About

I'm Alexander. I live and think at the intersection of contemplative practice, Buddhist philosophy of mind, and relational psychology — not as a tidy synthesis, but as a set of ongoing tensions I find productive to inhabit.

My engagement with Buddhism is primarily scholarly and practical. I've spent significant time with Bhikkhu Analayo's comparative work, which takes the Pāli Nikāyas alongside the Chinese Āgamas to recover something closer to the pre-sectarian teaching. What draws me to Analayo isn't only the rigor — it's the underlying attitude: that careful attention to a text is itself a form of practice.

The somatic current in my work runs through Hakomi — Ron Kurtz's body-centered, mindfulness-based approach to psychotherapy. Hakomi treats the body not as a symptom-bearer but as an intelligent witness. There's a deep resonance between Hakomi's method and early Buddhist phenomenology, and I find myself returning to that overlap often.

Terry Real's relational therapy — specifically his work on the full relational cycle and the patriarchal inheritance that distorts it — has shaped how I think about relationship as a site of practice in its own right. Meeting another person fully, without collapsing or disconnecting, is not a given. It's a discipline.

some things I hold

Attention is a form of care. The quality of how we show up for experience — our own, and another's — matters as much as what we do.

The body is not an obstacle to understanding. It is understanding, expressed in a different register.

Rigorous scholarship and personal transformation are not opposed. The best textual work I know has changed how people live.

Interiority without relationship becomes brittle. Relationship without interiority becomes performance.

elsewhere

Substack — longer-form writing, irregularly published.
walkthefold@proton.me — for everything else.