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Yoga in the Gardens at the Minnesota Arboretum is pausing for 2026, canceling the classes I'd been contracted to teach. I've been slow to accept it. The world doesn't always cooperate with our desires, and learning to accept that is central to contemplative practice. The only durable peace is the kind you build inside. If that interests you, come practice with me at The Marsh.

Last Thursday I asked a Tibetan monk if our practices still work in a world reshaped by AI and political instability. He chuckled at the mention of AI, paused, and said to use whatever tools work. So simple: the goal is training the mind, and the tool is whatever works. Patanjali said something similar in the Yoga Sutras.

There's a new large language model called Talkie, trained only on English text from before 1931. It can write in a charming old style, and then say something obviously false or downright mean. Looking at those responses felt like sitting on the meditation cushion. It got me thinking about when and how I have stopped updating.

OpenAI had to tell its model to stop mentioning goblins. It's funny, yet somehow familiar: AI models get nudged into grooves and keep going, and so do our minds. In Buddhist literature, goblins, hungry ghosts, and demons are the parts of ourselves we'd rather not face. AI can feed those patterns. Outer guardrails help, but the inner ones, built through contemplative practice, are much more important.

If one tool can make the work look more exciting, why choose a different tool that makes the work look basic? HTML can do things Markdown cannot. The latest technologies often tug on our minds, pulling us away from the work of thinking and revising. But choosing something simple can be a path toward a more durable joy.

A lot of AI products, when you strip away the hype, are happiness machines. After a day of likes, mentions, and kudos, I taught a yoga class and felt firsthand the difference between the happiness that comes from receiving vs doing. What does a yoga class have to do with slot machines? More than you might think.

What if caring about software is one way to care about people? Paul Cantrell's Minnebar talk challenged common assumptions about tech and solutionism. I came away thinking about values, free software, and where the work really begins.

What happens before an incident report is filed? While technical sessions at DrupalCon are often packed, building a healthy community is a shared responsibility that happens every day in issue queues, Slack channels, and passing conversations. Learn how to navigate the "middle ground" of community friction and use the Code of Conduct not just as a reporting tool, but as a guide for everyday collaboration.

"May you live at ease" is something I say at the end of most yoga classes. But living at ease doesn't mean getting everything just right. It means training your mind so you're less of a burden to yourself and others.

I went into DrupalCon Chicago suspicious of AI. I almost didn't go. What changed my mind wasn't a demo or a keynote. It was realizing the Drupal community already has what it needs: our Values and Principles. We just did not center them in the AI conversation.