My guest is Barnaby King from Clown Spirit, a master clown who also did a PHD in clowning and social change in Latin America. He has spent a large chunk of his life exploring what happens when we stop trying so hard to look composed, impressive or acceptable, and allow ourselves to be seen in what he calls “the beauty of your ridiculousness.”

We ended up talking about shame, about the terror of getting it wrong in front of other people, about what happens when we deliberately turn towards the parts of ourselves we’d rather hide.

We also talk about why so much of modern life seems to squeeze the playfulness out of us, why analysing our way back into play doesn’t necessarily work, and how micro-moments of silliness can open up another way of being.

And, on the beauty of ridiculousness, I had such a lovely moment with my daughter this week. She was explaining why she didn’t want a ponytail when she goes back to school, because she was worried the feather hairpiece she’s been wearing since Medicine Festival might fall out. Except instead of saying, “I don’t want a ponytail,” what came out was:

“I don’t want a cucumber.”

We both laughed hard.

And it made me realise again how precious those moments are when we can genuinely, spontaneously laugh at our own ridiculousness.

Hope you enjoy this one.

With Love

Louis

ps. be sure to check out Barnaby’s Clown Spirit, and especially he has a course coming up in Clowning for Mental Health. I will be there!

By indigenous, I should explain, I mean my people have roamed the industrial savannah of the North West for three generations. "Alrite r kid," we say to each other, a phrase that means I would take a bullet for you, but we will not be discussing our feelings today.

Our native outfit is the Kappa shell suit and bucket hat, and yes, we indigenous Mancunians have truly mastered the rain dance, performed with great conviction on the sticky dancefloors of the Hacienda (may it rest in peace) and Sankey’s Soap.
And we also have our ancient tea rituals, the ceremonial dipping of soggy chocolate biscuits, offered with gratitude to the Ur-Shamans of our spirit world: Bez, Ian Brown and Pep. (OK, Pep slightly appropriated.)

But do I really belong here? When at home, my accent does not seem so strong, and has in the past been called ‘a bit fuckin posh’. But when I leave my native land, others remark with admiration on my nasal Northern twang.

I've been thinking a lot about roots, ritual and belonging since spending a few days at the amazing Medicine Festival, a gathering in the English countryside that this year brought together over ten thousand people, spiritual seekers of all flavours, and indigenous wisdom keepers from around the world.

I was there to run a workshop on Fatherhood, which was really lovely. We did a constellation with each father taking turns standing in the middle, with a line of ancestral fathers behind us and a line of children and future generations in front, each side sharing what messages and gifts came through for that particular father. There was great vulnerability and tears and a deepening recognition of the sacred work that fathers have to do not only to help raise beautiful humans but also to make this world a bit better for future generations.

But less about me and my world-class facilitation skills…at one point over the weekend, I was listening by the main stage to a beautiful concert, a Californian woman who had grown up in an ashram singing Hindu mantras, when I heard a lady nearby express her anger.

‘How could they let a white American woman sing Hindu songs? This is just another form of cultural appropriation.’

As you may be able to imagine, this festival is full of people dressed in exotic garments: Amazonian feathers, Peruvian ponchos, Indian beads, African head wraps and so on. Why, she wondered, did we all have to go rummaging through other people's cultures for a sense of the sacred instead of digging where we actually stood?

I didn't have a good answer.

What does it even mean to honour your own roots if you are English, or Greek, or Italian, or Canadian?

Because when I try to picture what "honouring your own roots" would actually look like for me as an English born chap, chips and mushy peas is about as far as I get.
Maybe Morris dancing. Bells strapped to your shins, handkerchiefs waved with real conviction.

Try picturing yourself doing that sincerely in front of people you want to impress.
We'll fly across the world for someone else's ceremony and feel awe. We wouldn't put bells on our shins in our own village hall without irony.

Distance can make another culture feel sacred. Familiarity can make our own feel ridiculous, and maybe that is especially true for those of us whose inherited traditions have been thinned out by migration, secularisation, individualism, or one of my favourite new words from recent times oikophobia - hatred of ones own culture.

And this experience at Medicine festival has made me realise that our roots, our lineage they are largely a story we tell, a tale about where we are from, about our connection to that place, and we ground this story into our souls through repeated ritual, song, prayer, how we dress, how we speak.

I think of one part of my own lineage, the Jewish side, and how a people scattered across all four corners of the earth for two thousand years somehow stayed a people anyway, held together by nothing but a set of stories and rituals repeated on the same nights, year after year. This is where we came from. This is what it means to be us. When you repeat these stories and rituals and songs enough times, it stops being a story, and becomes an implicit, embodied memory, a ground you can return to.

I got a sense of this on Friday night at Medicine Festival, when we were invited to a Shabbat ritual on top of a hill overlooking the whole site. About thirty of us gathered, Jews from wildly different backgrounds, different countries, different skin colours, some in kippot, some not, nothing that would let you pick us out as one type of person from a lineup. What held us together in this moment was not a look but a story.

At festivals like Medicine, I have a feeling I’m partaking in a giant belonging experiment. It’s a temporary tribe, with a smorgasbord of cultures and rituals to sample. But I have to say that the one time I felt the most grounded, the deepest sense of belonging, was at the top of that hill on Friday night. And I am not a practicing Jew.

I don't want to overstate what happened on said hill. I didn't come down from the mountain, tablets in hand, 100% committed to my people. Back in Manchester, there is no synagogue where I feel like I belong.

If I have one place that comes close to being my church, it's a 5Rhythms dance floor. 5 Rhythms has the sense of a tradition. It has been practiced for 40 years. Many who come to the class have been going for 20 plus years. There is a growing lineage of teachers.

And so I am left thinking maybe there are two kinds of roots: the ones we inherit, and the ones we put down. One connects us backwards, into ancestry. The other grows through repeated participation in the places and communities where we find ourselves becoming more ourselves.

Perhaps the question, then, isn't simply whether we should borrow from other cultures or return obediently to whatever our ancestors happened to practise. It might be whether we are consuming practices or entering into a deeper relationship with them. There is a difference between sampling a ceremony because it gives you an extraordinary weekend experience, and returning to a practice for years, learning its history, being shaped by its teachers, contributing to its community, eventually taking responsibility for what you have received.

Belonging seems to require return, a commitment beyond the self, to a story bigger than the self, and a willingness to keep showing up long after the novelty wears off. And I'm grateful to Medicine Festival for the strange, generous, slightly chaotic permission it gives ten thousand people to go looking in the first place.

Not everyone will find a story waiting for them there. But I think many people go to experiences like this hoping, in one form or another, to make contact with an answer to that deeper longing for rootedness we surely all carry, an invisible voice inside our hearts telling us clearly: this is where you're from. this is what it means to be you. this is why you are here.

I’m in a coaching group with Anna Lundberg, and she left us all with a good question to ponder over this summer break:

“How do you define enough?”

It’s a good question, because it forced me to put some actual data to constrain the dopamine-fuelled hungry ghost part of me, the one that is continuously, relentlessly searching for more. How much is enough money? How much is enough insight? When is your child enough? Your partner? Your self?

And then I listened to a podcast with the founder of Toms Shoes, Blake Mycoskie. Toms shoes is a brilliant business that accelerated the idea of buy one give one: you buy a pair of Toms Shoes, and someone who can’t afford a pair gets a pair. Lovely idea, I bought a few pairs of these shoes over the years because it felt good, and seems like many people did the same, as a few years ago Blake sold 50% of his stake in the business for $300 million.

One might imagine that $300 million would be more than enough. Imagine not only having that level of positive impact in the world, leaving a legacy, but also imagine having all of that cash. But, after he stepped away from the business, Blake went into a deep depression, at one point considering taking his own life.

He was saved by San Pedro (a psychoactive cactus containing mescaline), from whom he received the message that the core wound driving his whole life was a fundamental belief that he was not enough. The plant medicine exposed to him (in a way he could digest) how his relentless pursuit of success, wealth, and external validation was just a coping mechanism to prove his worth.

After spending the next 40 days chanting the mantra ‘I am enough’, Blake took the obvious next step for someone basking in the energy of enough-ness: he built a new company…called We Are Enough.

The company has grown rapidly offering merchandise like bracelets and yoga pants, a podcast, a global movement around being enough. I’m laughing, but also slightly crying inside. When the cactus tells you you don’t need to prove your worth through scale, the natural response to this is of course: scale it.

I’m not 100% sure the bracelets are going to cure him, or me, or you.

2.

There is a saying, I think it’s from the world of psychedelics, “when you get the message, hang up the phone”. In Blake’s case, I fear he might have hung up the phone too early. Sometimes we need connection to that life-transforming insight on speed-dial, or intravenous cactus anyone?

There is a model of human psychology I love from Paul Gilbert, founder of compassion-focused therapy. It has three circles, to describe our three main drives.

Red is threat, fight or flight. Blue is dopamine-seeking, achieving, building, the one that got Blake his $300 million and his depression in more or less the same breath. And green is the zone of enough.

In the twenty-first century, we spend a lot of time in the blue zone, so focused on growing, building, acquiring and striving. When I used to teach mindfulness in schools, my favourite story to win over the reluctant boys was of rugby player Jonny Wilkinson. He reached the pinnacle of any rugby career – kicking the winning goal in the Rugby World Cup final in 2003. But shortly afterwards, he fell into a depression, having spent so long in the competitive, reward-seeking drive system. The happy ending to the story is, of course, that he discovered meditation and compassion (and then built a whole new personal brand, podcast, and movement around it).

Dopamine, the ‘molecule of more’ that triggers us to seek future rewards, has been discovered in many life-forms, even in jellyfish and coral. For life to evolve, it needs this mechanism for motivation, to seek pleasure and avoid pain. In fact, we need it just to exist. In an experiment in the 1950s, neuroscientists implanted electrodes into the brains of rats, blocking the release of dopamine. The rats stopped eating. Stopped having sex. Stopped doing anything. Within a few days, they died of thirst.

So when the cactus tells you you are enough, it is nudging you to hang out a little more in the green zone. But blue will always come back online, because blue is what kept your ancestors alive, and blue does not know how to sit still and just be enough. Blue knows how to build. So Blake, glowing with his green, heart-powered insight, went and built.

3.

My daughter really pisses me off sometimes. Often, when I’ve organised a play date for her, she will be having a great time with her mate and then about halfway through she starts trying to extend the date: “Can they stay for dinner?” “Can we take the dog for a walk?” “Can I go back to their house?”

It would be more bearable if it was just one comment, but it is often insistent to the point that the whole play date is now not going very well because instead of enjoying the moment (has she not read Eckhart Tolle for god’s sake?! Or absorbed it from me?) she is insistently focused on the next thing, and therefore not enjoying the thing she has got right now. Can’t she just linger for a while longer in the feeling that this moment right now, this is enough?

And here I am, in the middle of summer break, writing this Substack about being enough, hoping that when I read the data on this piece I’ll find that 78% of you read it, and that I got 2 more likes than last time, and at least 3 emails telling me how brilliant and funny and life-changing this piece was. So errr, yeah, some itches are hard not to scratch.

But in my defence your honour, writing is a form of therapy for me. I am figuring things out as I go along, and in this case I’m realising there is a bitter pill I need to swallow for my sake, my daughter’s sake, and possibly even for your sake too:

I will never be enough.

Ouch, what? Yes, that’s right, I will never feel completely, totally, never-endingly enough. Neither will my daughter. Neither will you. Because there will always be something else to want, somewhere else to go, another itch for that little blue rat to scratch. And thank God for that: without wanting more, we would die from thirst like those little blue rats.

If you need any more proof, consider Scottie Scheffler. The best golfer in the world, won two Masters and has been the world Number 1 for over two years straight. Before The Open this year, a journalist asked him something fairly ordinary, and he gave an answer that wasn’t:

"This is not a fulfilling life," he said. "It's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart." Winning, he said, is "awesome for two minutes." Then it's gone, and there's another tournament. He wasn't even sure why he wants to win so badly. He just knows he can’t help himself.

That’s about as clear a description of the blue circle as you’ll get from a human being, feeling awesome for two minutes after reaching the pinnacle of his career, and then like Sisyphus back down the hill with his big rock, a rock made heavier with all the trophies.

Chris Williamson often tells this exact story on his podcast as proof of the trap, and a warning to anyone chasing success: the athlete who got everything and still isn’t fulfilled. But Williamson also recently co-founded a nootropic drinks company, has three podcast episodes a week, guest after guest, a billion downloads. A man calling out the illusion of the hedonic treadmill whilst also sprinting on it.

Understanding ourselves doesn’t automatically stop us from repeating the same patterns.

But that doesn’t mean we are doomed. Maybe there is something we can learn from people who seem to have found more peace in their lives, not the ones shouting from the rooftops about how to find it.

I think of two people, both of whom you’ve never heard of. Which is rather the point.

One I met in 2013 as I walked around the lake in Pushkar, India and noticed a small wooden hut with the entrance open and a fire lit inside. I peeked in and a man came to greet me, invited me in, gave me a cup of chai, and then we sat by the fire and he began to teach me a particular form of meditation and some spiritual guidance and then I left. And I came back every day for the next two weeks. Sometimes there were other people by the fire. Sometimes just me. But this man, Jaggu, was just tending this fire, waiting for the right people to come in so he could fulfil his mission. He wasn’t trying to scale his enterprise, or sell hand-embroidered yoga pants and bracelets with Hindu mantras on. Somehow he was able to abide more in the green zone.

And then there was the late Ray Menezes, the best therapist I ever had, a properly eccentric, unheralded man who really had a profound impact on me. So much so that I tried to spread the word about him, setting up retreats with him, going on podcasts with him, because he was not promoting himself and my own inner blue rat felt the world needed MORE of this. He just never seemed that bothered. (I just Googled him and couldn’t find anything, other than his Linkedin profile with 17 followers.)

I don’t believe for a second either of these people had fully arrived. Maybe they were just really shit at marketing. But something in me is drawn to people who don’t seem to need to scale everything. Maybe enough is wanting something without needing it to prove anything about you. What I get from hanging with these people is not another injection of envy, scarcity, and dopamine-fuelled not-enoughness, but rather a sense that this

here

right

now

might be a nice place to dwell in a little longer than usual

Which brings me back to the original question: How do you define enough?

The answer is you can’t. There will always be more money I could earn. More spiritual depths I could plumb. More ways I could become a better parent. My daughter will often feel like this moment is not enough. The wanting is not a bug; it’s the thing that kept the rats drinking water.

I am realising that the best I can do is learn to love this little blue rat that runs in circles inside my head chasing the next hit, and maybe give him a few little crumbs of green cactus every once in a while.

And on that note, the naughty blue rat is saying this article is still not enough, and I am telling him, with the utmost love, to shut the fuck up.

As I watch this Substack grow, I feel a mixture of excitement and fear. The excitement says that I have so many ideas buzzing around this little noggin of mine, so many ways I think I can be useful and help reduce some of the suffering in this world, and so yes you are definitely in the right place. The fear says what if I’ve got nothing left to say, or what if I run out of ideas, or what if I get found out for being a fraud, a messed up human who doesn’t know what he is talking about.

And then there are the more pragmatic considerations, there is already a hell of a lot of noise in this world, so much content, so much information, we are drowning in a Tower of Babel of digital information (something I wrote about here), so why add more noise? Don’t people need less noise and more spaces to practise what they already know?

Given all of my uncertainties and confusion about ‘the right thing’ to do, I am grateful that you are here, giving some of your precious attention to these words. The choices we make about where to place our attention are so important, and so fraught in this age, so I really do appreciate that you have chosen to offer some of your attention to this space. The French philosopher Simone Weil said that “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our minds towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.”

And that is at its core what this Substack is about, a space where we can turn our minds (and our hearts) towards the good. I write here about how we can access the best qualities of our humanness in this divided and stressed-out age. Human beings have a bad reputation, but we are also capable of so much beauty, and tenderness, and creativity, and joy and love. What are the conditions that allow those qualities to emerge? This to me seems like one of the most important questions of our time.

Part of my answer to that is the Heart of Being Human paid community, where each month we explore and practice a particular human quality together. Last month we focused on Courage, and this month it is Playfulness. In the group, we take part in shared experiments and we reflect on the process in a private Whatsapp group.

I'm fairly obsessed with the structures that might help us remember what we already know how to do/be, but that modern life makes us forget. Most of us do not need another insight. We have read the books, listened to the podcasts, been to therapy, or had moments of clarity in meditation or a ceremony or in Tesco. But how do we live and embody what we know?

The Pali word often translated as mindfulness - sati - includes the sense of ‘to remember’. How can we humans support each other to remember our compassion, our courage, our playfulness, our creativity, our hope, when the world often feels like it is bringing out the very worst in us? This is the question we are exploring in the community. If you are interested in joining a group designed to help you remember and grow these qualities, you can join us here and I would love to welcome you for the next month’s theme, which will be decided by the group.

I am also very excited to announce the inaugural Heart of Being Human retreat this October. It is taking place in a beautiful 17th Century farmhouse in Catalonia, and it is designed for parents who are feeling burned out, feeling tired of holding everything together. The retreat is an opportunity for you to properly rest and recuperate, to let yourself be held, to meet a small group of lovely, thoughtful, heart-centred humans, and to discover what it feels like to spend a few days in an environment where you can finally drop the mask, stop pretending to be something you are not, and in particular, let go of the sticky idea that you are a problem that needs to be fixed.

The retreat is now almost full, with one or possibly two places remaining while I wait for a few people to confirm. Until now, invitations have mostly been shared personally, but I would also love to open the possibility to someone in this wider community who feels drawn to what we are creating and would benefit from some quiet and nourishing time to come back to your self.

If you are interested, please complete this short expression-of-interest form. If you cannot make it this year but would like to hear about future retreats, you can also register interest through the same form.

With all my love,

Louis

I want to tell you about the time I experienced ego-death and finally felt one with everything.

I desperately want to tell you about it.

I think I’ll write a post about it, because it’s such an exceptional story…

…except, I am sure my ego is still intact, despite taking hammer and tongs to it over the last 30 years. I can prove it to you.

About 10 years ago, I was reading The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer and it really pissed me off. Here was a super duper spiritual guy claiming that he’d found ultimate peace by totally surrendering in every moment. But as I was reading this, I was absolutely sure there was still an ego in Michael Singer’s brain making decisions, including the decision to tell a story about how deeply surrendered he was. And my ego was certainly intact, convincing me I was better than this fake teacher.

In fact, I’d say I’ve gotten pretty damned good at spotting spiritual BS, which I guess makes me kind of special. That’s the thing about the ego: it almost never clocks off. Behind the scenes of my own journey to enlightenment, my ego found it self a new job: Head of Spiritual Fraud Detection.

So a fair question arrives, and it’s one I’ve been chewing over for a good while now, but which has become more pressing these last few years as I work with more people who've had some kind of ego-death experience in a ceremony, in breathwork, or on a meditation cushion:

‘What the bleep is the ego anyway?’

2.

Right now, I’m looking at my hand and I know it’s my hand because it’s attached to my arm, and because when I send the signal to move my hand to my face and touch it, my hand responds and I feel the sensation on my nose. (Notice I used the word ‘I’ or ‘my’ 12 times in that last sentence).

Now I’m looking at the TV remote control, and I’m using all my psychic powers to get it to move into my hand, but it’s not budging.

So there’s a boundary that defines where I end and the world outside of me begins, and we notice it for example when we see that this bit here moves when I want it to, everything else doesn’t.

Now if I try to surrender fully to this moment, I suspect I may end up not moving from this couch for rather a long time. Which is also how it feels when you have taken 5+ grams of magic mushrooms. Using a remote control, texting your mum, buttering a piece of toast, all of these things become a lot more complicated when your ego has fully dissolved.

The thing doing all of that ordinary, invisible work, deciding where you end and the remote control begins, holding the thread of ‘I am the same person who promised to text my mum back’, seems to live, if it lives anywhere, in an area of the brain called the default mode network. It's one of the networks involved in holding together our familiar sense of self, narrating our experience: I am Louis, this is my hand, that is a piece of toast, I am hungry and I like butter. Give someone a hefty dose of psilocybin and activity within that network becomes reliably, measurably disrupted. And the quieter it gets, the more likely people are to report exactly what the mystics have always described: boundaries dissolving, self going soft at the edges, oneness with the sofa, the sky, the all.

We can have similar experiences in very different settings. I've felt some version of this in a mosh pit aged 17, all elbows and driving guitar riffs and no idea any more where my body ended and the crowd's did. I've felt it standing under trees that were alive before my grandparents were born. You might have felt it in a really good hug, or singing in a choir, sitting by the ocean, or in a crowd at a football game. The edges of ‘me’ are not permanently fixed, but are more like a tide that sometimes retreats inward and sometimes reaches a lot further out.

Of all these doorways into that place beyond ego, psychedelics are perhaps the best studied. There’s a model being developed by psychedelic researcher Robin Carhart-Harris along with the philosopher-neuroscientist Karl Friston, called REBUS: relaxed beliefs under psychedelics. The model is based on the idea of the brain as a prediction machine, constantly guessing what’s coming based on assumptions it laid down a long time ago, then filtering everything through those guesses. Some of those assumptions are doing something useful and boring: the floor will hold me; that’s my hand; this toast needs more butter on it.

But some of those beliefs were laid down in more challenging moments, and these are often more constricting beliefs about our self: I am only safe if I am in control. I am lovable when I am useful. If I stop performing, people will leave. Psychedelics may temporarily loosen the authority of some of those assumptions, allowing sensations, emotions and information that would usually be ignored or suppressed to come through more strongly.

This kind of shift, what some call ego-dissolution or ego-death, can be hugely beneficial for some people. So much suffering after all does come from a tightly wound focus on the self and all it’s flaws. When that focus softens, even briefly, we discover that reality contains more than the ego had been allowing through. But this is where the spiritual story of ego as enemy often goes wrong. Because if we were to truly stay in that place of ego death we might never be able to pick up the phone and remember to text our mum.

Fortunately, for most people (but not all) the default mode network comes back online after an experience like this, just with a slightly looser grip on things. And this is what I have described elsewhere as the Monday morning problem: we have a glimpse of another world, and then we find ourselves putting our crying child’s socks on whilst wolfing down a crust of buttery toast.

3.

The trouble with this word ‘ego’ is that it’s become a kind of skip where we tend to throw anything we don’t like about ourselves, or more importantly, other people, in particular traits like ambition, confidence, arrogance, control, defensiveness, self-importance.

“He’s got a giant ego”.

By which we mean, “what an arsehole”.

And spiritual teachers usually mean something much bigger than that, which is where the skip gets crowded. Wayne Dyer famously rebranded ego as ‘Edging God Out’, by which he wasn’t just referring to someone permanently attached to their selfie stick, but rather to a much broader claim about the ego being an idea we have about ourselves, an illusion in which we mistake who we truly are for the attachments we have.

And then there’s a third version, one that doesn’t behave like such a villain. Originally ‘ego’ was Latin for “I.” Descartes used it to mean the basic experiencing subject: I think, therefore I am, that sort of thing. And then of course Freud inherited this word and gave it a job description. He described the ego as being like a man on horseback, having to hold in check the superior strength of the horse, except that the horseback rider (he was careful to say) has to guide the horse where it wants to go, not simply where the rider fancies.

For Freud, and a whole lineage of psychotherapists since, the ego is not an enemy to be destroyed, but a boundary-maker and a protector. It is the invisible coordinator keeping us safely anchored in reality so we can text our mum and butter our toast. For the rest of this essay, when I use the word ‘ego’, I mean the collection of capacities that allow us to remain someone: to distinguish inner from outer, to contain powerful feelings, to test reality and to carry some continuity of self from one day to the next.

Ego is not the enemy. The problem is when our ego becomes so rigid that nothing new can enter, or so fragile that every new experience threatens to blow it apart.

4.

There’s a proper name for one of the most important jobs the ego does. Freud called it reality-testing, the capacity to tell the difference between what’s actually happening and what you fear, wish, or have simply lost the thread of. Turns out it’s very important for living.

Back in my raving days, I had one experience where I found myself lying face down on someone’s carpet for a good few hours and I was so far gone into the world on the other side of that carpet that at one point I remember thinking: “Are my parents real?”

This was an existential question, a genuine one that wasn’t attached to any fear at the time, a question emerging from whatever scrap of 'me' was left, no longer able to be sure about the existence of the two people who fed me, drove me to school, and told me when I was going wrong. Fortunately for me, I emerged from the carpet, made a cup of tea, and eventually found my way home.

There’s a podcast I’ve mentioned before, about a therapist in London called Anne Craig who spent years convincing a string of young, vulnerable female clients their fathers had sexually abused them. Anne Craig’s certainty was so powerful that some of these women came to reinterpret their whole lives through this story and ultimately cut themselves off from their families.

In the TV series Cape Fear, Max Cady, played by Javier Bardem, drugs and manipulates a teenage boy until he begins to doubt whether the family who raised him is really his family at all. Which makes me wonder what Michael Singer’s Surrender Experiment has to say about experiences like these. What does total surrender mean when someone is manipulating you, exploiting your vulnerability or inviting you to distrust your own reality? I wrote about the faculty of discernment here. A healthy ego can ask: How do I know? What evidence would change my mind? Is this memory, intuition or revelation capable of being questioned?

A healthy ego can have profound transcendent experiences and return from them and still butter some toast. A healthy ego is semi-permeable. It can open to experience and be affected by the world around it, but it can also return to some grounded sense of self.

Jack Engler spent a career finding out exactly what a healthy ego requires. He was a Harvard-trained psychotherapist and also a serious Vipassana meditator, close enough to the practice that he sat on the board of the Insight Meditation Society. And he was troubled by what he saw happening on some meditation retreats. People would sit for hours a day, sometimes weeks at a stretch, going deep into altered states of consciousness via meditation, and many of these people would become psychologically destabilised. Engler observed that Western meditators who lacked a stable, cohesive sense of self often experienced psychological fragmentation or trauma when attempting the kind of ego-dissolution taught in Buddhism.

He identified two specific abilities most of us never notice we’re using. One is watching your own mind while you’re inside it, being able to take your own thoughts and feelings as something you observe rather than simply are. The other is being able to tolerate difficult states, being frightened, furious, ashamed, without repressing it or avoiding it. These ego functions can take years to build, usually inside the context of ordinary human relationships.

He was also careful about a criticism he heard often, that Western psychology’s whole aim is to solidify a self the Buddhists are trying to help you see through. He didn’t think that was quite fair. The goal of Western psychology was never to build a fortress-self: clenched, rigid, brittle and unable to bend. What a good therapist actually does is widen that sense of self, help it to become semi-permeable, bringing in the parts of yourself you’d buried, so you end up with something more spacious, not less differentiated, still a self, still distinct from the world, just less afraid of it. He summarised his decades of work at the intersection between psychotherapy and meditation in one killer line:

You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.

5.

So how can we become a somebody that can also be a nobody?

How can we develop a healthy enough ego so that our transcendent moments can enhance our everyday lives, rather than leaving us stuck, either endlessly chasing the next big experience to feel that open again, or unable to find our way fully back to the reality tethers that were holding us before we let go?

As we saw above, Engler said this requires the capacity to watch your own mind while you’re inside it, and the capacity to tolerate a difficult feeling without fleeing it or acting on it. For most of us, these capacities begin in the same place: through someone else doing them with us, or for us, often enough that we eventually learn to do them alone. A parent who reflects your feelings back to you accurately enough teaches you to observe your own mind. A parent who stays close while you’re falling apart, without needing you to stop, teaches you that a hard feeling can be survived.

There’s a third capacity, built in much the same way, and it’s the one that decides what happens after a transcendent moment ends. Developmental psychologists have a name for it: object constancy, roughly, the ability to hold onto the felt sense that someone loves you even while they’re out of the room, or when you’re really pissed off with them. Object constancy is part of a healthy ego because it gives our experience continuity. It allows us to maintain a stable, realistic picture of ourselves and the people we love, even when our immediate feelings shift.

It isn’t there at birth. A very young child genuinely can’t yet grasp that the parent who just said no, or walked out of the room, or fed her too slowly, is the same person as the one who delights her an hour later. For a while, those feel like two different people. What builds the constancy is repetition, the parent leaves and comes back, says no and still loves her, gets it wrong and still shows up, again and again, until the child’s mind stops needing to split them apart and settles into one true thing.

This may also help explain why oceanic peace can begin to feel like a mirage by Monday morning, even though nothing about the ocean itself has changed. Object constancy gives us a model for how something real can survive separation. The same capacity that lets a toddler trust that her mother still loves her mid-tantrum may help us trust that what we felt at the ocean was real, even now, sitting at a desk staring at a thousand emails.

And if the relationships that were meant to build our original capacity for holding onto what is good and real were toxic, absent or unreliable, then this capacity may need to be built somewhere else, later. A therapist, a steady partner, or a good friend can all become anchors, offering enough experiences of steadiness and return that we gradually begin to internalise them. This helps us construct a solid and semi-permeable sense of self: one able to receive goodness, retain some sense of it when the moment passes, and remain intact while our experience changes.

Because without that inner solidity, even a genuinely good experience can feel strangely unstable, like fine sand running through our fingers. I think this is what it can feel like for a lot of us after a moment of ego-transcendence whether it’s in a church, a rave, or by the sea. That sense of connection slips through our fingers as we arrive back home, and the contracted, familiar version of ourselves has taken centre stage again.

The opposite of fine sand is roots. And we establish roots in a way that is annoyingly simple. Our brains evolved to learn fast from bad experiences and slowly from good ones, which means a genuinely good moment can pass straight through you, leaving nothing behind, unless you do one small thing: stay with it. A few seconds longer than feels natural. Letting it actually register in your body instead of moving straight on to the next thing. Psychologists like Rick Hanson have shown that deliberately dwelling a little longer in positive experiences can help them leave a deeper trace.

So if you keep finding yourself chasing the next moment where you can escape the prison of your self, it might be worth lingering a little longer on the experiences of connection you are already having. This does not mean trying to catch the whole ocean in a bucket, or gripping onto a moment of freedom so tightly it suffocates us. It simply means acknowledging: something good happened, and I am allowing it to linger in me.

Roots take time to establish themselves, through repetition and staying with. You have to be somebody before you can be nobody. And if you still see your ego as your enemy, consider retaining at least some of it’s services, because the cosmic void is terrible at remembering where you parked.

Have you made your first £10 million yet?

Are you living with the love of your life, and having tantric sex 15 times a day?

Are you happy ALL the time?

If you answered NO to any of the above then chances are you have a scarcity mindset, and I am here to help, live from my super yacht in the Bahamas.

If you have ever seen posts like this and a little vomit appeared at the back of your throat, then this guide is for you. If you ever feel your manifestation channels are jaded, if you’ve been burned at the cross of The Secret, and if you have resentfully accepted your impoverished lot, this one is for you.

In fact, I am not here to collude with your eye-rolls, but rather to tell you not to throw out the gold-plated baby with the bathwater. Because there is something important about abundance, something real about the ways we close ourselves down to possibility, about how our beliefs shape what we notice, what we reach for, what we refuse, and what we allow ourselves to receive, but you might not be getting the real juice from Tik Tok grifters.

2.

I have supported Manchester City Football Club since I was a little boy when my dad started taking me to the Kippax stand at Maine Road. And for almost 30 years we were shit, useless, the butt of many jokes. I remember very clearly the feeling of driving back from yet another match where we had lost, and I was feeling sad and grumpy and non-communicative, a feeling that could last for days. But as I got older I learned a really cool trick to mitigate my suffering: #pretendlikeyoudon’tcare.

This is one of the great spiritual technologies of the British male. When my team lost, I learned to shrug and say “Typical City.” When we won, I could enjoy it, but not too much, never too much, because Joy had to be handled carefully, like an unexploded bomb. This system worked beautifully, apart from the tiny downside that it gradually murdered my aliveness.

And then about 15 years ago we won a trophy, and then another, and then we got really good, and slowly but surely I let myself care again to the point that one game when City were in the final I brought a blue crystal with me and truly believed that through the combined power of my intention, the crystal, and my loud shamanic football chanting I could influence the outcome.

And we won, therefore it must have worked!

More important than whether the blue crystal really helped Agüero to score the winning goal is the fact that I had let myself want something out loud again, badly enough to look stupid about it. Most of us have a version of ‘typical City’ running in our minds, a resigned shrug or protective layer that learned to expect disappointment before disappointment could arrive, and which has probably helped us survive heartbreak, failure, rejection, humiliation, or worse. Your version might be catastrophising, running through every way it could go wrong so that at least you saw it coming. Or maybe it’s a cultured easy-goingness, pretending you don't really mind either way, when actually you've just gotten very good at abandoning your own preferences. For some of us, we might dress up this protection against disappointment as faith ("I trust the universe") when what we actually mean is I'm too scared to ask for this directly. Others will keep their options open, have multiple plates spinning because if we don’t fully commit then we won’t feel the pain of loss. Some of us just call ourselves ‘realists’ and lower the bar until we lose any sense of magic or possibility.

And this is what is worth keeping from the world of abundance, not so much the mantras and the vision boards, but the noticing (with love) the many ways you have stopped yourself from wanting what you want.

3.

The football story is about how we protect ourselves from wanting. But there is another, subtler problem: even when the thing we want actually arrives, the old filter can stop it from landing. Back in my ‘Typical City’ days, even when we won, I couldn’t fully enjoy it. I had to ration the joy, keeping one eye on the next disappointment. We don’t just limit what we reach for. We limit what we can receive.

Which brings me, naturally, to milkshake.

In 2011, a psychologist at Yale University called Alia Crum made a big batch of vanilla milkshake and then split it in two: one batch got a label that said “Sensishake: 140 calories, zero fat, zero guilt.” The other got a label that said “Indulgence: 620 calories, sinful, rich, the works.” Then she gave both shakes to the same group of people, on two separate days, and drew their blood before and after.

Both milkshakes were the exact same milkshake with 380 calories, and the only thing that changed was the label. And, incredibly, the labels made people’s bodies respond differently, feeling more or less hungry, even though they had both had the exact same drink. When they drank the ‘Indulgence’ shake, their ghrelin levels (the hormone that tells you you’re still hungry) dropped. Their bodies had decided, on the evidence of a sticker, that they were full. When they drank the ‘Sensishake,’ same milk, same sugar, their ghrelin levels barely moved as they were left wanting more.

Abundance is a state of being where we feel we have more than enough. And what we learn from the milkshake experiment is that feeling satisfied is not a mechanical response to objective reality (milkshake goes in, feeling full is the result), but rather it arises from a negotiation between what’s in front of us, the story we tell about it, and the way our biology responds to this framing.

This is where modern life is not exactly helping. We live in a culture of endless wanting, a million little jolts a day telling our brains we absolutely need this next shiny thing, but the next thing is also guaranteed to not fill us up. This is one of the places where a lot of abundance teaching becomes too simplistic. It says: get clear on what you want, visualise it, feel it as if it has already happened, then allow it to come to you with the total faith of someone refreshing their Monzo feed every six minutes. And I don’t think that is entirely wrong. Clarity matters, and imagination matters, and giving ourselves permission to picture a different future is important. For those of us who learned to keep our wants small, even admitting what we want can be a radical act.

But wanting is complicated. Sometimes we don’t know what we want. Sometimes we know exactly what we want but are too frightened to admit it. Sometimes we want something because someone else seems to want it, or because someone else has it, and desire is contagious. Often we get what we want and the glow lasts about three and a half minutes before the mind starts sniffing around for the next thing. So perhaps the real question is not simply, “How can I manifest my deepest desires?” but rather:

How can I relate to wanting wisely?

There is such a vulnerablility to truly letting ourselves want what we want. Can I let myself want something fully and wholeheartedly, knowing I may be disappointed? Can I let myself feel disappointment without shutting the whole system down? Can I receive what is already here, can I let the milkshake settle and nourish my cells, without immediately labelling it ‘not enough’ or moving quickly onto the next thing? Can I appreciate the goodness in my life before my brain starts demanding an upgrade?

4.

But abundance is a three-legged stool, and if you are only sitting on wanting and receiving, sooner or later you’ll fall off and smash your Rolex. The third leg is giving.

A few years ago, I travelled through Peru and Bolivia with a group of Indigenous elders on a walking pilgrimage through the Andes. On the morning of the winter solstice, we climbed Isla del Sol to watch the sun rise. We had been sitting for hours in the dark and cold waiting for the first light, and then as the sun began to appear the local people started singing and then out came the food. So much food. Food passed from hand to hand, shared with strangers, offered around without fuss or performance. There was a profound sense of generosity moving through that mountaintop, a living circulation of giving and receiving.

Later, I learned more about the Andean concept of ayni, often described as sacred reciprocity. Ayni points to the understanding that life is founded on the dynamic of exchange, that giving and receiving are one continuous motion, not two separate transactions. Trees release oxygen that we breathe in. We breathe out carbon dioxide, and plants draw it back from the air and turn it into food. Rain feeds the soil and the soil feeds the crops and the crops feed the people and the people offer something back to the land. In Andean ritual, this reciprocity is sometimes expressed through offerings to Pachamama, sweets, biscuits, flowers, packaged up and left in sacred spots as a gesture of gratitude for what has been received.

I don’t want to romanticise this. These communities experience hardship, and life is not always so easy and flowing. But I did witness here a version of abundance that was not based on having more, but on being in relationship with the flow of life. These people were not rich in the Elon Musk sense. Nobody was wearing a fancy watch, or installing a barrel sauna in their garden. They were more likely to have donkeys than Teslas. But in that place, I felt a kind of abundance I rarely feel in places where people technically have far more.

There is nothing wrong with wanting more. There is nothing wrong with being rich. But if abundance is just a quest to get more stuff, then energy gets stuck. If we receive and never give back, the flow stops with us. You could call that psychological debt, social imbalance, or spiritual constipation. And the flow can get blocked the other way. Some of us are excellent at giving and terrible at receiving. Hello people-pleasers, martyrs, wounded leaders, exhausted therapists, over-functioning parents, and anyone who says ‘no, no, I’m fine’ whist crumbling inside.

So here is the infidel’s guide to abundance (also available as part of my elite member’s club where we also discuss crypto trading secrets):

Want it honestly and out loud, without the shrug. Let disappointment be a reminder you are a living, desiring human being. Let the desired thing that arrives settle into your stomach and fill you up, instead of filing it under ‘not enough’. And give from whatever's overflowing, without keeping score.

Wanting. Receiving. Giving. That’s the whole shebang.

And even after all that, you might get filthy rich. Or you might not. You might get the relationship, the book deal, the trophy. Or you might not get any of it. But at least you will have lived life honouring what you actually wanted, instead of standing at the edge with your arms crossed, protecting yourself from a disappointment that hasn’t even happened yet. And you’ll actually enjoy the milkshake, instead of treating it as a stepping stone to a perfect future you that is always hungry and never enough. And you'll be part of the flow of life, effortlessly giving and receiving, like a tree (except its the type of tree that would fucking love a super-yacht).

In Kabbalah, there is a creation myth called Shevirat HaKelim. The creation of the universe began with a pouring of divine light into spiritual vessels. Some of these vessels weren’t strong enough to contain this light, and so they shattered under the pressure into many fragments of divine light, which became trapped inside hard, brittle husks called kelipot. Humanity’s purpose, according to this tradition, is to gather these shards of light to repair the split.

I keep noticing how this same shattering happens inside the mind. When I am split off from my experience, I suffer. By this I mean I suffer whenever there is me, and then there is a part of me watching me, judging me, saying 'Oi! That should not be there.'

One of my oldest and most battle-hardened fears is about sleep. I know people who say that no matter what is going on in their life, they can always sleep like a baby. Not me. I developed a whole beautiful, neurotic complex around getting 40 winks that has made it hard sometimes to simply get 40 winks. I have tried everything to beat insomnia, including hypnotherapy, CBT, IFS, pills, melatonin, CBD oils. Some of it worked for a little while, but none of it lasted. And I think none of them lasted because they were all based on a split. Whatever I tried was essentially an attempt from one split off part of me to get rid of another part of me. And therein lies the problem.

Freud saw all this coming, of course. In Civilization and Its Discontents he argued that every society runs on a deal: we hand over a portion of our wildness in exchange for not being eaten, and the superego is the police officer we install in our own heads to enforce the terms. A person with no inner “oi” at all is a potential menace to society and so some split is the price of admission to living among other humans.

But Freud’s patients had one primary judge - father, a priest, a schoolmaster - internalised and grumbling away in Viennese. We carry thousands of judges. The judge now lives in our pockets and it’s a product that never sleeps. You can now pay a monthly fee for a device that watches you sleep and tells you whether you did it correctly. People wake up feeling fine, check their score, and revise that feeling. This is the split, industrialised, miniaturised, and billed annually. Never before in human history have so many voices, so constantly and insistently, told us that some part of our being is not ok.

That’s the water we’re all swimming in. Anyway. Back to my bed.

What finally started to change things is a commitment to a practice I’d been circling for twenty years. I call the practice 'turning towards.' It’s very simple: whatever I've spent a lifetime avoiding, I choose to turn towards instead. So if I get into bed and the old fear rears its head, instead of fighting the fear or fleeing it I go looking for it. I find it in my belly and I settle in next to it, the way you might sit down next to a scared, abandoned child at a bus stop. And then whenever I turn towards the fear in my body it almost always shifts into something else and all I do is keep following, following, following, like following a thread through a dark house. That's the practice.

This practice has now become so consistent and ingrained that I am even seeing changes in my dreams. Not so long ago in a dream I find myself driving deep into the North (whatever that means) to go and find this demonic Voldemort-like figure who has haunted my dreams on and off for 40 years. And, when I eventually get to the place where he is hiding (the fact he is hiding, as opposed to me hiding from him was already quite remarkable), there is no sign of him but the scene becomes some kind of a conference for shamans. And as I walk into this gathering, I see a glimpse of some miraculous things happening, and I really want to find out more, but there are so many people there it is hard to find a way into the middle of it all. I’m feeling excluded from the possibility of miracles, and in this feeling of being excluded there is a familiar pang of loneliness. And then I wake up.

What I am learning is that when we turn towards our demons they often become something else, guardians of some precious and vulnerable part of us that once had to be hidden. In the dream, the demon had been guarding the place where miracles were happening. And perhaps that is exactly what our demons do. They guard the parts of us that still believe there is something magical and precious about this life. Or, to put it in the language of the broken vessels: what I call a demon may in fact be a shard of light trapped inside a hard shell, something split off from the source when the original vessel couldn’t hold what was pouring through it.

And a single vessel has limits; no one is strong enough to hold light-shattering experiences alone. What makes a vessel strong is the presence of other vessels beside it, people helping us bear the unbearable. When we don't have these support vessels around us, the split goes deeper. The husk thickens. And we forget the demon was originally a guardian protecting a miracle inside of us. I needed a therapist, a coach, and eventually a group before my own practice could hold. A vessel that can hold the light turns out to need more than one pair of hands.

We are living in a time of fragmentation. Our light is being shattered into a million little pieces, and then we are told to carry our own little spark in our own solitary vessel. “Stay in your lane!” they say.

But the split inside us and the split between us were always the same split. We do not heal by becoming perfect little self-contained units of trapped light. We heal by helping each other turn towards what we have exiled, by seeing through each other’s eyes what our demons have been guarding all along. This is how we begin to heal the split we were never meant to heal alone.

This is a lot of what we do in the Heart of Being Human community: turning towards, together. If you're tired of carrying your spark alone, you'd be welcome.

For most of my adult life I've been looking for the teacher, the practice, the retreat, the ceremony that would finally get me free from all this suffering. And I have been continually disappointed.

One of my first teachers/therapists actually believed he was free from suffering. I wasn’t 100% convinced. Maybe this was me cynical bypassing, as I talked about here. He was a very powerful teacher, and in our sessions I had glimpses of awakening, but sadly these glimpses proved hard to sustain in everyday life.

I remember coming back from India in my early 20s, and discovering talks from Eckhart Tolle that I downloaded from Napster (anyone remember that?). I thought he had The Answer. Whenever I listened to his words, I could feel my whole being drop into a deeply relaxed state. But, when I didn’t have his voice streaming into my lug-holes, I found the present moment elusive.

This pattern has repeated itself over and over, glimpses that another world is possible, and then back down to earth with a disappointed bump. Sound familiar?

These repeated disappointments have left me with an obsession. You might call it a holy irritation, the grit in the oyster around which a pearl has slowly been forming. That pearl is a question, a living inquiry.

What do we do after the glimpse?

What do we do when the retreat ends, the scent of palo santo fades from the ceremony, the teacher’s voice stops pouring into our ears, and ordinary life returns with its inbox, relationships, tired body, old fears and familiar loneliness?

What do we do with the gap between what we have seen is possible and what life feels like on a cold and lonely Monday morning?

Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh said that “the next Buddha will be a Sangha.” Sangha means community. It is one of the three jewels of Buddhism: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. The teacher, the teachings, and the community that helps us embody the teachings.

The word ‘community’ gets thrown around a lot these days. How many communities, networks, circles, memberships, tribes, channels and WhatsApp groups do we already belong to? And yet we still feel alone.

I don’t think Thich Nhat Hanh was talking about these kind of communities. I know beacause I have spent time in a monastery he set up. The thing is that a real community requires something of you. A real community asks us not only to receive, but to give. To show up, even when you don’t feel like it. To listen, and to risk speaking with honesty. To be affected by other people. To allow our private inner world to enter into relationship with another. In a real community, there is a mutual duty of care.

Loneliness is possible, even when we are surrounded by people. What I have learned is that we feel less alone when we drop the masks and stop performing. When we present ourselves to the world filled to the brim with our strongly-held opinions and our perfectly white and clenched smiles, we never find connection. Loneliness is what happens when the most tender, truthful, ashamed, grieving, longing or alive parts of us remain hidden.

And this is why I am doubling down in my commitment to The Heart Of Being Human experiment in community. Because we need more spaces where we can drop the mask, where we can relax into being ourselves, and where we can share practices together that help us integrate those glimpses of a more beautiful world that we catch from time to time.

And I am realising more and more that the actual method of delivery is not as important as the way we show up. In the Heart of Being Human paid community, for example, we recently shifted from monthly online gatherings to a Whatsapp group with a monthly theme and prompts, and I have been gobsmacked by how powerful this has been. I was cynical about digital channels as a means of creating meaningful connection and transformation, but I am changing my mind. This month in the group we explored the theme of courage, and what unfolded was a deep, vulnerable, heart-expanding process where a group of humans (strangers) became closer to one another, where people named difficult conversations they were avoiding, shared moments of shame, grief, freeze, tenderness, exhaustion, social risk, creative longing, and the tiny acts that helped fear loosen its grip. This is the kind of field I want to keep tending.

Here are some quotes from people in the group:

“It makes this a deeper process, hearing others’ experiences and perspectives. The more we do this, the more the smaller acts grow, and the old habits get weaker.”

“When things get busy, it’s nice to come back to these messages. It pulls me back into the original intention, so it doesn’t just get swallowed up by everything else and the daily grind.”

“The sharing of our vulnerability in this group will have even more exciting and unintended positive consequences for those around us.”

We’ll be starting the next monthly theme soon, and I’d love to welcome a few more people into the WhatsApp group before we begin. So if you are tired of trying to work on yourself in ways that make you feel more alone, if you are frustrated by how those glimpses of what is possible fade away so easily by Monday morning, if you want a community of shared practice, of heart-centered humans who are taking simple steps together to stay connected to our hearts in a world that pulls us away from them, then this is what we are building. Join the paid Substack here and I'll add you to the WhatsApp group, where we are focusing together on one theme a month, with a group of lovely humans, and no performance required. And I don't want anyone to feel they can't join because of your financial situation, so if you want to join but can't afford it, please just send me an email.

With Love

Louis

1.

A few years ago, I went on a retreat with a teacher who many claimed to be ‘connected to the source’, which fyi is spiritual code for enlightened. I heard her hugs were so powerful it was like 20 years of therapy in one cosmic embrace. When she hugged me, I winced.

One day in retreat we were sitting in circle while people shared some deep and vulnerable and often traumatic material. And then, usually before they had fully landed their point, this teacher would interrupt them, cutting through their story and pointing to what she saw underneath it: the attachment, the identity, the victimhood, the mind trying to make itself important again. At times it felt electric, like watching someone slice through a knot with a sword. People called her direct and confrontational style a ‘fierce grace’.

But at other times, something felt very off. Someone would ask a question, and the question itself would be treated as the problem. Someone would express doubt, and the doubt would be named as ego. Someone would try to explain the particular details of their life, and she would direct them, ferociously, away from the details, away from any questions or doubts, back toward surrender, presence, openness, the deeper truth beyond the mind.

The message seemed to be:

Your story is the trap. Your doubt is resistance. Your mind cannot be trusted.
Let go. Trust me.

And there is some wisdom in this, because yes the mind is a tricky beast, and we do get addicted to our stories, and we do use words to avoid feeling. But in that room, the teacher had positioned herself as the one who could tell the difference. She decided what was story and what was truth. She decided what was ego and what was insight.

That was the tension I could feel growing in my own belly. One part of me wanted to surrender to this teacher, to get the juice she was offering. Maybe the judgments building in my own mind were just another defence getting in the way of my own enlightenment? Maybe I needed to stop being so repressed and let the cosmic hug do its thing.

But another part of me was watching, uneasy. These were vulnerable people, and in the name of a possible awakening, they seemed to be surrendering their own autonomy. I found myself grappling with this in the circle, my mind buzzing back and forth between whether to open and whether to close. And so, as soon as this circle came to an end, I had to take myself for a walk up the mountain, and it was on the way down from the mountain top that I had an insight:

trust in your own discernment.

What does this mean? Well in the meditation and spiritual landscape, we are taught to let go of the ego, to ignore the thinking mind, and to watch our thoughts drift away like clouds. But we are rarely taught how to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Walking down that mountain, I realised that reclaiming my sovereignty required a better way of knowing which thoughts to listen to. The real skill isn’t silencing the mind but learning to distinguish between its voices, knowing which ones to trust and which to let go. This insight set me on a path to understand three inner filters through which we engage with the world: scepticism, cynicism, and discernment.

2.

Before we draw neat lines between things, it is worth noticing that cynicism, scepticism and discernment often share a common root. They all begin with a sacred interruption, a break in the spell.

At some point, a child realises their parents are not in fact gods, and that their rules are not immutable laws of nature. The grown-ups can’t tell you what to do. You can say no, you can lie, you can disobey them, and there is very little they can do about it.

This can be a terrifying and dizzying discovery, an archetypal moment in human development, and a profound disenchantment that can also be the beginning of a certain kind of freedom - the moment authority stops being absolute and becomes something we can relate to, question, resist, tease and test, or outright reject.

Something similar happens in therapy, in politics, in religion, in spiritual practice, in love. The spell breaks, and the person, system, teacher, parent, ideology or relationship that once seemed to hold reality together suddenly appears as limited and fallible. We withdraw our faith, keeping it in a glass jar.

In his book He, Robert Johnson captures this moment: “it is painful to watch a young man realise that the world is not just joy and happiness, to watch the disintegration of his childlike beauty, faith, and optimism. It is regrettable but necessary - if we are not cast out of the Garden of Eden, there can be no Heavenly Jerusalem.” In other words, there is no going back to original innocence, no matter how hard we try, but there is another, more mature form of heaven available to us here on earth, one that has seen through the spell, been disappointed, and yet refuses to become bitter.

But the journey from Eden to Heavenly Jerusalem is fraught with danger. Mostly, when a spell has broken we go looking for the next spell. We try to restore that lost paradise via the next relationship, the next therapist, the next ceremony, hoping that if we can find that one true cosmic hug we will finally return to some unbroken state before doubt ever entered the room.

But when our hearts have been broken, when we have accumulated a basket full of disenchantments along the way, this quest to find Eden gets tinged with a layer of protection. Part of us still longs to believe, but now we are also (often without even realising it) vigilantly watching for the moment of betrayal. We want to surrender, but part of us is already braced for the crash landing. We want to be healed, to be held, or to be holy, but we do not want to be made a fool of again. And this is where we need to distinguish between cynicism, scepticism and discernment, as they are all responses to disillusionment.

3.

Cynicism feels to me like a bitter tone that seeps into our judgments of people and things. It has a flavour of disgust, which makes sense as disgust is that ancient reflex that ejects whatever the body senses may be poisonous. Cynicism does a similar manoeuvre at the level of the soul. It spits things out before they can get anywhere near us, saying things like: this is bullshit, this will fail, they are fake, you are naïve, don’t be ridiculous. It can be funny, sharp, and devastatingly perceptive. But underneath the intelligence there is usually a wound trying very hard not to be opened. Scratch a cynic, and you’ll almost always find a heartbroken idealist.

For some of us , cynicism is a social or cultural inheritance (and for most Brits, its our mother tongue). We learn from others that tenderness is embarrassing, sincerity is risky, and the safest way to belong is to mock the very thing we long for.

Sometimes, this cynicism comes from the pain of feeling excluded. We see other people inside something we secretly long to enter: a friendship group, a romance, a community, a family, a career path, a movement, a spiritual practice, a kind of success. We envy something about them, and we alchemise the ache of exclusion into a judgment of superiority - they’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid; they’ve sold out; they’re deluded.

Cynicism tries to beat disappointment to the punch. It rejects the possibility before the possibility can reject us. But the cynic is never quite as indifferent as they pretend. Watch for the heat underneath the cool facade, the arms crossed over the chest, the eye-roll that needs an audience, the schadenfreude smirk that appears when the teacher falls, when the cosmic tantric relationship ends, when the ceremony turns out to be theatre. That eye-roll is looking for an accomplice. It builds a cheap, unearned intimacy, because it feels easier, or maybe safer, to bond over what we look down upon than to risk being seen, and found wanting.

You may have heard the term ‘spiritual bypassing’, coined by psychotherapist John Welwood. He used it to describe the way we can use spiritual ideas and practices to avoid unresolved emotional wounds, psychological pain, and the ordinary mess of being human. In honour of Welwood, I want to offer another term to our psychological vocabulary: cynical bypassing.

Cynical bypassing is what happens when we use doubt, judgment, and intellectual superiority to avoid looking stupid or getting hurt. It is standing on the edge of life, arms folded, cutting ourselves off from the thick of it, from the messy middle where hearts break, beauty brings us to our knees, and a hug might even be cosmic.

But if cynicism stands at the edge of life with its arms crossed, scepticism leans forward notebook in hand. Where cynicism arrives as a verdict, scepticism arrives as a question. Scepticism says: I don’t know yet, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

At its best, scepticism is simply agnostic. The healthy sceptic sits a little uncomfortably in the open question: maybe this is real, and maybe it isn’t. And that discomfort matters, because our minds don’t like ambiguity, and they tend to want to resolve the tension one way or another, collapsing into cynicism, or grasping at belief. To remain in not-knowing without hardening or reaching too quickly for certainty is a real discipline.

The word sceptic comes from the Greek skeptikos: ‘one who is still looking’. We could call the sceptic a seeker of truth, a seeker who refuses to pretend they have found what they haven't. Scepticism has helped us to dismantle false cosmologies (flat earth anyone?), exposed fraudulent medicine, checked unchallenged authority. It saves lives.

But scepticism has a shadow side too. Sometimes it is cynicism in a white lab coat, acting out a flawless performance of intellectual openness, but hiding the fact that the mind is already fiercely locked shut. Other times scepticism is fear with a clipboard, demanding more data because we are terrified of the vulnerability that comes with making a choice, because if we stop analysing and finally trust something, we risk making a mistake, we risk looking foolish, and we risk being changed.

And scepticism works better in a controlled scientific environment, less so when we are relating to the messiness of our own psychological worlds. It does not help us so much with deeply human questions like whether to trust someone, whether my grief needs more time, or how to stay open and engaged in the mystery of life.

Scepticism operates entirely from the neck up. It treats the rational mind as the ultimate arbiter of reality. It can see through snake oil, but it cannot feed a soul.

To feed a soul, you need a completely different kind of instrument. You need an intelligence that is embodied and integrated. You need a faculty that can protect you from false prophets but allow you to find an authentic faith. Ladies and gentlemen, may I hereby introduce you to discernment.

If cynicism is the refusal to believe, and scepticism is the hesitation to believe, discernment is the capacity to engage with truth with your eyes wide open. In many traditions, discernment is associated with a sword, a blade that can separate the true from the false. It often arrives when you walk up or down that mountain, when you stop trying so hard to figure things out. It cannot be rushed.

Cynicism and scepticism are often automatic reactions and postures we assume. Discernment is different. It is a conscious choice that needs space, room for the initial reaction to settle, room for the body to speak, room for the noise to quiet down enough so that the deeper signal can be heard. Discernment is rarely the loudest voice in the room, which is why it is so easy to miss.

But this is vital: real discernment does not create stillness so we can avoid life - oh look at how cool, and calm and discerning I am, whilst all those fools keep believing in stuff that ain’t real. Real discernment asks us to step into the fire. Where cynicism keeps you safe by keeping you out, and scepticism keeps you safe by keeping you analytical, discernment asks you to step fully into the experience and trust that you will know, from the inside, what is real and what is not. Ouch.

Discernment can walk into a room full of things it has every reason to dismiss and still find something worth keeping. It can sit with a flawed teacher and separate the wisdom from the wound. Discernment says: I am not a fool, but I am willing to believe. Discernment is open to the mystery and the magic and the miracles that abound in this life.

4.

Discernment is not just about dodgy therapists, or gurus, or cults. It is also about sharpening our sword in the fire of everyday life.

About fifteen years ago, I went to a wedding on a Greek island, and at the time I was reading a book called A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. It was quite an obscure book I had found in a library. I had never met another soul who had read that book.

One day, I came down to a quiet, long, and isolated beach, with no human anywhere to be seen apart from one man I saw on a deck chair. As I walked past him, I spotted he was reading A Short History of Progress, and because I was very much in the mode of synchronicity at that time, I immediately thought this has to be a sign.

So I started talking to him. And we hit it off. He told me he worked with children, and he had all these interesting, inspiring projects going on. I told him about my work with children and technology. We chatted for ages, both feeling inspired, and I left the beach with his email address and a clear conviction that this was a signal from the universe. This was meant to be.

We agreed to meet up in London a couple of months later. We met in a pub near the Royal Society of Arts in London. I remember going to meet him thinking this was a business conversation, maybe even one of those encounters that opens an important door in your life. But when I got there, the atmosphere was not what I expected. He was already sitting with a young Somali woman who looked to be in her early twenties. He was considerably older than her, and they had both clearly been drinking.

The evening got stranger. They carried on drinking, and I found out this young woman had grown up in a children’s home, and she was obviously vulnerable, and it was not clear what her relationship with this guy was, or indeed why she was even there. Until eventually, awkwardly, it became clear that they were both trying to draw me into some kind of sexual scenario that I was completely not up for.

Eventually I got up and left. I can’t remember what communications I had with this guy after that meeting, but what I do remember is the crash landing, how one story can turn from ‘a sign from the universe’ to ‘what the actual fuck’. After this I questioned my beliefs about synchronicity, I questioned the part of me that can take a coincidence, however beautiful, and turn it into a certainty. I became cynical. Whenever someone spoke about signs, miracles, or being guided by the universe, a little internal door would close, shouting ‘bullshit’ from the other side.

The truth is, I am still figuring this out. If there was a message from the universe in this Greek island encounter, it is that my own discernment can get outbid by my unmet longings. Because at that time I was wanting to build something meaningful around kids and technology, and this guy seemed to have access to a lot of resources. That hunger overrode my discernment, and the scar has remained with me ever since.

Lately, I have been writing about standing on the edges of things, watching from a careful distance, never quite belonging, never quite committing. I told myself this was discernment. And sometimes it was. But I am beginning to wonder how much of it has simply been the long aftermath of not wanting to be made a fool of again.

Here is what I want to say out loud, as much to myself as to anyone reading this:

Honour your wounds. Sharpen your discernment. And then, when you have created enough space, when the sword is steady in your hand, be willing to step back into the fire. Be willing to be wrong again. Be willing to be hurt again. Be willing to believe in something that cannot be proven, because you have decided, with your eyes open, that the alternative costs too much.

There is an energy that stays trapped when we keep our arms crossed against our chest. I can feel it in my heart right now. And I think you can too.

I had a dream recently where I’d arrived at the last planet in the universe. Beyond this there was nothingness. There was a feeling of the end of civilisation, and I was walking around this planet noticing different groups of people - some were having fun, some were working together, some were, well I can’t remember exactly, but the feeling tone was people together doing stuff. And I was an outsider, peering in.

In the dream, as I’m wandering around this planet watching these groups of people, I notice that I am feeling lonely, and then I bump into one of my oldest friends, Dean. In real life, I have known Dean since primary school. We used to smoke twigs in his garden (you know that time when smoking twigs was really cool?). And Dean is one person in this world I feel I can say almost anything to. So, it’s not that surprising that in the dream, when I bump into Dean on this alien planet at the edge of the known universe, I open my heart to him, telling him how lonely I feel, and as I am opening up a deep feeling of grief arises in my chest. I can’t remember if I start crying in the dream or not, but the grief feels real and intense. And then I wake up.

2.
I know we talk a lot about a loneliness epidemic these days, it’s worse for you than smoking, and all the chatter and good intentions that go along with that. But I am not convinced that these broader discussions are getting to the point, the point being that there is something fundamentally lonely about this human existence. I know this feels like a depressing thing to say, but it might be more empowering to embrace this fact. Humans are social creatures - I repeat this mantra at talks, workshops, in sessions - an incantation to remind us to connect more with each other. But I think I’ve been missing the other half of this equation:

humans are social creatures, who find it hard to connect.

Or maybe it’s just me?

I hope not. That would be a lonely place to be.

I was in the park recently with a friend, our kids, our dogs. A woman came over with a young dachshund and the children dropped to the grass, letting it climb on them, lick their faces, until they became a giggling cuddle puddle. And I noticed that my friend and I had both turned to watch, a little too gratefully, because between us, in the gap the dachshund had just filled, was an awkwardness. Two grown men, glad of a puppy to look at instead of each other.

Is connection really as simple as being more childlike? More dachshund?

Well, I’m not sure it’s that simple. Because our own puppy, a cavapoo, is exceedingly social. She goes up to everyone and tries to make a connection by licking, jumping up, bowing down, rolling onto her belly. But she is constantly rejected by other dogs. She is desperate to play, but most other dogs just don’t seem that bothered. And to be honest, every time she gets rejected, a little bit of my heart breaks. Perhaps it reminds me of all the times I had the courage or innocence or naiveté to reach out, sniff some bums, and then get knocked back, and perhaps I am projecting my own feelings of rejection onto my canine friend. Either way, she never seems to take the hint. Five minutes later she is sniffing bums again, wagging her tail, assuming there is a new connection around the corner.

3.

Back to that dream. It’s the end of the world, and the end of the known universe. And in this apocalyptic moment, people aren’t freaking out, they are sitting together. There are no headless chickens in this scene, no-one is building bunkers or storing rations, or planning to escape to the next planet, because there are no next planets. There are no other options. This is the end of the road. These humans on this planet seem to have come to terms with the reality that things are going to end, and their response is: to hang out.

And I am carrying this subtle feeling of loneliness. I barely even notice it until I meet Dean, and finally I have someone I can share it with. In this moment, loneliness is not what separates us, but what brings us closer together. Which makes me think of loneliness as a signal, pointing us back towards connection.

But if that were the whole story, that dachshund and my puppy and those children getting their faces licked would be the most connected creatures on earth. And yet they get rejected all the time…and they keep going back for more.

Somewhere along the way in my own world, the fear of rejection became stronger than the drive to connect.

4.

“I’m just an animal, looking for a home.”
(Talking Heads, This Must Be The Place)

Imagine for a moment that you have reached the last planet in the universe. There is nowhere left to go. No frontier beyond this one. No self-improvement project left to complete. No new shiny promotion. No bigger house. No fantasy dream partner. No rocket ship to Mars.

What would matter to you?

Who would you want beside you?

What would you regret not saying?

What current realities and neuroses would suddenly seem absurd?

My strong suspicion is that most of us wouldn’t spend those final hours listening to a podcast about kegel exercises, or reading a Substack about some guy’s random alien loneliness dreams. We would seek out the people who matter, the people with whom we can truly drop our masks and stop performing. The people we can sit beside and admit that we don’t know what we’re doing, that we’re scared, that we’re lonely, that none of us are getting out of this alive.

So many of my dreams are about trying to find my way home. Searching for a place I can finally rest. But it is dawning on me that the home I am seeking is not made from bricks and mortar. And the thing stopping me from finding it is not a Google Maps malfunction. And the thing stopping me from finding it is not a Google Maps malfunction. It is closer than that. A layer of fear around my heart.

I’ve been listening to the psychologist Rick Hanson talk about what it takes to repair a rupture in a relationship, and he offers an insight I think is powerful: repair only works if you actually want the connection on the other side of it. So often, our mind tells powerful (but mostly untrue) stories about why we don’t want that connection, because the other person is difficult, or the timing is wrong, or this is not my crowd, or I’m too tired to engage. But underneath all of these rationalisations there lies a deeper truth: often the door is open, and, out of fear, I’m choosing not to walk through.

What I am learning is that when I bring loving awareness to that doorway in my heart, when I allow myself to dissolve that fear a little, when I let myself be a tiny bit more dachshund, I am way more likely to find my way home. And yes, I might be rejected. And yes, that hurts. But it's the end of the fucking world, folks, and I for one am tired of standing outside an unlocked door, aching to come home.

If you tried to join us live today and couldn’t get in, that was entirely our fault. We had a technical mishap with the Substack Live link that meant many of you who’d planned to come simply couldn’t access it. We are sorry. It was frustrating for us to not be able to figure this out, and we’re especially sorry if you’d carved out time in your day to be there. I have been having so many tech issues this last week, I am dreaming of a world where we just sit around the campfire, and the only thing we need to concern ourselves with is if we have enough logs to keep the fire going.

The good news is the conversation happened, and we recorded it, and you can watch it above.

In this session, Genevieve and I explore what we’re calling the everyday grief of parenting, that often unspoken gap between the parenting journey we imagined and the one we’re actually living.

It’s a conversation particularly for parents of sensitive, deeply feeling, or neurodivergent children. But honestly, much of what we discuss applies to any parent who has ever felt the distance between expectation and reality.

We cover:

• Why so many parents arrive exhausted even after reading all the books and trying all the strategies

• What human beings (children and parents alike) actually need in order to thrive, and what happens when those needs go unmet

• The attention economy of parenting, and why modern family life makes it so hard to meet anyone’s needs well

• What it looks like when parents get their own needs met, and why that’s not selfish, it’s the whole point

• Those rare, precious moments of genuine connection with our children, when two souls co-exist, and how to create more of them

If this conversation resonates, we’re running our next Beyond Labels Parenting Lab on Monday 22nd June, 6–7:30pm BST.

It’s a small, live online group, capped at 20 places, exploring the theme of updating our expectations to meet the child we actually have. Including the grief that lives underneath the exhaustion, and what it might mean to slowly, gently, let go of the parenting story we were expecting to live.

The first Lab sold quickly. We expect this one to fill quickly too.

Book your place here.

Thank you for being part of this.

Louis & Genevieve

Parents wondering if their child needs a diagnosis, parents feeling exhausted by rigid school systems, parents wondering whether they were doing enough, parents grieving the gap between the parenting journey they imagined and the one they found themselves living.

The feedback afterwards was deeply encouraging. We heard that it was refreshing to be in a calm space that wasn’t trying to fix their child, or offer another parenting formula. Instead, we shared a space to think, feel, reflect, and connect with other parents facing similar challenges.

Because of the positive feedback, we’re opening a second Beyond Labels Parenting Lab later this month.

And before that, we’re hosting a free Substack Live conversation on a theme that kept surfacing throughout the first event:

Parenting Beyond The Playbook

Updating our expectations to meet the child we have.

📅 Monday 8th June
🕑 2pm (UK)
📍 Live on Substack.

Many of us begin parenting carrying conscious or unconscious expectations about how family life will look. And then reality arrives. Sometimes our children ask us to become different parents than we expected to be. They challenge our assumptions, stretch our capacity, and sometimes force us to let go of old ideas about success, achievement, family life, education, and even who we thought we were.

For parents raising sensitive, deeply feeling, or neurodivergent children, the gap between expectations and reality can feel particularly painful.

Together we’ll explore:

• The gap between the parenting journey we imagined and the one we’re actually living.

• Why letting go of expectations can sometimes feel hard.

• The loneliness, shame, and grief that can arise for parents of highly sensitive or neurodivergent children.

• The fundamental human needs that sensitive, deeply feeling and neurodivergent children may be pointing us towards.

• What happens when those needs go unmet, not only in our children, but in ourselves as parents.

• How we find confidence in our own instincts amidst school pressures, diagnosis pathways, waiting lists and conflicting advice.

• Why parenting highly sensitive children requires us to rewrite the playbook

Add this Substack Live link to your calendar if this calls.

And, we’d love you to join us for the next Beyond Labels Parenting Lab on 22nd June. We’re keeping numbers small to allow for genuine conversation, reflection and connection, so places are limited.

Hope to see you there.

Louis & Genevieve

I’m visiting my friend at Oxford University, at a dinner table next to students adorned with cravates and confidence, and I don’t want to belong here

I’m 16, drunk on cheap lager in the Ritz club in Manchester, when the DJ plays Radiohead’s Creep, and I feel like I’m not alone in not belonging here.

I’m lying face down on the floor, emerging from a journey terrifying and awe-inspiring in equal measure, when I instinctively reach out from the darkness to hold the hand of the person next to me, and I feel like I belong here.

2.

“They’re all pretending.”

“Some people are so fake.”

“I can’t believe how judgmental I am.”

I stood at the edge of a crowd whooping and dancing and weaving and twirling to a song and a band I have never heard before, and I noticed how bloody judgmental I can be. This temporary tribe all seem to know and love this song, but here I am feeling self-conscious and squirmy about my non-participation. The judging thoughts keep me awkwardly on the outskirts. Why can’t I just get involved? Maybe I need a beer, or something stronger.

My daughter appears. She wants to get ice-cream, and I am rescued from the edge.

3.

I bump into an old friend by the fire. We compare notes. He too feels like an outsider, watching these people dancing and chanting and transcending, and I meet him at the edge. I notice as we speak I’m turned at an awkward angle, giving him my side profile, and conscious I’m not eye-gazing as is the manner of things in this particular field.

4.
Home is here. Now is where the heart is.

My heart is beating right now as I think about all the humans I know who are truly at home in themselves. The problem is that for each candidate, I am quick to find their flaws. Am I just highly attuned to people’s edges, or does my own judgment stop me from resting?

My heart continues to beat, and meanwhile, somewhere in the Pacific, a raft of sea otters drifts along with the currents, sleeping. They are wrapped in kelp so the current doesn't separate them. Their paws are touching.

My heart beats.

Jamal is sitting in the park with his schoolfriend when he gets the call. He picks clumps of grass, squeezing them in his fists and letting them fall. He makes an excuse to leave. The next day at school he spends his breaktimes sitting on the toilet crying.

My heart beats.

In a conservation area in Kenya, a female giraffe is standing beside the body of her one-month-old calf. She has been standing here for four days. Other females come. They wrap their necks around one another, and stay a while.

5.

Its 10 pm, and my daughter has had 6 hours sleep, but has somehow motored through this day with energy and joy. I go to get her some food, leaving her in a trolley under a tree by the fire. When I come back she is crying: “I miss mummy, I want to go home.”

My heart beats.

I know how she feels.

I take her back to the tent. We snuggle up, touching paws.

Then came the mindfulness revolution.

The research behind mindfulness expanded, and companies like Headspace began to rebrand meditation from ‘that thing weird hippies do’, to something that is good for your health, ‘a gym for the mind’ as they used to call it. The hype grew and grew, and soon mindfulness was being introduced in boardrooms, in hospitals, in schools, with soldiers, prisoners, pensioners. Around 2014, my sister no longer thought mindfulness was weird - she invited me to come and teach her fellow doctors how to meditate.

The mindfulness bubble continued to inflate for years, until eventually (inevitably) the cracks began to appear, and mindfulness started to lose its glow as a universal remedy, beginning instead to attract a more sceptical gaze. Ron Purser wrote a book called “McMindfulness” in which he crystallised a critique that had been growing for some time: modern mindfulness, stripped of ethics and packaged for consumption, was being sold back to the very institutions generating the stress it was supposed to relieve. Critics began asking whether mindfulness was really helping people wake up, or simply helping them cope more efficiently with impossible conditions. At the same time, research began to complicate the picture, with studies suggesting that mindfulness could sometimes be harmful, and that school-based programmes were not always improving students’ mental health, and in some cases may even have been doing more harm than good.1

How can something go from such hype, a cure-for-all, to such a hard landing back to earth?

Well, we have been here before, and we will be here again. Because human beings are desperate. Desperate for something that will finally quiet that ache - a magic pill, a silver bullet, a system, a practice, an ideology, a leader, a supplement, a technology, or a breakthrough that will finally and forever relieve us of the unbearable weight of being human.

We are, perhaps eternally, vulnerable to the fantasy of panacea.

2.

Panacea was the goddess of universal healing in ancient Greek mythology. She was believed to have a remedy for any ailment, a cure for any condition. She is the archetype of the human hunger for total relief, for the fantasy that somewhere there exists a single potion that can tidy up the irreducible complexity of suffering.

And she travels in realms beyond the worlds of healing and medicine. I see Panacea when I see the latest new political figure promising eternal salvation, and everyone whether right or left getting whipped up into a frenzy of excitement - finally someone who can purify the human soul of all evil.

Of course, some leaders are wiser than others, some therapies are better than others, some practices genuinely help. The problem begins when our minds transform these partial truths into fantasies of total salvation, when our desperation causes us to hand over too much power, or certainty, or faith into something or someone that cannot possibly carry the weight we place upon it. And paradoxically, it is this very longing for absolute relief that can actually make us suffer more.

According to legend, the original silver bullet was used to kill a man-eating beast impermeable to other weapons. The silver came from recycled medals of the Virgin Mary, melted down by the French hunter Jean Chastel and loaded into a gun. Even in this myth, we see a tendency to recycle our faith into fantasies of total relief.

So why do we keep getting trapped in these fantasies, even though they seem to make us suffer more?

Our desperation for a panacea makes sense when we slow down to consider the nature of human suffering.

It can feel really fucking hard to be a human being. To love people so deeply, and to know you will lose them. To lie awake at 3am, drenched in sweat, heart beating like a pneumatic drill against your chest, replaying conversations, mistakes, futures that haven’t happened yet. To look in the mirror and see time leaving its fingerprints all over your face, and to know exactly how this story ends. To carry the lonely terror that you may have wasted this one precious life on the wrong work, the wrong relationship, the wrong way of being. To experience moments of beauty so profound they break your heart, especially because we know they cannot last. To desperately want certainty in a world where relationships change, bodies fail, economies collapse, people die, and no one can ever tell you for sure that everything will be okay.

All of this creates a uniquely human form of suffering, with countless different expressions, feeding our desperate yearning for something, pleeease God anything, that might finally take the pain away. Perhaps this is one of the deepest roots of prayer itself: the raw human cry that rises when we come face to face with our helplessness, our fragility, our inability to control the fact that we love, lose, age, break, grieve, and die. I think of the baby’s cry that brings it back into contact and hopefully comfort with mother. Beneath many of our prayers, ideologies, and panaceas lies a desperate longing not to feel so alone with the tenderness and the terror of being alive.

So if you (like me) have ever found yourself longing for a silver bullet, a cure, a technique, a therapist, a guru, a political movement, a spiritual breakthrough, a person who will finally tell you they know the way out, then I am writing this piece directly to you. Through these words, and whatever tendrils may reach out through this page toward your heart, I want to offer some kind of reassurance, reminding you that in this desperate longing to be free from suffering, you are not alone.

The baby that cries does not need a silver bullet. They just need to be held. They need a felt experience that they don’t have to face this overwhelming reality entirely alone. And this is where I believe many modern approaches to healing go wrong. We keep searching for the perfect technique, the ultimate breakthrough, the final cure, while overlooking the ancient conditions that have helped human beings survive suffering for millennia: community, shared ritual, friendship, loving touch, moments of shared vulnerability.

Panacea thinking also tends to search for a single answer. But most meaningful healing seems to happen differently, more subtly: a conversation here, grief finally expressed there, a good night’s sleep, a body slowly learning safety again, an unexpected moment of honesty, a friendship that helps us carry life differently.

We will never find the silver bullet that finally frees us forever more from the vulnerability of being human. But every now and then, we can find solace in the discovery that, even in the dark, someone is still there when we cry out.

I'd love to know in the comments if you relate to this at all? What have been your silver bullets? The thing(s) or people you handed too much faith to, hoping it would finally be the one?

Sarah Churman was born profoundly deaf. For twenty-nine years, she lived in a world of silence, navigating through lip-reading, visual cues, and a voice she could never herself hear.

But then, in March 2010 a new technology was released: the Esteem, a fully internal middle-ear implant. Eight weeks later, she was in an audiologist's office, switching it on, hearing her own voice for the first time.

When I watch this video, I feel an immediate wave of grief and joy. Grief for everything Sarah had been unable to hear for twenty-nine years, and joy at watching a new dimension of human experience suddenly open before her.

But not everyone experiences this moment as a miracle.

In fact, some parts of the Deaf community see cochlear implants as a threat, because deafness, for them, is not a disability, but a difference, an identity, and a way of being that they want to celebrate and protect. The deaf philosopher Teresa Blankmeyer Burke argues that the language of ‘tragic loss’ can feel profoundly misleading when applied to someone born deaf:

“Some of us do not share this experience [of loss] at all, but only know what it is to be in our bodies as they have always existed.”

In this worldview, sign language is a rich cultural inheritance, not a substitute for real communication. Cochlear implants can therefore come to symbolise the gradual erosion of a distinct way of moving through and understanding the world. Some Deaf parents will even refuse implants for their children. And the language surrounding these debates can become morally charged and deeply polarised. Some activists and parents describe cochlear implants as ‘genocidal’, and the doctors who perform them as ‘child abusers.’1

To many hearing people, this might feel difficult to understand. Why would someone refuse the possibility of hearing? Restoring a lost sense is the subject of miracles: I was blind now I can see. And who doesn’t want a miracle? Philosopher Robert Sparrow wrote that many hearing people struggle to understand ‘the hostility of many Deaf persons’ toward cochlear implants because they cannot imagine deafness as anything other than ‘a tragic loss and a disability.’

I find myself sitting in that gap, between Sarah’s tears in that audiologist’s office, and the parent who looks at the same technology and sees a threat to their existence. Both responses feel valid, and they seem to emerge from entirely different understandings of what it means to suffer, to heal, and to be fully human.

It sounds cliché these days to say that human beings are story-telling creatures, but stories like these reveal just how profoundly the narratives we inhabit shape our experience of reality. They influence what we experience as suffering, what we call healing, what we consider normal, what we believe people are capable of, and ultimately what it even means to be human.

2.

Last week, my wife and I were having a disagreement about our bedroom habits. She wanted me to turn the bedside light off because she said the brightness was overwhelming her. I wanted to keep it on so I could read before sleep. Initially, I found myself slipping into a familiar interpretation, that she was being ‘unreasonable’, ‘controlling’. She was telling the same story about me.

But, we softened toward each other the moment we found a different way of understanding what was happening. We started talking about how we might simply be ‘wired’ differently. Her nervous system may be unusually sensitive to bright light, while mine barely registered it. Now, neither of us was ‘wrong’ or ‘controlling’. Compassion became easier. Accommodation became easier. And through this understanding, a simple practical solution emerged: a different bulb.

Now, this explanation that we are both ‘wired’ differently is a story, as opposed to a scientific truth. My wife has never had a scan to show that her brain is indeed wired to react differently to bright lights. Does this matter? In this instance, not at all, because the story helped us to resolve a difference.

The bedroom scene may seem like a trivial example, but some of our most powerful 21st-century explanations arrive in people’s lives with the force of revelation. They can transform shame into self-compassion, struggle into purpose, and isolation into belonging. They can fundamentally reorganise a person’s relationship to their past, their future, and even to themselves.

Instead of:
You’re lazy.
You’re too sensitive.
You’re difficult.
You’re selfish.
You’re failing.

We now can say:

Your brain is wired differently.
You’re neurodivergent.
You have trauma.
Your nervous system is dysregulated.
You have an anxious attachment style.
You’re masking.
You’re burned out.
You carry ancestral trauma.
It’s the peri-menopause.
Mercury is in retrograde.

As you read this list, you may have noticed a part of you squirming or even laughing at some explanations, whilst keenly embracing others. We all have our preferred frameworks for making sense of suffering. Some people gravitate toward neuroscience and biology. Others toward psychology, politics, spirituality, mythology. Some explanations feel deeply illuminating to us. Others feel simplistic, threatening, irritating, or absurd. And these preferences are shaped by our childhoods, our families, our culture.

But despite their differences, all of these explanations circle the same ancient question:

Why am I suffering like this?

3.

10 years ago, Beth encountered the language of trauma and she breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, the scattered pieces of her suffering made sense.

The chronic fatigue that had taken her out of work twice in her thirties. The migraines that arrived without warning and lasted for days. The episodes of depression so heavy she could barely lift her arms, arms scarred from a period of self-harming when she was looking for some way of making this invisible pain become visible, legible. She had seen doctors, neurologists, a psychiatrist. She had been given diagnoses - Major Depressive Disorder, Fibromyalgia - and she had tried the SSRIs, done the CBT, learned the breathing exercises.

Depression had given her a treatment pathway and some hope. Fibromyalgia had validated that the pain was real. But these explanations never quite felt like enough, because she continued to suffer.

And then she discovered The Body Keeps The Score, and immersed herself in the language of trauma, of hypervigilance, triggers, freeze responses, and the ancient survival responses still firing long after the danger had passed. Trauma reframed her suffering from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” It removed any sense of moral failing, shifting the lens from brokenness to adaptation. Her symptoms made sense as a natural reaction to certain events in her childhood that had left their scars. And these trauma explanations felt especially powerful because they gave her suffering scientific credibility, that it wasn’t ‘all in her mind’ but encoded in her body, in muscle tension, chronic pain, startle responses, autoimmune symptoms.2

And so Beth tried EMDR, and Internal Family Systems, and even dabbled with MDMA-assisted therapy, because these treatments held a lot of promise for treating trauma. And there were moments where she genuinely believed she had finally found the missing piece, where she felt lighter, and her symptoms subsided.

But the relief never fully held. Old fears returned. Familiar patterns resurfaced. And despite some very real improvements, the initial relief and sense of hope slowly lost its charge. She continued to suffer.

Then one morning, she was out running with her best friend Nicola, when Nicola told her she had recently been diagnosed with ADHD. “My whole life finally makes sense”, Nicola had said. That evening, Beth typed ‘ADHD in women’ into her phone, and soon found herself reading articles and watching videos with a feeling she would later describe as ‘instant recognition’, as if someone had been watching her life from the inside and had captured every little nuance into one constellation of symptoms - ADHD. The chronic disorganisation she had previously attributed to depression. The way her mind moved, fast, associative, restless, always three steps ahead and somehow never where it needed to be. The exhaustion of social situations she had explained as introversion, or anxiety, or fibromyalgia, or trauma response. The jobs that had started brilliantly and slowly unravelled. At one point as she read these accounts, she found herself crying without quite knowing why.

By the end of the week she had arrived at a conclusion: This is who I am.

Not what was wrong with her, nor what had happened to her. What she was.

But it wasn’t just the explanation that felt so different this time. It was everything that came with it. Within days she had found communities of women who described her inner life with an uncanny accuracy. Many of these communities were gathering around shared identity and a sense of pride. There were resources everywhere, written specifically for minds like hers. There were public figures, creators, people she admired, openly and warmly claiming the same identity. The shame that had clung to every previous explanation was less heavy here.

This was more than an explanation. She had found a home.

When I imagine Beth in this moment of revelation, I think about Sarah Churman hearing her own voice for the first time. The same tears. The same feeling of a whole new world opening up, and maybe even the same grief underneath, a grief that says: I have been misunderstood my whole life, and it’s painful to imagine how different things might have been.

In the months that followed, Beth’s life reorganised itself around her new understanding. At work, she stopped apologising and started negotiating different hours, different conditions, with a boss who finally understood and could accommodate her differences without judgment. At home, she and her partner Dan fought less, after she sent him videos to help him understand her neurotype. And she stopped interpreting her own mind as a chronic failure and started extending to herself the compassion she had always found easier to offer others.

She even began to see the scars on her arms with less shame, and something closer to tenderness for the younger self who had been suffering without the language to understand herself.

For the first time in her life, she felt fully explained.3

4.

I’ve tracked many stories like Beth’s in my clinical work, and over time they have revealed to me the strange power that explanations have to shape human lives.

This process is not unique to diagnosis. Human beings are constantly using explanations to organise themselves and each other. I'm not a morning person. I have an addictive personality. I'm an introvert. I'm highly sensitive. I'm avoidant. I'm a people pleaser. I'm a perfectionist. When I was growing up, my mum told me I was indecisive because I was a Libran, and for years I unknowingly organised myself around that story.

Of course, every explanation illuminates something real. But it also casts a shadow. If you stay inside the story too long, the parts of you that don't fit it can fade away. What I started to see in my clinical work, again and again, was that explanations that once helped people make sense of their suffering could slowly harden into identities.

A teenage girl with an autism diagnosis had, pre-diagnosis, been getting to school most days, although it was not always easy for her. Four months post-diagnosis, she had stopped going to school. Then hairdressing appointments stopped. Then the supermarket became a no-go zone. Then sleepovers. To be clear, her difficulties were real long before anyone gave them a name. But the diagnosis seemed to have changed her relationship to her difficulties. What had once felt hard and effortful now felt incompatible with who she fundamentally was. Each withdrawal from the world now arrived with a reasonable but rigid explanation: I am wired like this. Taken together, these small retreats added up to a life steadily shrinking.

A 25-year-old man, newly diagnosed with ADHD and autism, gradually stopped accepting social invitations. He spoke about no longer wanting to mask, because it was simply too exhausting. His pain was real, but this explanation had also given him a framework, an identity, in which withdrawal made sense, whilst stretching himself socially no longer did. Symptoms often leave room for movement. Identities can begin to feel far more fixed. Eventually, almost all of his contact with the world moved online, where he felt safer and more in control.

And then there are the parents. A mother, exhausted and confused, whose teenage son’s PDA diagnosis had grown into an exemption from expectation. This explanation framed ordinary demands as neurologically intolerable, and so the ordinary negotiation through which family life functions slowly fell away.

Again, the boy’s struggles were real. But over time, the family’s relationship to those struggles changed, as expectations receded, and the small, ordinary frictions through which most young people gradually build confidence, tolerance, and resilience began disappearing from family life altogether. And with them, slowly, so too did the sense that this boy might one day become capable of navigating the wider world.

All of these people I describe above are overwhelmed, exhausted, and genuinely struggling. They are trying to survive in environments that repeatedly leave them feeling misunderstood, dysregulated, ashamed, or unable to cope. Under these conditions, explanations like ADHD, autism, or PDA can become lifelines, ways of securing understanding, accommodation, and belonging.

But over time, explanation can also become self-reinforcing. The philosopher Ian Hacking called this the looping effect: “People classified in a certain way tend to conform to or grow into the ways that they are described.” We shape ourselves around categories. These shifts are embedded and reinforced in relationship. Families adapt around diagnoses. Online communities reinforce particular narratives. Therapists, teachers, algorithms, support groups, TikTok videos, all begin reflecting the same explanation back to the person, until eventually the explanation starts to feel not like one lens among many, but like reality itself.

The question I return to is whether the explanation creates more room for a person to move through the world, or whether it slowly begins narrowing what they believe is possible for them.

5.

Call me naive, but I dream of a world where we can accommodate each other’s differences without needing to cling onto labels like life-rafts. I am excited about places like Portsmouth where they are shifting toward what they call a ‘needs-led’ model. Instead of waiting years for a formal diagnosis, families use a profiling tool to map a child's unique landscape of strengths and sensitivities. It’s a more flexible and nuanced model, and we need more like this.4 But for most of us, that future hasn't arrived yet. Until it does, many people have no other choice but to translate their suffering into rigid categories for rigid systems.

We can’t ignore the wider cultural backdrop, against which we define ourselves. Strong identities become most magnetic precisely when life feels more unstable. When the ground beneath us shakes, we reach instinctively for explanations that tell us, clearly and without debate, who we are, where we belong, and why we suffer.

This longing intensifies in a culture starving for empathy. As our attention fragments and our communities erode, we cling to any authority that helps us feel safe. That authority might be a politician, a spiritual teacher, or a scientific explanation of our neurobiology. But underneath them all lives the same profoundly human desire: to feel rooted in a volatile world.

If you are a parent standing in that gap, wondering if a diagnosis will help your child or haunt them, the choice feels impossible because you are trying to predict the future. You are choosing which story to bet on. And because of your deep care, the uncertainty can feel agonising.

The healthiest explanations are not the ones that explain everything completely, but the ones that leave enough room for mystery, contradiction, and change. We can use the ‘life-raft’ to get to shore without deciding to live on the raft forever.

This is what I see when I think about Sarah Churman. The ‘miracle’ in that audiologist’s office was not that she was finally healed. It was that she was given a new way to participate in the mess of the world.

We need our stories. We need our language. But no explanation can ever contain a human soul. Perhaps part of the temptation is that we long for explanations that finally settle the matter. Something solid enough to quiet uncertainty, and end suffering once and for all.

But human beings do not stay still for long. Nor does life. The Buddha taught that suffering is not caused by pain itself, but by clinging. We cling to certainty, to identities, to explanations that promise to finally settle the question of who we are and why we suffer. And this clinging, he suggested, is part of what deepens suffering itself.

Perhaps the most profound act of love a parent can offer a child is the refusal to believe that any story, explanation, or category could ever contain the entirety of their soul. We need identities, stories, and explanations. But they must remain permeable enough for life to move through them.

The blessing I want to offer to my clients, to my daughter, to myself, and even to you reading this is:

“You have my full permission to exceed every story we have ever told about you.”

(Watch the video above for the full story, or read on)

1. Beyond Labels: a new parenting group

If you are a parent of a child who is sensitive, neurodivergent, or somehow struggling in a world that wasn’t quite designed for them, this is for you.

My colleague Dr Genevieve Von Lob and I have created a new space for parents who are grappling with these questions. Genevieve has spent over 20 years working with families in CAMHS and private practice. Together we’re bringing our clinical experience working with children and families to bear on a problem we see constantly:

Parents get a diagnosis for their child. There’s a moment of relief. And then they’re still faced with the same question: how do I actually support this unique human being?

The label rarely answers that question.

What we’ve found matters most is something much simpler and much harder to come by: space. The reflective capacity that comes from slowing down, feeling less alone, and having somewhere to process and digest.

That’s what this group offers.

Beyond Labels — Monday 11th May, 8pm

Spaces are limited. If this calls to you, please sign up now.

2. The Heartspace Experiment

Last week I ran a five day WhatsApp experiment with our paid Substack community.

The question I was trying to answer is one I’ve been obsessed with for years:

How do we stay connected to the qualities of our heart, not just on a retreat or at a ceremony or in a therapy session, but on a Monday morning, when everyday life is triggering us in a multitude of ways?

I call it the Monday morning problem. You’ve had the ecstasy. You’ve had the breakthrough. You’ve had the glimpse of another world being possible. And then you come back to ordinary life…and the landing is painful.

So we ran an experiment - the Heartspace. Five days. Simple daily prompts. A small group of people agreeing to look at the world through a slightly different lens each day.

Beauty. Love. Imperfection. Music. Space.

I was honestly amazed by the results. People changed the way they engaged with the world, changed how they related to themselves, changed how they showed up in their relationships. With simple prompts, in a WhatsApp group, during an ordinary week.

I don’t want to oversell it. But I’m genuinely inspired at what became possible.

I think this was a glimpse of what Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh meant when he said: “the next Buddha will be a sangha (community).”

We’re going to keep going. More experiments. More prompts. More challenges. Simple, creative practices and invitations to help you stay connected to the best of yourself when almost everything around us seems designed to disconnect you from it.

If you want to be part of what we’re building, please join as a paid member. If this resonates with you, I would love you to be a part of this community.

Subscribe now

With Love, Louis

1.

Something in the current conversation about boys and men does not sit right with me. It’s the feeling of a feeding frenzy. We seem to have developed a bottomless appetite for content about men behaving badly, a kind of outrage porn that travels much faster than the truth, and leaves no room for anything but condemnation.

When Louis Theroux released his documentary about the Manosphere, for days it was all I saw on the news and in my social media feed, comment after comment, mostly filled with outrage, disgust, condemnation (and occasionally some curiosity). I wondered: why does content about men behaving badly seem to spread so fast?

I saw the same pattern after Adolescence was released, a viral outpouring of commentary and outrage. Politicians who hadn’t watched the fictional netflix series were slammed, and the UK government was even pushing for it to be required viewing in schools.

And then this week, similar shockwaves after a CNN report about a group of men who were sedating their partners, raping them whilst asleep, filming it and sharing these videos and tips with each other. The meme version of this story that I first saw said ‘62 million men visit online rape academy’, but when I read the actual news story, I realised this was a huge distortion. The actual report said the porn website (which mostly had videos in similar categories as other porn websites) had 62 million visits a month (to put this into perspective, the world’s biggest porn website, Pornhub, has about 4 billion visits per month).

When the conversation gets so loud and vitriolic, I notice a familiar, suffocating pattern in the men around me. Most of us find a way to look away, reassuring ourselves we aren't part of the problem. Others turn that shame inward, sinking into a quiet collapse. And some of us perform a version of care, like the right words with the correct emotion on social media, that doesn’t actually cost us anything. None of these responses are leading us anywhere better. In this article, I seek to understand what’s actually going on for boys and men right now, and what might genuinely help.

2.

Dan was my best friend. We met at a party in a beach in Thailand when we were in our early 20s. He was playing the saxophone whilst the DJ played house beats, and I thought that was pretty cool.

Dan was in many ways a man’s man: he captained large sea vessels, and was adventurous, brave, and chivalrous. But in hindsight, I can see there was a deep vulnerability beneath the confident sheen. When he took his own life in 2017, people were genuinely shocked.

Dan was brought up in a specific version of manhood. I must have heard him repeat over 100 times one of his dad's favourite jokes: "Sympathy? You'll find that in the dictionary, somewhere between shit and syphilis." It was a badge of honour, and yes I laughed along because part of me wanted to be strong. We were both hard on the outside, soft on the inside.

A few months before he died, at the height of MeToo, he posted something on Facebook, words filled with shame and self-hatred about the sin of being a man, about what it meant, in that moment, to carry that particular inheritance. In hindsight, that post was another clue, a cry for help. Dan was experiencing a profound mental breakdown, and his terror and confusion were met by a world that expected him to be either strong or self-flagellating.

We will never know exactly why he took his life. I had to surrender to that mystery a long time ago. Every reason reached for felt partial, a betrayal of his complexity, of what I actually knew about him, of the fact that he was irreducibly himself and not a symbol of anything.

But it is also a betrayal not to see my mate Dan’s death in a wider context, where suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK, and 75% of deaths of despair (suicide and overdose) globally are men. The ways in which men suffer tend to be more lethal. Their despair doesn't feel it can ask for help. It finds other exits.

3.

One of those exits is violence, not just to self, but to others.

Men commit the vast majority of violent crime. This pattern holds across cultures, across continents, across every dataset we have. 82% of sexual violence globally is perpetrated by men, mostly against women, with a significant subset of around 1 in every 10 acts of sexual violence being man on man.1

Women navigate a world shaped by male violence in ways most men never have to think about. And women often have a story, not just a fear. The man who followed them home; the comment at work they laughed off; the drink that tasted wrong; and much worse. Male violence toward women is not a fringe phenomenon. It is structural enough to shape how half the population moves through the world, every single day.

And yet, the tragedy of this violence is that it does not stop at the borders of gender; it eventually, and inevitably, turns back on itself. If we broaden our perspective, we see that men are also the primary victims of violent crime. Globally, men are more likely to be murdered, to die in wars, to be killed by strangers on streets. The same force that stalks a woman on her way home is the force that meets a man in a dark alley. This last piece reminds me of a horrific story a few years ago from my hometown Manchester, of Reynhard Sinaga, an Indonesian man who lured, sedated, raped, and filmed over 200 straight men, and is believed to be Britain’s most prolific rapist.

We are talking here about an entrenched pattern of violence, where men do awful things to women, and they do awful things to each other and to themselves, and the obvious and important question is: why?

Psychiatrist James Gilligan spent thirty years working with violent offenders inside the US prison system. He found that the primary psychological factor leading these men to cause harm was shame. “If you want to stimulate violence,” he wrote, “the single most effective way to do it is to shame somebody.”

How does shame transmute into violence? It starts as painful self-diminishment, feeling worthless, powerless, “less than a man.” Men who are socialised against vulnerability simply can’t tolerate this, so they lash out with rage to force “respect” via fear. In one prisoner’s words: “Pride. Dignity. Self-esteem... I’ll kill every motherfucker if I have to.”

In 1996, psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett tested Gilligan’s theory at the University of Michigan.2 They brought male students into a lab at the University of Michigan and asked them to walk down a hallway. Halfway along, a stranger bumped into them and muttered one single word:

“Asshole.”

The researchers were measuring what happened inside these men’s bodies. And they discovered that, among men who had grown up in the northern United States, the insult barely registered. Cortisol and testosterone levels stayed stable. They brushed it off and carried on. But among men raised in the American South, what the researchers called a “culture of honour,” where a man’s reputation is something to be defended, the response was entirely different. Cortisol levels spiked, and testosterone surged. Their bodies read the insult as a threat requiring a physical response, and they completed subsequent tasks with more violent imagery.

The difference between these two groups was not in their XY chromosome, but rather in the story each man had been told about what an insult means, about whether his honour was something fragile that had to be defended, or something stable that could absorb a bump in a hallway.

When I ran a therapeutic school for traumatised teenagers in London, I saw these cultures of honour play out. I remember one boy, I will call him Tariq. His family were refugees from Iraq. I visited their flat in Pimlico many times, and they were always generous and warm, and Tariq himself could be the sweetest boy, with a great sense of humour, playful and often childlike (he was 16 when I first met him). But Tariq’s parents carried the war inside them. Trauma had hollowed out their capacity to be present, to supervise, to provide the kind of consistent male presence that research shows is one of the strongest protective factors against violence. In that vacuum, Tariq found some version of masculine identity in gang culture, where displays of violence were the entry code, the badge of honour.

In one incident at school, Tariq got in a fight with another student, and he had to be restrained. As I and another teacher tried to restrain him, some of the other male students were egging Tariq on, and at one point he managed to free a fist and my colleague ended up with a black eye. Later that evening, I played squash with a friend, and I remember playing with a ferocity and aggression I hadn’t accessed since I was a teenager. I wiped the floor with my friend, and yes, it felt good. I also recognised that somehow Tariq's rage had moved through me, and I had discharged it by humiliating someone else. I had done exactly what the research describes, I’d found an exit, a squash court to discharge my rage. Tariq only had the street.

A year later, after he had left the school, Tariq stabbed a friend to death during a fight over a drug deal. He went to prison, and wrote me some letters. This was a boy I remembered mostly as sweet and funny, and in the letters that is the boy I felt. He thanked me for being there for him, for trying to understand him, and I felt touched that even though we hadn’t spoken for a long time, he still remembered our relationship as something solid and grounding for him. And I have wondered ever since whether we could have done something different.

4.

When these viral stories of male violence hit our feeds, we are not simply passive consumers of news; we are participants in a ritual. The algorithms have turned our legitimate anger into a high-velocity outrage machine.

I do understand the impulse, and anger is for sure a legitimate and often necessary response to violence. I am not arguing against accountability. I am arguing that shame is a remarkably ineffective way to achieve it. I worry that in our rush to condemn, we are fuelling the very physics of violence we claim to hate, driving more boys into darker corners of the internet to restore a sense of honour via the one tool they instinctively reach for: the humiliation of others.

In the Louis Theroux documentary on the manosphere, some of the influencers he meets are predatory in the way they walk the streets, picking up women. And yet, these same influencers make some of their most viral content by pretending to be an underage boy, and meeting a ‘predator’ for some kind of sexual interaction. When they catch the predator, they beat him up, and in one clip they force a man to eat dog food on camera.

The audience seems to love this humiliation porn, and the comments section is, in Louis Theroux’s own words, ‘gladiatorial’, a sense in which the crowd are baiting these people to do ever worse things. It is exactly how it felt when I was restraining Tariq outside the school, with a circle of students baying for blood. And it is the same logic of an episode of Black Mirror, called ‘Common People’, where a dad signs his dying wife up for Rivermind, a subscription-based life-support system that escalates costs, forcing him into a live-cam world where the crowd incite him to do ever more extreme humiliations like drinking urine or pulling teeth for viewers.

In George Orwell’s essay, ‘Shooting An Elephant’, he describes his time in Burma as a colonial police officer, rifle in hand, facing a now-docile elephant that no longer poses any threat. He knows he shouldn’t shoot it. But two thousand Burmese are watching, waiting, expecting the performance of power. And so he bows to the pressure of the crowd, and shoots the elephant. Orwell writes afterwards that he finally understood the hollowness of imperial authority: he was not controlling the crowd, he was its puppet. The man who appears most powerful is often the one most enslaved to the audience’s appetite.

The gladiatorial crowd is not only in the comments section of the manosphere channel. It is also in my feed. It is the outrage-fuelled meme that travels faster than the corrected headline. It is the pile-on after Adolescence, the required viewing in schools - which reminds me a bit of old school puppy training where you grab a puppy by the scruff of its neck and rub its face in its own shit: “See, look what you’ve done, you naughty boy.”

And let's be honest about what Louis Theroux is doing. He presents himself as merely curious, just a regular bloke who genuinely wants to find out about these strange humans. But his genius, and the reason we love his shows, is that he is the most sophisticated humiliator in the room. He doesn’t raise his voice. He just waits, asks the question that exposes the contradiction, and let’s the silence do the work. And we lap it up, feeling the particular pleasure of seeing a man who deserves it squirm.

We are in the arena, screaming with blood-lust: ‘finish him!’

5.

And, we have been here before.

Four thousand years ago, in the fertile heartland of civilisation, between the Tigris and Euphrates, Sumerian scribes etched the Epic of Gilgamesh onto clay tablets. It’s not easy to write cuneiform on a clay tablet, and they didn’t even have ChatGPT to spin the yarn, so we can assume something about this story mattered deeply to these people.

The Epic of Gilgamesh begins with a man so powerful and unregulated that his own people cry out to the gods for help. Gilgamesh is a force of nature: two-thirds god, all muscle and unchecked lust, raping his subjects’ brides and crushing his people under tyrannical whims. If he lived today, we might find him on Tik Tok.

The gods respond, neither by destroying him, nor by shaming him, but by creating a counterpart. Enkidu. A wild man covered in hair, raised among animals, living at the edges of civilisation. Enkidu eats grass in the hills with the gazelles and lurks with wild beasts at the water-holes. He has never known shame.

Enkidu meets a temple priestess called Shamhat, who has been sent to civilise him through sacred sexuality. Shamhat seduces him for six days straight, and through this sexual encounter with a powerful woman, Enkidu is transformed. He tries rejoining the wild animals, but they flee from him in fear. He is not the same, not fully human, and no longer wild.

And so, this ancient hero heads off to the city of Uruk to fight Gilgamesh. They wrestle, “snorting like bulls locked together,” until eventually Gilgamesh throws Enkidu to the ground, at which point the plot twists.

Instead of reaching for a weapon or nursing a grudge, Enkidu looks up at the man who just humiliated him and says: “There is not another like you in the world.” It is a recognition of the other man’s goodness that does not diminish his own. Instead of more violence, the two men embrace each other, weep, and become brothers. Their raw power is suddenly channeled into heroic quests; Gilgamesh softens from an abuser to a just ruler, while Enkidu gains purpose beyond instinct. Their aggression is no longer turned against their people, or themselves, but towards a collective sense of adventure, meaning, and purpose.

This is the moment four thousand years of masculinity has struggled to replicate. That one sentence: “There is not another like you” is the ‘physics’ of brotherhood. It is not the same type of honour code that feels threatened by the word ‘asshole.’ This honouring does not come from a place of submission; it comes from an ability to alchemise an energy that could so easily have become humiliation into a shared dignity.

The Buddha had a word for this: hiri - the inner respect that says, I know my worth, so I can see yours. This capacity is the only thing that can transmute humiliation’s poison into brotherly love.

When I shift the gaze to our world, I see plenty of Gilgameshes, tyrants and shadow kings asserting their power over others. I see boys and men turning that same vital force inward, until it collapses in on itself in a quiet, lethal despair. I see others, like Tariq, finding belonging in the only places where their wild edge is welcome, even if it leads to extreme violence and a prison cell.

And I see a much larger group of men who feel domesticated. These are men who have internalised the label of ‘toxic’ so thoroughly that they have become ghosts of themselves, moving through the world beneath a veil of virtue because they no longer know who they are supposed to be once the ‘wild’ is gone.

But in each of them, I also see the latent capacity for that Enkidu-moment. Beneath the shame and the performance, there is still the possibility of looking up from the dirt, recognising our own worth, and seeing a brother instead of an enemy. The ‘wild innocence’ hasn’t disappeared; it is simply waiting for a different kind of honour to call it home.

6.

I have a strange feeling in writing about men and masculinity right now. This an age when our understanding of sex and gender is being questioned and renegotiated, and here I am talking about a manhood coherent enough to have its own specific wounds, threats, and possibilities.

But the men I know, the men I have sat with in schools, in therapy sessions, in workshops, these men in all their complexity do share something. And, I am not sure how to distill this common thread into words. Toxic is not the right container for my grief, because toxic is a totalising verdict that heaps more shame onto men already drowning in it. Maybe the common thread is a particular kind of loneliness, maybe its a shared fear reaching back through the ages about a specific darkness that lurks in our hearts, and maybe its a longing for a light needed to balance that darkness, a light that can feel difficult to find.

And I’m also aware that in this attempt to understand what lies at the root of male violence, I risk being told to shove my sympathy in it’s rightful place in the dictionary. That you might think I’m trying to get sympathy for me or for mankind, this makes me feel a bit sick on my stomach, a bit ashamed. (Oh look, he’s doing it again.)

But let me be clear. Nothing in this piece is an argument for looking away from the harm men cause. Women deserve better than a cultural conversation that gets distracted by male fragility. What I am trying to show is that those two things are not in competition. The same conditions that give male shame somewhere safe to go are the conditions that can make women safer.

Of all the boys I’ve worked with that had tendencies to violence, there was only one I felt was truly unreachable. The rest, no matter however damaged or dangerous, had a softness underneath, a vulnerability you could access, but only through something specific: a consistent, strong, grounded masculine presence. Most of those boys did not go on to be violent, and some I am still in touch with today. Every one of those young men was born innocent. The journey from innocent boy to violent man is not inevitable. Layers or masks are placed over that innocence; trauma, loneliness, a father who was present but violent, a father in prison, a depressed, alcoholic mother.

Enkidu represents the wild, innocent version of masculinity, the version untainted by the human world. And in the myth, when Enkidu finally dies, Gilgamesh’s heart breaks open. He wanders in the wilderness until he finds a woman making wine by the sea. He feels safe enough to share a secret with this tavern-keeper, something that has been hard for men to admit since the dawn of civilisation:

“Because of my brother I am afraid of death.

Because of my brother I stray through the wilderness and cannot rest.”

That is what I am wishing for. More tavern keepers, more people and spaces where men can finally rest, drop the performance, say three magic words - I am afraid - and be received.

I am not asking for sympathy for the men who cause harm. I am asking for sympathy for the boy who was born innocent, the boy who survived by making himself hard on the outside, the boy who learned that his honour was something fragile that had to be defended at all costs, because he had never been offered another type of honour, an honour rooted in a sense of innate goodness. The boy who turned into a darker, more dangerous version of himself to cover up his fear, because that was the only shape the world seemed to have room for.

I want to find a sympathy that sits somewhere between shame and a dictionary large enough to contain the whole spectrum of being a man.

We can continue to stand in the gladiatorial crowd, screaming for blood and calling it justice. Or, we can choose to be the tavern keepers. We can be an innocent, wild light willing to meet the darkness in another man's heart, to wrestle with it, and to transform it into something more beautiful. Because a man who knows his own worth, a man who is in contact with his wild innocence, has no need for a victim.

I think of my friend Dan, hard on the outside, soft on the inside. He was one of very few male friends in my life who said, repeatedly, to me: “I am proud of you.”

I wish I had helped him to feel safe enough to say those three words: “I am afraid”.

• A huge rise in diagnoses like ADHD and autism

• Parents feeling overwhelmed with information, and pulled in different directions

• And a growing sense of confusion about what to actually do

Some parents don’t want a diagnosis and feel unsure what the alternative is.

Others receive one, and feel relief… for a while.

But then the same question returns:

“What now?”

Here’s some highlights from our conversation:

• There’s more awareness than ever, and more overwhelm than ever.
  Parents are navigating a constant stream of advice, opinions, and identities. It’s very noisy in the space of parenting generally, and specifically parenting a sensitive or neurodivergent child.

• Diagnosis can bring relief…but rarely gives a roadmap.
  It can name the struggle, but it doesn’t always show you how to support your child day-to-day.

• We’re raising children in a world that’s changing faster than the systems around them.
  Children are adapting to a rapidly evolving culture. Schools, however well-intentioned, simply can’t keep up.

• The search for labels is also a search for belonging.
  When you find a framework, you often find a community. And that matters more than we admit.

• Sensitivity is not a problem, but it often gets treated as one.
  None of the children we see are broken; they’re responsive, perceptive, and struggling in environments that don’t always meet them well.

We’re not here to say the system is broken. And we’re not here to say labels are the enemy. Because sometimes they help, and sometimes they open doors.

But they don’t always tell you how to raise this child…in this life…with the reality you’re actually living.

If this is something you’re navigating, you can watch the full conversation above. If you know someone this might help, please forward to them.

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What became really clear as we spoke is that parents don’t need more information.

They need a space to think, reflect, and make sense of their child, without feeling like they’re getting it wrong.

So we’re exploring creating a small group for parents who are asking:

• How do I support my child without reducing them to a label?

• What actually helps in day-to-day life?

• How do I trust my own judgement again?

If that’s you, you can take the first step by joining one of our upcoming Resonant Parenting Labs here. We are offering these on Tuesday 5th May 12:30pm-2pm and Monday 11th May 8pm-9:30pm BST.

A little note:
This is the beginning of a new thread I’ll be exploring from time to time, looking at how we support children beyond labels. I will still be writing the broader articles about the intersection of mind and culture and how we navigate this crazy world with a sense of wisdom.

So if Beyond Labels is not for you, you can always just ignore these particular emails, or unsubscribe, but I will be sad to see you go.

The theme is ‘Beyond Labels’. This is for parents, therapists, and teachers supporting sensitive or neurodivergent children.

We'll be talking about what diagnosis gets right, what it misses, and what parents actually need. Which, in our experience, isn't more strategies. It's somewhere to breathe.

This is the link to join, and there will be space for you to bring your questions and confusions. And don’t worry if you can’t make it, the recording will be shared after the call.

With Love

Louis and Genevieve.

And then I found these words carved into a weathered bench.

Its a prayer, a longing that this divine vision available at the summit can somehow stay in our hearts when we come back down.

This is a problem as old as time. Moses comes down the mountain and finds people worshipping a golden calf. The disciples want to build shelters on the Mount of Transfiguration, and Jesus says no, we're going back down. The descent is where it gets complicated.

Alfred Wainwright, who mapped every fell in the Lake District, wrote that people climb searching for something they can’t quite name, something to do with “man’s subconscious search for beauty, growing keener as so much in the world grows uglier.”

Wainwright died in 1991, long before Twitter, wellness apps and ayahuasca retreats in Essex, long before the algorithm decided for us what beauty meant. It has always been hard to come back down the mountain and hold onto that feeling. Now, on the descent, we have a million threads pulling our hearts away from it.

Whatever type of peak experience it is, I am regularly disappointed by how quickly the feeling fades. I bet you can relate to having a feeling - of peace, love, joy, freedom - that you desperately want to hold onto. It is so frustrating when it slips through our fingers, again, and again.

But, I do find some solace in the Sufi tradition. The Sufis built an entire spiritual tradition around longing for the divine rather than trying to possess it. This is Hazarat Inayat Khan, Indian Sufi Master and the first to introduce Sufism to the Western world:

“I went through the thick forests of perpetual desire, I crossed the running rivers of longing.

I passed through the deserts of silent suffering, I climbed the steep hills of continual strife.

Feeling ever some presence in the air, I asked, “Are you there, my love?”

And a voice came to my ears, saying, “No, still further am I”

If we turn our attention away from all the noise and tune into the longing in our hearts, this is the place where, perhaps, we can finally be free.

For those wanting more personal support, I offer one-on-one therapeutic coaching sessions and occasionally lead small group intensives for parents, Wounded Healers and Wounded Leaders, those carrying deep responsibility while navigating their own hidden wounds.

Learn more at www.louisweinstock.com.

And a reminder that this April 23rd, at 1pm, I will be hosting a Substack Live with my colleague a brilliant and wise psychologist Dr Genevieve Von Lob. The theme of the Live is “Beyond Labels”, and its for parents and therapists who are looking for a more practical, human way of understanding the children we care for, one that goes beyond labels. You can download the invite to your calendar here.