About

I started a meditation practice in the mid 1990s after I read Chogyam Trungpa’s The Myth of Freedom. In playwriting workshops at the time we had been reading the Frankfurt School thinkers—Adorno and Horkheimer, Marcuse, their American counterpart Norman O. Brown. These thinkers, who were central to the counterculture movements of the 1960s, explored a terrain of social analysis marked off by Karl Marx on the one hand and Sigmund Freud on the other. To this day I remember being astonished by how Trungpa seemed to put them all to shame when it came to the depth and clarity of his analysis of the human situation.

The playwright who ran these workshops, John Steppling, was strongly influenced by film noir—a tradition of crime narratives shaped in large part by German and Jewish directors exiled from Hitler’s Germany. John had written the screenplay for the compelling neo-noir 52 Pickup, based on a novel by Elmore Leonard. Having just moved to Los Angeles at that time, I found in John’s orbit a seriousness of engagement with art and thought that I had never encountered in New York City. Even now I don’t think I appreciated how singular John’s anti-institutional little institution was, nor how lucky we were to be making new theatre at a time when you could still afford to mount shows in LA entirely off the grid. And of course, if you’re investigating a Marxist and Freudian view of why we are such an entirely dysfunctional species, your plays will grapple with the concept of systematicity directly.

It is easy to locate the resonances between narratives about systems of control and the critique found in Trungpa and other Buddhist writers of the systemic dimension of samsara—the realm of separation and endless striving that defines the spectrum of normative human existence and that Gautama shook loose from on the night of his awakening. Trungpa’s account of this collision between an individual awareness and this realm of reactive behavior was distinguished by the possibility of a similar transformation, one that could only be truly understood in the enactment of it through slow and challenging practice. The intelligence of the writing was compelling, despite the fact that Trungpa himself was a controversial and troubled figure. The promise of transformation contained in his book arrived wrapped in hopelessness. Individual freedom, it turns out, was simply and sadly a kind of “myth;” this resonates strongly with the hopeless quality theorists have located as a core attitude of film noir.

While I was reading Trungpa a close friend from New York who had a practice came to stay for a couple of days. She shared the basics with me and I began to explore what happens when you sit and rest your mind on the experience of breathing. Through Steppling I found my way to a maverick meditation teacher named Marvin Treiger, who opened some doors for me on the energies and openings you encounter as you begin a sitting practice. Marvin used to run weekend retreats in his condo development in Marina del Rey—a dozen or more practitioners walking the paths like penitent zombies as the other tenants gawked and went on with their lives. On one of these retreats Marvin’s own teacher, a Canadian named Ken McLeod, arrived to deliver a guest teaching and in his energy and clarity showed us all what a real practice looks like. Ken had completed two three-year retreats with the Tibetan master Kalu Rinpoche and had served for some time as his main translator. He showed up at Marvin’s with a medieval broadsword which we all wielded in a ritual designed to move the experience of cutting through reactive modes of perception deep into the body. A bit over-dramatic, perhaps, but I still feel the weight of that sword in my shoulder.

From that session on Ken was my teacher, and I began to take his full week-long retreats up at the Mount Baldy Zen Center. Over the next few years I did maybe ten of those retreats, exploring a variety of esoteric Tibetan awareness practices, which Ken was very good at distilling into terms that made sense to a Western sensibility. These retreats were well known in Buddhist circles at the time and teachers from the different traditions would show up to experience Ken’s particular take on what Tibetan practice was all about. Central to his view was the system of reactive patterns that condition our daily life, and the role of awareness to cut through that reactivity like a sharp sword.

Ken McLeod began to withdraw from teaching about ten years after we met, though he is still writing and maintaining the voluminous Unfettered Mind website and stopped teaching altogether in 2010. At around that same time I began to gravitate toward Zen practice and for a time worked with a Sanbo Zen teacher named Henry Shukman in New Mexico and then, most recently, Roshi Ryodo of the White Plum tradition at the Zen Center in Los Angeles. I find the Zen koan work functions seamlessly with the Tibetan-based practices I learned from Ken. Like many practitioners I read widely and listen to whatever dharma podcasts I can get my hands on. I’ve been drawn lately to the dharma talks of the teacher Dave Smith and also to the remarkable work Judith Blackstone has done on embodied practice, and issues relating to trauma and attachment injury that I will be exploring in subsequent posts.

I am a playwright, novelist and film maker and for many years I ran Padua Playwrights, a LA-based theatre company devoted to new work written in the edgy poetic tradition of the Off-Off Broadway tradition. I produced fifty or so full runs of new work by myself and others, moving several to stages in New York City, Atlanta, Berlin and other cities. I also edited eight anthologies of plays stretching back to the birth of the company in 1978, along with a volume of critical essays (all these books are available nationally via TCG). I received a PhD in Theatre Studies from UC Irvine in 2015 and now teach at Cal Poly Pomona, UC Irvine and, occasionally, CalArts. My plays include Vagrant, The Inside Job and The Black Glass and I have made two feature films and numerous short films that can be viewed here: https://cutlab.org. Most recently, I completed, with Brad Cooper, a documentary on Murray Mednick’s The Coyote Cycle narrated by Ed Harris.

I view the artistic traditions in the West as tantric lineages that do not recognize themselves as such. In my view these lineages have seeded the ground of Western culture with seeds of awakening.