I was able to see myself clearly, maybe for the first time, during my sabbatical.
It wasn’t pretty.
—
I think it was all the time and space I had to think.
And the comparative level of maturity that I’d developed over time to be able to hold myself with unconditional self-love and self-respect.
It is only with unconditional self-love and self-respect that one could see oneself clearly enough.
That is the only way you can be safe without the armor of stories and identities one has built around oneself out of defensiveness and fear.
Otherwise the terrain is too fraught, too risky.
One could get eaten by the sharks of shame.
One could get buried under an avalanche of self-loathing.
—
In sabbatical, I spent a lot of time with the teachings of Zen masters.
Ones that had guns pointed at them. That had willingly spent time in prisons. That had taken vows of poverty. That had risked their lives for the oppressed. That had recited the sutras and spent thousands of hours in meditation and then actually flexed the power of their titanium-grade spiritual backbone in real life.
If only people knew what “mindfulness” is really capable of in Mahayana Buddhism.
It was actually breathtaking, thinking about how green and shallow I have been in comparison.
(What’s more breathtaking was how unaware I had been of that fact.)
What an impudent little poseur I had been, thinking that I was some kind of hot shit, doing something profound, changing the world!
I also saw the limitations of my personal character with brutal clarity.
My irascibility. My imperiousness. The sloppy command over the formidable instrument of my own mind that led to so much ‘leak’.
This was all felt, once again, with zero unkindness toward myself.
Rather, I felt like a child who scaled the neighborhood hill, proudly planted the flag I’d painted at home, then looked up to discover Everest.
The ferocity of my feeling was not hatred against the version of myself who climbed the little hill, but a fire that was a love of climbing.
I saw higher.
Infinitely higher.
I was humbled.
It felt terrible.
And deeply, deeply cleansing.
—
I had read the excerpt of Alexei Navalny’s memoir, which sent me down a rabbit hole of reading the epistles of Occupied Korea’s own freedom fighters on death row.
My husband argued with me. “I don’t believe for a second he actually wrote that stuff from prison in the Arctic. How’d he get it out?”
But it actually didn’t matter to me whether he really did write those words in prison.
There were plenty of others before him, and there will be others after him. In Russia. Turkey. Iran. Both Koreas. Palestine.
What mattered to me was the example of fierce moral clarity and courage that slice through the haze of willful oblivion, selfishness and greed that cloud our collective vision. The dry Russian wit — in the midst of it all!! — was just a heartrending cherry on top. (He cracks jokes with his prison guards!)
What a man.
—
Navalny died for a free Russia.
“What are you willing to die for?”
That is a horrible, distasteful, inhumane question.
Because who wants to die?
I do not romanticize situations where that question becomes necessary.
In any universe, I am sure Mr. Navalny would have preferred to be alive, at home, reading his books, bickering with his wife and playing with his grandchildren. It is peace that ought to be prized and romanticized, not authoritarianism, not strife, not war.
And for most of us who are lucky enough to only have to ever face much, much smaller stakes, this question becomes useful insofar as it leading us to the opposite question.
In a world where too many people are forced to risk bodily harm and death to fight for their own dignity, those of us who have the luxury of not having to do that can ask ourselves: “what we are willing to live for?”
Whatever the answer, we can do the living with our full throats and bellies.
If all there is to fear is life — ah, life! — it really cannot be that bad.
We can slash fear and dance on.
Bravely.
—
I have not accomplished much of anything in life. (I recently had this thought while examining the resume of J.D. Vance. That man has done nothing of consequence in his life except write what used to be evaluated as a decent book. Then I realized — well, hah, neither have I, I guess. At least one of us isn’t a heartbeat away from the Presidency.)
I’m not qualified to do much of anything.
I’d be pretty useless in a nuclear apocalypse. I do not know how to hunt, or grow food, or treat the sick, or build shelter.
I don’t know much of anything. (That is truly not false modesty, and you will find out how that’s true if you ever had me on your team while playing Trivial Pursuit).
My qualification for getting up and keeping going is that I am alive, I have a heartbeat, and there is something moving inside me that wants to be expressed.
The difference between when I was younger and now is that, today, I truly believe that that is good enough.
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.
Aurora Borealis in High Latitudes from the book William MacKenzie’s National Encyclopedia (1891)
For nearly 15 years, I’ve called myself a coach.
I have trained, taught, and yes, coached coaches.
For the longest time, I had the purest love for it.
And I am leaving this world behind.
I wanted to talk about why.
Let’s zoom out a little bit.
And take a look at historical context.
The whole field, and construct, of coaching couldn’t exist without psychology and psychotherapy having come first.
Coaching, like psychotherapy, is a complicated field.
It’s complicated because, in the Western world, these are often the only options someone has to get help when they’re in pain.
This is not a small thing. Because there is a lot of pain in the Western world.
And they couldn’t have survived this far if they didn’t sometimes work, and work vitally and profoundly.
I have said this before, and I am happy to repeat this: I credit people who call themselves coaches with saving my life. They really did. And I know I am far from alone.
Many therapists and coaches do literally life-saving work. (And many others don’t do much, and many others yet do quite the opposite.)
The fields of both therapy and coaching are sometimes self-selected into by people who are selfless, compassionate, and profoundly moved by the suffering of other humans. Other times, not so much.
Sometimes, the practitioners of therapy or coaching are incredibly skilled at their craft. Other times, not so much.
For many who are genuinely skilled, their dedication to it comes way before their desire for money or status, if they care for those things at all. I know both coaches and therapists who basically live like ascetics, and are content with their lives just helping people.
To make black & white generalization about either of these fields is difficult.
These fields do a lot of good. And they do some not-good.
Because I experienced firsthand so much of good in it, and met some of the most generous and kind-hearted people in it (including so many of my teachers, colleagues and clients), I carried the torch for it and defended it for as long as I did.
But over the past few years, it has become increasingly difficult to do so, as I learned more history, reflected on the realities of the world, and delved deeper into my own spiritual roots.
Doing even the smallest amount of research into the roots of Western psychiatry and psychotherapy is to be horrified by its racism, colonialism, and violence.
Perhaps even more horrifying to contemplate than the violence that is visible for all to see is the violence of what has been cleanly erased, exterminated, wiped off the map, to make for the advancement of these Western institutions.
What has been erased can’t make sounds.
(The sounds of my great-grandmother throwing a knife at the door to cast out wayward spirits. The sounds of grandmother rattling her shaman’s bells.)
It is from the “clean slate” of this erasure that the field of coaching is born, breathless with the promise of 20th century, Cold War-era, American capitalism:
YOU can get rich. YOU can be hot. YOU can be happy. YOU can hack your way out of aging, unhappiness, and loneliness.
All you need to do is to improve yourself. Let us show you how! Here’s where to make the deposit.
Both coaching and therapy were created, popularized, and represented — still — at the highest levels by white people (mostly men), in post-colonial, post-industrial times, growing in conjunction with capitalism, with the centers of intellectual influence coinciding with global centers of economic and military power (e.g.US, Western Europe.)
In the big scheme of things, I’m small fish, swimming in small waters. And from my view, I have come to see how this shows up in every crevice of what I could observe.
(1) The fact that there is almost no coaching “practice” that hasn’t been appropriated, multiple times over, from an indigenous tradition.
Borrowing and adaption between cultures is entirely normal and healthy.
An utter lack of acknowledgment or crediting because of the enormous power differential between cultures, no sense of right relationship, and no appropriate sense of how to be in relationship with lineage… is another.
Take, for example, the Eastern practice of “mindfulness” — the idea of observing your own thoughts from a neutral place. This was never, ever meant to be in service of individual happiness, productivity, and wealth. And in Eastern traditions, it was always, always grounded in the necessity of moral action and serving the needs of the community.
I could give a hundred other examples.
(2) The way that default coaching “goals” and aspirations fit so snugly with capitalist values that are destroying the Earth
The quickest and easiest possible accumulation of individual wealth, growth at all cost, the celebration of consumerism, individual happiness (an oxymoron), what I call the “Amazon Next Day Delivery” approach to inner peace and contentment…
… a compartmentalized vision of “wellness”, productivity, an ideal of physical beauty that Hitler would salivate over (Aryan-blonde, blue-eyed, slim, youthful and fertile)…
(3) And, as a corollary, a pathological avoidance of things that are decidedly NOT capitalism-friendly
Slowness, aging, pain, illness, decay, illness, loss, darkness, silence, liminality — all things that were honored, and considered to contain inherent value and wisdom by Indigenous traditions.
(4) The fact that the vast majority of coaching businesses do not even make passing references to systemic and collective issues, and, in fact, go out of their way to avoid them.
Because it’s “unprofessional.” “Irrelevant.” “Low vibrations.” “Divisive.”
And, ultimately, “bad for business.”
(5) The dire lack of eldership — despite the overabundance of self-professed “experts.”
All of the above contribute to an environment in which enormous sum of money are always being cycled through while the collective is, somehow, becoming more and more impoverished both materially and spiritually.
There was a moment when I clearly saw that the work of “redeeming” or “changing the system from the inside” was an illusion.
That’s when I knew: I was out.
… human interdependence and cooperation, rather than individualism and commodification must be at the heart of the psychology of liberation, which should be about empowering people to change institutions and radically transform social structures, rather than adjusting and submitting to the status quo while making a profit. — Hamza Hamouchene
A friend asked me what I would call myself, if I am no longer calling myself a coach of any kind.
My answer was simple; HUMAN.
Because, that, I am.
You may call me teacher, as I intend to go on teaching. Oh, there is so much to teach.
If you still want to call me a coach, that is okay, too. I am not offended. It is a name I was proud to go by for many years, and I am okay to still be called it. It is part of my makeup and lineage.
If you want to know what self-cultivation and healing looks like outside of the broken cultures and institutions of the Western world, read books by people like Malidona Patrice Somé, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Thich Nhat Hanh, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta, Cole Arthur Riley, Tricia Hersey, Tamela J. Gordon.
The list could be miles and miles long. These are some names I could throw off the top of my head, just the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
There’s no moral purity here.
I collude with white supremacy and capitalism by virtue of being alive in 2024, despite ongoing experiments to more responsibly steward what I can.
We’re all wrestling with complicated history and constructs and doing our best.
There are coaches of color doing groundbreaking work, and white coaches who are actually radical activists in disguise, doing some of the most courageous work I know. (I bow down to you.)
Coach, Schmoach, whatever… these are just words.
We will be known by the seeds we sow in the world, not what it says on our business card (or, nowadays, Instagram bio, I guess).
Whatever you call yourself, I don’t care.
If you take the time to hang out with me, read my words, and find my thinking useful, I am grateful to you. And you are warmly welcome in my world, always.
Not turned on by the prospects of earning millions (other than thinking not worrying about money would be nice)… or being on TV, and making headlines?
You’re not broken, or destined for “mediocrity”.
You know, I think our society has a very warped relationship with the idea of ambition.
The only form of ambition it glorifies is one that concerns (1) money, (2) worldly status, and (3) the individual.
That has many people who DO seek ambition ending up lonely, feeling empty and burnt out, with broken homes… and at worst, do harm to the communities around them.
So let’s look at how much more multidimensional the ambition can be.
One form of ambition is RELATIONAL.
How rich are you in relationships? Yeah, a lot of people know you, but how many people know you?
How much closeness do you enjoy, and with how many people?
A relationally ambitious person doesn’t stop at transactional and surface relationships. They invest in depth and intimacy. They know how, they keep learning how to be even better at it, and they reap the rewards.
Another form of ambition is CREATIVE.
We are all creative — even if your thing isn’t what is conventionally considered “art”.
A creatively ambitious person makes stuff as a response to their own aliveness, vs. to please an audience, or to fulfill the demands of capitalism.
How much of your time do you spend making stuff, just for the fun of it, just because you’re responding to an impulse inside of you? (There are enormously “successful” “artists” who haven’t created for the fun of it in a loooong time. They haven’t been creatively ambitious because they’ve been too busy feeding the “success machine.”)
Another form of ambition is DOMESTIC.
There are people for whom a lovingly-tended, beautiful and happy home is the ultimate and highest form of wealth. My mom is such a person.
Home-making isn’t something the patriarchy “forced” her to do. It is a sacred vocation that makes her come alive more than anything else, and this is true for many people — of all genders.
For a domestically ambitious person, a home is their church, their workplace AND playspace, their exhibit, and their sanctuary.
Another form of ambition is SPIRITUAL.
Elon Musk might have won the “worldly ambition” game.
But a monk you’ve never heard of who’s been silently meditating in a cave in the Himalayas for the past 15 years — and finds the ultimate meaning and fulfillment in that — takes the cake when it comes to spiritual ambition.
Spiritual ambition seeks communion with the transcendent, the divine.
Another form of ambition is SERVICE.
People who seek to help others and drive change in the world because they derive meaning and fulfillment in that, in and of itself, regardless of what comes back to them, are ambitious in terms of service.That’s pretty self-explanatory, right?
The last form of ambition is the ambition for SPACIOUSNESS.
There are people — and cultures, even — that find the highest fulfillment in… well, not doing a whole lot.
They do NOT see the validation of identity or purpose in WORK.
Dolce far niente. Leisureliness. Insouciance. The space to wonder, wander, dream, nap, and simply BE.
***An important note I want to make is that (1) I literally just thought of these, so this is not some kind of absolute or exhaustive list (feel free to think of your own list!) and (2) these are, obviously, NOT mutually exclusive.It’s not like you have to choose between the binaries of “worldly” vs “spiritual”…
… though, in terms of the constraints of 3D space and time, we sometimes have to make tradeoffs. (For example, you can’t paint AND build refugee camps at the exact same time!)
I believe that each of us has every single types of ambition — in different amounts — inside of us.
And we are called to make choices that best express and fulfill our inner ambitions, even with the aforementioned 3D constraints.
I share this with the hope that it gives you a sense of relief and validation that your desires and yearnings matter and are worth pursuing…… even if they don’t conform to individualistic and capitalistic ideals.
Learn how to tell them apart, and you’ll save yourself massive amounts of trouble.
Tier 1. People who don’t like you and have no intention of taking the risk of actually relating to you
Think: behind-your-back gossipers, or people who leave nasty comments about celebs whom they have ZERO chance of meeting in person. This is a true hater, whose hating is bolstered by the convenience of extremely low accountability, and never having to confront the other’s humanity. People who feel truly whole and well in their lives do not do this. What they need to work out doesn’t involve YOU. It involves them getting a therapist. Action step: tune them out. Send them love and healing. Protect your energy.
Tier 2. People who have feedback and THINK they’re relating to you, but are actually making demands.
Relating starts with the genuine willingness to meet the other person where they are, and understand them as they would wish to be understood. Any message where what they’re really saying is “I don’t like you or what you are doing. Please submit to to my demand for you to change or do something differently so that you can make me comfortable”, there is no relating, just an attempt to control. There is also no willingness to take responsibility for their own experience.
Action step: if they’re like, an online rando, ignore, let that shit bounce off of your force field, and move gingerly past them.
If they’re someone who is actually in your life, and maybe even close to you, or maybe even someone you love (it happens! Sometimes we do it to people we love, too!), and depending on your desire snd capacity, you may decide to hold loving space for them to “let them be” and do their thing without giving into them.
Easier said than done, I know.
Or sometimes, you gotta cut that person out of your life. There is too much nuance for me to give blanket advice regardless of context. You gotta exercise your discernment from a place of self-love and self-respect.
Tier 3. People who have uncomfortable feedback and come to you with the willingness to truly relate.
How you know this is the case: they are taking responsibility for their stuff. There is no dumping-and-demanding. There’s no “you made me feel/do ____ therefore you should ____.”
And there is respect, openness and possibility in the conversation, even if it is a difficult one.… and the genuine efforts to get to know you where you are, and be known for where they are.
Action step: Whenever this happens, I do everything possible to be available for what they are bringing me — even when it bruises my ego or makes me confront stuff I’d rather avoid. ESPECIALLY when, because that’s when learning and deepening happen.
The desired conclusion is not “everyone holding hands and singing kumbaya,” but people moving closer to their respective truths, and a more authentic relationship between the two parties. Sometimes that results in “happy endings.” Not always. And that’s okay.
(remember, this is just me sharing what I do in hopes it may help to inspire your own discernment. This is NOT a prescription for all of humanity)
Many of us try to prove or earn our worthiness by people-pleasing those in tiers 1 and 2. This is called fawning.
This is not only exhausting and unpleasant, but guaranteed to fail. You cannot earn your worthiness by performing for others’ good opinion, because (1) you do not have power over others’ thoughts, and (2) your worthiness is not dependent on what is happening inside another’s brain and nervous system.
Your worthiness is inherent, infinite, and non-negotiable.
You are an important being that is worthy of being cherished, full stop. You are not for everyone, and you are not responsible for everyone’s comfort, full stop.
Respect for yourself, your time, and energy is where responsible community stewardship begins.
Knowing this deeply is how we unlock our greatest potential for accountability.
Here’s the shocking thing I am learning from having made millions of dollars.
Here’s why money is so attractive to good people, and why making and having a lot of money is such a powerful experience for so many of us.
It’s what money gives us, which I personally experienced for the first time in my life: a true abundance of options and a great sense of safety.
I come from an ancestral legacy of colonization, war, and poverty.
Mind you, there was great dignity in our resilience. And honor in our values, ways of life, and the way we stewarded resources.
But needless to say, a deeply felt sense of physical and spiritual safety, AS WELL AS having access to an overabundance of options, was and is foreign to us.
This is what money bought me and my family. It felt like more than just “it’s sweet having nice things!”
It felt like a cleansing. A medicine. A redeeming. And a sense of coming home.
Because here’s the thing: you don’t have to be Korean to have inherited a legacy informed by theft, violence, trauma, and diasporic displacement.
You can be Indigenous American. Black. Latine. Irish. Jewish. Palestinian. Armenian. Romani. Uighur. Tibetan. The list goes on.
And/or the economic underclass of basically any society.
And/or just NOT a cishetero male.
For us, HAVING a lot of money will, for the first time, and at least briefly, give us that sense of SAFETY AND OPTIONS.
The option to exist.
The option to care for our loved ones abundantly.
The option to do what we like, not what we are forced to do.
The option to make decisions for joy and thriving, not mere survival.
But money was never inherently what gives us these things.
WE HAD THESE THINGS IN THE BEGINNING.
SAFETY AND OPTIONS TO LIVE RICH, JOYFUL, FREE LIVES ARE OUR BIRTHRIGHT.
And for so many of us, money was what allowed us to BUY THEM BACK .
In the past few years, having money allowed me to feel a complete freedom to be my entire self and live out ALL of my values without compromise… for the first time.
The trouble is…
MONEY IS NEITHER THE THING ITSELF, NOR THE SOURCE OF THE THING.
When we mistake money as being THE THING itself, our relationship with money morphs into a different subjugation and bondage.
(I have seen it happen a lot. I know you have, too.)
As a business coach, my highest and most aligned aspiration is NO LONGER giant piles and piles of money for you.
It is now the reclamation of your spiritual birthright.
Your spiritual birthright to an over-abundance of safety — the kind that recodes your nervous system. To an over-abundance of options and freedom.
To a powerfully felt experience of what your ancestors, too, had, before they were stolen from and subjugated — THE JOY OF ALIVENESS, CREATION AND INTERDEPENDENCE.
For some of you, the journey of reclamation may very well involve making giant piles and piles of money with your business…
…and learning how to steward that wealth in ways that break toxic paradigms and create new ones.
For some of you, it might not.
It might mean just getting you to a place financially where you can easily meet all of your needs, aligned desires and commitments to the ecology that surrounds you…
… and seeing where the spirit of your business wants to take you from there.
The aligned path will differ for each of us.
And it will ask us to wrestle with what it means to reclaim what is ours in a world dominated by cruel, dignity-stealing, earth-depleting systems of supremacy.
It will ask each of us to bring our unique gifts and perspective to the table to be part of the healing.
But I am no longer available to co-sign the falsehood that wealth is the ticket to freedom and aliveness.
Freedom is the ticket to freedom. Aliveness is the ticket to aliveness.
And both are already parts of your soul.
They cannot be purchased. Only claimed and activated.
And it was only ever the legacy of imperialism that ever bamboozled us into thinking that we needed to earn them…
… by making and hoarding millions of dollars through participating in a wounded economic system.
If you’re resonating with what I’m saying, thank you for being here.
