By the time I was going to multiple AA meetings a day across the Bay Area, it had become hard to deny that my prized intellect had profoundly failed me. I was a party boy, yes, but I had also built an identity around being smart, fast to quote philosophers over bong rips. In those recovery rooms, my fancy ideas and Ivy League degree carried no weight.

One of my first sponsors was quick to remind me that it was my clever thinking that had destroyed my life, and therefore my ingenious ideas about how to save it were not necessarily to be trusted. Instead, these men preferred maddeningly simple aphorisms, the type that were wise but could also be hanging on a sign decorating a cheap Airbnb. They repeated things like: Take it one day at a time. It works if you work it. To keep it, you have to give it away.

Then, at my regular Saturday meeting in a church basement on College Ave, one of the guys said:

It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than it is to think your way into a new way of acting.

At the time, I didn’t realize this was an AA classic. I just thought, okay, we have transcended the genre—this one actually slaps. The line slipped through my usual hard-headed resistance. I had accumulated so much baggage, so many failed promises of achieving my potential, that I felt like I was standing on a pile of shit, waiting, I guess, for an epiphany to show me how to scheme my way out of the mess I’d made for myself.

It was in this state that I had finally become desperate enough to be teachable, open to the possibility that someone else might know better than I did. I had no other options, and quite literally nothing left to lose.

So I decided to do what they said.

At first, I thought the line applied only to staying sober, but over time it became something like an organizing principle for my life. I can’t fully explain why action can reach parts of us that insight alone cannot, but I can show you how it has worked in my life: I’m trapped in a way of thinking I cannot reason my way out of, I take an action that contradicts it, and eventually find myself with a different understanding of who I am and what is possible.

Your habits can change before you believe they can

Prior to getting sober, I could not make it twenty minutes without getting high. The thought of becoming someone who goes to concerts without sneaking a few key bumps and drinks sparkling water at parties was impossible to wrap my head around. Keep in mind, this was before it became cool to be sober. Drugs were how I relaxed, connected, escaped, explored, did my best work, and understood myself. My mind had decades of evidence for why I needed them and nothing to suggest I might be better off without them.

My plan, to be honest, was to just get off the hard drugs and resume drinking and smoking as quickly as possible. I would not be a sober guy (read: a loser). Fortunately, AA did not require me to settle this. They told me, over and over, just don’t use today. Go to a meeting. Get there early, stay late, and always help newcomers. When I asked how the hell I could help anyone when I had only a few weeks, they reminded me that a few weeks was still more sobriety than the person walking in on day one had.

One of the first newcomers I tried to help was a fully tatted guy who had been living on Skid Row in LA and using heroin and meth. After I told him my story, he said, “Damn, dude, you’re way gnarlier than me.” We both started laughing, and for the first time in longer than I’d like to admit, I was no longer the central problem in the universe. There was a sweetness in that moment of camaraderie that went deeper than anything drugs had ever given me.

Being useful also put me back in touch with the tenderhearted kid I used to be, the one who would cry when he saw homeless people on trips into the city. I had long feared I had destroyed him, but as I kept showing up and following these stupidly simple instructions, I became more dependable, more generous, more joyful, and I began accumulating evidence that I was better off sober, even as my thoughts continued to insist this was not who I was.

I have now been sober nearly eleven years and I still, in some core part of my psyche, feel like the same pothead and party boy. That’s the trick, I think: to focus on your daily actions while stubbornly ignoring the idea you have about who you are, especially when that idea has already done enough damage.

You do not have to stop being afraid

I used to travel around the country giving big presentations, and I thought I was pretty good at it, or at least pretty swaggy. The only problem was I had to be numbed out on some combination of Oxy, Xanax, coke, and weed to get the job done. When I got sober, I discovered that I could barely make it through a six-person team meeting without having a legitimate panic attack.

I would spend days dreading a meeting, and once, even though I was the one running it, I left almost as soon as it started. Fuck, even reading a few introductory lines aloud at a recovery meeting would make my voice quake.

So I did what I knew how to do and tried to think my way out of it, reading everything I could find on presentation “hacks,” watching speakers I admired, anxiously preparing for meetings, monitoring my voice and inflection, and trying to CBT-replace every anxious thought, all of which gave me one more thing to do while panicking.

I did all this because I wrongly assumed the fear had to disappear before I could trust myself in front of people again. What I actually needed to do was speak anyway, even when my voice quaked, even when everything in me was screaming that something was very wrong. Call it a mildly traumatic form of exposure therapy: I would speak, panic, get through it, realize afterward that it hadn’t been that big of a deal, and then do it again.

In early recovery, I was a raw nerve, relearning the basics of human functioning without drugs numbing everything I felt. Meditation helped me see that my nervous system had confused being seen—and potentially judged—with being in life-threatening danger. But some of the charge came from how much I cared about reaching people, and the sensations I had interpreted as fear could also be felt as excitement.

That insight helped, but it took hundreds of reps speaking in meetings and leading groups for my body to believe that speaking was not an emergency. What also reassured me was that people responded to what I said and rarely, if ever, mentioned the nerves I was tripping out about in my mind.

Public speaking has gone from something that I used to dread for days to something I genuinely enjoy, even relish. I often show up with only a loose idea of what I want to say, trusting that something better will come through if I can get out of my own way. People now tell me I am unusually articulate, or even that I seem to be channeling something, which is woo-speak for having no idea where the sentence is going while maintaining eye contact.

Let the question of purpose resolve itself through action

With my life finally getting back on track, my comeback job was another tech role with a nice view of Market Street. By my third day, moving between the usual stack of software products, deal outreach, and back-to-back meetings, dread had settled into my gut: This cannot fucking be it.

At first, I thought the answer was to marry my business prowess to what had happened to me spiritually. I interviewed for leadership roles at Calm and Headspace, trying, basically, to turn my spiritual awakening into a business plan. I would help a mindfulness startup 10x its revenue. Yes, I thought. That was it.

Underneath all this strategic scheming, I still harbored the belief that there was a correct answer hidden somewhere inside me. My nascent explorations of Jungian psychology, mythopoetic men’s work, and various Eastern traditions had not exactly disabused me of this notion. I took individuation, mature masculinity, and dharma to mean that there must be one clear calling that would make sense of everything I had been through and tell me exactly what to do next. If I journaled enough, found the right framework or teacher, healed enough, meditated enough, or achieved the correct spiritual state, surely it would finally reveal itself.

This was especially strange because in my startup work and entrepreneurial side projects, I knew how to approach uncertainty: run thoughtful experiments, observe what happened, and course-correct. If a friend had asked me what to do with his life, I probably would have offered him a version of that advice. Yet when it came to my own purpose, I treated it like a metaphysical riddle and kept trying to think my way into a solution, banging my head against my journal.

Slowly, with nothing to show for all my clever thinking, I stopped waiting for an answer and began doing things. Specifically, I began doing things that seemed useful and exciting to me:

• I started a Substack in 2018 because I wanted a place to share my ideas and crazy-ass life experience, thought it might help someone, and had always secretly wanted to be a writer.

• I began coaching friends, former classmates, and people sent my way by colleagues, often around addiction but sometimes through psychological or spiritual struggles, long before I felt qualified to call myself a coach.

• During COVID, when people needed community and a place to make sense of charged topics together, I started one.

• After training in various men’s groups, I started one of my own on the hunch that I had something unique to offer.

• I offered my startup expertise to the people who had helped me heal with psychedelics and ended up co-founding a nonprofit with them, working alongside some of the most talented people in the field.

I was still confused about my purpose as I did these things. At each new stage, I thought maybe I had found it. Annoyingly, more than one of them felt like it could be the answer. I was pulled toward several kinds of work and seemed to be good at them, so I concluded that I was a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, which sounded like the opposite of a man living his purpose.

Only later did I realize that I had been living my purpose for years. Surviving addiction seems to have rewired me in some of the ways people describe how a near-death experience changes them. I was happier simply to be alive, more open to the world, and felt a responsibility to give away what had been given to me. The projects I had treated as competing answers were all ways of doing that. And then, after a lot more meditation, even the need to call this my purpose has fallen away, and the question itself no longer really makes sense.

These days, there is only the life in front of me and the next obvious thing to do. If you are still tortured by the question of your purpose, I know the feeling acutely, and I think it is worth acting your way toward resolution. Your efforts may result in a life where the question no longer occurs to you.

There is only enlightened activity

Purpose was not the only thing I thought I could figure out by thinking harder. If you’re anything like me, you might catch the enlightenment bug. You have a taste of what’s possible on a retreat, a journey, or just spontaneously while waiting for the bus. And this taste produces such a stark before-and-after that you think, holy shit, it’s possible to live with the loving ease of MDMA and the awe of LSD without taking anything. Yeah, you are going to want more of that.

The dharma completely took over my life. Every spare moment was spent meditating, inquiring, feeling into the nooks and crannies of my consciousness, surrendering, clenching, unclenching, trying too hard again, remembering to give up, and so forth.

It’s important to say that I don’t believe this desire is itself a problem. Tina Rasmussen calls it the enlightenment drive, a natural human impulse that appears at different levels of intensity. Mine, if you cannot tell, was on the far end of the spectrum, about as far as a non-monastic with my particular personality and problems could go, I’d reckon.

The trouble, obviously, was that my addiction had followed me onto the spiritual path. I’d begun to use enlightenment like the promise of a drug: once I get there, my problems will go away. It was the same logic I used when I would go score in the Tenderloin, telling myself I would deal with the impending doom of withdrawal and mountain of debt another day.

Fortunately, I was surrounded by good teachers, a loving partner who does not take my bullshit, and men’s groups that kept me honest about how I was actually living day to day. After a particular meditation shift, when my experience became nondual, the usual boundary between me and the rest of the world thinned. From that open space, I could see that my addiction had gone all the way down into thought itself.

At the most subtle levels, I had been compulsively using thinking to step outside direct experience and assess whether I was having the right experience. Was the sense of being a separate self really gone? Would the shift last? Had I finally arrived? Even after tasting freedom directly, I was still trying to think my way into certainty about whether I was free.

“Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.”

—Suzuki Roshi

This quote is legendary because it exposes the absurdity of trying to determine whether a dream character is awake. For a while, I enjoyed geeking out on maps of enlightenment. They helped me understand my experience, and the curiosity was only natural. I had spent a dozen years marinating in hustle culture, so it was also only natural that I would turn such maps into a measuring stick.

But who, exactly, was doing all this measuring? The closer I looked, the more dreamlike Alex became, as though he were a wispy cluster of ideas and memories held together by thought.

Suzuki Roshi’s line also makes a matter-of-fact point: the spiritual path, the dharma, is much bigger than a personal improvement project. It concerns how we meet and participate in this beautiful, occasionally terrifying situation of being alive. So, much like purpose, I no longer find enlightenment particularly interesting as a question.

These days, I am much more interested in my actions, whether they are wise and guided and bring more kindness into the world. The new way of thinking takes care of itself. Because apparently, the men in AA had already given me the advanced teaching: do the next right thing.

If you want some help acting your way into a new way of thinking, that is what we’ll be doing in the founding cohort of Break Your Addiction to Overthinking.

Over four weeks, we’ll establish a daily practice through two live sessions each week, one-on-one time with me, a much-needed digital reset, and a very sweet crew for community and accountability.

We begin on September 8, less than two weeks from now. This is the only time I’ll offer the course this year.

Come practice with us

Still have questions? Join my free Q&A next Wednesday, September 2, at 10am PT.

I told him, yeah, of course. I’d been writing about it for years, somewhere at the intersection of what I call “modern addiction” and waking up, which, in my view, are the same project. Yet, combing back through my archive, I realized that for a reader to get the full four-dimensional view of what I’ve been on about, they’d have to read, at a minimum, five of my essays.

So I decided to plant my stake in the ground. I’d been feeling less inspired to write, but figured I’d take one good run at it, if for no other reason than to give Tom an approximate answer. I poured an almost unreasonable amount of effort into the piece and, much to my surprise, it became the most-read thing I’ve ever published. The follow-up went viral, too, and together they’ve now been read hundreds of thousands of times.

Across the hundreds of replies—and several workshops—the same bell kept ringing at the end of class: “Okay, Alex, but how do we keep doing this?” At a certain point, building a course just began to feel… obvious. And good.

Today, I’m opening enrollment for the founding cohort of Break Your Addiction to Overthinking.

Come practice with us

It’s a four-week live course to help you get out of your head and back into what matters to you in your life. It’s run in partnership with Aurora, the nonprofit led by my very wise friend John Howard. We start on September 8.

The essays aren’t going anywhere. I’ve already shared most of the ideas and practices behind the course for free, and I’ll keep doing that. You do not need to take a course to begin changing your relationship with overthinking.

But the mind is remarkably good at grabbing onto a liberating idea, filing it under interesting things I’ve come across, and carrying on exactly as before. For the insight to take root, you have to practice it. Optimally with other people.

This year’s workshops showed me how quickly this can click with a group, and how much fun it can be. And having fun is important, because the last thing an overthinker needs is another grim self-improvement project. But as each workshop ended, I couldn’t help feeling that we had only scratched the surface. Four weeks gives us time to go further and lets me work with each person when the practice inevitably brushes up against their particular conditioning, which is usually when they could use some help.

My work has always centered on community, whether in addiction recovery, guiding contemplative practice, or hosting a dialogue or retreat. Groups have changed me more than almost anything else. I believe in spaces of radical honesty, where people get in the habit of doing what they say they are going to do and support each other in sticking with it. That type of accountability is simple, yet unfathomably deep. And for changing a pattern like this, I’ve found it non-negotiable.

At the heart of the course is learning one meta-move that you can begin practicing immediately: catch the overthinking loops, soften the body, smile because noticing is the win, and return to what matters to you.

We’ll learn to stop solving problems that don’t need solving yet, or perhaps at all. And we’ll progress through a ladder of resources beyond thought, including the body, the senses, movement, and a wider field of attention.

We’ll also start with a much-needed reduction of compulsive digital inputs, because no attentional practice has a chance if you spend your day extremely online—which is to say, extremely distracted. So you can also think of this as a refreshing four-week reset. (You’re welcome.)

The course is designed for busy people with full lives. If you’ve never had a contemplative practice, this will help you build one. If you’ve practiced for years but still find yourself tripping over praise, blame, shame, lust—and feeling just how much that can hurt—you’ll have a precise way to work with the loops that have proved meditation-resistant.

The practical aim is singular. You learn to catch yourself mid-spiral and release back into the moment in front of you. Each catch compounds until the grip of overthinking begins to loosen on its own, and conversation, work, creativity, and life become easier to rejoin. You’ll begin to trust that this is a skill you can develop—like facility with chopsticks or pull-ups.

I also believe this kind of attentional agency will only matter more in the AI age. As machines get better at cognition, we’ll need better access to the rest of our intelligence, the uniquely human parts that compulsive thought tends to obscure. The irony is that when we stop overthinking, the thinking we most need gets better.

But I’d be selling you just a fish instead of a fisherman’s fount of knowledge if I said that was the sum of my hopes for you. I’d have this course be a friendly Trojan horse for spiritual practice. Or better put, perhaps, a launching pad. You come to work on overthinking and get a taste of what’s possible. Of what you really are capable of.

If you’re into any of this, I’d love for you to join us.

Come practice with us

If you’ve been blessedly offline, you might have missed that “agency” is the obsession of the hour. Agency, in this context, is something like the opposite of helplessness.

It is the fixation of tech founders, productivity guys, rationalists, and my own spiritually-centric Substack milieu, where the dream is to become an “agentic sage,” the meeting point of high worldly impact and high consciousness. The New York Times has weighed in. and have a book on it out in a couple of weeks, which I’ve pre-ordered and suggest you do too, given the consistent profundity of both their insights.

It’s not hard to see why the word caught on. Culturally, we are coming out of an era focused on the forces that shape us: systems, power, trauma, attachment styles, algorithms, screens, dopamine… take your pick. Much of this was long overdue; rugged individualism had quite a run.

But the corrective pendulum overshot. Somewhere along the way, we went from illuminating our constraints to being defined by them, so fluent in our own conditioning that we can describe our wounds better than we can act inside them.

To further complicate things, or perhaps drive them, we are building machines that can increasingly operate on our behalf. AI “agents” are now pitched as the future of work, taking on more of the tasks that once required human discernment. Agency, in other words, is becoming the central human question of our age: when almost anything can be outsourced, what is ours to do?

To be clear, being able to make what you want happen in the world is a good thing. I say that as someone who once lost much of his functioning to addiction and had to relearn the basics of adult life. So I don’t take agency lightly.

But every kind of agency rests on a single skill you were likely never taught.

To act on the world, you first have to hold an intention over time, through temptation and difficulty, until it becomes something done. Attention is what makes that possible. Without it, even great talent goes unused, and your best intentions remain just ideas.

Before agency becomes a personality type, moral achievement, political argument, spiritual ideal, or a feature we install in machines, there is a prior question:

Can you put your attention where you want it, and keep it there?

I didn’t have a term for this until one of my retreats last year, when I was fumbling to describe the root move behind almost everything I care about: meditation, recovery, somatic psychotherapy, making things, prayer, awakening, even love.

Someone across the circle said, “You mean, like, attentional agency?”

Yes. Exactly. That.

Attentional agency is the most basic freedom you have. It’s what your life is built on.

It’s the only agency you are always in possession of. You can’t reliably control what happens to you. You can’t control the thoughts you think or the emotions you feel—if you could, you’d have stopped worrying long ago, and put blogs like mine out of business. Despite what it seems like from the inside, you aren’t the author of your thoughts. They arrive on their own, like weather patterns.

But you do have a sliver of freedom in where your attention rests, and how tightly you hold it. And thin as it may feel at times, it’s enough, because in the end a life is made of whatever you paid attention to. That sliver is the miracle of individuality, and learning to work that one small margin is, I’ve come to believe, the core project of a conscious existence.

Attention is the most valuable resource you have, and the most hunted.

A surprising amount of a life gets decided in a few seconds of attention. Someone catches your attention at a party, and whether you follow the thread or miss it—because you’re scanning the room or stuck in your head—can determine who’s asleep beside you thirty years from now. Look away from a toddler for the half-second it takes him to reach the street, and the glance that catches him in time might be the most consequential thing you ever do.

You don’t get moments like these back. Whether you’re there for them or not comes down to attention, and attention, unlike luck, can be trained.1

Let’s start with the version of yourself that has almost no attentional agency. Your days pass by in a blur. You wake up telling yourself you’ll finally do the thing, whether it’s a project or a workout or an email, and surface by the afternoon not knowing where the time went. At dinner you’re lost in thoughts about how you’ll never change and fuck, I guess this is just how life is now, as you sit across from your family.

Nothing catastrophic happens, which is kind of the problem. You’ve gotten used to your own intentions dissolving by mid-morning. All your days feel thin.

Now give that same person a little training. The mind still gets pulled into thoughts and distractions, but you notice sooner and come back faster, to presence or to whatever you were just doing. Your days feel more substantial, like you actually lived them. The days feel longer too, in a good way. Your groggy morning intentions convert into actions more easily, and you start gaining the capacity to sustain those actions for longer and longer. This feels amazing. Most of us just want to be able to create.

Best of all, your sustained actions mean you get to accomplish your dreams, which may sound like a New Age infomercial until I remind you that every dream is just several thousand hours of devoted attention.

But none of this can happen if you let yourself be hunted.

You already know what it feels like to be hunted: you open your phone to look one thing up, and twenty minutes later you surface from a YouTube rabbit hole with no memory of choosing any of it. In my case it’s usually a survival dude building an igloo shelter in an Alaskan storm, an MMA knockout reel, or some obscure dharma talk. Unfortunately, the Don Drapers of Madison Avenue were hiring psychologists to engineer this long before Silicon Valley did it for your favorite apps, and we’ve now basically turned it into the business model of our time.

You’ve undoubtedly heard the term attention economy, and how modern life is built to hijack your attention.

And then the even newer trend: a second economy to sell you the cure. Apps that lock you out of your other apps, flip-phones with the internet stripped out, plastic bricks you tap to disable your own device, screen-time dashboards that show you exactly how many hours of your day you lost to scrolling…

We’ve lost our attentional agency, and we’d rather pay for the quick fix than rebuild it.

Algorithms have been training your attention for years, just not in your favor. Fortunately, the human brain is awesomely plastic at any age. The same plasticity they exploit is yours to reclaim.

What follows is the how. It starts with a few core skills and some defense against screens, but it goes deeper than the apps, because the mind was the original doomscroller. As you stay with it, you’ll expend less energy “fighting” distraction, though that’s kinda just the appetizer. In time the practice matures into the agency to rest attention on what you love, and to cultivate a reliable sense of okayness that doesn’t depend on external circumstances.

The practice of rebuilding attentional agency

If attentional agency is putting attention where you want it and keeping it there—so you can create the life you intend—then there are three core skills to train.

This practice is the through-line of much of what I’ve written lately, from freedom from overthinking to waking up the right hemisphere of your brain to choosing the direction your life goes.

Below is the simplest version.

1. Notice when attention is lost, whether it wandered off or was captured.2 You can’t choose where attention goes if you don’t know where it is. Early on, this noticing comes minutes, or even hours, after it’s drifted. So celebrate every catch, because rewarded behavior repeats: the more you celebrate, the sooner you notice, until the gap shrinks to seconds.

2. Rest attention where you choose. And note the word: resting, rather than placing or aiming. Rest gestures at the intended mode of this practice, which is relaxed, unforced, curious, playful. Attention that gets forced is not sustainable, as anyone who has tried to white-knuckle their way through a boring work meeting knows.

3. Return it. Attention will wander off again, because that’s its nature, so the wandering is not a failure of the practice. Bring it back lovingly, as many times as it takes. The nervous system learns the way muscles do, and each return is one more rep. It’s better to think of “keeping attention on its resting place” as returning it there over and over, rather than holding it still.

The three skills above remain throughout. What changes as you practice is what you attend to, which gets subtler as you go, from the pull of the phone in your pocket all the way down to attention itself. We’ll work our way down from here.

But before we do: if this sounds suspiciously like meditation, you’re not wrong. In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the foundational text of yoga, this skill is called dhāraṇā: binding attention to one place. In the Bhagavad Gita, when Arjuna complains that the mind is as hard to control as the wind, Krishna answers that it yields to abhyāsa, which is the practice of returning again and again.3

Even the Buddhist word we typically translate as mindfulness, sati, literally means remembering: remembering to come back. And in 1890, William James, the OG of American psychology, wrote in The Principles of Psychology:

“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”

Humanity has known all this for a very long time. We just happen to be facing attention’s greatest adversary yet.

Watch where your attention goes

The way down starts with the least subtle of attention’s captors: screens and media. Before you can turn inward, you have to play some defense against them, or modernity will happily decide where your attention goes.

This point is much belabored, and I’ve written about it often, from negative media as a drug to the importance of tracking phone pickups, so I won’t repeat myself here.

We begin playing defense with observation. Spend one full day tracking where your attention actually goes, without managing or wrangling it, the way a field biologist watches an animal. What you’ll find will likely align with the research: attention rarely rests in the present moment, and, as the landmark Harvard study dubbed it, “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

If you’d shown me a pie chart of my attention from my old life, the biggest slice would have been labeled “managing how I’m seen,” a respectable name for self-attack.

When you see how often your attention goes somewhere dark, you’ll be tempted to declare war on your own mind. Don’t do this! The war on distraction is itself a distraction. So no fighting yourself. Just notice when attention strays, and gently bring it back.

If you have ADHD, or attention that feels extremely difficult to work with, you can still train this—so please don’t be discouraged. The science of contemplative training for ADHD is still young, but the results are promising, especially when paired with emotional work. And the support out there keeps evolving. Rather than quick fixes, the best of it improves your attentional agency, including my friend’s company Attention Copilot, whose live trainers work alongside you in real time as you work through emotional blocks that arise.4

Oh, and don’t expect the wandering to ever fully stop. A meditation-teacher friend of mine loves to ask the enlightened masters he meets about this, and every single one, he tells me, still gets distracted. I know plenty of accomplished meditators myself, and I kid you not, many are glued to their phones as much as anyone.

This should comfort you and also tell you something important: deep spiritual realization will certainly help with mind-wandering, but it doesn’t guarantee attentional agency in the way I mean.

Rest attention on what you love

The first resting place is the life in front of you. We all know what it feels like to sit across from someone whose attention is divided. Every parent acutely knows the difference between actually being present with your child and being next to them while scrolling your phone, half-listening to a podcast, thinking about work, or doing anything else. Your child can feel it too. That difference, between being looked at and being truly seen, comes down to the quality of attention.

Attention is the unit of love. Whatever has your attention quite literally has your love, whether you mean to give it or not.

(Which is what makes the pie chart from the last section so sobering. It is a map of what I—and maybe you—have been loving.)

So rest it on what’s here. The way in is usually through the senses, whether it’s the warm water on your hands, the sound of the room, or the taste of what you’re eating. The senses only ever happen now.

Then, within what’s here, favor what you love. Attention is an amplifier. If you’re walking with a blister forming on your toe and birdsong overhead, whichever one you attend to becomes the vibe of your morning.

When a raft flips in whitewater, the guide only points toward safety, never at the rocks. A swimmer flooded with cold water and adrenaline cannot process “not that way.” The system only registers a direction, and what you point at, you get more of. This is called point positive, and it applies to whatever you’re trying to build or become. Train your attention as the guide would, gently pointing it toward what’s presently beautiful, loved, or simply safe.

This practice works by accumulation. Each return of attention takes a second and might feel unremarkable, but your default is changing over time. You are training yourself, little by little, to eventually become present without trying. And that’s when ordinary moments become decidedly psychedelic.

Rest attention in fundamental okayness

Underneath the life in front of you, there’s a subtler place to rest your attention, though your brain might resist it. We descend from creatures who survived by assuming every rustle in the grass was a predator, so the brain learned to take in bad news instantly and deeply, while good news barely registers at all.

This is negativity bias, which our media and culture only reinforce. The brain, as the neuropsychologist Rick Hanson describes it, is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones. A threat sticks the moment it touches you. An ordinary pleasure slides off within seconds, unless you deliberately hold it.

But! Even though the brain is wired for survival, we are, at our essence, good. Better than good, actually. Tibetan Buddhism calls this basic goodness, the teaching that beneath all the threat detection, our fundamental nature remains untouched.

Countering the negativity bias and rewiring the system toward that goodness is the deeper half of attentional agency.

So, when something is even mildly good, hold it. Whether the warmth of your morning coffee, clean sheets, your kid squealing as he rides his scooter, or the surge in your chest when your team scores, rest attention there for a breath or three and let it register.

Ask yourself, as I’ve suggested before: am I okay, deep down? If there’s even a pixel of a yes, savor it. Returning attention to that basic okayness, over and over, retrains the whole system toward safety, until the okayness is no longer something you have to look for. It becomes the substrate of your life.5

The source of attention itself

Training attentional agency starts with objects, which give your attention something to hold. But as we’ve progressed, the resting places have been getting subtler. Even though you can direct attention at it, the okayness of the last section is not, technically speaking, an object. It’s more of a meta-somatic felt sense, something closer to awareness, consciousness, or being.6

And attention itself is not an object either. You can’t look at it the way you look at a thought, because it is the looking. So the final stage of the practice evolves into a natural inquiry: what is the source of attention?

Don’t answer with a thought. Look. Feel. Sense.

Or relax the focus altogether: let attention go wide open, wider than any object, and notice what’s left holding the entirety of your experience.

Either way, you won’t find anyone. Look for the source and there’s just attention, still moving to your to-do list, your thoughts, a sound, more thoughts, back again, with no one behind the spotlight running the show. Go wide and there’s no one at the center of the openness either.

One of the unsettling dharmic realities is that the “agent” of attention is a story added after the fact. I used to roll my eyes at a certain kind of New Age teacher waxing about the light of consciousness. But the more I live, the more I become a caricature of myself, turning into all the things I used to mock, so please trust me when I tell you that attention is, indeed, something akin to light. Rest attention in its own source and it becomes the space everything appears in, including you.

Which brings us to a fourth capacity, one I haven’t mentioned until now:

Letting go.

I didn’t want to muddy the waters with this earlier because it isn’t something you do, but stop doing. It’s also most effective once you’ve trained some stability of attention, which is why most meditative paths teach concentration before letting go. So don’t necessarily skip ahead.

Remember how you can’t control the moment of noticing, how the mind moves from lost to found all on its own? That goes all the way down. The same is true of resting and returning, even of the choice to point attention toward what you love and want to create. It all happens by itself, the way you breathe in your sleep. So eventually, you stop trying to do what is already happening. You simply let go.

Simone Weil famously wrote that attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. Her word for attention was attente: waiting. Meaning, not straining toward anything, definitely not seeking anything, but suspending thought, leaving the mind open and the spirit ready to receive. Attention this pure is self-emptying; the “I” vacates the premises in surrender to something bigger. In other words, attentional agency taken to its height becomes a devotional offering, with no one doing the offering.

Despite many years of practice, my attention still creeps toward work (this essay included), even when my partner and son are right in front of me. The grooves of conditioning run deep. But when I stop trying to manage my attention and let go, it finds its way back to them. This is the edge of attentional agency for me: trusting my attention to return to what I cherish most instead of forcing it back. That trust is my moment-to-moment prayer. As I’m continually reminded, the universe is a better agent than I am.

If you want to train this kind of attentional agency alongside others, enrollment is now open for the founding cohort of Break Your Addiction to Overthinking. It’s a four-week live course, and we begin September 8.

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On Thursday evening, your boss texts you. “Can you come into the office tomorrow for a bit, 9:30am?” You do your best to respond casually.

“Of course, see you then.”

Inside, you are not casual. Your stomach has turned liquid. Why does she want you in on Friday, your WFH day? Your standing 1:1s are on Tuesdays.

You start gaming out scenarios, and they all end the same—termination. There could be no other reason. Makes sense, do it before the weekend… Should have sent that deliverable earlier, shouldn’t have taken that last PTO… should, shouldn’t, rinse and repeat.

You barely sleep. Your melatonin mocks you. By 3am, you’ve given up and you’re on LinkedIn, drafting responses to recruiters from a year ago.

Finally, blessedly—cursedly—you sit across your boss’s desk, doing your damnedest to be like that one situationship who always let you down: studied nonchalance.

“So,” she closes her laptop.

Here it comes.

“Paul resigned. Definitely not alcoholism.” Did she just wink? “He was about to be promoted to director.”

You nod. You can feel your pulse in your neck.

“Now, we think it should be you. I made the case with leadership, they agreed. Are you up for it?”

“Yes—yeah, absolutely… Thank you.”

The rest of the meeting passes in a blur. You walk out grinning. You reach the elevator. The doors open, close. You suddenly feel silly.

Why did I lose a night of sleep over this? Why did I scroll LinkedIn like a banshee on blow? What the hell is wrong with me?

And then the doozy: Wait. Director? That’s a totally different job. I’m already a stress case. They’re gonna realize I’m out of my depth. How could they not?

The spiraling thoughts follow you, and by the time you’re on the train home, you’re cursing your promotion.

And on and on it goes…

***

The fucked up part is that this passes as completely normal. If you’ve been alive in a body in modern society over the last decade, you’ve almost certainly been there. You probably vented about it to friends over lunch and moved on, not realizing the boss text just turned up the volume on what’s already the default state of being for you, and nearly everyone else: a state of relentless, compulsive thinking.

It hurts more than we allow ourselves to notice. I believe it’s the subtlest addiction of them all.

A couple months ago, I published an essay distilling my core thesis on this: addiction has become an organizing force of modern life, and if you follow it all the way down, past the substances and the screens, you arrive here: at thinking itself.

Much to my surprise, it went viral—read by over 90,000 people, hundreds of whom wrote to me about migraine relief, OCD softening, even long-time meditators reporting breakthroughs. I suspect it resonated in part because more of us, watching the world seemingly unravel, are finally ready to see the pattern in ourselves.

I also had some standing to make the claim. I’m a survivor of a multi-substance addiction that nearly killed me, and crawling out of it, I found that the narcotic chemicals, and later the phone, were never the final boss.

Thinking was the final boss.

When I got sober, I was confronted with what I’d been medicating: a crushing, ambient anxiety. I’d built a career on public speaking, only to find I couldn’t get through a team meeting without a mild panic attack. The voice in my head was merciless. I appraised myself in every room, judged everyone else in it, micro-adjusted my personality to seem bigger than I was, and hyper-analyzed every way I was failing to live up to my potential. And the whole time, I was waiting for people to realize I was a fraud.

It took years, and more practice across more traditions and modalities than I’ll bore you with here, to learn how to unhook from my thoughts. But now—and I promise I’m aware of how all of this will sound—overthinking still happens, it just releases on its own. I’m no longer a prisoner to the voice in my head, which means I no longer need to formally meditate to feel present. An ordinary moment, like re-writing this paragraph on a loud, cross-country flight, goes deeper than the best sits did from my decade of try-hard meditation.

More of my waking hours pass in something like a tuned-in flow state, what athletes call the zone. I’ve learned to trust spontaneity, so I don’t have to rehearse what I’m going to say. What comes out is better, like it’s arriving from somewhere much more creative and intelligent than the little me. I can wait for inspiration instead of grinding for it, although I’m more forgetful than I used to be, which feels like a fair trade. And it’s left me with a higher baseline of wellbeing than I thought was possible, especially for a formerly neurotic guy like me.

In the years since this shift, I’ve worked with all kinds of people on it—in one-on-one somatic sessions, addiction programs, men’s groups, and with founders who can build nine-figure companies yet struggle to rest their minds for five minutes on vacation. Whatever the presenting problem, the engine is always the same.

Overthinking is the signature state of the modern mind.

We’ve become a left-hemisphere culture, each of us under more cognitive load than any humans throughout all of history, drowning in information, endless choices, faux connection, and an attention economy literally (literally!) designed to distract us.

But it isn’t only modernity. Our minds evolved as threat-detection machines. We are descendants of apes, middle-of-the-food-chain creatures who had to scan the savanna for predators, track who in the tribe was friend and foe, and plan the day’s hunt. That physically and socially oriented software kept us alive. But now most of us live in conditions of relative comfort, ironically barraged with a digital onslaught of synthetic threats that the mind reads as predators all the same. And, to be fair, some of them are.

The problem is that most of us, monks aside, were never given the training to update our software. So the mind never stops scanning for threats or something to fix. The result is the daily, whirring thought-tornadoes most of us have come to mistake for our selves.

Can’t stay present when the people you love are right in front of you? You’re just spacey, always have been. Lying awake after googling a symptom and landing on the worst possible diagnosis? You’re just a worrier, like your grandmother. Leaving a party and auditing every conversation on the drive home until it calcifies into proof you’re unlovable? You’re just self-aware. Highly sensitive.

Freedom from the voice in your head is a trainable skill.

What if you could change your relationship with your mind so it became a wonderfully useful tool you can pick up and set down? What if, when your boss texts you on Thursday night, you could notice a completely normal pulse of fear without being defined by it, and then the spiral that follows just… doesn’t? And when the good news comes the next day, you’d just be like, oh wow, sick.

Look at our opening scene again, a person called into the office by their boss. Run it through a strictly psychological lens, and you’ll find performance anxiety, rumination, imposter syndrome, early-attachment stuff, dorsal collapse alternating with sympathetic mobilization, a punitive superego in full song, late-capitalist precarity panic, existential dread—and that’s just the surface. You could spend years in therapy on any one of them.

But what if all of those are downstream from one root cause? What if you don’t have to untangle each strand—you could just pull the whole thing out at the root?

This is the promise that spiritual traditions offer. Compulsive thinking is the mechanism, and what it feeds is something even more fundamental: a case of mistaken identity, the lifelong assumption that the thoughts appearing in your head are you. Truly seeing this, not just understanding it intellectually, produces the kind of experience that makes people want to scream from the rooftops, or, in better hands, write Zen poetry. And frankly, the relief this offers is still undersold.

Spiritual traditions correctly point to what becomes available when you loosen the grip on the thinking mind and rest in something vaster. The trouble is they were built for a life almost none of us live: full immersion, ethical containers, community, devotion to the sacred as the orienting axis. Strip that away, sell it as McMindfulness or distill it to “just see through the false self,” and you fall into intellectualization and spiritual bypassing—the look of insight on a nervous system that never changed.

Modern psychological practice often works the symptoms—reframe your catastrophic thoughts, medicate your anxiety, do some box breathing—and it can genuinely help, for a time. But it has the opposite problem, skipping the root cause entirely. You can do CBT for years and still end up at 3 a.m. drafting LinkedIn responses to recruiters.

You need tools made for someone with a smartphone and seven unmuted group chats.

Which is to say, you need practical, contemplative tools designed to change your relationship with overthinking.

This begins with healing a body running on chronic activation. Annoyingly, overthinking almost always protects you from feeling something uncomfortable, kind of like how a fever fights off an infection. Take the protagonist of our opening scene. He was thinking his way through his problem rather than simply allowing himself to feel the stress, fear, shame, and helplessness it produced in his body.

A nervous system held in low-grade threat has no real shot at transcendence, which is why somatic psychology is non-negotiable: to settle the body into enough safety that the mind can let go of its watch.

And, perhaps most overlooked in this conversation, is the wisdom of addiction recovery. If we are all subject to addiction today—and recognizing this, fittingly, is the first step—you stand to benefit from the principles of recovery: the willingness to face the problem squarely, the radical ownership of your part in it, and the move toward action and service before you feel “fully healed.” Especially in the AI age, when the temptation to outsource every difficulty grows by the month.

What follows is a guide for freeing yourself from compulsive thinking that weaves what I’ve found most helpful from addiction recovery, somatic psychology, and contemplative practice.

It’s presented roughly in that order, with each section building on the previous one, opening toward an awareness much larger than thought.

Dr. Anna Lembke’s research on dopamine and addiction suggests it takes about four weeks to reset the brain’s reward pathways—and meditation research finds neural changes on a similar timeline. So give these practices a month of honest effort, and you should, mercifully, feel the difference. And if you don’t, I’d genuinely like to know.

The cure for your thinking addiction: a guide

The unsexy part (aka the truth)

The majority of people, when they first hear my addicted-to-thinking frame, say something like oh my god, that’s *so* me—and then go right on doing what they were doing. The thinking mind that has been running the show for thirty or seventy years is not interested in being deposed by a clever Substack. It will absorb it, file it under interesting things I’ve read… and continue.

For this to work, you have to be willing to admit you have a thinking problem. To say, “compulsive thinking runs my life, it hurts me, and I will no longer pretend it doesn’t.” Which won’t be too hard for most folks to say, because overthinking is the most relatable thing in the world. That, and the small horror of replying ‘you too!’ to a waiter who just said ‘enjoy your meal.’

So the admission has to land somewhere lower, and deeper, than the head. You have to viscerally feel it, to the point where something in you says: yes, this is real, and I want out.

Ask yourself: Do I actually want to be free of this, or do I just want to keep reading about being free of this? And most operatively, am I willing to work on it?

Count the cost

Addiction is a two-headed devil, made of compulsivity and consequences: the behavior you can’t seem to stop, and what that behavior costs you. And because the compulsive part runs unconsciously, the way in is through the other head—you have to look closely at the negative consequences in your life.

If you agreed in the last section that you’re willing to work on this, reflect honestly. And if you can, write about it. What has compulsive thinking cost you? Sleep, for one. Dinners without tasting the food. Loved ones who felt your absence when you were sitting right in front of them. That thing you wanted to do or build or say that your inner committee of overthinkers shot down before you even gave yourself a chance.

I might even be so bold as to suggest that compulsive thinking has been the root of all your problems in life. Well—maybe not all your problems. The grocery store indeed ran out of your favorite oat milk. Tariffs, apparently. But the ten-minute internal monologue you ran about it? That part was you, and it was optional.1 And if you can feel the truth of that, even partially, radical change becomes possible.

Cut the inputs

Just like it is impossibly difficult to get sober if you hang out at a bar all day, you have virtually no chance of entering a new relationship with thinking if you are, as the kids say, extremely online. Screens are the ultimate pacifier, and most of us are sucking on one for five or more hours a day.

The most recent numbers put the average American at around 205 phone pickups per day—basically once every five minutes you’re awake—and for millennials it’s closer to 324. Eighty percent of us check the phone within ten minutes of waking up.

We are not the same animal we were two decades ago, and we will spend the rest of our lives—and our children’s lives—reckoning with what the smartphone era is costing us as embodied beings.

Most of us know all of this already, yet we are still massively underreacting. Reaching for the phone has become a reflex, like flinching from a hot stove. Neurons that fire together wire together, so every rep lays the groove a little deeper, until reaching becomes the path of least resistance and not-feeling becomes your default. As long as the phone is in your hand at every uncomfortable moment, the capacity to unhook from thought and find the more wondrous part of you never gets a chance to grow.

More sinisterly, the phone also creates more of the discomfort it then relieves. Maybe you open it to numb a dull moment, but ten minutes later, you put the phone down in disgust. This is the oldest move in the dealer’s playbook: get ’em dope sick, then sell ’em the cure.

You must reduce your digital inputs to heal your brain and start feeling your life. I mean it. Below are the practices that worked for me, treating the phone the way you’d treat any addictive substance.

Humor me for just one month, and everything you’re muting will be exactly as unhinged when you return.

As the body stops bracing for the next hit, the mind will follow.

Get clear on what you want

Before you write this off as all too dreary a business, let me remind you why we are doing this.

In my most recent essay, I described how easily most of us can list the things we don’t want in life, and how much harder it is to define what we do. Desiring to stop overthinking is solidly in the “don’t-want” column. Which is fine, but it’s not a clear direction to move in. Change goes faster—and easier—when you have something to walk towards, whether that’s love, truth, aliveness, connection, awakening, whatever calls you.

Recovery dubs this The Promises: keep doing the work, live with integrity, and your life will get better than you can imagine, on life’s terms.2 The spiritual traditions promise even more on the other side of awakening. That is, on the other side of the small self, something vast, something free, something loving and beautiful.

To get a taste of this, pay close attention to what comes up for you as you reflect on one of my favorite psychoactive prompts:

If you had infinite money, no fear, and didn’t need recognition, what would you do? What would you create?

Take a few minutes to write down some ideas.

Spot the difference between a thought and a thinking spiral

If you allowed yourself a moment with the prompt above, you probably noticed two things happen in close succession. First, a thought arrived—a word, phrase, idea, or image, something that just poofed into being, unbidden. And then, almost immediately, a string of thoughts about that first thought arose. These are often quick to analyze and quicker to doubt. They love to bully and dismiss. Well, that’s not realistic… I don’t have the time… I don’t have the money… What if, what if… I fail.

The point of all this is not to go to war with your mind or make analytical thinking the enemy (you’d lose; you’ve already lost the moment you start fighting). But learning to tell these two apart—thoughts v. compulsive thinking—becomes one of the most crucial skills available to you.3

Compulsive thinking is thoughts about thoughts, running in an unaware loop: ruminating on the past, fantasizing about the future, rehashing arguments, catastrophizing, prosecuting yourself for old wounds, etc. It’s the ego at work, contracting you into a small sense of self and bracing against something uncomfortable in the body.

Thoughts arise and pass on their own. They are not you. They are organic bursts of literal energy. They can be of anything: arbitrary image, dark impulse, poignant memory, liberating truth. But when you’re quiet and listening—and lucky—they arrive from Source as inspiration, creativity, insight, and truth.

It’s the difference between the effortless wisdom of epiphany and the drudgery of cogitation.

From here on out, start paying close attention to the thoughts that arrive on their own, especially the ones that energize you, that feel like inspiration, like primal intelligence moving through you.

Catching yourself is the goal, and you need to celebrate it

You’ll also notice, far more often, the other kind: the moment you realize you’ve been lost in a thinking spiral for the last three minutes… or three hours.

Oftentimes this realization comes with a flash of disgust. And then even more self-critical thoughts about why you got lost thinking, yet again. But the nature of compulsive thinking is that it’s unconscious—it happens outside of your conscious control. When it comes to attention, there are really only two modes: unaware and aware. Just like the exact moment you fall asleep is out of your control, slipping into a thought spiral is too. And so is the moment you “wake up” from it.

So what you’re going to start doing is celebrating each time you catch yourself. I cannot stress enough how important this is: when it comes to lasting habit change, most people too readily bypass their reward mechanism—and the reward is what truly drives the change. It’s also what keeps you going to the four-week mark, when habits finally start to stick.

Every time you catch yourself lost in a spiral: pause… then celebrate it! Put a literal smile on your face, your whole body. When the negative thought shows up—ugh, why did I get lost again—answer it with good job for catching it! Proverbially pat yourself on the back. Lean into the performative element, the fake-it-till-you-make-it of it. This celebration is what trains your system to notice more moments of being lost, priming you to be aware more often than unaware.

Relax your brain

You can make incredible progress simply by catching yourself lost in thought as you move through your day. And if you want to take this further, extend the pause. After you catch and celebrate, instead of snapping back to whatever you were doing, let the moment open and soften the body.

I’ve written before about dropping attention down to the soles of the feet. Releasing the unconscious ass-clench, if you’re anything like me.

But please do not forget the one place it would seem most obvious to relax: the head. Open and release the jaw, unfurrow the brow, soften the small muscles around the corners of your eyes, and let the scalp loosen. And then, one level deeper, relax the brain itself.4 Now, there are no muscles in your brain, but since most Westerners feel like thoughts arise somewhere in the head, overthinking has the distinct texture of mental tension, a contraction. The anatomy may be metaphorical, but the felt sense is absolutely real. And going after it works.

So when you catch yourself overthinking, relax all the muscles around your skull, then let that softening sink inward. Michael Taft, my favorite meditation teacher, has a prompt for this exactly: relax the core of your mind. It’s worth practicing throughout the day, too. The more you relax, the more you can open to feeling.

Let the animal in you finish feeling

What modern life has done, with its steady drip of alarms from screens, is constantly fire activation without offering a way to complete it. The body braces and stays braced. The mind, sensing the unfinished business, takes over and manufactures a story to make sense of the unease.5

But the core observation from Peter Levine and somatic psychotherapy is that the nervous system needs to complete the cycles of activation, response, discharge, and return to rest.

So you need to learn to reach into the body. Before the mind turns a sensation into a story, there’s a brief moment of pure felt tone, whether the experience is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. The early Buddhists called it vedanā, and the practice is to stay with the sensation in that moment, before craving or aversion grabs it and starts building a story around it.

This is the heart of what’s called somatic tracking: you notice something arising in the body, and instead of going up into the head to figure out what it means, you bring your attention directly toward it with curiosity.6 This is why I’ve reluctantly become the ‘where do you feel that in your body?’ guy, a question I used to find insufferable, yet which remains undefeated.

And curiosity is the active ingredient. Approaching a sensation with genuine interest rather than fear is how you signal to the nervous system that it’s safe, that there’s nothing here you need to flee, and that felt safety is what finally lets the braced activation discharge.

So you stay there—gently and lovingly—as long as you can. Notice where it’s located, near the skin or deeper in, its shape and size, whether it’s still or whether it’s moving. The one rule is no agenda: the moment curiously tracking the feeling in your body becomes a mechanism to banish that feeling, you’ve snuck aversion through the back door. The body reads it as one more attempt to flee.

Given attention without agenda, the body knows how to complete its own cycles and heals itself. The psyche works the same, once you stop interfering. You must let the animal finish feeling.

There’s nothing to do here

To help you get out of your own way, I’ll hand you to my favorite instruction from Loch Kelly, a meditation teacher: relax the problem-solver.

The thinking mind is a problem-solving organ. It often functions like a manager: the part of you whose job it is to anticipate, plan, control, and prevent the bad thing from happening. It is tremendously good at its job, which is why it got promoted. And like any overworked manager, it cannot remember a time when it was not on duty.

So you ask it, coaxingly, to take a break. Lovingly suggest it take its hands off the tiller for a little while. And then, with the manager relaxed even slightly, you sit with this question for five, ten, thirty minutes:

What is here, right here, right now, when there is no problem to solve?

Don’t strain for an answer (there isn’t one). The trick is to stay in a mode of open-ended receptivity rather than trying to get something right. Just notice what is present: your breath, your breathing, the sounds of the room, the weight of your body, the smell of the passing dust…

The manager will keep coming back to solve problems, and when it does, you let it. Then you relax again. You keep reminding your whole system that there is no problem to solve right now. There’s no tiger.

Whose voice is it?

The voice in your head sounds exactly like you, which is unfortunate, because if it sounded like anyone else, you would have stopped listening to it years ago. (Or maybe checked in at a psych ward.) Instead, because it sounds exactly like you, the assumption that it is you goes unexamined, sometimes for decades.

Catching that assumption and questioning it lies at the core of contemplative practice. Sit for a moment and listen for the next thought to arrive. When it comes—and it will, very soon, almost certainly in a familiar voice—notice that something in you registered it as a thought. Something received it. That receiver, or the awareness of it, was not the thought itself. The awareness was present before the thought arrived and will be present after it passes.

If you can hear the voice in your head, you must be some-thing other than the voice.7 What noticing this allows, over time, is for the voice to become something you hear without engaging. The voice does not have to be obeyed or defended, or even answered. It is mental chatter, arising in the field of awareness the way sounds arise in the field of hearing. It can be quite helpful to imagine your thoughts as a radio playing in a room of someone else’s house, nothing to do with you.8

Rest assured, the manager-self will not like this. The moment you start noticing the voice as just one stream among many, more voices will arrive to defend its authority. Am I doing this right? This feels weird? Who am I if I am not these thoughts? All of that is more chatter, made of the same stuff. You let it arrive, you notice it, and you keep recognizing.

What you realize, the more often you do this, is that identifying with the voice has been the central act of forgetting your larger self.

Zoom out

One of the most reliable ways to remember you are much bigger than your thoughts is to literally zoom out. Instead of focusing on anything in particular, you relax the sense of focus itself. Wherever you are, let attention soften and widen. Notice the entire visual field, miraculously appearing in front of you. The room, the furniture, the view out the windows… then notice sounds arriving on their own, without any effort from you.

Welcome all of it: sensations, sights, sounds, subtle energies you can’t describe, the vibratory nature of experience. When the mind contracts onto some singular point, relax again and let attention go wide. Never strain to open further, because you’re not actually opening anything; the vastness is already present, simply waiting to be noticed.

Now, from this soft and expanded attention, notice your thoughts. They are the tiniest sliver of what you’re experiencing, and arising and passing, no different than anything else that comes and goes.

One of the keys to unwinding overthinking is finding the other parts of your experience that are more interesting than your thoughts.

The zoomed-out view is full of excellent candidates, whether your sensate experience, a general felt sense of light or beauty, the physical space experience happens in, or the sheer miracle of any of it appearing. When you’re hooked, a thought feels like the whole of reality. Train your attention to zoom out and lose itself in whatever doorway beckons your curiosity.

Somewhere to rest that no thought can reach

Countless thoughts have already come and passed for you today. Where are they now? Try to find any one of the old ones and notice that they’re gone, which is what the Zen masters mean when they say thoughts leave no trace, like writing your name with your finger on the surface of a pond.

Now notice what remains untouched. Up to this point, we’ve explored it a few different ways: what’s present when you relax the problem-solver, the receiver behind the voice, the awareness you zoom out into. The simplest word, and my favorite for it, is Being. It’s the same presence that was there when you were a little child running at the playground, the same awareness that looks in the mirror and doesn’t feel any older, the one part of you that’s never been impacted by anything that’s ever happened to you, that cannot be improved and cannot be diminished.

Pause and relax into it now. Go underneath the thoughts, and get curious about the bare, unmistakable sense that you simply exist, this always-on awareness that never turns off. Sink into it the way a stone sinks to the bottom of a lake.

The yogic traditions I came up in have a Sanskrit word for this: sat-chit-ananda; being, consciousness, bliss. Meaning, it doesn’t just feel neutral to rest here. There’s a bliss to simply being, a fundamental okayness underneath everything, and learning to trust that reorganized my life. What helped me most was taking the mystics at their word: that this is the most ordinary thing in the world, and that we all have access to it, right now, wherever we are.

Become more interested in this than in the fluctuations of the thinking mind, and identity itself begins to shift, since Being is not separate from thinking. You could even say it gives rise to thinking, so any time you notice a thought, you can let it dissolve back into Being, the way it came.

Rest there as often as you like.

A larger life awaits

If you’ve stayed with me this far (bless your heart), the whole thing might feel like a lot. But it’s actually rather simple, so simple it can feel very fucking difficult. Like getting sober, the first days of detoxing your mind are the hardest, and you’ll likely feel withdrawal.

But the four-week window is real. Even the most deep-seated habits can transform in that period, and as you practice this, the change starts to build on itself. It becomes fun rather than work, and you find yourself finally swimming with the current.

On a practical level, there will be another Thursday night. A text will come again, whether from your boss, your ex, or, god forbid, your kid’s school. The difference is that the fear just moves through you now, and you trust yourself to meet the moment, with capacity to spare for our batshit world.

Gurdjieff said you cannot get out of a prison you don’t know you’re in. I spent most of my life in one without the faintest idea, mistaking my hyperanalytic mind for strength, sometimes even genius. As we move deeper into the AI age, I’ve come to believe that unhooking from thought, and growing the intuitive human capacities that live beneath it, is the most important skill any of us can develop. There’s also nothing that feels better than getting free of the compulsion.

And yet nearly all of us are still in the cell, narrating our way through the one life we get, so utterly convinced the voice is us that we never think to question it. The trippiest part, the part that took me a decade and nearly cost me my life to learn, is that the door was open the whole time.

I’d love to tell you I walked out in a blaze of enlightenment. I’ve had my breakthroughs, proper before-and-after shifts. But none of them are what freed me from overthinking. Mostly I just kept noticing the door, forgetting it was open, and noticing it again, for years. The secret is the noticing compounds.

And the result is like taking Advil for a headache; you don’t know exactly when, but at some point it’s just gone. One day you realize you’ve been free for a while without registering it, and the old story, the one that narrates nonstop about you being small and worthless, starts to feel like a melodramatic movie you walked out of. Only by walking out could I step into a life wilder and more beautiful than anything I’d have dared to plan. And you can walk out too.

If you want to keep going, I wrote a practical guide to training attention itself, the skill underneath all of this. Eventually, the practice turns toward what you love and a fundamental okayness beneath whatever happens.

If you want some help turning the ideas in this guide into a practice you stick with, enrollment is open for the founding cohort of Break Your Addiction to Overthinking. It’s a four-week live course, and we begin September 8.

Come practice with us

Essays like this take me 40-50 hours of work. If you got something from it, consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s the best way to directly support my work.

Subscribe now

Or, if you want to contribute in a smaller way, a like or share helps a dude who does what I do.

And special thanks to Erin, Ryan, Zach, Conlan, John, and Grace for reading drafts and making this better.

If you’ve ever been whitewater rafting, you might remember the safety briefing before you hit the rapids. The lead guide, probably a sun-leathered dude in Chacos named Dave, explains what to do if the raft flips and you end up in the water. Look for me, he tells you. I’ll be pointing in a direction. Always swim that way.

You reach the gnarliest section of rapids, the part you paid for. The raft flips. You’re tossed in the river. The life preserver pops you to the surface, but the whitewater is deafening, and you’re disoriented. You don’t have time to think. All you can do is find your guide standing in one of the other rafts, pointing. He’s pointing toward safety. Usually to the shore, but sometimes away from a danger you cannot even see.

What the guide never does is point in the direction you should avoid. He doesn’t gesture at the rocks and shout, “Not there!” And good thing, because under that kind of duress, your brain can’t compute a negative; it will hear “rocks” and swim toward them. So the guide only ever points towards where you need to go.

In outdoorsmen’s lingo, this is called point positive.

And like many elegant concepts from people who spend their lives in moving water, its simplicity hides an enormous depth.

Point positive has an opposite, and it often explains why we feel stuck in life.

Malcolm Ocean, the writer and systems designer, coined a pair of terms I frequently use in my work: awayness and towardsness. They describe two fundamental motivations that shape our lives. Awayness is wanting to move away from something without having a clear destination. Humans are wired with this impulse, but it has a fatal design flaw.

If all you know is what you don’t want, you can move in literally any direction.

On the river, this is how people drown. Away from the rocks could mean toward the falls, and away from the falls could mean into a current that takes you somewhere worse. Every direction feels equally urgent, but none of them feel useful. So you just get carried by whatever current is strongest.

If you start paying attention to how your friends and loved ones talk about what they want, you’ll find that almost all of it is awayness. You’ll hear things like, I don’t want to do this mindless job anymore. I can’t date one more person with no emotional range. I don’t want to be priced out of the economy and made irrelevant by AI. I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Etcetera.

You will hear people trying, with whatever grace they can muster, to stop hurting. But it’s a trap. What you focus on, you get more of.

Point at the rocks long enough and you’ll swim right into them.

Without a direction, you meet your defaults.

So much of our lives are organized around awayness—around just wanting to get away from feeling something—that we default to whatever we were taught to want.

I have, occupationally speaking, a front row seat to this. Someone comes to me wanting out of their job that looks perfect on paper, their marriage, a company they built from nothing, you name it, and they can talk for an hour about all the reasons why they need to go. It’s all awayness. And without a direction from somewhere deeper than conditioning, the result is dissatisfaction, depression, addiction, and alienation. That’s why they show up in my office in the first place.

So when I ask them okay, but what do you want instead, they often stall, and their body language shifts—a tell that they’re encountering the unknown. And this happens so often, applied to virtually every life decision from career to kids, that I’ve started giving people a cheesy exercise: create two columns, what you want and what you don’t want. For the don’t column, people are poets.

The want column, it turns out, is the whole game.

When I first met one of my mentors, before we’d even gotten through introductions, he asked me:

What is your deepest aspiration in this life?

Besides being a hell of a way to start a relationship, the question moved me so deeply that I started asking it of everyone. And most people will just stare at me for a minute, because nobody typically asks this, and then say something like, I don’t know, that’s a damn good question.1

Some will go to the surface: retire early, find their person, start an impactful company, or make enough money to go off-grid and exit the rat race. But a surprising number of people, if you give them a moment, will go straight to the big stuff. They want their lives to be vehicles for Love, Peace, Belonging, Truth, or Freedom. The single words you arrive at if you keep asking what’s underneath your top-level motivation, and underneath that one, and so forth.2

And honestly, you probably don’t need to dig that hard to find yours. If you slow down right now, while reading this, you likely already know what you want on a deeper level, at least partially.

Maybe it’s Love. Or for things to feel a bit more Okay. Maybe there’s one thing you’re struggling with, and you can feel its opposite calling you. Whatever comes up, own it. I cannot stress how important it is to own it, because we all have an allergic tendency to shy away from the things we want most.3

Say you want to make a lot of money and retire early—don’t pretend you don’t because it’s not “spiritual” enough. Instead, ask yourself what’s underneath that desire. If you made your money and retired early, how would you feel? Now, see if you can feel that right now, however much of it is available, and sink into it, or let it wash over every part of you. The feeling, without the story attached, will be something fundamental—one of those single words.

Whatever came up here is your towardsness. Let it take you somewhere.

Just know this: you’ll mistake awayness for towardsness if your motivator is escape.

When I was in the throes of my addiction, my entire life was organized around avoiding the insufferable pain of opiate withdrawal. The cruelest trick of addiction is that it mimics towardsness so convincingly. You have a mission—in my case, I told myself it was peak performance and spiritual transcendence—and you pursue it with incredible urgency. But no matter what you do, the destination ever-elusively recedes. Because the engine is built on escape.4

This is why the most dangerous form of awayness is the one that feels like purpose. You can build an entire career on awayness disguised as purpose and never notice. It’s what drives most of productivity culture, and why so many successful people feel empty at the top.

But the most pervasive form of awayness? The voice inside your head, convincing you it’s always helping.

If you read my last essay on breaking addiction to thinking, you know where this goes. You feel something you’d rather not feel, which could be anything—a tightness in the chest, the particular nausea of having said the “wrong” thing to a friend, a wave of jealousy you thought you had outgrown, the creeping sense that you’re behind at life—and instead of staying with it, you retreat into the safety of your head. Maybe distracting yourself by gaming out scenarios for how to get ahead, or building a case for why you were, obviously, right. Often to the point of obsession.

This is awayness dressed in its Sunday best. Of all the addictions I’ve known, and I’ve known a few, overthinking is the one that hides best. It feels productive. But strip it down and it’s just escape. And escape is not a direction.

A bunch of people reached out to me after that essay, saying some version of, This changed my life, and, I’m working on not thinking so much. I love that, and I want to gently offer: that’s only half the equation.

The other half is having something to move toward, rather than defaulting to overthinking.

So when you catch yourself getting pulled into it, you pause and feel what’s in your body. This is attentional training. You’re not trying to get rid of the thoughts or make them a problem. You’re just trying to stop the impulse to immediately escape them, to let them be there while your attention shifts toward what you actually want.

Practice this enough times, and your nervous system rewires. The engine shifts from escape to intention. You begin to open to the intuitive gifts of the Tao, or whatever you want to call it, slowly attuning to it, until it leads your life.

Fair warning: even the practices designed to train your attention and free you from escape can land you on the left side of the diagram. For years, I meditated with an away orientation without realizing it. I was trying to stop being distracted by obsessive thoughts of self-importance, and I got quite good at it—shifting my state of consciousness into ethereal realms, moving subtle energy in my body, or catching a thought and fleeing into presence. Some of that was genuinely skillful.

But underneath, especially when I was tired or uncomfortable or not feeling “dialed,” there was a rejection of my direct experience—the don’t want column applied to my own bodymind. And that’s a hard thing to catch, because negation dressed up as transcendence can look an awful lot like progress.5

The solution was pointing myself toward a deeper motivation. Each time before I formally meditate, I invoke bodhichitta, which is basically the Buddhist intention to awaken the heart for the benefit of all beings. Sometimes I will say it as per tradition. I’ll often add my own specifics, too—may I be more patient and loving as a partner and father, fiercer and more truthful in how I lead my groups. But most times it’s more of a vague gesture toward awakeness or radiance or, honestly, something I can’t even describe, just a pull toward freedom of the infinite, and that becomes the attractor. It magnetizes everything, becoming the current that carries practice on and off the cushion. And over time, the structural gravity of my life.

This is point positive, applied to consciousness.

Whatever you can clearly intend, consciousness will bend toward.

If you can imagine something—an outcome, a circumstance, a feeling—on a certain level, it already exists. So if you want to point your life toward Peace, Love, Aliveness, Connection, or Healing—you can just… do that. Trust me, it will guide you. And if that sounds like manifestation, that’s because it is, just not the kind you’re used to hearing about.6

Say you point your attention toward Love. Inevitably, you start noticing love in more places, sometimes gaudy and obvious, sometimes subtle. It was always there, the intention just primed you for it. Towardsness, ironically, doesn’t involve constructing anything new. It just changes what you notice. And the more you play with this—and it is play—the more something reaches back.

You discover you can participate in the direction of your life with an ease that would have seemed impossible when you were just reacting to whatever current was strongest.

I used to think the path meant giving things up. Yet the further I go, the more capacity I find to move toward what I want. Because what you actually want from anything is the feeling behind it. Get clear on that, and life tends to meet you halfway.

This is how surrender and agency merge—you go far enough downstream, and you realize you and the current want the same thing. You always did. And there’s your guide, still standing in the raft, zinc-smeared arm extended, pointing. But what he’s pointing at is right where you are.

If you want some help turning toward what matters rather than getting lost in your head, enrollment is now open for the founding cohort of Break Your Addiction to Overthinking. It’s a four-week live course, and we begin September 8.

Come practice with us

If you find value in my writing, the best way to support it is by becoming a paid subscriber. It’s a bet on more ambitious essays like this, and me never needing to post on LinkedIn ever again.

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If there’s been a throughline to my work over the last decade, it’s that addiction gets subtler the further you follow it. First I had to get sober from the obvious “bad” stuff, the narcotic chemicals that nearly killed me. Then I had to reckon with the legal drugs like Twitter, Instagram, PornHub, and yes, The New York Times politics section, which I used to read cover to cover as if it were oxygen. After that came other socially sanctioned drugs I had long mistaken for purely virtuous: achievement, ideology, productivity, optimization, and having a sharp take on everything.

I started calling it “modern addiction” when it became clear that this wasn’t just about me and a few other broken individuals, but a pattern that defines contemporary life. We are, all of us, drawn into dopamine-driven loops that gradually narrow our perspective and agency around whatever helps us avoid pain, a dynamic called reciprocal narrowing.1

What surprised me most, though, was where the road eventually led. If you keep tracing addiction to its root, if you keep asking what engine is driving the meta-engine, you arrive somewhere far more fundamental than heroin or TikTok.

You arrive at the addiction to thinking itself.

We may be the first generation in history rewarded for maintaining a nonstop internal commentary—curating who we are for an imaginary audience, staying informed, and responding in real-time online. Now we’re building machines that can out-think us at literally everything, and the reaction has mostly been to double down… think faster, stay sharper, keep up. Few are asking whether we should instead be strengthening the capacities that machines will never have, the ones that dwell entirely below thought. But when mental activity has become synonymous with intelligence, even maturity, it’s nearly impossible to see that thinking itself might be operating as a dependency.

And yet addiction to thought does not look dramatic. It’s elusively ordinary.

If you’re anything like me, it looks like rehearsing how you will respond to a text from a friend you want to impress, lying in bed replaying something slightly dumb you said six hours ago, pre-adjusting your personality before a work event, or zoning out at dinner while strategizing your next career move as your kid and wife sit right in front of you—and then she asks you what you think, and you nod along, having no fucking clue what she just said.

The tricky part is that none of this looks like addiction. A good therapist might diagnose it as anxiety. Most people, if pressed, will say something like, “that’s just how my brain works,” as if it’s a personality trait. And it passes for being a responsible, informed, “together” adult.

None of this is an indictment of the mind, which is extraordinary and has built civilizations and, on a few occasions, saved my life. I’m very pro-brain. The problem is not that we think, but the compulsive way we think, and the fact that we cannot simply let our minds rest. For most of us, thoughts do not arise and pass as Eckhart Tolle assures us they should. They obsessively loop, sometimes at 2:17 a.m.

And like any addiction, there is a hit. You replay the conversation, and for a brief moment, there’s relief, the feeling that you’re on top of it. In control. But the relief never lasts. The body is still left with whatever sensations you were trying not to feel. The uncertainty returns as discomfort in the body, and the mind reaches again, this time for another thought, sure that one last round of analysis will settle it. And this all happens at the speed of thought, which is to say, instantly, before you realize it’s happened.

Over time, the field of experience narrows until the story narrated, on loop in your head, feels more real, more important, than the miracle of life unfolding directly in front of you.

It took me roughly a decade of enthusiastic self-destruction, followed by an unexpected brush with the Absolute, and then another decade of recovery, including working in the addiction space myself, to realize it’s addiction all the way down.

We change the object, but keep the mechanism.

The object shifts from opiates to Instagram to productivity, but the move is always the same: escape the feeling and reach for the next thing that promises relief. Thinking is just a higher-status version of this. It grants you the feeling of control.

The thing is, the nervous system cannot distinguish whether the object you’re reaching for is a substance or a thought. The underlying physiology remains the same: the body tightens. Next time you catch your thoughts racing, notice what your brow, jaw, shoulders, or belly are doing. Even if it’s subtle, some part of you is bracing.

But once that compulsion to think through everything relaxes, you find there’s something wiser and more effortlessly responsive that’s been running the show. A way of being in the world, amid all the trappings of modernity, that doesn’t revolve around constant internal commentary. And it doesn’t render you dull or passive. If anything, you move through life more spontaneously, more lovingly, more playfully, and, somewhat annoyingly, more effectively.

You trust yourself to respond to the text when it comes, rather than rehearsing it. You let the dumb thing you said six hours ago dissolve without a post-mortem. You walk into the work event without pre-adjusting anything and speak from the core of your being. At dinner, career domination thoughts might still come and go in the distant background, but you’re there, and the people you love can feel it. You start to see that much of what you’d been strategizing can, and does, happen all on its own.

This is, more or less, what every serious contemplative tradition has been describing for thousands of years.

It just took me an embarrassingly long time to actually grok it. During my first hatha yoga teacher training, we did a sutra study with Edwin Bryant, who wrote the definitive Western commentary on the text. We spent an entire day on this one line:

Yoga citta vritti nirodha.

This is Sutra 1.2, the opening salvo of the entire tradition. It means: yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. Everything else—the postures, breathwork, ethical precepts—is just preparation for releasing your grip on mental noise.

The tradition I’ve spent even more time in, Buddhism, basically says the same thing with more mechanical precision. The Pali word for clinging, upādāna, means fuel.2 We keep feeding the fire of thought with our grasping—at feeling good, not feeling bad, being right, and the story of who we think we are. Nirvana means to blow out the flames. The Taoists called it wu wei, effortless action. The Christian mystics spoke of releasement, letting God act through you rather than narrating your way through existence.

Across all cultures, sages have told us that you can set down your compulsive inner commentary and discover that something deeper has been living you all along.

Which raises the obvious question: how do you actually do that?

I took a first pass at this in a previous essay on the shift from left to right-hemisphere dominance. But the addiction frame I’m exploring here goes somewhere different, and I think closer to the root. That piece was about changing how you perceive. This one is about loosening the compulsion that keeps you locked in thought in the first place.

And it can be trained. The time and effort vary, but progress comes faster than you’d think. You can make noticeable headway in ten-minute bouts of practice. You can make serious progress if you commit to thirty-minute sessions and noticing the hook throughout your day. The catch is that the achievement orientation still running modern culture, including most of self-help and spirituality, is the very thing you have to relax here.

Once I understood that this was the mechanism I needed to work on, it took me about two years of devoted practice to reach a life-changing result: thought moved to the background and direct experience moved to the foreground.

Then, something I’d describe as an “auto-release” function became established—where overthinking definitely still happens, but lets go on its own, partly because the discomfort of the thinking loop has become so obvious. In short: it’s reliable access to being “in the zone,” which is a way more creative, fun, and enjoyable mode of existence.

All my prior spiritual practice and training helped, but if someone had pointed this out to me more clearly and earlier, I’m convinced I could have saved myself a great deal of time. Which is a big part of why I’m writing this today.

What follows is the simplest version of what I wish someone had told me.

You can’t think your way out

The most important thing to realize is that you cannot stop thinking. Trying to is counterproductive. The issue is not that thoughts arise, but that you believe they’re yours. A thought shows up, and because it showed up in your head, you assume it’s important, meant for you, and worth following. So you follow it. And by the time you notice, you’re already three thoughts deep.

And like all addictions, this happens compulsively, and it has consequences: you miss what’s more primary in experience, such as your body, the room, or the person right in front of you.

All addictions are intelligent, and the compulsion to think is no different. For many of us, staying in our heads was the safest place to be, especially early on. The nervous system learned that if you can think your way through something, you don’t have to feel it. Thinking became your protector. At the time, it was a smart strategy.

The temptation is to wage war on your own thinking. What helps instead is recognizing, with as much compassion as you can muster, that a part of you has been working overtime to keep you safe. And giving it permission to take a break.

This is also why pop-psychology advice on stopping overthinking often doesn’t work. You can’t override a nervous system response with a mental command. That’s a top-down instruction to a bottom-up problem. The body has to feel safe enough to stop gripping before the mind will let go.

So the first move is to relax the body.

Drop down

The practice begins below the neck. The body is the doorway to training your attention to rest on something, anything, that isn’t thought. Such as, the direct sensation of being alive. It’s especially helpful to let attention move down, down, and then even a little further down. Feel your feet on the ground. My favorite prompt here is to imagine that each sole of your foot has a pair of nostrils, and you are literally breathing from the earth.

A lot of spirituality and self-help talks about focusing attention on the heart, but for most Westerners, the heart is actually too close to the head to quiet mental distractions. Instead, the pelvic bowl is an endlessly rich place to rest attention, breathing the perineum into your chair and expanding that three-dimensional space like an accordion.

Sink downward, as effortlessly as a leaf falling from a tree. The lower you settle, the more the nervous system gets the signal that it’s safe to let go.

Come to your senses

The sense gates are your other doorway, because they are not thinking. When attention inhabits a sense, thinking naturally fades to the background. You can taste this freedom as easily as shifting your focus from reading these words to feeling the sensations in your right hand or noticing what you can hear right now.

Instead of thinking, you simply sense. Ideally with an explorer’s mindset, playing with the underrated joy of bouncing awareness between your faculties of perception. Feel the tips of your toes and heels against the ground; sense the whole body all at once; open into the sounds around you; notice the entirety of the visual field.

A great practice for this is Shinzen Young’s “See Hear Feel,” where you simply note what’s happening—whether you’re seeing, hearing, or feeling—and notice how effortlessly attention moves between them. You immerse yourself in each sense, as fully as possible, for just a few seconds at a time. Part of the revelation is how much is already going on that has nothing to do with thinking.

Thinking is the sixth sense

In Buddhist psychology, thinking is classified as exactly that: the sixth sense. The mind is a sense organ just like the ear or the eye, and thoughts are its objects, the same way sounds are objects of hearing. This frame is radical if you take it at its word. We have a hard time accepting that thinking is just like hearing or seeing. But for a moment, let’s pretend it is.

Can you stop sounds from arising? Can you stop the visual field from appearing? Can you, despite your best efforts, not taste chili when you spoon it in your mouth?

You can’t. And the same applies to thinking.

When thoughts become just another sense, something that just happens like the weather, your identification with them can soften. Loud construction outside your Zoom meeting is annoying, but you don’t believe it says anything about you. Meanwhile, a harsh thought shows up, and suddenly it’s you and all your failures. That is the addictive hook.

It feels like we control those thoughts when, in fact, we do not. And I have a quick way to test that.

Thoughts without a thinker

Get quiet for a moment. Close your eyes and pick a number between 1 and 50. As you do this, pay close attention to how the number appears. Did you think it before it arose? Or did it just appear, the number actually being a complete surprise to you?

The spoiler is that you never chose it. It just appeared. And the more unsettling reality is that this is how all thinking works. Even when it feels like you’re planning what you’re going to think, the thought has already been produced by causes and conditions outside of your awareness. That’s at least how the Buddhists explain it.

I know that even if this little exercise landed for you, the bigger claim—that this is how all thinking works—is harder to believe. And if you really let it in, it can be destabilizing. But if you keep looking, you can’t unsee it: there’s no author behind the thought stream. It’s worth going slow here, and being gentle with yourself, because it pokes at the foundations of identity itself.3

You already know how not to think, which is good news

Most daily actions happen without you thinking through them. Driving is one of the most obvious examples. Your foot adjusts the accelerator and brake as needed, your hands flip the blinkers, and you can swerve from the d-bag who cuts you off before a single thought gets involved.

The same goes for pouring orange juice, cracking eggs, taking a walk, or riding a bike. You even do it half-asleep every night, adjusting the pillow when you’re uncomfortable.4 The body knows how to take care of itself. Athletes train specifically so that thinking drops away and they can dynamically move and respond from somewhere beyond thought. Surfers are deeply in touch with this, attuning to the water and wind and swell until the self disappears and flow takes over.

Thinking can layer on top of these activities afterward and take credit. But the invitation here is to do one mundane task today, and do it with zero internal commentary. Notice that you still function. Notice that you might function better! And notice how fast the narration rushes back to claim ownership, which reveals the depth of the habit.

The key is noticing that you’re aware of doing the task without thinking about it. You practice this over and over, building confidence, gradually handling more complex situations. It’s unreasonably delightful. This is wu wei.

No thought, no problem

This really does go all the way down. The addiction to thinking is, at root, an addiction to wanting things to be different from how they are. The fuel is always some version of: this moment isn’t enough. The machinery of mind grabs a thought, hoping it will resolve the tension. Alas, it never does. So it grabs another, and another, and the body is left holding whatever you were trying not to feel.

But as you get better at relaxing the compulsion to think, a funny thing happens. Without the thought about the experience, there’s no problem.5 When you meet sadness, fear, or frustration without a storyline, they’re just sensations moving through the body. Sometimes it’s brutal. Grief can feel like your chest has been completely hollowed out. But because you’re not numbing out or retreating into your head, you’re feeling more of it, not less. You’re just not adding the story that makes it worse.

The unwinding, if you want to boil it all down, is pretty much one move: notice the loop, pause, feel what’s actually in the body, relax, open to what’s here.6 Or practice one of the above exercises. Repeat until it rewires. And eventually, if you stay with it, the whole practice intuitively collapses into something simpler than words—you just relax, lovingly, into what’s here.

What’s on the other side

When the compulsive loops quiet down, thinking actually gets better. Creative thoughts arise unbidden, with a freshness that the busy mind could have never produced. That’s because the mind was never the problem.

When I sit with coaching clients, free from overthinking, I’m spacious and open-hearted. Some-thing registers what they’re saying without me efforting to process it. Rather than planning my response, I listen from empty space, notice intuitive pings in the body, and wait to see what wants to come out. It takes time to build trust in this, especially when it comes to speaking. But when you do, it changes your relationships in ways I can’t oversell.

The ordinary moments is where it gets exceptionally good. Early in the morning, when Grace and my son are still sleeping, I unload the dishwasher. And it becomes an adventure… How quietly can the plates land? How does the body know to rotate the mug handle inward without being told? The whole organism conspires together to not wake anyone, and I’m kinda just along for the ride, almost stoned on the elegance of my own hands.

Or right now, writing this draft, typing on my keyboard, there’s awareness of everything in the room. From my window, I see sideways rain, a rare sight in the Oakland hills, pounding the sidewalk; the palm trees across the street look like they’re in a hurricane in Florida. My playlist sounds delicious in my ears. A ginger tea is steaming on my desk. And the words just come out, arising from nowhere, appearing on a screen that is just there in front of me. As I type, I’m not strategizing what will come out. But I can still notice when the thought this essay is getting too long shows up. Useful data!

This shift, from being thought-dependent to allowing the source of life to lead, is in the neighborhood of what contemplative traditions call spiritual awakening. I’ve avoided that term until now because I think this process is even more natural and accessible than that, a human birthright beyond any lineage or vocabulary.

But it turns out “awakening” is largely about waking up from being lost in compulsive thought.7 And the depth of it is determined by how thoroughly you’ve stopped trusting thought as your source of reality, and how much you trust the larger field of experience instead. When thinking relaxes its grip, so does the identity built on top of it. And what comes through, in my experience, tends to be intuitive and tremendously kinder than anything I could have thought my way to.

Carl Jung once described addicts as frustrated mystics. I believe that’s true for all of us. We’re all chasing, with increasingly sophisticated tools, relief from the chase itself. At the root of every addiction is a longing for what’s on the other side of thinking. And recovery, all the way down, is a homecoming to this place beyond words.

If you want the how-to, you can read Part II here. It’s a proper guide for unhooking from the voice in your head and stepping into a larger life.

If you want to turn this from an idea into a practice you stick with, enrollment is open for the founding cohort of Break Your Addiction to Overthinking. It’s a four-week live course, and we begin September 8.

Come practice with us

Thanks for reading. Essays like this take me ~30 hours of work and, apparently, a lifetime of practice. If you got something from it, consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s the best way to directly support my work.

Subscribe now

Or, if you want to contribute in a smaller way, a like or share helps a guy who does what I do.

And special thanks to John, Erin, Sam, and Grace for help with this one.

Some names and details have been changed to respect privacy. Most have not.

1^st time

The first time I got high, I was a freshman at a big public high school with open lunch. Two juniors named Spencer and Mike, notable cool dudes and bad boys, took Sam and me to Dmitri’s house that afternoon. Dmitri’s parents, professors at Georgetown, left his townhouse empty during the day, making it the perfect getaway.

We gathered in his backyard. Maryland sky, crisp air. Spencer pulled out his mega bong, his meaty paws twisting the grinder—pack it, light it, toke it, pass it. When it came to me, I took a big, big hit that filled the entirety of my lungs, held it until my chest burned with the effort, and proceeded to cough my guts out, laughing all the while as the smoke billowed out of my mouth and nostrils. My boys lost their shit. Everything became clear and mushy at the same time, each sense turned up past ten while my thoughts turned to honey.

We piled back into Mike’s Jeep. He cranked the music up loud, cheap 12” subwoofers thumping in the trunk as Jurassic 5 rattled the doors. The car bounced our youthful levitating bodies.

Goddamn, did we feel cool.

Sitting later in the back of history class, Dorito-dust caking my fingertips, the room tunneled nicely; it seemed obvious that this—this looseness, this sense that the world was finally arranged correctly—was how things were supposed to feel. Everyone else was working much too hard, missing the point. I, however—I’d somehow stumbled into the next-level operating system I always knew must exist.

4^th time

Three weeks later. Sam, Dmitri, and I were in Rachel B’s basement after smoking a big bowl with the girls, sprawled out on the floor together, laughing and laughing and laughing. Our bodies were tangled in the remains of a Twister game gone… right.

When the munchies hit us hard, we walked a mile to Micky-D’s on Rockville Pike to score some burgers, fries, and, like, ten hot apple pies, the cardboard boxes warming our hands.

Back in the basement, Lizzy giggled uncontrollably on my lap.

Where is it?! she demanded, looking around wildly for her warm apple pie.

I dunno, I said, laughing.

Everyone was dying because everyone but Lizzy could see it—the crumbs in my lap, the other pie sitting right there, not even pretending to be hidden. We were all high out of our fucking minds.

I don’t remember which girl I had a crush on, because I think it was all of them.

213^rd time

I’m in the attic of Vera’s house. She was a senior and I was a junior, and we were having a fling, or some such. Technically, I had a girlfriend. Well, we were on a break. Ross/Rachel sitch. Or I’d talked myself into believing it was fine. Vera had brown hair and a pretty face, the kind of girl who carried herself like she knew things I didn’t.

Take one of these, she said.

What is it?

Percocet. A painkiller. If you chase it with this, it’ll be nice.

She took two pills from her palm and washed them down with a long pull from a bottle of Smirnoff. Then she handed them to me. I followed her lead, feigning the same casualness as I took my first opioids.

The room softened. She climbed on top of me and started kissing me, a lá Francaise, and I tasted the vodka first, then her, then the vodka again. Sharp and sweet on my tongue, and fuck, I’d never felt anything like this. I immediately wanted more.

Not long after, we got into her white Volkswagen Jetta. She asked if I was ready but didn’t wait for an answer: she continued teaching me how to drive a five-speed, patiently correcting me here and there. It felt good to be properly schooled by an older woman—especially on vodka and painkillers. We chased the winding bends behind Rock Creek Park, with no one around, on roads that felt like private swampland, the kind of place you’d joke about burying a body. Or actually bury a body. We played a game, turning the headlights off and driving in the pitch until one of us got too scared. It was always me.

We ended up near an abandoned medical facility near the woods, as creepy as it sounds. She told me the high school lore, how it had once been a loony bin and was now ghostville. It was quiet and eerie, thrilling. We wandered around, moonlight our only witness, talking and sharing, until we found a spot beneath a willow tree. The bottle still between us.

414^th time

We made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in Jandro’s kitchen, laying the magic mushrooms between the bread like banana slices. We ate them standing around the counter, grinning at each other and already laughing in mere anticipation.

The start of Ghost was on, which none of us had seen, and as it played, I proceeded to experience each human emotion in turn, in turn, in turn, like that spinning potter’s wheel Demi works so fiercely, Swayze holding her phantamasgorically from behind… Yeah, that movie was sweet.

Then we went into the backyard. It was fall. Red and yellow leaves. We rolled round on the grass, climbed past the fence just to see what was there, laughing with our whole bodies. Everything was tapped in and full of possibility.

Once inside again, I held something bright red in my hand, staring like it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I thought it was a wild raspberry, ripe and glowing. Then someone said, Alex, you’re bleeding, you’re bleeding, and I looked down and saw that the raspberry was my own blood—a big open cut on my finger from scaling the chain-link fence, stains smeared down the side of my gray lacrosse sweatpants.

But I didn’t care. I just kept laughing.

Later, we piled into my dad’s Toyota Avalon parked in Jandro’s driveway, passing around a fat blunt, windows closed, properly hotboxing, with John Scofield’s jazz band playing loud enough to feel it in our spleens. Jandro had a gal curled up on him like a cat because, at some point, we must have invited girls over. Lester was holding court about guitar tone and drum work, giving a sermon the way only he could, and Jandro and I just kept laughing, choking on smoke bouncing off the windows.

It was perfect. Whatever people spent their lives looking for was already here. I was at home in my body, in the group, in the night. Nothing else needed to happen, because being here was enough. I was enough.

15,423^rd time

Selling weed and LSD will make you popular on a campus full of money and ambition. So will DJ’ing. By then, I was the treasurer of my fraternity at Dartmouth, Alpha Delta, the literal Animal House, and the treasurer of a secret society I won’t name, because otherwise what’s the point? Not a bad outcome for a kid whose parents worked overtime to get him there, always saying education was the one thing no one could ever take away from you.

That morning, I woke up groggy. I climbed down from the loft in my fraternity’s storied Room Nine, careful with my footing. My head pounded. My lungs ached. Once I was down, I packed a bowl in the massive German-engineered ROOR bong and took a long wake-n-baker’s rip. It did what it was supposed to do. We called the bong the Patriot. It was a gift from Ube, an older football player from California who had shown me the ropes.

Ube shipped me medical-grade California weed because New Hampshire didn’t have much beyond low-grade beasters. I checked behind the couch to make sure my safe was still there, a cheap Home Depot model, stuffed with cash. It was Green Key weekend, and Room Nine once more assumed the altar of the host: come on by, I will get you high.

I had my connect from the Philadelphia nitrous mafia bring up two large tanks, which I sold—one balloon at a time—over the course of a very profitable weekend.

Shortly after, I heard a knock. Oh-lo-oo? a voice called, meaning me. I tiptoed to the door so I wouldn’t wake Riley. She was still sleeping in the loft.

It was Nick, the house janitor.

Come in, man, I said.

I packed him a bowl, and he got right to it. Nick was in his forties, hanging on, and had been around the fraternity for years, long enough that we’d developed an understanding. I was always good with people, you know, good at reading between the lines.

That bad? I asked.

Yeah, man. I dunno know how much longer I can do this. But this Cali shit helps.

His wife had terminal cancer, and he spent most of his time outside of work caring for her or camping out at the hospital. Because of the illness, she had prescriptions for all kinds of things, including OxyContin and Opanas. At some point, Nick and I fell into an arrangement where I traded him weed for his dying wife’s pills.

Pretty much everyone did drugs at Dartmouth. It was a party school, especially for an Ivy, at least the parts I rolled in. I mostly kept the pills to myself. Some mornings I woke up with a dull headache and a low irritation. But I had people who wanted to be around me, girls who were interested, and a primal sense that things were working in my favor. So, I didn’t think much of my first signs of withdrawal. I learned to space the pills out, chase them with beer instead of vodka. I’d learned some since Vera.

17,781^st time

Your turn, Brolo.

Z nodded toward the back room off the pool house, where the light was dimmer. Two neat lines of OxyContin waited for me on the glass top. I rolled up a twenty, bent down, snorting them both in one go—the sweet, buttery powder hit the back of my throat just right. It was a taste, a texture that signified relief. Almost immediately, the stuff of life I ever-braced against was poof, gone. I was invincible.

Love you, man, Z said, clapping me on the shoulder as we drifted back out together, half-philosophizing about literature, like, whether anything serious could survive the internet.

I enjoyed cocaine when it was good shit, but it made my hands tremble and my whole body too awake in the wrong places. Oxy, my love, was different. Oxy didn’t ask questions. It just worked. Especially as landing gear after taking a bunch of uppers.

The combo made me feel something I’d felt before, dead sober—freshman year, benched for stealing Heinekens on the team flight out West, watching the Northern California hills from the back of the van. Happy cows circling through fog. Then I became them, became the hills and cows, all of it dissolving into one thing speaking without words. You don’t survive by trusting free gifts, so I went looking for the chemical route back, even though I knew then that my destiny lay in California.

And four years later, I found myself at Z’s pool house in Atherton, in those same hills. His parents’ place was immaculate and expensive and sealed off from the street. Here, consequences were only theoretical. Our friends floated in and out, leaving wet footprints on the stone, Fred Falke playing in the background, melodic and slowly building. Benny handed me an IPA. Sauce passed the spliff around. Someone else laughed too loud.

When I graduated from Dartmouth in 2009, I headed straight into the Great Recession. Instead of landing a banking or consulting job—the path most of my peers were gunning for—I was unemployed. But I’d saved about twenty grand selling weed and DJ’ing, and that money carried me and four of my closest boys out West. It was to be a magical summer built on borrowed time.

Officially, I was staying at Anthony’s mom’s beach house in Stinson. Sometimes I did, rolling big spliffs and driving the PCH with electronica blasting, my black five-speed Subaru cutting through blind curves, clutch and gas working from muscle memory. But I didn’t spend much time there.

Riley was the reason.

She was a year younger than me, interning in Menlo Park for the summer, technically for work but really so we could be closer. We’d been orbiting each other ever since our first drunken night in her Hitchcock dorm room, after one of my DJ sets. She was sweet and shy and breezy. Rural Maine clung to her—backwoods and pine, her blonde hair always a bit unkempt. She was the younger sister of a famous Hollywood actress, though she never carried herself that way.

That afternoon at Z’s house, somewhere between the fifth game of pong and Benny’s theory about how winning was just losing in reverse, she gave me a look: she’d reached her limit with the frat-boy circus. She called me by my real name, never Olo. We left together and drove back to Palo Alto. The windows were down, Daft Punk blaring as we shared a spliff. We cruised past low gates guarding long driveways that disappeared into ancient hedges.

At her place, we turned on a show we barely watched, poured some cheap Malbec, and started making out. We did a few more lines of Oxy. The night fell away, bringing us together.

We were outsiders in a type-A world we mostly wanted to escape. Riley loved the version of me who DJ’d and liked to party, while I loved how little she seemed to need from the world we were in. The difference was that she could take or leave the drugs. I didn’t know that was even an option.

20,000+ time

After I got promoted at Salesforce, I joined a new team at 101 California Street. That morning, I took the Muni in from Hayes Valley and stood with the rest of the commuters, surrounded by suit jackets, goofy backpacks, and leaky coffee cups. The city’s tech boom was well and truly popping off, and your boy was fully in the mix.

Once I got to the office, I dipped into the bathroom for my morning pilgrimage, praying it would be empty. Of course it wasn’t. Someone was destroying a breakfast burrito nearby, the sounds and smells making my stomach turn. I locked myself in the handicapped stall—the junkie’s office—and crushed the last of the blue Roxies with the back of my Muni card, using the toilet paper dispenser as my desk.

Someone else came in, boots banging on tile. I froze, Muni card suspended in hand, waiting for them to piss and leave. My nose was running in anticipation. Finally alone again, except for Breakfast Burrito Guy’s ongoing crisis, I laid out a thin, careful line and snorted it through a trimmed plastic straw I kept in my pocket, tilting my head down just as Burrito Guy flushed, using the sound as cover.

When I stood, my nose burned and my hands were already starting to shake because I knew they knew, they had to know, nobody spends this much time in the handicapped stall with a sinus infection that never goes away. I washed up fast, checked my eyes (fucked), straightened my tucked-in flannel, and went out to sell.

I was good at the job. That part was real. My grandparents fled the Third Reich with nothing but the clothes on their backs, the Nazis hounding at their heels, and built lives from scratch in a new country. Work was proof we belonged, that we earned our place. Even if it was a grind—endless calls, manufactured enthusiasm, the slow, soul-sucking arithmetic of quarterly quotas… But with the right mix of Adderall, Oxy, Xanax, and caffeine, I found a familiar mode where my charm was dialed up and my confidence was effortless. People loved me. Deals closed. I was one of the best. At least for the four-hour windows when my chemical cocktail was properly calibrated.

I was twenty-three years old and burning through my paychecks as fast as they landed. Riley and I were still together, long-distance now while she finished her senior year at Dartmouth. She was taking care of my pet snake, Ram Dass, feeding him, checking the heat lamp, texting me updates. I did love her. I was faithful, too. Except on the nights when I ran into Alina, who’d always been my kryptonite.

Around this time, my body started to rebel in every way possible. By lunch the opiate high turned. My legs wouldn’t stop trembling, the restless dope shake that starts in your bones and works outward through your muscles. Sweat gathered at the base of my spine. My chest caved in, like I’d been punched or was starving. Nothing Gatorade and Advil could work to abate. This was pain that took over the whole field of awareness, and worse, I knew that today I didn’t have anything left to make it stop. Withdrawal. Broke. Not a single tablet left in the fold of my pocket.

That scared the shit out of me.

I stepped outside near the Embarcadero, the Golden Gate Bridge foggy and metallic in the distance, and started calling doctors from the Yellow Pages. I wasn’t looking for addiction treatment per se; I thought I had a physical ailment, something purely chemical. I was a committed materialist, after all. So I did what I thought a smart, rational person would do—I called a professional.

I worked up the alphabet, starting with A. The first few offices didn’t answer. One receptionist told me, There’s a process, son. Another said the doctor wasn’t taking new patients. The eleventh call went through.

Dr. Paul Abramson listened longer than I expected. He told me he didn’t usually take calls like this. He said there were steps, and he called me Alexander. I explained my symptoms carefully, leaving certain details out, emphasizing my job, my responsibilities, my increasing lack of funds, the fact that I couldn’t disappear, and, most importantly, that absolutely no one could find out.

When I met him the next day in his office, he tried to explain how serious and dangerous things were getting for me. I cut him off.

What do I do, Doc? I can’t go to rehab. I’ve gotta keep working.

His answer was Suboxone. An opiate-antagonist that helps addicts safely stabilize and taper. Imagine if a sex addict were only allowed hand jobs. Such was the hollow agony of its relief.

27,000+ time

I was teaching Riley how to ride a longboard, gliding backwards on mine so I could watch her wobble forward—when my wheel caught a crack in the cement. The world spun. I flew face-first into asphalt and everything went blank.

Oh my god, oh my god, I heard Riley’s voice, far away, then closer.

Half my eyebrow was gone, scraped off on Telegraph Ave. Blood ran into my eye. It should have hurt more than it did, but I was already floating rather nicely on cannabis edibles and a morning benzo.

Two hospitals later, we found someone willing to stitch my face back together. The ER doc wrote me a script for Vicodin—two weeks’ worth that wouldn’t last me two days—and kept asking about a possible concussion. Did I know what day it was? Could I follow his finger?

That’s when I saw my opportunity.

I called my manager, played up the head injury. Told him I used to be an athlete, you know, have had a bunch of concussions, so gotta be careful. Said I needed a week, maybe two. The concern in his voice told me I’d sold it.

I’d already been through one failed round with Dr. A—stabilized on Suboxone for a few months before convincing myself I could manage with just weed, booze, benzos, and, you know, a little blow with the boys on weekends. That led to a spectacular five-month relapse and bender that ended with me back in his office, shaking and begging for another chance. He took me back, but I couldn’t stay clean. Failed test after failed test until finally he cut me loose. Then I sent him some late-night screeds I couldn’t quite remember, surely professionally worded.

This was my chance to do it right. Cold turkey. On my own terms.

I set up camp in our bedroom with concentrated cannabis and a blowtorch for dabs, which essentially turns your lungs to glass and makes you cough up demons. It wasn’t crack, I reasoned. I added my leftover antipsychotic meds, Seroquel, for sleep. I told Riley I needed rest. Leave me alone for a few days. She brought me soup I couldn’t eat, and coconut water I couldn’t keep down… for my concussion.

Days two and three were their own particular hell. The first day always fakes you out; you feel almost human, start thinking, this time, maybe, things will be different. Then day two arrives like a debt collector. That scooped-out feeling where your bones turn to straw and nothing in your body works anymore. I’d ridden this bronco before, even made it to week two once, but please know that Trainspotting makes cold turkey look like something you can actually accomplish by locking yourself in a room instead of what it is: dying, without the relief of being dead.

Somehow, impossibly, I made it two weeks.

I was exhausted, but the world looked different. Sharper. Though less interesting. I picked Tim up and went to Golden Gate Park, where we set up my slackline between two trees, me wobbling above the earth like I was learning to walk again. We went back to his place, smoked more, had beers, and ordered Thai food while we watched Breaking Bad. I felt empty but clean.

Then, four beers in, that familiar whisper: You know what would make this even better.

30,000+ time

The week Twitter IPO’d, we threw an epic company-wide celebration. I was twenty-six and convinced we were changing the world for the better.

Six months later, when the equity lockup expired, everyone on the fourth floor refreshed their Schwab accounts to see if the money was real. I checked mine. There it was. Nothing life-changing, but more than enough to keep the party going. I felt supremely validated—a kid from nowhere special, now holding shares in the coolest company in tech, where everyone wanted to work. For a while, it erased everything else.

That bright day in early May, I sold everything I could at around $32 a share and transferred the proceeds straight into my checking account, where I desperately needed the money. I was now spending all of my salary on “performance-enhancing” drugs.

Twitter was full of vegans, coffee snobs, tattooed hipsters, ultramarathon runners, nerdy ex-Googlers, nice people, and buttoned-up Stanford grads. Afternoon smoke breaks were rare. I lit a cigarette anyway and walked away from the building alone.

I strutted across Market, skipping the trolley tracks, heading toward where Ninth becomes Larkin. I tried calling my guy, Kayvo. No answer. Classic.

By then the cold sweats had already started. Earlier that morning, I’d been sitting in a cleverly named conference room with Sylvia, my loyal Account Manager who ran my book, closing a high-stakes deal with a major bank. That’s when the drugs turned on me. First hot, then so fucking cold. Full-body shivers. An ache in my thighs. The feeling of termites crawling under my skin, especially in my arms and neck. The perennial pain signal: it’s time.

I picked up my pace, brisk and deliberate, careful not to draw attention. As I passed Civic Center, I ruffled my curlyish hair, untucked my flannel, and pocketed my employee badge, loosening the tech uniform. I knew it didn’t really matter. Where I was headed, I was going to stand out.

At night, with time on my side, I could roam the Tenderloin until I found what I needed. Midday missions were different. The thought of running into colleagues out in groups—people who’d skipped the bourgeois catered lunch and wandered into the city together—made my insides swarm.

I cut up Larkin and turned right on Golden Gate, eyes darting. I was making my way to Turk and Leavenworth, aka Pill Hill—the undisputed center of drug dealing and crime in the city. Pigeonholed between the new Mid-Market tech opulence and the skyscrapers of the Financial District, it’s one of the most lawless places west of the Mississippi River.

I’d become the hunter, and that thrill never died. My gift for gab, and a face people couldn’t quite place, had always given me cover. Still, you never knew who was tweaking too hard. I’d been robbed before. Almost stabbed, too.

I walked towards a group of three young men, all clearly dealers, passing around a blunt, bobbing to East Bay thizzle from the sidewalk stereo. I checked my pockets. The cash spilt up between them, and my badge was hidden. I slowed, making eye contact with the tallest one.

Blues, I said.

They closed in too fast, offering everything else. Hands came at me from every direction. I backed off and kept moving.

I checked my watch. Only nine minutes before my team meeting.

Rounding the block, I took in the scene. Low-riding cars idling on the one-way, stoops filled with dice games, bent figures stumbling, electric wheelchairs buzzing past, tweakers and earnest folks down on their luck.

What you need? a man leaning on a dented Camaro asked.

Blues. And pins if you got ’em.

The price was wrong, but I didn’t have time to haggle. He pulled out a crumpled plastic baggie with easily a hundred blues inside and handed me one to inspect. That told me enough.

I handed him the cash and he handed me the rest.

Take my number, he said.

Good idea, I replied, already thinking he might replace Kayvo.

Just call me T.

I liked T more and more, but the pushers were now surrounding me like a scene out of Black Hawk Down, and I had to go. I walked uphill fast, half-expecting a police cruiser to roll up behind me. Nothing did.

Departing the sea of criminality, I allowed myself a grin and kept moving.

On the way back, I crossed Larkin and handed the last drags of my cigarette to a gray-haired homeless man on Market. He squeezed my hand with greasy fingers and told me God had blessed me. For a moment, everything inside me felt right as rain, like some deeper order had reasserted itself and was watching over me.

I ducked into the side elevators closest to Ninth, the ones I’d learned to favor. They dropped directly in front of the new seventh-floor locker room, below the cafeterias and coffee bars everyone else loved. I locked the shower door, laid everything out, and finished my prayer. Two minutes, start to finish.

I poured a coffee, grabbed a Dutch waffle, took the stairs down to the fourth floor, and slipped into my meeting with a quick apology, my eyes scanning the room to see who’d noticed I was late.

40,000+ time

At 1 a.m. the night before my wedding, I realized I had a problem: I was running out of drugs. I was two hours from home, from my narcotic resupply in Oakland’s skid row, which might as well have been on Mars.

We’d picked Monte Rio, California, for its idyllic Dartmouth summer-camp vibe. A hundred friends, colleagues, and family were in town. I knew I couldn’t deal with withdrawal this weekend.

Riley was already sleeping on her side, her golden hair cascading off her face. The moonlight nestled in her locks. She looked peaceful, untouched by whatever was happening with me, or what I was about to do. I was sweating, but not uncomfortable.

I grabbed my phone and stepped onto the balcony, making sure the sliding door shut behind me. Overlooking the Russian River and a crescent moon covered by light clouds, I dialed Kayvo.

It was late. He was annoyed. I told him it was an emergency, that I’d pay five hundred. He told me to fuck off. I reminded him it was my wedding. He asked about the big order. I said it was mostly gone. So, after some back and forth, I said I’d come to him. What choice did I have?

Fine, he said. Just don’t be wakin’ my kids, Al.

My soul alight for the first time all weekend, I went back into the hotel room. Summoning the second wind only cocaine can gift, I scrambled to find some of the cash Riley and I had received as early wedding gifts. I grabbed my keys and cigarettes. I glanced at my sleeping bride, nodded, and left the room.

Once outside, I breathed in the fresh midnight air. The edges of my body were nowhere to be found. I turned the ignition, lit a Camel, cracked the windows to let the smoke dissipate, and stepped on the gas.

I cruised through the redwood darkness, so far from God but so near to meeting Him. The speedometer climbed past rational thought; seventy miles per hour on serpentine roads that twisted like the lies I’d been telling myself, where each curve was taken on faith that the next one wouldn’t be the last, the moon following me through the canopy like a conspirator who knew exactly what kind of madman leaves his bride sleeping alone the night before their wedding to chase drugs through wine country, knew and didn’t judge, just watched as I pushed the accelerator harder, trying to outrun the withdrawal already whispering in my bones that this would never be enough, there would never be enough. I would always be stealing from tomorrow to pay for tonight.

Only fifteen minutes into my journey, and out of nowhere, I saw police lights blaring in my rear-view, speeding up to my tail so fast I could hear its engine humming. Its red and blue lights strobed, its siren wailed, and it killed the nostalgic buzz of my favorite jam band.

Next thing I know, two more cop cars joined the parade. One shot ahead and slammed its brakes. Another pulled flush to my left.

I hit the brakes hard. Four cops stepped out with their guns drawn.

Weirdly, I wasn’t scared. Instead, a serenity enveloped me. I felt a culmination taking place.

Well, you finally did it, Al. You found the edge.

One of the officers asked what the hell I was doing. I told him it was my wedding tomorrow, that I was stressed, that I’d gone out for some air.

Some air? he said. Do you have any idea how fast you were driving?

I said I did not. I told him I was just thinking about, you know, the Big Day. We talked some more. I nodded and apologized.

They stepped back and talked among themselves while I waited. Eventually the police chief came over and told me to follow his cruiser. I assumed that was it, that I was headed to jail the night before my wedding, but ten minutes later, we pulled into a 7-Eleven instead.

He bought me a coffee, put his arm on my shoulder, and steered me outside, sitting me down firmly under the redwoods. We talked and talked, I nodded along, gone but seeing everything, saying whatever seemed to keep the moment alive.

He told me to drive straight back to the inn and get some sleep. Of course, sir, I said. I can’t thank you enough. I really needed that.

The moment he was out of sight, I turned the car around and booked it to Kayvo’s, ripping cigs the whole way.

I never told Riley. Not that morning, not ever. She woke up next to me, her husband-to-be, and we got married happily that afternoon under the burning California sun.

50,000+ time

I woke up locked inside my body. I hadn’t been sure I would wake up, and that had become routine. The night before had been bad. I felt used up and ashamed.

But I still had to act.

I stumbled downstairs and made coffee. Riley was already at work. I was between jobs, to put it charitably, with my unemployment check still a week away. I’d already liquidated my 401(k) and was more than $96,000 in debt. I was out of cash, rideless after crashing my car on a late-night run to Kayvo’s, and deep in skull-splitting withdrawal.

In the garage, I found my black Dre Beats headphones next to my old DJ equipment. I stared at them for a while. Then I lit a cigarette and walked the half mile to Buy Sell Loan on 51st and Telegraph. I can’t tell you how humiliating it felt to walk in there again.

How much for these, I mumbled.

Sixty to sell. Twenty to borrow.

That would barely get me through the day. Still, I said, fuck it. I sold them and called Kayvo, who was waiting nearby.

Just three? he asked.

Uh, for now, I said, embarrassed even by my dealer.

I took a CD from his side panel and crushed up half of a tiny pill, trying to conserve. Let’s go to Starbucks, I told him, knowing that if the moment presented itself, I might try to steal a handful more from a man who would kill me for it.

The last time

Minutes before my interview with Slack, I snorted a personal-record mixture of uppers and downers. I found that flow where my body disappeared into its source and then something else took over—I got the job. It was the hottest startup in the Valley, and I’d be the first Sales Operations Manager, helping build strategy on their founding sales team.

Despite everything falling apart—the hidden debt, the multiple rounds of failed secretive treatment, the most recent string of startup blowouts—I still had an enviable résumé for a twenty-eight-year-old. This job was going to be my saving grace. The equity alone would be worth millions. It would finally correct everything that was wrong with me. I’d be fixed. More than that, I’d be legitimate again. Three generations of striving would stay intact.

The company was a typical startup stress ball, and so was I. My manager would tell me to do one thing, then scold me the next day for doing exactly that. We worked around the clock—twelve-hour days plus weekends—because we were the ones who built the messaging tool that meant no one was ever not-working.

The night before a trip to Miami to visit my family, I worked until dark. Then I drove my ratty 2001 Sebring convertible to Kayvo’s place. The block had dried up. All he had was morphine. I railed it all before the red-eye. In Miami, I’d be in withdrawal, relying on transitioning onto leftover Suboxone.

That was my master plan.

At breakfast the next morning in the hotel lobby with my parents, my sister, her friend, and Riley, I nodded off and passed out into my eggs—my family frozen in the horror of watching someone you love become exactly what you always feared they were becoming, while the hotel lobby carried on with its mundane breakfast sounds, the clink of silverware and murmur of normal families having normal mornings.

My sister’s friend was a doctor, which did not help. She looked at my parents and sister and said, he’s high as a kite.

My family staged an intervention. I was open to it, too, even touched by their care. I was so tired. My body couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t have much fight left. I came clean about the debt as well, sitting there like a child, crying to my parents after years of keeping them at arm’s length. The problem was I came clean to them before I did with Riley, which was an amateur move, ethically and strategically.

We’d been growing distant anyway. My lies were mounting and mounting, this double life impossible to maintain. But Riley and I were soulmates. I had to get better.

I agreed to go back to outpatient treatment, to see Dr. A, whom I trusted. It was a way to stabilize the pain, appease everyone, and get my hands to stop shaking. I wasn’t ready to stop. I wanted to keep using, just not like this. By then I’d moved on to fentanyl and other harder drugs. If I wasn’t actively using, my body tipped into acute withdrawal within minutes. That’s what drove everything else.

Once I was back in the clinic on 450 Sutter Street, a long walk from Slack’s HQ, Dr. A had tightened the screws. The place had grown, and so had the rules: twice-weekly groups, weekly therapy, daily drug tests, a crowded waiting room, shitty coffee, my name called from a clipboard, again.

I failed the first drug test, then the next. I told them I’d just been to Vancouver for a company happy hour and had some whiskey. Don’t you know how important my job is?! I said. I didn’t even know you could test for alcohol. That part was new.

You fail the next one, we’ll have to kick you out again, Alex, Dr. A said, looking disappointed.

The treatment nonetheless helped. The worst of the withdrawal eased. I felt like utter dogshit, but I was no longer in free fall. I had a doctor prescribing me things again, which felt reassuring. We trust the medical system. My parents, bless them, were paying for it this time. I obviously couldn’t afford it.

The program’s psychologist was the first therapist I’d had who was in recovery herself. A PhD, a recovering alcoholic, and a meditator: the trifecta appealed to my sensibilities. In our fourth session, after I’d spent an hour defending my sophisticated relationship with substances, she cut me off.

You know what you’re actually looking for, right?

I didn’t.

The drugs, the danger, this whole outlaw spiritual quest. What do you think that’s really about?

Getting high? I responded.

There’s already a fire in you, she said. But you keep trying to light it with gasoline.

She was the first person to really understand me. A few times, I even felt a momentary recognition that she might be right, that there was another way. But my plan stayed the same. Make it through the worst of the withdrawal. Get my hands to stop trembling like I had Parkinson’s. Get off the hard drugs—my only real problem—and keep the booze, weed, dissociatives, and designer drugs. Plenty of therapists and counselors told me I needed to quit everything to give recovery a chance, including her. They obviously didn’t know who they were dealing with. I was the Hunter S. Thompson of the goddamn valley.

That Saturday, we went to a STS9 concert. Riley danced, just moving with the music, and I watched her from the crowd, feeling almost normal for a minute. Sauce passed me a fat joint. I knew exactly what it meant: failed drug test #3, potential expulsion from the program, my therapist’s face twisted in something deeper than disappointment.

I took a long drag anyway, swearing to myself it was the last time.

I didn’t know I was finally right.

Three months into Slack and the secretive-outpatient-treatment grind, I was pulled into a meeting with HR and my manager. They told me I was okay at my job, then let me go. They never said the word drugs. They didn’t have to.

I rushed to pack my things and leave without seeing anyone, sick with shame, and walked out onto Market Street. Another startup squandered. The comeback equity that was supposed to save me never vested. Work had been the one thing holding me together. Without it, I was just another pathetic little man, a drug addict, a complete fraud, a nobody. I walked so fast I was nearly out of breath, past establishments I used to frequent, phone tight in hand, the Tenderloin just a few blocks away—until, miraculously, I found myself waiting on a BART platform at Embarcadero for a train home.

Riley was on the couch, working. I told her I got fired.

Are you serious? she said.

I tried to explain myself.

This is unbelievable, she muttered.

She stared at me and shook her head, and under her gaze I felt very small.

I’m so sorry, I said.

You’re always sorry, she said, her voice exhausted.

She’d been hearing it since Dartmouth. Through every lie about where the money went, where I’d been, why I’d sleep till noon with the blinds drawn. Through every promise that this time was different. I could see in her face that she was fed up with making sacrifices for someone who wasn’t going to change.

We argued until she left the room. I was surprised to feel my legs give out.

Next thing I knew my face was in this ugly beige rug we’d bought at Target when we first moved in, when I still had tech money and she believed I could still get better, and now I was drowning in it, tasting dust mites and my own snot while Riley moved around upstairs, probably calling her best friend like she always did when I fucked up, definitely not coming back down. Somewhere between the choking and the guttural sobbing it hit me that this was it, this was the edge I’d been racing toward like a maniac my whole life, another fucking startup gone, another comeback turned embarrassing failure, only there was no helpful country cop to buy me coffee this time, no money to call Kayvo, just me and this itchy ass rug and the truth that I was never going to stop, not like this, not on my own. And that thought was scarier than withdrawal, scarier than losing Riley, scarier than realizing I’d spent a decade learning how to die but had no fucking clue how to live.

The whole elaborate performance I’d been holding up for years—the fancy job titles, the double life and alter ego in the hood, the idea that I was somehow more special than every other addict—finally collapsed into a single, intolerable stillness. There was no way to scheme my way out of this one. No identity left to defend. No next job to save me, or last appeal to effort or endurance.

I’d made promises before, but there was always a loophole hidden underneath, one I didn’t even know I was keeping. Now there was just nothing left. Not even the part of me so good at clawing his way out.

There, on that scratchy rug I always hated, in the ruins of everything I’d built myself to be, I finally admitted that I couldn’t handle life on my own. I said I would do anything, and whatever was listening could have me.

My breathing slowed. Face wet, pressed into my palms.

And in that moment, with nothing left to protect or pretend, I was done.

After many months of baby-induced ego death, I’m excited to finally kick off a new season of the pod with someone who has profoundly shaped my spiritual life: Michael Taft.

We sat down for a wide-ranging conversation that spans enlightened wizards, psychedelic dismemberment, and the very practical art of recognizing awake awareness in the midst of daily life. I’m delighted to share this one with you—it might be my favorite to date.

Michael Taft is a longtime meditation teacher and author whose work integrates nondual wisdom traditions, classical Tantra, and modern neuroscience. He’s the host of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast and has guided thousands of practitioners into deeper recognition through his Dharma talks, guided meditations, and retreats. Before teaching full-time, he spent decades training with masters in Hindu and Buddhist lineages—including time living in India—and became one of Shinzen Young’s most prominent students.

Before meeting Michael, I’d been practicing about as seriously as one can outside a monastery—fully committed to the spiritual path, with all the neuroses that come along with that. His teaching helped my system relax in a way I didn’t realize was possible and flipped what seems to have been an irreversible switch. Since then, I’ve dove into his retreats and teachings, and I now regularly send his guided meditations to friends and clients…. and the ones who stick with it reliably have awakening experiences and sustained insight. Not many teachers can produce that kind of result.

What continues to impress me most is his teaching style: relaxed, emotionally friendly, grounded, precise, funny, and, when needed, sharp enough to cut through the bullshit. He’s a teacher who can help you go all the way in awakening, not just taste it.

You can feel that in this conversation. Towards the end, he guides us through a direct, real-time glimpse of what he calls Nondual 2—the shift from transcending the world to waking up in the world—and why so many people unknowingly stop halfway on the path.

In this episode, expect to learn more about:

• How a soul-annihilation psychedelic experience in the mountains of Japan catalyzed his initial awakening

• Why he refused to teach for years, and what ultimately shifted his perspective

• How he trained with “enlightened wizards” in India, and how those experiences shaped his humble, anti-guru approach to teaching

• What he calls Nondual 1 vs. Nondual 2: how awakening often stops at “no separation” and a desire to transcend the world—and why the deeper realization is seeing everyday life as the sacred display of awareness

• Why later Buddhist and Tantric traditions resonate more for him—embracing emotion, energy, and everyday life rather than trying to shut them down

• How to recognize awake awareness on demand in the middle of ordinary life

• The unseen pitfalls of highly-altered-state retreats—and why he designs retreats that reduce breakdowns and increase integration

• How to build confidence in awakening through direct recognition rather than belief or attainment-chasing

• Why he believes awakening is ultimately about God, death, and not missing the point of being alive

If you’re new to Michael’s work, I highly recommend exploring his vast library of free meditations and talks on his YouTube channel.

Start with his beginner nondual series: do the full sit, then listen to the dharma talk and Q&A later in the day to help integrate the insight. After that, move on to this nondual series or simply start following his weekly sits at the Alembic.

Do this for 30 days and let me know what you notice.

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When I started blogging, I published here each week religiously, treating my self-imposed deadline with more reverence than I ever gave my day job. I woke at 5 a.m., showered cold, meditated, journaled over Gongfu tea, and wrote uninterrupted for hours—the kind of heroic optimizer morning routine that’s since become a meme. But mock as you might, I was a man on a mission. A tech bro possessed, burning with purpose.

I can’t overstate how much writing here—and treating it as a form of spiritual practice—has changed my life. It not only helped me heal but also allowed me to radically reshape my career and opened doors to collaborations I once could only dream of.

For a long time, I believed writing was the one thing I could never lose. But I’ve recently come to terms with the fact that I can no longer write like I used to. Things have been trending in this direction for a few years, and though I’ve hinted at it before, it feels appropriate now to reveal myself more directly. Part of me has been grieving this change, slowly coming to terms with it, while another part is genuinely excited about what it might open up.

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We’ve all had moments when things just felt aligned and connected—whether that’s showing up for your family, at work, socially, or even just laughing with friends—when everything is clicking and you feel: yes, this—this is me. There’s something about it that feels right in your body, and at the same time there’s this intuitive alignment with how you want to show up in the world. It’s a kind of knowing, but not an intellectual one. More like a compass.

Inevitably, we lose track of that sense of radical yes, the sense of being exactly how we want to be in the world. There are so many things pulling at our minds these days, so many distractions. But then there’s also the ways in which our psyche keeps repeating old patterns. It’s common to have a period where everything feels flowing and vibrant—often after a retreat or a big personal breakthrough—and then inevitably comes the crash back into old patterns. Suddenly you’re thinking: I had it, I lost it, and now I feel awful. What the hell happened? Where did it go?

A helpful frame for this comes from a Buddhist teacher who talks about the leading edge and the trailing edge. The leading edge is what I’ve been describing: that place in ourselves where we see clearly, where we have that sense of how we want to show up, where we’ve tasted some insight. It’s where we want to be moving towards, and it is where life naturally wants to take us once we get out of the way.

But we all have this trailing edge, which you could think of as an anchor on a ship. The ship just wants to sail forward toward that open expanse, the endless horizon. But the anchor—that’s these unconscious patterns, implicit memory stored below awareness, the ways we keep recycling behaviors and feelings and thought loops that prevent us from moving forward in the way we naturally can, once we get out of our own way.

So the real work, I think, isn’t just about being at the leading edge. It’s about understanding that you’re able to hold both, and not just expect the leading edge to be there. In fact, that expectation is what causes most of the confusion and suffering. You have that breakthrough moment, you experience growth, and then the trailing edge comes up. And often those old patterns surface precisely because the breakthrough has opened enough space for us to face them.

But then what happens is: oh, since this is arising again, I’ve messed up! I’m a failure! That was just a fleeting insight, nothing real. A “flaky breakthrough” is the term I’ve heard. And that can indeed feel true.

But what I’m more interested in here today is what in Dzogchen, a Buddhist tradition, they call the view. The view is your fundamental orientation to reality. In their cosmology, it’s the recognition that we’re not separate. That awareness and appearances are one indivisible whole. That everything is just this one field. And when you forget that, you suffer. You feel uncomfortable, contracted, in pain. But when you remember that—when you remember that we’re all connected, that we’re all in this together—you feel aligned, clear, alive, fun, joyous, at ease.

And the thing about the view is, you can have a taste of where you’re going on that leading edge, and you can keep reminding yourself of it, set the intention, which is beautiful. But that’s not enough. It has to be practiced. It has to be tended.

Like tending the embers in a fire.

It reminds me of when I was in early recovery and first got sober. I accidentally tripped into this awakening I didn’t expect, and I wouldn’t have had the language for it at the time. But it lit a fire in me—a real lust for life, discovery, growth, spiritual truth. That fire took over my life.

And that’s the thing about awakening: it’s like fire. It can catch and build and grow on itself and burn up everything in its way.

But fire also has to be tended. Because it can harm. Neglected, it dims. Left wild, it can burn the wrong things.

So the real work is about being a keeper of your own inner flame.

And in the world we’re facing today—it goes without saying—we’re in unprecedentedly challenging times. And it feels more vital than ever, in my opinion, for all of us to be tending to our own flame, in whatever capacity that means for you. To be a keeper of that flame, a keeper of the view, and to keep moving toward the leading edge. To keep showing up in a way that feels authentically aligned with the person you know you can be.

For me, that means one thing: being all in. Being all in on life.

Which reminds me of my favorite quote—probably my favorite of all time—from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

For me, this is so beautiful because it points to the fact that we have to hold so much pain and suffering right now in this world. And being a keeper of the flame means not turning away from that, not pretending it doesn’t exist. Of course it’s not just “out there”—we experience it within ourselves too. Because we’re all connected.

And the other vital piece is not forgetting the vision of the Great Eastern Sun. The sun as this symbol of fire, always rising in the east, every single day.

When you can hold both together, then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.

And I love tea.

In a famous letter to the widow of a family friend, Einstein once wrote:

“For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

It might sound a little obtuse, even bypass-y to someone grieving. But it was pro…

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The internet has created a strange kind of authority figure. A lot of the most successful content comes from people who’ve struggled with a core part of being human—dating, self-worth, intimacy, whatever—and worked relentlessly to change it. That’s why they’re such good translators. They’ve been to the depths, taken notes, and come back with a map.

But there’s another kind of person entirely. Someone for whom that thing just isn’t a problem. It comes naturally, like walking or breathing. And they’re not online explaining it all day because... they’re out living. They don’t think of it as a skill or an achievement. It’s just who they are.

I’ve lived somewhere between the two worlds. In some core domains—health, money, purpose, presence—I’ve had to earn every inch of ground through trial, error, and the occasional spectacular faceplant. At best, I’ve become a decent translator of hard lessons. Plenty of people do it better.

But dating and relationships have always come fairly naturally to me. Not always successfully, for sure, but intuitively. Let’s just say your boy never really struggled to get a date. And that vantage point helps me see this particular corner of internet advice a little differently.

When I watch people try to reverse-engineer intimacy, package formulas for “romantic polarity,” offer takes on masculinity, or listen to some clearly brilliant hyper-nerd explain romance, it rarely resonates. Not because they’re necessarily wrong, but because the whole thing can feel over-coded. It’s like trying to write a manual for dancing. You can break it into steps, but if the music isn’t in you, those steps won’t help much.

You might think, well dude, it’s internet advice. Just log off! But we’re well past that. The internet is where we go to find authority now. It’s where people seek guidance on the basics of being human: how to date, how to parent, how to lead, how to be less of a mess. And to be fair, a lot of these folks have earned their credibility. They’ve actually done “the work.” The catch is, the medium itself favors people who can explain themselves best, not necessarily the ones living the most coherent, grounded, or relational lives.

The trouble with the internet is that it collapses two very different forms of transmission into one. In spiritual traditions, there’s the explicit transmission—the words, frameworks, and carefully articulated methods. And there’s the implicit transmission—the felt sense of someone who is free in a certain way. The first you can get from a Substack essay. You can sometimes catch a bit of that second kind through a podcast or video, though it’s never quite the same as being in the room with them.

But online, we tend to confuse eloquence for embodiment and articulation for realization. We end up over-indexing on the most legible people, rather than the ones most worth paying attention to.

The naturals have their blind spots, too. When something has always been easy, you often don’t know how to explain it. You don’t even realize there’s anything to explain, because there’s no process, no sense that what you’re doing is remarkable. Your strength is invisible to you, so you can’t teach it in a way that lands.

And this isn’t just about dating. You see the same pattern in business advice, parenting, politics, and definitely spirituality. The people with the most articulate frameworks tend to rise to the top. But the ones living the most integrated, sane, or beautiful lives often go unnoticed. The most transformative teachers I’ve met have had very little to say, and they rarely post. They teach by doing, how they move through a room, or how they listen. Which means the only way to learn from them is to notice—really notice—what’s right in front of you.

Lately I’ve been paying closer attention to the people around me, not only teachers, who seem to have certain things come naturally. My partner Grace, for example, has this uncanny ability to put people at ease. There’s something in her presence that’s immediately calming. She doesn’t perform empathy, she simply relates, with a kind of effortless humanity. If you asked her how she does it—and believe me, I have—she’d just say she loves people.

But what I’ve come to see, watching her in relationships, friendships, and even passing interactions, is that it’s truly less a technique and more a vibe. A kind of poetic attunement. She meets people in a relaxed, sincere, responsive, unguarded way. I’m often amazed by how much she actually seems to enjoy small talk. She’s not trying or forcing anyone to go deep—but people end up going there anyway, drawn in by her warmth.

Another person I learn from all the time, about leadership and charisma, is my dearest friend Conlan. He’s probably the funniest person I know: effortlessly witty, self-deprecating, sharp in a way that engages. We went out for sushi one night with my mom and dad in Chelsea, and somewhere in the middle of dinner, he inserted a raunchy joke—something about anal sex and poop—that could’ve easily flopped, but instead had everyone in stitches. The bit took on a life of its own, and he carried into the night as we wandered the city, eating ice cream and laughing down the sidewalks like kids. It wasn’t crude for shock value, it was just him, being hilarious and loose and totally himself.

He’s taught me something like comedy as a way-of-life, and I try to bring that into the groups I lead and the projects I run.

To be clear, I can’t quite mimic that. A big part of this process, for me, is learning my own limits. I’m funny, I’m playful—but I’m not that funny. Yet being around it does something, leaving a trace. And even when I’m not trying to be funny, if I can just remember it, it opens some silliness in me.

And of course, neither Grace nor Conlan is posting about any of this.

I keep finding myself pulled towards that kind of effortlessness, wanting to see where it leads. Sometimes it’s noticing how my dad plays with my 14-month-old son; stacking toys, building towers just to knock them down again, narrating the whole thing in a voice that keeps him enthralled. I watch them and realize I’m not quite as good at it yet. Maybe I’m still learning (and tired).

Other times, I notice how a friend pulls back, setting boundaries that can feel distant or even cruel. But they hold, and in their own way, they inspire me. I’ve absorbed something there too: I’ll say “no” now, more quickly and with less apology, even with small things. Like the other day, when someone tried to rope me into building a campfire on the beach, and I just didn’t want to. Which, I know, might sound lame—but we were about to leave and I had a baby to tend to.

The hard part, I think, is discernment. We live in a time when so many voices are vying for our attention. Everyone has a take, method, or framework. And the truth is, some of the most visible ones really are worth listening to. That’s what makes it tricky.

My friend , for example, has taught me a lot about how to build a thriving business in public that actually helps people, while having fun and not losing yourself in the process. He’s also one of the friendliest, most generous people I know. At least once a month, someone reaches out to me saying, “Hey, I’m a friend of Jonny,” because seemingly everyone is a friend of Jonny.

Then there are friends like , who just wrote a bestselling book on experimental productivity and somehow made it feel like a fun gift rather than a project. And there are plenty of others, too.

These are people who are visible and living well. They are not mega-influencers. And maybe that’s part of the magic. They’re just visible enough, rewarded for their earned insight, but not yet flattened by it. That balance is rare.

What I’m tracking, I think, is ease. The kind that not only shows up in how someone lives, but also in how they share. Some people live so fully they hardly need to say anything. Others post on social media because they’ve walked through pits of hell and come back with language. And then there are a few who share because they simply love to. For this third Goldilocks group, even posting comes naturally. Not performatively, but as a form of contact, and a way of being generous.

While I’m often wary of advice from people who seem to inhabit the internet more than the world, some of them are still worth learning from. When I see that kind of ease, in any of its forms, I pay attention.

The question, then, is what to do with that attention. How do you learn what comes intuitively to someone else? Unfortunately, there’s no formula. The best I’ve gathered: you watch closely, you experiment, and you let yourself look a little foolish in the process. And more than anything, you relax—enough for their way of being to seep in, like a friend’s catchphrase naturally sneaking into your own speech patterns. That’s the slow transmission, the kind that happens without you even trying. Which is why it matters who you spend time around.

Because the digital age still makes it dangerously easy to confuse eloquence with wisdom. And if we’re not careful, we end up shaping our lives around the people best at explaining themselves, rather than the ones best at living well.

My hunch is we still need to pay more attention to the ones who have something deeper to offer, whether or not they’re putting it into words. You can catch it in the way someone pauses before answering, the air between two people who trust each other, the softness in someone’s face. The signal is always there, right in front of us.

For the past three months, three times per week, I developed a somewhat unusual habit: I got as angry as possible for exactly three minutes. I’d close all the windows to spare my neighbors, grab my analog timer, and clear space on my bed. Then I’d let it rip—kicking, screaming, and fuming like a man possessed. Letting guttural, ugly-sounding anger flow.

This exercise is called the “3-3-3.” It came to me through one of the more adventurous guys in my men’s group, who’s been training with Possibility Management—a sort of fringe-y, emotional alchemy outfit that blends radical expression, shadow work, and what I can only describe as psychomagic with a dash of weird.

Why do something like this? Because most of us moderns have repressed our anger to a pathological degree. And while that might sound obvious, there’s a canyon between reading another diagnosis about our collective emotional constipation and actually doing something about it. If my work over recent years has a throughline, it’s embodying experiential change—putting into motion what science and tradition point to, rather than orbiting it from a safe intellectual distance.

And it worked. I’ll share what changed for me in a moment. But first, a bit of context.

On anger

Anger is perhaps the most misunderstood of all the emotions. Most of us associate it with harm—verbal abuse, violence, broken glass, control. And for good reason. We’ve all been on the receiving end of that kind of anger. Most of us have also dished it out. The damage it causes can be lasting, even life-defining.

It’s heartbreaking how often anger, instead of being felt cleanly, gets turned outward as punishment or inward as poison. If you’re anything like me, you’ve both lashed out at people and turned a scorching anger of self-hatred towards yourself.

But that’s anger used against someone, not anger itself.

There’s a big difference.

The tragedy is that because anger has been so consistently misused—twisted by repression, shame, powerlessness, or trauma—most of us have learned to fear it entirely. We’ve decided that anger itself is the problem, when really the problem is what people do with it when they’re unconscious.

Anger, in its pure form, is not the enemy. It’s what helps us set a boundary—not the performative pop-psych kind that therapy culture suggests we need in every conversation, but an actual boundary. The kind your system instinctively knows to make when something crosses a line and your body says “no.”

My favorite example of this type of utterly natural anger comes from cats. If you get too close to their face, or step on their tail, they’ll hiss at you with tiny lion rage or swipe with tiny bear claws. There’s no story or resentment, just a sharp “back off.” And then, just as quickly, they go back to chilling. Maybe grooming themselves, or napping in the sun.

That’s just one role anger plays. It’s also what, counterintuitively, clarifies a “yes.” So much indecision—so much spinning in place—comes from stuck or unfelt anger. You can’t move forward if you’re still holding a thousand undigested no’s in your system.

Because once anger starts to move, something deeper wakes up. Maybe most importantly, anger is what allows you to protect the sacred. Whether it’s the safety of your child or the creative life you keep putting off. It’s what gives you the momentum to move toward what matters. And significantly, when anger shows up, it means you care. Apathy doesn’t roar. Anger does.

But again, most of us—especially men—have been taught to repress it. We channel it into snarky tweets, performative outrage, or self-loathing. We don’t let ourselves feel it cleanly, directly, in the body. Instead, it gets stuffed somewhere—usually the shoulders or gut, sometimes the jaw, neck, or lower back—until it either turns inward as depression or leaks outward as blow-ups, passive-aggression, or cruelty disguised as insight.

Some say the body keeps the score, and while there’s debate around the science of that, you can usually spot it. Repressed anger has a way of calcifying into chronic tension, headaches, digestive issues, or a low-grade irritability that colors everything.

Everyone’s got a theory. What we don’t have are many practices that get under the hood of the nervous system. This one—screaming on your bed for three minutes—seemed as good a place as any to start.

The 3-3-3

It’s exactly what it sounds like.

Three times per week. Three minutes each time. For three months.

The mechanics are deceptively simple. You lie on your back, kick your legs, bang your fists, and let yourself get mad. Really mad. You start with clenched fists, eyes closed, and consciously summon the emotion—pulling anger up from wherever it’s been hiding in your system. The prompt is to go big. Not a cat hiss, but full-throttle, uncensored rage. It’s physical, vocal, and intentionally excessive.

Per the instructions, it’s best to direct the anger at someone specific.1 We’ve all got people who fit the bill—and if you can’t find any, you’re either an actual saint, or you haven’t looked hard enough. I’d suggest looking for childhood bullies, betrayals, resentments, or any unresolved energetic charges.

Here’s a demonstration of the 3-3-3 by Clinton Callahan, founder of Possibility Management. Skip to around 37 minutes for where the demo begins:

Your first concern might be: “What about my neighbors?” or “I’ve got kids!” Fair enough. You bite down on a towel and scream into it. I did this plenty when Grace and the baby were home. I’d just say: “I’m going to do that anger thing for three minutes,” and go shut the door. That’s part of the beauty—this practice is short. As far as emotional release goes, it’s one of the more efficient ones out there.

According to the Possibility Management folks, this type of psychomagic “clears the cobwebs.” It’s about flushing the system so your emotions can flow more regularly. They talk about it like building a capacity dial—you might start by accessing just 10% of your anger, then gradually build toward 100%. The idea being: the more you can fully feel your own anger, the more you can stay present when someone else expresses theirs. Without flinching or dissociating, even if they are completely raging.

And this part’s important: they emphasize not mixing emotions. Anger often masks sadness or fear, and if something else arises in the middle of the session—tears, heartbreak, collapse—you follow that. You let it move. Which means this practice doesn’t just help you release anger. It also sharpens your ability to sense what emotion is actually present. In that way, it’s not just expressive release. It’s interoceptive training, meaning the skill of tracking what’s happening inside you.

Some takeaways

This wasn’t my first time working with anger. I’ve done and led all sorts of versions: primal screaming in redwood groves, breath-fueled release sessions, even the occasional “Fuck You” circle (a men’s work classic, ask me about it sometime). I’ve held space for others mid-rage. But this was the first time I committed to it as a consistent personal practice.

Overall, I found this practice extremely effective, though not always in the ways I expected.

Cathexis versus catharsis. The Possibility Management folks make a crucial distinction here. Catharsis is the idea that if you just express those “bad” feelings enough, they’ll go away and leave you alone—like emotional vomiting. Cathexis is different. It’s about experiencing and expressing anger, sadness, fear, and joy clearly and consciously, without mixing them together.2 You’re not trying to get rid of the emotion. You’re learning to circulate that energy through your system so you can use it as a resource.

Feelings vs. emotions. Another distinction I found useful: a feeling is clean, sharp, and temporary—it rises, brings clarity or momentum, and resolves. By contrast, an emotion lingers. If you’re angry for more than three minutes, you’re probably in an emotion, not a feeling. Feelings help you handle what’s happening now. Emotions help you heal what happened then. And if you don’t learn to tell the difference in real time, your life starts to fill with confusion, breakdowns, and disappointments.

Timing mattered. I found that the best window was morning or as early in the day as possible. The practice would raise my energy for hours, sometimes the whole day. Thanks to a decade of spiritual practice, I’ve become energetically sensitive, or what Grace might generously call “high-maintenance.” I had to be careful on days I had caffeine—sometimes the combined energy would be too much, leaving me wired in an uncomfortable way. That said, your system might respond totally differently.

Where I aimed the anger mattered even more. At first, I directed towards myself—my flaws, perceived failures, all the ways I haven’t lived up. I’m excellent at that. But after a couple weeks, another guy in my men’s group reminded me of something the legendary coach Joe Hudson teaches: that anger is usually more effective when it’s directed outward. Not to avoid responsibility, but because most of us—especially the self-aware, therapy-literate types—are already experts in blaming ourselves. What we rarely give ourselves is permission to get angry at others. Once I made the shift, something unlocked. The anger had somewhere true to go.3

One person became my focus. A specific figure from my past who, despite my best efforts, still occupied a small but persistent corner of my mind. I started directing most of the anger towards them… and it worked. The impact is subtle but known. Their memory feels significantly lighter now, less sticky. I hadn’t realized how much I was still carrying until it started to move.

Anger has swagger. On the days when the practice really clicked, I could feel the truth of the saying: anger leads to clarity. There was a vivid boldness in my body afterwards, a kind of swagger. Like a grinning “don’t fuck with me” energy that made me want to buy a leather jacket or something. That part was fun.

The practice deepened over time. Toward the last month, I could access more subtle dimensions of anger, particularly the somatic sensation of heat spreading and dissipating in my body. It started to feel oddly good. Like circulating superpower energy that had been lodged in my system for years. At times, it even felt shamanic.

No matter the day, it helped. I’ve been in an intense stretch of parenting, but the truth is, I’m probably the happiest I’ve ever been. Some days, I felt so good and thought, Do I really need to simulate anger right now? But every time I did it, I was grateful afterward. Even when I was calm. Especially when I was tired and it was the last thing I wanted to do. I don’t want to overstate the impact; it didn’t radically change me. But I do think it made me much more comfortable with anger, and subtly raised the floor on my wellbeing.

The spiritual implications

In most Buddhist traditions, anger is classed as one of the three kleshas: mental poisons (or defilements) that cloud wisdom and generate suffering. The common view is that it must be purified or transcended. Many spiritual practitioners internalize this as a kind of moral allergy: if you feel anger, something’s wrong with you. You’re not advanced enough, not spiritual enough.

And while I understand the spirit of that teaching—and have greatly benefitted from inquiry practices that ask where the anger is arising from, or who, exactly, is getting triggered—I’ve come to believe it’s incomplete for modern humans. That perspective can easily be misinterpreted as implying that anger itself shouldn’t arise. But most of the deeply realized teachers I’ve know will secretly admit: they still get frustrated! It does seem possible to dissolve anger entirely if you’re a saint, maybe—but that’s exceedingly rare, and I’m not sure it needs to be the goal for most of us.

That confusion—that if you were really spiritual, you wouldn’t feel anger at all—has always struck me as missing the point. If the aim is a happy life of presence, then what matters isn’t whether anger arises, but how we meet it. How it’s liberated. Not with suppression or shame, but with breath, contact, and a willingness to feel it cleanly, without being overtaken.

This practice reinforced that anger isn’t the opposite of peace, but is what protects it. Anger is the internal signal that says something matters here. And when felt consciously—without mixing, without harm—it becomes a kind of spiritual heat. It burns off confusion and enlivens the body.

Part of why I’ve been so drawn to the non-dual view in recent years is because there’s no hierarchy of experience. We don’t rank “states of consciousness.” Rage is as welcome as bliss because what matters is presence, being awake to what’s here, and letting it move through. In that tantric frame, anger isn’t an obstacle in the path, but a key part of the curriculum.

I’m certainly biased, and I swim in a specific corner of the pool. But I can say with confidence that practices like this work especially well for men and spiritual practitioners—two groups often conditioned to bypass anger in the name of control or virtue. And if your nervous system is subtly choking on all the no’s you never voiced, you can’t fake your way to freedom.

For much of my life, I lived entirely in my head. I rehearsed conversations that never happened, gamed out scenarios that rarely came true, and replayed awkward interactions on a loop—thinking my way through moments that begged to be felt. From the outside, it looked like I had my shit together. I was a real deep thinker. A real smart guy.

Then again, that’s not quite true. My closest friends and family could see I was lost in my own world. Not because I let them in, but because it kept leaking out anyway. Internally, I either strategized my next move or simply dissociated from the present one entirely.

Over time, that began to shift. It took years of messy recovery, trying pretty much anything that might quiet my mind and bring me back into my body. I meditated like life depended on it, experimented with more consciousness-altering techniques than I care to admit, and found teachers who helped me see it was all much simpler than I’d made it.

At first, I just wanted to stop drinking and using. But eventually, I saw the deeper engine beneath it all: an addiction to thought.

Slowly, sometimes excruciatingly so, I learned how to settle back into my own skin. It took daily practice to calm my system. What emerged was spacious presence: the ability to be here, fully in my body, letting this moment be enough. It surprised me to learn that this capacity wasn’t some rare gift or personality trait—it was a muscle. I worked it consistently, like training for a marathon, until being present stopped being work. Before I knew it, life started to organize itself around something deeper and more primal than thinking.

What I got for all that effort is something I’m still getting used to talking about. My relationships became simpler and more honest. I feel connected—to the earth, to other people, to silence. Life changed from something I had to figure out to something I could actually feel. And a soothing presence is available whenever I need it. I can sink in and let the Tao carry me.

Only later did I realize this shift had a name beyond the spiritual frameworks I already knew. Apparently, it had been described—beautifully and at length—by psychiatrist . The guy’s having a serious moment right now, and you can’t escape his ideas on podcasts, Substack, or anywhere thoughtful people gather online. He shows how modern life runs mostly on the left hemisphere: the part that controls, labels, breaks things apart. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, holds the wider, relational, poetic depth we all crave. Some feel that longing acutely, others hardly notice, but it’s wired into all of us.

For decades, McGilchrist has laid bare how we’ve become a left hemisphere culture, hooked on control and the comforting lie that we can think our way out of everything. The right hemisphere—our seat of wholeness, intuition, embodied wisdom—has been pushed aside, mostly benched. Largely suppressed. Which might explain why so many people are tuning into his work now. We’re hungry to remember what we lost.

But here’s what most people miss about hemispheric theory: reading about it is left-brain as hell!

For every minute spent scrolling through a newsletter on the importance of right-hemisphere living (including this one!), ten more would be better spent practicing something like alternate nostril breathing (Nadi Shodhana is a method that actually balances the hemispheres). McGilchrist isn’t just describing theory here. He’s pointing to a completely different way of moving through life.

And in an age of AI and ever-growing cognitive noise—mounting entropy across every dimension of life, from politics to culture to the very lineaments of our cityscapes—this might be one of the most practical life skills you didn’t know you needed. The personal benefits are huge, so much so that, if properly done in sufficient numbers, the effects could ripple on societal scales. Being the change you wish to see in the world, and whatnot.

To our left-brained selves, it may be a comfort (and motivation) to know that groundbreaking neuroscience bears this up. The shift into persistent awakening, and all the wellbeing attendant to it, might quite literally be a shift from left- to right-hemisphere dominance. This is supported by MRI research showing structural brain changes in long-term meditators, and by meta-analyses on how the hemispheres work together over time. Our brains are awesomely plastic. Which just means you can learn this whenever you decide to, right in the middle of everything else you’ve got going on.

At first it might not be easy, but it’s always simple. That’s what this piece is about.

What follows is a field guide for changing how you meet reality, drawn from what’s actually worked for me (after a long list of things that didn’t). It’s my small attempt to offer something grounded and useful amid all the hemisphere discourse: a way to actually embody the shift, not just analyze it.

In the end, it’s mostly about loosening our grip on the one addiction we rarely name but constantly feed: thinking.

Unclench

Right now, as you read this, check in with your belly. Is it tight? What about your face—is your jaw locked, your brow tense? If you’re anything like me, you might even be clenching your ass without meaning to. Most of us carry a habit of bracing: an old animal reflex tucked into the body, a muscle memory so deep we mistake it for normal, if we notice it at all.

You could try this. Starting at your feet, slowly scan up through your legs, your back, your shoulders and face, all the way to your scalp. There’s almost always at least one knot of tension you didn’t know was there.

Now, if you feel like it, clench your hand tightly, squeeze hard for five seconds, then let it go.

Feel the difference?

That’s the whole move here.

It sounds simple, but noticing and letting go is a skill most of us forget how to use. It’s not something you do, but something you stop unconsciously doing.

McGilchrist explains this clearly. The left hemisphere tightens its grip when the world feels uncertain, trying to control reality by chopping it into smaller, manageable parts. Under stress, it hoards more blood flow, more metabolic fuel, and your body follows, gearing up to fight or run.

The right hemisphere, meanwhile, works completely differently. It’s built for open attention that sees wholes rather than parts. But you can’t white-knuckle your way there. You have to actually relax and unclench to sense the whole of what’s happening. When your system feels safe enough to drop its defenses, the right brain comes alive. It yawns, it loves, it softens the edges, and remembers that connection is possible.

Thomas Hübl, a contemporary teacher who bridges mysticism and trauma science, puts it simply: “Relaxation is the prerequisite for deep perception.”

Your nervous system can’t soften into the wider field when it’s locked and loaded for the next crisis in your inbox.

Stop strategizing and start dancing

Instead, stop thinking about how to manage your body and move it. Stretch, breathe, roll on the floor. Seriously, when was the last time you rolled around on the floor? One benefit of being a new dad is watching kids go absolutely feral on the ground.

I might also suggest dancing alone in your room to this and this. Or, if you like getting dubstep freaky, this. Anything that reminds you you’re an animal, not a strategy machine.

Again, if you’re anything like me, you spend a terrifying chunk of your tens of thousands daily thoughts on strategy: how many sips of caffeine is the Goldilocks number, what snack won’t ruin my gut, exactly how to sit so I don’t wreck my back again, what exact bedtime ritual will guarantee my son sleeps through the night, and so on.

We could spend our entire lives planning how to live. Or we could just stop. None of this micro-managing is actually required!

Unhook awareness from thought

Even as the body softens, the mind still wants the spotlight. That is not a flaw. The left brain is brilliant at naming, planning, and weaving meaning out of the chaos of stimuli. It makes language and maps and keeps your life organized. This is a gift. The trouble comes when it loops on its own stories and you forget they are just stories. You get so caught up in the spin that the echo starts to feel like real sound.

Enter Loch Kelly, who blends neuroscience and nondual awareness in a way that’s surprisingly good at cutting through this very human mess. You don’t fight thought head-on. You just stop feeding it. He calls this unhooking awareness from thought. I picture it like a fish slipping off the hook and drifting back into open water—where it belongs. (Unless you’re ordering sushi.)

When you notice you are lost in thought, just pause and name it softly: thinking. Then maybe let yourself feel a little glad you noticed. This moment matters more than people think. Every time you celebrate escaping the thought hook, you train your brain to love coming home. You strengthen the muscle that prefers presence over rumination. It’s one of the simplest and most underrated skills there is: the ability to unhook and see thought for what it is.

But noticing is only the first half. The shift only really happens when you place your attention right away on something tactile and alive: the hum of the fridge, the soles of your feet, the rise and fall of your breath. Sensation pulls you back into the room, which is, inconveniently or beautifully, the only place your life is ever happening.

Feel more

Once you unhook from thought, what’s left is sensation. The animal in you knows how to feel without your supervision. Let it. One of my teachers, who had roots in a Thai forest monastery, told me that the head monk always reminded him:

“The only thing you really need to do is think less, feel more.”

Let each sensation be exactly as it is. There’s nothing special to reach for, and you don’t have to get calm or “spiritual” about it. Just stay close to the pulse—meaning, stay with the living, shifting texture of your body and the space around you.

It’s like letting your awareness spread out and touch the room itself—not scanning it with your mind, but sensing it as if you could read its vibe through your skin. Almost like you’re reading space if it were psychic braille, as Peter Brown puts it, attuning to the experiential texture of what’s happening.

Feeling in this way is both the practice and the fruit. At first, it might feel awkward or difficult. But if you stick with it, the right hemisphere naturally takes over, and the edges start to blur. The warmth of sunlight on your arm doesn’t feel like something happening to you—it feels like something you’re part of. The sound of traffic becomes less like noise and more like a rhythm you’re swimming in. Sometimes you might forget where you end and everything else begins.

Soften your gaze

Of all the doors back to the right hemisphere, vision might be the one we ignore most, which is ironic, given how much we depend on it. Humans are primarily visual creatures: some estimates say that 30 to 50 percent (or even up to 80%) of our cerebral cortex is dedicated to visual processing. That is more than touch and hearing combined. But most of us use our eyes like a lighthouse rather than the sun: instead of illuminating everything around us, we narrow our focus, always scanning for the next singular thing to grab.

The left hemisphere loves this tunnel vision. It thrives on details, labels, parts—drilling down to catch what it can name. What it can’t name, it can’t see. The right hemisphere works differently. It sees the living whole, the web of connections stitching everything together.

Most of us never learned to use our eyes this way. But when you soften your gaze to include what’s happening at the edges, you tap into another kind of perception—the brain’s relational networks instead of its laser focus mode. When you relax your eyes, the brain shifts from dissecting parts to taking in the whole.

McGilchrist points out that the right hemisphere holds this wide, steady attention by default. This is simply how your eyes and mind work when you stop trying to control what you see. But most of us unconsciously clench our vision the same way we clench our jaw—and it lets go when you do.

If you feel like playing with this, pick something in front of you. Let your eyes soften until you start to notice the space around the object itself—the little bit of room it sits in. Then see if you can sense the space all the way out to the blurry edges at the far boundary of your vision. It is a bit like switching from a narrow sniper’s scope to what I call a soft cyclopic eye: one wide, relaxed eye that takes in the whole scene at once.

This part is key. You are looking out through a single visual field, a continuous space where everything appears together as one thing. Nothing in that field truly stands alone. As John Donne famously wrote in 1624: no man is an island. And in this way of seeing, no-thing is an island either.

Next time you find yourself puttering around your kitchen, try softening your eyes into that soft cyclopic eye. See how the fridge stops being just a fridge. It blends into the counter, the light, the leaves on the windowsill. Everything reveals itself as part of one unfolding whole, made of the same fabric of seeing, open to what is seen.

When the cyclopic eye was first pointed out to me, it was a bit of a breakthrough. I realized that meditation didn’t have to stay inside my body or breath, but could include everything I was seeing. I started practicing this again and again: noticing when I got caught in thought, unhooking, and relaxing into the wider view. It’s a literal shift from content to context, which is what right-hemisphere living is all about.

With a bit of training, this kind of seeing becomes second nature. And it’s really pretty sweet. It’s a small taste of the oneness mystics have always waxed poetic about. It’s just so simple and ordinary, most people overlook it.

Notice that reality is turned on

While working with the visual field, you might also notice something rather astonishing: it’s all just here, showing up by itself. The whole scene—objects, colors, shadows, the way light hits the wall—is all just appearing without any effort on your part. You didn’t push a button to make your visual field show up. You’re not straining for sound to enter your ears. When you woke up this morning, consciousness just came back online, and the whole world was waiting for you. Even thoughts arrive the same way—unbidden, instantaneously manifest.

This, too, is so simple that the left hemisphere usually skips right over it. In fact, that’s the thread running through everything we’ve covered: the right hemisphere awakens when you notice what was always already here. When you really let this sink in—that everything you see, hear, and think is showing up on its own—it feels both clear and obvious.

The thing is, sometimes the sheer force of life happening on its own, all around you, without your effort, can feel so big you might want to run from it.

For years, I did everything I could to avoid the raw horsepower of reality, even though deep down, it was what I wanted most. Substances, screens, endless busyness—anything to dull the overwhelming immediacy of what was actually happening. And our culture makes this avoidance incredibly easy. The entire consumer machine depends on pulling your attention away from what’s plainly here, selling you distractions from your own life.

But if you slow down, even for a second, there is this undeniable vibration underneath and within everything. Eventually, you won’t even need to slow down to notice that…

Reality is already switched on.

It always was. And “reality” is just another word for the undeniable happening of experience.

Stop trying so hard

Once you catch even a glimpse of this, something else becomes obvious: you don’t have to work nearly as hard as you think! Effort starts to feel a little absurd. This is what Taoists call wu wei—effortless action, or the art of non-doing. Not being lazy, but moving with the current of life instead of against it.

Suddenly, you’re surfing.

Let it be strange

The more you notice reality doing its thing without any of your help, the more undeniable it becomes: you have absolutely no idea what’s going on here.

Look at your hand right now. I mean really look, zoomed in. Notice the lines etched like old riverbeds, the texture of skin that’s somehow both solid and soft, the way light catches those tiny hairs that grow without you telling them to. Feel the warmth, the blood moving through your veins.

Then zoom out: this hand is attached to an arm, connected to a body that’s somehow breathing itself, pulling oxygen from air that trees exhaled this morning, trees that are somehow turning sunlight into the very molecules keeping you alive. All of this is happening on a planet spinning through an infinite void we call space at 67,000 miles per hour, while orbiting a nuclear explosion we call the sun. And it’s all made of stardust. Literal stardust, forged in the furnaces of dying stars billions of years ago, somehow organized into this temporary arrangement that can read these words and wonder of itself.

The details are mindfuckingly intricate. Your eyes are translating electromagnetic radiation into this vivid, three-dimensional movie. Your brain—three pounds of electrified meat—is somehow producing thoughts, emotions, the experience of being someone. Quantum fields are fluctuating in the space between your atoms. It’s all wildly, impossibly strange when you stop taking it for granted.

And who are you in the middle of all this? Beyond the non-answer of the name your parents gave you, it’s not an easy question. A better one might be: What are you? A “hominid” is as flimsy an answer as your name. There is something even stranger here—something that is aware—but try to find it and it slips through your fingers, because “you” are the one doing the looking.

And here is the strangest part: the hand, the brain, the planet, the stars—they’re just mental labels. The mind makes up words for things it can’t actually find. In direct experience, there is only this swirl of color, sound, and sensation, happening whether you think about it or not.

This should produce awe. Reverence, even.

As Socrates put it: “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” But in this area, I think Mary Oliver captured it perfectly:

“Let me keep company always with those who say ‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.”

The mind wants to explain it all away, to keep things neat and manageable and controlled. But the right hemisphere thrives when we let things stay just a little mysterious, when we can break from our addiction to having everything figured out.

Because maybe the point was never to know. Maybe it was always to stand here, astonished, for as long as we get to stay.

I’m happy to share a new piece in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, part of their Father’s Day offerings. For those unfamiliar, Tricycle is kind of like the New Yorker of the dharma world. I’ve been reading it for years, always curious about the lives of seasoned meditators, so having a piece in there feels surreal.

Here’s a gift link so you can read it. Free trials are available too, and it’s a nonprofit worth supporting:

Read my essay in Tricycle

This piece felt especially meaningful to write. There’s not much I cherish more than the dharma, my son, and the love that gave rise to both of us in a way. And it felt like a natural moment to reflect, as our lil dude just turned one!

There’s so much I could say about my still-very-much-a-noob experience of parenting, but I was grateful for the chance to explore it through the lens of spiritual practice.

And to really understand how fatherhood has deepened that practice, it helps to know what meditation has meant to me from the start.

It’s not a stretch to say that meditation saved my life. I’ll never forget the moment in early recovery when I knew something had truly shifted. I had just received another blow during one of the hardest stretches I’d ever been through. I was embarrassed, ashamed, and humbled. Every part of me wanted to escape. But instead of reaching for my usual narcotic fixes—which, believe me, were tempting—I found myself sitting on my cushion, in front of my altar, crying, and being with it all. And I stayed.

I’d always heard in dharma talks that you’re not really a meditator until you sit when everything’s falling apart. That moment felt like one of those reluctant initiations, when I realized, somewhat begrudgingly and a little pridefully: I guess I’m a real meditator now.

At first, meditation was a refuge, a means of survival. It was a “tool,” mostly to feel better. But over time, it slowly blossomed into something else: a way of living, an understanding that, on the deepest level, we are always meditating, no matter what’s happening. There were times I considered becoming a full-blown Buddhist, as a kind of devotional gesture to the lineages that had done so much for me. I didn’t, but I’ve continued walking this path with reverence.

Lately I’ve been thinking back to those early, hard years, even as life now feels, honestly, richer than I ever imagined. We’ve got a house full of love, good health, and a real sense of freedom. Parenthood has stretched me to the edge of my capacity and somehow brought me deeper into presence. It’s also softened my heart in ways I didn’t know I needed. Practice has a lot to do with that. These days it feels like a kind of post-conventional dharma, less about formal technique and more about embodying the essence. Pure devotion, without an object.

This feels especially significant against a backdrop where so many are suffering, as our systems break down and the world convulses in pain. At home, we’ve been living in a kind of bubble, full of joy, play, and the sweetness of this new chapter together as a family.

At the same time, I’ve been holding the tension between that wild joy, with my son’s laughter literally blasting through the house, and the weight of a world in crisis. Rather than diminishing either truth, approaching fatherhood as dharma has made me more attuned to the collective’s pain and more available to everyday happiness.

It feels like the world could use a reclaiming of the father archetype: grounded, benevolent, trustworthy, loving, and strong in a healthy way.

So happy early Father’s Day to all the dads out there—biological, spiritual, or otherwise.

Read the essay

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This one’s about something I know intimately:

• the psychic pain of doing work that doesn’t fit

• the conditioning that keeps us stuck

• the courage it takes to leap—or moonlight—into the unknown

• the limits of “follow your bliss” (or its modern cousin: “follow your aliveness”)

• the soul’s hunger for meaningful work in a world coming undone

• and how, with time, the question of purpose dissolves altogether into presence

I might turn this into a series. We’ll see.

The full transcript is below. Thanks for reading, listening, or just lurking. I hope something in it finds you.

The purpose problem

Bullshit jobs, lost purpose, and the urgency of soul-aligned work in the AI age (TRANSCRIPT)

I. The ache: defining the "purpose problem"

If you've ever felt hollowed out by your job with the sense that this can't be it, you're definitely not alone.

I call this the purpose problem.

It's a quiet, persistent sense that your work doesn't fundamentally reflect who you are, that you're spending your life on tasks that don't feed your soul.

And it's definitely not rare. Millions of people feel this way. We spend over 40 hours a week doing things that we ultimately often don't believe in. And I think that this has to mean something.

I'm certainly not the only one to point this out. Many others have explored this. One of my favorite voices is the anthropologist David Graeber, who defined a bullshit job as:

“A form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.”

That one always stings a bit to revisit. But for me, the purpose problem goes deeper. It's not just about meaningless jobs. It's about a soul misalignment, which creates a painful tension between the life that you're living and the one that you know or that you sense that you're meant for.

It's disturbingly easy to end up here living someone else's dream and calling it your own. I know this because it happened to me, and it was something that I lived inside for many years.

II. My wake-up moment

I'll never forget the moment when I was in early recovery and after going through something that was really quite devastating, I had finally landed back on my feet and I was at a new tech job. I had been in leadership roles throughout my whole career and I was back in an office with a nice view of Market Street and on paper everything looked great.

But in that very first week, I think it was something like the third day, and I was going through the motions in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Salesforce, plus one-on-ones. And I just felt something in my gut that said this cannot be it.

I knew then that something was off. I could go through the motions. I knew how to do the job. I could certainly earn a lot of money doing it. But I knew that something was no longer cohering for me.

Read more

Years ago, when I first began writing online, one of my spiritual mentors sent me a long, scathing response to an essay I’d published. The piece examined how modern spirituality gets co-opted into performance, ultimately alienating more people than it includes. Naturally, it became one of my more popular writings at the time.

His core point was simple: everything I was writing about was more a reflection of me than anything else. But this insight came buried in what I can only describe as a thorough “woke dump”—buzzwords and social justice outrage that could have been written by The Onion. The language was so politically charged and single-minded that it undermined his credibility. Not to mention that much of what he wrote simply did not land for me.

Still. My deep reverence for him and his lineage, combined with my genuine commitment to educating myself on anti-racism at that time, meant I couldn’t simply dismiss his words. And his critique penetrated deeper than I initially wanted to admit.

It hurt to be so intensely lit up by someone I looked up to. I could acknowledge the partial truth in what he said, even as I sensed that his response reflected an ideological framework I was beginning to question—especially one that seemed to justify moral certainty at the expense of curiosity, nuance, and relationship.

I sat with his note. I wrote back, explained my intent, and thanked him for his feedback. That felt mature, then.

It was the last real exchange we had, and in effect, the end of our relationship.

Given how much he had taught me—practices that became a staple in my life, teachings that continue to shape my work—it was heartbreaking. But it was also a tremendous learning. Even now, I sometimes find myself sending him prayers, or warm good vibes from afar.

Time passed. The first strands of gray appeared in my already thinning hair. Years of maddening hustling and seeking slowly settled into something resembling patience. I became a father, which radically shifted my understanding of cultural impact.

And lately, I find my relationship with writing breaking down—or “evolving,” if we’re being generous. Much of what used to fuel me doesn’t move me anymore, as it derived from a place of fundamental inadequacy.

I’m still integrating all this. I can feel the process is healthy and natural, even if it’s disorienting. Some days, like today, something clear and true emerges. The love of writing is still there—the satisfaction of chasing the perfect sentence, of making meaning, of baring my soul.

But it’s also hard. I find myself simply unable to read the things I used to obsess over. How do you create “content” when you no longer want to consume it?

I know I’m not alone in this. We’re all fumbling in the dark of these liminal, global transition times. I realize that phrase sounds like something you’d read in a slightly unhinged Instagram caption, but it also feels true.

I’m still learning how to write from wherever this is. And to be clear, it feels far better, with much less room to compromise myself.

In recent months, I’ve been revisiting some of my earlier work and seeing, with fresh eyes, just how much of it was plain wrong—passionate but misguided, clever but incomplete. In other words, deeply on-brand for the era. Much like the spiritual essay I mentioned earlier.

As I look back, I can see how often my critiques were less about the culture I claimed to analyze and more about something unresolved within me. That pattern has resurfaced lately in small, subtle ways, especially as essay ideas come and go. When I catch it, I often think of the final lesson I received from my mentor.

He came to mind again this week, though this time it felt different—like something I hadn’t fully worked through. I found myself digging through my inbox to revisit that old exchange. (I save all the replies to my essays, and this was long before Substack had a comment feature.)

His tone still strikes me as emblematic of what’s broken in progressive culture. And yet, I can now see he was profoundly right about one thing: I wasn’t just critiquing culture. I was projecting.

What I understand now is that nearly all cultural critique is a mirror. We think we’re diagnosing the world, but we’re mostly revealing ourselves. The finger pointing outward usually has four curled back.

When we call out society’s flaws, we’re often naming the exact development shit we haven’t figured out in ourselves—like how to hold two opposing ideas at once, or own our shadow, or loosen our grip on a single stubborn perspective.

This is what’s wild about having over 200 essays to look back on: they chart the edges of my own growth (and also my ability to sound confident while being completely wrong). I can see exactly where I was bumping up against the limits of my understanding. Every one of those cultural commentaries is simultaneously a self-portrait, drawn in negative space.

Even my mentor’s email—so incisive, so corrective—was mostly about him. His lens, his projections. Just like mine. Just like all of us.

That’s the beautiful, maddening truth: our biases, our baggage, our secret hopes for how the world should work are folded into everything we say, every opinion we hold, every sideways look we give. Sometimes a stranger can spot it before we do. It’s part of why I love men’s work, because there’s something sacred in making those hidden layers visible, in showing up real instead of performing.

And when you step back far enough, scientifically or spiritually, the pattern becomes obvious. We never actually experience the world directly. What we think we’re seeing is really just our brain’s best guess, shaped by all our memories and moods and whatever helps us feel like we understand what’s happening.

Neuroscience calls this predictive processing—basically, your brain is constantly guessing what’s out there and filling in the gaps with what it already knows. The Dharma calls it emptiness, dependent origination, or simply illusion.

There’s a famous Zen story I think about often. Two monks are watching a flag flutter in the wind. One says, “The flag is moving.” The other says, “No, it’s the wind.”

Their teacher overhears them and, in classic fashion, totally owns them:

“It’s not the flag. It’s not the wind. It’s the mind that moves.”

That’s the heart of it. We don’t just observe the world. We participate in its making, every time we look. In this vein, projection isn’t a bug, it’s a feature—the very medium through which we experience anything at all.

Everything we critique, admire, or condemn is filtered through this dream of self. That’s why so much of what we call cultural commentary ends up revealing more about the commentator than the culture. It couldn’t be otherwise.

What’s been harder to admit—something I didn’t fully realize until this year—is that much of my cultural critique, and honestly most of what I see from other people who make a living having opinions, comes from people who are just... unhappy. Not necessarily depressed, but carrying around this subtle dissatisfaction that needs somewhere to go. So we point it outward and call it insight.

This isn’t to invalidate critique itself. We need voices that question, call bullshit when they see it, and disrupt the status quo. More than ever.

But there’s a world of difference between critique that comes from curiosity and critique that’s really just someone trying to fix their own stuff by fixing the world.

You can feel the difference. Words born of projection land differently than words born of a wise heart. And right now, when everything feels like it’s falling apart anyway, learning to tell them apart—and aspiring to the latter in my own work—feels important.

Which brings me back to that email. The way it landed like a punch, how defensive I felt, how disorienting it was to be seen that sharply. And how, with time, I’ve come to recognize how right he was, and how wrong we both were in different ways. Maybe that’s what makes something a real teaching—it lingers, works on you for years, and then eventually, it lets go.

I don’t think I’ll carry it much longer. The lesson feels absorbed. But I can still sense it, even now, reminding me to keep softening the part of me that wants to be right.

What if the most important psychological and spiritual question isn’t about finding meaning or knowing God, but simply checking: Are you fundamentally okay, right now?

This question, despite its unassuming nature, cracked something open in me and, with equal intensity, reconfigured the way I work with ot…

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Today, I’m happy to share a reported feature I wrote for DoubleBlind—a magazine I’ve long admired for its mission-driven, independent journalism in the psychedelic space.

It’s a deep-dive on ketamine: how the hype around its rapid rise as a treatment for depression has outpaced scientific understanding, safety protocols, and regulatory oversight—creatin…

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So, I decided to shake up my creative process and try something different. Partly to keep things fresh for myself, partly because staying nimble feels necessary in this strange new landscape.

No carefully crafted essay this time. This is unedited, just my thoughts flowing in real-time, as was my intent. You can watch the video, listen like a podcast while driving, or read the slightly edited transcript below. Your choice, no pressure. Though I suppose watching me in my office occasionally stumble upon my words might add a certain unplanned charm to the proceedings.

One thing I discovered while recording my course is that video is a surprisingly vulnerable medium. There’s nowhere to hide when it’s just your face and your voice carrying your ideas into the ether. Let me know what you think of this experiment—both the format and the ideas themselves. I’m equal parts nervous and excited to share it with you, which, I know by now, is a healthy place to be.

And without further ado, here it is.

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