A steadier bliss — hidden in the way you read a poem.
For the spiritually inclined, the artists who never found a room for it, and the practitioners who've felt the ground give way.
Hi — I'm Gian. I'm a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, a teacher of Kundalini yoga and nondual practice in the Udāsīn–Nirmalā lineage of Yogi Amandeep Singh, and a published poet. For years I chased the states the great teachers describe. I found them in the last place I expected — in how a poem is read.
I discovered a way of reading poetry that turns a fleeting glimpse of bliss into something you can return to, daily — and, underneath it, the one question every practice circles but rarely asks: who is doing the practice?
It worked for me. I think it will work for you.
To begin, download my book, How to Be a Poem.
Inside: five practices, three poems, and a way of reading almost no one is taught.
Whether you're reaching for awakening or just trying to make truer art — if you've felt the ground move, there's a place for you here.
A stranger said a single sentence to me when I was thirteen — and it changed my life.
He said You can never be anything but bliss.
I've spent the rest of my life learning how that could be true. And I want to share the deepest thing I've found with you.
You may have been practicing for years. Sitting. Chanting. Making art. Reading the nondual teachers until the words went thin. And still — something's off. A quiet wrongness no amount of practice has reached.
Wherever you're coming from, there's a question underneath all of it that the practice almost never asks: who has been doing the practice?
Here's where I first met that question. I was thirteen, in a small Louisiana town, certain I'd never be happy there. A substitute teacher — a quiet man who taught civics and, it turned out, Vedanta — listened to me complain, and said two things: this town does not exist except in your mind. And you can never be anything but bliss.
I dropped into a steady, unearned joy that lasted six months. Then he was gone, and the door closed. Everything I've done since has been finding my way back to that afternoon.
What I discovered — as a poet, as a scholar, and through the teachings of my teacher, Yogi Amandeep Singh — is that the states the great teachers describe are not only reached on the cushion. A poem, read a certain way, holds the same state and sets it going again inside whoever's ready to receive it. I call it reading for the residue.
In How to Be a Poem, I'll show you how to move from what can feel like an emotional roller coaster toward something steadier — a daily, sustainable bliss — through five simple practices, three poems, and a new way of reading.
This is for the spiritually inclined, the mystically inclined, the artists without a home, and the practitioners who lost their footing. If that's you — you have a place here.