trusting the mind in moments of transition.

A reflection from the archives, bridging a 2020 note on global panic with six years of lived survival, somatic practice, and the emergence of fierce confidence.

The afternoon sun is blasting across Vermont today, but I am sitting in the deep, deliberate shade of my cool northern porch. From here, I can relish the sudden flickers of sunlight dancing through the leaves of my forest. My chimes are singing a soft, unpredictable melody in the breeze, punctuated by the sharp cawing of ravens echoing across the field.

Six years ago, on March 16, 2020—exactly one week after the world tilted on its axis—I sat down in a rare moment of quiet to write an article at the tipping point of a global catastrophe.

My phone was vibrating with a chorus of absolute terror from friends and family around the world:

“I’m worried about going into work tonight at the hospital... I’m worried I’ll be walking into a war zone.” “My boss is asking me to consider firing people to save our company... and that does not align with any of our core values.” “What are we supposed to do right now?”

Listening to those panicked voices, I felt my heart pulled in ten thousand directions. I recognized that the human race was having to face the terrifying reality of impermanence en-masse for the first time in a generation.

Back then, I leaned heavily on my twenty years of meditation experience, trying to offer a lifeline to a world spinning into chaos. I wrote:

“How you work with your mind will determine your experience of this moment... What I’m worried about is the pandemic of panic. At the root of the fear of COVID-19, I believe, is the underlying fear of death... As the ancient Four Reminders from Tibetan Buddhism tell us, ‘Death comes without warning; this body will be a corpse.’ Contemplating the vivid truth of impermanence, however, ultimately frees us from the fear of death.”

When I published those words, I understood the philosophy of the path. I knew the breathing exercises. I knew how to map out a step-by-step meditation on the concept of transition. But I did not yet know what it meant to have that philosophy tested in the fires of a living hell.

Shortly after that article was published, my spiritual community dissolved, stripping away the foundational anchor I thought would hold me through the pandemic. That loss tipped me into a dark, multi-year charnel ground. My entire life was ripped apart and torn to pieces. I found myself navigating the devastating realities of domestic violence, child abuse, single parenting under immense duress, and the suffocating weight of housing, food, and financial insecurity.

In the lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, the great 11th-century yogini Machig Labdrön taught that the ultimate practice is to run directly toward the places that terrify us—to lean into the charnel grounds where the corpses rot and the demons howl. She taught that we must ground our consciousness right on the razor’s edge of our experience, transforming the exact sensation of an obstacle into the path itself.

I did not lose my seat. Through every terrifying wave of trauma and survival over the last six years, I chose, over and over again, to soften in the face of fear rather than harden. I stopped trying to escape the mess. Instead, I built an internal sanctuary inside my own heart and mind, treating every external moment of challenge as a raw, sacred practice opportunity to open to the basic space of phenomena.

That is the birthplace of lungta—the windhorse of clear seeing, the fierce, unshakeable confidence that arises only when you have met your demons face-to-face and realized they are entirely empty.

If you were fortunate enough to survive the global crisis of 2020, and all the quiet, personal crises that have texturized your life since then, you are standing on a sacred threshold. You possess a deep, honed experience. You now have the opportunity to harness your mind to meet and engage with absolutely any challenge that arises.

Yesterday afternoon, I went out into my yard in the heat of the day. I took a rusted wheelbarrow, heaved two massive tree stumps across the grass, and built a beautifully janky garden archway out of gifted sticks that had waited behind my woodshed for an entire year.

As I screwed the crooked pieces together, laughing under the hot sun, I realized that the archway is a physical manifestation of my mind. It isn’t flawless. It bears the marks of weathering and grit. But it stands tall, marking the entrance to a sanctuary I chose to build out of the raw materials of my own survival.

How you work with your mind in this moment will always determine your experience of this moment.

So take a deep breath. Let the wind of change blow right through you. Step out of the suffocating cocoon of panic, come sit on the branch with the ravens, and trust your own sharp feet to hold the wire. The razor’s edge isn’t a place of danger; it is the only place we are ever truly free.

Thank you for reading.

If this reflection offered you a moment of grounding, consider sharing it with someone navigating their own threshold, or subscribe to receive regular essays on somatic resilience, genuine presence, and contemplative practice.