In this next section I’ll share a few more stories from the “early days”(up till around June 2013). Some of these precede the Killing the Crazy story, but cover topics aside from paranoia, many are from the months shortly following that story (which occurred late 2012 or early 2013). The main point here is that as my anxiety levels began to diminish, I was able to ‘work the program’ and consider a broader array of topics through the lenses of impermanence and suffering.   These stories are still mostly born from contemplation on obvious problems, pains and slights — I like to think of them as using Dharma to triage a situation. They continued to build my understanding of control, impermanence and, to a lesser degree, suffering.

In this section I will also try to introduce a few additional tools and techniques that have served me well over the course of my practice. Though this is by no means everything, you will see many of these particular techniques repeated frequently in my stories; here I will try to highlight them and describe them a bit so that as we proceed you will have a sense of some of the tools I have used to learn to guide and structure my thinking.