This may be business suicide… but if it is, maybe my business doesn’t deserve to survive.
This is me declaring: I’m a business coach for people of color.
If you want to do the work of being an ally — because being an ally is more than feeling like you’re a good person and calling yourself one — and TAKE THE ALLYSHIP CLASS I’M OFFERING WITH RASHIDA BONDS on December 5th & 12th, and learn the skills for not centering yourself, I can also be your coach.
But I will be a coach for you second.
Because my commitment will be for people of color first.
I made my name, reputation, and money doing work that white people loved, that (mostly) made white people feel very comfortable.
Up until now.
I’d rather not have a business at all than to continue to do that.
Business that centers white people, serves white comfort, and fails to challenge white complacency — even by default — is one that actively betrays and hurts people of color.
And I am not willing to do that to us.
That’s not why I’m here.
If you’re a person of color, I am here to insist on the bigness of your spirit, defend your ideas, champion your business, and see your vision through to its fullest realization.
You will have an faithful and hardworking partner in me.
Dear friends of color,
This is how internalized white supremacy shows up in your business.
(1) You feel like you need another certification or degree — given by white bodies and institutions — to feel qualified.
(2) You just don’t have the “right look,” and feel like you need to keep modifying and “investing” in yourself to achieve the “right look.”
And the “right look,” of course, being, the “white look.”
(3) You feel afraid to slow down and rest.
Even if your body and spirit are screaming at you to. You feel the compulsion to endlessly move at the speed of whiteness. And whiteness does not rest.
(4) You feel the need to constantly “translate” what you know and believe into a language that is palatable to the “mainstream.”
The mainstream, of course, being the white norm.
(5) When you are doubting your own judgment or decisions, you automatically assume someone who is white and has other markers of “white status” (e.g. wealthy, featured in white-dominant media, pedigreed in white institutions) knows better, defer to their judgment, and gaslight yourself out of your instincts.
(6) Given the choice, you sometimes pay white teachers over teachers of color, even when you— deep down — trust the teachers of color more. Because you don’t trust the part of YOURSELF that trusts the teachers of color.
White people are not “the enemy”.
They are worthy and precious humans, too.
However, the prevalence of white dominant culture and racism leads to an internalized racial superiority for those who adhere to it. And their experience and attitudes are what come to define normality (source: National Museum of African American History and Culture).
And therefore, they have the power to marginalize and punish that which falls outside of that norm.
White supremacy is the enemy. Not the people.
White supremacy hurts all of us.
But it hurts people of color most.
(At some point I’m going to run out of patience explaining basic things like this. Because I shouldn’t have to. But that day is not today.)
a redwood forest, possibly the very embodiment of the opposite of “noise”
I just did an extensive Q&A series on Instagram stories.
On all the topics.
(It is saved as a “stories highlight” on my profile if you want to look. It will be on there for a while, though it might be gone if you’re reading this post far enough in the future.)
Responding to something I said there, a friend asked, “how do I know if my program isn’t just adding to the noise, putting more of ‘what everyone else is doing’ out there?”
I was, and am, so grateful for this question.
It is a courageous question, coming from someone whose spirit is healthy enough to be willing to risk discomfort.
That’s more than I could ask for from… so many.
I thought deeply about how to answer this, and want to talk about it here.
But first, non-duality.
Nothing is inherently noise, or non-noise.
The music you love so much might just be noise to someone else.
The literature you find so meaningful might just be unremarkable strings of words to someone else.
The teaching that saved your life might just sound like fluffy nonsense to someone else.
Noise isn’t an inherent property of anything, but a perception, a judgment.
That said, judgments are sometimes useful.
Judgment is discernment.
And sometimes, the lack of discernment hurts us.
Here’s what I’m willing to define as noise, right now: that which lacks substance and root.
When something is lacking in substance and root and still manages to persist in the world, it is usually because it makes up for what it lacks in other attributes.
Like: the soft manipulation of shiny packaging and sleek slogans, and the ability to appeal to the lowest common denominator through the triggering of our basest instincts.
Add on top of that the irresistible pull of the “cheap, fast, easy, and convenient”, then we have a recipe for something full of static… but no signal.
One of the reasons I’m pulling my old, enormously popular podcast off the air is my profound regret that, in hundreds of episodes teaching people how to get the word out about their thing, I’ve rarely stopped to ask them: “is your thing worth getting the word out about?”
If I were to do a do-over — which I am, now — here’s what I would ask again, and again.
Does your thing have substance?
Meaning, did you come by what you claim honestly?
Is it embodied and battle-tested?
When you take away the packaging, the buzzwords, the constructs and methodologies skimmed off 2-month-long course without the much slower, non-linear, winding and vexatious work of personal cultivation, is there a there there?
And can you answer this infuriating — and yet, ultimately the most important — question of:
“Why does your thing matter in a world where wars and genocides are still raging, a quarter of the global population is living under the poverty line, and where we are all equally facing a mass extinction event, probably less than a century away?”
Does your thing have roots?
Meaning, how deep does it go?
Are the roots deep enough to sustain you through floods, draughts and storms?
What kind of worldsense is it grounded in — if not the default of appropriative, disembodied, post-colonial capitalist emptiness?
Can it stand the test of time?
Where can you track the lineage of your thing?
Is that something you can make moral sense of — if not be proud of?
These are thorny, inconvenient, terribly difficult questions.
If you have an easy and quick time answering them, you’re probably already on the wrong track.
And it’s worth repeating: my biggest regret is that I haven’t posed these questions to the world sooner, more frequently and insistently.
It’s not that I believe everyone should sit on their hands and wait to take action on their passions until they have all the answers perfectly figured out.
I actually think that’s impossible.
But I think the questions beg to be honestly, humbly and vigorously wrestled with.
I think doing so is the work.
It is how you become a person of substance, and how you grow roots.
I don’t think anyone who is unwilling to do so can claim to be a serious person in the public arena.
I think anyone who is unwilling to do so is most likely, by default, just contributing noise.
This year, I did something I’ve never done before.
Declare a sabbatical without an end date, knowing that the end date might be quite far away.
It started in the summer.
And one of the things I noticed in the beginning was that I was feeling a profound fatigue around short-form content.
Weary to my bone of carousels and reels, emails and podcasts, being relentlessly mined for dopamine, and the illusion of having done something useful with one’s mind just floating in a sea of quickly churned out, and equally quickly forgotten output.
So, when I logged off from the world, it wasn’t even out of some lofty principle.
I was just following what I instinctively yearned for — the way a shark can smell blood from miles away, the way pregnant women are said to crave the food that contains the nutrition that their gestating fetuses need.
I needed words cooked slowly.
Slooooowly.
Perhaps even agonizingly slowly (I once had a friend who was a novelist. The time it took to birth a novel — agonizing indeed.)
To make up for the years I spent immersed in words, images and videos that took only minutes, or hours, to make. The fast food of creativity.
So I dove into a months-long marathon of doing almost nothing but reading novels.
More importantly, I’d traveled to the insides of extraordinary minds. Minds that were fully awake to the world, sensate equally to its brutality and its beauty.
Poverty.
War.
Partition.
Genocide.
Slavery.
The endless re-enactment of hatred and trauma.
And, threading through the midst of it all, impossibly — courage, love, kindness, tenderness, art, humanity.
These minds grabbed the thorniest, most uncomfortable questions of humanity by the throat, and stared into its eyes and refusing to look away, courting madness and fury.
These novels did not give me answers.
They did not prescribe a “how to” for how I ought to live the next chapter of my life, nor how to respond to a catastrophic world with my sanity and conscience intact — both of which I was subconsciously looking for.
But what they did, I feel, was restore my humanity.
They connected me back to the person I am, and always have been, outside of the professional roles I play.
Simone who looks. and keeps looking.
Simone who thinks and asks questions.
Simone who does not tire of searching.
That Simone is the most authentic Simone there is, and any identity of mine that is even a little bit more stable, poised, and reassuring than that is a lie.
These books also punctured giant gaping holes in the comfort of my former intellectual and ethical indolence. I found myself interrogating:
Why was I so content to communicate to my people through tiny Instagram squares and minutes-long videos?
Why was I so content to consume the same from others, and call it “learning” or “connection”?
What happened that I had become so comfortable conflating learning with entertainment, conversation with sound bites of conversation, and the sacred materiality of human togetherness with doing a bunch of clicking and swiping?
Had my thinking become so at ease with the conformity and shallowness that commerciality dictates, that I felt little inner tension with doing just that for years and years?
“If you’re ever going to go back to work, do it different,” I heard from within.
I need space where my thoughts can really stretch out without having to be cut up into squares.
I need space where my friends can read, and we can talk to each other without the interruption of constantly having to scroll left, and blinking notifications left and right.
So here we are.
An old-timey, 2006-style blog.
A blog is not the answer.
But it is a place where we can ask a hell of a lot of good questions.
Outside of that + my company’s basic operating costs, I’m donating the rest of our profits.
Here’s why I’m making this decision.
For the second half of this year, I’ve been taking sabbatical. And I’ve had the opportunity to do nothing but to think deeply.
And one of the realizations I’ve arrived at is this: we can live in either one of two modes: what I call the “hungry ghost” mode, or in spiritual wholeness.
Hungry ghost
“Hungry ghost” is a term that comes from Buddhism and Chinese folks religion.
The way I use this term colloquially, I am referring to a way of being that says: more, more, more, more. Never enough.
It is animated by an insatiable, ever-deepening gnawing existential void inside that nothing can fill.
The void plays host to an endless array of addictions — to more work, more money, more “growth”, more popularity, more comfort, more convenience, more entertainment, more dopamine, more adrenaline, more power.
More more more more more.
And, paradoxically, even when you accumulate and hoard more and more, the void doesn’t actually get filled. It somehow gets deeper, darker, more terrifying.
So then the addiction becomes even more frenzied. So then you get even more addicted to the chase. Then the void grows even deeper. And so on it goes…
In Buddhism, hungry ghosts, or pretas, are beings who are tormented by desire that can never be sated. (source)
The void is the very engine of consumerism (and so much of “business growth”).
The bigger the people’s void, the more they consume (and “work” a lot of the time), and the more alienated they grow from their own souls, and disconnected they become from everything life-giving, connective, and sacred.
Hungry ghost syndrome is not new to humanity — insatiable greed has always existed — but it has been inflamed to grotesque proportions and normalized amongst the populace to a terrifying degree thanks to capitalism.
Spiritual wholeness
The alternative to “hungry ghost” syndrome is spiritual wholeness.
You can have one, or the other. But not both. And there is nothing in between. No such thing as a middle ground. Pick one.
Spiritual wholeness is the opposite of the perpetual state of addiction that attempts to fill the void within. Consumerism, addiction, and alienation meet their end in spiritual wholeness.
The critical ingredient to spiritual wholeness that indigenous wisdom traditions have known for all ages, all over the world, is right relationship.
Right relationship with ourselves, our communities, with non-human living beings, with the Earth, and with unseen energies.
Right relationship with knowledge, money and material things (not “possessions,” since Buddhism teaches me that there is no such thing).
Right relationship between two beings requires attention, respect, and balance.
And one thing I have come to reflect on deeply is that excess is antithetical to right relationship.
What is enough — the opposite of excess?
What does it mean to steward (not “own”) enoughness?
Enoughness is not a fixed state.
What is enough for a healthy person is not the same as what is enough for a sick person. What is enough for an infant is not the same as what is enoughs for a teenager, which is not the same as what is enough for an elderly person. What is enough in a state of crisis is not the same as what is enough in a state of calm.
So it is a dynamic, moving idea.
And yet… we must never cease asking, “what is a balance that constitutes enoughness? And how do we meet it wisely?”
Otherwise, we cease to be in right relationship.
So, in 2025, I decided to enter into an experiment.
I call it an experiment, because everything is an experiment.
We try things, we learn and grow from them, and we try things differently, better — hopefully — based on the new knowledge we’ll glean. I don’t know what I’ll learn from this upcoming experiment that will make future experiments different.
But for now, here is what I am committed to.
I am taking a fixed salary.
It is a salary that will allow my family to live comfortably.
Not extravagantly, but with all of our basic needs AND many comforts met, while allowing us to save some for our future, while also allowing us to exercise a bit of generosity in our private lives.
(And no, I’m not sharing this number — on purpose. I have no problem sharing numbers.
But I feel that, once the number is known, it becomes distracting. Some may think it’s too much, some may think it’s too little, and more importantly, it may, for many, unconsciously become a kind of cutoff line at which people are “allowed to” make similar decisions. And none of that is useful, because the number itself is not the point.
The “enoughness” number will be different for everyone, and it will be different even for me at different stages of my life.)
My company also has ongoing expenses. My team members need to be paid, and there are tech expenses, taxes, etc.
And if we have profits on top of that — and I’m honestly not sure how much of them we’ll have, given that I’m also intending to move at a much slower pace and making significant changes to my business, leaving behind many features that used to reliably bring in “big money” — I intend to donate them to nonprofit organizations that support decolonization and climate justice.
I thought long and hard about whether to talk about this publicly at all.
Because, at the end, I’m not doing this for anyone but for myself. (Remember the whole thing about spiritual health? It’s MY spiritual health I’m choosing.)
But ultimately, I chose to speak about it publicly, because I don’t think I would’ve thought to move in this direction if it weren’t for indigenous, Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist teachers of mine who shared wisdom and stories of their own lives and lineages that exemplified what it means to live in right relationship, away from capitalism’s dictates.
And I think that matters — sharing of stories. If it could support and embolden at least one other person to move in similar directions, I would be very happy.
This is an uncertain and perilous time for many across the world.
The more of us there are who are connected to the health of our spirits, the better hope we have of creating a world that is safe for our descendants to inhabit.
