The world is a shitshow right now. Our family needs multiple go bags if god forbid something happens.

This thought, unprovoked and uninvited, floats into my awareness not even a minute after settling onto my meditation cushion.

Back to the breath.

Daniel. Shit. I still haven’t responded to his text from two days ago. I have to get back to him today.

I smile. Back to the breath.

What’s the weather in North Carolina next week? I need to start packing. I hope it’s warm.

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

I wonder what Holly is going to tell me when we hang on Sunday. I know I pissed her off last month. What am I going to say when…

Thinking. Planning. There it is again.

This back and forth persisted for an hour. Stretches of breath, stillness and quiet, but then, out of nowhere, the future creeps back in. Again. And again. By the time I opened my eyes I’d mentally rescheduled two clients, responded to a text, rehearsed a difficult conversation, planned for a catastrophe that hasn’t happened, and checked the forecast in Stone Ridge, New York City, and Asheville.

Leaning over and blowing out the candle in the mantle in front of me, I realized I’d just spent an hour in relationship with a bunch of things that don’t exist.

—

I rise from my cushion and turn around when Florence, my three year old, appears at the base of the stairs. One look and I know. She is sick. Oh shit.

She lumbers to the couch and curls up like a tired cat. Belly down, cheek pressed into the cushion, blanket pulled up. Her favorite stuffie clutched to her chest, thumb in her mouth, switching to the other, back again.

I glance down at her, say to myself poor thing, and then my mind automatically kicks into planning mode.

I scramble to the dining room table, reach for my phone, pull up my calendar, and shout for Eliza in the kitchen.

I spiral. My day is packed. How the hell am I going to pull this off? What does the rest of this week look like? Which clients can be shifted? What does Eliza’s schedule look like?

I am now triaging a day that has barely started, already canceling meetings in my head, solving for variables based on incomplete information, while Florence lies on the couch needing exactly one thing: her father to be with her.

After ten minutes of coordination with Eliza, I walk back into the living room and gently sit beside Florence, trying not to disturb her. I put my hand on her head, look down, and take her in—her droopy sick eyes, the slow blink, the sound of her thumb sucking, the hopelessness of a child who just feels awful.

When I finally arrive, my thoughts dissolve. My body softens. It is just her and me, together in this moment.

I am flooded with love, connection, the urge to comfort this tiny sick human. And underneath it, something rises from the depths of my stomach, heavy and familiar. Guilt. For the first twenty minutes of her sick day, while she lay there needing her dad, I had been somewhere else entirely, racing ahead, solving for a future that hadn’t arrived yet.

It was the same pattern I experienced on the cushion, this unconscious pull to dwell on what might come, to solve for the future. And I started seeing it everywhere. In the kitchen making breakfast. Chasing the girls in the backyard after school. Running on the trail. Behind the wheel. At my desk between sessions. Even sitting across from a client, supposed to be fully present, worrying about where I needed to be next or what I had to fix.

I could no longer unsee this pattern, not just in myself but in my wife, my family, my friends, and my clients. We are always one disruption or thought away from leaving what’s actually here.

—

We’ve been scanning the future since before we had language for it. This is one of the great features of human consciousness. Our brains can simulate what hasn’t happened yet: anticipating threats, solving problems before they arrive, and planning for what’s ahead. When something disrupts the plan, the emotional brain fires before the thinking mind can catch up: fix it, solve it, get ahead of it, make it stop.

The question isn’t whether the reflex is useful. Sometimes it is. The question is whether it takes over before we’ve even looked at what’s actually in front of us.

The future feels controllable because it’s still malleable: you can envision it, shape it, adjust it, prepare for it. The present just is. You can only meet it exactly as it’s unfolding, and that’s uncomfortable for most of us. Planning is how we escape the present. When what’s in front of us feels uncertain or just too much, we withdraw and go somewhere we feel more in control.

The future becomes a refuge from uncertainty and discomfort. And when something unexpected happens, the reflex is immediate: solve it now, even when now isn’t necessary.

This is a familiar and particular reflex: to respond, protect, and solve the instant something unexpected disrupts the plan. It’s the nervous system responding to a perceived threat before the present moment has even been fully assessed and met.

In those first moments with Florence, I didn’t know how sick she was or what the day would require. But before I’d even looked at her—really looked at her—I was already somewhere else. Pacing between the kitchen and living room, eyes glued to my phone, mentally inventorying every client. When did we last meet? What are they facing? Which sessions can move? I was relaying options to Eliza as she checked her calendar and relayed back her availability.

Underneath all of it was a fear I couldn’t quite name in the moment: I couldn’t let my clients down. What would they think if I canceled? Would they still trust me? Would they see me as unreliable? So I was deep in relationship with imagined versions of each of them, their potential disappointment and possible frustration, while my daughter lay on the couch, right in front of me.

Whether I sorted this out at 7am or 8:30am, it wouldn’t have mattered. The clients could wait a few hours. Florence couldn’t. But that’s the nature of deep conditioning—by the time the mind catches up, the body is already ten steps ahead.

Sometimes we plan to escape discomfort. But sometimes, like that morning, we plan because we think we have to when in fact, we don’t.

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa had a word for this—shenpa. The urge to scratch. We reach for the future the same way we reach for anything: to avoid the raw, unmediated experience of what’s right here. Planning feels productive and relieving. Being here feels exposed.

Does it always have to be now? Most of the time, no. If it’s not now, something else is. And that morning, it was caring for Florence.

—

Back at the dining room table that morning, checking my calendar and mentally rescheduling clients while Florence lay on the couch, I wasn’t just physically and emotionally checked out. I was somewhere else entirely, fully absorbed in a projection of a day that hadn’t happened yet. Florence was right there and I was relating to a ghost.

When I’m in an unconscious relationship with the future, there’s often a particular quality I can feel in my body: tightness, contraction, collapsing, grasping. Driven by the need to control what hasn’t happened yet and avoid the discomfort in the moment. It crowds out everything else. The present vanishes. We’re consumed by a simulation our minds have constructed.

This is what the future actually is when we live there compulsively. It’s not a place, but a relationship with a figment of our imagination: a fear, a story we’re telling ourselves about tomorrow, next week, or next year might require. And like any relationship, it consumes our attention, devours our emotional bandwidth, and influences how we move through our days.

Real relationship can only happen in the present because that’s where everything actually is. Florence’s sick eyes, her slow blink, the particular way she switches thumbs. None of that exists next Tuesday. Neither does the temperature of the room, the weight of the blanket, the sound of the house settling in the morning quiet. It’s all right here, right now, asking to be met.

When we’re in relationship with the present, we can come into contact with so much more than we realize: the people we love, the texture of our clothes, the beating of our own heart, the way light comes through the window at dawn, the look from our partner when we greet them in the morning. All of it alive. All of it available. All of it only here. This is life as relationship.

The future isn’t just where we escape to. It’s what pulls us away from being in relationship with what’s actually here.

—

One morning this week, as I was leaving the gym, I received a frantic 5 minute audio message from a client in crisis. On the drive home, I began thinking of their situation, rehearsing my response, and mentally creating space for them in my calendar.

I parked, stepped out of the car, and walked into…

The fullness of spring. Seventy degrees. Blue sky, radiant sun. The warmth on my face. Robins and blue jays calling from the birch and maple trees ahead, their branches just beginning to bud. The sound of the creek running alongside the building. The smell of the magnolias. Cars whooshing past on the road behind me.

The strange thing is, this moment felt familiar but forgotten. Not this particular parking lot. I’m there most days. But this openness. This groundedness. This sense of being back in my body. This field of relationship available in every direction—the sun, the air, the birds, the ground under my feet, the whole world showing up for contact at once.

Of course. It was always here. It always is.

This is the practice of returning. Over and over, for the rest of your life.

I’m still learning this. Some mornings the cushion is full of go bags and weather forecasts and conversations that haven’t happened yet. Some days I don’t return until I’m halfway through dinner. But I’m catching it sooner and seeing it more clearly. And every time I come back, there it is. That familiar openness. That field. That intimacy. That sense of arriving somewhere I somehow already knew.

And what’s here, when I arrive, is never nothing. It’s everything that actually matters—and it’s only available now. Florence on the couch, asking to be comforted. The client who needs my presence, not just the slot on my calendar. Eliza’s face in the morning when I greet her after a hard night. The creek I’ve walked past a hundred times without hearing.

When the future pulls us away, it takes the fullness of what is right in front of us.

And when I catch myself leaving, there’s one question that brings me back: does this really need my attention right now? Most of the time, no. And that question, asked honestly, is often enough.

Saturday. Late morning.

I step off the porch and it hits me immediately. Thawed earth and wet bark, the smell of life waking up. I can still see the vapor of each breath, but the sun is warming the earth. A woodpecker is working somewhere in the canopy. Newly hatched peepers chirping from the pond fifty yards away, just beyond the property line. I’m surrounded by a chorus of birdsong I haven’t heard since fall.

I walk over to my apple trees—the ones I planted years ago, neglected, and finally showed up for last fall. I take them in, up close, for the first time in months.

This winter buried the trees under two feet of snow and ice. I would glance at them from the window during storms and worry.

I’m impressed. The beds look well taken care of, immaculate. No debris. The mulch I laid in November was compacted from the weight of the harsh winter, but these trees were unscathed—they survived.

I get to work, beginning with the smaller Jonathan. I snip the zip ties one by one with my pruning shears, then open the cages, trying not to snag my flannel on the stiff, biting wire. I inspect the young, delicate tree from the trunk up, looking for damage and competing leaders, two branches reaching for the same light, dividing the tree’s energy.

I see one, knowing I have to remove a large branch to support its growth this season. I position the loppers at the base, squeeze the handles, and feel the resistance before the wood gives way with a soft crack. The branch drops. My heart sinks for a moment, not yet trusting my pruning skills and instincts. I pause, then continue with my pruning shears, making a few smaller cuts with slightly more confidence and grace. I move to the Honeycrisp and do the same.

Standing here in the first moments of spring, I feel gratitude not just for the trees, the sun, and the life teeming around me, but also the winter that we’re emerging from. This one was different.

—

Winter was relentless this year in Upstate New York. Sub-zero temperatures for days on end. Several feet of snow on the ground refused to melt for months. Power outages. School delays and cancellations.

In prior years, I would have resisted the cold, complained to my wife every day, and just counted the days and weeks for it to end. But this year, rather than treat it like an unwelcome guest, I decided to lean into it, just as I had with these apple trees last fall.

I wondered. What is winter asking of me? What does my body need in its grips? How do I want to relate to it?

I trusted what I heard. Accept. Rest. Simplify. Go inward. Focus on home.

For five months, like the apple trees, I went dormant. For the first time, maybe ever, I decided to hibernate, focusing on my spiritual practice, my health, my family, and my coaching clients. The rest had to be pruned back—this Substack, vibe coding, courses, podcasts, random books, social media, networking. I just had no energy or desire for anything that asked me to plow ahead and get anything extra done.

Every morning at 5:30 my alarm pulled me out of a dream state. Dark. Cold. Quiet. I’d gently shut the bedroom door, turn up the heat, and tiptoe down the hallway and stairs, careful not to wake my wife and kids.

In the dark I’d take my cushion, fumble for a lighter, and find the candle, waiting for me in the fireplace. The room would shift from blackness to a gentle yellow glow. I’d sit for an hour, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter depending on when the kids lumbered downstairs calling for me.

It was just me, my body, and whatever the mind wanted to serve up. I’d gaze into the flame and somehow the rhythm of my breath would sync with its dance. That daily ritual set the tone for everything that followed. I was coming into deeper relationship with myself.

And that quality of attention, awareness, and relationality began to spill into everything else.

I put the kids to bed without resentment. I went to bed early with little FOMO. I had more intimacy with my wife than we’ve had in years. I cooked giant pots of soups and stews to nourish my family. I didn’t work nights and weekends. I put my phone away, sometimes. No travel. No chasing new ideas. I even paused seeing coaches, going to therapy, doing plant medicine, and breathwork. All of it.

And in the stillness of winter, I began to see and feel it—I was always in relationship with something. The cold that jolted my bones when I ran outside to grab the mail without a jacket. The blisters on my hands from shoveling. The candle on my mantle slowly becoming a blob of wax. The strange silence that settles right after a snowfall. The stray birds emerging from the trees. The perplexing art installations when I escaped to DIA Beacon. The chest cold that had me sidelined for a week. My wife. My girls. My clients. Everything.

—

As the days got longer and the stillness deepened, something surfaced that reframed the path that I’ve been on over the last decade.

I had believed these were threads in a larger reinvention story—meditation, sobriety, leaving venture capital, coaching, Downshift. I saw it as a decade of identities shedding and being reborn. VC to coach. Addict to sober man. City dweller to outdoorsman. Bachelor to husband. Husband to father. Coach to guide and healer. Atheist to Buddhist.

But this winter, in the stillness and quiet, a new vantage point came into view. Every transition brought me into deeper relationship with myself, my body, those in my life, community, nature, and mortality.

I also saw my work differently. I’ve talked about it as shepherding professionals through transition and transformation, but that’s not quite right anymore. What I’m really doing, what I’ve always been doing, is helping high agency professionals, largely men, cultivate the awareness to come into deeper connection with themselves, their bodies, their families, their work, their lives…and then change based on the quality of relating.

—

And just last weekend, the morning after I pruned my apple trees, a few lines emerged in my journal while the kids were still asleep upstairs:

Life as Relationship. At every level. In every direction. All the way up and all the way down.

I’m still sitting with what this will ask of me. It feels big and daunting. I suspect it’ll take years, if not decades, to fully grasp. I can’t articulate why I’m being pulled in this direction, but I trust it.

I can feel it in how I move through my morning ritual, in how I show up with my daughters, in how I listen to a client, in how I stood in my backyard on Saturday with pruning shears in my hand, in relationship with two young apple trees. I’m still working out what relationship actually means at this level, but I’ve come to see it as continuous interplay, attunement, multiple phenomena merging into one.

What I’m beginning to sense is this: so much of how I’ve moved through life has been separate, self-centered, and transactional. For decades, I used situations and experiences to get somewhere else. I treated relationships with people, with work, and with my own inner life, as a means to an end. There’s grief in that.

Something is shifting, though. I’m starting to experience life as a constant, dynamic web of relationships with thoughts, impulses, sensations, emotions, other people, objects, nature, time, even mortality. Inside and outside, simultaneously. What’s arising internally shapes how I experience the world, and what I experience in the world shapes what arises internally. All of it relational and alive, every moment of every day.

And it’s not just about what I’m in relationship with, but also how I’m relating to what’s in my awareness. Am I present or oblivious? Open or armored? Attracted or averse? That’s where the old patterns loosen their grip, and where I find I have more agency and freedom.

I don’t have this figured out and I’m not writing from the far bank of the river. I just hopped into the choppy and muddy water, still figuring out how to swim.

But this is the thread I’m following now in my work, in my writing, and in how I want to live each day. I can’t not do it. It’s exciting, expansive, and overwhelming too, but I feel like a new season in my life is beginning. And when I step outside, I know it is.

I’m grateful to be here with you, in relationship. If something I wrote stirred something within you, hit reply and say hello.

The TLDR: Happy holidays! I’m excited to share that the eight edition of my Annual Reflection Guide is now live.

The eight-step process is designed to help you look back on where you’ve been, see where you are now, and step into 2026 with more clarity. This year’s edition features new exercises, guided meditations, a future self visualization, AI prompts, and a curated playlist to accompany you on the journey.

It’s free. My holiday gift to you.

Get the guide

A decade ago, just after I got sober, I began an annual practice of reviewing my life and reflecting on my year. It started as a creative impulse. I had no grand vision or plan. All I had was a journal and a few hours to look back and set intentions for the new year.

The following holiday season, some friends asked if I would share my process with them. At the time it wasn’t exactly a process, but they inspired me to codify it into a structured framework. A few years later, I published a Medium post with the detailed process, and then in 2020 I created my first interactive guide in Notion.

Since then, the various editions have been downloaded over 50,000 times in more than 80 countries. Every year I hear from people who say it shifted something for them. Quit a job. Left a relationship. Started a company. Took a sabbatical. Changed their sense of self. That’s why I keep refining it.

The guide is better than ever (in my opinion, but you tell me), with one big change I want to point out. I’ve decided to no longer call it The Ultimate Annual Review. It’s now the Annual Reflection. A review asks what worked and what didn’t. It judges and evaluates. Whereas a reflection creates space to notice what actually transpired and what’s here now. I want this to feel spacious and expansive, not like a performance evaluation of your life.

My aim has always been to create a space for you to connect with yourself and life exactly as it is. No performing or judging. Just being with what happened, what’s here, and what’s emerging.

Here’s the process:

1. Map your memories and milestones

2. Capture lessons and learnings

3. Assess where you stand across key life dimensions

4. Conduct your annual edit

5. Visualize your future self

6. Identify your core values

7. Set intentions and quarterly goals

8. Write a letter to your future self

Each step builds on the last, designed to move you from reflection to intention to action.

This Year’s Theme

Each year I choose a theme for the guide, a lens to look through while reflecting. This year it’s relationality—the idea that everything is connected and exists in relationship.

For most of my life, I moved through the world as if I was separate from it. My ego led me to believe I was an individual actor making choices, controlling outcomes, and getting what I wanted. I treated my life like a project to manage rather than a relationship to tend. I acted this way for nearly four decades, and I still do at times.

Through working with a Zen teacher this year, I’ve come to appreciate that our lives are entirely made up of relationships. With yourself. With others. With your environment. With the seasons. With time itself. We’re not as separate as we think. We change moment to moment based on what we’re in relationship with.

Enter into a difficult conversation and your chest tightens. Walk into a room full of laughter and your mood lifts. Step outside after work and your body softens. Sit with one question you’ve been avoiding and suddenly see a way forward. You’re always in relationship with something, whether you realize it or not. This orientation is reshaping how I experience life.

My invitation is to look at your life through the lens of relationality as you move through the reflection. What happens when you pay attention to what’s here, in your environment and inside you? What do you notice? Thoughts. Sensations. Emotions. Memories. What shifts?

This Reflection Guide is an opportunity to come into deeper relationship with yourself. With who you’ve been, who you are now, and who you’re becoming.

What’s New This Year

Every year I refine the guide based on the feedback I receive and what I’m learning from my coaching clients.

Here’s what’s new:

Two formats. The guide is now available in both Notion and Google Docs. In the past I only offered Notion, but there was a lot of demand for Google Docs last year, so I created one. Notion has the full experience with audio and interactive features. Google Docs is streamlined for those who prefer it.

AI prompts. I added AI prompts to support the process. There’s a voice-to-text prompt if you prefer to talk through your answers rather than type them. And at the end of each step, there’s also a stage-specific prompt to surface insights you might have missed, new questions to consider, and exercises to go deeper.

Meditations & Visualization. Each step opens with a “Pause for Presence” recorded by me to help you drop in and settle your nervous system before beginning. The guide also features a 20-minute visualization to help you meet your future self at the end of 2026.

Goals are back. Last year the theme was enoughness, so it deliberately had no goals. Many of you asked me to bring them back. And over this year, I’ve come to recognize that both being and doing are essential. So I’ve added a simple quarterly goals framework. I now see goals as something you’re in relationship with that evolves as the year unfolds.

An expanded Spotify playlist. Every time I sit down to journal and write, music is playing. The right song can unlock a memory, shift your mood, or help you stay with a difficult question a little longer. The Downshift playlist is seven hours of neoclassical, ambient, and shamanic tracks to accompany your reflection. Get it here.

I hope this reflection becomes a living record of your year. Something you return to over time to see the arc of your life, the patterns and the growth, and the moments that shaped you.

Take your time with it. Trust what emerges.

If any questions or feedback comes up along the way, or you want to share what surfaced, I’d love to hear from you. Reach out at s@schlaf.co.

Wishing you a happy and healthy holiday season.

Get the guide

Our annual pilgrimage across the Hudson River to Rose Hill Farm was underway. Kids in a wagon, apple cider donuts in their bellies, smiles on their faces, and their bags ready for a giant haul. This early fall afternoon was perfection.

We walked between towering rows of honeycrisp trees, branches sagging under the weight of apples. Fruit scattered everywhere on the ground—some fresh from the night before, others already soft and brown. I stepped around what I could, crushed the rest.

I looked at my wife. “I can’t wait until the honeycrisp in our backyard is producing like these bad boys.”

Eliza laughed. “Are you kidding me? We have a long way to go. Our trees are pathetic.”

I knew she wasn’t being mean, just telling the truth. She was right—the trees were struggling.

I didn’t say anything. I just put my head down and kept squashing rotten apples that got in my way. But I couldn’t stop seeing it—the chasm between these trees and the stagnant ones in our backyard.

—

Later that day, I was back home on the deck grilling. I looked out toward my kids playing in the backyard, then left toward the side of the yard where our apple trees live.

Bare branches. Thin trunks. The beds completely overgrown with weeds. I hadn’t touched them in well over a year. Most days I just walked past, never really seeing them.

Four years. Four years in the ground and this is where we are. Barely alive.

I bought them on a whim, put them in the ground, built cages around them, and thought that would be enough. It wasn’t.

Shame. Embarrassment. My neglect was staring me in the face.

—

A few weeks later, my daughter’s preschool took a field trip to Wrightman Fruit Farm just up the road. It was foggy, damp after an early morning rain. One of the first days that felt like fall was settling in.

The farm has been in the family since 1986. The son now runs it with his father, both of them knowing every tree on the property. I spotted Junior by the entrance—mid-30s, work boots, faded jeans, hands that had spent decades in soil. I approached him while my daughter was painting a pumpkin.

“Hey, got a second?”

“Sure thing,” he said walking towards me with a welcoming smile. “How can I help?”

“I have these apple trees—a few Honeycrisp and Jonathans. They’ve been in the ground for more than four years and they’re really struggling. I haven’t done much other than an occasional spring cleanup. Do you have any tips?”

He nodded, not surprised. “You gotta start caring for them.”

Like Eliza, he wasn’t being harsh. Just real.

“Get your soil tested. You need to know the pH levels, whether you need lime, nitrogen, or other minerals. You’ll need to prune. And there’s more. Spring feeding, pest management, and mulching at the right time. You can learn about this on YouTube.”

“Okay. When do I need to do all this?”

“Reset the beds by Halloween. Don’t wait till the ground freezes. Prune in February. The rest, you’ll learn as you go.” He said it without any effort, like he’d walked others through this a thousand times.

I stood there taking it in and mentally repeating to myself. Resetting the beds. Soil testing. pH levels. Lime. Nitrogen. Pruning schedules. Halloween deadline. Shit, this is getting complex.

I was clueless. I didn’t know any of this.

“Thanks, man. Really appreciate it.”

He nodded. “Of course. Good luck with them.”

I turned around to find my daughter sampling her fifth apple of the day. I took out my phone, opened my task list, and wrote: “Apple Trees – start caring for them.”

—

Last weekend, just one day after Halloween, I got to work.

I stepped into my backyard to survey the beds. I could see my breath in the early morning freeze. Winter is coming. Perfect timing.

I gathered all of my equipment—shovel, rake, scissors, wheelbarrow, and gloves.

I pulled off the cages first. Cut the zip ties, and they came apart easily. The wooden stakes I’d driven into the ground four years ago were barely holding. They’d all rotted at the base. I removed them and set them aside.

Then I started clearing.

First, the weeds. Dense, tangled, everywhere—inside the beds, around the beds, choking the base of each tree. I pulled them by hand, roots and all.

My daughters were playing nearby, running through the yard with their hula hoops. Every few minutes one of them would come over. “Daddy, can I help?” I’d hand her a small pile of weeds to carry to the compost.

I grabbed the wheelbarrow and shovel and began scooping out the decomposed mulch—four, maybe five inches of it, mixed with leaves, weeds, and rocks. The smell of earth and decay, rich and damp.

Trip after trip to the back of the woods where I was dumping it. I lost count of how many loads. What surprised me was how much I had to clear just to expose the soil. The beds had been completely buried under years of neglect.

An hour in, I realized this wasn’t going to be a quick job. This was going to take four to five hours over several days.

Once the beds were bare, I could see how much I’d neglected. Bare soil, finally visible. The cages weren’t just weak—they were useless. The whole system needed to be rebuilt.

I drove to the hardware store and bought metal T-stakes. Six feet tall, galvanized steel, the kind that won’t rot. Back home, I set up my ladder and started driving them into the ground with a post driver.

Each stake took real force—lifting the driver overhead, slamming it down, feeling the impact travel up through my arms and into my shoulders. The sound of metal hitting metal, then the duller thud as the stake sank into earth. Hit rocks more than once. Had to pull stakes out, reposition, start over.

My youngest brought me water. “Are you almost done, Dada?”

“Yeah, love. I’ll be done in an hour.”

By Saturday afternoon, my hands were blistered, covered in dirt, fingernails black. The muscles in my shoulders burned. But I kept going.

Sunday morning, I woke up sore. My back, my arms, my legs. I could feel exactly where I’d been working.

I went back outside to finish. The air was cool again, but the sun was out. I could hear the birds also getting ready for the winter. I installed trunk guards around each tree—wrapping them carefully around the thin trunks, securing them to protect against rodents. I rebuilt the cages with new zip ties, pulling them tight. Added three fresh inches of mulch to each bed, the smell of fresh wood chips mixing with the cold air.

One wheelbarrow at a time. One stake at a time. One tree at a time. No rushing. The sound of the post driver. The resistance of the earth. The texture of bark under my hands as I fitted the guards. The raw smell of broken ground. My breath visible in the cold.

Sunday evening, after the last bed was finished, I called my wife over to the living room window. I put my arm around her.

“Look at those beds,” I said.

Now, they looked professional. Clean. Cared for. Like the ones at Wrightman Farm. The trees are ready for winter.

She smiled.

—

I don’t know if these trees will ever bear fruit. That’s years away, if it happens at all.

But I’m getting to know them as they are right now.

For four years, I’d walked past them without really seeing them. I planted them, built cages, and thought wanting them was enough. It wasn’t. Wanting something and being in relationship with it are completely different things.

Being in relationship with something is not passive. It’s learning what it needs and when it needs it. It’s showing up consistently, through the seasons that ask more of you and through the moments when nothing seems to be happening. Real relationship requires attuning to signals you might have missed before and noticing what’s struggling, what’s dormant, and what’s ready. You meet it as it actually is, not as you wish it would be.

For me, that has meant soil tests and reports. New stakes driven deep into rocky ground. Trunk guards against predators. Mulch and lime spread in November. Pruning in the winter. Nitrogen in the early spring. Checking in every season, not when it’s convenient, but when they actually need it.

The previous version of me cut corners—used cheap materials, did the minimum, and called it done. But when you’re actually in relationship with something, that’s not an option. Those rotting wooden stakes I pulled out of the ground? I replaced them with steel stakes that won’t rot. I took the time to understand what they actually needed, and finished the job properly. I cared.

My world expanded once I started paying attention. The land. The weather. The seasons. The birds preparing for winter alongside me. The chemistry of the soil. The predators I need to protect against. I entered into relationship with something beyond myself, and everything else came into focus.

I expanded too. I stepped into the weekend not knowing what I was doing. Now I’m the guy who knows what the trees need before winter, who stays up late learning about pruning schedules, who is beginning to understand soil chemistry and seasonal rhythms. That version of me didn’t exist four years ago.

When we tend something long enough, we transform in unexpected ways.

We all have our version of these apple trees. We’re surrounded by things asking to be tended. A creative practice you walked away from. An old friendship that’s been drifting. Your body that you’ve stopped listening to. The finances you keep avoiding. A skill you wanted to learn. The land around your home. A project you started with energy. A dream you’ve been sitting on. A commitment you haven’t kept.

That original impulse—the one that drew you to it in the first place—came from somewhere intelligent. It wasn’t random. A part of you recognized something worth your attention. Something that could grow if you tended it.

What in your life is calling for your attention? What is asking you to come into relationship with it?

Downtown Phoenix. The air was cold and damp from a late afternoon shower, the atmosphere was electric. A group of us—lifelong friends from Boston—shuffled into a soaked parking lot turned concert venue to catch The Roots play a sold-out show.

We’d been drinking and getting high all day, and everything was a bit hazy. It was Super Bowl weekend, and I was prepared to rally into an evening of parties and shenanigans with my closest buddies.

The show was underway. Not even fifty yards from the stage, I had a clear view of Black Thought gripping the mic, Questlove behind the drums, the whole band locked in. White and yellow lights cut through the cold air and fog.

Office buildings rose on all sides, trapping the bass and drums in a canyon of concrete and glass. I couldn’t make out the songs—everything was fuzzy, just vibrations I could feel through my chest, my legs, and the ground beneath me. The crowd moved as one body to the beats. Every few steps I hit a puddle, cold water seeping into my Jordans.

The Roots tonight. Patriots in the big game tomorrow. With my best friends. Life can’t get any better.

We danced. Talked shit. Laughed. Drank. Just guys being guys on Super Bowl weekend.

At some point, I grabbed another Bud Light. A stranger I’d been chatting with handed me a fat joint. I felt the crispy paper between my fingers, blew on it to make sure it was fired up, and brought it to my lips. The taste of sativa filled my mouth as I took a long, deep inhale. Warm smoke filled my lungs. My shoulders dropped, legs softened. Without hesitation, I took one more pull and passed it to my best friend Zac who’d been waiting.

Within seconds, heat flooded my body. Then tingling. Then vertigo.

The buildings began to shift. My vision tunneled. The music warped and slowed. Everything went blurry. My legs turned to putty.

I turned to Zac. “I’m going down.”

I lunged for him. He tried to catch me, reaching out, but I was dead weight. The ground rushed up in slow motion. Everything went black.

—

When my eyes fluttered open, I was on my back. Concrete beneath me, sweat-soaked through my button-down. My jeans damp with water. Voices above me, muffled like I was below the surface. Hands inspecting my chest, fingers on my neck checking for a pulse.

Flashlight beams cut through the fog in my head. I squinted against the light.

“Can you hear me?”

Where am I?

“What’s your name?”

What happened?

“Do you know where you are?”

Am I in trouble?

I forced my eyes fully open. Shock. Paramedics in navy uniforms hovered over me, looking down, furrowed brows, pressed lips. Radio chatter crackled from a nearby walkie-talkie. Just beyond them, Zac stood frozen, his face plaster white. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.

The Roots still played. The music still thumped around us. The crowd still grooved as if nothing happened. But I was flat on my back on cold, damp concrete 2,400 miles from home, with strangers in uniforms checking my vitals, trying to understand what the fuck just transpired.

One minute I was dancing. The next, I was consumed by darkness and then surrounded by strangers.

—

The medical team let me go 30 minutes later, once I came to my senses. My vitals stabilized. I spoke coherently. I could walk without support. I convinced them I was okay.

I wasn’t okay.

For the rest of the weekend, I was shaken up and ashamed. I didn’t want to talk about it. When Zac asked if I was alright, I waved it off. “Yeah man, I’m good. I think I went a little too hard.” I tried to act like everything was cool and this was just a random thing that happened. I told him and my other friends it was nothing to worry about.

But I couldn’t stop seeing it. The paramedics. My damp clothes. Zac’s face. The images looped in my head, over and over. They overshadowed the Patriots’ miraculous Super Bowl victory the next day.

I flew back to New York a few days later and returned to my life. But I wasn’t the same person who boarded that flight. Something had finally broken open when I hit the cold, wet concrete.

—

Jungian analyst and author James Hollis wrote: “Awakening to the Middle Passage occurs when one is radically stunned into consciousness.” His book, The Middle Passage, presents an opportunity to reexamine our lives and ask: Who am I apart from my history and the roles I have played?

I was radically stunned into consciousness that weekend in Phoenix.

I’d been on autopilot for years. Wake up. Check Twitter. Shower. Make coffee. Get stoned. Walk to the office. Take pitch meetings. Go to meetups and dinners. Have a beer or three. Get stoned again. Work until midnight. Repeat.

I thought I could keep it all together—my career, my marriage, my health, my performance—while hiding what was really happening underneath.

I’d wake up at 3 AM in a silent panic, my heart pounding, knowing I was addicted and in over my head. A voice kept whispering that I had a problem, that I was using substances to numb the anxiety of pretending I had it all under control. And I was keeping it from my best friend—the very woman sleeping next to me. The foundation was cracking, but I couldn’t let anyone see it. If I admitted who I really was and stopped performing, the whole thing would collapse.

That night in Phoenix, the illusion shattered. A portal opened to the middle passage.

—

A portal opens when the constructed self—who we think we are or hope others see—meets something it can’t manage, can’t control, or can’t explain away.

In the first half of life, we build an identity to get our core needs met—love, belonging, respect, safety, security. We spend decades reinforcing it. But when it meets forces larger than the ego can manage, we become helpless. These moments force us to face what we’ve been avoiding—sometimes gently, sometimes violently.

When we’re stunned into consciousness, a threshold appears. An invitation. The opportunity to abandon the identity we constructed in the first half of life and step toward something more true, an authentic way of being.

Portals don’t open randomly. They emerge when something underneath the surface, something we’ve been ignoring or running from, finally breaks through and demands our full attention.

Sometimes life opens the door for us. You walk into the office and they’re waiting for you—a box on your desk, security escort to the parking lot. The doctor doesn’t meet your eyes when she delivers the news. Your partner says the words you’ve been dreading: “I can’t do this anymore.” The bank account hits zero and there’s no safety net left. Someone you love dies, and suddenly the world you knew doesn’t exist anymore. The external world shatters the illusion of control, and the portal opens whether we’re ready or not.

Other times, the door opens from within. Depression that won’t lift, no matter how much you exercise, meditate, or pretend everything’s fine. Anxiety that wakes you at 3 AM with your heart pounding and won’t let you fall back asleep. Your body turning against itself: bald spots appearing, autoimmune flares, mysterious symptoms the doctors can’t explain. The addiction you can no longer hide from yourself nor the people who love you. The voice that’s been whispering this isn’t working for months, maybe years, until one day it’s not whispering anymore. It’s screaming. The inner world erupts, and the portal opens from the inside out.

I was stunned into consciousness from the outside. Collapsing in public. Paramedics. Zac’s face. The external event I couldn’t rationalize away. But what it revealed was the internal pressure that I had been running from for years. A soft voice that had been whispering I had a substance use problem. I’d been managing it, rationalizing it, and pushing it down. Everything was going well on the outside…until it wasn’t.

Phoenix made it impossible to ignore.

—

This is why portals are so threatening.

The ego’s job is to manage our existential anxiety—to keep us feeling safe, stable, and in command. In the first half of life, it constructs an identity built on external achievements and social expectations, then fiercely defends that construction. It tells us stories about who we are, what we’ve accomplished, and what makes us valuable and special. And it works hard to convince us that this provisional self—this socially acceptable performance—is who we actually are.

Mine had been working overtime. I was a venture capitalist on the rise. Decent husband. Benevolent resource in the tech community. Influential voice on Twitter. I thought I was untouchable and in control.

But I knew for years I had an addiction. The voice was clear: Steve, you have to stop. You’re killing yourself. Every time I heard it, I’d reach for another hit. I’ll quit next week, I’d tell myself. Next month. After this deal closes. I was living a double life—the public persona and the anxious addict. And as the addiction grew stronger, the gap between them widened.

Walking through the portal means letting that constructed self fall away. It means admitting the ego was never in control. And the ego will fight like hell to prevent that because it’s a matter of life and death.

—

When a portal opens, you’re forced to face what you’ve been hiding from. You see the truth. But seeing it isn’t the same as walking through.

In the gap between awareness and action, you’re caught between two versions of yourself—the one you’ve been performing as and the one you sense you need to become. The old situation and identity no longer fits, but the new one hasn’t taken shape yet. You’re suspended. Unmoored. Neither here nor there. The gap is uncomfortable and, for some, unbearable. Most of us try to deny it, then escape it, but it’s where transformation happens.

I returned to New York in February 2015 knowing something had shifted. The question was there: Who am I, now, and what is life asking of me? But I wasn’t ready to face it, to answer it.

For five months, I lived in the gap. I continued to go through the motions—Twitter, weed, pitch meetings, dinners, more weed—but everything felt hollow. I’d wake up in the middle of the night knowing that my addiction and anxiety were growing and I needed to change, then would try to convince myself by morning that I could manage it. Rinse and repeat.

The ego didn’t give up easily. It tried to regain control. Maybe I can just cut back. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I don’t need to quit entirely…I just need better boundaries. The rationalizations were endless. The bargaining was relentless.

This is what happens in the gap. The ego fights to close the portal, to convince you that you can go back to the old life and pretend this never happened. But you can’t unsee what you’ve seen. The old life doesn’t fit anymore. The cracks are too wide now. You have to choose—walk through, or keep pretending and perpetuating the old way of being.

The gap stretched on for months—February, March, April, May. I kept working and performing. My ego was pretending I was fine while the foundation continued to crack.

The portal was still open. The real question was whether I was ready to face my fear and do what I knew was required.

—

In June 2015, I finally stopped fighting.

Walking through a portal begins with acceptance. The raw, uncomfortable acceptance of reality exactly as it is. You stop fighting. You stop rationalizing. You stop numbing what you know to be true.

This runs counter to how we think change works. We assume we have to force ourselves to become better, to fix what’s broken, to will ourselves into a new version. But the psychologist Arnold Beisser described what he called the paradoxical theory of change: “Change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not.”

I couldn’t change by pretending to be the guy who had it together. I could only change by accepting what I actually was: an addict that was in over his head. Most importantly, someone who couldn’t do it alone. I was done trying to hold it all together myself. I’d seen enough. My ego could no longer take care of me. I was suffering too much.

Then came the harder part: turning toward what I’d been running from. Facing it instead of numbing it. Speaking it out loud instead of keeping it hidden.

Late May 2015. I was sitting in my office with an intern who’d been working for me that spring. He was in his mid-twenties, sharp, earnest. I knew he was in recovery—he’d mentioned it casually a few weeks earlier because we were evaluating a company in the addiction tech space.

I don’t remember what we were supposed to be talking about, but I remember the moment I stopped pretending.

“I have a problem,” I said. “I can’t do this by myself anymore.”

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t look surprised. He just nodded with compassion and acceptance, like he’d been waiting for me to say it.

“There’s a meeting tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’ll take you.”

—

The next morning, I walked into my first AA meeting in a church basement in Midtown Manhattan.

I didn’t know who I would become. I didn’t know what my life would look like on the other side. But I walked through anyway.

That was June 6, 2015. I’ve been sober from alcohol and cannabis ever since. My first adulthood had finally come to an end. The second was beginning.

The man who walked into that Roots concert five months earlier no longer exists. He is in many ways a figment of my memory. That version of me died that year. Over many AA meetings. In dozens of therapy sessions. Daily walks in Washington Square Park. Countless moments of surrender.

And inside that portal, something unimaginable emerged. I left venture capital. Became a coach. Became a father. Moved out of New York City and into the woods. Built a life I didn’t know I wanted, one I couldn’t have even imagined when I was performing the old one.

The portal opened up something my ego, at the time, could never have planned or predicted. That’s what portals do. They don’t lead to the life you think you want or the life someone had planned for you. They lead to the life that’s actually yours.

—

Your portal may be lurking in an addiction, too. It could be the relationship that’s slowly suffocating you. The job that’s draining your soul. The grief you’ve been running from. The pain you keep ignoring. The voice inside that keeps saying this isn’t working.

When the moment arrives that stuns you into consciousness will you let the truth reshape you, or will you spend your life force fighting reality?

You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to stop fighting, accept what’s true, and take one courageous step forward.

If you’re reading this and there’s a voice you’ve been ignoring or a truth you’ve been avoiding, the portal is already open. You’re standing at it right now.

The only question is whether you’ll walk through.

In the spring, my friend Justin Welsh and I went for a hike. He asked me to give a talk on downshifting for his Unsubscribe community.

I’m close with Justin and love teaching, but I almost said no and even rescheduled twice.

Justin’s audience is largely in what I call “upshift mode.” They’re solopreneurs launching, building, and scaling their businesses. These aren’t folks sitting around wondering what to do with their lives or whether to take a sabbatical. They generally know what they want and they’re going for it.

I told Justin, “I’m not sure it’s the right audience for my message.” But Justin pushed. “I think this could be really valuable for them. A lot of the group struggles with burnout and comparison. Just sit with it.”

I eventually said yes, then filed it away and tried not to think about it. Like any creative endeavor, I didn’t want to force it, but I trusted Justin and the process that’s worked for me before. Patience. Asking. Listening.

Two weeks ago, as the date drew closer, something essential clicked.

It dawned on me that I’ve been defining downshifting too narrowly all this time, as something you do after burnout, in transition away from hustle mode, or when you’re ready to redefine yourself and your career.

But that’s not what downshifting actually is. Or at least, it’s not only that.

Here’s what I realized:

Downshifting is a gear change—a momentary, periodic, or seasonal slowing down to create realignment.

Sometimes it’s 30 seconds, a few hours, 30 days, or in some cases longer. But the question is always the same: Is what I’m focused on expansive and energizing or constricting and draining? Am I still building and living what’s mine? Or have I drifted into something that belongs to someone else?

Downshifting is about making sure your life and ambition is pointed at the right thing. Your thing.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a burnt out executive, an ambitious founder early in your journey, or an investor wanting to play a different game. Every professional can and should do it.

But it’s especially critical for solopreneurs. I’ve learned over many years that we’re wired to move fast and build something that can sustain our lives. It makes sense—we don’t have a team to rely on, so most if not all of the strategy and execution falls on our shoulders. But when you move fast without pausing, it’s easy to drift into someone else’s lane, or hit a wall.

I know this territory better than most. I’m an ambitious solopreneur myself and I’ve burnt out multiple times pursuing someone else’s definition of success. I’ve also coached many others through it.

Here’s how it happens: We see projections of success on social media and think, I should do that. We adopt their strategies, their voice, their definition of winning. And before we know it, we’re building something that looks successful from the outside but doesn’t feel right on the inside.

That’s what no one talks about: spending years building the wrong thing while sacrificing our health and relationships in the process.

Last week I finally gave the talk. I spent 75 minutes with Justin and 25 solopreneurs from his community.

We covered:

• What alignment actually feels like (and what misalignment feels like in your body)

• The two types of burnout (overwork vs. misalignment—and why most people only know about the first one)

• How drift happens (and why it’s so easy to miss when you’re moving fast)

• The practice (how to check alignment daily, weekly, and quarterly so you catch it early)

• What becomes possible when you’re aligned (flow instead of force, aliveness instead of depletion, yours instead of theirs)

The talk was energizing to give. Participants stayed after to ask more questions. A few folks reached out later to say it shifted something for them.

I’m sharing both the slides and the video here, in case it’s useful:

Download the Slides (PDF)

Here’s what I want to underscore: Downshifting isn’t about slowing down. It’s about deep personal integrity. It’s about playing your own game, not copying someone else’s. It’s about building and living on your own terms, even when that means doing something that doesn’t look like what everyone else is doing.

The hardest part is having the courage to pause and be honest with yourself about whether this still feels right. Most people never stop to ask. They keep building, grinding, and checking boxes until one day they wake up depleted and wondering why none of it feels right.

I’ve been there. I’ve pursued and attained success that wasn’t truly mine. But I’ve also reimagined and rebuilt from that place.

And I’ve never been more alive, more myself, or more successful. My coaching practice is thriving. My life feels expansive and creative. Alignment has given me clarity, agency, and peace. I’m finally playing my own game.

You don’t have to wait as long as I did. The same clarity and freedom are available to you when you choose to pause, listen, and align your life from the inside out.

If you watch this and something lands, hit reply. I’d love to hear from you.

—Steve

Before my birthday musing, I want to say thank you. Thank you for reading and being part of this with me. I share what I’m learning and discovering so I can make sense of my journey and we can explore these questions together. Your time and attention mean more than you know.

A few quick announcements:

• I’m hiring a part-time Virtual Assistant for my coaching practice and business. This person will help me manage the business and collaborate on some creative projects I’ve been dreaming up. Ideally someone in the Hudson Valley (where I live) or elsewhere in New York state, but I’m open to other possibilities. Starting at 10 hours per week but can scale up over time. [→ Learn more about the VA role here]

• For the first time in six years, I have a few spots open in my coaching practice. I’ve kept my practice small on the heels of my sabbatical, but I’m ready to slowly grow it again. If you’re a professional navigating transition or a major inflection point and you want support, this might be a good fit. [→ Learn more about coaching here]

If either resonates with you or someone you know, I’d love to hear from you.

Today I turn 46.

Last week, as an early birthday gift to myself, I scheduled a breathwork session with Alice Wells, a master practitioner, mentor, and frequent collaborator. Before the breathwork began, we talked about the last few months—the closure of Downshift, my summer sabbatical, and what’s been opening for me.

“My awareness is online most of the day now,” I told her. “Maybe 60, 70% of the time. But it often vanishes when I’m in social situations.”

“What happens?”

“I can feel myself blocking connection. My heart just closes.” I gestured at my chest. “With certain people and in group settings. Even Eliza sometimes.”

“Old patterns,” she said.

“Yeah. Armoring. It feels like a lead plate pressing on my chest when it arises. Even with this felt sense, this knowing, I still do it.”

She invited me to lie down on a giant futon on her floor and get comfortable with pillows and blankets. Once I was settled and eyes closed, she began making audible inhales and exhales, prompting me to follow her rhythm.

Within minutes, I could feel the intensity of the breathwork building in my body. The room faded to black. My mouth and throat became bone dry. I began to feel lightheaded. My hands and arms started tingling. My hips twisting back and forth to dissipate the energy building in my torso and abdomen. Suddenly my whole body was convulsing.

The energy in my hands became too much to bear. I began fanning my hands back and forth like I was trying to extinguish a giant fire within me. The harder I tried, the stronger it became, the more futile it was. I felt hopeless.

Alice leaned in. “What do your hands want to say?”

Stop. The word surfaced in my mind, but I couldn’t get it out.

“Are they telling you to stop?”

She found it.

“What do they want to say?”

“Stop. Yes, STOP.”

Next thing I knew, I was rolling around on the ground, on my stomach, crying like a little boy.

“I just can’t do it anymore,” I said through tears. “I can’t keep holding it all together. I’m exhausted.”

“Exhausted from what?”

“I don’t know how to be and do at the same time.”

Alice’s voice cut through: “You can just be here. There’s nothing to do.”

My whole body softened deeper into the futon. The relief of that nourishing statement—that I could just be—broke something open. I sobbed harder.

But even as I cried, the energy was still there. I rolled onto my back, hoping it would dissipate, that something different would emerge in its place.

“There’s electricity running through my hands and arms,” I told her. “It’s unrelenting, intense.”

“Where do your hands naturally want to go?”

Intuitively, I put them on my chest. Each hand covering each pec, fingers meeting at my solar plexus. I could feel the charge drop into my chest. I breathed into it.

Alice made that audible breathing sound again—slow, rhythmic—encouraging me to stay with it. I matched her breath. In. Out. In. Out.

The energy radiated through my chest, warm and electric at the same time. My hands could feel my heartbeat underneath them. For a few minutes, I just stayed there, breathing, feeling this current moving through me.

Then I had an impulse. I lifted my hands straight up, perpendicular to the ground, to see if the energy would shift.

Within a second, the current completely vanished. All the energy went blank.

“There’s no more energy,” I said. “It’s gone.” There was a part of me that wanted it to come back now because I could feel it had something to communicate.

“Your heart has a lot of energy,” Alice said quietly.

I lay there for a moment, hands still in the air. Something about what she said landed differently than anything else in the session.

“Wait,” I said. “My hands...” I couldn’t finish the sentence. The realization was forming.

“What about your hands?”

“They weren’t connected to my heart.” The words came out almost like a question, like I was discovering it as I spoke. “When they were on my chest, the energy was there. When I lifted them...”

“And now?”

I slowly lowered my hands back onto my chest. The current flooded back instantly—warm, electric, pulsing through my chest and into my palms.

I gasped. Tears came immediately.

My hands are an extension of my heart.

It was so simple. So obvious. My hands weren’t separate from my heart—they were of my heart. A way for it to reach out, to express, to give, to touch the world.

“Oh my god,” I sobbed. “How have I missed this for so long? It’s so obvious.”

Alice stayed quiet, letting me feel it.

“These hands,” I said through tears, “are a medium to express the heart. A medium to express love. A medium to serve.”

—

For years, I’ve wrestled with the same question: How can I be and do at the same time?

I’ve written and talked about presence, about just being here in the moment. But doing always felt separate—the work, the making, the building, the incessant forward motion of my life. I’d exhaust myself trying to hold it all together, armoring my heart in the process, blocking the very thing I was trying to access.

Lying on that futon in Brooklyn, I finally understood.

Doing and being aren’t separate when they come from love.

My hands aren’t tools for accomplishment, for getting shit done. They’re how my heart touches the world. Cooking dinner for my family. Folding laundry. Writing. Building something. Giving my daughter a back rub before bed. Hugging a friend. Texting a client. Every gesture, every action—all of it can be an expression of the heart.

The heart moves through these hands.

As I step into my 47th year, I’m living into an essential question: What does my heart want to express through these hands?

I can feel the answer right now, typing these words. There’s a slight buzz in my palms and fingertips. It’s the same current I felt on Alice’s floor. My heart, reaching out through my hands toward you. That’s what I’m bringing into this year.

The question I’ve been wrestling with—how to be and do at the same time—finally has an answer I can feel and trust.

Love.

When my hands move from love, being and doing are the same thing. I’ve been feeling it all week. In the ordinary moments. In the smallest gestures. My heart, speaking through these hands.

“I’ve been to countless film screenings in the city for three years,” Olivia told me on our Zoom call, passion and frustration in her voice. “I have notebooks full of ideas, I know what it takes to develop a short film, I’ve even connected with producers and financiers.” Her shoulders dropped slightly and she paused. “But I’ve never actually made anything.”

“You mentioned your husband’s support. What does he say when you talk about this?” I asked

“He asks me all the time what would bring me the most joy in this next chapter.”

“Sounds like you have a supportive partner. So what do you say?”

“I just want to be on a film set. I just want to be part of the storytelling process.” Her longing was palpable…and so was the gap between knowing exactly what she wanted and taking action.

I asked what was stopping her.

She looked down, her voice dropping so softly I almost missed it: “I would do it, and the quality of the film I would create would just be so low. I would just embarrass myself and everyone around me.”

There it was—her creative impulse suffocating under the weight of imagined failure.

I could see her frustration in the way her body seemed to shrink as we dove deeper into her paralysis. She desperately wanted to create something, but she was trapped by everything she thought it needed to become. She worried it would be a wrong career move and lead to financial ruin.

“What’s one thing you could create this weekend?” I asked. “Just to see what happens?”

She closed her eyes, taking a few deeper breaths to let the question settle. When she opened them again, something had shifted. Her voice became clearer, more animated. Her shoulders relaxed.

“I keep thinking about this one scene from my notebook,” Olivia said, leaning forward. “What if I just brought that to life somehow?”

Suddenly we weren’t talking about careers or film industry success anymore. We were talking about making one small thing, something that wanted to exist for its own sake.

—

I immediately recognized her struggle, though mine played out differently.

The creative impulse for Downshift—the program I founded to help ambitious professionals slow down during seasons of transition—came on a frigid Saturday morning while I was washing dishes. It occurred as a question: Why do we only have accelerators? And then the statement: We should also have decelerators.

There was no thought behind it. This sequence emerged from somewhere deeper than reason. In an instant, I knew something like a decelerator needed to exist in the world.

Within days, that pure creative impulse got hijacked. Instead of asking, “What wants to be expressed here?” I started asking, “How do I scale this?” and “How do I turn it into a business?” Instead of letting it be a workshop, a book, or just an idea that lived in my journal, I immediately thought: This has to be a brand, something big.

Before I knew it, I was working with a Trademark attorney, touring retreat centers, developing a curriculum, analyzing pricing models, crafting positioning messages, and building a landing page. All this occurred before I’d even talked with prospective participants. I wanted to make Downshift as notable as other cohort-based courses like Write of Passage, AltMBA, and The Hoffman Process. I visioned impacting thousands of professionals and building a business that would spit off cash.

—

Eighteen months later, as our Spring ‘25 application deadline loomed, I was working at my kitchen table at midnight, teeth clenched and jaw sore. I was crafting my fifth marketing email in seven days for a program about slowing down—I was far from practicing what we preached. My wife and daughters were long asleep upstairs. My neck and shoulders ached from being glued to my laptop for hours.

I spent the day in four coaching sessions, a team meeting trying to figure out how to drum up more applications, and two applicant interviews. My phone had buzzed with Slack notifications about marketing ideas and curriculum updates. On top of that I was coordinating our team offsite which was in less than a week.

We had more than 150 people on the waitlist, but with three days until the deadline, only six had actually applied. I kept refreshing the application dashboard, hoping six would magically become twenty.

This isn’t why I started this, I thought, exhausted. This isn’t the work that feeds me. I had built this whole machine, piece by piece, thinking it would give me more freedom and aliveness. Instead, it had become exactly the kind of work I’d left startups and venture capital to avoid.

I see this all the time. The coach who has an insight but immediately thinks of scaling an audience on Substack before they’ve even written one word. The entrepreneur who feels called to solve a problem but jumps straight to pitch decks and investor meetings before they’ve built or shipped anything. The creative who longs to have meaningful conversations but gets stuck writing a podcast brief, researching equipment and platforms, and planning growth hacks before recording the first episode.

So many of us suffocate the creative urge before it has a chance to blossom. I built Downshift—the thing I wanted to create—but lost that creative spark in the process of building. What if I’d treated it differently from the start? What if I’d approached it as a creative project rather than a business to scale?

—

On a recent call with my friend and mentor, Jerry, I was describing how I wanted to show up in this next chapter of my career. “Steve,” he said, his voice carrying that sage wisdom I’ve come to trust, “You’re no longer in a season of building. You want to focus on your family, your coaching practice, your writing, your health. And I get it—you still want to create.”

He paused, letting that silence land. “There’s building, and there’s creating. Two completely different orientations.”

Creating starts with an internal knowing, a restlessness that pulls at you from somewhere deep. It asks: “What’s wanting to emerge through me?” And then the response: “This wants to be expressed—I can feel it stirring.” No predetermined shape, no business plan, no guarantee it will become anything beyond what it is right now.

But here’s what happens: When that creative impulse arrives, your thinking mind immediately wants to solve for the uncertainty. It wants to turn the impulse into a plan, the spark into a strategy. That’s when building mode hijacks the creative impulse.

Building mode responds with the thought: “This has to become something”—a business, a career, a scalable system that justifies your time through growth and metrics. It immediately jumps to questions like: How do I scale this? What’s my business model? How do I turn this into my new identity? It either takes over completely—like I experienced with Downshift, leaving me asking “How did I even get here?“—or it suffocates the creative impulse before it has a chance to be expressed.

Take Olivia. Her creative impulse was hijacked into anxiety about building a filmmaking career, when what was actually stirring was much simpler: to be on a film set, to be in the story-making process, to bring one of her stories to life. She doesn’t need to become “a filmmaker” right now. She just needs to honor what’s alive in her.

—

The creative impulse shows up differently for all of us, but here are a few ways I’ve heard it described: a felt sense of expansion, a surge of energy in your hands or chest, a current moving through your body, sometimes rising up through your torso and out through your chest. There’s an immediate knowing—this matters, this resonates.

These impulses arrive at a different frequency than thoughts. Where thinking feels analytical and effortful, they feel like something you recognize rather than something you figure out.

One of my new clients described it beautifully last week: “It feels like something hits you, but it’s coming out of you simultaneously.” He told me about sitting in a coffee shop in the West Village on a fall afternoon several years ago. “A man walked in reading an old novel. Jazz was playing outside, maybe it wasn’t live, but it felt like a movie. In that moment,” he said, “I felt like I could go home and write a novel or create a piece of art or build a company. It was intoxicating.”

That’s the signal. When your chest opens rather than contracts, when you feel energized rather than tight, when the work pulls you forward instead of you dragging it along.

Sometimes it’s triggered by a place, a conversation, a piece of music. Sometimes it just emerges from deep within.

The timing is often brutal. Just as the impulse arrives, your day job is calling or you have to put your kids to bed. “Those moments are fleeting,” my client continued. “As soon as it went away, I tried to journal about it and get back into it, but it was just gone. I was left with a kind of creative longing. I know I touched something real but couldn’t quite get back to it.”

This is where most of us lose it. The impulse arrives, and within seconds we talk ourselves out of it. I don’t have time for this right now. I’m not talented enough. This can’t become anything meaningful. There are more important things to do. We let it pass by entirely, telling ourselves we’re not ready or we’ll come back to it later. We rarely do.

—

It doesn’t have to be this way. When you feel that stirring—that pull toward something you can’t quite name—you have a choice in how you respond. Pause and ask yourself: What wants to be expressed right now?

Not “What could this become?” or “How would I scale this?” Just: What wants to be expressed?

This question gives you permission to shift your focus from outcomes toward what’s stirring. From this place, curiosity comes online and anxiety begins to soften. Instead of dismissing the impulse or immediately strategizing how to build it, you’re simply witnessing what’s alive in you.

Then take one small step. Voice-record the idea on your way to pick up your kids. Sketch something in your notebook before the meeting starts. Text a friend about the conversation you want to have. Write the first paragraph on your lunch break. Film thirty seconds on your phone.

The step doesn’t need to be huge or profound. It doesn’t need to lead anywhere. It just needs to honor what’s alive in you right now. You might be surprised.

Since walking away from Downshift, this question has become my practice. Over the last month, I’ve sketched ideas that I haven’t acted on—a course outline on self-awareness that sits in my notebook, a fund concept focused on consciousness that I drafted and filed away. I let each one exist without needing to become something more. This week, I became enamored with the distinction between creating and building. Something was stirring. My body felt open, curious. So I asked: What wants to be expressed? This essay wanted to come. So I followed it.

The creative impulse has no guarantees. It asks you to honor something you can’t yet name, to take the next step without seeing the entire staircase.

Your mind will want to relieve that uncertainty by turning the impulse into a plan or letting it slip away entirely. But there’s another way to respond.

What wants to be expressed through you today?

Ask the question. Take whatever small step feels right. That’s all the impulse needs from you right now.

That night at Levon Helm Studios felt like a dream. I was standing front-row in the balcony, the wooden rails worn smooth by countless hands and elbows before mine. Below me, the stage was washed in green lights. J.S. Ondara, stood just feet away with his signature fedora, shades, powder blue suit, and acoustic guitar, his voice filling every inch of the converted barn that had become a pilgrimage for musicians and fans. The evening so far had been perfection—the venue, the music, my view—it felt almost too good to be real.

Just as the second set began, I first felt it. A strange sensation in my abdomen—something that made me pause mid-song and think, this is kind of weird.

I should have been absorbed in the lyrics and music. Instead, my nervous system still on edge from a challenging psychedelic ceremony just twenty four hours earlier, I found myself zeroing in on this odd feeling deep in the bowels of my gut.

I tried to ignore the sensation and enjoy the rest of this intimate performance. I told myself it would be gone by morning.

It wasn't.

When I woke up, my attention went straight to that spot like a tongue trying to soothe a sore tooth. Without hesitation, there it was, and even stronger than the night before. I could feel the twisting and pulsing, as if a buried object was waking up inside of me.

And that's when the stories started. Maybe it's from those intense bodyweight workouts I've been doing. Maybe I pulled something. Maybe it's just stress. Or the residue from the ceremony a few nights ago. I was grasping for any explanation that would let me go about my life without panic.

But a week later, as we headed up to Lake Placid for July 4th weekend, the pain had settled in like relatives who overstay their welcome. The reasonable explanations—pulled muscles, workout strain, ceremony aftereffects—fell apart when the pain stuck around. My mind began crafting darker narratives. What if it's something serious? What if it's cancer?

—

By the end of July, my entire existence had collapsed into this puzzling sensation in my body. I'd wake up at 3 AM, shuffle to the bathroom, and before I was even fully conscious, there it was—the pain and fear waiting for me in the darkness. I'd come back to my room, look at my wife sleeping and think, What happens to her if I leave? The next morning, I'd watch my daughters playing and feel this crushing weight: How do I tell them dada might be dying?

Every few minutes throughout the day, my hand would drift to my abdomen and ribcage, pressing, probing, massaging, checking if it had changed or if I could feel something just under the skin. I'd find myself on WebMD at random hours, typing symptoms into the search bar and watching the screen populate with terrifying possibilities. My creative energy vanished completely. I couldn't focus on work, couldn't be present in conversations, couldn't think about anything else. This thing followed me everywhere like the Grim Reaper, a constant shadow that turned every day into a confrontation with my fragility and mortality.

Several months into this battle, I scheduled appointments with multiple doctors and practitioners. My primary care physician. Two gastroenterologists. A colonoscopy. A full blood panel. A full body scan. Dozens of hours and countless dollars trying to get to the bottom of this pain.

The colonoscopy results came back completely normal. When I asked my gastroenterologist if I should get an endoscopy, he was kind but direct. "Sure, if you think it will help you, but I sense this is something that's going on up here," he said, tapping his temple, "not in your body." He shared something frank and wise, that thoughts about pain can trigger the pain itself, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. That perhaps it was psychosomatic.

I could sense the truth of his statement because it tracked with my experience, but I wasn’t ready to hear it. This pain was real. It stung to think it might be “all in my head,” but I trusted him enough to sit with the possibility.

You would think that each appointment and normal result would have been relieving, but I only felt farther away from a conclusion—whatever was wrong was somehow dodging the tests. The pain and stories continued.

I tried everything I thought could help relieve my suffering. Reworked my diet with the help of a nutritionist. Sessions with a master bodyworker who specialized in abdominal work. Meditations where I'd sit and try to just observe the pain, hoping it would dissolve. Yoga nidra recordings that I'd listen to while trying to relax and breathe into my body, while part of me was mentally cataloging the lingering symptoms. Affirmations about healing that felt hollow in my mouth. Hypnosis apps promising to melt the pain and heal my energy system.

I was deep into a spiritual and existential emergency—a dark night of the soul—that clearly wasn’t going away. I threw just about every tool and method at this thing. None of it touched what was really happening, until one night in November, more than five months into living with this obscure pain.

—

The kids were finally asleep upstairs. I was sprawled on our couch, the familiar ache pulsing in my gut, complaining to my wife for what felt like the hundredth time that week. "I don't understand why nothing is working," I said, pressing my hand against my ribcage again. "The doctors say I'm fine, the meditation isn't helping, the bodywork isn't helping. This thing is still here every single day."

She looked at me with that no-nonsense look I’m so familiar with. I knew she was done with my shit.

"You just need to find a therapist who can help you process what's going on."

Something inside me knew she was right. As much as she loves me, she couldn't help, and I could tell she was tired of listening to my endless complaining. I needed a therapist, someone who could just listen to me. For months, I'd been trying to heal myself, fix myself, figure this out on my own.

After months of suffering and complaining, I finally did something I should have done over the summer when this all began. I grabbed my phone, went on Psychology Today, and found a local therapist who specialized in psychosomatic pain, specifically anxiety disorders related to fear of illness and death. I emailed him immediately.

Two days later, sitting in his office for the first time, I felt like I was admitting defeat. All my doctor appointments, spiritual practices, all my inner work, all my supposed wisdom about presence and acceptance, and here I was, needing another human being to help me see what was right in front of me.

I hadn't been to therapy since I got sober eight years prior. I thought I was beyond needing therapy, that I had healed my past wounds. But I was broken, desperate and finally accepting my limitations.

We had two sessions the first week and began to meet weekly. An old pattern began to surface that I could see with perfect clarity—my fear of terminal illness and death had followed me in different manifestations since I was in college. The jaw discomfort I was convinced was mouth cancer from chewing tobacco. The chest pain I thought was a heart attack. The persistent esophageal burning I thought was cancer when I was smoking weed every day. I could trace the line back nearly twenty years.

For six months, I'd been carrying this terror in isolation. The fear had grown in secrecy, the catastrophic thoughts I couldn't share and the weight of holding such enormous dread alone. But in that first session, and especially over those first two weeks, something shifted. He wasn't trying to fix me or offer frameworks. He was just collecting information, listening to my history, really unpacking when this all started.

And slowly, I began to name it. The thing I'd been too afraid to say out loud to anyone: I was terrified of death, my death. Terrified of annihilation, of illness and sickness and suffering and pain and misery. I'd been holding all of this in my body because I couldn't bear to name it to anybody.

Through our conversations, I began to understand something that all my medical and spiritual interventions had missed: I needed to actually feel and experience the fear, not intellectualize or transcend it. I needed to grieve the reality of having a body that would someday fail. I needed to honor the impermanence I'd been running from. I had to own it all and be witnessed.

He just held that space. Didn't try to talk me out of it, didn't offer diagnoses or solutions, didn't make me feel crazy. Sometimes all we need is someone willing to hold space without judgment, to just listen to our suffering and fear and pain from a place of loving presence. In our society, we think we have to effort to help someone. But sometimes the most powerful thing is simply being willing to listen without trying to fix or figure anything out.

So I let myself cry about not wanting to leave my family, this life. I accepted it, fully.

And the knot in my abdomen began to release. Just five percent at first, but I could feel it. I no longer had to hold it alone in my body. I was sharing it.

Within two months, the physical pain was completely gone. I let the therapist know our work was finished, not because I'd learned some technique, but because I'd confronted my demons, confronted and felt this fear of death, and began to honor the impermanence of life.

I had a choice then. I could continue living as if my body was a ticking bomb, scanning for threats, or I could accept that discomfort is part of being human. That pain doesn't always mean danger. That I can honor what my body tells me without letting it dictate my entire existence.

I know I’m not alone in this. This fear of death, of losing everything we love, is as human as it gets. I've had friends and clients come to me with their own versions of this story. We torture ourselves trying to prolong life and control the uncontrollable, and in doing so, we miss so much of the life we're desperate to protect.

—

As I confronted this fear, I began to share my existential crisis outside of my therapist's office. I was in my men's group when Ian looked at me and said in his eloquent British accent, "I know why you're so scared of death, Steve. You just love life so much, you don’t want to lose it.”

Ian was right—I absolutely love life and everything about it. My family, my friends, my home, my work, this imperfect body that carries me around every day. Morning coffee and watching my girls play together in the backyard. The way light cuts through the trees at sunrise. Leaves drifting to the ground in fall. Crickets chirping at night when I take the trash out. Classical music filling the car on a random Tuesday when I drive to the office. The look my wife gives me when our three-year-old says something that cracks us both up. I even love the challenging moments—the arguments, the sleepless nights, the worry, the pain. All of it.

The fear I realized comes from love. The deeper you love life, the more terrifying it is to lose it. But living in constant fear of losing what you love means you're not really living it at all. You're just holding on so tight you can't feel what's actually in your hands. Impermanence isn't the Grim Reaper, it's what makes everything precious.

Now when I feel something strange in my body, I pause. I notice. If it persists or concerns me, I get it checked out. But I don't let it steal months of my life. I've learned the difference between honoring my body's signals and being held hostage by my mind's stories.

Two and a half years later, I can sit with discomfort without writing horror stories about it. I've learned to get help when I need it instead of trying to fix everything myself, and I'm getting better at honoring what I'm actually experiencing, even when I'm afraid to admit it. That's progress.

—

Earlier this week, I was walking down our street as our six-year-old rode her bike alongside me. She looked to the side of the road and asked why the ferns were now brown and wilting. I told her it was because the seasons are changing. It's fall now, and they're dying. She glanced back at me with wide eyes. "Everything dies?"

“Yes, everything—plants, animals, and even me—but hopefully not for a long time,” I said, “and fall reminds us of that.” I explained, “But those ferns and all the plants around us will return next spring. This is the rhythm of life—birth and death. It’s what makes life so beautiful and so special.

She looked at me for a moment, then raced off on her bike to catch up with our neighbor's dog.

Early morning. My phone vibrates with an unexpected notification. I roll over in bed, squinting at the screen. Oh shit. A major sell-off was underway.

Bitcoin had been bleeding for months, down from its high of $64,000. As the morning unfolded, price alerts triggered again and again. I was hunched on the couch, compulsively refreshing Coinbase, then flipping to Twitter for commentary, back to Coinbase, then Twitter again.

My heart rate spiked. Thoughts poured in: I should have sold months ago. Steve, you greedy prick. Is it going to $10K? Jesus. Years of gains wiped out. I couldn’t feel my body anymore, just the rush of thought.

Everything else faded—the room, the light, my wife with her coffee, my daughter playing with Legos a few feet away. There was only one number on the screen, falling like a stone: $22,000. $21,000. $20,000.

I told myself this dip was temporary, that I was in it for the long haul, that I’d held through crashes before. I was a believer. I’d bought in 2011 and promised I’d never sell, that I’d leave it to my kids someday.

But the number kept falling. There seemed to be no floor.

—

Later that morning at the playground, my wife and I sat on a bench while our daughter yelled “da-da” from the monkey bars. I missed the whole thing. I was there physically but not mentally. I was spiraling on my phone and lost somewhere else on planet Steve. Coinbase is open. My thumb hovers over the sell button like I'm defusing a bomb.

My wife had suggested the sensible path: "Sell half. Recover our cost basis. Take some profit. Ride the rest." But panic doesn't do sensible. Everything I'd read about Bitcoin being an inflation hedge was crumbling as tech stocks crashed and took crypto with them. Ten years of holding was cracking. This time was different, I told myself.

My daughter giggled, climbing higher on the jungle gym. I was consumed by numbers and what-ifs.

I have to sell. This bloodbath could get worse. I just want out. Get me out.

I just couldn't hold the tension anymore. I folded. I hit sell.

I took a deep breath. Relief flooded me as if a long battle had finally come to an end.

Then came the sinking feeling: What have I done? Oh shit.

After a decade of holding, after swearing I’d never sell, I buckled under pressure and I broke.

—

For two years, I carried that decision like an anchor around my neck. The guilt and shame would hit me in waves. It wasn't a crushing blow that would sideline me for days, but more like a buzz that would capture my thoughts while I'm making coffee or picking up my kids from school. I'd start calculating: If I'd held, that would be worth a small fortune now. Jesus. The house we can't build. The cars we can’t purchase. The early retirement. The financial security to become a fulltime writer. Twenty or thirty minutes would disappear as I stared at my phone, doing the math over and over, knowing I fucked up.

I did everything to cut it loose—journaling, meditation, therapy sessions where I'd talk in circles about "letting go" and rationalizing the decision. I tried to find acceptance, to move on. Sometimes I thought I had.

Then my twin brother would text me out of the blue asking if I saw the latest price, definitely mocking my decision. Or I'd be lying in bed next to my wife, half-asleep, and suddenly I'm designing our dream house in my head and thinking about the capital that could have made it possible. I wasn't my best self those mornings, distracted with the girls at breakfast, irritable over what could have been.

I just fundamentally felt like I failed at something I'd been so sure about for over a decade. All that conviction, all those years of holding through crashes, and I'd bailed at the bottom. That was hard to carry until something shifted last month.

—

One afternoon, while on sabbatical in Portugal, I was mindlessly scrolling Instagram vids as my little one napped in the next room. All of a sudden, the algorithm fed me a post from Morning Brew: Bitcoin had hit an all-time high, north of $110,000.

What had disappeared for months came flooding back. The math was immediate and brutal. My stake would have been worth millions of dollars. All those zeros I'd never see or spend.

I could feel it all—the greed, the regret, the shame—and somehow it was all here again. That familiar tightness in my chest, the mental movies of what could have been, the weight settling back onto my shoulders like an old coat I couldn't take off.

—

Later that day, walking to meet my family at the pool, something suddenly shifted.

I was observing the old thoughts, feeling the suffering, really feeling it, when this thought emerged: Wait. I suffered when I had it too.

And suddenly I could see it clearly. When I owned Bitcoin, it was never enough. I always wished I'd bought more when I first discovered it. When it surpassed $60,000, I kicked myself repeatedly for not buying more at various price points.

And during the big runups when mania would set into Twitter, I always wanted the price to go higher. I was constantly checking the charts, constantly calculating what it could be worth, forecasting future price movements, constantly living in some future where I'd finally have "enough."

The realization hit me like my toddler slapping me in the face: I was creating suffering on both ends. When I had it, it wasn't enough. When I sold it for a gain, it wasn't enough.

The anchor that had been dragging me down for two years suddenly fell to the ground. I could feel it viscerally… the crushing weight just… gone. The shame that had been pressing on my chest, randomly following me through coffee shops and school pickups and irritable mornings, simply evaporated. I was liberated.

—

Here’s the reality: I made a decision. It didn’t work out the way I expected, the way I wanted.

What hit me that afternoon in Portugal was something we all know but rarely admit: I just didn’t want to suffer over this anymore. I didn’t want to continue to fuel the part of my mind that will never be satisfied, no matter what I get. There is no winning with "not enough."

Surrounded by olive trees with the sun beating down on me, I could finally see the abundance flowing in my life—my family, my health, our home, my coaching practice, the freedom to take sabbaticals and write, the simple fact that I was walking to meet my kids at a pool in the countryside. I'd been so busy calculating what I didn't have that I'd missed what was right there.

We all regret decisions we've made—bad investments, paths not taken, opportunities passed on, things that could have easily changed our fortune and security. We all imagine what could have been. Whether we have $10 million, $1 million, $100 thousand, or $100 the bank, we all have our own versions of this dynamic. The numbers change, but the mental torture remains the same.

But when we live in the past, identifying with these decisions years later, getting trapped in guilt, blame, anger and sadness, we suffer. We grasp at what could have been versus what simply is.

Through my coaching practice and countless conversations with friends, I see how universal this is. We all do this. It's natural. There's nothing wrong with wanting a better life or having nice things. But when we get stuck playing Monday morning quarterback, feeling fundamentally broken because we don't have certain things, we miss what's actually here.

Here's what I know: as soon as I get what I desire, there’s always another thing, and another. It's endless, especially in our culture where what we have communicates who we are. But there's a different way.

It comes down to acceptance of what transpired. Compassion for myself, for the choices I made. A gentle letting go, a softening, the way your body relaxes when you finally trust something or someone. I go within to find out where I am. Can I accept myself for the decision? Can I accept the thoughts and feelings that are here? Is there still constriction, resistance? Can I see the suffering it's causing? Can I choose not to make it a big fucking deal that haunts me for the rest of my life?

The truth is, I can. And from that place, gratitude flows naturally. Not as something I have to practice, but as what remains when I look around and stop fighting what is.

When the “never enough” voice starts up now—and it still does—I recognize it faster and see it for what it is. I just don't take it as seriously anymore…and with that I’m learning to be free.

📢 A quick announcement before my latest musing. I launched a new personal website at steveschlafman.com. It's home to my 1:1 coaching, writing, and ongoing explorations. I'm proud of how it captures who I am and my work in this season of life. I'll be adding to it in the months ahead, so I hope you'll take a look.

A towering mountain appeared in the distance. As the vision drew me closer, I could see the dense evergreens covering its slope begin to disappear. Not gently fade, but get torn away by tremendous force. Trees uprooted and hurled aside. Wood cracking and splintering. Debris scattered. An entire swath of forest had been leveled. What remained was raw, cleared earth stretching across the mountainside.

I stepped into the clearing, over fallen logs and scattered branches, mounds of churned earth where roots had been torn free. The forest floor was a graveyard of broken wood and earth. The silence was eerie, the void of sound that trails a cataclysmic event, when the world feels fragile and fractured.

I continued walking through the wreckage, stepping carefully around deep gouges in the earth. The scale of destruction felt overwhelming.

Surrounded by the browns and grays of devastation, it seemed impossible that anything could have survived. But there, barely visible against the churned soil, a tiny green shoot was pushing through.

I knelt down, looking closer. Then I saw another. And another. Small shoots of green.

The deeper I inhabited this cleared space teeming with new life, the more it lived within my bones. Spaciousness where there had been overgrowth. Groundedness in the raw earth. The expanse of open sky where dense canopy once blocked the light. These were the qualities I had been searching for in my own life.

For weeks after, the vision I received continued to surface in my mind. I didn't try to analyze it or make sense of it. Something from the depths of my psyche was working on me, showing me what I couldn't yet understand intellectually. The clearing space, the destruction that made room for what wanted to emerge.

I didn't immediately understand what this meant for my actual life. But over the following months, I began to notice how cramped my days felt, how little breathing room existed between Downshift operations, team meetings, and client sessions. The image had planted something. I was longing for space.

A confluence of factors eventually inspired me to walk away from Downshift and take a sabbatical this summer. At first I noticed resistance to clearing space—fear of not making income, fear my coaching clients wouldn't return, fear of losing all the momentum I'd built over many years. When I sat with them, I saw them for what it was—the ego trying to keep me tethered to the comfortable and familiar. Despite these fears, my wife encouraged me to listen to these deeper longings and clear the space for something new to emerge in my life.

—

This summer was one of the most expansive periods of my life. I spent my sabbatical in Portugal and back home in upstate New York, immersed in nature. Aside from a very light client load, I didn't do much other than be with my family, journal, meditate, read, walk, eat lots of ice cream, and just be.

I went into sabbatical with no agenda, no outcomes to achieve. Just a commitment to follow the image of the clearing and trust what wanted to emerge.

Two weeks into our stay in Lisbon, I was sitting at a playground watching my girls play when something shifted. I felt completely dropped in—present and aware—in a way I'd only experienced on long meditation retreats. But this wasn't a retreat. I was just watching my daughters play, fully there with them in an ordinary moment.

Several days passed and this sense of presence stayed with me, something that rarely happens. Usually after experiences like this, I'd slip back into my normal mental chatter and patterns within hours or days. But I remained unusually calm and clear throughout our time in Lisbon and it began to expand upon our return home.

At first, the unfamiliarity and intensity of it was unsettling. I kept waiting for it to fade. When it didn't, something deeper settled in, a groundedness I hadn't felt in my life.

—

While I'm holding most of this experience sacred and private, there are three shifts I feel ready to share.

The first is that my center of gravity has shifted from work and doing to something I can only call spirit and being. Not in any religious or dogmatic sense, but a felt connection to something larger than my individual self. I feel guided by this deeper wisdom rather than just my ego's plans and fears.

In hindsight, I can see this shift has been developing for over a decade, but stepping away from Downshift was the tipping point that accelerated everything.

The second is that I notice things differently now. I catch my ego's stories as they arise rather than getting swept away by them. I feel emotions more directly without immediately creating narratives about them. I see patterns in myself and others with more clarity. Sometimes this comes with intense physical sensations—like energy coursing through my body before sleep—that I'm still learning to navigate.

I also notice more clearly how I create unnecessary suffering by getting caught up in stories and reactions. Eckhart Tolle calls this “ordinary unconsciousness”—the background static of unease and discontent most of us carry. This summer I realized how much of this I'd been creating without even noticing it. I consider myself pretty self-aware, and was surprised to keep seeing patterns I'd been blind to. Being able to catch these patterns as they arise has brought much more ease and less drama in my life and relationships.

The third is how this shift will reshape my work. The past five years have been dedicated to studying transitions and coaching professionals through evolution. That remains central to my work, but I'm drawn to the foundational qualities of awareness and attention.

Awareness is the world that we inhabit and attention is where we place our energy, our focus. I'm realizing that how we work with these—how present we are and what we focus on—shapes our experience of ourselves and our lives. Our ability to navigate transitions, handle stress, and make good decisions comes back to this essential capacity.

I'll continue working with transitions, but I want to explore these foundational capacities more directly. I feel called to help people develop their ability to observe their own experience so they can make conscious choices about what deserves their attention and what doesn't. This kind of metacognitive awareness becomes especially valuable during challenging moments when we need clarity most.

It feels awkward to put this into words, other than to say this knowing was right under my nose the whole time. I remember as a punk ass kid walking down to the beach across the street from my house and sitting on the pier, staring out into the Atlantic. All the chatter in my head would evaporate, everything would slow down, and I'd sense something profound within myself but couldn't put it into words. That same awareness I spent years seeking through meditation and spiritual practices was already there, waiting to be recognized.

I'm realizing through experience it has always been a part of me. If what I'm discovering is true—that this awareness is our shared and essential nature—then it's also a part of you.

This shift has actually brought me closer to home. I don't plan to leave my family, join a monastery, and become a monk. I used to joke that the acre and a half I live on was where I was most unenlightened. Now I see it as the place where my heart resides, where my most important spiritual work lives.

—

At the moment I'm settling into being rather than doing, with the exception of supporting my 1:1 coaching clients and penning an occasional essay. I'm dedicating myself to study, practice, and integration—the dharma, meditation, Hakomi, other wisdom traditions, and my own inner experience. I feel more at ease than I have in years, without the constant need to strive, prove myself, or push toward the next thing. It's a good place to be.

This is where I find myself: in the space after letting go. What began as an image of a forest clearing has become my reality. The trees that were cleared were the endless meetings, the inner pressure to always be creating and building, the not-enoughness that drove me, the shoulds and supposed-tos that had grown dense around my life. They represented the life I thought I should be living—productive, scaling, always becoming more.

Now on the other side, I am experiencing more spaciousness, more trust, more freedom, more ease. This cleared space is a container for whatever wants to emerge next. For the first time, maybe in my life, I don't feel the need to rush in and fill it. It's perfect exactly as it is.

If any of this touches something in you, a longing for spaciousness, an exhaustion with the endless doing, know that you're not alone in it. Thank you for walking with me.

Several months ago, during our completion day for the Spring '25 cohort of Downshift, my partner Tracy led the group in a future-self visualization. I turned off the camera, laid down on my couch, and dropped in.

I've participated in (and led) this exercise countless times over the past decade, but what I saw this time was genuinely unexpected and profound.

When I met my future self in 2029…it looked similar to my life now. The outer contours of his world were all familiar.

Externally, things were more or less the same. I lived in the same house and community. I was still in the same marriage. I still coached and guided professionals navigating transition. My girls were thriving, but older. There was no huge company or team. No New York Times bestseller. No newfound influence or wealth.

But inside, something had changed. My life was not different, but I was different.

My presence felt deeper. My nervous system was more regulated. My love was overflowing. I was rooted and at peace.

I was in the company of a man who had chosen to live a simple and spacious life of service. I felt calm and grounded just being in his presence.

And that's what shocked me.

For many years, I've used these visualizations to project a future I hadn't yet manifested. Someplace bigger and bolder. More successful. More influential. More complete.

But this time, I realized: the life I was envisioning is pretty much the one I’m already living.

The life. The work. The relationships. The community. The way of being. It's essentially all here. Right now.

That vision stayed with me and continued to work me in both obvious and subtle ways. It touched something deep that had already been stirring since earlier this year when I wrote Slow Enough to Matter. And it helped me see more clearly what I hadn't yet fully admitted to myself: it’s time to clear space, simplify my life, and focus on the essential. It’s time to downshift.

That’s why, after eighteen months of hard work building the program, I’ve made the difficult decision to step away from Downshift indefinitely.

Downshift has been a labor of love, but it also consumed me. Beyond a full 1:1 coaching practice, I was parenting two young kids, caring for my body and mind, writing an occasional essay, and studying Hakomi, a powerful mindfulness somatic psychotherapy. The program demanded everything else.

Zoom meetings ate into my deep work blocks. Operations, email marketing, and social media—work that left me drained—consumed hours I wished I could spend creating. I found myself working after bedtime stories, skipping workouts, rushing through meditations. There was virtually no time left over for me.

When things got busy and hectic, I wasn’t the best version of myself. I was overscheduled. Flustered. Often scattered and distracted. Sometimes even lashing out at my team. There was even a Thursday evening in March when I snapped at a teammate who had inadvertently taken down our application right before the deadline. Irate, I hung up and sat at my dining room table, realizing I barely recognized myself.

The more I checked in with my body, the more I noticed there's nothing in the system that wants to keep pushing Downshift forward. The drive is gone. There’s no desire to run another cohort, to scale to hundreds and thousands of participants, to write email marketing campaigns, to hang out on social media promoting the next program, to stack my life and schedule even more.

From this experiment, I learned that when I overload my system, I’m not only tired, but I can't relax. My nervous system stays activated. My ADHD kicks into high gear, and I morph into the worst version of myself.

I realize that I need spaciousness and simplicity to feel good in my body and to hold space for others, including my family. I need fewer commitments, and I want to do less, but do it better.

Part of what drove me to build Downshift was an unexamined success script: that the natural next step in my evolution as a coach was to start a company. To become a master of the craft, I had to lead others and design my own program. That building something big was the only path to feeling whole and complete, especially as I entered my professional prime.

Downshift came from my soul and also from my shadow. I poured my heart into it, but beneath the surface was a subtle fear that unless I built something meaningful, I wouldn’t truly matter. That I wouldn’t be enough.

Through deep work with my mentor, I've come to see that I'm not meant to be a startup founder, at least not right now in this season of life. I don't thrive in back-to-back meetings or operational complexity. And he helped me see that impact doesn’t always come from action. Sometimes it comes through stillness and leading by example.

Instead, I want to deepen as a guide, a healer, a craftsman. That path requires something different than building: stillness, spaciousness, time, and presence.

This season of life is precious and demanding. My kids are still young, and I want to be with them as much as I can. I want to show up fully for my coaching clients, to write without haste, to lead intimate workshops or deep retreats. I want to make art with my hands, not to perform or profit, but because I feel called to make things.

For the first time in my life, I can say this without flinching: I have enough. I am enough.

I don't need to build or scale a company to feel whole or worthy of respect and love. I don't need to write a New York Times bestseller, though I still hope to write a book someday. I don’t need millions of dollars in the bank to feel safe and secure.

More and more, I'm accepting that I'm not an operator, an optimizer, or a scaler—I'm a space holder and creator. I love building the first and second version of something and offering it as a gift. Then I want to follow the next spark, the next curiosity, without needing to extract from it. As my therapist recently said, "This is just the beautiful critter you are. Let's honor it."

I feel most satisfied when I'm not striving or hustling at all. When I'm simply following what calls me, what feels easeful, what wants to be expressed through me. When I spend mornings hiking in nature, holding space for clients, meeting close friends for coffee, following creative impulse rather than a set playbook. I feel lucky that I get to choose this way.

So this summer, I'm taking a sabbatical—a real pause—for the first time in nearly a decade. I'm traveling with my family, resting, moving my body. I'm reconnecting to what brings me joy and deeper presence: time in nature, making art, reading fiction, slow and empty mornings.

Before I step into this sabbatical fully, I want to thank the people who made Downshift possible: David Spinks, my co-pilot, who touched every aspect of the program from the very beginning; Tracy Lawrence, my sparring partner, who infused it with radiant feminine energy and somatics; Andy Johns, my yoda, who is a wellspring of wisdom and product insight; Matt Yao, my apprentice, who stayed on top of every detail and always asked the right questions; and Alice Wells, who brought elder energy and deep wisdom into our retreat container.

And to the 30+ Downshifters who took a chance on an unproven program and had the courage to decelerate in a culture that prizes acceleration. You shaped the soul of this work more than you know, and were a constant source of motivation and inspiration.

I'm also deeply grateful to my wise friend Jerry Colonna for inviting me to imagine the life I want, not the one I think I should pursue. To my Hakomi therapist Melissa Grace for helping me feel, really feel, my truth. And to my editor Rachel Jepsen for always helping me make sense of change through writing and creative expression.

But most of all, my wife, Eliza Blank, who supported me through the inception, the building, and now the letting go. Entrepreneurship and transitions, especially with kids, require deep partnership and sacrifice.

Now, as I step away, I'm also in the process of completion, with my team and personally. We're honoring the journey we've been on. We're celebrating what we built. We're letting ourselves grieve. We’re appreciating our learning and growth. We’re expressing our love and gratitude for each other. Despite all the clarity I feel, this was still a surprise to everyone.

On a personal level, there are specific dreams I'm laying down. The vision of leading a platform with dozens of coaches. The fantasy of being featured on big podcasts as an influential founder and coach. The imagined future where Downshift becomes a category creator in the emerging transition space. I can feel parts of me that still long for that scale, for that recognition, for something larger. I'm learning to be in relationship with those parts, too.

Downshift is complete for now, and maybe for good. We’ve decided not to continue the program this fall. We’re honoring the journey, closing the chapter, and placing it gently on the shelf. Not in the trash, but not in our hands anymore either.

I feel proud. Of what we built. Of the impact we've had on dozens of wonderful humans. And of the decision to end it with integrity. I'm not leaving because Downshift failed or wasn't working. I'm leaving because it feels complete.

Downshift began as an answer to a question that hit like lightning one morning: In a world filled with accelerators, why aren't there decelerator programs? Why aren't there spaces for ambitious professionals to slow down during moments of transition?

I thought I was creating a program to help others transition. And I did. But I can see now I was also creating a soft landing for a part of myself that had been sprinting for too long.

It's time to slow down.

Every month, professionals come into my coaching practice in transition or stuck in a version of success that no longer fits. When I ask what they're hoping for, what they want to prioritize, they commonly share a desire to feel energized again.

Many are burned out, disconnected from their bodies, and increasingly starting to question their relationship with substances. They're beginning to see the connection: that the very things they've been using to cope—the nightly wine, the weekend binges, the casual edibles—might be part of what's keeping them stuck in that dull, depleted state they're trying to escape. They tell me, "This isn't working anymore. I want something different."

They share this with me because they've seen me walk the path. In my writing, they've watched me navigate sobriety through fatherhood, entrepreneurship, and reinvention. And questions still remain: How have you done it? Is it possible to give this up and still enjoy your life? What does sober even mean anymore?

A decade in, and I'm still figuring it out. Still asking these questions. Today I'm crossing a new threshold: I have ten years of sobriety.

And it's been a chance to reflect on what this means to me now. How sobriety has evolved from rigid abstinence to something more expansive, more alive. How it's become less about what I don't do and more about how I choose to show up. And what that might mean for anyone ready to define sobriety on their own terms, even if they don't identify as an addict.

—

Exactly ten years ago today, I walked into the basement of a church in Midtown Manhattan and attended my first AA meeting. At the time, I was filled with shame and frightened, but desperate and ready to make a change. I had tried everything to quit for years and had reached a point where I couldn't keep going down the same path. I hated how I felt—physically, emotionally, spiritually. At the suggestion of a close friend, I found my way to that meeting. I sat down in the circle, listened, and began counting days.

In those early months, AA gave me what I needed: structure, rhythm, language, and community. The 12 steps. The Big Book. The Serenity Prayer. The ritual of introducing myself as an addict. The program offered clarity in a time when I had none. The simplicity was comforting and necessary. Don't drink or drug. Go to meetings. Work the steps. Call my sponsor.

And for a long time, it worked. I loved the meetings, the ritual of gathering in scattered rooms across the city to share their stories and speak their truth. The tears. The laughter. The hard-earned wisdom. The transformations. The relief of being understood. There was something sacred that I was observing. We came from all walks of life, with wildly different stories, yet we shared a common thread: a desire to heal and improve our lives. Those people became my anchor and the rooms my sanctuary.

Looking back, I'm deeply grateful. AA probably saved my life, or at least my marriage. But I also brought old habits into that new space. I absorbed a more rigid version of sobriety than I understood at the time, one that, for me, equated sobriety with striving. I wanted to do it right, to be a "good" sober person, to fit in. I shared in meetings the way I thought I was supposed to. I clung to the rules and rituals like a life raft. I took pride in my streak, in showing up, in saying the "right" things. It wasn't disingenuous, but in hindsight, it was performative. I was performing my recovery as much as I was living it.

Sobriety, in those early years, became another way to strive toward perfection, another identity to cling to and protect. I still carried the same inner critic, the same part of me that craved control and acceptance, the same drive to be seen as disciplined, exceptional, good.

Even then, though, I was beginning to sense there might be other ways to heal. In the time between meetings, I found myself drawn to meditation, to books about consciousness and presence. I started working with therapists and teachers who talked about trauma, embodiment, and aliveness. I began to wonder if recovery could be about more than just not using. What if it could be about actually coming alive?

—

Eventually, the scaffolding of AA began to loosen. This didn’t happen all at once or out of defiance. My life slowly began to shift. I became a father. My recovery broadened. My transition into coaching captivated my attention and energy. My days grew full in ways that made the daily rituals of early sobriety harder to maintain. And then came the pandemic, which upended everything. Slowly, without even realizing it, I stopped going to meetings. I stopped introducing myself as an addict. I wasn't rebelling. I just wasn't relying on the same structures anymore.

And yet, I didn't drink. I didn't get high. What surprised me was how natural that felt. I hadn't imagined sobriety outside the bounds of the program, but somehow I was living it. That realization opened something. It made space for new questions. Am I still sober? What does sober actually mean to me now?

For the first time, I began to see that sobriety might be something more than abstinence and meetings. That it could be about presence, alignment, honesty. That it could be less about following a program and more about living in integrity with myself—my body, my values, my relationships, my work. The absence of alcohol and drugs was no longer the point. The point was how I showed up in my life.

As that shift unfolded, I began expanding the tools I used to heal and expand my consciousness. Eight years into my sobriety journey, I started exploring modalities beyond talk therapy and meetings. I began working with psilocybin in ceremonial settings, supported by experienced guides and therapists. I also experimented with microdosing in structured ways to support my inner work. And on several occasions, I took full doses with close friends in carefully held, nature-based settings.

None of this was escapist. These were conscious acts of listening, of seeing myself more clearly and feeling more deeply. The medicine revealed patterns and pain that traditional therapy hadn’t fully reached. It helped me experience presence not as a concept, but as a living, embodied reality.

Some might say this disqualifies me from being sober. I understand and respect that perspective. But for me, these experiences deepened my commitment to consciousness and truth-telling. They were about unearthing something buried within me and connecting to something far greater than myself.

Still, there were moments of doubt. I’d spent years tethered to a structure that told me I needed it to stay sober. Letting go of that map brought fear and uncertainty. Was I drifting too far? Was I lying to myself? Had I compromised my sobriety? There was no one to check in with, no one counting my days. And yet I found that my sobriety was still intact, not because I feared drinking or getting high, but because I no longer wanted to escape myself.

—

For me today, ten years in, sobriety is about telling the truth—to myself and to the people I love. It's about making hard choices and understanding the emotional trade-offs without just saying, fuck it. Even the subtle residue that sticks to my psyche when I go against what I know deep down to be true.

Sobriety means noticing when I want to check out, not just through alcohol or weed, but through overwork, achievement, control, scrolling, sugar, even self-optimization. It means asking: What am I avoiding right now? And then choosing, as often as I can, to stay. To stay with discomfort. To stay present. To stay in relationship with myself and the people I care about.

It's about looking in the mirror and knowing I didn't abandon myself. Not out of ego, not out of purity, not to perform, but because I want to live clean. Not morally clean—congruent.

It's not just about substances. It's about boundaries. Saying no to another opportunity that looks good on paper but doesn't feed my soul. Reading one book at a time instead of five. Letting myself rest when the part of me that still craves achievement says, do more. It's about closing doors. It's about honoring limitations, not as a flaw, but as part of life. There's a groundedness and clarity I've found in saying no. In finding meaning in repetition. In discovering depth in the mundane, and soul in stillness.

—

I grew up in the shadow of substance use. Both of my parents struggled with addiction at various points throughout my childhood and adolescence. That child learned that when things got hard, it was normal to reach for something to take the edge off. He learned that pain was something to escape, rather than feel. He learned that substances were the answer when life became too much to bear.

My kids are growing up in a different kind of light. Not the harsh glare of perfection, but the warm presence of someone who chooses to commit—to stay. But this path I’ve chosen isn’t about resentment or vindication. It’s about breaking the chain. It’s about honoring my parents by living differently because I know, deep down, they wanted something better, too.

And because my girls deserve nothing less than a sober father. Not a perfect one, but a present one. A father who loves them deeply. Who admits when he's wrong. Who apologizes. Who cries in front of them and holds them when they cry.

That shows up in the sacred, everyday mess of parenthood. Like when one of my daughters dissolves into tears on the kitchen floor, and I don't try to fix it—or her. I kneel beside her. I breathe. I place a hand on her back. I stay. Eventually, she climbs into my lap, her small body still trembling, and we sit together—silent, grounded, enough.

That's sobriety, too. The capacity to stay present with pain, mine and theirs, without needing to numb it or fix it or run from it. The willingness to be fully here, even when here is uncomfortable. Especially then.

This is the gift I couldn't give myself as a child, but I can give to them: the experience of being truly seen and held, no matter what they're feeling. It's the gift my parents wanted to give but couldn't, trapped as they were in their own survival patterns. The cycle breaks here, in these small moments of presence.

—

When I first walked into that church basement a decade ago, I didn’t understand the God talk. The language of higher power made me cringe. But I see now that what I was searching for wasn’t God in the traditional sense. It was connection—to myself, to others, and to the totality of life.

And connection is what sobriety has given me. It didn’t come through doctrine or dogma, but through practice. Through embodiment. Through expression. Through telling the truth. Through being with others who are trying to do the same.

A decade in, I’m still listening. Still learning. Still returning to myself, again and again, exactly as I am.

One day at a time.

Several months ago, I revisited Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, and was grabbed by a passage that seemed to have been waiting for my return:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Rilke’s wisdom holds even more relevance today than when he wrote these words in the early 1900s.

We now live in a culture that values speed and convenience, where search engines and AIs can answer most questions in seconds. From a young age, we’re taught that success depends on having the right answers, and quickly. When we don’t know it all, we feel lost, inadequate, or even flawed.

There are some questions whose answers cannot come quickly, or at all. What if, as Rilke suggests, we allowed the biggest questions to guide us, carving our path through the unknown and teaching us to embrace uncertainty?

Sometimes, the journey the question puts us on is more valuable than the answer we may find.

A few weeks after revisiting Rilke, I listened to an episode of the Huberman Lab podcast featuring Josh Waitzkin—the chess prodigy turned martial artist and coach. He discussed his Most Important Question (MIQ), a framework he and his clients use to guide focus, decisions, and growth. It clicked immediately. This was the same kind of inquiry Rilke had written about, but applied to high performers.

In the midst of my own season of change, I felt a deep pull to explore the biggest question I could ask myself, my own MIQ.

Through daily morning pages and long nature walks, I began to listen to what demanded my attention. As the material emerged from my psyche and soma, I “emptied the tank” on paper, capturing my thoughts, emotions, sensations, and images. I reflected on what was pulling at me emotionally, creatively, and spiritually, noticing the open loops, friction, and subtle tension in my thoughts and body. I wasn’t seeking answers, but simply gathering raw material for my own MIQ to emerge.

A list of questions began taking form in my journal. Over several days, I let them linger, reading them aloud and feeling into each one until, finally, my guiding question was obvious:

What is the clearest, most aligned structure for work in this season of my life?

When I read the question aloud, something stirred deep within me—an intellectual knowing, a deep longing in my heart, tension in my belly, and creative energy rising from the center of my being. This question didn’t offer the relief of an easy answer, but it introduced a new purpose: a resonance, a sense of "this really matters to me."

I knew I had to stay close to the question, creating space but returning to it gently, again and again. I let it shape how I began and ended my days, weaving into my creative work, conversations, and moments of pause. I journaled on it daily, placed it on post-it notes around my office, set it as my iPhone wallpaper, and wrote it down each night before bed. It became like a mirror I couldn’t look away from, reflecting my truth back at me from different angles every day.

In the first week, I broke the question apart, treating each piece as an inquiry to explore: What season of life am I in? What feels aligned, and what doesn’t? What is clear? Which structures in my life feel soul-nourishing versus life-draining? These were loose threads, and over time, as I sat with what emerged, a fuller tapestry slowly began to take shape.

As I went through this process, I felt the urge to give the question space to breathe. I’d step away from it, sometimes for long stretches during the day, or even for a day or two. I trusted that, in those pauses, it was quietly deepening its roots in my unconscious. The question became a relationship, one where at times I was deeply engaged, and at other times, it quietly lingered, guiding me without needing my constant attention.

Over several weeks, longings I hadn’t fully acknowledged started to surface—desires for spaciousness, simplicity, depth and craft, creative expression, a deeper connection with nature, and more time with family. But alongside these longings, there were tensions my ego didn’t want to face, because the answers were threatening things I cared deeply about, like Downshift. Eventually, the actions I needed to take became clear, but not through force or fear, but out of reverence and clarity.

Through this process, I’ve come to appreciate that a great question is a living, dynamic inquiry. You can’t solve it all at once; it requires you to inhabit it, to wear it like your favorite outfit. As you do, it stretches your perspective, broadens your understanding, deepens your sense of self, and expands what you thought was possible. It reveals where you are and what’s ready to unfold in your life.

The right questions carry a gravity of their own. They demand your attention and shift it. Living the question is not about getting things "right" but about getting closer. Closer to the pulse of life. Closer to that which matters. Closer to your truth, until you can’t ignore it anymore.

And how did I know when I had lived inside the question long enough? I could feel it. There was a sense of completion, of knowing, of saturation. New energies were wanting to take root. Not because I had answered it, but because the question had brought me through something, a threshold. I began to feel different. My life and sense of self was changing, both subtly and profoundly.

Now, nearly two months later, I’ve begun to step into change and move toward a more soul-aligned life. I’ve carved out more creative time each day, planned a summer sabbatical to be with my family and go on a vision quest, and deepened my study of Hakomi. I’ve also formed a partnership with my colleague David Spinks at Downshift to share the load, and I’ve stopped working at night.

Through all of this, I’ve realized that leading and scaling a startup no longer aligns with the season of life I’m in. Equally important, being a CEO and traditional founder isn’t in my nature. It’s not who I am, and it’s not what’s calling to me. Instead, I’m called to deepen my craft as a coach and writer, spend more time in nature and with my family, and less time in front of a screen.

The question continues to work on me in unexpected ways, revealing deeper layers with each passing day. It’s pushing me to embrace uncertainty, step away from what no longer serves, and lean into what truly matters. By living with the question, rather than rushing toward an answer, I’ve found the next thread of transformation.

In the simplicity of a single question lies profound depth. While answers may come over time, the true gift is in how the question shapes us along the way. To live with it is to embrace the unknown, trusting that in the stillness and patience, something deeper is being revealed.

What if we all lived more fully in the presence of the questions that stir us, instead of rushing to resolve them? Maybe, in the end, it’s not the answers that matter, but how these questions move us forward, step by step, toward something new.

I woke up with a strange heat in my body—an inner signal that something was off, though I couldn't yet place it. For a moment, I remained still beneath the heavy blanket, trying to discern what I was feeling. I was warm and cold at the same time.

Eventually, I got up and stumbled to the bathroom. My head was thick with fog. The tile was cold beneath my feet. I fumbled through the cabinet, found the thermometer, slipped it beneath my tongue, and waited.

The numbers ticked upward: 96…98…99…100…

When it finally beeped—101—I felt a sudden drop, a tightening deep in my stomach.

I opened the hallway closet, pulled out a COVID test, ran the swab around my nose, and set it on the bathroom sink.

I didn't even have time to look away. The second line appeared almost instantly.

Positive.

The room felt suddenly still and airless. My mind darted to the day ahead: our long-anticipated team off-site. The entire team had flown in from across the country. We'd been planning it for months. I had booked an Airbnb, gone shopping, curated the agenda with intention and care, woven strategy sessions with space for bonding, nature, and inner work.

Gone.

Then, in a deeper, more panicked breath, I thought of the Downshift retreat on Tuesday, just five days away. The cornerstone of our work. The sacred container I had poured myself into, shaped and reshaped over several years. The experience that gives me life, that reminds me why I do this work at all.

Within minutes, I moved into quarantine in our guest bedroom, separated from my team and my family. I kept the shades half drawn and cracked the windows, just enough to feel the cool air drift in, to hear the rustle of trees outside. A small but vital thread connecting me to the world beyond the walls.

For the first few hours, I stayed busy. Texting updates. Shuffling logistics. Trying to convince myself that maybe this would pass quickly. Maybe I'd bounce back in time.

But as the hours passed and my health declined, reality began to sink in.

I would have to Zoom into the off-site and miss the bonding, the side conversations, the hugs, the laughter on the trail. Two days of hikes, shared meals, and deep strategy, now reduced to a mosaic of digital pixels.

Part of me wanted to resist, to fight against what was unfolding, but another part already knew: this was out of my hands.

I could try to relax into it, to trust the unfolding, but there was also a vulnerable, childlike part of me that was just heartbroken to miss it all. Saddened to not be there. Disappointed to feel so far from the team I had been craving connection with.

And the next morning, I admitted to myself what my body had already known. I likely wouldn't make the retreat. I was still down and out.

Emotional Undertow

I drifted in and out of sleep, waking to the stillness of the house, the filtered light through half-drawn shades. At one point, restless and aching for connection, I reached for my phone and began scrolling through texts. And there it was—a photo of the team without me. Smiling on a trail. Arms wrapped around each other. Together.

That's when the breakdown came.

I was sick. Powerless. My team was together, still moving forward, preparing for the retreat…without me. The program I had created, nurtured, and protected as if it were my own child.

I could feel the sadness begin to wash over me. A heaviness settled in my chest, like a weight pressing down at the very center of my being, pinning me into the bed. I didn't resist it. I let it come.

And then it arrived, rising from somewhere deep inside me, moving up through my belly, into my throat, toward my eyes. Tears surfaced. And I sobbed.

Not just one wave of sadness, but many. Each with its own texture, its own rhythm, its own somatic fingerprint.

The first wave was pure heartbreak. I had poured so much of myself into this retreat—the months of shaping, promoting, refining—and now it was slipping through my fingers.

The second wave was the sting of absence. My team was gathered, and I wasn't there. They sent updates, voice notes, reflections. I was glad they were finding clarity, but I also felt, acutely, like an outsider in the company I founded.

The third wave was longing. These moments of in-person connection are rare, special. So much of my work is remote, lived through screens and Zoom. I had craved this: the warmth of shared meals, the spark of live collaboration, the inside jokes, the ease of being in each other's presence.

The final wave was grief, the kind that lives below words. A hollow ache. The weight of anticipation dissolving into sheer disappointment.

I cried for a long time.

Not as a performance, not to process or to move through, just to be with what was.

And when the tears finally began to fade, something subtler emerged—a quiet trembling in my belly.

This sensation awakened a memory deep in my body and psyche: a medicine journey where my ego had dissolved into nothingness. In that sacred space beyond words, a truth had been revealed: nothing was actually mine to possess. Not my work. Not my body. Not even my family. Everything belonged to something larger. My purpose was simply to serve the unfolding.

That same energy returned now as I lay feverish in bed, crying, gentle but unmistakable, washing over me despite my weakened state.

I lay there, eyes closed, and let the memory and feeling move through me. Deep vibrations in my belly. Shaking.

Then I began to think of my team—Tracy, David, and Andy.

I thought of how much each of them brought to Downshift. Tracy's intuition and optimism. David's steadiness and thoughtfulness. Andy's creativity and genius. The curriculum we'd shaped together through debate and discovery. The late-night audio messages shared over Slack. The countless hours they had poured into this work. Not out of obligation, but out of belief. The way each of them had stepped forward not as support, but as leaders, as true partners.

As I held these realizations, something began to soften.

My body settled deeper into the mattress. The clenching in my chest began to release. The tears began to ease. A warmth spread through my torso, not a feeling, exactly, but a presence.

Gratitude. Appreciation. Genuine love and respect.

And then, without fanfare or announcement, a quiet truth landed in the center of my being:

Downshift doesn't need me.

Not in the way I had once believed. Not to be the guru. Not to facilitate every workshop. Not to obsess over every detail. Not to sit in every meeting or approve every decision. Not to be the face of every launch or the fixer of every challenge.

And somehow, that didn't feel like a loss. It felt like a gift.

The Gift of Letting Go

It wasn’t a flash of insight or a single defining sentence, just a slow, steady recognition that something I had helped birth had grown strong enough to stand on its own.

There was no need to push. No need to strive. No need to be in every discussion or decision. No need to control. No need to feed my ego or make it about me.

And in that moment, something even deeper surfaced:

Maybe this is the mark of real leadership—not being the one everyone depends on, not holding the weight of the whole thing on your shoulders, but quietly creating the conditions for others to rise. It's not about being central, or irreplaceable, or always available to swoop in and solve things. It's about cultivating enough clarity, structure, and trust that others feel empowered to step forward, not out of obligation, but from a genuine sense of ownership and care.

It's about building something that doesn't collapse in your absence. Something with roots. Something with integrity and coherence that lives beyond your personality or presence. Something that can stand on its own, not because you're no longer needed, but because you've created the kind of foundation that allows others to help carry it forward.

There's a strange beauty in that—a mix of grief and grace—as you realize the very thing you poured yourself into no longer relies on you in the same way.

It also means not needing to hold it all. Not being the one who answers every question, fixes every issue, or carries every burden. That’s been a deep shift for me. I’m no longer a solopreneur, willing this thing into existence alone while my family sleeps. I have a team now. A real one. And part of my work is learning to trust them. To let go of the subtle compulsions to over-function, to rescue, to insert myself just to feel useful.

It's now about trusting others to carry the fire. Not just to keep it lit, but to tend it in their own way. To bring their own wood, their own rituals, their own steady hands and discerning hearts. There's something humbling about stepping back and watching that happen, about seeing the warmth and light of the thing you helped ignite continue to radiate without needing to stand beside it.

And maybe that's the deeper invitation: not to disappear, not to disengage, but to loosen the grip. To shift from being the sole source of the fire to becoming one of many who tend it, each of us adding something essential, none of us holding it alone.

Tending the Fire, Together

The fire stayed lit. The circle held.

A few days later, I made it to the retreat. I arrived a day late, masked and distanced, but grateful to step once more into the work I so dearly love, and to feel the trust of both the team and the participants. I didn’t arrive with FOMO. I didn’t need a play-by-play of what I had missed. I knew my team. I trusted them. And I could feel, in the space, that they had carried it beautifully.

The retreat was deeply nourishing, not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet, grounded rhythm that felt true. The space held a kind of ease. The energy was steady and spacious. The group dropped in deep, layer by layer, and the team held it all with grace, clarity, and care. Nothing felt forced. The work unfolded naturally, in its own timing, as if the guides and the group knew what was needed.

But the real transformation, the one I’ll carry with me, didn’t happen at the retreat.

It happened earlier, in that quiet room, all alone, on Sunday afternoon.

I hadn’t seen the threshold until I was already crossing it. I hadn’t recognized the lesson I was being offered until I had fully surrendered to what was.

That was the moment something deep began to shift.

The moment I felt—less as a thought and more as a knowing in my body—that true leadership isn’t about being central, or in control, or even responsible for every outcome.

It’s about trust.
It’s about service.
It’s about the quiet, ongoing practice of supporting something greater than yourself, especially when you’re not the one in the room.

And maybe that’s when it matters most.

For years, I’ve coached ambitious professionals, published essays on stepping back, guided retreats, studied what happens when we stop sprinting. I believed I knew how to loosen my grip, to trust, to let things unfold instead of forcing them.

But beneath the stillness, an instinctual force still propelled me forward.

A few weeks ago, I found myself deep in the wild terrain of my own psyche, confronting my core wound, not just unworthiness, but the wound of ever-becoming. The subtle yet relentless urge to stay in motion. Always learning, always growing, always striving.

Beneath it all was a single belief: stillness isn’t just uncomfortable but also dangerous. If I slowed down, I risked fading. Becoming irrelevant. Being left behind and alone.

As I looked closer, I saw how deeply this instinct had shaped me. How it built an identity around movement, momentum, and the unconscious belief of not enough. This wound had forged my Achiever: the relentless driver who refused to stop, convinced that only by doing more could I earn my place in the world.

Then, as I sat with the wound, and with my inner Achiever, the reality of it hit me like a punch to the gut.

The very thing I had built—Downshift, a program designed to help ambitious professionals slow down—was still being driven by the part of me that refused to stop.

My Achiever is clever. It shapeshifts. It can even turn slowing down into something to master, something to prove.

But now the truth was impossible to ignore: I was still caught in its grip.

I had been running, not just from slowing down, but from the visceral fear that if I let go of momentum, if I wasn’t actively proving my value in the world, especially at 45, I would fade into irrelevance.

Beneath that was a deeper fear: if I stopped, I would have to confront the question: who am I without all the doing?

And yet, as I sat with the weight of this realization, another truth emerged.

At the center of my unworthiness wasn’t just pain. It was my soul.

The wound itself, the very thing I had spent my life avoiding, held the gift I was meant to offer the world.

The Invitation: A Meeting of Opposites

When I shared this sobering realization with Kent Dobson, a guide at Animus Valley Institute, he nodded.

“Sit with your Achiever and your soul,” he said. “Not just in your head. Feel it. Let it move through you. Embody it. Step inside of it.”

Kent leaned in slightly, his voice steady.

“Imagine two interlocking circles,” he said. “One for everything you’ve known yourself to be—the roles, the drive, the Achiever who’s always pushing forward. The other? That’s your soul. The part of you that moves differently. The part that knows. The Fire Snail.”

He let the words settle.

"Where they overlap…that’s the Mandorla. The place where contradictions meet. The tension between them isn’t something to resolve. It’s something to hold. And if you stay with it long enough, something new emerges."

I sat with his words long after our conversation ended. I knew I couldn’t just think about this. I simply had to step into it.

So the next morning, alone in my office, I closed the door, divided the room in two with my meditation cushion, and allowed the space to morph into my Mandorla.

I stood at the edge of it, heart pounding.

If I was going to do this, I had to fully step in, to let each part of me take the stage, uninterrupted, unfiltered. To embody them completely, without trying to fix, soften, or intellectualize them.

I braced myself, took a deep breath, and stepped forward into the Achiever.

The Heat of Never Enough

Everything in my body changes.

My breath shallows, my chest constricts, my fingers twitch, ready to reach, to grab something, to make shit happen. My weight shifts forward onto the balls of my feet. No settling. No resting. Just moving.

And then, the voice arrives. Fast. Blunt. Unapologetic.

Steve, what the hell are you doing?

Slowing down? Pausing? Thinking?

You don’t have time for this. We don’t have time for this.

My hand slices through the air, quick, decisive, as if there’s no time for hesitation.

You think the world is going to wait for you?

You think Downshift is just going to build itself while you sit here being and feeling things?

Get real.

I exhale sharply, shaking my head. Pathetic.

You should be creating. Publishing. Building. Scaling.

You’ve already taken your foot off the gas too much. You’re getting soft.

My jaw tightens. Shoulders draw up. Heat surges through my arms, restless, electric, bracing for impact.

I feel it now…the hum beneath my skin, the sharp current that says keep going, keep pushing, keep proving.

Don’t forget, you’re either growing, or you’re fading.

The words don’t just land. They reverberate.

Not just my voice, but my father’s, my brother’s, my coaches’.

The voices that shaped me, the ones that drilled it in over and over: keep going, don’t slow down, don’t fall behind.

You have to be the best. You have to win.

Look around.

The winners? They don’t stop. They don’t hesitate. They don’t sit in silence waiting for “alignment.”

They fucking move. They obsess. They grind. They execute.

My arms keep moving, cutting through the air, commanding, restless.

You think you have time for this? You’re 45.

The heat in my solar plexus spikes.

Every year. Every month. Every day. It all matters.

And you think you can afford to slow down?

Someone else is going to pass you and take your place. Someone younger. Someone hungrier. Someone more committed.

And then what?

Do you want to be remembered as the guy who had potential?

The guy who had something real but let it slip because he wanted to trust the process instead of going for it?

What’s the plan, Steve?

Mid-day nature walks?

Morning journaling sessions? Writing pages no one will ever read, including yourself?

A summer sabbatical, just wandering while everyone else is building?

Long essays that take weeks to finish while others are posting threads daily?

What happens when you become irrelevant?

My breath is full-on shallow now, barely reaching my ribs.

I glance toward the other side of the room, the space where the Fire Snail waits, but I can’t look for long.

Hesitating means weakness.

Weakness means slipping.

My hands clench into fists. My arms feel tight, wired, bracing for impact.

Because that’s what this is, isn’t it?

Not just ambition. Survival.

If I don’t keep going, I lose momentum.

If I lose momentum, I lose the edge.

If I lose the edge, I lose everything.

The nightmare isn’t failure.

The nightmare is becoming irrelevant and ordinary.

My upper torso is on fire now…tight, burning, my whole nervous system locked in hyperarousal.

I exhale sharply, hands on my knees. My pulse is hammering. My entire body is trembling.

And yet…

There’s something else…a felt sense, just barely perceptible beneath the frenetic pulse.

A whisper. A pull. A knowing.

Something different.

I straighten my back, allow my breath to slow and deepen, and prepare to move to the other side of the room.

Where the Fire Snail waits.

Stepping Into Soul

I slowly step across the room and drop to my knees.

The shift is instant. My breath deepens, my shoulders drop, my weight settles back into my body. The sharp pulse of urgency that had gripped me begins to unravel, but it is still present, a faint hum in my chest, but no longer holding the reins.

Knees pressed against the floor, I feel something I hadn’t felt before—the full weight of my body being held. My palms rest lightly on my thighs, my breath moves deeper into my belly, and for the first time since stepping into this room, I feel my body arrive.

The urgency softens. The mind settles.

Something else begins to take shape.

Ah. Here I am. Home.

I close my eyes, and the static fades. My breath expands, filling spaces I hadn’t even realized were clenched. Softening. The tension in my ribs, in my shoulders, in my jaw…it loosens, dissolves.

I am no longer bracing. No longer straining toward some invisible finish line.

There is no finish line. There is nowhere else to be.

A warmth spreads through my limbs, slow, patient, steady. Not a surge, not an impulse, but something deeper, more intelligent. A quiet ember instead of a roaring flame.

The Fire Snail does not rush. It does not scramble for relevance. It does not seek recognition.

It moves as it moves, steady, unshaken, its rhythm woven into the very fabric of time.

I have always been here. Waiting. Knowing.

And now, as I settle into you, you remember.

Not as a new lesson, but as something long-forgotten. Something older than words. Older than effort.

You are exactly where you need to be.

A deeper exhale moves through me. I feel my connection to the earth beneath me, the slow rhythm of what is real. The ground is solid. It holds me without expectation.

There is no urgency here, no striving, no pressure to be anywhere but inside this moment.

I live in the depth of trust.

There is no rushing the seasons. No forcing the flower to bloom before it’s ready. No tearing the fruit from the tree before the harvest.

I know that enduring things take time. That real creation does not come from pressure, but from patience and allowing.

And I will be here for all of it, every phase of the cycle.

I see now: The world does not need another exhausted leader. It does not need another voice shouting into the void, fighting to be heard above the noise.

The world doesn’t need more noise. It needs depth. Presence. Work that is rooted, alive, slow enough to matter.

If I lose my connection to what is real, to the earth, to myself, and to those around me, nothing I create will last.

If I lose my connection, I lose everything.

So I step away, away from the compulsion to be seen, away from the instinct to move faster and go bigger.

I return to being. I return to what is real.

I create, not from urgency, but from a deep, rooted knowing that this is what I am here to do.

And I see now: Downshift will only succeed if I lead from this place.

The Achiever will hustle it into oblivion, burn it out before it could ever become what it was meant to be.

But the Fire Snail leads differently. It builds from the forest floor, from the soil, from the quiet places of emergence.

It does not force itself into the world.

It simply becomes.

This is the way of the Fire Snail.

Breath by breath. No rush.

Because when I lead from this place, everything aligns.

Not just sustainable, but potent.

Not just efficient, but alive.

I do not create to prove. I create to give.

And this—this is what I am here to give.

Sitting Inside the Tension

I step onto the meditation cushion in the center of the room. Slowly. Deliberately. My body still holds the grounded stillness of the Fire Snail, but as I settle in, something else begins to stir.

The Achiever is still here. Its energy hasn’t disappeared. It lingers, moving through me in quiet ripples, waiting to be acknowledged.

At first, I feel it as a faint buzzing…a restless current beneath my skin, not frantic but not quite still. Then, as I sit deeper into my body, the energy sharpens into something more acrid: anger.

A frustration and resentment that spreads through my ribs, into my arms, a pulsing fire. Anger at how much space the Achiever has taken up in my life. How often it has pulled me away from presence, out of connection, always reaching for the next thing, never allowing me to just be.

I sit with it. I let it burn. I let myself feel the full weight of resentment for all the times I was right there, in moments of beauty, of stillness, of love, and yet still somewhere else. Thinking about the next step, the next milestone, the next move.

And then, just as quickly as the anger rises, it shifts. The sharp edges dissolve into something deeper, something quieter.

Sadness.

It washes over me, unexpected and heavy. A grief for all the years I spent ruled by this energy. For the way it shaped me, propelled me forward, but never let me rest. For the quiet moments it stole. For how young it still feels inside of me, like a desperate, scrambling child, terrified that if it stops moving, it will disappear. Tears.

I breathe. I place a hand on my chest. And for the first time, I don’t fight it. I don’t try to push it away. I just sit with it.

I see you.

And in that seeing, something shifts again. The sadness, too, begins to soften. And in its place, appreciation emerges.

Because, of course, the Achiever was never the enemy. It has given me everything. My ability to build, to create, to reach. It has shaped who I am, carried me through challenges, brought me here.

I wouldn’t be where I am without it.

I let that truth settle into my bones. I honor the Achiever, not as a tyrant, but as a force that has served me well. And I see now that I don’t have to reject it. I don’t have to exile it.

I only have to let it rest.

My breath deepens. My shoulders drop. I turn my attention toward the Fire Snail.

And immediately, everything feels different.

There is no anger. No sadness. Just a quiet recognition of what has always been true.

This is what I long for. Not the frantic movement of proving, but the slow, steady rhythm of trust. Not urgency, but spaciousness. Not striving, but simply being.

I sit with both. The Achiever, no longer frantic, no longer demanding control. The Fire Snail, patient, unwavering, waiting for me to remember that it has always been here.

And I know: It is time for the Fire Snail to lead.

Not from rejection of the Achiever, but from a deeper truth.

Because I no longer need to prove. I no longer need to rush. I no longer need to chase.

I am exactly who and where I am meant to be.

And as that knowing settles, the Achiever exhales…a subtle, almost imperceptible release.

Finally, it softens.

Then, for the first time, it rests.

Leading from Soul

In the days that followed, I carried them both with me, the Achiever and the Fire Snail. The tension between them is no longer confined to the Mandorla but moving with me, moment by moment, like twin forces shaping my way forward.

I felt the Achiever stir each morning as soon as I walked into the office. The impulse was familiar, automatic…a pull toward momentum, toward proving, toward getting shit done.

And yet, the Fire Snail was there too. Not as a counterforce, but as something deeper, something steady beneath the urgency. When I caught myself reaching, it was the Fire Snail that whispered: Pause. Breathe. Feel your feet on the ground. What really matters right now?

For so long, I had missed something essential about this dance. In seeing the Achiever's shadow, I had forgotten to honor its wisdom. Because the Achiever carries wisdom too: the power of focused attention, the joy of bringing ideas into form, the deep satisfaction of seeing something through.

The problem was never the Achiever itself. The problem was what drove it.

When the Achiever operates from the wound of unworthiness, from the belief that I must become more to be enough, it can never rest. It becomes a master that demands constant motion, constant proof. It disconnects me from what truly matters, from the soul’s deeper longing for connection, creativity, and embodiment.

But when the Achiever is welcomed home, seen not as an enemy to overcome but as an ally to integrate, everything shifts. The question is no longer how to banish the Achiever, but how to invite it into right relationship.

This, I believe, is one of the most beautiful opportunities in the second half of life: to be rooted in soul and led from soul rather than ego. To let the deeper current, the Fire Snail’s steady knowing, guide the way forward.

The ego is not meant to be rejected. To create anything in the physical world, we need the ego’s capacity for focus, for structure, for persistence. The 3D world requires hands that can build, minds that can plan, wills that can sustain effort.

But the ego was never meant to be the captain. It is here to serve something greater.

When the soul leads and our actions emerge from our deepest values, our truest connection, our most authentic presence, the Achiever finds its rightful place. No longer driven by the need to prove its worth, it becomes a faithful servant to what matters most. It becomes the hands of the soul in the world.

This integration isn’t a destination I’ll reach once and for all. It’s a path I’ll walk again and again, a balance I’ll lose and find and lose again. Some days, the Achiever will still take the wheel, racing ahead of my soul’s pace. Some days, I’ll resist action entirely, mistaking stillness for depth.

But I now understand: I don’t have to rush this journey either. I don’t have to perfect this dance overnight. I simply need to notice, again and again, which voice is leading. To gently invite the soul forward when the Achiever has stepped ahead. To kindly call on the Achiever’s gifts when ideas are ready to take form.

And I know this truth: When the soul leads and the Achiever serves, something remarkable happens. Creation becomes neither forced nor abandoned. Action becomes neither compulsive nor avoided. Life becomes neither a constant race nor a permanent retreat.

Instead, my life becomes a powerful expression of what matters most to me, measured not by what I accomplish, but by how fully I embody my truest nature. Not by how much I produce, but by how deeply I connect with the current of creation moving through me.

Breath by breath. Slowly. Steadily. Powerfully.

Like the Fire Snail.

"Do you think it's possible to achieve greatness and be happy?"

Jason Jacobs asked me this on The Next Next podcast a few weeks ago. We were talking about what it takes to build something great later in life—when ambition collides with new realities. Kids, aging parents, and deepening responsibilities at home shift our attention and capacity, making the all-in, obsessive approach of our twenties less feasible.

Jason pressed further. "To perform at that level, it requires immense sacrifice. Do you think any of those people are actually happy? Do you need to be tortured, at some level, to make the level of sacrifice that cuts so much into the bone of daily joy?"

I sat with it for a moment, letting the weight of the question sink in.

"I don’t know if the highest performers in the world are tortured," I said. "But I do know that achieving greatness requires sacrifice—constraints, commitment, and focus."

At the time, I framed greatness as a question of tradeoffs—that some things require going all in, and suffering is just part of the deal. But sitting with it now, I wonder: Are we even asking the right question?

Because the more I think about it, the more it seems like we’ve been handed a narrow, incomplete version of greatness—one that worships effort, struggle, and sacrifice, while ignoring other ways people create extraordinary lives and impact.

What if greatness isn’t about how much we sacrifice, but about how fully we live?

Why Do We Believe We Have to Be the Best

We're not born believing we have to be the greatest. There's no biological blueprint encoded within us that says we're destined to become hyper-achievers, strivers, or winners. Instead, we inherit success scripts—stories handed to us by our family, peers, and culture that tell us what it means to be worthy, what it takes to be "enough." Over time, these scripts become our operating system, silently shaping our choices and determining what we chase.

The most haunting of these scripts whispers: "Success is proof of your value. Without it, who are you?"

Other versions quietly vibrate in our unconscious:

• Work harder than everyone else, or you'll fall behind.

• You have to be the best to be taken seriously.

• Your worth is measured by your achievements.

• If you slow down, you'll become irrelevant.

We don’t wake up one day and decide to adopt these beliefs. They take root long before we even recognize them.

Maybe in our families, love felt tied to performance—affection flowing more freely when we excelled, running dry when we fell short. Maybe praise only came with straight A’s, championships, moments of standing out. Or maybe we watched a parent struggle, trapped in patterns of stagnation or self-destruction, and we silently vowed to carve out a different path, to escape from their shadow.

Over time, we internalize a quiet but powerful message: To be worthy—to be loved and accepted—you have to be exceptional. Being good isn't good enough. Only by achieving more, proving more, being more, do we earn our place.

Then we step into the world, and that message is no longer quiet—it’s everywhere.

American culture glorifies winners. Workplaces reward endless hours and constant achievement. Social media transforms every aspect of life into metrics to be optimized—followers, likes, and views. Those who rise to the top become case studies, while those in the middle fade into the background. Over time, the work itself stops mattering—it becomes merely a way to prove our worth, to be seen, to matter.

And when we look for role models, we see the same story repeated: the sacrificial greats. We glorify the ones who push through pain, who outwork everyone, who sacrifice their bodies, relationships, and well-being in the name of excellence. These stories become blueprints for how we believe we need to operate. Over time, they don’t just shape how we measure success; they shape how we measure ourselves.

Without realizing it, we absorb our culture’s success scripts as our own. We chase the accomplishments, follow the rules, and accept the tradeoffs offered to us—rarely questioning whether they align with what we actually want. The more we internalize them, the harder it becomes to imagine another way. And so we keep running, measuring ourselves against standards we never chose, sacrificing without stopping to ask: Is this even mine?

And that’s how it shows up—not as a conscious choice, but as a feeling you can’t shake. A quiet, gnawing pressure that follows you everywhere. In moments that should feel restful—on the couch, in the car, at the dinner table, with your family—it never fully lets you exhale. When your sense of worth is tied to achievement, anything other than work feels like falling behind.

And so we keep climbing, pushing, proving—never pausing long enough to ask where this path actually leads. We don’t question the game. We just keep playing harder, believing that if we suffer enough, we’ll finally arrive.

The Games We Play

In 1986, James Carse introduced a simple but profound idea: There are two kinds of games in life. “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” Decades later, Simon Sinek popularized this concept, but its essence has been around for generations—some pursuits are about winning, while others are about staying in the game as long as possible.

As a venture capitalist, I was playing a finite game. There were clear winners and losers, and I wanted to win. There was only so much room on a cap table in the hottest deals, only so many phenomenal opportunities each year. Success wasn’t just about making smart investments—it was about securing my place in my firm and industry, because there was always someone else ready to take it.

That meant constantly scanning, competing, and proving myself. Every pitch email, every meeting, every investment decision felt like a test—one more chance to prove I belonged. The stakes felt high because, in a finite game, they are. There wasn’t enough to go around. If I wasn't moving up, someone else was taking my place. And when I was in it, I didn’t question the rules—I just played harder.

I lived in a world where success was measured in markups, returns, exits, and rankings. But doing a good job wasn’t enough—I had to stay constantly plugged in, track the latest trends and companies, build a following, and earn the respect of entrepreneurs and co-investors. Because in a world where scarcity ruled, if I wasn’t winning, I was falling behind.

I told myself I was playing for the founders I backed, for the rush of making big bets, for financial security, for the intellectual challenge of the game itself. And maybe I was. But beneath that, there was something else—a quiet exhaustion, a creeping sense that no matter how much I strived or how many times I won, the game would never really end. There would always be the next deal, the next fund, the next wave to chase.

And that was the part that drained me the most—not just the effort itself, but the knowing that it would never stop.

I didn’t fully understand the difference between a finite and infinite game—until I started coaching. There's no “winning” in coaching. No ranking system, no scoreboard, no IPO moment that signals arrival. The only real measure of success is depth—depth of craft, depth of connection, depth of self-mastery.

In infinite games, there is no finish line. No point where you can declare victory and be done. The meaning isn’t in the outcome—at least for me, it’s in the continuous unfolding, the endless discovery of what’s possible, the deepening of one’s capacity to learn and serve.

To Win or to Live? The Tradeoffs We Ignore

There’s no final scorecard for who lived most meaningfully, no ultimate ranking of who made the biggest difference, no gold medal for who mastered life itself. And yet, we often approach our work and lives as if there were—as if every day is a competition, every achievement a test of our worth rather than a step in an ongoing journey.

We try to "win" at things that were never meant to be won. We chase the title of "best creator" when no such title exists. We compete to be the “top coach” in a field where excellence isn’t a zero-sum game. We strive to be the “most successful entrepreneur” as if some definitive ranking determines our success and worth.

It’s like trying to "win" at watching your child grow up. The very framing misses the point entirely. And yet, that's exactly what we're doing in so many areas of our lives. We exhaust ourselves chasing success, believing that if we just push hard enough, sacrifice enough, achieve enough, we’ll finally earn the love, security, or fulfillment we crave. But in the process, we sacrifice the very things we’re running toward.

We grind harder, work longer, push faster—believing it’s the only way forward. We mistake motion for progress, busyness for purpose. We keep climbing mountains that don't exist, never stopping to ask: What if the thing I’m chasing is already here? Am I sacrificing what I truly want in pursuit of something I think I need?

If you feel the pressure to be "the best," take a step back. Ask yourself:

• Is this truly a finite game, or am I applying the wrong rules?

• Am I running old success scripts that no longer serve me?

• What would success on my own terms actually look like?

• Am I still chasing external validation, or am I playing for the love of the craft?

• If there were no rankings, no scoreboards, no trophies—would I still be doing this?

You don't need anyone's approval to stop playing games that drain you and start playing ones that energize you. You can step off the treadmill of endless competition and into the infinite game of continuous unfolding. You can shift from asking "How do I win?" to wondering "How do I keep this journey interesting?" From "How do I beat everyone else?" to "How do I make this sustainable for a lifetime?"

You can simply choose—right now—to play a different game.

What Happens When You Stop Playing the Wrong Game?

Shifting from a finite to an infinite game reshaped how I approach my work—and my life.

I have zero interest in being the best coach in the world—because that title doesn't exist. There’s no singular definition of success. What I care about is connection, impact, and longevity. I care about sharpening my skills, being of service, continuing to learn, and staying engaged in the work for decades to come.

This shift isn’t about lowering ambition—it’s about redirecting it. Playing an infinite game doesn’t mean you stop striving, it means you strive differently:

• Instead of beating the competition, you focus on your own growth—because the competition doesn’t define your success.

• Instead of proving yourself, you deepen your craft.

• Instead of racing toward an endpoint, you embrace the process—because there is no endpoint, only evolution.

• Instead of chasing short-term wins, every action becomes a long-term investment.

We’re told that greatness requires sacrifice. That to reach the top, we have to give up something—our time, our energy, our health, our relationships. And yes, meaningful work requires commitment. But if the game you’re playing forces you to sacrifice the very things that make life worth living—what exactly are you winning?

And that’s what I started to see in others who had built careers with longevity—not just in coaching and writing, but across pursuits. Watching my coaching clients shift from finite to infinite games, and rewrite the rules altogether, I’ve learned time and again how many options we truly have for how to live and how to define greatness and a great life. We’ve been taught to believe that greatness has to be grueling. That impact has to come at the expense of ease. That to achieve anything meaningful, we have to push ourselves to the brink. But there are other ways to play, and games you have never even heard of.

Jason asked if greatness and happiness could coexist. But maybe that’s not the real question. Maybe the real challenge is redefining greatness itself—so that it’s not about sacrifice for its own sake, but about the pursuit of what truly matters. That way, you get to decide what the rules and opportunities are for your own life.

The goal shouldn’t be to win a game that costs you everything. Instead, you could build a game you really want to play.

Where the Road Bends has always been about navigating transitions with awareness and intention, drawing from my own journey and the wisdom of those I’m privileged to support through Downshift.

Lately, I find myself in a season of deep learning and expansion. Winter, after all, invites us inward—to reflect, to settle, to uncover the quiet seeds of growth beneath the surface. And yet, even in its stillness, nature reminds us of resilience.

Here in upstate New York, the ground is frozen, blanketed in snow and ice. Yet, the Blue Jays, Woodpeckers, and other songbirds carry on, unfazed by the cold—a quiet testament to life’s persistence, even in the harshest conditions. There’s something humbling about winter’s pause, how it holds both dormancy and the quiet promise of what’s to come.

Beneath the cold and darkness, renewal is already in motion. The seeds, though hidden, are quietly awakening—just as we are, nudged by something unseen yet undeniable.

Below are the seeds in my life that are beginning to take root—and a few that are already breaking through the surface.

Spring 2025 Downshift Decelerator: Applications Now Open

I’m thrilled to announce that applications are now open for our Spring 2025 Downshift Decelerator cohort! Over the past year, we’ve had the honor of guiding 24 ambitious professionals through this program, witnessing profound and inspiring changes in their lives. They’ve moved countries, extended sabbaticals, finalized divorces, grieved serious illness, discovered their second calling, recovered from addiction, and more.

Downshift helps ambitious professionals recalibrate their inner compass, and create a relationship with work that feels intentional, authentic, and energizing. Our hope is to create a space where participants can slow down, reconnect with themselves, and explore what’s truly meaningful—especially in the face of uncertainty, change, or transition.

Our seven-week program begins with a transformational four-day retreat on March 18th at Menla Mountain Retreat in the Catskills, just two hours north of New York City. This retreat is where our community takes root, and together, we’ll explore how to cultivate embodied presence while exploring powerful themes such as endings, death, uncertainty, and the experience of lostness.

Following the retreat, participants will engage in six weeks of virtual programming designed to integrate and deepen the experience. This includes:

• Weekly workshops

• Peer partner groups

• Live AMA sessions with the guides

• An online group for connection and support

Each week, we’ll explore key topics designed to shift how you navigate work and life, including:

• Productivity and Busyness: Examining our cultural obsession with doing and how to redefine a healthier pace of life.

• Ambition and Achievement: Unpacking the drivers of success and ambition, and aligning them with what truly matters to you.

• Money and Security: Exploring your relationship with money and how it influences your decisions, freedom, and sense of safety.

• Core Values: Identifying the principles that ground you and using them as a compass for your choices.

• Zone of Genius: Understanding where your unique strengths lie and how to work in alignment with them.

• Possible Selves and Experimentation: Imagining new versions of yourself and testing possibilities to find what feels most alive and true.

Over the past year, we’ve guided two cohorts through this journey, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, with NPS scores consistently between 8 and 10. This spring, we’re excited to bring you our most refined and intentional offering yet, with deeper community connections, enhanced virtual workshops, and so much more.

We’re hosting three informational sessions in February, where you’ll have the chance to meet our team and hear directly from two alumni panels. These sessions are a wonderful opportunity to explore whether this journey resonates with you. I hope you’ll consider applying—or sharing this with friends or loved ones navigating a transition.

Learn More & Apply

Stepping into Leadership at Downshift

This year marks a profound turning point—not just in my career, but in my sense of who I’m becoming.

For the past five years, I’ve been a solo practitioner, moving with autonomy and flow, shaping my work around my own rhythms and desires. But now, I feel an undeniable pull toward something bigger: stepping fully into leadership, not just as a coach, but as a founder, as a steward of a growing team, and as a guide for the evolution of Downshift itself. We are now a team of five. What was once just an idea, a vision I held close, is now a living, breathing entity with a mission and momentum of its own.

Stepping into this kind of leadership requires letting go. There’s a part of me that still clings to that freedom I had as a solopreneur, that feels the weight of responsibility as a loss of something precious. But I also know this: true service often asks us to surrender parts of ourselves we’ve held tightly, so that something even greater can emerge.

I’ve wanted this transition for a long time, and now that I’m in it, I feel the full spectrum the human experience—the excitement, the fear, the resistance, the deep sense of purpose. I’m learning to hold it all, to trust the unfolding, and to allow myself to be supported by the incredible team around me.

I don’t have it all figured out. I’m still feeling into what it means to lead in a way that feels fully aligned, to hold responsibility without losing presence, to serve without self-sacrifice. But I do know this: I’m all in.

And that feels like a beginning.

Rooted in What Matters: My Core Values for 2025

In December, I completed the Downshift Annual Review. It was a grounding and illuminating process—both a pause to take stock of a truly incredible 2024 and a doorway into what energizes me and brings me alive. Through this practice, I identified five core values that feel deeply aligned with who I am and how I aspire to show up in the world:

• Spacious Presence: To be deeply attuned to both my inner experience and the external environment, fully inhabiting the present moment.

• Holistic Health: To lovingly nurture and care for my body, mind, and spirit with intention and reverence.

• Devotional Service: To serve life, family, and Downshift with love, presence, and a commitment to spreading growth and consciousness.

• Creative Expression: To channel and express the creative force that flows through and around me, bringing ideas and visions to life.

• Deep Learning: To explore new domains and depths of knowledge and embody that understanding in daily life.

There’s an undeniable energy and rightness to these values—they’re not aspirational or distant ideals, but rather principles that are already alive and expressing themselves in my life every day. Recognizing them has felt like coming home to myself.

Hakomi: The Next Evolution of My Coaching

Three years ago, I discovered Hakomi—a mindfulness-based somatic psychotherapy that uses deep awareness to uncover the unconscious beliefs shaping our lived experience. Guided by five core principles—mind-body holism, nonviolence, organicity, unity, and mindfulness—Hakomi invites clients to slow down, sense their inner world, and observe how deeply held patterns influence their reality. In this space of gentle observation, insight naturally arises, creating the conditions for healing and transformation.

Ron Kurtz, Hakomi’s founder, described it as “assisted self-study.” Using mindfulness and the wisdom of the body, the practitioner and client explore how unconscious beliefs organize experience, including our thoughts, perceptions, and emotions. Through experiments—subtle, evocative explorations that reveal the inner structure of a client’s reality—we uncover the core messages that have shaped their sense of self. From there, we don’t analyze or try to fix—we offer the nourishment needed to heal, integrate, and become whole.

For years, I explored somatic therapy and coaching in a more informal way, but last year, I felt an undeniable pull to go deeper. I began with a five-day intensive training and was immediately struck by the method’s gentleness and elegance, yet profound transformative power. Shortly after, I started working with a master Hakomi therapist, and each session has left me more resourced, integrated, and deeply healed.

Last weekend, I took a big step forward, beginning the Level I Comprehensive Training—the first milestone on the multi-year path to Hakomi certification. The bar for certification is high, requiring years of study, practice, and embodiment, but I’m fully committed to the journey ahead.

Hakomi represents a significant evolution in my journey of healing, presence, and transformation. I’m energized to be a student again, humbled by the depth of this path, and already noticing how it’s reshaping the way I show up in both my work and life.

Turning Towards Elders

For most of my life, I’ve kept older men at a distance. More recently, that distance extended to master coaches, teachers, and practitioners—those 10, 20, even 30 years ahead of me. I admired them, but I couldn’t let them in. There was fear in it. Fear of being judged, of not measuring up, of being exposed in ways I couldn’t fully name. But beneath that fear lay something deeper: an old wound.

I’ve had a complicated relationship with my father—at times deeply close, at times painfully strained. And in high school, I was traumatized and assaulted by my football coach who led with control and domination rather than care and wisdom. Somewhere along the way, I learned to be wary of authority, of older men in positions of power. I told myself I didn’t need mentors, that I could find my own way. And for a long time, I did.

But this year, I turned toward what I had been avoiding. I started building real relationships with master coaches, therapists, and seasoned practitioners—elders, in the truest sense. Not just as colleagues, but as guides. And something in me is softening. There’s a different kind of strength in allowing myself to be mentored and taught, to be shaped by those who have walked further down the path.

I’m finally embracing that I don’t have to navigate this work alone—that I don’t have to uncover every insight in isolation or rely solely on my own experience to deepen as a coach and healer. And for the first time, I don’t want to. I want to be taught, challenged, and refined by those who have spent decades mastering this craft. I’m here for it. I’m ready to listen, to absorb, to allow mentorship to shape me in ways I once resisted.

A Journey Into Oneness: Exploring Non-Duality

For the past 45 days, I’ve been on an immersive exploration into the world of non-dual meditation and Dzogchen philosophy. At its heart, non-duality points to the recognition that the boundaries we perceive—between self and other, subject and object—are constructs, and that beneath these appearances lies an indivisible oneness. It’s not just a concept to grasp intellectually (and I’ve struggled with it in the past), but a way of directly experiencing reality as it truly is—free from the filters of separation.

My close friend Alex Olshonsky introduced me to Michael Taft, a gifted non-dual meditation teacher who has posted dozens of guided meditations on his generous YouTube channel. Each session is 90 minutes long, featuring a 60-minute meditation followed by a 30-minute dharma talk. Every morning, I’ve been sitting with Michael’s brilliant and relatable guidance, and this practice has become a foundational part of my day.

This practice has also led me to explore the writings and teachings of Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, James Lowe, and others—each offering their own unique lens on non-duality. I’ve been particularly moved by The Imaginary Me by Adyashanti, Rupert Spira’s two-and-a-half-hour masterclass on the Know Thyself Podcast, and The Illusion of Solidity by James Lowe. These voices have served as signposts along the path, helping me deepen both my understanding and my practice.

Through this daily practice, I’ve found myself seeing reality through a completely fresh lens. There’s a lightness to how I move through the world, a spaciousness in my perspective, and a deepened sense of presence I haven’t felt before. It’s subtle, but it’s reshaping how I experience everything—from the mundane to the profound.

Soulcraft: A Deeper Calling

Last summer, I attended a week-long Soulcraft retreat with the Animus Valley Institute, an experience that profoundly reshaped my relationship with nature and deepened my sense of connection to something vast and mysterious. While wandering in the wilderness, I had a mystical experience and a soul encounter—one that left me with an unshakable belief that when we slow down and listen, we can attune to and access an intelligence far greater than ourselves.

Since then, I’ve been immersing myself in Bill Plotkin’s work, particularly The Journey to Soul Initiation and Nature and the Human Soul. These books explore his Soul Development Wheel, a nature-based model of human development that maps the stages of life—not just psychologically, but also ecologically and spiritually. Unlike conventional developmental models, which often emphasize social adaptation, Plotkin’s framework guides individuals beyond ego-centered adulthood toward true soul initiation—an identity rooted in nature, purpose, and deep belonging.

I was so captivated by these ideas that I’m currently enrolled in a ten-week intensive to study this model in depth.

While I haven’t yet integrated Soulcraft—Plotkin’s approach to soul initiation—into Downshift, I sense this path holds deep potential for our work. Soul work invites us to step beyond personal growth and into mythopoetic discovery—the uncovering of one’s unique ecological niche in the greater web of life. As I continue deepening my understanding of Animus’ teachings and Plotkin’s framework, I’m exploring how these profound inquiries might eventually weave into my coaching practice.

Trusting What’s Beneath the Surface

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. Truly.

If anything in this update resonated with you—if something sparked a thought, a feeling, or a curiosity—I’d love to hear from you. Don’t hesitate to reach out.

I don’t know exactly how all these seeds will take root or what will emerge from them. And, honestly, I’m okay with that. This season of my life feels like one of unfolding rather than controlling, of stepping forward with openness rather than certainty. What I do know is that I’m here for it—holding my experience with curiosity, embracing the unknown, and, more than anything, enjoying the ride.

Jake sat across from me, carrying the weight of transition like an anchor tethered to his soul. Now on sabbatical, he had built a successful company, and though he had stepped back from day-to-day operations, he remained entangled in several unfinished projects. He wanted to write a book, support his wife and family, and rediscover a sense of purpose—but he felt paralyzed.

"It's resistance," he said, almost spitting out the word. "I've been trying to work through resistance for 10 years, and I haven't really changed anything. I didn't even see it for what it was until my early 30s, but now it's everywhere. It's like this sticky film I can't shake off—the stories I tell myself about it, the shame and fear it stirs, the way it keeps me stuck. Why is it so damn persistent?"

His frustration was palpable, his voice heavy with exhaustion. "I've tried everything," he continued, ticking off a list: "IFS, psychedelics, somatic experiencing, meditation, coaching. And yet… it's crafty. Every time I get close, it finds a way to redirect me."

There was a moment of silence as he wrestled with the questions that had been gnawing at him for years. Then, almost in a whisper, he said, "I know this book has potential—it could really matter. But what if I never try? And worse… what if I do try, and it still isn't enough?"

Shame and fear hung thick in the air, each attempt to push through winding tighter with every effort. The more he fought it, the more the threads of doubt tangled, trapping him in a loop that felt impossible to escape.

I let the silence settle before speaking. "Jake, I notice something in the way you're describing this. It's like you're resisting the resistance itself. What if, instead of trying to fight it or push through, you surrendered to it? What might it look like to welcome it—to let it exist without trying to fix it?"

He shifted in his seat, his brow furrowing. "Surrender to it?" he said, his tone a mix of skepticism and curiosity. "That feels… impossible. If I surrender, won't I just be stuck there forever?"

"That's what it feels like," I said. "But what if surrendering isn't about giving up? What if it's about creating space—space to see what resistance is trying to tell you, instead of letting it control you?"

Jake's dilemma was stark: resistance had become an immovable inner force, a wall he couldn't climb or break through, even with the guidance of highly skilled practitioners. It wasn't just the wall itself—it was the weight of what it represented. Each attempt to scale it left him more depleted, reinforcing the very thing he was trying to overcome.

What Keeps Us Stuck

Resistance is a familiar companion for anyone striving toward something meaningful. You've likely felt its grip—a force holding you back even when every logical step forward is clear. And perhaps, like Jake, you've done the work: therapy, coaching, mindfulness, self-exploration. Yet resistance persists, embedded in the patterns of your thoughts and actions.

Resistance isn't just a barrier—it's a protector. It arises from the parts of us that long to feel safe, avoid pain, or stay within the familiar. These parts don't care about your ambitions or aspirations; they care about keeping you secure. Change doesn't just challenge what you do—it threatens the identity you've built, along with your sense of control, belonging, and stability.

The paradox of resistance is that it doesn't just guard against external risks—it shields us from the discomfort of transformation itself. It's about the stories we tell ourselves when we reach the edge of our own growth. Resistance wraps itself around our deepest fears: fear of failure, fear of success, fear of being seen, fear of stepping into something new.

Over time, this kind of resistance becomes habitual, embedding itself into the patterns of our lives. It shows up in subtle ways—hesitation, procrastination, self-doubt—and keeps us tethered to the familiar, even when the familiar no longer serves us. For Jake, it crept into all corners of his life, from his book project to household responsibilities to unfinished work at his company.

What makes resistance so insidious is that it often disguises itself as personal failure. We misinterpret it as laziness, lack of discipline, or evidence that we're deeply flawed. We tell ourselves, I should be further along by now. I just need to try harder. I have to push through.

But this self-blame obscures the truth: resistance isn't a flaw in our character—it's a natural, human response to uncertainty and fear. It takes enormous effort to resist the things we truly want—effort that leaves us depleted and stuck. Stepping into a larger, more creative life demands a different kind of effort: the courage to move beyond resistance, to create, to face the vulnerability of being seen.

Resistance isn't a failure of effort, but it may be a mirror reflecting the tension between who we've been and who we're becoming. It's there to be understood, not overcome.

Opening the Door

Once you can identify your resistance, the next step is counterintuitive but essential: you welcome it.

Imagine resistance as an unexpected guest arriving at your door—not someone you invited, but someone who insists on being seen. You can ignore them, slam the door shut, or even yell at them to leave. But they'll remain, knocking persistently, until you acknowledge their presence. What might happen if, instead of treating resistance as an unwelcome intruder, you opened the door and said, Come in. Let's talk.

"What if," I suggested to Jake, "instead of trying to push through this resistance, you simply welcomed it?"

He looked at me skeptically. "Welcome it? I've spent 10 years trying to overcome it."

"Try this," I said. "Next time you sit down to write, or when you notice yourself avoiding those household tasks, just pause. Notice the resistance. Smile. Say hello to it, like you would to an old friend who keeps showing up uninvited."

"Hey there, resistance. Welcome back?" Jake's voice carried a mix of doubt and curiosity.

"Exactly. Then get curious about what it brings with it. What sensations do you notice in your body? What thoughts or emotions arise?"

Jake closed his eyes for a moment. "There's this tightness in my solar plexus. And this voice saying I'm not doing enough, that I should be further along by now."

"That's it," I said. "You've started the conversation. Now, instead of trying to silence that voice or push past the tightness, let them be exactly as they are. Ask what they need from you, what they're here to show you."

Over the next few weeks, as Jake began to engage with his resistance, its nature shifted. What once felt like an insurmountable block started to reveal itself as a messenger.

Resistance often carries more than just obstacles—it brings signals. Sometimes it warns us of risks we haven't yet addressed. Other times, it holds wisdom, urging us to slow down, reconsider, or realign. Often, it carries unresolved emotions that need to be felt before we can move forward.

When you approach resistance with curiosity instead of hostility, it stops being a wall you hit your head against. It reflects back the fears, beliefs, and unmet needs that hold you in place. What you once dismissed as procrastination might actually hold a clue about what matters most.

Welcoming resistance takes more than mental acknowledgment—it requires softening into the experience. Notice where it resides: a tightness in the chest, heaviness in the limbs, or a restless energy that keeps you pacing. Instead of tensing against these sensations, lean into them. Take a deep breath. Allow the tightness to expand with the inhale, creating space for it to soften.

This act of surrender doesn't mean giving up. It means creating room for resistance to exist without needing to fix it. It means trusting that even discomfort has wisdom to offer.

What Calls Us Forward

Welcoming resistance is the first step. But to truly shift, we need to reconnect with what lies on the other side: the deeper longings that make the action meaningful to us.

If resistance is the wall, then longing is the light that shines just beyond it. At first glance, resistance feels like a force pulling us away from action. But look closer, and you might find it's actually standing guard over what matters most: our deepest desires for growth, connection, impact, and authentic expression.

"Let's take the book," I said to Jake. "Why does it matter to you?"

At first, his answer was practical: "I think it could have an impact. Maybe even change how people think about technology."

But as we sat with the question, letting it sink beneath the surface, something shifted. "It's more than that," he admitted, his voice softening. "I want to leave something behind that matters. I want my kids to see me follow through, to know I didn't just talk about doing something meaningful—I actually did it. And... I want to show my wife that I can step up. She's been carrying so much while I've been stuck."

In that moment of vulnerability, the book transformed from a daunting project into something sacred: a symbol of Jake's commitment to sharing his voice, supporting his family, and creating a legacy that aligned with his deepest values.

This is the power of connecting with our longings. When we touch what truly matters—when we feel the pull of what's possible—resistance loses some of its grip. The fear doesn't disappear, but it becomes smaller, more manageable, because we can finally see beyond it.

These longings might speak in whispers—a quiet urge to create, to connect, to step into something larger. They might show up as a yearning to make a difference, to heal something broken, to bring beauty into the world, or simply to become more fully yourself.

When we take the time to connect with these deeper longings, the struggle with resistance becomes less about forcing our way forward and more about aligning with what matters most. The wall of resistance became a mirror, and is now a doorway, inviting us to step through—not because we've conquered our fears, but because we've found something worth walking toward.

When Resistance Becomes Your Teacher

In the months that followed our conversation, Jake's relationship with resistance began to shift in subtle but profound ways. The resistance didn't disappear—it still visited him, whispering its familiar doubts. But now, instead of seeing it as an enemy to defeat, he recognized it as a signal worth heeding.

When resistance emerged during his writing sessions, he'd pause to notice it: the tightness in his chest, the urge to check his phone, the whispers of not enough. Instead of fighting these sensations or berating himself for feeling them, he'd acknowledge them with gentle curiosity. "Hello, old friend," he'd say, and then he'd remind himself of what lay beneath the resistance—his desire to create something meaningful, to show his children what it means to follow through, to step fully into his role as husband and father.

This new relationship with resistance rippled outward. Those household tasks he once avoided became opportunities to express care for his family. The lingering projects from his company transformed into chances to complete what he'd started with intention. Even his creative work took on a different quality—less driven by force, more guided by meaning.

Over time, Jake discovered what resistance had been trying to teach him all along: that transformation doesn't happen through force, but through relationship. His "stuck" moments weren't failures—they were portals to deeper understanding. Each pause, each hesitation, became a teacher revealing the truth of what mattered most.

The way through resistance isn't about force—it's about presence, patience, and purpose. It's about learning to hold both the resistance and the longing, the fear and the possibility, as you take one small step, and then another, toward the life that's calling you forward.

The first unexpected message from the medicine came sharp and strange: “Your penis doesn’t belong to you.”

I was deep inside the journey, far from the familiar edges of consciousness, when those words surfaced. I didn’t laugh—I was perplexed, caught off guard by their vulgarity and weight. The words echoed, reverberating through my body as if they carried a current to the depths of my soul. And then the messages kept coming, insistent and steady, each one revealing another layer of understanding: “Your body doesn’t belong to you. Your body belongs to life.”

Moments later, as if guided by unseen hands, I felt myself sinking into the Earth. The soil was warm and heavy against my skin, pressing down as I descended deeper. My body softened under the pressure, yielding to its force, as though it had always belonged there. The weight of the earth surrounded me, grounding me completely. Once I settled, massive beetles began to crawl over me, their legs deliberate and gentle as they glided across my flesh.

At first, there was a flicker of resistance—a brief impulse to pull away—but it quickly dissolved into acceptance and stillness. There was no fear, only calm. I was cradled by the Earth, absorbed into its pulse, and for the first time, I understood: nothing belongs to me. Not my body. Not my family. Not my possessions. Not even my life.

The message was undeniable, a truth that settled into me like roots sinking into soil: I am an expression of life, entangled in its infinite web, no more separate than a single blade of grass in a vast meadow or a droplet in an endless stream. And if this was true, then everything I believed I owned—my body, my emotions, my thoughts, my identity, even my sense of self—was not mine. It all belonged to something much greater.

Releasing Ownership, Finding Belonging

In the days and weeks that followed, I kept returning to that moment—the truth that nothing belongs to me, and that I belong to something far greater than my mind can comprehend. At first, this realization felt like a loss. Ownership, after all, is something we’re taught to pursue and value—especially in a capitalist society: our homes, our work, our achievements, even our bodies and identities. To own something is to claim it, to separate it from the rest of the world as distinctly mine.

I was conditioned to believe that ownership makes us unique and special. It’s a marker of success, a proof of individuality. Owning more means being more. In a culture that prizes independence and self-sufficiency, ownership is often equated with identity, worth, and meaning. It’s what sets us apart, what makes us somebody.

But I hadn’t considered the cost. To own something is to place myself outside the whole—to draw a line where none exists. What I thought made me special was also what made me separate.

Slowly, I began to see how ownership creates walls—divisions between myself, my environment, and the life I am part of. To own is to grasp, to possess, to control. It’s to perpetuate the illusion of division. This is mine, not yours. This is me, not you. Ownership demands effort: acquiring, maintaining, protecting. And yet, it’s a losing game. Nothing we own today will endure. Even our bodies, stripped of identity and form, will return to the Earth—their energy and elements consumed, scattered, and woven back into the endless dance of life.

The walls of ownership don’t just divide us from the world outside; they shape how we experience life within. Ownership, I began to see, creates suffering through identification and aversion. When anger arises, we say, “I am angry,” as though we are the anger itself, fusing it with our identity. When life doesn’t unfold as planned, we cling to disappointment or frustration and call it ours. The simple truth of what is—our subjective experience of each moment—gets buried beneath our resistance. Ownership turns what is fleeting—emotions, thoughts, even moments—into something fixed and heavy, something we must carry.

This realization shifted something in me. If I could release ownership—of my emotions, my expectations, my need for control—what might I discover in its place?

If nothing belongs to me and everything belongs to life, then I am not separate. I am not separate from life; I am life. My body, my breath, the pulse that beats through me—they are part of life’s vast rhythm, inseparable from nature and the living world. To release ownership is to let go of control. It is to trust in something much greater—a force that guides the unfolding of life, within me and all around me.

Ownership, I realized, is incompatible with being. To own is to do—to grasp, to strive, to divide. But to release ownership is to be—to belong to life itself, to move with its flow rather than against it.

Stepping Into Devotion

If nothing belongs to me—if I own nothing—then what is left?

This question stayed with me as I continued to integrate the journey. The answer, I began to realize, is being. Ownership demands doing: grasping, manipulating, managing, striving to control. Without ownership, there is no need to hold, to cling, or to fix. Instead, there is space to simply be.

This realization brought with it a profound shift: from seeing myself as a doer—someone who must achieve, accumulate, and control—to embracing the role of a vessel. If life flows through me and my consciousness, then my role is not to direct or dominate it, but to be with it, to serve it. This service begins with my own body: not as something to push, optimize, or overcome, but as a sacred expression of life itself. From there, it extends outward—to my immediate surroundings, my family, and the planet.

To live as a vessel of life requires more than doing less; it requires reorienting entirely—from striving and achieving to witnessing and aligning with what’s emerging. This isn’t just a shift in behavior, but in how I relate to life itself. It’s stepping into devotion, surrendering ego’s grasp in favor of deep connection and presence.

And yet, I can’t help but reflect on the language of vessels and devotion, words so often tied to femininity, and what it means to me as a man. Women are described as vessels of life because they physically carry and bring life into the world. My own body, though different in form and function, holds the same potential for alignment with life’s flow. Gender, in this sense, feels secondary. What feels essential is the recognition that being over doing—releasing ego’s hold—isn’t a matter of biology but of orientation. It’s about embracing a way of being that is open, receptive, and in service to something far greater than myself.

This shift feels radical, even unsettling, because it asks me to move away from what my ego craves: productivity, recognition, validation, comfort, and security. It invites me instead to listen, to witness, to feel, and to serve. And while the impulse to do still arises, I’m learning that devotion to life isn’t about abandoning action, but about letting action flow from presence.

The Subtle Practice of Being

If devotion to life begins with being, then the question becomes: what does it actually mean to be? At its core, being means meeting each moment fully with spacious awareness—showing up without grasping, without pushing it away. It’s not about doing nothing or retreating from life; it’s about being with life exactly as it is.

To be is to witness experience as it unfolds, moment by moment with all of our senses open. It’s the practice of softening resistance—of noticing what arises within me and around me and allowing it to exist without judgment or attachment. Thoughts come. Emotions come. Sensations come. Life comes. And instead of reacting or trying to control it all, I learn to simply accept what is.

But this doesn’t mean my hands are off the wheel, drifting wherever the wind takes me. To accept what is doesn’t mean resigning to indifference or abandoning agency. It’s not about ignoring life’s responsibilities or letting go of my role within it. Instead, it’s a commitment to responding consciously rather than reacting—to moving with life rather than against it. Being allows me to meet each moment with clarity and presence, to see what’s needed and act from a place of acceptance and alignment instead of grasping or resistance.

This isn’t an abstract idea; it’s a practice. Devotion to being isn’t about striving to embody presence or treating stillness as another goal to achieve. It’s not about becoming a superior spiritual being or perfecting a posture of calm. It’s about cultivating and allowing presence to emerge naturally—being with what is. Softening into the flow of life. Attuning to what’s needed in the moment. Trusting that life itself will guide me.

And yet, this practice is anything but easy. My ego is often at odds with being. It thrives on separation—on grasping, pushing, and striving. I see it most clearly at home, in the small, everyday moments that pull me out of presence. Like when I cook a meal and find myself fishing for praise: “How is it? Is it good?” Or when my daughter tugs at my sleeve, asking for my attention while I’m lost in an email or my own thoughts, and I feel that familiar frustration rise. Even the subtle urge to “win” an argument with my wife—to prove I’m right—becomes a wedge. These moments expose how my ego clings to control and validation, creating separation. Not just between myself and my family, but between myself and life itself.

The challenge of being is to notice these patterns without judgment. Instead of rushing to fix or control them, the practice is to meet them with curiosity and compassion. Being means holding space for what is—both the beautiful and the uncomfortable—and allowing it to move through me without grasping or rejecting it. It’s recognizing that beauty and discomfort don’t just coexist; they depend on each other. They are two sides of the same coin.

What makes this work so subtle—and so difficult—is that it’s not about optimizing or perfecting. It’s not a project to complete or a skill to master. There’s no finish line, no blueprint. It’s about surrendering the impulse to control, loosening my grip, and aligning instead with the flow of life. This requires patience, humility, and trust—qualities that feel foreign to a mind conditioned by doing.

The more I practice, the more I see that being isn’t passive. It’s alive, dynamic, and deeply attuned. It’s about devotion: to the present moment, to life’s unfolding, and to the people and experiences right in front of me. In being, I’m no longer separate. I’m part of it all.

Honoring the Thread

The message I received—your body doesn’t belong to you; your body belongs to life—wasn’t a conclusion; it was an invitation. An invitation to see beyond the walls I had built, the stories I had clung to, and the illusion of ownership that had shaped my life. It asked me to let go—not into nothingness, but into connection. Into the vast, unbroken rhythm of life.

What does it mean to belong to life? It means surrendering the need to hold, to claim, to control. It means allowing myself to be carried, like seeds by the wind or water by the river, trusting the current to shape the path. It means showing up fully—not to dominate, but to witness, to care for, to serve. And it means meeting the moment with reverence, even when it is messy, uncomfortable, or fleeting.

I still feel the pull of the ego, the whispers of "mine" and "more." But when I pause, I return to the truth I felt that day: I am of life, no more separate from its pulse than waves meeting the ocean’s shore. And that is enough.

If nothing belongs to me, then all I can do is honor what is—this body, this breath, this fleeting moment. Not by trying to hold on, but by opening my hands. Not by trying to be more, but by learning to simply be.