Lisa Ray Instagram – #REPOST @robinpeckham with @get__repost__app A few years ago when I did the Yale happiness course (highly recommended on Coursera, should be a core requirement for adulthood) I decided to institute a mindfulness practice. It worked wonders for a time in its own right, and after a while I learned how to integrate mindful breathing, thought clearing, loving kindness, and body scan techniques into my physical practice, primarily through distance running. Meditation might be grounded in specific traditions, but as an umbrella term for forms of contemporary practice it becomes a radically open suggestion to savor the internal experience. Charwei Tsai’s work has tracked a few different meditative traditions, focusing over the last few years on tantra. She explored this heritage by pushing at its geography, moving north to Mongolia, west to India, south to Indonesia, east to Taiwan and Japan, finding and engaging with in each territory forms of living that resonated with both tantric meditation and deeper (and less specifically named) modes of being with the earth. Her 2021 exhibition “The Womb and the Diamond” brought together several of these threads, from woven mandalas co-created in Indonesia to her own calligraphic repetition of Buddhist sutras at a massive scale, culminating also in a mirror and diamond mandala composed of mantras spoken in a single breath into glass globules just as they were blown. In her more recent exhibition this spring, “Coming Together,” she continued to weave strands across the same broad geography, most notably for me in suspended spiral forms reminiscent of mandalas inscribed with romantic poetry—where it becomes evident that this contemporary mindfulness is not about following rules but rather feeling for the threads that constitute experience. Exiting the exhibition in the rain I made a series of phone calls that went unanswered due to a network error. Rather than religious practice we seek and find divinity as practice; grace as practice; connection as practice. They all require focus on a daily basis but we should probably stop calling it “work” and give it a gentler name instead. #repostios #repostw10