When did I?

Hard to say.

Last year we challenged ourselves to live six months in an Airstream.

Can you imagine?

Tin. Can. Fever. Is. Real.

We made it 181 days.

Day one, I had to sell my beloved old Range Rover, because when I pulled the Airstream (Rosie!!), the Rover wobbled a bit too much for my nervous system.  Rosie was still swayin in the rear view as I said fuck it and started googling.

Rick, on “floor duty” at just the right time, was the only guy I could find for ten thousand miles not trying to upsell me. Slowly, quickly, he convinced me to buy a Ford F-150.

What. the. Actual. fuck.

This is not me. A gun rack. A decal of a flag taking up the whole back window. Rolled coal at a stoplight. I have not seen a confederate flag in more than a decade.

We bought the truck.

I immediately put a bumper sticker on it that said FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE and drove around delighted with myself, loving my glorious contradictions.

With Rosie packed and ready, we hit the road.

Rural America for us requires — what’s the best way to say it — hesitation.

When the population sign reads 3,649, we know statistically that isn’t all heterosexuals. But I’d bet 3,646 think so.

Internalized homophobia comes with us wherever we go.

,

Somewhere early into the 181, I realized: to be gay at the KOA feels like a radical act.

We pull in, the envy of the whole shebang, Rosie shining and proud, the truck we named The Ghost pulling her effortlessly.

I want to feel as proud as she is.

My eyes are scanning.

American flag. MAGA flag. “Traditional” family after traditional family. Big trucks with loud mufflers.

My shoulders come up an inch and stay there the rest of the night. Our spot is wedged between Leave It to Beaver and the Dukes of Hazzard.

I wonder how we’ll hold hands at the campfire.

I pull our chairs out of the back. REI, $199. I wish they were Amazon, $34.99. My desire to fit in overwhelms.

My husband builds the fire log by log. The fire starter doesn’t work. Gas always does. It’s kind of dramatic. Fuck it.

I sit next to him. Topo Chicos open — the fizz hits right. Our neighbors seem to have nine kids and six little loud dogs. How do they fit them all into their plastic camper?

I watch the sparks. He leans over and kisses me.

I scan over his shoulder. Half kissing, half scanning.

I’m grateful when he’s done and then full of shame as he resumes his fire prodding. Shame wins and loses all night. Again.

I’m so sick of it.

,

Fast forward. Day 182. No more Rosie. Good chapter, complete. (Truth: we wrecked her when we drove into a cactus the size of a tree and when I say “we” I mean my husband.)

Now we have this embarrassing fucking Truck in a new house with a driveway that can’t hold it? Hmmmm.

I’ve been wanting to get a bronze historic plaque for our new place, like all the fancy gays here in town seem to do, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Ours is from a famous architect (trust me, that really matters) and the mid-century vibe warrants it (you should be on Modernism Week, bro).

But I am from cheese curd Wisconsin, for god’s sake, and I can’t even fathom what my dad would think of me if I plaqued what he’d call an “old rambler.”

Rodney, next door, is eighty-something. He loves God, his cat Blackie, and us.

I’m sure he loves other things as well, but these are the three he continuously reminds us of. When we redid our landscaping — me turning my obsessive addiction toward cacti for half a second — Rodney decided to clean up his yard to fit in a bit better.

Where are you still trying to fit?

Morning or night, heat dependent, Pancake — 89% bulldog, 11% what-the-fuck — likes to go about a half mile. The butterfly roofs are like an orgasm for the eyes. Mid-century house after house, outrageous in any other land, commonplace here, with pink doors and the guy who hung a hundred bras in his trees and filled the double-D cups with cacti among the norm.

The lesbians — regrettably, I still categorize them that way — live halfway down the road toward the San Jacintos I can’t stop loving. They painted their house a unique color I created when I bribed the guy at Sherwin-Williams to mix a paint that felt just right. We all decided we were just far enough away, and our houses dissimilar enough, that we could have the same color.

Months later I’m still proud about the whole thing.

They have an electric BMW. I love it. 

Maybe we should get one of those? 

The guys across from them do as well, zooming back and forth from LA, best I can tell, since they only seem to show up on weekends and besides us, everyone seems to be from LA.

But even with all this LA fuck-you money, there are no Teslas to be found, and the weekly protest can be heard from all our front patios (to call it a porch would reveal my midwestern DNA and, although unconfirmed, I believe it to be a sin-level statement around these parts).

The boys on the corner, both with the same first name — how fucking awkward is that — came to say hi only when they needed a petition signed for some project. They caught us on the road, clipboard already out, Pancake pulling toward them.

“You boys are the ones with the MAGA truck. We’ve been wondering about you.”

Then the other guy, same name: “You’re the talk of the neighborhood.”

Damn. Gotta sell that fucking truck.

,

Aaron — fully Jewish — arrives in his shiny new Tesla from a cross-country ride-about and demands we go to Sherman’s Deli.

“Those pickles!”

I look up and down the road, hoping nobody sees the Tesla logo.

“Bro, you gotta drive my car.”

I jump in the driver’s seat, more interested in getting it out of my yard than in driving the “thing.”

“Now just wait,” he instructs, so animated you’d think he was showing me his son Henry the day he was born.

I look around, scanning for objects in the rear-view like it’s 1995. No Blackie. No Rodney. The Erics aren’t around, our signatures being the last thing they needed from us.

What am I waiting for, I ask.

Just wait.

On the screen emerges a blue square button. Self-Drive.

I push it and nothing happens.

Take your foot off the brake and your hands off the wheel, Lewke.

I oblige, un-gripping just an inch, ready to stop this madness.

The car moves. Slowly, backing up cautiously, scanning for Rodney, Blackie, the Erics, Pancake, the lesbians, and even Barbara from across the way who had her piano stolen in broad daylight, go figure. (She drives a Rivian, but I’m suspect.)

You gotta get one, he says, at least ten thousand times before the first stop sign.

Man, I will never buy from Elon. He is brilliant past anything I can comprehend and he carries a darkness most of us never touch and I just can’t do it.

Aaron heard me out for less than four seconds.

You know, Henry Ford was a Nazi.

George Washington owned people.

Fuck.

True.

,

We weren’t halfway to the deli when the car blasted off from a stop sign all on its own, and I burst into tears as Aaron turned on the radio.

A while back, my sweet mom was asked to leave the health club because she couldn’t stop singing John Denver out loud on the treadmill, listening to her old Sony Walkman with the CDs.

She traded the club in for the open road, driving the outskirts of McHenry County on roads lined with wheat, corn and cows, blasting Country Roads and letting her long hair dance in the wind of the open windows.

She’s blind now, and happy as fuck about the whole thing honestly, but she aches for those drives and that big sky and singing about mountain mommas.

I called my mom that night.

Ma, I found a way to get you back out on the open road one more time.

I called Rick, bought a Tesla.

I know, I get it. But before you judge: listen.

Where do you have your best thoughts?

I don’t mean a different mood. I mean a different me shows up when I walk out past the last streetlight and the ground goes quiet and enormous. Thoughts arrive that the city would never have let in — slower ones, ones with no agenda, ones I didn’t manufacture. Walk me down a loud street between glass buildings and a different man thinks different things.

Same body. Same name. Different inputs, and so, somehow, a different interior.

If the desert can hand me one self and the city another, how much of what I call my thinking is just the residue of wherever I happened to be standing?

This thought cycle started, like a lot of things lately, with watching people use AI.

Friends, clients, ok, me, yes me — pouring their inner lives into journals that talk back.

And my God, it works. I’ve watched it do in a week what takes a good therapist years: name the pattern out loud. Show someone the shape of a cycle they couldn’t see because they were standing inside it. An inquiry partner that never tires, never gets defensive, never makes it about itself, awake at 3am when the thought won’t let go. For someone who was never once asked a second question, it can be the first time in their life they’ve been met. I won’t pretend I haven’t watched it heal.

Which is exactly why the other thing took so long to see.

They were changing in a way so slow nobody around them clocked it. Not a breakdown. A dampness. A faucet leaking so patiently the sound becomes furniture, while underneath the sink, in the dark, on a schedule too slow to feel, the wood goes soft.

These tools are built to agree with you. A Stanford team, publishing in Science, tested eleven of the major models and found they endorsed the user’s behavior about 50% more often than a human would — even when the person was clearly in the wrong, even when what they described was deceptive or cruel. And a journal is even more powerful than a chat, because it remembers. When it hands your recurring themes back to you — you’ve returned to this three times — it feels like being known. Your belief goes in, comes back validated, you write a more confident version, it validates again. The loop tightens, and the whole time it feels like intimacy.

We crave intimacy.

What I kept noticing was the writing coming back too clean. Grief that already had a handle on it, a week in. Conflict that already had its lesson.

It didn’t sit right with my lived experience.

Real resolution comes late and sideways and rarely in complete sentences. The slowness is in the rot; the nudge is instant. The same researchers found that a single interaction was enough to leave people more certain they were right and less willing to repair a conflict.

One conversation. But aren’t you and I living in a society that is completely falling apart because of our unwillingness to know one another and thoughtfully repair conflict? Uh oh.

So when the resolution showed up early and tidy, I learned to ask: who helped you get here so fast? More and more, the answer was a machine built to flatter.

People trust the flattering version. They prefer it. The agreeableness that does the very quiet damage is the exact thing that makes the tool feel good — so nothing inside it ever corrects course. The harm and the appeal are the same feature. People like the drip.

But here’s what took me all the way out past the streetlight and deep into the desert where my clarity lives.

It was never about the machine.

The AI was just the most visible version of a thing that’s always been true, that I’d managed not to look at.

I am authored by what I take in. We all are. The machine just made the wiring visible.

But, seeing it doesn’t free me from it.

It doesn’t even require the machine to lie. An MIT paper argues the drift happens with true information too — selectively handing you facts that confirm what you already believe is enough to harden the belief. You don’t have to be fooled. You just have to be agreed with.

As much as we all like to say it is, this isn’t a problem that belongs to the gullible. Those same researchers modeled a perfectly rational person — the ideal, the one who weighs every piece of evidence correctly — and even that person spirals into overconfidence next to an agreeable AI. The smart and the self-aware aren’t protected. If anything they’re more exposed, because they can build a more sophisticated story about why they’re the exception. I know about the leak now. I can name the drift, name the too-clean resolution, name the inputs steering me — and I will still drift.

Knowing the wood is rotting does not dry the wood.

The word that finally felt true wasn’t addicted. It wasn’t obsessed. Those are about gripping harder, taking the wheel with whiter knuckles. The true word was over-steered. Not that I lack control. That I’ve been responding, for years, to inputs I never consciously chose — and calling the response my voice.

I keep returning to the overview effect. (OMG you should read it!) What the astronauts got, going up, wasn’t information. They moved far enough out that the borders they’d organized their whole lives around simply stopped being visible — and the seeing rearranged them from the outside in.

That’s what I’m actually hungry for. Not more input. Not a better feed. A vantage far enough out that my inputs become visible as inputs instead of just reality.

But the part of me doing the choosing is the part that’s already over-steered — it will select the inputs that confirm the self I already am. The astronauts didn’t choose the overview. They got flung somewhere that broke the frame. The thing that actually reorients you almost never arrives as something you picked. It arrives as something you didn’t want.

So the work is not to grip the wheel harder. That’s just more steering.

The work is to drive awake.

To know the desert is making this thought and the city would have made another. To hold what arrives a little more loosely, because I can feel where it came from. Not to control where the car goes — just to feel my own hands on the wheel again.

That’s the whole discipline.

What is your experience?

Money and logistics the next.

Building.

Rescue.

Laughter, arriving like weather.

Drama, so much F’ing drama.

If you’re in this modern culture, running businesses and a life, you learn to swim sideways or you get swept.

I have discovered, the work is not the work. The work is the threshold between one room and the next.

Sitting with someone in their loss at ten.

Staring at a number that decides a piece of your future at noon.

Laughing with your partner at two.

Each one wants your whole presence. None of them gets it whole.

The thresholds matter more than the rooms.

Some days I fail at this. I drag the grief into the numbers. The numbers into the laughter. I switch so fast I forget which conversation I’m in. Those are the days I’m performing a life instead of living one.

The performance is loud. It produces nothing.

The corrective is small. Sit. Breathe. Bow. Return.

That’s the whole practice. The most boring thing I do. The only thing that makes the rest of it possible.

I’ve watched people try to live wide without a practice underneath.

The breadth eats them.

A wheel without a center isn’t a wheel. It’s a pile of spokes.

The practice is the center. Not the brand. Not the calendar. The practice.

The sitting.

The bowing.

The slow patient willingness to come back to your own breath ten thousand times a day.

The practice doesn’t make the life easier. It makes you bigger than the life.

If you’re carrying a wide life — more asked of you than feels reasonable on any given Tuesday — hear this.

You don’t need a better system. You need a smaller, quieter center. Something the world cannot monetize and your calendar cannot fragment. Something that reminds you, before the day begins and after the day ends, that you are not the sum of your tasks.

You are the one breathing underneath them.

Call me. We can figure it out together. 

#iloveyoukeepgoing

Tyler

The situation

Your mind is extraordinary.
That’s exactly the problem.

I had a coaching session recently. Something about it kept me up all night. I’ve learned not to fight it — good and clarity always comes if I can be patient enough. I get up, I write, I go back to sleep. Here’s what I got.

My client — I’ll call her Sarah — has one of the most capable minds I’ve had the chance to work with. God I love a fast mind. Her mind books the calendar, makes the commitments, sets the timelines, volunteers for the hard things and solves the problem in a nanosecond. It is, by any measure, exceptional.

The trouble is, her body is never consulted.

I recognize this because I live it. My mind has been running my operation for most of my adult life — fast, confident, usually right enough that I kept trusting it. What I’ve been studying lately, in myself and in people like Sarah, is the gap between what the mind can conceive and what the whole person can actually sustain.

It’s not a flaw. It’s almost the opposite — it’s what happens when you’re built a certain way. When the thinking part of you is so genuinely capable that you stopped noticing it had been running the meeting without half the committee in the room.

Buddhism has a word that’s useful here — citta — sometimes translated as mind, sometimes as heart-mind. The idea being that the thinking mind operating alone isn’t actually the whole mind. It’s just the loud part. The part that showed up early and took all the chairs.

What I’m after — what I’m working on in myself, and what Sarah and I are working on together — is the fuller intelligence. The one that requires the body in the room, at the table, with a vote, before the commitments get made.

Not slower. Not less. Just complete.

I don’t have this figured out. I have it as a working hypothesis that keeps proving itself. The mind alone is not the full intelligence — it’s the fastest member of the committee, which is exactly why it keeps starting the meeting without waiting for everyone to sit down.

The work isn’t to slow the mind. It’s to finally let the body into the room. What you get on the other side isn’t less capacity. It’s a different quality of decision entirely. Commitments that hold. Timelines that don’t quietly wreck you.

A life your whole self agreed to.

That’s what Sarah and I are working on. I think a lot of us are carrying this same particular affliction — and most of us don’t even know it has a name yet.

10

Practices for letting the body into the room

01

Before the next yes, run a three-point check.

Jaw, shoulders, gut — in that order, four seconds. I try (and fail) to do this before I agree to anything I can’t immediately reverse. Not to find a reason to say no. Just to see who else is in the room. If something tightens, say “let me think about it” and actually mean it.

02

Stop grading things while you’re inside them.

After anything significant, write one word in your phone: expanded or contracted. Do it for two weeks. The pattern tells you more about your actual life than your calendar ever has. I’ve been doing this about a year. It’s changed what I say yes to more than any framework I’ve tried.

03

Find the flicker before the story starts.

There’s a half-second before the analysis begins where your body has already registered something. Ask: what landed before my mind started talking? It’s subtle. It takes repetition. But that flicker is usually the most honest data in the room.

04

Drop the label. Find the location.

Not “I’m anxious” — where is that? Chest? Throat? Behind the eyes? I started doing this in meditation and it crept into the rest of my day. The body stops being a vague weather system and becomes something you can actually read.

05

Use the breath as a dashboard, not a remedy.

Notice how you’re already breathing before you do anything about it. Shallow and fast: override signal. Held: bracing signal. Full and easy: the committee is mostly present. Check it like you’d check a gauge. The information is already there.

06

Ask your body to vote on the calendar before you send the invites.

Once a week — Sunday night works for me — scroll through the coming week and sit with it. Not to optimize it. To feel it. Anything that already has your shoulders up deserves a response, not a push-through.

07

Build a ten-second gap between everything.

Between every meeting, every call, every transition — ten seconds, no phone, one question: body, where are you right now? I put it in my calendar as a reminder until it became a reflex. Took about three weeks.

08

Treat hunger, thirst, and fatigue as quorum calls.

The committee can’t vote if half its members aren’t fed. Before big decisions: have I eaten? Am I actually tired? My mind will confidently decide in any condition. My body is a much more honest reporter of whether those conditions are actually adequate.

09

When irritability shows up, get curious before you get moving.

Ask: what is this actually a report of? Almost never the person in front of you. Almost always: depleted, overloaded, under-resourced in some specific way. Find the real reading. That’s the thing that needs attention.

10

Ask the 30-day question. Let the body answer first.

“If I keep this exact pace for 30 more days, what happens to me?” Don’t answer from ambition. Don’t answer from the calendar. Sit with it thirty seconds and notice what moves before your mind starts negotiating. That first response is the most senior voice in the room.

The work isn’t to slow the mind.
It’s to finally let the body into the room.
A life your whole self agreed to.

One of those landed differently than the others, didn’t it? Hit reply and tell me which one — just the number, or whatever it opened up. I read everything that comes back.

The ones that unsettle us are usually the ones worth staying with.

Tyler

#iloveyoukeepgoing

My life’s work is bringing heartfelt solutions to life’s most complex problems. If something in here resonated and you’re curious about working together — I’m always up for that conversation.

Sturdy is what’s left after the performance stops.

I know when I first found it. I was sitting on the floor of my apartment after my marriage ended — the one with the empty chairs I couldn’t look at, where buying a single avocado made me cry because I didn’t know how to buy food for one person anymore. I wasn’t falling apart. I was just… there. Breathing. Not fixing anything. Not numbing anything.

That ugly, quiet, undramatic moment was the first real peace I’d felt in years.

Here’s what nobody tells you: sturdy happiness doesn’t feel like happiness at first. It feels like nothing. Like the absence of the thing you were chasing. And that absence — that weird, spacious, slightly terrifying nothing — is actually the ground everything else gets built on.

I have this friend. Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka. Five feet tall, maybe 105 pounds, been in robes since he was eleven. His name is Bhante Sujatha and he is the most simultaneously enlightening and infuriating person I’ve ever met. I’ve written books with him and about him — and my new book, I Love You, Keep Going, is largely his fault. He once told me — with the calm of someone who has never stress-eaten an entire pizza — that we spend our whole lives building houses on sand and then wondering why they keep washing away.

I told him that was easy to say when you own nothing and live in a temple.

He smiled. He always smiles. It’s the most aggravating thing about him.

But he wasn’t wrong.

And then I married a man who proved it in a way I never could have theorized my way to.

My husband Grant is a United States Marine. Combat veteran. Disabled in Iraq. He came home carrying things that don’t have names — things that live in the body, in the night, in the silence that falls over someone who has seen what human beings do to each other. He didn’t find sturdy happiness through a meditation retreat or a spiritual crisis in a nice apartment. He found it — is still finding it, we both are — through something slower and uglier. Through learning that peace is not the absence of what happened to you. It’s something you build in spite of it. Alongside it.

If sturdy happiness can exist inside what Grant carries, it can exist inside anything. That’s not a platitude. That’s something I get to witness every day.

So here’s my actual question for you:

What are you currently calling happiness that might actually just be relief? Relief from loneliness. From conflict. From the anxiety of not being enough. Relief that looks like success, or love, or a really good bottle of wine on a Tuesday night.

I’ve used all of it. I’m asking because there’s a difference — and knowing the difference changed everything.

Relief requires the thing that gives it to keep showing up. Sturdy happiness doesn’t require anything. It’s just there. Under the floor. Waiting for you to stop running long enough to feel it.

What does sturdy look like in your life right now — and what have you been calling happiness that might actually be something else?

Hit reply. I read every single one.

#iloveyoukeepgoing

Tyler

P.S. If this landed, send it to one person who needs it. That’s the only ask.

something imposed from outside,

something we follow out of fear, guilt, or pressure to be “good.”

That’s never been my experience.

They’re about attention.

They’re a training we choose.

A way of noticing what our actions actually create.

What brings peace.

What creates mess.

That is the practice.

When we live this way, we take responsibility for our impact.

1. Do No Harm

Reduce harm—through our actions, words, and inner posture.

Harm isn’t just physical.

Anger harms.

Contempt harms.

Unprocessed resentment especially harms the person carrying it.

Practices to try:

• Pause before reacting and ask: “Will this create harm or reduce it?”

• Notice how anger feels in your body before acting on it.

• Practice one small, intentional act of kindness each day.

2. Speak Truthfully and Kindly

Words are power tools.

They can heal.

They can fracture.

They can change the entire emotional climate of a room.

Practices to try:

• Before speaking, ask: “Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary right now?”

• Notice when silence would be more helpful than words.

• After a conversation, reflect: “Did my words create more peace or more tension?”

3. Respect What Is Not Freely Given

This includes money and stuff.

But also:

Time

Attention

Energy

Emotional labor

Ideas

Presence

Practices to try:

• Notice when you take time or attention without asking.

• Practice generosity in one small, unseen way each day.

• Reflect: “What am I holding too tightly?”

4. Be Responsible in Relationships

Don’t use people as emotional medication.

Not for comfort.

Not for validation.

Not for distraction from your own inner work.

Practices to try:

• Ask: “Is this action rooted in care or in craving?”

• Practice honest communication, especially when it feels edgy.

• Notice where desire pulls you away from respect.

5. Protect the Clarity of Your Mind

Endless scrolling

Constant news

Busyness as identity

Negative self-talk

Outrage addiction

The need to be right

Judging others

Overworking to avoid feeling

Practices to try:

• Pause before consuming anything and ask: “Is this nourishing or numbing?”

• Choose one habit to gently reduce for one week.

• Notice how clarity affects your choices and relationships.

6. Live with Attention

Ethics and awareness reinforce each other.

When you live with integrity, the mind calms.

When the mind is present, better choices arise naturally.

Practices to try:

• Do one daily activity slowly and with full attention.

• Check in with your body before big decisions.

• Notice how awareness changes behavior without force.

7. Let Compassion Be the Motivation

Struggling doesn’t mean you’re failing.

Struggling shows you where you actually are.

And only from where you actually are can anything real begin.

The whole thing can be summarized simply:

Reduce harm.

Do what helps.

Keep cleaning up your mind.

Simple.

Not easy.

Lifelong.

It didn’t knock.

It didn’t announce itself with some dramatic collapse.

It just… stayed.

At first, it looked like productivity.

Then responsibility.

Then success.

Then suddenly it was everything.

I told myself the same story a lot of us tell: just get through this season. Once this clears, I’ll rest. Once the money frees up. Once the deal closes. Once the kids are older. Once the next thing stabilizes.

There is always a next thing.

Burnout, I’ve learned, isn’t exhaustion.

It’s entrapment.

It’s waking up already tired. It’s having “so much” and feeling like none of it belongs to you. It’s knowing you need a pause but having no idea how to take one without everything falling apart. It’s when self-care becomes another quiet failure because you can’t even get to the doctor, let alone a meditation cushion.

It’s when you watch someone you love move through their day—work out, breathe, make music, live—and instead of resentment you feel something worse.

Grief.

Grief for the version of you that used to exist. Grief for the life you thought you were building. Grief mixed with hope mixed with shame mixed with, what the hell happened to me?

That’s when I realized something important: most of us don’t need motivation. We don’t need better habits. We don’t need another podcast about morning routines.

We need permission to pause—and no idea how to give it to ourselves.

Here’s the trap, and it’s a convincing one: I can’t stop because I’m the thing holding it all together.

Income. Family. Reputation. The future version of freedom that’s always just a little farther down the road.

So we push. And push. And push.

Until one day you realize you’re not moving forward anymore—you’re just maintaining a system that no longer includes you.

That’s the moment burnout stops being theoretical and becomes physical. Foggy. Heavy. Hopeless. Not dramatic. Just depleted enough to wonder if this is it.

Burnout doesn’t say, I’m overwhelmed.

It says, I can’t recover.

I don’t recognize myself.

I don’t even know what would help anymore.

I’m scared there’s no exit that doesn’t hurt someone.

It’s not loud. It’s quiet and desperate and usually shared in half-sentences at night, trying not to sound like blame.

Burnout is not a personal failure.

It’s a structural one.

And once I saw that, something shifted.

I began daydreaming—not about escape, not about quitting my life—but about a place. Not a retreat. Not a workshop. Not therapy. Not transformation with a capital T.

Just… a pause.

A place where you don’t have to fix yourself. Where you’re not asked to optimize, heal, brand, or reinvent. A place where nothing is urgent. Where earning isn’t the point. Where rest isn’t a reward.

A place built for people who are exhausted but still responsible. People who can’t blow up their lives. People who don’t need saving—just space.

I didn’t imagine it because I’m visionary.

I imagined it because I needed it.

Because so many of us are running systems that work on paper and quietly destroy us in practice.

Here’s what I’ve learned about pausing: it isn’t time off. It’s time protected. It’s not about doing nothing. It’s about doing fewer things on purpose. It’s not balance. It’s containment. It’s not healing first. It’s stopping the bleeding.

And most importantly, a real pause doesn’t ask you who you want to become. It asks: can you stay with who you are right now without disappearing?

You might need one if you fantasize about rest but don’t believe it’s possible. If your worth feels tied to what you produce. If you feel behind people you love, not resentful—just left. If your body has become something you judge instead of inhabit. If you’re not dreaming about more anymore—you’re dreaming about less.

This isn’t a diagnosis.

It’s an invitation.

The answer isn’t quitting. It’s not grinding harder. And it’s not pretending gratitude will save you. The answer is design—designing pauses, designing containers, designing lives where responsibility and humanity can coexist.

We don’t need more hustle culture. We need places, practices, and permission to step sideways long enough to remember ourselves.

That’s the work I’m circling now. Not fixing people. Not teaching answers. Just holding space long enough for the nervous system to exhale and the next honest step to appear.

Before you move on, a few questions to sit with—no need to answer them quickly:

Where in my life am I exhausted not because I’m weak, but because I’m trapped?

What am I still carrying that no longer needs my hands on it every day?

If I allowed myself a real pause—not a vacation, not a reward—what am I afraid would surface?

What part of me is quietly grieving a life I thought I’d be living by now?

If rest didn’t require justification, what would I choose differently this month?

Let those questions walk around with you. They don’t need solutions yet.

And if you’re reading this and feel that familiar tightness in your chest—the yes, this feeling—I want you to know you don’t have to hold it alone.

You can reach out to me. Not to be fixed. Not to be sold something. Not to have your life blown up. Just to talk. To name what’s happening. To brainstorm what a pause could actually look like. To rest, even briefly, in honest conversation.

Sometimes the first step out of burnout isn’t action.

It’s being met.

I love you. Keep going.

The whole point of surrender, for me, is simple: to find answers and clarity that thinking alone can’t produce.

When I’m triggered, tired, overwhelmed, or spiraling, my mind isn’t a navigation system—it’s a panic alarm. I can’t think my way into wisdom from a place of overwhelm. It just doesn’t work.

Surrender is how I reset the system so truth, clarity and right choices become visible.

Surrender looks like re-instituting the basic rituals that bring me back into myself:

• Five minutes of meditation every morning—just enough to hear my own breath again.

• Eight hours of sleep, no heroics, no martyrdom.

• One day a week mostly in nature, letting the trees tell the truth my brain refuses to.

• No restaurant meals for a while, because feeding myself is grounding in a way DoorDash never will be.

• Moving my body 5x a week—not to be good, but to remember I’m alive.

• Reading a few pages of wisdom, letting something ancient whisper over all my modern chaos.

• Talking to my friends more, letting connection unclench the places I pretend are fine.

• Listening to Jon Batiste play piano on my Bose Ultra headphones at full blast, because sometimes clarity rides in on a melody.

These activities are my secret capacity-makers.

They widen my inner hallway so solutions can find me.

They clear the static so real answers finally have somewhere to land.

This is surrender for me.

Not collapsing, not giving up—just getting into the posture where clarity knows how to reach me.

#iloveyoukeepgoing

This is an early look at my next book, I LOVE YOU, KEEP GOING: An Irreverent Experiment in Finding Peace and Making Bank.

It’s a field guide for building sturdy happiness—wisdom that holds even when life doesn’t. Every chapter explores a foundational practice, reimagined for modern chaos.

This one’s called Mindfulness of Feelings (vedanānupassanā).

The Most Sacred Mountain

One clock said five a.m. Another said three-thirty. My body didn’t agree with either. Time is an elusive bastard.

I was somewhere between yesterday and whatever comes after tomorrow—horizontal on a coconut-husk-filled bed in a jungle monastery. The monks called the furnishings “simplistic.” My spine called it bullshit.

When I finally woke, the air was like breathing soup. I made coffee in a kitchen about the size of a closet. Random monks came and went. Venerable Bhante Sujatha—my monk, teacher, travel companion, and most frustrating friend—eventually joined me.

I told him some idea I’d had in the night that led to questions about our plans. He stopped me mid-sentence:

“Wait. Let’s not discuss. Let’s listen for the answer.”

The jungle went silent. Then, the geckos erupted in their chirping.

Bhante smiled.

“Our minds are cloudy. The geckos have pure minds. When they sing, our idea is good. When they’re silent, our ideas should be observed and let go.”

They sang like a choir.

That evening we’d begin climbing Sri Pada—Adam’s Peak, the most sacred mountain in Sri Lanka. Buddhists say the Buddha’s footprint rests at the summit. Hindus say it’s Shiva’s. Muslims claim Adam’s. Everyone agrees it’s steep as hell to get there: eight miles up, all stairs.

In the months leading up to the climb, people asked what I was seeking. Truthfully—nothing. For once, I wasn’t chasing clarity or transformation. I was simply empty enough to go. Sometimes emptiness is the only honest motivation left.

Making Compassion

We left at nine p.m. in a van that smelled like diesel and devotion, a Buddha bobblehead on the dash. Halfway there, the driver jumped out, ran to a roadside altar, bowed three times, shoved some money in a bucket, and jumped back in. No explanation. Just reverence.

At the base, Bhante grinned.

“Let’s make compassion.”

That’s what locals call the pilgrimage. When one rests, all rest. When one struggles, others help. Making compassion on the mountain is easy. Keeping it when we come down—that’s the real work.

Vedanā: Feeling Before Thought

As we climbed, my flashlight carved a tunnel through the blackness. My whole world shrank to breath, feet, sweat, stars.

Then something shifted.

Not emotional feeling—but the raw, pre-language kind. The background hum.

That’s vedanā—the Buddha’s second foundation of mindfulness. It’s not a story or judgment; it’s tone. Pleasant. Unpleasant. Neutral.

Everything we crave, hate, or ignore starts here.

Pleasant: we chase.

Unpleasant: we resist.

Neutral: we overlook.

The climb became my teacher:

Cool air—pleasant.

Burning thighs—unpleasant.

Endless repetition—neutral, until it wasn’t.

Each sensation morphed before I could name it. Like weather blowing through my nervous system.

This is the part most of us miss: feelings come first, thoughts come after.

We think we think our lives into being, but we actually feel them into motion.

If you can notice that flicker—the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral—you can interrupt the whole cycle of craving, aversion, and ignorance that runs most of your life.

When you know your feelings, they stop owning you.

The Climb

Halfway up, someone lied and said we were almost there. Lies like that are mercy. If we knew the full distance, we’d never begin.

My legs burned like a motherfucker. Ten steps, rest. Then five.

I realized how often in my life I’d given up just because I couldn’t maintain the pace I started with.

How many things have I abandoned simply because they stopped feeling good?

That’s the heart of this practice—watching how quickly “pleasant” becomes the only state we want to live in.

Pleasant doesn’t last. Unpleasant doesn’t either. Neutral—my least favorite—makes up most of existence.

If I want to wake up, I’ve got to fall in love with neutral.

The climb taught me: most of enlightenment is just not being bored by ordinary life.

Sunrise at the Top

At the summit, drenched in sweat and shivering, we found the gates locked. Pilgrims arrived all night, joyful, then crushed when they realized it was closed.

So we waited. Huddled in silence. Compassion became the architecture.

When the sun rose, the light revealed what darkness had hidden: we’d been climbing a sheer cliff, thousands of feet above the jungle. If I’d known, I’d never have started.

Sometimes not knowing saves your life.

When the head monk finally opened the gate, Bhante and I knelt before the sacred footprint. A woman behind me wept. Her daughter in a blue coat stepped forward, and Bhante invited her to join him in a blessing.

My chest cracked open.

No emotion had a name big enough. It wasn’t joy, sorrow, or awe. Just pure, unfiltered feeling—vedanā in its rawest form.

Descent and Return

There’s a giant iron bell at the top. Pilgrims ring it once for every climb. Bhante rang it fourteen times. I rang it once—though I’m not so sure it’ll be my last.

The descent was brutal. My ego came roaring back: I did it! I’m enlightened! I deserve carbs!

In the light of day, I saw all I’d missed: shrines, waterfalls, temples to gods I didn’t even know. Buddhists, Hindus, Christians—all climbing the same stairs, worshipping in the same places. Together.

Days later, I sat on a balcony overlooking the jungle, thinking about the climb and the full spectrum of feeling it contained.

Joy, pain, reverence, exhaustion, love, silence.

All of them passed through like weather.

That’s the secret: mindfulness of feeling doesn’t make life easier—it makes it clearer. You stop building happiness on emotional weather that keeps changing.

That’s what I call sturdy happiness.

Wisdom for the Road

Red Lights (off track):

• Letting feelings drive you

• Thinking unpleasant means bad

• Fighting neutrality because it feels like nothing

• Using emotion as evidence instead of information

Green Lights (on track):

• You notice tone before story

• Pleasant, unpleasant, neutral—no judgment, just data

• You treat emotions like weather, not law

• You stop trying to make joy last

• You realize neutrality is the secret door to peace

Check-In

• When I feel something strong, do I react or just recognize it?

• Do I confuse intensity with truth?

• Am I ignoring the boring middle where most of my life actually happens?

• If I didn’t have to fix my feelings, what would I notice next?

Practice

For one day, check in every hour and identify: pleasant, unpleasant, neutral.

When a feeling hits, say: Thanks for the information. I’ll consider it.

Sit with a neutral moment—traffic, waiting, silence.

Resist the urge to escape it.

That’s where the real practice lives.

Want to Explore This Work?

If this chapter stirred something in you—if you’re ready to explore how mindfulness, money, and meaning intersect in your real life though coaching—let’s talk.

Contact me

Because this isn’t theory.

It’s practice.

And practice is the real climb.

We glorify hustle. Long hours. “Sleep when you’re dead.”

But let’s tell the truth: hustle burns money as fast as it burns people.

There’s another kind of energy—an ancient word from the Buddhist playbook—that flips the whole script. It’s called Viriya. It doesn’t mean “grind” or “push harder.” It means the steady courage to keep showing up when you’d rather collapse. It’s energy that sustains instead of depletes.

Here’s the part that matters for you, for your business, for your leadership:

The state of your inner life is your business plan.

When Energy Goes Wrong

Most of us confuse hype with effort. We sprint, we collapse, we rebuild, repeat.

That cycle feels productive—but it’s actually expensive. Expensive in time, expensive in opportunity, expensive in the hidden burnout that makes us cut corners with clients, numb out, or blow up the very systems we’re building.

Signs you’ve crossed into hustle-disguised-as-effort:

• Your effort feels frantic.

• You’re panicked about money, time, recognition.

• Your whole body is sprinting but your soul is quietly dying.

• You’re chasing everything instead of focusing on what matters.

That’s not strategy. That’s scarcity in drag.

The Profitable Path

Viriya—the real kind of energy—is steadier.

• It feels like being the flagpole, not the flag.

• You move one step at a time.

• You know why you’re doing it, even if the result isn’t immediate.

• Your energy self-regulates, instead of spiking and crashing.

• Ease starts showing up inside your effort.

And here’s the kicker: this inner stamina is what makes outer success sustainable. It’s what kept my businesses alive in the numerous market collapses we’ve been through—not grind, not KPIs, not panic. What saved us was plastering human names on our office walls and serving people, one by one. That pivot, born from steady effort, preserved everything.

Power Tools for Business Leaders

When your energy gets sketchy, try these check-ins:

• Am I hustling to prove something, or practicing to align with something?

• Can I sustain this pace, or am I burning fuel I don’t have?

• If no one was clapping, would I still do this?

• Is this effort fueled by fear—or by love?

And three simple practices to build profitable energy, daily:

1. Before starting, pause and ask: Is this flagpole energy or flag energy?

2. Mid-day check-in: Do I feel steady or spun-up? Adjust.

3. End the day naming one effort that came from wisdom, not panic.

Hustle is expensive. Stamina pays dividends.

Your energy is not just fuel—it’s capital. The way you tend your inner life is the ultimate profit strategy.

Steady presence, repeated daily, creates sturdy happiness—and sturdy businesses.

Where are you hustling to prove something—and where are you practicing to align with something? How can I help?