I’ve been meditating without a timer, a phone or something keeping track of my sits for a while now. No app to track my streak, or an open phone next to me, no voice telling me when to notice the breath or come back to the body. Just me and a wall and whatever the hell my mind decides to take me for thirty five to forty-five minutes of no instruction.

It is worse than I expected. Also better.

Something to Practice

So this might be (will be) a little against my own interests here, seeing as most of my working life has been building and teaching guided meditations. But I think the whole point of sitting in meditation is to eventually need less help …sitting.

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I’d had a lot on my mind and a lot of caffeine in my body throughout the week, and in stressful periods like this I’d often find myself awake at 3.30am contemplating the meaning of all of this. In a few weeks there will be a new person in this house who doesn’t know what a sink is, or a spoon or 3.30am. And I keep noticing that my mind isn’t scared of the actual thing coming. The holding, the crying, the strange animal tenderness of it all. I think I’m ready for that part, or as ready as anyone gets.

What I keep bracing for is the version of it my mind has already built. The one where I’m running on no sleep for six months straight or where I’m a fog-brained zombie snapping at people I love, where the exhaustion compounds and compounds until there’s nothing left of me. That version doesn’t exist yet. It might never exist in the shape I’m imagining. But I’ve already lived through it a dozen times this week, lying awake rehearsing a future that hasn’t happened.

Something to practice

There’s this weird kinda suffering that comes from living a day before it arrives.

I’ve noticed this with sleep, because has it’s long been my nemesis. A few rough nights and I’m a problem to be around. But right now, my mind isn’t actually reacting to last night. It’s reacting to an imagined version of the next six months, one where I’m running on no sleep and somehow expected to support a wife, a newborn, and a business, all at the same time. None of that has happened yet. But the tension shows up in my body as if it has, as if I’m already failing at something that hasn’t started.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite, and funniest, Buddhist teachings: papañca. It roughly translates to mental proliferation, or as I like to think of it, day-dreaming about shit that hasn’t happened. The mind takes one small, real thing, like a tired night and builds an entire future out of it that has nothing to do with what’s actually in front of you. The original moment is gone under everything you’ve added to it.

This happens to me constantly on silent retreat. I’ll be watching some guy pile his tray with a a heroic amount of rice and lentils at lunch and within about four seconds I’ve built a whole case that he’s a sociopath. Zero evidence. Nothing has actually happened. Just a funny mind reaching for a story.

You probably have your own version of this. Maybe it’s not sleep. It could be the the email that hasn’t come back yet and you’ve already written the story where you lost the client. Or the fight with your partner that hasn’t actually happened, the one you’re rehearsing in the shower, building a whole case for.

The antidote isn’t to stop the mind from doing this. I don’t think that’s possible, trust me on this one. It’s just to notice when it’s happening and to see the story as a story rather than a fact. The guy with the rice is not a sociopath. He’s just hungry. And most of my 30, 90, six-months-from-now catastrophe isn’t actual information. It’s just something that hasn’t happened yet, and inshallah might not.

Something to learn

This week, I’ve been thinking about dana. The Pali word usually gets translated as generosity, but that doesn’t quite nail it. Dana isn’t really about the object being given. It’s about what happens in the giver when the grip loosens.

While building gentle—noise I’ve been leaning on a lot of friends, new and old, for help. I’m doing a lot of things for the first time, and I’ve been in awe of how much time some of them have given me, answering my dumb questions, walking me through things they could charge alot of money for.

In Sri Lanka, dana is often one of the first practices people are taught. It comes before ethics, and event before meditation. The idea is that you can’t really steady the mind while it’s still clenched around clinging and identity. Generosity, in this way, isn’t about some kind of moral virtue or performance. It’s more about letting this go without keeping score.

I’ve been trying to pass along the generosity I’ve been shown, mentoring people where I can, taking a meeting when there’s nothing in it for me. None of this feels spiritual in the moment.

But I think that’s the whole point. In a society that continues to divide and scare us into becmong productivity machines - doing things out of a genuine desire feels counter-cultural.

What I’m starting to compute, is that if giving still feels like a loss, it’s not authentic. It means I haven’t actually let go, I’ve just overridden the clinging with willpower or some version what I think I should be doing. The interesting practice this week is to notice the flinch right before the act, that subtle “but what about me, what about my time, my money …” and seeing it clear enough that eventually you can decide to let it go.

By the way, I don’t think I’m that good at this yet. I’m notice the clenching more than I’m noticing the release. But every day we try a little more.

And also - thank you friends, for giving me so much. You know who you are.

Something to enjoy: All of it.

It struck me this week that I would not have dreamt of a life like this ten, fifteen years ago. But here we are. And in the scary, busy, overwhelming moments (moments exactly like this one) I can lose track of that entirely.

We don’t often talk about the benefits of grit in wellness circles. For all of the shitting things I learned in the world of start-ups, grit was perhaps the one defining gift.

It’s what fortifies us, what shines brightly in our darkest days and also what we forget what had all along.

So this week, allow me to offer you this small pep talk: You’ve survived every one of your darkest days so far. Whatever this next stretch asks of you, you’ve already shown you have what it takes to keep meeting it. Nothing is permanent.

Take it all in as part of this weird, cosmic dance. And try to smile a bit while you’re at it.

That’s all.

This week I found myself reading an essay by Buddhist studies scholar Ronald S. Green that asked a surprisingly simple question.

Who is meditation actually for? At first, I thought it was a weird question. Most of us assume meditation is for everyone, right?!

But the longer I noodled on it, the more I realized we’ve been asking a different question altogether.

Does meditation work?

As teachers we tend to point to studies showing lower stress, better sleep and improved focus. Those are useful findings, especially when you’re pitching the HR manager of big multi-national, and of course many people experience those benefits. But they also shape our thinking on what we believe meditation is for.

Historically, that wasn’t the central question.

For most of its history, meditation wasn’t offered as a way to relax or become more productive. It was a way of understanding the mind. The practice lived within a much larger tradition that included ethics, community and guidance. Meditation wasn’t the destination. It was one part of the path.

Somewhere along the way, our expectations changed.

Today many of us come to meditation hoping to feel calmer, quieter or less overwhelmed. Those are deeply human reasons to begin. In fact, they’re often what bring us to the cushion. It was sure was for me.

But if you stay with the practice long enough, and I hope you all do, it begins to change.

The question itself moves from How can meditation make me feel better? to What is meditation helping me see?

That shift changes your practice. Maybe even your life.

If my only measure of a good meditation is whether I feel calmer and more focused afterwards, then every restless sit feels like a failure.

But if meditation is an investigation into the mind itself, then even distraction becomes something to learn from. Restlessness has something to teach us. So to does frustration, which becomes part of the practice rather than evidence that we’ve somehow done it wrong.

I believe the real invitation of meditation isn’t to become someone else.

It’s to become deeply interested in the person who’s already here.

And then, slowly, to begin questioning whether that “person” is as fixed and solid as we imagine.

Practice

Before your next sit, ask yourself one question.

Why am I practising?

Whatever answer comes up first, don’t rush past it.

Maybe you’re hoping to feel calmer. Maybe you want relief from a difficult week. Maybe you simply want a break from the constant noise of your own mind. Those are all honest places to begin.

Then meditate as you normally would.

If your mind wanders, notice how quickly you decide you’ve failed. If you’re restless, notice the urge to fix the experience or reach for a different one.

What if none of that is a problem to solve?

What if meditation isn’t asking you to manufacture a particular state of mind, but to become more intimate with the one that’s already here?

For me, that’s where the practice really begins.

Not when the mind becomes quiet, but when I stop treating every uncomfortable moment as evidence that something has gone wrong.

Listen

I had the pleasure of spending Friday evening in conversation with legendary Rich Roll.

I don’t like many podcasts, and definitely not many podcast hosts. But I’ve admired Rich’s work for years, what I liked the most was who he was when the cameras weren’t rolling. Humble, curious and deeply present. It was a real privilege to be interviewed by him. I can’t wait to share the conversation with you.

Before we recorded, I’d been listening to his recent conversation with Dr. Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychologist often referred to as the mother of mindfulness. One idea about the conversation was around the decisions we make.

We spend so much of our lives wondering whether we’ve made the right decision. The right career. The right relationship. The right next step.

Langer suggests we’re asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking, Did I make the right decision? ask, How can I make this decision right?

It’s a simple, but it changes almost everything. It moves us away from certainty and towards responsibility. Rather than searching for the perfect path, we commit ourselves fully to the one we’re already on. It’s a fascinating listen.

It felt aligned with everything else I’d been thinking about this week.

gentle—noise

A quick update on gentle—noise.

As we continue to grow, so is the community around it. Over the coming months we’ll be expanding beyond meditation into new conversations, practices and experiences. That means bringing in teachers, chefs, artists and practitioners from a range of contemplative traditions.

If you’re based in New York, or know someone who is, and you’d like to be part of that world, I’d love to hear from you. We’re beginning to build a directory of thoughtful people working across meditation, qigong, tai chi, food, movement and culture.

You can add your details here.

Coming this week

One more thing before I go.

Tomorrow I’ll be sharing details of a new free four-week meditation series here in New York City.

As always, paid subscribers will receive first access before registration opens publicly. The same goes for our next evening at Public Records, where one of my favourite teachers will be leading the practice.

If you’ve been thinking about becoming a paid subscriber, this is a good week to join.

That’s the Brief. More on Wednesday.

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For the last few weeks, I’ve been telling myself that life will calm down soon.

We’re preparing for a baby, which turns out to involve so many appointments, classes, lists, conversations and small plastic objects than I expected. I’m trying to be present with my wife through all of it. I’m going to doctor’s appointments, learning about car seats, comparing bassinets and pretending I understand the difference between various kinds of bottles.

At the same time, I’m building a new business.

That means writing articles, recruiting, meeting potential investors, talking to partners, reviewing contracts, recording a podcast and answering so many damn emails. Somewhere in there, I’m also trying to teach, meditate, exercise, sleep and remain a kind.

I keep thinking that once we get through the next few months, things will become easier.

Then I remember I’ve been saying some version of that for most of my adult life.

Once I finish this project, earn more money, move houses, wait till the business is stable….

Once the baby arrives.

Then I’ll have time to write. Then I’ll return to my practice. Then I’ll feel more present. Then life will properly begin.

The right time is always just ahead of us.

We imagine a future version of ourselves who is less tired, less distracted and somehow better organised. This person wakes early, answers emails efficiently, meditates every day and has enough emotional energy left to listen properly at dinner.

I have been waiting for him for years. He appears occasionally, usually on holiday.

It’s a persuasive idea because sometimes circumstances really do improve. A difficult project ends. A debt gets paid. A child begins sleeping through the night. There are periods when life becomes quieter. But quiet periods don’t remain quiet.

Something else appears.

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Sometime in 2006, a few months after my first panic attack, I became obsessed with yoga and meditation.

I had been sick for months. I couldn’t sleep properly. I was anxious most of the time and had no idea what was happening to me. Doctors told me I was fine, which was good news, except that I felt terrible. And very not fine.

Then I found meditation and later yoga. For the first time in months, I could sit inside my own experience without immediately wanting to escape it. I could breathe. I could feel my body again. Sometimes, for twenty minutes, I felt okay.

I became completely obsessed, naturally.

I read everything I could find. Buddhism, meditation, yoga philosophy. Books from Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Chogyum Trungpa, books about monks and mystics and people who had apparently worked out how to be human without finding it quite as difficult as I did.

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Saying that out loud sounds just as bad as I feared it would.

And I don’t mean I have been distracted for a few days, or that I missed a week because I was busy. For much of the last year, I have been dealing incessant brain fog that has made the simple act of sitting down and paying attention much harder than it used to be.

I am still trying to understand what’s going on. There have been CT scans, endoscopies, colonoscopies, blood tests, stool tests, visits to specialists, and more tests still to come. There’s inflammation in my body. I just the last three years haven’t been the kindest to by body. Whether it’s autoimmune thing or something else is still unclear.

Alongside this, I have spent much of the year moving through different time zones. New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Sri Lanka, Berlin, Paris. I have slept badly for long stretches. Some mornings I wake up and it takes a while to remember where the hell I am.

Then I sit down to meditate.

For twenty years, meditation has been the most consistent thing in my life. I have practiced through heartbreak, anxiety, career changes, long flights, good years and difficult ones. I have taught tens of thousands of people how to do it.

And now, some mornings, I can barely follow a three breaths.

I’ve been hard on myself about this. I would sit down and immediately begin measuring the meditation against some earlier version of myself. My attention used to be sharper. I used to sit longer. I used to be able to stay with the breath without feeling like my mind was disappearing into fog. I used to be more ‘aware’.

There’s a weird kind of angst and frustration in struggling with something you are supposed to know how to do.

But when I look at my life over the past year, something else is also true.

I have been relatively steady. My life has been…pretty pleasant.

Not always happy, or calm. But balanced enough. I’ve been able to move through uncertainty without completely collapsing into it. I’ve been able to work, travel, teach, love my wife, prepare for a child, and deal with the strange bureaucracy of being a person with a body that nobody can quite explain.

I started wondering why.

Part of the answer, I think, is that years of meditation leave something behind.

I sometimes think of it as a savings account of mindfulness. Every time you sit down and notice a thought without following it, every time you feel anger in the body before speaking, every time you return to the breath, everytime you’re aware of your reality something is being deposited.

Over years, it adds up.

You can stop meditating for a while. Your attention can become scattered. The practice can feel far away. But I don’t think you simply lose everything you have learned.

The space between a feeling and a reaction may still be there of course. You might still notice when you are being a jerk or you might still recognize a thought as a thought. You may still know, somewhere in your body, that this moment will pass.

Formal meditation strengthens these capacities, but eventually they begin to live beyond the cushion.

There is another reason I think I have suffered less than I might have over the past year.

For a long time, I thought meditation was the main event. The rest of my practice was interesting, sometimes useful, but meditation was the real practice.

I don’t believe that anymore.

This past year I’ve spent more time studying the Buddhist teachings on ethics and morality. How we speak. How we act. What we consume. How we earn money. How we treat people when nobody is watching. What we do with desire, anger, envy, and power.

These things have probably helped me as much as meditation. At times, more.

This isn’t unique to Buddhism of course. Nearly every religious and philosophical tradition has tried to answer the same basic question: how should a human being live?

The language changes. The Buddha taught precepts. Christianity has commandments and teachings on virtue. Judaism has mitzvot. Hindu traditions speak of dharma and the yamas + niyamas. The Stoics asked what it meant to live according to virtue. Aristotle believed character was formed through repeated action.

Modern psychology covers some of the same territory through a different door. Our wellbeing is shaped by the quality of our relationships, whether our actions match our values, how much conflict we create around ourselves, and whether we can live with the person we are becoming.

This can all sound very serious. Morality is not a fashionable word in the world of wellness. Ethics can sound like a university subject or a list of things you are forbidden to do, for those that have PTSD from early experiences.

But for me, the Buddhist understanding just feels practical.

If you lie, you have to remember the lie.

If you speak cruelly, you have to live in the atmosphere your words create.

If you constantly chase what you want, your mind learns that this moment is never enough.

If you betray people, manipulate them, or act against your own values, some part of you has to carry that.

You can meditate for an hour every morning and still spend the rest of the day creating the conditions for your own suffering. This is why some of the worst people I have met, I have met on meditation retreats.

You can’t meditate your way out of how you treat others or the world around you. You can’t use awareness to bypass narcissism, greed, or a basic lack of humanity.

This is also why ethics comes before meditation in many traditional teachings. A quieter mind is easier to find when your life is not full of things you are hiding from yourself.

I’ve come to see this more clearly during a period when meditation itself has been difficult.

Maybe the practice is also in the email I choose not to send while angry. The conversation where I tell the truth. The moment I notice that I am making someone else responsible for my mood. The way I behave when I am tired, afraid, or disappointed.

None of this requires perfect concentration.

The past few days I sit and the brain fog is still there. I lose the breath. I forget what I am doing. The bell rings and I am not sure where the time went.

I am trying to be less harsh about that.

I still meditate. I still believe in the practice. But in this season of my life I no longer believe that the quality of a meditation tells me very much about the quality of a life.

I know how I live the rest of the day will tell me more.

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So here is the first one. My wife and I are having a baby. A little girl. She is due in September, which makes her a Virgo, which my fellow September people will understand the gravity of.

This took three and a half years. We tried for a long time and eventually went the route of IVF, and along the way I earned what feels like a PhD in fertility. But the thing I actually came away with was awe. Awe of the female body. Awe of Sophie-Alexia specifically. I watched her inject things into her body we both couldn’t pronounce. I watched her ride the swings, the close calls, the heartbreaks. There were stretches where all I could do was witness it, and be left without anything useful to say.

I have only felt that kind of speechlessness once before, when my mother was dying. There is a a kind of courage that only becomes visible when you’re close enough to someone to see the cost of it. I saw it in my mother. I am seeing it again now.

None of this happened in a clean season of my life. The exit from Open. My own health issues. Moving states. The fertility road underneath all of it. And yet I am writing this from Fort Greene Park, in a city I am madly in love with, and from here it feels divinely worth it.

Here’s the other thing. For alot of this process, I gave it up to something bigger than myself. If it was meant to be - I figured it would be. Call it god, the creator, love, the universe, whatever word survives your skepticism. If you believe, as I do, that some things are already written, then there are moments where the only available thing to do is surrender. I am not good at it. I am learning it anyway.

Six months of gentle—noise

Today I let myself look back, which I rarely do, and thank the version of me who trusted his gut.

Six months in, the editorial is at 10K. Instagram is just under 11K. We have worked with brands like Highsnobiety, Vogue France, Kulm Hotel, Dior Beauty, and others I still can’t quite believe say yes. I’ve taught in St. Moritz, Sicily, Paris, Berlin, and soon London. We’re in conversation with a few dream partners about making this work more accessible, which matters more to me than the logos do. I’m also starting a foundation arm to gentle—noise. A way to back the things that matter, with more than words.

Our little team is also growing. A head of business, a head of special projects, and soon an associate editor. And a lot of love and credit that’s overdue: Sophie-Alexia writes our Instagram posts. If you’ve read them and felt something, that was her. She put alot of work into these and as you can probably tell sh’s a far better writer than she lets on.

When I left Open, one fear sat above the rest. I didn’t know whether people had resonated with me or with Open. I had changed so much inside that machine that I wasn’t sure who was left when it was gone. You guys answered that question for me. You stayed. You showed up when I started going on about anti-optimization and standing on my small soapbox about spirituality, which is not a safe subject to build on. You sell out the events, some in under twenty minutes (s/o nyc friends). Beyond the ego of it, this confirmed the thing I most wanted to be true. That we are in a moment that asks for more. More than what’s on offer. More from those of us who teach and lead.

What’s next

Personally, I’ve been accepted into the Hoffman Process. For those who don’t know it, it’s an intensive weeklong residential retreat built around tracing the patterns we inherit in childhood and learning to release the ones we never chose. After the last three years of grinding, I’ve missed retreat after retreat, almost every real chance to sit with myself. There has been so much output and almost no input, and I’m starting to feel the deficit, especially walking toward fatherhood. I’ve met some of my own shadow lately and there’s clearly some stuff to process, work through, and eventually befriend. So I’m going. I’ll be offline mid to late July and I’ll tell you about it honestly when I’m back.

Paris, and the rest of you in the EU. I'm coming over in a few weeks to teach at a Vogue France summit, and if you can make it, I'd love to see you there. And if there are any Parisians among you, reach out. I want to know you're out there.

The podcast. After years of complaining about podcast bros, I have become one. I’ll try not to be insufferable about it. These episodes are less about me and more about the guests and how each of them keeps a spiritual practice alive inside this strange, beautiful world. A few of them will undo you a little. Some clues, since I can’t help myself: Groundhog. Grammy. The Box. Icon. It launches in September.

Guided meditations. A lot of you have asked. Yes. I’ve missed making them. This time I want to do it differently: starting in August, here on Substack, a new meditation and contemplation each week.

Help me out and let me know what you’d like to hear or more importantly, what’s alive for you in your practice…

That’s all for now. As always, I’m grateful that some of you trust me to share this and to walk a little of the path alongside you. I’m not a guru. I’m a friend further a few steps ahead of you on the trail who keeps turning around to check you’re still there. But I take that seriously.

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She’s talking and I’m listening. Or I’m doing the thing that looks like listening.

Ten days. She has ten days of life to share with me; small things, important things, the kind of details that only matter to someone who loves you. And of course I’m nodding and agreeing. Asking the right questions. My eyes are on her face.

But I know, even as I’m nodding, that I’m not really there. You can feel that about yourself. The gap between your face and your actual attention.

I’ve been a founder for close to ten years. First A—SPACE. Then Open. Now gentle—noise. And somewhere, gradually across those years, without really noticing it, I stopped being a person who builds things and became the thing I was building. The founder. Always on. Always available. Always one email away from dropping everything. Urgh.

Every founder says they struggle to switch off. I’ve said it too, probably in interviews, probably with a weird kinda pride disguised as complaint. But I’m trying to do it differently this time. Genuinely trying. And right now, honestly, it’s hard.

What I’ve noticed most isn’t the exhaustion. It’s the attention. The way it fragments. An urgent message from a designer mid-dinner. A prospective investor who wants a call at 7pm. Small interruptions that don’t feel like much in the moment but leave something behind. A residue. The conversation you were in before the phone lit up doesn’t fully return when you put it down. You’re there, but part of you is still somewhere else, managing something, solving something, being the person the company needs you to be.

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For the last three months I think I’ve been teetering on the edge of burnout.

Since launching gentle—noise, chaos has most definitely replaced calm. The irony of a meditation teacher admitting this isn’t lost on me. But here we are, trying to build something meaningful inside a culture that rewards constant motion. Also trying to make a small difference while paying the bills, supporting a family, answering emails, and remembering to get enough protein in a day.

Lately I’ve been wondering whether these two lives can actually coexist and be sustainable.

A few weeks ago I was in Los Angeles moving between meetings with investors, agents, brands, and partners. Conversations about growth, strategy, audiences, and revenue. A few days later I was standing at the gardens at Esalen with my friend Max, leading a retreat for sixty people, many of whom I’d spent years practicing with online.

The first day was harder than I expected.

I couldn’t settle. My mind was racing. I felt disconnected from the room and, if I’m honest, disconnected from myself. There was a moment where I wondered whether I was actually a teacher at all or simply someone playing the role of one.

Fortunately, retreats have a way of stripping away whatever story you’re carrying.

By the end of the weekend I was reminded of a few things.

First, I’m a teacher before anything else. I’ll (god-willing) do it until I croak.

Long before there was a business plan, a podcast, a newsletter, or a brand, there was my practice. I was fortunate enough to receive teachings that have been handed down for more than 2,500 years. My teachers entrusted those teachings to me and, in turn, I try to pass them on as faithfully as I can.

Everything else is secondary. That’s easy to forget.

The second thing I was reminded of is that we’ve collectively lost something important in the way many of us approach spiritual practice.

As meditation, yoga, breathwork, and mindfulness entered the mainstream, they became increasingly framed through the language of optimisation and performance. Better focus. Better sleep. Better productivity. Better leadership. I’ve banged on about this before, i know.

And none of those outcomes are inherently bad. Many of them are really useful.

But somewhere along the way we and maybe even me lost contact with mystery.

The traditions these practices emerged from weren’t self-improvement systems. They were attempts to understand the nature of reality itself.

Buddhism, despite how it’s often presented in the West, isn’t purely secular or psychological. It’s filled with ideas that many modern people find uncomfortable: rebirth, unseen realms, karma unfolding across lifetimes. Whether you take those literally or metaphorically almost feels beside the point. What matters is that these traditions were never solely concerned with becoming a slightly more efficient version of yourself. They were asking much larger questions.

Who are we?

What is consciousness?

What happens when we stop organising life entirely around our own preferences and fears?

Spending days in silence beside the Pacific Ocean, meditating several times a day, I could feel that vastness again. As a genuine felt sense. It was a reminder that practice connects us to something much bigger than self-improvement.

Most of us aren’t living in monasteries. We exist inside a complicated world of careers, families, mortgages, deadlines, algorithms, ambition, and desire. The retreat was a remembering of sorts.

I remembered who I was beneath the noise. Thank you Big Sur.

Then, forty-eight hours later, I was back on a plane.

Home long enough to see my wife before heading to Sicily for a retreat hosted by Vogue France.

Even writing that sentence makes me laugh. One day I’m speaking about Buddhist philosophy in Big Sur. The next I’m teaching meditation at a luxury retreat with a fashion magazine and a group of models.

A part of me immediately got lost in my head again. Was I somehow less of a teacher because I was leading a meditation retreat for Vogue France? What kind of fraudster am I ? (the world kind surely).

Interestingly, over the course of a few days I found myself sitting with artists, designers, writers, photographers, entrepreneurs, and creatives from around the world. Different backgrounds, different beliefs, different lives, yet the conversations kept circling the same themes: meaning, purpose, faith, identity, belonging, love, and what it means to live a good life.

I can get so immersed in Buddhist practice and wellness culture that I forget most people arrive at these questions through entirely different doorways. Not everyone meditates. Not everyone is interested in Buddhism. Not everyone has a spiritual practice. Yet many people seem to be wrestling with the same underlying questions.

How do I make sense of this life?

What can I rely on when things fall apart?

Is there more to life than…this?

It left me reflecting on how differently we all relate to the big questions. Some people call it faith. Others call it God. Some find it through art, nature, family, service, community, creativity, or contemplative practice. The language changes, but the impulse is familiar. Beneath our different stories and beliefs there often seems to be a desire to feel connected to something larger than our individual concerns.

Perhaps that’s always been true. But lately it feels especially visible.

Many of the structures that once provided people with a sense of meaning and belonging feel less certain than they once did. We’re surrounded by information and yet many people feel starved for wisdom. In that environment it’s not surprising that so many people are searching, even if they’re not entirely sure what they’re searching for.

As I write this, we’re moving through Saga Dawa, which coincides with Vesak, the most significant period in the Buddhist calendar. Traditionally, it commemorates the birth, enlightenment, and passing of the Buddha. For practitioners, it’s considered an especially auspicious time to deepen meditation, practice generosity, strengthen ethical conduct, and cultivate compassion.

Whether you’re Buddhist or not, I think there’s something valuable in the spirit of that invitation.

It’s a useful time to reflect on the intentions shaping your life. To pay attention to what you’re cultivating through your actions, habits, and relationships. To be a little more generous than usual. A little more patient. A little more forgiving. To extend kindness when it’s inconvenient. To remember that our lives are shaped less by what we believe and more by what we repeatedly practice.

The rest of the year is simply an opportunity to continue.

By the time you read this, I’ll be somewhere between Sicily and Berlin, heading to a couple of talks and gatherings. If you’re in Berlin this week, come by. I’d love to meet you.

Hello from LA.

Here I am in my friend Max’s new Los Feliz home, watching the light move through the eucalyptus trees, an $18 Erewhon smoothie in hand, hating myself and missing this life in equal measure. Six tough years in Venice, and I woke up this morning realizing the east side was the answer the whole time. Dang. You live, you learn.

Maybe there’s a second LA chapter somewhere in the works. I just have to convince my wife to relocate, again.

I’m here for a few things: a private event with the music industry, time with old friends, some potential investor meetinga and then slowly making my way up to Big Sur for our Esalen retreat. This retreat always acts as a reset. Four days of deep meditation and dance, no wifi, the Pacific somewhere underneath. It feels like the kind of time that strips things back to what was always already there. I keep thinking about what drew Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, and Aldous Huxley to that particular stretch of coastline. Five years in, I think I’m beginning to understand.

Go at least once. See what you too can find.

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Something to Practice: Finding refuge.

In Buddhism, there’s a foundational teaching called the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. For those of us practicing outside a monastery or religious connotations, that translates loosely to our capacity for waking up, a path worth walking, and a community that holds us to it. They’re not abstract ideals. They’re structures. Shelters the mind learns to return to when it’s no longer sure where it is.

But lately I’ve been contemplating something else: what do we actually take refuge in today?

Our phones, probably. The scroll. The inbox. The feed that never fully empties. The average person touches their phone over 2,600 times a day. We’ve built, without quite meaning to, a perfectly engineered shelter that asks nothing of us and returns just enough to keep us coming back. Dopamine without depth. The feeling of connection without the weight of it.

The ancient texts name false refuges too. Praise, gain, pleasure, status. The things we reach for believing they’ll finally settle something restless inside us. They don’t. But the reaching is so habitual it can begin to feel like living.

And we’ve added new ones. The news cycle, which offers the feeling of being informed while quietly replacing any real sense of agency. Celebrities, whose lives we track with an intimacy we rarely offer our own. And lately, AI.

There’s something worth examining in how quickly we’ve begun outsourcing not just our tasks but our thinking, our processing, even our loneliness to a machine that reflects us back without ever actually knowing us. These aren’t judgments. They’re just worth noticing.

What we take refuge in shapes us. Slowly, mostly without our permission. Real refuge is quieter and less immediately satisfying. The breath, when you actually feel it rather than think about it. The friend who tells you what you don’t want to hear. The practice you return to not because it soothes you but because it orients you. The community that holds a mirror rather than a mood board.

This week, once, when you reach for your phone out of pure habit, just pause before you get there. Ask yourself what you’re actually looking for. You don’t have to answer cleanly. The asking is the whole thing.

Something to Learn: Not being owned by our desires.

Or more precisely: not being quietly owned by it.

Every day in this hyper-individualist, instant gratification culture, we are seduced. Western thought has largely framed desire as the engine of a life well-lived: money, sex, power, status, followers, the right kind of recognition from the right kind of people. We’ve dressed it up beautifully. Called it ambition. Called it vision. Called it knowing what you want. Blah.

But sit with this honestly for a moment. Has being at the mercy of your desires actually worked out for you?

Most of us would rather not look at this directly: the root of our suffering isn’t the circumstances of our lives. It’s the relentless wanting that moves underneath all of it. The grasping. Desire, unobserved, has always worked this way. It shapeshifts. It relocates the horizon.

I’ve watched this in myself for years, read: the wellness industry version of it. The next project, the next launch, the next milestone that would mean something had finally landed. It never quite did. There was always another desire waiting just behind the one I’d just satisfied, patient, already dressed and ready to go.

Of course, this isn’t an argument against wanting things. Goals matter. Inspiration matters. Longing, real longing, can be one of the most honest things about life. The question is whether you’re moving toward something or whether something has its hand around the back of your neck.

Something to Enjoy: Watch Rental Family.

Set in Tokyo, it follows Brendan Fraser as a waffling American actor who takes up a job with a rental family agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers: a son, a husband, a presence at someone’s table. I won’t give too much away about the movie but I invite you to take a peek.

Director Hikari holds the movie with real restraint and what emerges is something devastating about what connection actually costs us and what it gives back.

The spiritual undertow runs through the whole film without ever being loud about it. Impermanence in every relationship that forms and dissolves over the course of a single afternoon. The idea of not-self, visible in the way Fraser’s character loses and finds himself inside each role he inhabits, until the boundary between performance and person becomes genuinely unclear. Underneath all of it, the idea that compassion, genuine compassion, doesn’t require permanence to be real. Somehow, you can show up fully for someone you’ll never see again and that this is not lesser love. Actually, It might be the purest kind.

Highly encourage a viewing!

gentle—noise update

Two sold-out events in New York the last two weeks, back to back, and honestly it’s been so amazing to watch a community beginning to take shape there. I’ve wanted to spend more time cultivating it but work and travel have had other plans. Stay tuned for June events, which will be shared with paid subscribers first in the coming days.

I’ll also be in Berlin in a few weeks, leading an experience at a venue I’ve been wanting to teach at since it opened. If you’re there, let me know.

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Less as a clinical term or as the lingo of bodyworkers and trauma therapists. Actually as a word people bring up over dinner. As a category that’s appearing in wellness apps, in Instagram bios, and suprisingly in corporate offsite programming. It’s even happening in fashion brand activations. Google searches for “somatic therapy” have risen sharply over the past two years, mirroring a broader pattern that talk therapy, meditation apps, and optimization protocols are no longer fully satisfying.

When I first encountered the word somatic, it felt like a niche subculture, rooted in activist spaces, trauma-informed communities and specific movement lineages. Nowadays it’s become something the mainstream is reaching for. In NYC, studios are offering trauma-informed movement. Therapy offices now house practitioners trained in Somatic Experiencing who ask you to track sensation before meaning. Of course Nervous System Regulation also became the buzziest word in wellness over the last three years.

The numbers confirm what the culture is feeling.

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I woke up, meditated, had breakfast with the family. Now I’m here, coffee in hand at a desk overlooking lush green trees. “This is luxury” I think to myself. I then remember what it was like waking up in Brooklyn yesterday; sirens, car alarms, horns - so many car horns. But today, just birds chirping and a house coming slowly to life. My nervous system slowly exhales.

Today is Mother’s Day. My mother passed in 2021, and I think about her most days, not with the sharp weight grief used to carry, but with something a little more tender these days. The chest opening rather than tightening when you let yourself remember. I notice it more this morning, maybe because the house feels warm and full, and that fullness always carries her absence somewhere inside it. If you’ve lost a parent, I’m thinking of you. I hope you can honor their presence in some way today.

This past week was also dense in the best way. I led the first of our two May gentle—noise events at Public Records, both sold out in under thirty minutes. Which is always crazy to me. I think it says less about gentle—noise or me and more about our hunger for gathering in-person. We want something real. Something AI and apps can’t really give us. I was also re-entering life after time in Sri Lanka and Miami, recalibrating and remembering…I’m responsible for a whole ass business these days. The week ahead feels similarly full, hello LA.

But this morning, in this shared office, Ella’s footsteps echoing and the sun gently caressing my face through these old Connecticut windows, I find myself less interested in what’s coming and more arrested by what and who is already here. By the strange fortune of this particular life. By how rarely we I stop to actually feel it.

Something To Learn

The preciousness of human life is a central teaching in Tibetan Buddhism.

The tradition reminds us that consciousness moves through countless births across multiple realms, and that to arrive here, in a human body, with the capacity to reflect, to choose, to practice + meditate, is extraordinarily rare. The great Tibetan teacher Tsongkhapa described it as more unlikely than a blind sea turtle surfacing once every hundred years and passing its head through a single golden ring floating somewhere on the ocean’s surface. The image sounds elaborate until you think about it for a while. Then it starts to feel, if anything, like an understatement.

For a secular reader, the teachings on rebirth don’t need to be taken literally to be useful. What they are pointing at doesn’t require cosmological agreement. It requires only honesty: most of us move through our days as though time is infinite, as though the people we love will remain available, as though there is always another moment to say and do the thing we mean.

There isn’t.

Research on mortality salience, the conscious, embodied awareness of our own impermanence, consistently shows that people who hold this fact clearly tend to make more values-aligned choices, feel more present in their relationships, and report deeper life satisfaction. The psychologist Irvin Yalom spent decades studying what he called “awakening experiences,” moments, often brought on by loss or illness, in which people suddenly see their lives with startling clarity and begin living them more fully. What’s interesting to me is how rarely those awakenings are accompanied by despair. In fact, people describe something closer to relief. As though the awareness of finitude doesn’t diminish life but restores it to its actual size.

The Buddhist framework and the scientific one are arriving at the same place from opposite directions, as always.

This life is rare. This moment is unrepeatable. The question worth sitting with isn’t whether you believe in rebirth. It’s whether you’re actually here, in the one you already have.

Whenever life feels so overwhelming, so hard and so hopeless - the rarity of this human experience helps me keep going.

Something To Practice

If you love someone, make sure they feel it.

I know that sounds simple. It isn’t. Most of us carry feelings of love for people in our life we never quite express. Visits we postponed. Calls we didn’t make because we assumed there would be a better time. The thing we almost said at dinner, then didn’t, because the moment passed and we let it.

My mother’s passing taught me, among other things, that love unexpressed doesn’t accumulate patiently. It waits, yes, but not forever.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that each morning we’re given twenty-four brand new hours. Not borrowed from yesterday. Not guaranteed tomorrow. Given, today. There’s a practice he called “looking deeply,” which is not another technique but more like an orientation: to see the person in front of you as though for the first time, to resist the comfortable familiarity that causes us to stop actually perceiving the people we’re closest to. Familiarity is one of love’s subtle erosions. We stop seeing people because we assume we already know them. We stop saying things because we assume they already know.

They may not.

One practice this week: close the gap between what you feel and what you express. A message sent without occasion. A visit made without reason. Saying the thing you’ve been meaning to say. It doesn’t require a grand gesture or the right moment, because the right moment is a story we tell ourselves to avoid the small courage it actually takes.

Later isn’t promised. This is. Just send that text. Now.

Something To Enjoy

One of my dearest friends and teachers is Anu Gupta. You’ll meet him properly very soon, but this week I sat down with him to talk about life, where we’ve been the last two years, and a conversation he had on the Telepathy Tapes podcast, which had a chokehold on the cultural consciousness last year.

I’ll be honest: I hadn’t listened until he appeared on it. His episode was amazing.

If you’ve been curious about the deep roots of psychic and telepathic practice specifically within Eastern traditions, this is a thoughtful entry point. These aren’t fringe ideas in Vedic and Buddhist schools. They have long, serious lineages. Anu brings both the scholarship and the lived understanding. Worth 45 minutes of your time.

____________

Ella is now scratching at the door as we’re about to head to lunch.

The house has gone a little Sunday-quiet. The week ahead, there are more cities, more events, more of the necessary work of building something that matters. The road doesn’t stop.

But before it picks up again, there is this. A morning that holds my mother, my mother-in-law, my work and the week behind me and the one ahead, all at once.

This is the practice, I think. It’s not transcendence. Just the willingness to be here, fully, before the next thing begins.

Sometimes it’s all so simple.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about teachers lately. The modern spiritual kind. I gotta admit, there’s a little bit of ambivalence there.

It’s hard not to feel that way. The teacher a lot of us started the path with, Deepak Chopra, appears in the Epstein files and something feels innately gross about it. Then there are people like Jay Shetty, who’s built a multi-million dollar enterprise on the back of repurposed ancient wisdom, repackaged as life coaching, delivered in sixty-second reels shot with professional lighting and ending, always, with a link to a masterclass. Then someone DMs you a podcast clip of a guru/scientist/philosopher in a luxury SUV talking about non-attachment. And you feel it, that fatigue. The exhaustion of watching more spiritual content.

I’ve been around for a little while, nowhere near long enough to be any kind of authority in spiritual wellness, but there’s a kind of dissonance I haven’t been able to shake for the last twelve months. After all, we are not short on spiritual voices. With TikTok and AI we are drowning in them. And yet something that actually nourishes feels harder to find than ever.

The ones with real reach have mostly become brands. The ones with real depth rarely break through. And the ones in between, sincere but half-formed, are filling the gap with content that looks like wisdom and functions like comfort food. It goes down easy and makes us feel good momentarily, but rarely does it change us.

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I’m back. Barely.

I am writing this from New York, which feels, after the last 10 days, like an act of mercy.

No disrespect to anyone that lives in Miami. But it does not feel like a real place and I, for whatever reason, never quite seem to enjoy myself there. It could have something to do with ebing sick for a whole week. The heat doesn’t care about your fever. The palm trees have no sympathy. I was horizontal in a hotel room watching the ceiling, replaying all of my life decisions that had gotten me to this point.

Anyway, It’s good to be back in the beauty and bravery that is Brooklyn. I missed my bed, my wife, the particular chaos of this city. There’s something about New York that confronts you, whether you’re ready or not. Thankfully the gift Miami did give me was the gift of slowing down and looking back. Something i haven’t done in 5 months.

Something to Learn

That you don’t have to say yes to everything.

I hate having to relearn lessons from childhood. But here we are. There’s a term for this in psychology; somewhere between people-pleasing, FOMO, and what some researchers are calling opportunity anxiety, the low-grade sense that every open door must be walked through or it will close forever. That every opportunity needs to be taken. That the next yes is the one that finally changes everything.

For those of us who grew up in immigrant households or in environments where enough was never a complete sentence, this pattern runs particularly deep. It isn’t ambition exactly. It’s closer to vigilance. A type of hypervigilance that once kept us safe and now just keeps us scheduled.

It’s also akin to the Pali word: tanha. Often translated as craving, though the Pali holds more than that. It’s the thirst that believes the next thing will finally satisfy. And it shows up in the most random moments. The next opportunity. The next city. The next version of your life. The science tracks alongside it: our threat-detection systems can’t easily distinguish between actual loss and the mere anticipation of it. So we say yes to avoid the feeling of missing out, which is really just another way of saying we say yes to avoid sitting with discomfort.

This next chapter is teaching me again and again things I need to learn. It’s OK to say no and to learn to sit with the discomfort long enough to hear what it’s actually telling me.

Perhaps you too are going through your own version of this. As a fellow suffering being I’m here to remind you that you don’t have to say yes to everything.

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Something to Practice

Imagination.

I know. Bear with me.

There is a network in the brain that activates precisely when we are not focused on a task. When we’re daydreaming, remembering, drifting forward into a future we haven’t planned yet. For a long time neuroscientists considered it background noise. Now they understand it as something important: to creativity, to meaning-making, to the slow construction of the ‘self’.

This is not a small faculty we’re talking about, turns out it’s quite crucial.

Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, wrote in Let My People Go Surfing about building a company around a different set of values entirely. Not growth for its own sake. Not the next raise or the next exit. But quality, slowness, integrity, a business that could hold a life inside it. The book is essentially an argument that imagining differently is not naïve. It’s the only serious response to a world that has stopped questioning its own assumptions.

I’ve been thinking about this obsessively as I build gentle—noise, which is the third significant thing I’ve built in this ‘industry’ and feels, in almost every way, unlike the first two. With my first company, A—SPACE, we were young and running on hunger. Idealistic in the way that only works before you understand the literal cost of things. With my second, I moved almost overnight into a venture-backed world, and the velocity of that had its own kind of aggression. Real things were built. Real things were also lost.

This time I’m less interested in building the next big thing. I’m more interested in imagining a different way of doing this entirely. A conversation with my dear friend Anu Gupta the night before I spoke at Harvard made me think: there has to be another way of operating in this industry. One that doesn’t require disappearing inside it and losing yourself ethically. I haven’t fully mapped it yet. But I think it begins here, in the imagination, before it becomes anything else.

And I wonder if the same is true for you.

Not about business, necessarily. But about something in your life that has started to feel like a given. The relationship that’s gone a little quiet, accumulated the sediment of routine until you’ve forgotten what first moved you toward that person. The health you’ve been meaning to return to, the walking or running you’ve been postponing. The version of yourself you had a feeling about once, before the noise got loud.

We talk a lot in wellness culture about healing. About fixing and optimizing. But I think what we need first, before any of that, is the willingness to imagine. To believe, genuinely, that there is a way. That the shape of things is not fixed. That something new is still possible.

Especially now, when algorithms have become the primary architects of our attention, choosing to imagine something genuinely new is not escapism but closer to an act of refusal.

This week: ten minutes without your phone. Without a prompt, without an outcome. Let the mind move toward something it actually wants. Let it believe, for a moment, that a different arrangement is possible. Notice what arises. I think that space is where everything begins.

Something to Enjoy

The outside.

I’ve done a number of interviews recently, most of them around the same questions: AI, social media, mental health. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and brands are scrambling, hosting panels, publishing tip sheets, booking keynotes. I understand the impulse, it happens every year in May.

Here’s one novel thing I’ve been telling them: let your people go outside. Literally. Away from their desks, away from their devices. Create something that doesn’t remind them, even softly, that there’s a full inbox waiting.

The data is there if you need it. Time in natural environments measurably reduces cortisol. It restores directed attention. It quiets the default anxieties of screen life. But more than the science, we feel it. We have always felt it. The body knows things the calendar doesn’t.

Social media use is declining across demographics. Gen Z is pushing what they’re calling the “touch grass” movement. We are exhausted in a way that productivity culture cannot fix, because productivity culture is part of what exhausted us.

So go outside. Not to optimize. Not to track a walk on your wearable. Just to be somewhere that was here long before any of this was.

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The inner critic gets loudest right before something big happens.

Greetings from Miami, where I spent the better part of last week sick in a cabin on a yacht, horizontal, watching the ceiling move with the swell. I was there to teach at Summit in the Sea, a gathering that sits somewhere between wellness conference and Burning Man, with a strong preference for biohacking. Neither of those things are really my world. But the team were warm and generous, and even though I could only make it out to teach each day, something in it felt worthwhile.

I was at the tail end of two and a half weeks of travel. Sri Lanka first, to speak at a conference, then Miami. So lying there, sick, maybe because of it, I found myself returning to something I’d been noodling on for months. The fear that had been with me since I left my last job. The questions that don’t ask themselves out loud but live just below the sternum. Is gentle—noise going to work? Did you do the right thing? How am I going to fund this thing? Would gentle—noise find its people? Was this a real thing, or just a story you were telling yourself on the way out the door?

That voice is familiar. Most of us have a version of it.

What I’ve come to understand, across years of practice and teaching and building things that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, is that voice doesn’t arrive when things are genuinely falling apart. It shows up right before something shifts. A signal, if you know how to read it. Psychologists call it the impostor cycle. At the precise moment we’re about to confirm our own competence, the inner critic launches a pre-emptive strike. The nervous system, running ancient threat-detection software, cannot always distinguish between danger and growth. Both narrow the field. Both register as alarm.

There’s something clarifying in that, once you see it clearly. The loudness of the doubt is not evidence of its accuracy. It’s evidence of proximity. Something is close. Something is about to change.

So when that voice gets loud, before you argue with it or try to drown it out, pause long enough to notice: oh. something is about to change.

That might be all you need to do with it.

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Practice

The last four months have been strange in a way I’m still sorting through.

The reception to gentle—noise has been overwhelmingly warm. Warmer than I let myself anticipate. Brands reached out. People wrote in. Investors got curious. There was even an offer to open a physical space. Something landed. And instead of feeling the relief I’d been quietly moving toward, I felt something closer to flatness. A low, untroubled is this it. The horizon I’d been navigating toward arrived, and it looked surprisingly ordinary. Not bad. Just present. Unadorned.

I lay in that cabin, mildly feverish, half-watching yachts I will never understand the appeal of, and thought: this is the thing I was afraid wouldn’t happen. And now it’s happening. And I feel mostly tired.

They call this arrival fallacy. The psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar named it: the belief that achieving a specific outcome will produce a sustained and meaningful sense of fulfillment. It almost never does. The brain is not built for arrival. It is built for pursuit. Once the uncertainty resolves, the dopaminergic machinery that made the goal feel luminous quietly disassembles itself and begins scanning for the next thing. The feeling we projected onto the future doesn’t transfer. It dissipates on contact with the actual moment.

We expect arrival to feel like resolution. Like a door closing softly on everything that worried us. Instead it usually feels like Tuesday.

This isn’t an argument against wanting things. Desire is not the problem. The Buddha understood this. The second noble truth doesn’t name desire itself as the root of suffering. It names tanha, clinging, the grasping quality we layer onto desire, the way we clutch at outcomes as though they could hold us steady. Arrival fallacy is just a modern psychological term for something the tradition mapped over two and a half thousand years ago: we don’t suffer from wanting. We suffer from the stories we build around what the wanting, once satisfied, will finally make us feel.

The problem is the emotional futures we attach to desire. The elaborate stories about how we’ll feel once the thing happens. The relief we pre-spend before anything has actually arrived.

Try this, sometime in the next few days. Before you check the response, the metric, the feedback, whatever arrival you’ve been quietly moving toward: pause. Settle into the body for a moment. Ask yourself what you actually feel right now. Not what you hope to feel. Not what you think you should feel. What is present, physically, before you know the answer.

Then check.

Then ask again.

The point isn’t to perform detachment or manufacture gratitude on command. It’s to close the gap between anticipation and experience by being honest about both. The arrival will always disappoint if you’ve spent months projecting an entire emotional future onto it. But the actual moment, met clearly and without the accumulated weight of expectation pressing down on it, usually has something real inside it. Something worth staying with.

Even Tuesday has texture. If you’re paying attention.

From the Room

gentle—noise has grown faster than I can keep up with. Which is a strange and genuinely good problem to have, especially for someone who spent the better part of last week lying in a ship cabin wondering if any of this was real.

It is real. And it is moving.

Which means it’s time to bring someone in.

I’m looking for a Head of Business, fractional to start, based in New York. Someone with a finance and commercial background who knows how to build inside an early company, without full infrastructure, without a map for everything, with high ownership and low ego. Someone who understands what we’re building here and why it matters.

If that’s you, or if you know who that is: careers@gentlenoise.com

This is an early seat. The kind that shapes what a thing becomes.

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I’m once again writing this from Colombo. I’m three papaya juices and two cappuccinos down.

Today the the air is thick with jasmine and diesel fumes, which, right now, is its own kind of irony.

I was a different person the last time I was here. Younger, less formed, more certain about things that turned out not to matter. I’ve spent the two decades since studying the mind, sitting in silence, building things, breaking things, trying to understand what it means to live with any integrity at all. And now I’m back on this island, and it looks familiar the way a dream looks familiar. The same but shifted. Like the world rearranged itself slightly while I wasn’t watching.

Sri Lanka is absorbing another shock.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, triggered by the US-Israeli strikes on Iran in late February, has been called the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The effects go everywhere. But they land hardest in places like this. Sri Lanka imports nearly all of its petroleum, and its economic buffers remain thin after the 2022 financial collapse. Schools are on a four-day week. Public institutions scaled back. Fuel rationing, again. At its peak, Brent crude hit $126 a barrel. Pump prices, electricity tariffs, the cost of almost everything produced here, all of it climbed. Sri Lanka Brief

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(I just posted a voice note intro, above — listen to it in case you missed it)

NOTICE

What the body already knows

There is alot of hearbreak happening in the world right now.. Iran, Lebanon, Gaza. It’s that dread of watching a region destabilize in real time, even from a distance, even from a screen. The thing is, your nervous system doesn’t know you are safe in your apartment or your office. It only knows threat.

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On Sunday I stood at the podium inside a chapel on the campus of Harvard Business School and tried to say something honest.

The chapel is non-denominational. Which felt about right for this particular conversation.

The talk was called “Spirituality and Religion in the Temple of Capitalism.” Karina Singhal, a graduating student of the MBA program was moderating the conversation and generously invited me. The audience was a room full of graduating MBA students — people who will, in a few months, run things. Companies, funds, teams, lives. People who have spent two years learning the language of markets, and who were now sitting, quietly, in a chapel.

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Not metaphorically. Actually.

Last week I said I was leaving the company I cofounded. The response surprised me — not because people were kind, but because of how specific the kindness was. People named things I hadn’t said out loud. I think that’s the kind of messages you read twice, then put your phone down.

Today I spoke at Harvard Business School. A room full of people asking serious questions about where wellness is going, what it’s actually for, whether any of it is working. I don’t have clean answers. I said that. It seemed to help.

I then drove home and sat in the car for ages before going inside.

Life is moving fast. Not chaotically. Purposefully. But fast enough that I have to keep checking — am I still the one steering?

The newsletter has a new name.

Field Notes From Samsara served its purpose. I loved it. But it belongs to the chapter that’s closing, and I don’t believe in dragging furniture into a new room and calling it a move.

This newsletter is now gentle—noise.

Same name as the platform. Because they’re the same thing.

What I’m building isn’t a newsletter with ambitions attached. It’s a publication, an experiment. An ongoing inquiry into what spiritual practice looks like inside a contemporary life — not above it, not beside it. Inside it.

The name came from something I kept returning to. What if the signal isn’t hiding in the silence? What if it’s already present — woven into the noise, underneath it? Gentleness isn’t the absence of disruption. It’s a quality of attention you can bring even to disruption.

That’s the practice. That’s the platform.

gentle—noise is also something more personal than a brand name.

It’s what I called the whisper I first heard in my twenties — grinding through a corporate job, doing what you’re supposed to do, being good at it, feeling nothing. A quiet, persistent question underneath all of it: is there more to life than this?

I didn’t have language for it then. Just the feeling. Low, constant, impossible to fully ignore.

That question is what sent me toward practice. Toward teaching. Toward building. And now, all these years later, it’s back — louder this time, or maybe I’m just less afraid of it.

Some questions don’t leave. They just wait.

Here’s what’s coming: guest essays from writers I actually want to read, genuine journalism about an industry that deserves honest scrutiny, events worth traveling for, and — a podcast. I know, I know. I’ve made the groan myself. But I finally know what I want to make: long conversations with people doing real things. Not famous in the expected way. Interesting in the actual way. I’d listen to it.

I’m glad you’re here for it.

This week, notice

There’s a voice that speaks before the mind catches up.

Not the anxious one. It’s not the one rehearsing tomorrow’s conversations at 2am. A subtler voice. You know, the kind that shows up halfway through a walk when you’ve stopped trying to figure anything out.

I’ve been hearing mine for about two years.

It didn’t arrive with urgency. It arrived the way most true things do — slowly, underneath everything else. It kept saying: something slower. something that actually goes deeper.

I kept moving. Filled the space with work, my phone, little bits and bobs or with the next thing. Told myself I’d listen later.

Later is a very convincing lie.

Do you know what i’m talking about?

What we experience as intuition isn’t mysticism. It’s information. Antonio Damasio’s research on somatic markers shows that the body encodes past experience as emotional signal and surfaces it before conscious thought has formed a question. The gut feeling arrives first. The reasoning comes after — usually to justify what we’d already sensed.

Most of us spend enormous energy arguing with something that already knew.

In Theravada Buddhism we have a word for what exists underneath discursive thought. Sampajañña — clear comprehension. A knowing that precedes analysis. The tradition doesn’t ask you to trust it blindly. I believe it invites you to get quiet enough to hear it at all.

That’s the harder part.

The quieter the life gets, even if it’s just internally. The clearer the signal. Not because silence is holy. Because noise, real noise, the kind we manufacture — is how we avoid what we already know.

We stay busy. We stay useful. We stay distracted enough that the voice can’t quite finish its sentence.

But it doesn’t stop. That’s the thing about intuition. It’s patient in a way the mind isn’t. It will wait years. It waited years for me.

I got quiet. And turns out, the quiet had something to say.

Practice Boredom

We don’t talk enough about boredom.

I’d finish a morning sit, feel something quiet and open, and immediately collapse it. Phone. Notifications. Instagram. Emails. Ideas. Tasks.Whatever was next. The dopamine hit would land and then drag — a low static that followed me through the whole day.

I thought I was just catching up. But I was avoiding the gap.

When I finally stopped filling up all of my free time — that’s when it came through. Not in meditation. In the leftover space after. My creativity spoke in the pauses I keep refusing to give it.

There’s science behind this. Default mode network activity — the brain’s resting state — is when we consolidate experience and surface what we actually think. We suppress it every time we reach for stimulation. We are literally interrupting our own knowing.

So the practice this week is simple. After whatever you already do in the morning, just wait. Don’t get into doing. Let yourself get a little bored.

Then ask: What have I been knowing that I haven’t been saying?

Don’t chase it. Sit with it the way you’d sit with someone who needs a moment before they speak.

When something surfaces, just stay with it. Don’t write it down. Don’t analyze it. Don’t turn it into anything. Just let it be there. Unresolved. Unfinished. That’s the practice. Most of us have never let a thought complete itself without interrupting it. Boredom is the threshold. What’s on the other side is yours.

Listen to Pema

This week I received a lotta love from this community, more than I knew what to do with.

Messages from people who said: I’ve been thinking about doing this too. Or just: good.

Sometimes good is everything.

There’s something that happens when someone bets on themselves openly. It touches something others are already sitting with. A decision not yet made. A voice half-heard.

I think its evidence. That it can be done. And you can do it, too.

This week: Pema Chödrön’s talk, Comfortable with Uncertainty is what I invite you to listen to. YouTube and Spotify. If you don’t want to purchase the book, listen to this video. In the book she talks about the moment before the leap; not as something to overcome, but as the practice itself. The groundlessness isn’t the obstacle.

The groundlessness is the ground.

That’s what I’m standing on. It’s less stable than what I left. It’s also more honest.

Manoj,

The Brief, every Sunday. The Inquiry, every Wednesday.

In 2020, I left Melbourne for San Francisco — right in the middle of COVID, a US presidential election, and fires that turned the California sky an unnatural shade of orange. The world felt like it was holding its breath.

I arrived anyway.

What followed was one of the most formative chapters of my life. And now, one of those chapters has closed. After years of building, teaching, and growing with the team and community at Open — I’ve decided to move on.

I leave with a lot of gratitude. For the team. For the students most of all. You taught me more than I’ll ever be able to say.

The Murkier Part

The last twelve months have been a spiritual practice of sorts.

Walking away from something you love. Something your identity has been quietly wrapped around for years, is not a tidy process. There’s no clean narrative. No triumphant pivot. Just this weird murky middle. The place between who you were and who you’re becoming, where the floor is soft and the walls aren’t quite visible yet.

It’s been hard to pretend otherwise.

Somewhere in that murk, something started to shift. All those years of practice. All those hours on the cushion. Perhaps some karma beginning to ripen.

I’m starting; slowly, imperfectly, to believe that I am not my work. That my worth isn’t located in what I’ve built or what I build next. That what are you working on? and who are you? are not the same question.

I’ve said this to students for a long time.

I’m just finally starting to mean it for myself.

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So What Is Next?

Everyone keeps asking.

My honest, slightly annoying answer: I don’t know.

I’ve spent most of my career thinking five steps ahead. Planning. Building. Projecting. This time I made a deliberate choice not to. To actually live the thing I’ve been teaching — which is harder than it sounds when you’ve spent years being productive about presence.

But underneath the “I don’t know,” there is something more specific.

We’re at a strange moment. People are waking up, drinking their iced matchas, going to their $35 pulates classes and brunches — all while the world runs on algorithms, wars hold a low constant hum of anxiety, and AI quietly rearranges what it means to be alive. The institutions that used to hold our deepest questions; religion, community, ritual, have either collapsed or been replaced by something worse.

The wellness industry took those questions and repackaged them as productivity. Sold them back in apps, $3,000 retreats, push notifications reminding you to be here now.

The existential angst is real.

A whole generation of genuinely curious, culturally alive people got left holding the receipt. Hungry for something real, with nowhere credible and relevant to go.

That gap. That’s where I’m building.

A space where contemplative practice and contemporary culture don’t just coexist — but need each other. Where practice isn’t separate from love, from making, from loss, from the full mess of being alive. Where you don’t have to choose between depth and culture. Between stillness and being fully in the world. Where the ugly and the beautiful are sometimes the same thing.

This isn’t wellness. It isn’t religion. It’s something older and more necessary than both.

And honestly? Building it feels less like a launch and more like an admission. That I can’t not do this. That the gap I’ve been describing to others for years is the same one I’ve been standing in myself.

That something has a name now: gentle—noise.

A place for people who are done being optimized. Who want to practice without performing. Who sense that the contemplative and the contemporary belong in the same room. talking, questioning, sitting with what’s hard.

It’s early. It’s alive.

More to share soon.

But for now, I hope you will join along me for the ride.

Manoj.

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