About T.A. Vieira
Hi, I’m Ted. I write mostly about Eastern philosophy, spirituality, creativity, and this strange business of being a human being.
I’m not a scholar, guru, or enlightened master. I don’t own the appropriate robes, and life continues to provide me with a remarkably steady stream of opportunities to prove I’m still a work in progress.
I’m just someone walking the path myself, paying attention, occasionally stumbling over things, and trying to understand what all of this is pointing toward.
A lot of my spiritual writing grows out of the traditions and texts that have meant the most to me—the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, Vedanta, and the wider teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism.
But what interests me most isn’t collecting spiritual knowledge.
It’s what happens when these teachings leave the page and follow us into our actual lives.
Who are we underneath all the roles, identities, opinions, fears, and stories we’ve accumulated? Why do we suffer? Why do we keep doing things we know make us miserable? What happens when we become a little more aware, a little less attached, a little more compassionate—and maybe stop taking ourselves quite so seriously?
I think that last part is especially important.
My books are really just my way of sitting with those questions and sharing what I’ve come to understand along the way.
Not from the front of the room.
More like the guy in the chair next to you.
Music
I’ve also been a jazz guitarist for most of my life.
I’ve played professionally for more than thirty years, taught guitar at the college level for a while, and spent an unreasonable number of hours thinking about chords that most of the population is perfectly happy not knowing exist.
Eventually that led to Essential Concepts, my book on music theory for guitarists.
Even there, though, I discovered something about myself: I’m not particularly interested in making complicated things sound complicated. Plenty of people can do that.
I like making them understandable.
Jazz has taught me much more than music theory anyway.
It has taught me to listen.
To be present.
To respond to what is actually happening instead of what I thought was going to happen.
To prepare as deeply as I can and then, when the moment arrives, let go of the preparation and just play.
Come to think of it, that sounds suspiciously like a spiritual practice.
Photography
Then there’s photography.
Especially black-and-white film photography, which is wonderfully impractical in an age when I can take a perfectly good photograph with the little rectangle already sitting in my pocket.
And yet I love it.
I love loading the film. Slowing down. Having only so many frames. Not immediately knowing whether I got the shot. Waiting.
Film asks me to pay attention.
And photographing people has taught me something else: the photograph isn’t only about light, lenses, composition, or technique.
Something happens between two people.
There’s trust. Energy. Vulnerability. Presence.
Sometimes the moment I’m really looking for happens when both of us forget about the camera altogether.
That interests me far more than perfect exposure.
Someday I’ll probably write a photography book. But I doubt it will spend much time explaining f-stops or the exposure triangle. There are already plenty of excellent books for that.
I’m more interested in:
Mood. Feel. Story. Connection.
Why does one photograph stay with us while another technically perfect image leaves us completely unmoved?
How do we create something that doesn’t just show a person, a place, or a moment—but somehow feels like it?
It’s All the Same Thing
For a long time, I suppose I could have described spirituality, jazz, photography, and creativity as different interests.
I don’t really see them that way anymore.
They’re all asking me to do the same things.
Pay attention.
Listen.
Get out of my own way.
Be here for what is actually happening.
Let go of some of the ideas I have about how things are supposed to be.
And every once in a while, when I’m fortunate enough to stop interfering, something beautiful comes through.
That might happen while I’m reading the Bhagavad Gita.
It might happen in the middle of a jazz solo.
It might happen looking through a camera at another human being.
Or it might happen on an otherwise completely ordinary Tuesday morning.
That’s really what this site is about.
Living creatively. Living consciously. And seeing what we discover when we pay a little more attention to the life we’re already in.