Happy New Year, Reader! I wish you a healthy body and a content soul. I wish you inspiration, and the courage to act on it. And I wish you meaningful connections, conversations, and collaboration for 2026. As the year is about to begin, I find myself asking a familiar question: what do I want to start, stop, or continue? We tend to focus on beginnings. New habits, new goals, new energy. It's exciting. Yet, we've all learned that what we forget to stop often comes at the highest cost because...
10 days ago • 3 min read
Dear Reader, What tells you that you’ve done a good job? Pause for a second before you answer. Is it a number, a feeling, a comment from someone else, or the simple relief of being done? Most of us have a metric, even if we’ve never named it. And once it’s there, it starts steering far more than we realise. I noticed this recently, in the most unlikely of places: on my meditation cushion. Before my last Vipassana retreat, a “good” meditation was easy to define. It was a sit where my mind...
17 days ago • 3 min read
Dear Reader, I came back from ten days of silence on Sunday. No phone. No writing. No reading. No podcasts. Just long hours of sitting, scanning sensations, and noticing how quickly the mind wants things to be different. Less pain. More comfort. A way out. Vipassana calls the practice equanimity. The capacity to stay with sensation as it is, without craving when it’s pleasant and without aversion when it’s unpleasant. Not suppressing. Not indulging. Simply noticing. When we stop feeding our...
24 days ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, By the time you read this, I’ll be sitting in silence. Today will be day six out of ten. Ten hours of meditation a day. No phone, no notebook, no book, no calendar. Just me, my breath, and whatever Goenka has to say about observing sensations without reacting to them. It’s my sixth Vipassana (listen to my insights after the last), which means I should know by now that the first two days feel excruciating. My mind throws a tantrum like a toddler whose iPad has been taken away....
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, I said yes. Too quickly. Again. And here I am, looking at the pile of broken glass, wondering what I could have done differently. Isn't it ironic that I'm a facilitator who literally teaches people how to work together. And still, I fell into the oldest trap in the book. Someone invited me to collaborate on something exciting. I felt flattered. My gut told me to slow down, to have a real conversation about how we'd work together. But I didn't want to be the difficult one....
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, How do you know whether the group you're speaking to is engaged or not? Last week I was facilitating a workshop on the basics of facilitation for a new community. I asked a question. Silence. Everyone stayed on mute. I tried another prompt. More silence. But people had their cameras on and smiled—they were clearly engaged, just not speaking. I've written about the sound of silence in facilitation, and this week Yuko shares the Japanese perspective on it in the podcast. But last...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, Do you avoid difficult conversations? The 'constructive' feedback? The cancellation of an appointment? The ask for a raise? If so, what's the story you tell yourself when you do? What if they won't like me? What if they get angry? What if they push back or shut down or accuse me of making things bigger than they are? What if they dismiss what I say? What if they think I'm the problem? What if I actually am??? As I've observed not only my own responses but those of participants in...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Dear Reader, What did you hide about yourself at work today? Recently, a client asked whether I could host a workshop. Normally, I’d check my calendar and if I am not available on that date, I'd respond with something neutral and suggesting alternatives. This time, I didn't need to check my calendar because I knew the reason I was unavailable. Without overthinking, I told them: “I won't be free that day because I’ll be at the municipality with my fiancée to register our wedding.” Within...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Dear Reader, When was the last time you started from scratch? For me it was last week, and I almost cheated. I'd just joined Substack—a platform where writers share their thoughts without the pressure of personal branding or selling. It seemed like the perfect home for my podcast archive and this newsletter. As a way of making myself comfortable, I imported not only my full podcast archive but also my subscriber list. And it was with pride that I looked at the number of 6,000 next to my name....
2 months ago • 3 min read