A Letter to My Younger Self, at the Beginning

Dear Dana,

Tomorrow is our birthday.

I know you’re scared, even when you don’t have language for it yet.
I know your body has become unfamiliar terrain, and the doctors’ words feel heavier than your own name.
I know you think practice will save you—or at least make this make sense.

I want to tell you something gently, before you turn practice into another way to survive yourself.

The Dharma you’re looking for cannot be controlled, mastered, or forced to explain itself.
It has to be permitted.

At first, you’ll try to do Zen correctly.
You’ll try to hold the teachings tightly, hoping they’ll steady the ground beneath a body that keeps betraying you.
You’ll mistake discipline for safety.
You’ll mistake understanding for peace.

But what you’ll slowly learn—again and again—is that the living Dharma does not respond to force.
It speaks when it’s allowed to speak.
And it asks you to listen without bias, without agenda, without trying to get somewhere else.

Your illness will teach you this before Zen does.

aHUS will strip away the fantasy that you’re in charge.
It will collapse the timeline you thought your life was supposed to follow.
It will demand presence—not philosophical presence, but this-body-right-now presence.
You won’t always like how it teaches.
Sometimes it will feel cruel.
Sometimes it will feel unbearably intimate.

But it will keep returning you to what is real.

Here’s what I wish you knew sooner:

The Dharma is not an answer to suffering.
It is what remains when suffering is not resisted.

Your innate nature—what the old texts point to—does not disappear when your kidneys fail, when your energy vanishes, when your future feels uncertain.
It is not improved by health or diminished by illness.
It does not belong to the version of you that could do more, be more, sit longer, or understand better.

It’s here even when your mind is foggy.
Even when you’re angry.
Even when prayer feels hollow, and sitting feels impossible.

But to recognize this, you’ll have to stop trying to use the Dharma.

You’ll have to let it move first.

That means listening with a heart-mind that isn’t trying to confirm what it already believes.
It means letting teachings pass through you slowly enough that they can be retained—not memorized, but digested.
Embodied.
Trusted.

You’ll learn that some days, practice looks like sitting.
Some days it looks like resting, dialysis, or chemo infusions.
Some days it looks like grief, or cursing, or telling the truth about how tired you are.

And all of it counts.

The living Dharma doesn’t ask you to transcend your body.
It asks you to stop abandoning it.

You don’t need to become someone else to be worthy of awakening.
You don’t need to wait until you’re healed, or calm, or less afraid.

What you are looking for has never left you—even now, even then.

Be patient with yourself.
Let the Dharma breathe.
And when it speaks, listen—not to be saved, but to be honest.

With love,
From the one who is still learning how to listen.

Happy Birthday.

-FDW

The Long Disease

My blog and this Substack are about my journey through chronic illness—about how I work with my mind inside a body that has taught me, repeatedly, that nothing is guaranteed.

But lately I’ve been thinking about illness more broadly.
Not just my own.

I live in the United States. And what’s been happening—most recently in Minnesota—has been sitting heavy with me. I don’t have a clean argument or a neat conclusion. I just have a sense that something is very, very unwell.

Chronic illness doesn’t arrive suddenly.
It develops over time.

It’s not one incident.
It’s a pattern.

It’s what happens when the body compensates for harm instead of healing it. When inflammation becomes the norm. When systems designed to protect start doing damage.

The United States feels like that to me.

We call ourselves “United,” but we are anything but. If we are united in anything, it’s in our conditioning to divide—to separate, categorize, and fear one another. I learned early in life that fear is one of the most powerful tools we have.

Fear can drive us toward courage or cruelty.
Toward protection or destruction.
Toward care or annihilation.

Fear doesn’t choose the road—we do.

In Buddhist teaching, we talk about the five aggregates, the skandhas: form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. These aren’t flaws. They’re what make us human. They’re how experience arises.

But when these conditions go unexamined—when they harden into identity and ideology—they can also become the engine of immense harm.

We feel something.
We perceive it through conditioning.
We build stories around it.
We act.
And then we justify what we’ve done.

Over and over again.

What does it mean to live so driven by unexamined feeling and perception that we enslave, kill, diminish, and erase other sentient beings? That we label some lives as disposable while insisting on our own innocence?

We tell ourselves stories so we can sleep at night.
We rewrite history so our children won’t have to carry what we refuse to face.

But energy doesn’t disappear.

It doesn’t vanish just because we rename it or bury it. It moves through bodies. Through families. Through institutions. Through soil. It lives somatically—as trauma passed down, as fear learned before it’s understood.

Chronic illness works the same way.

Untreated injury doesn’t resolve itself.
It migrates.

What we refuse to heal gets carried forward.

The United States has been living with the same disease since its birth. Racism. Separation. Extraction. Capitalism intertwined with domination. All the isms that grow out of the same root: the need to divide, to categorize, to control, to avoid what makes us uncomfortable.

At its core, this is an illness of avoidance.

Avoidance of grief.
Avoidance of accountability.
Avoidance of shared humanity.

I know this pattern intimately—not just as a citizen, but as a patient.

For years, I avoided my own pain. I avoided grief. I avoided responsibility for healing because healing meant feeling. And feeling meant letting go of the stories that kept me protected.

The body doesn’t heal through denial.
Neither does a society.

Healing begins when we stop running long enough to tell the truth about what hurts.

I don’t know what collective healing looks like in practice. I don’t have prescriptions or policy answers. What I do know is that unexamined fear will keep reproducing the same outcomes, no matter how many times we say we want something different.

Chronic illness taught me this:
You don’t heal by wishing things were otherwise.
You heal by staying present long enough to work with what is.

This isn’t optimism.
It’s practice.

Mirrors, Mortality, and the Teachers Who Refuse to Let Us Look Away

It took fourteen years for my aHUS diagnosis.

Fourteen years of not knowing what caused me to lose my native kidneys.
A heart attack.
Twelve years on dialysis.
Two kidney transplants that each lasted a year—one of them a gift from my father.

I was twenty-five when he gave me his kidney.
I was twenty-six when I lost it.

The doctors had no idea why it failed.

What followed were years riddled with guilt and depression. Years of not having language for what I was carrying. Years of trying not to feel anything at all. Therapy would come later. Practice would come later. At first, there was just avoidance.

When I lost my dad’s kidney, I avoided him.

I couldn’t face what it meant. I couldn’t mourn the loss. I didn’t want to feel the pain—mine or his. I was bitter. Angry at the world. Angry at everyone. But mostly, I was angry at myself.

There was no grace.
No love for myself.

And when love is absent, something else moves in.

For me, it was guilt.

Guilt is a virus. It spreads quietly, like a pandemic, eating away at you until everything is poisoned. In Buddhism, the “poisons” aren’t literal toxins—they’re mental states. Anger and ignorance were eating me for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and probably a snack.

Life is always offering teachable moments. I’ve noticed that when my rhythm is steady—when I’m moving with my life instead of against it—the Living Dharma whispers. It whispers even through struggle. Even through pain.

But back then, I was still avoiding.

In some areas of my life, I was showing up. I was hyper-focused on work, trying to be the best designer I could be. I poured everything I had into that. But I was still ignoring what made me uncomfortable. Still running from the parts of my life that hurt the most.

Around that time, I began studying with my first teacher, Sato Sensei.

Sitting was brutal at first.

Zazen meant sitting with everything I wanted to escape—hurt, shame, anger, guilt. There was nowhere to hide. But slowly, subtle shifts began to happen. Awareness started to open just enough to let in a little air.

Zazen didn’t make the guilt disappear. What it did was quiet it enough for me to see that other things were happening in my life at the same time. That there was more than just suffering. That presence was still available, even while everything hurt.

I was still finding my way then.
I think I’m always finding my way.

Never arriving. Just flowing with the current of my life, learning how to return when I drift.

My awareness now comes back a little faster than it used to. Not because I’m better—but because I’ve practiced returning.

My current teacher, Koshin Sensei, calls what we carry the bag of shit—the bag filled with shame, anger, guilt, and old stories. Back then, I was dragging that bag everywhere. Zazen gave me a refuge where I could put it down for a moment. A chance to breathe fresh air without being suffocated by the stench of my own unexamined pain.

The bag didn’t disappear. It’s still here.

But Zazen offered clarity. And clarity changes how you carry things. When you pick the bag back up, you hold it more steadily. With less violence. With less collapse.

In time—when I was ready—I stopped ignoring how losing my dad’s kidney made me feel. I stopped running from the grief. From the anger. From the shame.

Sato Sensei showed me how to hold it all with compassionate hands instead of judgmental ones.

I stopped avoiding my father.

I learned that sitting wasn’t enough on its own. Sitting showed me that I needed help—therapy, language, tools—to work with what was coming up off the cushion. Practice helped me see that showing up for my life meant showing up for all of it.

Every day experiences became mirrors.
Teachers appeared everywhere.

Illness. Community. Loss. Practice.

All of them asking the same question:

Can you stay?

That’s the work.
That’s the practice.

Not fixing.
Not transcending.
Just showing up—again and again—with a little more clarity, a little more compassion, and a little less running.

Preference, Resistance, and the Exhaustion of Wanting Things to Be Different

Hospitals always bring me back.

This week, sitting in the recovery area after surgery to remove and replace my medical port, I felt it again—that familiar drop into memory. Hospitals have a way of returning me to where my chronic illness journey began. To those fixed moments in time that reroute your life without asking permission.

We all have them.
Hard coordinate shifts.

Moments where the trajectory you thought you were on—your plans, your dreams, your assumptions—bends or breaks. Moments where you either flow with your life as it is, or exhaust yourself fighting against it.

A few years ago, during a rough patch when I was experiencing a slight rejection episode of my kidney transplant, my current teacher, Koshin Sensei, could tell I was struggling. Not just medically—but mentally. Emotionally.

In my head, I was running from everything.

What if the rejection couldn’t be reversed?
What if I had to go back on dialysis?
What if I lost this freedom I’d been given?

The thought of being tethered again—to a machine, three times a week, for hours—terrified me. Especially after years of being untethered. Free.

I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to feel it. I didn’t want to be there.

Koshin looked at me and said something simple:

“I’m rooting for you… to be in your life.
Even the parts that are uncomfortable.”

That landed like a punch.

Because suddenly, I was right back in the now.
No escape. No future fantasy. No running.

Just fear.
Just grief.
Just uncertainty.

And it pulled me even further back—to when I first lost my native kidneys and had to start dialysis.

That’s actually where I was introduced to Zen practice.

My first teacher, Sato Sensei, was on dialysis with me. He sat next to me, hooked up to the same machines. And I was angry back then. I was 25, confused, scared, and completely unprepared.

I was rude to nurses. Short with staff. Bitter.
I had no language for what I was experiencing. No tools.

The doctors didn’t even know why my kidneys failed. Just: you blew out your kidneys, kid—have you tried the hospital Jell-O?

I went to dialysis every day pissed off.

Why me?
This can’t be my life.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.

I was clinging hard to a version of my life that no longer existed.

After months of listening to me repeat the same complaints, Sato finally had enough.

“Enough,” he said.

“I keep hearing you say this isn’t your life. Sorry, kid. This is your life. Not your whole life—but a part of it you don’t get to ignore.”

Then he said the thing that really cracked me open:

“You’re going to die. We’re all going to die.
Are you going to spend the time between now and then being an asshole?
Or are you going to live in reality?”

I didn’t like hearing that.

I didn’t like seeing myself reflected back like that.

But that’s what good teachers do. They act as mirrors. They help you see yourself when you’re distracted by your conditioned shit—by preference, fear, and resistance.

Both Sato Sensei and Koshin Sensei did that for me at different points in my life. Both brought me back—painfully—to the living reality of now. To the Living Dharma as it was unfolding. To sitting with what I didn’t want to sit with.

This is why sangha exists.

Community isn’t there to fix you or cheerlead your preferences. It exists to walk with you. To help you find your way back when you’re lost because you were trying to be anywhere but here.

We’re all here—living our humanity.
With joy and sorrow.
With ignorance and insight.
With clarity and confusion.

The greatest gift we can give each other is not solutions or spiritual platitudes.

It’s to bear witness.
To hold one another’s joys and sorrows.
To stay present without breaking.

That’s the practice.

Even when it’s exhausting.
Especially when it’s exhausting.

Next up

Post #4: Mirrors, Mortality, and the Teachers Who Refuse to Let Us Look Away

The Bag of Shit (And Why Putting It Down Matters)

Lately, I’ve been carrying all of it.

I was supposed to be at winter sesshin this week—five days of sitting Zazen with my sangha. I had the train tickets. The hotel. I’d paid for the retreat. My mind had already packed its bags and arrived.

Then life did what it does.

An unexpected medical issue with my port—the small, surgically implanted device that allows me to receive my chemo infusions—meant surgery. My doctor didn’t want me traveling afterward. Between the surgery and being immunosuppressed because of my kidney transplant meds, it just wasn’t advised.

So I didn’t go.

And yes, it was disappointing.

My preference was to be there. My heart wanted to be in that room, on that cushion, breathing with my community. But the rhythm and beat of my life said, not this time.

Zen practice has taught me—slowly, imperfectly—that you don’t get to force your life into your preferences. You have to learn how to flow with what’s unfolding. The living Dharma isn’t something abstract. It’s happening right now, whether you like it or not.

And here’s the part that still gets me:

The moment truly doesn’t give a fuck whether you approve of how it’s folding.

It’s not about you.
You’re a part of what’s unfolding.

I understand this intellectually. I can say the words. I can nod wisely at the teachings. And still—my feelings show up. The frustration around my illness. The limitations I work with daily. The constant recalibration.

I’m grateful for my life. Truly.
And I’m also exhausted by it sometimes.

Both things are true.

That’s part of what my teacher once described as carrying a bag of shit. We all have one. It’s filled with disappointment, plans that didn’t happen, fear, anger, uncertainty, logistics, grief, and the stories we tell ourselves about how things should be.

The bag gets heavy when we pretend it isn’t there.
It gets heavier when we refuse to put it down—even briefly.

Zazen, for me, isn’t about escape. It’s not about emptying the mind or transcending the mess. It’s about learning how to sit with the weight without letting it collapse me. It’s about noticing how I’m working with my mind while I’m carrying everything.

Sometimes the practice is simply seeing:
Oh, I’m clenched right now.
Oh, I’m fighting what’s already happened.
Oh, I’m exhausted and pretending I’m not.

Putting the bag down doesn’t mean the contents disappear.
It means I stop dragging it across every moment.

Lately, I’m also carrying uncertainty about what’s happening in this country—politically, socially—and how that instability touches my work and the people I care about. That weight lives right alongside my health concerns. Another example of how multiple truths occupy the same space without canceling each other out.

This is the tapestry.
Everything woven together.
No single thread telling the whole story.

Stillness, I’m learning, doesn’t arrive when life finally cooperates. Stillness is something you practice inside the carrying. Inside the disappointment. Inside the uncertainty. Inside the very human wish that things were easier than they are.

Some days, the practice looks like sitting.
Some days, it looks like admitting I’m tired.
Some days, it looks like letting go of the idea that I’m supposed to be anywhere other than where I am.

I didn’t make it to sesshin this time.

And I’m still practicing.

Right here.
With the bag.
One breath at a time.

Next up

Post #3: Preference, Resistance, and the Exhaustion of Wanting Things to Be Different

I Wrote This During a Pandemic (And I Wasn’t Trying to Be Enlightened)

Khmer Samacky Monastery in Henrico County, Virginia.

I started this book during a global pandemic.

Life had already been doing what life does—interrupting plans, shaking foundations, piling grief on top of uncertainty. Then the world cracked open. People were dying. Systems were failing in plain sight. The names George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery weren’t abstractions—they were weights on the chest. Add chronic illness to that mix, and suddenly “coping” felt like a joke people told to survive.

This wasn’t a book I sat down to write with clarity.
It was something that stewed in my head for years before I ever touched a keyboard. And even then, it came out in bursts—between work, layoffs, doubt, procrastination, and the usual mental fuckery we cling to when we’re overwhelmed.

Originally, this was meant to be a private healing conversation with myself. A way to make sense of living with rare disease while practicing Zen as a lay Buddhist. But suffering doesn’t stay neatly in its lane. Personal pain doesn’t politely separate itself from collective pain. Everything is woven together—every thread tugging on another, whether we notice it or not.

That’s one of the first things illness teaches you.

Another thing it teaches you—whether you want the lesson or not—is that compassion isn’t always easy. Especially when you’re exhausted. Especially when you’re asked to hold space for people whose conditioning causes them to do harm. We’re all interconnected, sure—but we don’t all move at the same frequency. Trauma, history, fear, and inherited narratives shape how we show up. Sometimes that conditioning traps people in loops they don’t even realize they’re repeating.

What’s strange—and still astonishing to me—is that while some patterns refuse to die, others do change. Cultures learn. People grow. Bonds form where fear used to live. Progress is uneven and messy, but it’s real. The tapestry holds all of it at once—beauty and brutality, love and confusion, rupture and repair—without canceling any single thread.

Zen practice didn’t teach me how to bypass that complexity.
It taught me how to stay with it.

Over time, I began to understand something simple but not easy: working on myself doesn’t just help me. Because nothing happens in isolation, that work ripples outward. The way I meet my own suffering affects how I meet others. Every choice, every pause, every reaction becomes another thread laid into the fabric of things. Inner work isn’t self-indulgent—it’s participatory.

A Korean Zen teaching called the Fourfold Grace talks about gratitude not as a mood, but as an orientation:
gratitude for the world that sustains us,
for those who raise us,
for all beings we live alongside,
and for the structures that allow us to coexist.

Put less elegantly: don’t be an asshole.
Extend grace—to others and to yourself.

As I’ve gotten older, one realization keeps repeating itself with obnoxious consistency:
get out of your own way.

That doesn’t mean suppressing how you feel. It means letting feelings exist without handing them the steering wheel. It means asking better questions:
Why does this hurt?
What am I clinging to?
Do I need help with this?

Zen practice didn’t magically fix my life. It did something more useful. It trained me to notice how I’m working with my mind—especially when things don’t go according to plan. It taught me that freedom isn’t about controlling outcomes. It’s about learning how to flow with what’s unfolding—without collapsing, without hardening, without pretending you’re fine when you’re not.

Stillness, I’ve learned, isn’t what happens when you drop everything and retreat from the world.
Stillness is what you practice while you’re carrying it all—while the tapestry keeps weaving itself through you.

That’s what this series is about.

It’s about illness and loss, yes—but also about trust. About loosening the grip on preferences. About recognizing that many truths can occupy the same space at the same time. About learning—over and over again—to pause, breathe, and see where you actually are inside the larger weave of things.

If you’re living with illness, if you feel lost or broken, if you’re exhausted from trying to hold it together—this is for you.
It’s also for my younger self, who thought he had to muscle his way through everything alone.

I’m not here to sell enlightenment.
I’m here to tell the truth as cleanly as I can.

To practice meeting the moment that’s already here.
To move with the fabric instead of fighting it. Moving with the Living Dharma.

We’ll take this one breath at a time.

Next up

Post #2: “The Bag of Shit (And Why Putting It Down Matters)”
Zazen, attention, and learning when to stop dragging the whole tapestry behind you.