Standing Still(ish) in a Snowstorm

Hi friends,

It’s Roam week! The part of the month where we take what we’ve been exploring and make it feelable through contemplative or creative practice.

Last week we looked at winter water and the Walk for Peace - the invitation this season gives us to settle our perpetual motion enough to let clarity and wise action emerge.

This week I found myself standing in the middle of a blizzard asking: What does it mean to settle when you’re in the middle of the storm? Why is settling important? And what’s waiting when we do?

We got slammed with a supposed two feet of snow here in Toronto yesterday (I can confirm, the drifts were much higher). Halfway through the storm, I went out on my porch to marvel at the rapid obliteration of my hood, and my neighbour walked by. Understandably, he asked WTF I was doing just standing there.

“It’s really nice out!” I blurted. He looked at me like I was a dime short of a dollar.

But it really was nice. Standing still on the porch like that, massive flakes swirling around 100 year old trees, a city street blanched into quiet. It was beautiful. “Yes,” I smiled blissfully, “this is how it really issss.”

But then, I wandered down the block to the busy cross street below to see how others were faring.

The four lanes of road were gone, a streetcar was stalled, and cars crawled angrily, honking their frustration at the universe. People trying to get to work and home and someplace (anyplace!) warm, climbing over treacherous hills that used to be sidewalks. And someone lost their footing and fell into a snowdrift (That was me. I did that). I thought to myself, “Welp, I guess, this is how it really is, too.”

Laying at the bottom of that snow crater, I gave myself an uncurated moment of stillness as the world whipped by. And I found there, under all the commotion, a quality of mind like a clear pool of water. The clarity that can be with whatever is happening, preferences be damned.

This ever-present aspect of ourselves is so simple, we barely notice it. It just holds the whole snowglobe of our experience - beautiful and ugly, easy and difficult - and gives space for intelligent response to arise.

So I laid there, cocooned, waiting for whatever wisdom might come from the depths.

“Girl, you need to shovel the damn sidewalk,” it said, finally, “and then get your frozen asscheeks inside.” Wise. Can do.

We do this dance all the time. We linger with what we like and honk at what we don’t like. And either way, we’re a little miffed that none of it is really what we had in mind.

We do it with our contemplative practices, too: When meditation is blissful and flowing, we call it good. But when it’s restless and noisy we call it bad. Meditation, like life, ends up feeding the same malaise.

I remember a talk Lama Alan Wallace gave years ago during a 2-month retreat, where he reminded us that judging our experience in terms of good and bad misses the point of practice entirely.

“Don’t evaluate how it’s doing,” he said. “Evaluate how you are doing in respect to it. How are you responding to what is coming up?”

This goes for life, too. The measure of how it’s all going, isn’t what hand you’re being dealt. It’s how you’re relating to it. He reminded us about the Tibetan masters who spent years in Chinese concentration camps and turned their imprisonment into a meditation retreat.

And now, I think of all the organizers fighting fascism with joy and grit, turning crisis into opportunities for community growth, for grassroots education, for collective flourishing.

This life is the meditation retreat. The harshness of winter, of this season of global unrest, of each of our private confusions. Good and bad, grief and joy swap places daily, at breakneck pace.

This is the practice, extending the same invitation toward clarity that’s offered in the gompa or the ashram or the pew. Here, in the middle of the “real world”, the invitation is just louder, more polarizing, more obscured in the storm.

If we can rest our existential ping-ponging and be intimate with this whole mess, intelligent action will find us. Even if all it does is get you to shovel three feet of snow from the sidewalk and then warm your frozen toesies in a bath.

This, too, is the werk.

The Inquiry: Asking “How am I meeting whatever arises” instead of “How well is the world cooperating with me”?

3 ways to inquire:

• In the World:

  • Go outside and stand there with nothing to do.

  • Notice when preference kicks in: “This is real nice” or “This fkn sucks”

  • Be with the whole thing: preference or dislike can linger. Don’t push it away. Just notice: liking and disliking, good and bad, are all just happenings pointing you to this still moment of wild awareness. YOU ARE HERE.
    

• On the Cushion:

  • Sit with the intention to be with whatever arises - restlessness, clarity, boredom, peace.

  • Shift your attention from what’s happening to being with what’s happening.

  • Look at the whole snowglobe of your experience… then look through at the one who looks
    

• In Creative Practice:

  • Write or make something from this prompt:
    “The measure of your life isn’t what happens to you, but how you meet it.”

  • What does that mean for you right now?

Let me know what you discover!

Then join me Sunday for the Moonlit Sit where we’ll practice some semblance of this together.

❤️ Lama Tasha / Tasha Bo Basha / hey, you

DATE: February 1, 2026
TIME: 8-9pm ET
LOCATION: Online (Zoom link emailed on registration)

TOPIC: Stillness in Motion
First we relax. Then we find our balance like surfers riding waves - stable even as everything moves. Then we look at the clear, spontaneous presence of just being here.

DANA: This session is open to all on a PWYC basis. If you’d like to support this work, you can donate during registration or become a paid subscriber on Substack.

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