In 2025, I spent six weeks on retreat in Central Otago. It was an unusual retreat because, alongside my practice, I spent several hours each day setting up pages in WordPress, ready for publication on the reorganised Unfettered Mind website, which was due to launch in August. A dedicated team had prepared transcripts for more than 40 classes and retreats, including 14 that had not been previously published.
Shortly after the new website launched, Ken McLeod wrote a newsletter explaining what he hoped Unfettered Mind would offer:
The purpose of Unfettered Mind is to help practitioners and seekers find a way.
He went on to encourage those who had benefited from its resources to share them with others, and suggested making the connection personal:
The single most helpful action you can take to help fulfill this purpose is to connect practitioners you know with Unfettered Mind's resources. By connect, I don't mean the weak, ephemeral connections of social media. I mean the stronger, more substantial, and more meaningful connections that develop when you add a personal touch: a note with a link to an article, a talk, or a retreat series that has been especially meaningful to you, a cut-and-pasted copy of a translation that spoke to you, or a review of a book in which you describe your own experience when reading it—in short, whatever has helped you find your own way.
I had spent many years working with Ken, and he had profoundly influenced my practice. His invitation suggested a way I could pay forward the gratitude I felt. I could share passages that had been particularly helpful to me, along with my reflections on them. That was how the idea for No Centre, No Edge began.
During the same retreat, I had listened to Samaneri Jayasāra's Wisdom of the Masters recordings. Among them was a reading of The Pointing the Staff Instruction, a teaching attributed to Padmasambhava and revealed in the twelfth-century by the tertön Nyangral Nyima Özer.
Pointing the Staff tells of an elderly man who, approaching the end of his life, asks Padmasambhava for an instruction that is easy to understand and simple to practise. Padmasambhava points his staff at the man's heart and tells him to look directly into his own awareness.
Listen here, old man! Look into the awakened mind of your own awareness! It has neither form nor color, neither center nor edge.
Padmasambhava, Pointing the Staff at the Old Man, from Advice from the Lotus-Born, translated by Erik Pema Kunsang.
Those words stayed with me. They pointed to something fundamental in the practice of awareness—what we are invited to recognise cannot be located, bounded, or made into an object. When I came to name the blog, No Centre, No Edge felt exactly right. Yet although I remembered the words, I couldn't recall their exact source.
A few days ago, a close friend sent me the text of The Pointing the Staff Instruction. Reading it brought back the memory of listening to Samaneri Jayasāra during that retreat, revealing the source of the name chosen for this blog.
What marvelous serendipity. My friend shared a teaching that spoke to her deeply, just as Ken had encouraged us to do. In the process, she had helped me recover an important connection to a wonderful dzogchen teaching, and also reminded of why I started this blog in the first place.