Why Friends?

In 2023, I stopped teaching meditation and Buddhist ideas.

I had been doing it for years. That year, I had taught an Ongoing Studies course on Je Tsongkhapa’s Great Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, a seminal text in Vajrayana Buddhism. I had poured myself into trying to express its ideas in ways that made sense today.

When that course ended, something inside knew it was my last. It wasn’t the course itself. Quite the opposite. The material I was teaching had gone over well. It was more of a build-up within me that spilled over.

I simply realized I was teaching within a system I didn’t want to be part of anymore.

For years I had observed how meditation had become something of a performance sport. Silent retreats, initiations, mantras, enlightenment, and other hallmarks of spiritual progress were often displayed as trophies. In talks I gave, I sometimes said I saw more striving and attainment in the spiritual world than I had in the business world…and that is saying something!

Exacerbating the problem, a hierarchy of attainment had formed around spiritual teachers whose word was rarely questioned. I watched sharp, thoughtful people switch off the moment they were in the presence of a spiritual teacher. It was as if their discernment had no place in that realm.

In short, it felt as if our performance culture had colonized the very territory that was supposed to lead us beyond it.

This wasn’t how I understood Buddhism. I saw a tradition grounded in inquiry and critical thought. Its texts and teachers clearly valued investigation and thoughtfulness. As I understood it, Buddhist ideas are not meant as dogmatic expressions of the way things are. They are more like hypotheses than truths.

My teacher, Segyu Rinpoche, who had long encouraged me to teach, understood how I felt. Hillary and I had discussed these concerns with him often, and he couldn’t have encouraged us more to address them.

But I had run out of steam. I had tried for too long. For some reason, I couldn’t muster the inspiration anymore.

A year or so later, a new idea began to take root.

It grew out of conversations with Hillary and two dear friends who shared many of the same concerns. We began talking about a form of practice and learning in which hierarchy gives way to peer relationships. Those relationships would be marked by openness, trust, and a willingness to help each other, share, and learn together.

The lightbulb went on.

I knew exactly what this form of relationship was.

Friendship.

In friendship, there are no pedestals. There is no attainment. There is nothing to win. We can explore, be wrong, change our minds, and be who we are — open, vulnerable, playful, and silly. In friendship, we genuinely extend ourselves to embrace another. Everyone has a voice.

Friendship doesn’t mean we all have the same knowledge or experience. One friend may know far more about something than another, have decades more experience, or possess skills and wisdom the other doesn’t. We learn from each other. We admire each other. But differences in knowledge and experience are simply that—differences. Friendship lets those exist without turning them into differences in status.

It turned out I was not the first person to value friendship in a spiritual context.

In the earliest Buddhist teachings, the Buddha said that good friendship, good companionship, and good comradeship are not half of the holy life, but the entirety of it.

Confucius taught that the highest human virtue is fundamentally relational.

Philosopher Martin Buber wrote that the sacred is revealed in genuine relationship—in the real meeting between people.

And Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan taught that we’ve learned nothing if we don’t understand the nature of friendship.

These teachers weren’t suggesting that friendship replaces the path. They were pointing to something essential about learning from and alongside others.

The more I thought about this, the more it resonated.

As I looked back at my own journey, what stood out to me was not the hours I spent sitting in an audience listening to a monologue. It was the times I spent engaged. It was the days, weeks, and months Hillary and I spent in rooms full of whiteboards with Rinpoche, Pam, and Christina, dissecting the tradition. It was the lively discussions we shared with friends about our questions, experiences, and challenges along the way.

Mostly, it was the way Hillary and I had gone about it. We constantly discussed and debated Buddhist ideas and their modern counterparts. We took our questions and doubts to Rinpoche and dissected his guidance. We practiced and dialogued together as equals. Those were the times we were part of the process—engaged, exploring, and having fun.

This view became the inspiration behind Meditation with Friends. The conversation, sharing, caring, openness, and playfulness we value in friendship don’t just belong in our spiritual lives.

They’re essential to them.

What might this mean? Maybe grab a friend and try meditating together. Or maybe it’s simply a reminder to invest a little more in the friendships we have. As I used to say in talks about my book, there’s nothing better than a cup of tea with a friend.