22 Feb 2026
Dharma talk: Alysa Liu finds joy (and gold)
What I said, more or less: Did anyone catch Alysa Liu’s amazing free skate at the Olympics this week? I highly recommend watching it if you haven’t. From the moment she steps onto the ice, it’s just joy radiating off her face. And she flies through her very difficult program like it was a walk in the park. Now to get there, you know she had to do endless practice. But because she put in all the preparation, the movements became transparent.
In the same way, with practice over time, the asanas, the physical poses, can become transparent and I suggest that that’s where the practice starts to get really exciting.
Once you know the basics of warrior 2, you can move beyond the physical asana and into something deeper.
Liu’s skating program didn’t include big fancy triple axels or quad jumps; she found freedom in the slightly simpler moves she knew well and executed them so effortlessly they blew everything else out of the water. There’s a time to seek out the biggest challenge and a time to set it aside. There’s a joy to be had in simplicity.
A performance of 20,000 Variations On A Paper Plane In Flight 两万种变奏：飞行中的纸飞机 by Mschf at the new Wang Contemporary. The swirling of the paper airplanes reminds me of Alysa Liu’s twirls and jumps on the ice!
Some of the fallen paper planes
I read this with a different Lunar New Year theme on Monday 2/16, but it’s a favorite so I thought I’d share:
I was away and did not teach on 2/12 and 2/14… and then 2/23 was canceled for the epic NYC blizzard!
I do not use AI to write my dharma talks or the content for this newsletter, and I never will.
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