ALIVENESS: a philosophy and practice for living fully in the awareness of a finite life.

A practice has been gradually emerging for months now. Something you actually do. Every morning. Every week. Every year.

Today I want to share it with you properly, attached as a PDF guide you can keep, return to, and use.

May I introduce The Aliveness Practice.

You may already know mindfulness. Most people do.

Mindfulness teaches you to be present. To notice where you are, what you are feeling, what is happening in the here and now.

Aliveness exists because of a simple truth I keep returning to: time is finite.

You cannot feel fully alive without a relationship with mortality. When you feel that honestly, even for a moment, everything else becomes clearer.

Where mindfulness calms the mind, Aliveness designs the life. Together they are more powerful than either one alone.

But Aliveness goes further than that.

When you know what you are living toward, everything else deepens.

Aliveness is not the only practice you need. It is the one that makes the others more purposeful.

Here is what outcomes the Aliveness Practice produces.

What people notice first is clarity, the kind that makes decisions easier because you suddenly know what actually matters.

Then courage. The willingness to have the conversations you have been avoiding, to take the path you have been circling for too long. Then more honesty with yourself, more presence with the people you love, less tolerance for drift.

The background anxiety that comes from avoiding what matters begins to lift. Decisions that once felt impossible start to feel obvious. And underneath all of it… fewer regrets. Which might be the whole point.

Here is what I have watched the Aliveness practice do.

Two days ago I guided a group of parents through The Ultimate Meditation in Vietnam. Afterwards several people came to find me one by one. They looked like something had been put down that they had been carrying for a long time.

The same words was repeated.

“Thank you, the session created real clarity.”

Elad, one of the parents, wrote to me afterwards: “It reframed death as something that can actually help clarify how to live more fully right now. It made me want to reorganise how I live, make decisions, and spend my time.”

A few weeks ago, Alex tried the technique and said: “There’s something quietly brilliant about flipping the whole thing and asking how you want the final feeling to land. Most folks spend their lives chasing goals and never pause long enough to check if any of it adds up to a life they’d actually want to remember.”

I want to tell you what it has done closer to home.

My wife Linnea and I have been doing the morning and evening practice together every day.

Something has shifted between us that I did not expect. We are calmer. More honest. Less caught in the small frictions that used to take up more space than they deserved.

And without saying a word about any of it to our children, we watched something change in them too. Our more balanced energy is rippling out and into them.

Here is the Aliveness Practice (also available in TOOLS)

The Aliveness Practice

1.99MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The Ultimate Meditation

I want to be honest. This practice is new. I am still developing it. I am sharing it now, imperfect as it is, because waiting until something is finished is exactly the kind of postponement this practice is designed to interrupt.

Which means I need you.

Try just the morning practice this week. Tomorrow, before your phone, ask yourself one question:

What would I need to do today for today to feel like a good day tonight?

Then send me a message. Tell me what shifted. What felt true. What needs adjusting. I am building this with you, not for you.

One more thing.

Aliveness Practice workshops and guided meditations for subscribers are coming soon. Most likely from when I finish traveling from late May, and if you want to be among the first to know, reply with the word yes and I will make sure you hear first.

Live happy,

Hoppy

If this landed with you, please share it with one person who needs it.

Tools & Updates

Aliveness Practice workshops and guided meditations for subscribers are coming soon.

Reverstory: my bespoke AI guide that shows you the life you’re heading towards, so you can avoid future regret and start living with clarity and confidence. Available to paying subscribers.

Live Purpose: my other AI guide that helps you choose your direction and build a life that feels right, meaningful, and aligned with who you are. Available to paying subscribers.

Go deeper: The World Below The Surface / Impact of Death Denial on Health / Rebranding to Aliveness

ALIVENESS: a philosophy and practice for living fully in the awareness of a finite life.

We’ve had the good fortune these last few months travelling the world as a family to have access to pools.

Now, every time I jump into the water, I do the same thing.

I sink to the bottom. Roll onto my back. And stay there for as long as I can hold my breath. It’s my new favourite mini-meditation.

Above me, the surface undulates. Light bends through the shifting membrane, where air meets water, in long, shifting prisms. Rainbow edges catching and dissolving, catching and dissolving. The whole ceiling of the water is alive. Psychedelic. Like looking up at the sky through someone else’s dream.

From my mouth and nose, bubbles pop and rise. Slowly at first, then faster as I exhale.

I’ve learned I can control the movement of the bubbles, a long slow breath produces a single column of silver, rising in a perfect line. A short puff sends a cluster scattering upward, each one finding its own path to the surface.

I watch them go.

My boy suddenly swims over me, looking down with goggles, grinning, mischievous. He then gives me an underwater kiss before gliding away without sound.

Down here, the noise of the world above are muffled. Children’s voices. Music. Someone laughing. All of it softened to a baseline hum, like the world is happening somewhere far away and I am briefly, blissfully, elsewhere.

I don’t know exactly when I started doing this. A few weeks ago. But I know why I keep doing it.

It feels extremely comfortable. Like a womb.

Not metaphorically. Actually. The weightlessness, the warmth, the contained silence, the sense of being held by something larger than yourself.

I wrote once about a ceremony in which I was taken back to the memory of being in my mother’s womb - the orange glow, the heartbeat, the feeling that everything was safe and nothing could reach me there. The pool gives me a version of that. Voluntarily. Whenever I need it.

I am forty-six years old and right now, with this swimming pool, I return to the womb every day.

I am writing this newsletter from Phu Quoc, a Vietnamese island where we have spent the last few weeks at a ‘world school’ - a pop up, temporary community/school where travelling families come together and engage in educational activities.

At world schools the children find each other across languages and nationalities, whilst the adults recognise a similar sense of adventure in each other’s faces. We all made the same unusual choice to travel for months, sometimes years. We all said yes to something most people only talk about.

Last July, my wife Linnea and I sold our house, packed one carry-on bag each, took our children out of school, and left.

Some days that still doesn’t feel real.

There are moments on this trip, when I have felt something close to awe. A perfect sunset. A picnic meal in nature, or sitting around a fire on Lake Atitlán, singing ancient medicine songs with people we met three days ago and will probably never see again.

The particular dizziness of realising you are actually inside your life, not watching it from a safe distance.

The pool gives me that too.

When I am lying at the bottom, looking up at the rippling surface above me, I think: this is what it feels like to be on the other side. Up there is the world I usually inhabit, the decisions, the plans, the notifications, the calendar, the version of life that happens on screens. Down here is something older. Quieter. More true.

Most of us spend almost all of our time above the surface. Reacting. Managing. Moving through the day at the speed the day demands. It is not a bad life. In many ways it is a full one. But it is not the same as being fully inside it.

There is a difference between living your life and inhabiting it, and most of us only discover that difference in the moments we least expect. A piece of music that stops us mid-step. A child saying something that cracks us up. Thirty seconds at the bottom of a pool on a Vietnamese island, watching bubbles rise toward the light.

Aliveness is not always found in the extraordinary.

It is found in the ordinary. The mundane. Every where.

This week, I’d like to invite you to find your version of the pool.

Not literally, though if you have access to water, I genuinely recommend it. But the question underneath the question is this: where in your life do you drop below the surface? Where do you go when the world above gets too loud? And if the honest answer is nowhere… that might be worth sitting with.

You don’t need a Vietnamese island to find it. You just need thirty seconds and the willingness to go under.

Live happy,

Hoppy

If this landed with you, please share it with one person who needs it.

Tools & Updates

Reverstory: my bespoke AI guide that shows you the life you’re heading towards, so you can avoid future regret and start living with clarity and confidence. Available to paying subscribers.

Live Purpose: my other AI guide that helps you choose your direction and build a life that feels right, meaningful, and aligned with who you are. Available to paying subscribers.

The Ultimate Meditation: a guided practice for reconnecting with what matters. Available free to all subscribers.

I would like to tell you how the word arrived.

Since launching this project months ago I’ve had a nagging feeling about the language. Mortality awareness. Death. Limiting fears. Finite life. All accurate. All true.

But here’s the problem: the moment most people hear those words, walls come down.

Not because the idea isn’t relevant to them. Mortality is universal. But because, the reality is in our society, very few people want to read a wellbeing newsletter with the word ‘dying’ in the title.

And yet ‘Dying To Live With Purpose’ (my former title) was really about living FULLY through the lens of mortality. Being fully alive to the life you actually have - which will allow you to step into deepest potential.

I kept thinking, if only there was a single word for this philosophy… a word like ‘Mindfulness’. Simple, immediate, human. A word that captured not the mechanism but the outcome. The feeling. A word that could become a wellness practise in its own right.

And then one evening, it just appeared.

Aliveness.

The moment I read it, I felt it, like an electric bolt. That’s it. That’s what this has always been.

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The Thing Most People Feel But Don’t Say

There’s a feeling a lot of people carry but rarely say out loud. That life is fine. Good, even. But rarely amazing. Rarely magical. Somewhere along the way, without really noticing, they switched onto autopilot.

Thinking ahead. Managing things. Postponing what matters. Assuming there will always be more time.

Sound familiar? We all do it.

What Aliveness Is

Aliveness isn’t a new word. People have used it for years to describe energy, presence, a feeling of being fully here. You might have said it yourself.

But here’s what’s new. From my research, the word Aliveness has never been directly connected to mortality.

And yet life and death are two sides of the same coin. The moment you see aliveness through the lens of mortality, the word takes on more depth. More weight. More truth.

This is exactly why so many people are living on autopilot.

Aliveness is the antidote. Not morbid. Not heavy. Just honest. And because of that honesty, genuinely powerful.

What if aliveness wasn’t something you stumbled into... but something you could actually practise?

The Aliveness Practice

I’ve now almost finished writing The Aliveness Practice - a practical guide to living more fully, for people who know something is missing and are ready to do something about it.

Mortality awareness is still the root. But aliveness is the experience.

Mortality awareness is how we get there. Aliveness is what we find when we do.

And that changes how this whole conversation feels. You’re not trying to think about death. You’re simply noticing what brings you back into your own life. Fully back.

The Benefits of Aliveness

Here are just some of the outcomes I am seeing unfold from practicing Aliveness:

Radical clarity — the kind that makes decisions easier, because you know what actually matters to you.

Less anxiety about the future — because you stop trying to control what was never yours to control.

More presence — in conversations, with your children, in ordinary moments you’d previously have moved through without noticing.

Deeper relationships — because you stop performing and start actually showing up.

More intimacy — presence is the most attractive thing there is. When you're fully there, everything deepens. Your relationships. Your connection. Your sex life.

A clearer sense of purpose — a knowing of what you’re here to do.

More courage — to change things, have difficult conversations, take the path you’ve been circling for too long.

Less procrastination — because time starts to feel real, not abstract.

Better sleep and lower stress — the mind rests differently when you’re no longer avoiding what matters.

Healthier choices — almost as a side effect. When life feels worth living fully, you want to take care of it. Physical and mental health improves.

And underneath all of it — less regret. Which might be the whole point.

A Keystone Practice

Aliveness isn’t another practice to add to the pile. I believe it is THE practice that makes every other practice work better.

Your meditation goes deeper. Your relationships become more honest. Your work becomes more intentional. Your creativity opens up.

Everything changes when time feels real. Aliveness doesn’t replace anything.

It amplifies everything.

And honestly? I have a feeling it could become as significant as mindfulness, if nurtured wisely. That’s the vision.

What’s In The Works

There’s a lot coming…

I’m deep into planning the Aliveness book.

I’ll be teaching the practice formally: workshops, programmes, ways to go deeper than a newsletter can take you.

There will be an Aliveness community, a place to practise together, support each other, and stop living by default and start living by design.

I’m also training to take leaders through a six week rite of passage. Coaching them through the identity thresholds that come with success, that strange moment when you’ve built something significant and realise the life that got you here isn’t quite the life you want next. Helping them step into a second chapter that’s richer, more meaningful, and more fully theirs than the first.

More on all of this soon. But if any of it resonates already, hit reply. I’d love to hear where you are.

Thank You

I want to say thank you. To everyone who has been supporting this newsletter since October 2025, and to those who’ve joined along the way.

This feels like a big moment where the philosophy evolves and crystallises, shaped by all of you reading, reflecting, supporting.

A Simple Reminder

You don’t need to change your whole life. We just need to stop living as if we have unlimited time.

That’s where the magic begins.

If this article resonated, please comment, like, re-stack, and share. By supporting this work you are helping the Aliveness vision come to be.

Live happy,

Hoppy

p.s. I attached the Aliveness manifesto to the bottom of this newsletter

Subscribe now

Tools & Updates

Visit Tools to explore 15+ self guided exercises designed to reduce anxiety, improve vitality, deepen your sleep, and bring clarity to your relationships, career, and health.

Reverstory & Live Purpose: the bespoke AI tools designed to help you identify and avoid major life regrets and take you on a journey into deeper purpose. Available to paying subscribers.

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

I have been invited to perform the mediation at both Connect and Medicine Festivals this summer.

Go deeper: Oscar Wilde: Famous Last Words / Impact of Death Denial on our Health / Return to the Womb

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about Aliveness: “Conversations like this are what I’m here for! Love this article which asks us to consider this: “Am I living, or am I mostly existing?” (Laura)

More testimonials here

Aliveness Manifesto (short Version)

3.7MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Your weekly dose of living fully

When I first read “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” I recognised it. Not as a philosophical idea. As a description of something I had felt, and if I’m honest, something I have done in my life.

Existing. Moving through the days. Busy, responsible, functioning. But not completely alive.

And I think a lot of people feel this privately, even when everything looks fine from the outside.

Wilde knew something about this. He was born in Dublin in 1854 and by his forties had become one of the most celebrated writers in the English-speaking world.

He was adored by society, famous for a wit so sharp people collected his sentences like objects. Then it all collapsed. His affair with a young man led to his arrest. He was imprisoned for two years and died in poverty not long after, at just 46. Separated from his children. Exiled from the country that had celebrated him.

A man who lost everything. And who understood, perhaps better than most, what it actually means to waste a life, and what it means not to.

So when he wrote that living is the rarest thing in the world, he wasn’t theorising. He was someone who had felt the full weight of that sentence.

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The Strange Drift Into Existence

I don’t think anyone decides to stop living fully. It happens slowly. You postpone things. You choose the safe option. You delay the conversation. You tell yourself you’ll do it later, when things calm down, when the children are older, when work is easier, when the timing is right.

This is the unconscious drift Oscar Wilde was pointing to. The difference between existing and living is not usually dramatic. It is subtle. It is made of small decisions, postponed risks, avoided conversations, unlived versions of yourself.

Mortality Changes The Question

This is where mortality enters the conversation in an important way. When we avoid thinking about death, we behave as if time is abundant. As if life will just continue, and therefore there’s no real urgency to make difficult decisions or live differently.

But when you truly remember that your time here is finite, something changes. The question shifts. You stop asking: how do I stay comfortable? And you start asking: how do I actually want to live?

Mortality awareness has a strange effect. It does not make life smaller. It makes it sharper. Clearer. More vivid.

You start noticing the magic in the ordinary things again. A meal with friends. A walk in the evening. Your children laughing in the next room. Sunlight on a wall. A conversation that matters.

Wilde himself, during his time in prison, found a kind of unexpected spiritual depth, writing about his convictions, finding meaning in the place that had taken everything from him. As if the very loss of his comfortable life cracked something open.

Mortality does not make life depressing. It makes life precious.

Existing Versus Being Alive

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between existing and being alive.

• Existing is mostly about maintaining things. Being alive is about experiencing them.

• Existing is about security. Being alive is about presence.

• Existing is about avoiding risk. Being alive is about choosing growth, which means stepping out of one’s comfort zone.

• Existing is about keeping everything under control. Being alive is about accepting that you never really were in control.

And this is the strange paradox of being human. The things that make us feel most alive often involve uncertainty, change, courage, vulnerability, honesty, and sometimes loss.

Wilde knew this better than most. He was physically weakened, financially ruined, and estranged from his family after his release from prison. And yet the writing he produced from that broken place, the long poem he wrote about his imprisonment, the letters he sent from exile, is some of the most searingly alive work he ever created.

Aliveness does not come from comfort. It comes from engagement with life as it actually is.

The Present Moment Is Where Life Is

One thing mortality makes very clear is that life is not happening in the future.

It is happening now. Not next year. Not when everything is sorted. Not when you finally feel ready, or have enough money, or enough certainty. Now.

This conversation. This season of your life. This body. This family. This ordinary Tuesday.

A Gentle Question

Oscar Wilde said that living is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. It’s a brutal sentence in a way. But also a kind one. Because it invites a question rather than delivering a verdict.

Not a big dramatic question. Just a quiet one you might sit with on a walk, or in the car, or lying in bed at night when the house has finally gone still.

Am I really living, or am I mostly existing?

There’s no need to panic if the answer is uncomfortable. Everyone drifts at some point. That is part of being human.

Because in the end, the goal probably isn’t to be successful, or impressive, or efficient.

It’s simply to be fully alive… while you are living.

If this article resonated, please comment, like, re-stack, and share. By supporting this work, and being part of this community, you are helping this vision come true. Thank you.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools & Updates

BIG NEWS: I will be rebranding soon to ALIVENESS. What began as Dying to Live With Purpose which spoke more to the mechanism of ‘Mortality Awareness’, has evolved into a bigger idea: Aliveness – living fully in the awareness that one is mortal. I believe this could be as big as Mindfulness, which teaches people how to be present, whereas Aliveness will teach people how to live fully in a finite life.

Visit Tools to explore 15+ self guided exercises designed to reduce anxiety, improve vitality, deepen your sleep, and bring clarity to your relationships, career, and health.

Reverstory: the bespoke AI tool designed to help you identify major life regrets and suggest ideas of how to course correct while you still can. Available to paying subscribers.

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

I have been invited to perform the mediation at both Connect and Medicine Festivals this summer.

Go deeper: The Powerful Secret That Improves Your Sleep / Carl Jung: Famous Last Words / What Is Purpose?

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: “Hoppy, This is extremely important and helpful work that you are undertaking. It deserves to be widely shared” (Fergus)

More testimonials here

Thank you for being here. If you are new and curious about how mortality awareness can improve every aspect of your life, read more on the about page.

If my work nourishes you consider becoming a paid supporter and receive 14+ exercises and access to my AI companion, designed to improve vitality, deepen sleep and bring clarity to relationships, career, and health.

Subscribe now

Sleep is often the first place where truth shows up.

For most of my adult life I couldn’t sleep through the night. I would often struggle to get to sleep, and then 3am would come for me with a vengeance.

Mind suddenly wide open. The house dark and quiet while I lay there running mad loops on things I often couldn’t solve: work. Direction. Family. Frustrations. More frustrations. Decisions I kept putting off.

My mind was stuck in the future.

By morning I’d be functioning again. Just. Meetings, conversations, responsibilities. From the outside everything looked fine.

But something inside wasn’t at rest. I was hanging on. And a lot of people recognise this pattern. Most just don’t say it out loud.

What Good Sleep Actually Feels Like

As we all know, when sleep is good, life feels different. Genuinely different. You feel amazing. Vital.

You wake before the alarm, not because you have to but because your body is simply done sleeping. Bang. No drowsiness, just… delightfully awake.

You make coffee and it actually smells like coffee. In fact, you often you don’t need coffee.

That day you are able to be more patient. You listen properly. You make better decisions, not because you’re smarter, but because you’re not operating from a place of depletion.

When I’m well-rested I am a different person.

People who sleep well carry lower anxiety, maintain better relationships, and even live longer on average.

Sleep is not a luxury. It is one of the foundations of a good life. And for a long time, I was building mine on very shaky ground.

The Mind That Cannot Rest

The majority of people carry worry through their days. It becomes so familiar we stop noticing it. It’s just the background noise of being alive.

What will happen to my work? Am I making the right decisions? Where is the world heading? Am I on the right path?

We talk constantly about productivity, innovation, disruption.

But there is one subject almost nobody talks about. Our mortality.

The simple, plain truth that our time here is finite.

Because here’s what I’ve come to discover. Our anxieties and worries, the work ones, the direction ones, the what-if-I-get-this-wrong ones, they are not really about work or direction or decisions. They are fears. And all fear, if you follow it honestly to its root, grows from the same, ancient, existential source.

The fear that time is running out. That we will reach the end having not quite lived the life we meant to. That we will run out of chances. These are all modern fears that grow from the same root.

We don’t face that root directly. It’s too large. So instead we break it into a thousand smaller worries and let the mind keep scanning the future, trying to control what was never ours to control.

And this, more than anything, is what shows up at three in the morning.

Where Mortality Changes the Equation

Something amazing happens when we become aware of our mortality on a regular basis. Not in a dramatic way. No thunderclap. Just a quiet acknowledgement that life is finite, time is actually moving, and certain questions deserve real attention now, not eventually.

When that truth routinely lands, something simplifies. The future loosens its grip. Instead of scanning ahead, trying to manage what can’t be managed, you come back into the here and now. Into this meal, this conversation, this ordinary Saturday.

Sleep only happens in the present moment. Anxiety only exists in the future.

When the mind is scanning tomorrow, it cannot rest. It is trying to predict, control, prepare, solve. It is trying to survive a future that does not yet exist.

But when mortality becomes real to you, not as an idea but as a fact, something pulls you back into today. Into this room. This breath. This ordinary life that is actually your life.

And it turns out the nervous system can only relax here. In the present. That is where sleep blossoms.

When you stop pretending you have unlimited time, decisions that once felt paralysing begin to clarify. The fog lifts.

And clarity… real clarity… the kind that comes from honesty rather than optimism, has a calming effect on the nervous system. You become present.

Because a lot of what keeps the mind awake at night isn’t workload. It’s unresolved direction. The role that no longer fits. The conversation you’ve been avoiding for months. The path you can feel pulling at you but haven’t stepped onto yet.

While those tensions remain unspoken, the mind keeps working on them quietly. In the background. At 3am. Sleep becomes restless because life feels unresolved.

My Own Turning Point

I won’t overclaim this. But I will tell you what’s true. Since I began practising mortality Awareness, something I am starting to see as a state of ‘Aliveness’, regularly this last year, not as a concept to think about, but as something to actually sit with, the quality of my sleep has transformed.

I sleep through the night now. Deeply. Like a baby, which is not something I ever thought I’d say about myself. And it is a beautiful thing. Waking rested changes my entire experience of being alive.

The world feels different when you’re not moving through it half-depleted.

A Simple Thought Before Sleep

If sleep has been restless recently, you might try something simple tonight.

When you get into bed, before reaching for your phone or letting your mind wander off into tomorrow, take a series of slow breaths and let yourself hold something quietly true.

Your time here is finite. Not as a threat. Just as a fact of being human. The same fact that makes a sunset worth stopping for, or a meal with someone you love worth being fully present for.

If you want a more powerful sleep practise, look at the exercise attached at the bottom.

If this article resonated, please comment, like, re-stack, and share. My vision is to establish mortality awareness as a recognised wellness practise. By supporting this work, and being part of this community, you are helping this vision come true. Thank you.

Live happy,

Hoppy

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Tools & Updates

Videos: Watch my conversation with award-winning Funeral director Poppy Mardall, on what it’s like to work in the death sector.

Podcast: I appeared on the Unapologetic Living podcast with Elizabeth Elliot, discussing how mortality awareness unlocks potential and purpose.

Visit Tools to explore 14+ self guided exercises designed to reduce anxiety, improve vitality, deepen your sleep, and bring clarity to your relationships, career, and health.

I am designing a new AI chatbot called Live Purpose, that will help you discover deeper purpose in life. Stay tuned.

Reverstory: the bespoke AI tool designed to help you identify major life regrets and suggest ideas of how to course correct while you still can. Available to paying subscribers.

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

I have been invited to perform the mediation at both Connect and Medicine Festivals this summer.

Go deeper: I Finally Did The Backflip, Aged 46 / Return To The Womb / How Death Denial Influences The News

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: “In a world increasingly disconnected- from nature, from one another, from spirit, and from death itself-Hoppy’s work offers a vital path. He helps people release their fear of death and reconnect with a deeper sense of meaning and belonging.” (Nick Von Christierson, CEO of Woven Science & El Puente)

More testimonials here

Below this paywall is a Sleep-boosting Breath Exercise.

The Deep Sleep Breath

280KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Thank you for being here. If you are new and curious about how mortality awareness can improve every aspect of your life, read more on the about page.

If my work nourishes you consider becoming a paid supporter and receive 14+ exercises and access to my AI companion, designed to improve vitality, deepen sleep and bring clarity to relationships, career, and health.

We are turning mortality awareness into a wellness movement.

Subscribe now

In this conversation, I sit down with Poppy Mardall, founder of Poppy’s Funerals, an award-winning, London-based funeral service reimagining how we care for both the living and the dead.

We explore what it’s really like to work in the death space. The subtle judgments. The discomfort it can stir in others. And the way people often don’t know how to respond when you choose to step toward something most spend their lives avoiding.

But what becomes clear through Poppy’s work is this: when death is approached with openness, care, and humanity, it doesn’t close life down… it deepens it.

“I never could have imagined I would become an undertaker” (Poppy Mardall)

Her approach prioritises choice, transparency, and environmental responsibility, creating space for more honest, meaningful experiences around loss.

Because when we stop pushing death away, something unexpected happens.

Life begins to feel more real.

If this newsletter resonated, please comment, like, re-stack, and share. My vision is to establish mortality awareness as a recognised wellness practise. By supporting this work, and being part of this community, you are helping this vision come true. Thank you.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools & Updates

Visit Tools to explore 14+ self guided exercises designed to reduce anxiety, improve vitality, deepen your sleep, and bring clarity to your relationships, career, and health.

I am designing a new AI chatbot called Live Purpose, that will help you discover deeper purpose in life. Stay tuned.

Reverstory: the bespoke AI tool designed to help you identify major life regrets and suggest ideas of how to course correct while you still can. Available to paying subscribers.

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

I have been invited to perform the mediation at both Connect and Medicine Festivals this summer.

Go deeper: I Finally Did The Backflip / How Death Denial Influences The News / The Amazing Way Mortality Transforms Your Love Life

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: “Beautiful words Hoppy, thank you for sharing this deeply intimate experience.” (Tom)

More testimonials here

Subscribe now

Thank you for being here. If you are new and curious about how mortality awareness can improve every aspect of your life, read more on the about page.

If my work nourishes you consider becoming a paid supporter and receive 14+ exercises and access to my AI companion, designed to improve vitality, deepen sleep and bring clarity to relationships, career, and health.

We are turning mortality awareness into a wellness movement.

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Flipping Fear

I finally did a backflip at the age of forty six.

You are well within your right to find this concept ridiculous, but the truth is, I had wanted to do a backflip my whole life and somehow never found the courage.

Every now and then over the years I’d stand on a high diving board and think about it. You know that moment where your toes curl slightly over the edge and you look down at the water and try to picture the movement in your mind.

And then the same thing would happen. A tightening in the stomach. A flash of catastrophe.

A quiet voice saying something very reasonable like:“you’re too old for this.” Or “you’ll land on your head.” “You’re not sixteen anymore.”

So I stepped back. For almost thirty years.

Which is funny when I think about some of the other things I’ve done in that time. Built companies. Directed films. Sat with dying people in hospital. I once flew hundreds of drones over a crowd of more than one hundred thousand people at Glastonbury while quietly praying nothing malfunctioned and quietly dying inside from anxiety.

Apparently all of that felt safer than a backflip.

The mind is strange like that. It decides very selectively what counts as danger.

Backflip #1: Guatemala

Earlier this year we were travelling through Guatemala on our year off as a family travelling the world, and found this beautiful swimming spot. A lake surrounded by jungle and a high diving platform sticking out over the water.

My boys were launching themselves off it again and again. Absolute joy. The kind of shouting and splashing that echoes across water.

I stood there at the edge pretending to supervise. In reality I was negotiating with myself. Part of me knew exactly what was happening.

I spend a lot of my time now talking about courage and stepping into the life that’s waiting on the other side of fear. Helping people move toward deeper purpose.

And yet here I was, toes on the edge of a board, stuck in the exact same hesitation that had followed me since I was a teenager.

So I climbed up. Looked down. Calculated the drop. Fifteen feet maybe. Perfectly safe really. And then I climbed back down.

No one noticed. I told myself it didn’t matter. Got changed, even told everyone it was time to leave.

But the kids asked for ten more minutes. But the kids asked for ten more minutes. They were having such a great time. Something about the way children move through fear is very different. They feel it, but they don’t negotiate with it for thirty years.

I said '“OK”. That was it. Years of hesitation dissolved into a single decision. The swimming trunks went back on.

I climbed up again and this time I did not negotiate. I calmed myself as best I could and went for it.

And it was… glorious.

Not the flip itself. That part happened in a blur. But the feeling of something old finally dissolving. A little victory.

I realised something very simple. If I had left without doing it, that little thorn would still be there. Now, it is gone.

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Backflip #2: Thailand

A few weeks later we were on a snorkel trip in Thailand.

I spotted that our boat had a high dive platform. Maybe fifteen feet above the sea. The water that deep turquoise colour you only really see in places like that.

Without much ceremony I climbed up and did another backflip.

This one was much easier.

The physics were exactly the same. Same height. Same rotation. Same water waiting below. But the fear had already been met once.

Courage, it turns out, becomes easier once you’ve touched it.

You might even notice I tried to add a little bit more of an Olympic flourish to my water entry this time.

The Golden Moment With My Son, Bror

And then something happened I will remember for the rest of my life.

Just after my flip, my nine year old son Bror went and performed a surprise front somersault whilst my wife was still filming.

He didn’t say anything. Didn’t announce a plan. Just climbed up there quietly after seeing his dad show some courage and went for it.

It was a perfect forward flip straight into the water, caught perfectly on camera.

Clean. Confident. No hesitation.

And I felt this sudden rush of intense fatherly pride in my chest that caught me off guard. A rush that far outweighed my own personal achievement and pride of my own flip.

Not just because Bror did it. But because something about the moment felt… connected.

Like courage had moved through the air between us.

Courage, it turns out, becomes easier once you’ve touched it.

“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.” (Bruce Lee)

Courage Is Contagious

Lately I’ve been wondering if that’s how it works.

Maybe courage really is contagious. Maybe the quiet decisions we make about fear ripple outward more than we realise.

I’ve spent the last few years thinking deeply about mortality. Sitting with the simple truth that life is finite. That time moves whether we like it or not.

And when you remember that often enough, hesitation starts to look different. You stop believing you have endless time to circle the things that matter.

Somewhere along the way I think I simply stopped believing I had forever to do the backflip.

The Backflip Most People Avoid

Much anxiety, I’ve come to believe, is about unlived life waiting patiently.

The conversations we keep postponing. The changes we sense but haven’t stepped toward. The small risks that quietly sit in the corner of our lives asking for courage.

Often the fear isn’t really about the thing itself. It’s about the moment of stepping into the unknown.

But once you do it once… something shifts. The next time it becomes easier.

A Small Reflection

You don’t need to go and do a backflip. But maybe there’s something in your life that feels a little bit like one? Something you’ve been circling for years. Something you suspect you’re capable of, but haven’t quite stepped into yet.

A conversation. A change. A truth. Maybe just notice it.

Because when you finally move toward the thing you’ve been postponing, something curious tends to happen.

The fear loosens. And sometimes… someone else finds their courage too.

If this article resonated, please comment, like, re-stack, and share. My vision is to establish mortality awareness as a recognised wellness practise. By supporting this work, and being part of this community, you are helping this vision come true. Thank you.

Live happy,

Hoppy

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Tools & Updates

Videos: Watch my conversation with Substack author Joe Nichols on what it’s like living with anxiety as an entrepreneur.

Podcast: I appeared on the Unapologetic Living podcast with Elizabeth Elliot, discussing how mortality awareness unlocks potential and purpose.

Visit Tools to explore 14+ self guided exercises designed to reduce anxiety, improve vitality, deepen your sleep, and bring clarity to your relationships, career, and health.

I am designing a new AI chatbot called Live Purpose, that will help you discover deeper purpose in life. Stay tuned.

Reverstory: the bespoke AI tool designed to help you identify major life regrets and suggest ideas of how to course correct while you still can. Available to paying subscribers.

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

I have been invited to perform the mediation at both Connect and Medicine Festivals this summer.

Go deeper: How Death Denial Influences The News / My Father’s Death / The Incredible Way Mortality Awakens Happiness

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: “Hoppy’s vision is profound, important, and joyful. He is truly committed to sharing his life changing insights with others, reminding us that by facing death we can meet ourselves with integrity” Dr. Rosalind Watts, clinical psychologist and TED speaker

More testimonials here

Drawing on my near death experiences and my work as an end of life guide, we look at how the fear of death quietly shapes many of our decisions, often without us realising it. When we begin to face that fear directly, something surprising happens. Life starts to feel more vivid, more honest, and more aligned with what truly matters.

In this episode we talk about why death awareness can dissolve fear, how mortality sharpens our sense of purpose, and simple ways to move from avoidance toward a life lived with greater presence, gratitude, and courage.

Live happy,

Hoppy

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Your weekly dose of living fully

I’ve been noticing the pull to check the news again.

And again.

Conflict. Escalation. Retaliation. Markets wobbling. Leaders posturing.
Language hardening.

It’s not that I want bad news. It’s that something in me feels compelled to look. And I’ve been wondering why.

Because beneath the headlines, beneath the analysis, beneath the political arguments, there is something far more primal being activated. Mortality.

The news, especially during global conflict, forces death back into view. Not directly. Not always graphically. But unmistakably. And we are a ‘death-phobic’ culture that over-consumes news without being able to metabolise it.

The Nervous System Loop

When mortality is unconscious, it doesn’t disappear. It becomes anxiety. And the modern news cycle is very good at stimulating anxiety.

Breaking updates. Red banners. Urgency. Language that signals threat, instability, unpredictability.

So you check again. And again. Not because you are informed. Because you are scanning for survival.

This is where death denial enters. When we have never been taught how to sit with mortality calmly, every reminder of instability feels like a personal threat.

War somewhere else becomes fear here. Economic downturn becomes identity threat. Political volatility becomes existential unease.

So we scroll. We argue. We attach to narratives that make us feel more certain. And certainty becomes a substitute for safety.

The Fear Economy of the News

There is another layer to this. Negative news doesn’t dominate simply because the world is collapsing. It dominates because it works.

So the stories that spread most easily are the ones that activate our deepest survival instincts. Conflict. Collapse. Crisis. Catastrophe. The result is a loop.

Our unconscious fear of mortality pulls our attention toward threatening information. The media system learns that threat keeps us watching. So more threat is delivered. And our nervous systems return for another scan.

Not because we enjoy it. Because something ancient inside us is trying to stay alive. The strange result is that we become addicted to the very information that keeps our anxiety alive.

When Mortality Is Avoided, Drama Increases

So - the more uncomfortable we are with death, the more appetite we develop for dramatic, negative news.

This is how conspiracy thinking spreads. This is how misinformation gains traction. This is how society polarises.

Not because people are stupid. But because they are quietly afraid. And they do not know what they are afraid of.

Often what we call political anxiety is not fear of dying. It is fear of losing the life we know. Status. Stability. Identity. Control. All rehearsals for death.

The Strategic Advantage of Mortality Awareness

Now here is the useful bit. When you consciously acknowledge your mortality and integrate it, something steadies.

And from this perspective, you stop seeking psychological safety through constant updates.

You stay informed. But you are not possessed. Your nervous system does not spike with every headline. You do not need the world to feel stable in order to feel internally stable.

That is maturity. That is authority.

Mortality awareness does not make you passive. It makes you deliberate. Instead of reacting to every tremor, you choose your response carefully. Instead of fuelling collective panic, you regulate yourself first.

And that shifts everything.

So What Is The Shift?

When mortality is acknowledged:

• Your news consumption becomes intentional, not compulsive.
• Your conversations become measured, not reactive.
• Your leadership becomes calm in volatility.
• Your family feels your steadiness instead of your agitation.
• Your decisions are not shaped by fear of loss, but clarity of values.

You stop confusing stimulation with relevance. You stop mistaking outrage for engagement. You begin to ask quieter questions:

What actually matters here? What is within my control? What kind of friend, parent or leader do I want to be in unstable times?

A Small Pause

The next time you feel the pull to check the news again, pause for ten seconds.

Notice your body. Is this curiosity? Or is it anxiety scanning for certainty?

Then remind yourself, gently: Instability is part of life. Impermanence is not new. And my steadiness does not depend on headlines.

Mortality is not the enemy of peace. Our avoidance of death is.

And when you learn to sit with that truth, something remarkable happens. The world may still be loud. But you are not.

If this article resonated, please comment, like, re-stack, and share. My vision is to establish mortality awareness as a recognised wellness practise. By supporting this work, and being part of this community, you are helping this vision come true. Thank you.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Subscribe now

Tools & Updates

Visit Tools to explore 14+ self guided exercises designed to reduce anxiety, improve vitality, deepen your sleep, and bring radical clarity to your relationships, career, and health.

Reverstory: the bespoke AI tool designed to help you identify major life regrets and suggest ideas of how to course correct while you still can. Available to paying subscribers.

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

I have been invited to perform the mediation at both Connect and Medicine Festivals this summer.

Video: Watch my conversation with author and psychotherapist Louis Weinstock, as two men discuss fear and death.

Go deeper: How Death Denial Impacts The Environment / The Amazing Way Mortality Transforms Your Love Life / J. R. R. Tolkein: Famous Last Words

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: “Thank you for this, this touches on how I feel so exquisitely.” (Sylvie)

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There is something you know that needs to change. You’ve known it for months. Maybe years.

But you’ve built a very intelligent life to avoid it. So have we all.

Let’s read Tolkien’s quote again:

“A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.”

When I first read The Lord of the Rings, I loved it. When the movie came out in cinemas, it was the only time when, as the credits rolled, I walked straight to the box office and bought a ticket to watch it again on the next day.

I needed to go back in. And I now realise, many years later, that something in that story resonated deeply.

There’s a reason Tolkien’s work is so incredibly powerful.

The Shire is Comfortable

The Shire, the home of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, is a super safe place. Predictable. Smug, even.

The hobbits have manicured gardens, steady routines and second breakfasts. Nothing particularly wrong. And yet, when the call to adventure comes, it terrifies them. They don’t want to leave. And neither do we.

But just like Bilbo, we can’t deny that nagging feeling that you’ve outgrown something. The work no longer fits who you’re becoming. The edges feel tight.

So you rationalise. You optimise instead of pivoting. You expand instead of redefining. You stay busy instead of getting honest.

And that feels like safety. But it’s not. It’s a actually the shortcut back to fear Tolkien refers to, and all fear ultimately, is existential.

Because what you’re avoiding doesn’t disappear. It compounds. And if ignored, over time, will lead to deeper regret.

I Took The Shortcut Too

There was a period in my life where my body started speaking before I did. Panic attacks. Tight chest. Shallow breath. That creeping sense of losing control.

On paper, things looked fine. I was outwardly ‘successful’ in a conventional sense. I had a family, a house, a business I had built. But I was avoiding a truth. I knew my soul was being pulled toward more purposeful work, yet I stayed in a world that no longer aligned. Part of me was dying away.

I thought I could manage it. Push through it. Adjust around it. Instead, the fear met me in my nervous system.

Tolkien was right; you can run from your fear, but you will meet it again. And when you do, it rarely feels gentle.

The Death Beneath The Fear

Here’s what I feel most people miss. What we call fear of change is usually fear of identity death. The part of yourself that no longer serves you.

If I leave this version of my career, who am I? If I pivot the business, what happens to my status? If I slow down, what happens to my worth?

Entrepreneurs are particularly good at avoiding this. We build. We scale. We achieve. We optimise. But sometimes growth becomes a distraction from evolution.

Why Tolkien’s Heroes Grow

The hobbits don’t leave because they’re fearless. They leave because staying becomes more dangerous than stepping out.

And when they return, they’re not the same. They’re deeper. Wiser. Connected with true purpose.

They could never have become who they were meant to be without leaving comfort.

You can avoid that realisation for a while. But eventually, like Gandalf, it will come knocking on your door. Sometimes as restlessness. Sometimes as burnout. Sometimes as crisis. Sometimes as panic in the chest at 3am.

Authority Is Built At The Edge

Every meaningful expansion in my life came from entering a dark cave I didn’t want to enter. Leaving the career that defined me. Writing about death in a culture that avoids that very conversation. Selling the house and leaving the Shire.

Each one felt irrational at first. Each one required letting something old die. And each one led me closer to who I actually am.

Something I am discovering in real time.

An Invitation

You really don’t have to burn down your Shire to make a shift. But notice where you’re circling something.

A conversation. A pivot. A truth about your work. A change you keep postponing.

Ask yourself: If I keep avoiding this, where will I meet it again?

Because Tolkien was right. The shortcut never leads away from fear. It leads straight back to it.

If this article resonated, please comment, like, re-stack, and share. My mission is to establish mortality awareness as a recognised wellness practise. By supporting this work, and being part of this community, you are helping this vision come true.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools & Updates

Visit Tools to explore 14+ self guided exercises designed to reduce anxiety, improve vitality, deepen your sleep, and bring radical clarity to your relationships, career, and health.

Reverstory: the bespoke AI tool designed to help you identify major life regrets and suggest ideas of how to course correct while you still can. Available to paying subscribers. I’m offering a special 25% off paid subscriptions until the end of this month. That’s only £6 / $8 a month to transform your life.

Subscribe now

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

I have been invited to perform the mediation at both Connect and Medicine Festivals this summer.

Video: Watch my conversation with author and psychotherapist Louis Weinstock, as two men discuss fear and death.

Go deeper: Return To The Womb / Socrates: Famous Last Words / The Ultimate Meditation

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: “John exactly this! In the moment when I ask ‘what is happening NOW’, fear falls apart. Only the present moment remains, in which usually nothing bad is happening.” (Sophie)

Below this paywall you will find The 5 Why’s Exercise. A simple but powerful self guided exercise designed to help you trace your motivations back to their root and uncover your true purpose.

Discover Purpose With The Five Whys Excercise

2.95MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

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Dr. Michael Karlfeldt is a renowned naturopathic doctor, bestselling author, and founder of The Karlfeldt Center. With over 35 years of clinical experience, he bridges cutting-edge science, holistic health, and spiritual awakening.

His show features guests from Nobel Prize winners to pioneering scientists and spiritual thought leaders, exploring breakthroughs in health, consciousness, and human potential.

In our conversation, we explored how mortality awareness transforms fear into clarity, courage, and deeper purpose, and why facing death may be one of the most powerful tools for personal and collective wellbeing.

Grateful to Dr. Karlfeldt and his team for the space to share this message on such a respected platform. You can listen and share it using any of the links below:

Apple Podcasts:

Spotify:

Youtube:

Tools & Updates

I will be talking to psychotherapist, coach, social entrepreneur and author Louis Weinstock next Thursday 26th Feb @ 12pm UK time. We will be dicussing what it’s like to live with existential anxiety as grown men. Click here to join the chat. A link will be emailed too.

Reverstory: the bespoke AI tool designed to help you identify major life regrets and suggest ideas of how to course correct while you still can. Available to paying subscribers. I’m offering a special 25% off paid subscriptions for the next month. That’s only £6 / $8 a month to transform your life. Subscribe here:

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

I have been invited to perform the mediation at both Connect and Medicine Festivals this summer - I’m feeling very grateful and honoured.

Tools: For access to Reverstory and guided exercises to help you live with less anxiety, boosted vitality, deeper sleep and greater purpose in life.

Go deeper: Impact of Death Denial on Politics / Carl Jung Famous Last Words / The Amazing Way Mortality Transforms Your Love Life

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: “Another brilliant piece John. Thank you so much. I love what you are offering the world.” (Donna Lancaster, author of A Pilgrimage for the Soul)

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In July 2025 my wife Linnea and I sold our house and most of our possessions to make a long held dream possible. We sat our kids down, and together we decided to travel the world for a year.

A Dream We Kept Postponing

We had talked about this world trip for years but the vision always seemed out of reach. Our jobs, school, money, and dozens of other reasons blocked the way.

Our vision was to visit exotic places we had always wanted to see. Spending real, connected time with our children before they grew older and slipped off into their own lives. Experiencing different cultures, slower travel, and ways of living first hand instead of through screens and headlines.

But underneath all of that was a growing awareness that time is not elastic. That childhood is brief. That health is not guaranteed.

A Spark of Instinct

In late 2024 Linnea and I were both at crossroads in our careers.

My work had begun to make me physically unwell as I realised my true calling was in mortality awareness, not entertainment. Linnea had been searching for a job that fit her more honestly, but not much was sticking.

It felt reckless. It felt terrifying. But we had followed instinct once before when we moved to Somerset, to a town we did not know, and that courage to move rewarded us with seven extraordinary years in our beloved Frome.

So once again we trusted our hearts over our minds.

We took the children out of school. Stepped away from work. Let go of routines that normally hold life in place. Sold almost everything. Released the mortgage and loans. Asked our friend Paul to look after our dog, Ragsdale.

We even limited luggage to one carry on backpack each. It was not minimalism for aesthetics. All in an effort to become as light as possible, physically and psychologically.

The Goodbye That Broke Us

One of the hardest parts was leaving on the train in Frome. Our close friends running down the platform, alongside the carriage as the train began to move off, everyone in floods of tears. Our children pressed to the window, sobbing.

And as the train pulled away toward the airport, something hit me in the chest.

The Cave

Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero’s Journey, once wrote:

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

That moment was our cave. Stepping away from comfort. Letting go of a life that worked on many levels, yet feeling called beyond it.

The fear was not danger. It was loss. Deep grief.

Instinct does not shout. And over the years that sense of instinct grew louder. A strong pull toward expansion. Toward living less carefully. Toward not postponing something that mattered.

Mortality awareness shaped this more than I realised.

Hospice research consistently shows that one of the most common regrets at the end of life is not having had the courage to live true to oneself.

We did not want to reach the end of our lives and realise we had waited too long.

What Travel Has Actually Taught Us

So far we have visited Sweden, USA, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Thailand.

We have lived close to nature with limited connectivity. Participated in world schools and experienced communities.

We have attended conferences on regeneration, tokenomics and AI through the DAO Incubator and The Gathering. Met people who challenge what we once thought success looked like - and what a world that works for everyone, looks like for us (based on Buckminster Fuller and Marc Buckley’s work).

There have been doubts. Parenting wobbles. Homesickness that feels physical.

But there has also been proper, deep space to reflect.

We have, for the most part, all slept in the same room during the last six months. We have had time with our children that is not rushed. Conversations that stretch. A new definition of what enough means.

We have watched our children grow emotionally as our family bonds deepen. All of us learning Spanish together as a family.

This space has gifted us the clarity about what comes next. I am now training as a coach, using mortality awareness to help people dissolve fear and discover deeper purpose.

Linnea and I are even considering advising other couples who are also on the fence about big life decisions.

This journey is not an escape. It is an investment. In family. In perspective. In listening when instinct calls.

Because ‘the cave’ is rarely a physical place. It is the step away from comfort. The release of identity. The willingness to not know what comes next.

And when we turn toward what we fear instead of away from it, life expands.

We feel deeply grateful for this experience. And proud that when the moment arrived, we chose courage over comfort.

An Invitation

You do not have to give up your home. But maybe there is one small step you already know you need to take?

A conversation. A simplification. A risk you keep postponing.

Start there.

You do not get infinite seasons. You get this one.

If this newsletter resonated, please comment, like, re-stack, and share. My mission is to establish mortality awareness as a recognised wellness practise. By supporting this work, and being part of this community, you are helping this come to be.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools & Updates

Reverstory: the bespoke AI tool designed to help you identify major life regrets and suggest ideas of how to course correct while you still can. Available to paying subscribers. I’m offering a special 25% off paid subscriptions for the next month. That’s only £6 / $8 a month to transform your life. Subscribe here:

Subscribe now

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

I have been invited to perform the mediation at both Connect and Medicine Festivals this summer - I’m feeling very grateful and honoured.

Tools: For access to Reverstory and guided exercises to help you live these ideas day to day.

Go deeper: Reverstory / My Father’s Death / Socrates: Famous Last Words

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: “Dying to Live with Purpose, is a gentle, grounding guide for anyone seeking to live more fully by befriending the truth of impermanence.” (Cristabel)

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I donned my tech entrepreneur hat again these last few months and I’ve been developing something exciting which goes live today.

May I please introduce a transformative AI tool called REVERSTORY, designed to help you identify major life regrets you are headed towards, and then suggest ways to avoid them. Allowing you to step into deeper alignment and purpose in life.

The problem

Reverstory didn’t start with an idea for a tool. It started with a shocking problem I read several months ago that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

There is a sobering statistic coming out of hospices and hospitals in the West, reported by nurses and hospice workers; the people who sit with us at the very end of life.

When I put this stat through various AI tools to verify accuracy, it actually said the number might be far higher than reported. Here’s some rough calculations…

About 20% of the world's population lives in the Western Hemisphere. That’s roughly 1.6 billion people.

65% of that figure is approx 1.04 billion people dying with major life regrets.

And that’s just in the West.

Common regrets

Based on analysis from National Institutes of Health, and Bronnie Ware (author of Top Five Regrets of the Dying), here are the most common major life regrets:

• Living for Others: Not having the courage to live a life true to oneself, rather than meeting others’ expectations.

• Overworking: Spending too much time working and sacrificing time with family, friends, and personal joy.

• Suppressed Emotions: Lacking the courage to express feelings, both in terms of love and speaking one’s truth.

• Neglected Friendships: Failing to stay in touch with friends and neglecting social connections.

• Fear of Risk/Happiness: Not allowing oneself to be happier, not taking risks, and letting fear dictate life choices.

• Ignoring Self-Care: Not making physical health a priority or failing to enjoy life’s moments.

That 65% number sat in my chest for weeks because it felt so unnecessary. No one, and I mean no one, wants to die with a major life regret.

And the regrets themselves… they weren’t what I expected. Not about money. Not about success or promotions or any of that.

They were more subtler: not living true to themselves. Staying too long in safe, empty work. Not spending enough time with the people they loved. Avoiding the hard conversations.

Most people don’t regret failing. They regret having allowed their limiting beliefs to prevent them from living fully in their lifetime.

The gap nobody's filling

And here’s what got me: we’ve built entire industries around productivity. Time management. Habit tracking. Morning routines. We optimize everything.

But when it comes to actually examining whether we’re living a life we won’t regret?

I realised that there’s almost nothing out there, because in the West, we live in a death phobic culture and we do anything to avoid talking about the end.

No regular check-ins. No honest frameworks. So we drift without realising. And then one day we’re at the end, looking back, wishing we had not taken life for granted. We wait until there’s no time left to realise we had time all along. Time is our most valuable asset.

So I kept asking myself one question…

A solution

Reverstory starts from how you want to feel at the end of your life (happy, complete, with no regrets) and works backwards to identify which regrets you are consciously or unconsciously walking towards.

It then gives suggestions of how to course correct, avoid regrets, and create your best life.

It’s not self-help. It’s not about optimising yourself or becoming some shinier version of who you are. Instead, it’s a reckoning.

How it works

You answer ten questions. It takes fifteen to thirty minutes. The more honest you are, and the more effort you put in, the better. Real names and emotions. Messy answers. Lots of detail. A brain dump is far more useful than something polished.

And then Reverstory gives you a written reflection. Not a pep talk, but a pattern. The shape your life is taking right now. The regret you might be sleepwalking toward if nothing shifts. And a few commitments, small, grounded, that point somewhere truer.

The first time I did it myself, I had to stop. Not because it hurt. Because it was right.

It showed me where I was aligned. And where I was lying to myself. It gave me something I didn’t have before: a way to check back in. To test decisions when things change.

I believe one of the great benefits of AI is its ability to bring radical clarity to complex subjects. And each human life is a rubik’s cube of complication.

In the future I will be releasing more reflective, purpose-driven AI tools like this. Tools that help you remember your mortality and step into deeper purpose, without skipping over your humanity.

How to get access

I’m launching Reverstory to paying subscribers who will receive a special access code.

Paying subscribers also get access to more great value: the growing exercise library (currently 11 self-guided practices) and the live guided meditations that will start again later this month. Click any of the subscribe buttons to gain access.

Subscribe now

Reverstory is in beta phase and I genuinely need your feedback. What lands. What doesn’t. What feels true. What feels performative. There is a short survey you can fill out at the end. This tool will only get better if it’s shaped by real lives, real answers.

Why this matters

Reverstory exists because life is short and regret is more common than we know. And because it doesn’t have to be.

Reverstory is for people who want transformation.

No one should die with major regrets.

Don’t wait until there’s no time left. Get your paid subscription now.

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Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools & Updates

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

Tools: For access to Reverstory and guided exercises to help you live these ideas day to day.

Go deeper: The Amazing Way Mortality Transforms Your Love Life / What is Purpose? / Surviving my Own Murder

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: “I literally am so blown away by your message every time… it resonates so much with me - the newsletter where you talked about allowing us to love more was just incredible.” (Lynda)

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I’ve been contemplating the fact that love deepens when we remember it will not last forever.

When I fully realise this, I stop waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect version of myself, the perfect future where everything finally feels sorted.

And love… breathes again.

This isn’t only about romantic partnership. It’s about how you connect with another person and with yourself.

Awe Is Where Love Lives

There’s something subtle that comes back when you remember nothing is guaranteed.

Awe.

Every ancestor survived long enough to pass life forward and somehow it ended up here, in this room, with this cup of coffee, this familiar face.

When love is met from that place, it changes texture.

You start seeing your partner with fresh eyes. Not as someone to fix. Not as a problem to solve. But as a miracle of existence and consciousness.

The ordinary starts to glow again. Morning coffee. Shared silence. Even disagreements soften faster. Even goodbyes carry gratitude.

I see this happening in my own relationship. Not perfectly. Not all the time. But enough to notice.

As my wife and I practise meeting life with mortality awareness, we listen more carefully and we repair quicker. Love feels less like something to manage and more like something to receive.

When Fear Enters Love

Fear rarely announces itself loudly. It slips in as worry. Worry about money. About time. About being enough… about anything.

One of my favourite authors, Cormac McCarthy once wrote, “A worried man cannot love.” I often thought of those words during a long period of my life when I was constantly worried about one thing or another, and I could feel my ability to love was massively diminished.

You can sit beside someone you care deeply about and still be elsewhere. Replaying old conversations. Fretting over imagined futures. Rehearsing loss before it arrives.

Love doesn’t live there. It lives here. Now.

The Ancient Roots Beneath Modern Love

Most of us are not afraid of love itself. We’re afraid of what love might cost.

Grief, after all, is the loss of something we love.

Fear of rejection. Abandonment. Fear of failure. Fear of public speaking or intimacy. At the root of all these modern fears lies the grandmother fear… of Death.

Our nervous systems were shaped for survival, not expansion. Rejection once meant exile. Exile meant death. Scarcity meant not surviving the winter.

We no longer live in caves, fighting off sabre-toothed tigers, but our brains are still wired with the same ancient survival instincts, which have not been updated to fit our modern lives. So we cling. We protect. We hoard.

How Mortality Changes Everything

When we avoid thinking about death (which our culture in the West encourages), we hold love tightly. We need it to keep us safe.

When we face mortality, something shifts.

Psychological research shows that gentle, and intentional, reflection on mortality increases gratitude, compassion, and forgiveness. Not panic. Not despair. But depth.

This is why Buddhist monks meditate on their own death each morning. Not to become grim, but to step into each day in full gratitude for being alive.

When love is known to be fleeting, we stop taking it for granted. We say the words sooner. We forgive faster. We stop postponing tenderness.

And if you’re not currently in a relationship, this awareness doesn’t exclude you. It prepares you.

Mortality awareness sharpens discernment. It dissolves performative connection. It draws you toward relationships that can meet you where you are, not where fear wants you to be.

Love begins with how honestly you meet life.

I learned this the hard way. Years ago, panic attacks brought me to my knees during a crisis at work. It felt like a small death. Everything I thought defined me, fell away.

That unexpected unraveling led me here. Into this work. Into deeper alignment. Into relationships that feel more real. Including a deepening of the one I was already in. Read more in My Story.

An Invitation

Before you scroll on, pause for ten seconds. Look at the nearest person to you. Or if you’re alone, bring someone to mind. And remind yourself:

This person is not guaranteed. Notice what changes.

Often it’s subtle. A warmth in the chest. A loosening of whatever you were holding too tightly.

That’s the power of mortality doing its work. That’s love waking up. For when we stop demanding forever, we finally experience now. And now is where love thrives.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools & Updates

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

Tools: For guided exercises to help you live these ideas day to day.

Go deeper: The Incredible Way Mortality Awakens Happiness / My Story / The Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: “John exactly this! In the moment when I ask ‘what is happening NOW’, fear falls apart. Only the present moment remains, in which usually nothing bad is happening.” (Sophie)

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See below for A Mortality Practice for Deeper Love: to soften fear, release the urge to control love, and return to presence by remembering that connection is precious because it is not guaranteed.

Read more

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Something became clear to me as I observed people near the end of life. Those who had already faced struggle, loss and change earlier on in life were less afraid. More open. More at peace.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a Swiss-American psychiatrist best known for transforming how the modern world understands death, dying, and grief.

She spent years sitting with people who were dying. Listening in the way most of us are never taught to listen. Not to fix. Not to reassure. Just to be there for others.

In a world that preferred cures to conversations, she chose presence. And in doing so, she began to see something many of us sense but struggle to name.

That beauty is not something we start with. It is something life works into us.

A Willingness to Stay

Kübler-Ross entered medicine at a time when death was hidden away. Patients were shielded from the truth. Emotions were considered inconvenient. Grief was something to move past quickly.

She didn’t accept that.

She asked dying people what they were actually experiencing. What they were afraid of. What they wished they had done differently. What mattered now.

Words never spoken. Love never fully expressed. Lives lived carefully rather than honestly.

The Small Deaths Along the Way

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.” (Elizabeth K-R)

What her quote points to so quietly is that death doesn’t only arrive at the end of life.

It visits us again and again.

When a relationship ends. When a parent dies. When a version of ourselves no longer fits. When something we built our identity around falls away.

These are small deaths. Initiations, really.

They ask us to let go of who we thought we were. They take away certainty. They leave us exposed.

And most of us are taught to avoid that exposure at all costs. We are, after all, a “death-phobic society”, according to Stephen Jenkinson (and I agree).

There’s a reason this idea of small deaths feels personal to me.

At the time, it felt like something was going wrong. Looking back, I can see something was ending.

I thought I had it all figured out: a business I had built myself, a wonderful family, a great home… but that small death forced me to slow down, to listen, and to ask deeper questions about how I was living.

It was the doorway that led me into this work now, into sitting with mortality, into deeper purpose that feels far more honest and soul-aligned than the life I was trying to protect.

How Depth Is Formed

Kübler-Ross saw that those who allowed themselves to be changed by loss emerged differently.

Not louder. Not shinier. But steadier.

They listened more carefully. They judged less. They were less interested in performance and more interested in truth.

You can feel this kind of person in a room. They don’t rush you. They don’t need to be right. They don’t flinch when things get uncomfortable.

They’ve already been there.

This is the beauty she’s talking about. A beauty forged, not inherited.

And there is something else here that matters.

One of my favourite philosophers, Eckhart Tolle, often reminds us, it is through struggle that consciousness evolves. The ego resists this. The soul does not. The soul knows that tension, discomfort, and even suffering are not mistakes, but pressures that shape us, like muscle under load, like a tree bent by wind.

“It may look as if the situation is causing the suffering, but ultimately this is not so - your resistance is.” (Eckhart Tolle)

Struggle is not a detour from the human journey. It is the journey. And joy, the kind our soul truly yearns for, is not found by avoiding these moments, but by allowing them to open us into something wider, truer, and more alive.

Why We Resist It

From my perspective, our culture doesn’t make much room for this kind of transformation. We’re encouraged to stay upbeat. To move on quickly. To treat endings as failures rather than thresholds.

But when we bypass grief, and avoid the conversation of our mortality, we bypass depth.

Every loss we don’t fully feel stays unfinished inside us. Every ending we refuse to acknowledge quietly narrows our lives.

Kübler-Ross knew that grief, when honoured, doesn’t weaken us. It widens us.

Preparing Without Knowing It

Perhaps this is the wisdom beneath her life’s work. Those who learn to meet the small deaths of life are less frightened, and therefore create less limiting beliefs.

Not because they want it. But because they’ve practised letting go. They’ve learned that love survives endings. That meaning doesn’t vanish when form changes. That something essential remains.

I’ve also learned this by studying as a Soul Midwife (a type of end of life guide) and for two years, I volunteered as a compassionate companion with Dorothy House Hospice and the NHS at the Royal United Hospital in Bath, sitting with people who were dying - people who had no one to be with them (an unfortunately common theme in Western hospitals).

What I saw again and again was not fear of death, but a tenderness around life.

Those moments taught me that learning to meet endings earlier in life matters. Those who had already faced loss and change seemed less afraid at the end. More open. More at peace.

A Gentle Pause

You might take a moment today and ask yourself:

What ending in my life have I not fully allowed? What loss have I hurried past?

There’s nothing to fix here. Nothing to solve. Just notice.

Because the beauty Elisabeth Kübler-Ross names does not come from avoiding pain. It comes from letting life do its work on us.

And those who allow that work, slowly, imperfectly, become the people others feel safe with. The “beautiful ones”.

If this newsletter landed with you, please comment, like, re-stack, or share it with a friend. Subscribe to get weekly essays, videos and tools to help you live a life of no regrets.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Subscribe now

Tools & Updates

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

Tools: For guided exercises to help you live these ideas day to day.

Go deeper: The Ripple Effect of Denying Death / Maya Angelou: Famous Last Words / The Surprising Way Mortality Enhances Creativity

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: Hoppy, I LOVE this!!!!!! Just so on point and desperately needed - thank you. (Max)

Updates:

• The Beta version of Reverstory is almost ready and will be coming to paying subscribers soon. This is an AI tool that will reverse engineer your life, identify the major life regret you may be heading for, and give you suggestions of how to step into deeper alignment.

• We will be sharing a survey with all subscribers in the coming days, looking for feedback to improve this newsletter and add more value for you.

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If you want to understand modern politics, do not start with ideology.

Start with fear.

Not fear as an abstract idea, but fear in the body. Fear of loss. Fear of threat. Fear of disappearing. Fear that something essential is about to be taken away.

Beneath almost every political slogan, culture war, or polarising headline, there is an older fear at work. The fear of death. The silent, Grandmother fear, from which other fears grow... such as the fear of vulnerability, impermanence, and loss of control.

The subject of death is taboo in the west (despite it being the only thing in life that is guaranteed) and as a result, we rarely name this ancient fear. But it shapes far more of our political landscape than we like to admit.

Fear as a Tool of Power

Human beings are most easily influenced when they feel unsafe. History shows this again and again. When people believe their survival is under threat, they become willing to trade freedom for certainty, complexity for simple answers, and compassion for protection.

A body of psychological research calls this ‘Terror Management Theory’. Decades of research show that when people are reminded of mortality, even subtly, they are more likely to cling to strong leaders, rigid belief systems, and in group identities.

They become less tolerant of ambiguity and more hostile toward perceived outsiders. This is not a flaw in character. It is biology.

When fear of death is activated, the nervous system narrows. The world becomes smaller. The question shifts from what is true or just to what will keep me safe right now.

Political messaging that leans on existential threat does not need to convince. It only needs to trigger.

What makes this fear so potent today is not death itself, but our refusal to face it.

Modern societies do not teach us how to relate to mortality. We hide it, medicalise it, euphemise it, and push it to the edges of life.

Death becomes something unspeakable, unthinkable, and therefore terrifying. When a culture denies death, fear has nowhere to go but outward. It attaches itself to politics, identity, borders, bodies, and belief systems.

From Fear to Polarity

Fear is where polarity is born.

When fear is high, nuance disappears. The world fractures into us and them. Good and bad. Safe and dangerous. Loyal and traitorous.

In domestic politics, this plays out as culture wars, scapegoating, and moral outrage cycles. Immigrants become threats rather than humans. Opposing voters become enemies rather than neighbours. Complex social problems are reduced to villains and slogans.

Data backs this up. Studies in political psychology show that heightened mortality anxiety increases authoritarian attitudes, reduces empathy for marginalised groups, and strengthens prejudice against outsiders. Xenophobia rises not because people suddenly hate more, but because fear collapses their capacity to hold complexity.

We see it everywhere. In debates about borders. In rhetoric about crime. In panic driven responses to economic uncertainty. In the way disagreement is framed not as difference, but as danger.

You can feel this in everyday moments. A headline read before breakfast. A comment thread that tightens the chest. A conversation at the dinner table that suddenly turns sharp.

The speed with which curiosity collapses into certainty. The body reacts before the mind has time to think. That reaction is not political. It is mortal.

Short Term Power, Long Term Damage

Often what we call political fear is not fear of dying, but fear of losing the life we know. Status. Identity. Belonging. Control. These are all rehearsals for death.

When leaders operate from fear, or exploit it, decisions become short sighted. The focus moves to immediate wins, electoral cycles, and symbolic victories. Long term wellbeing gets pushed aside.

Climate action stalls because it requires facing loss. Social investment is cut because it does not deliver quick reassurance. Education becomes ideological rather than developmental. Health becomes reactive rather than preventative.

The irony is painful. Policies sold as protective often undermine the very stability they promise. Fear driven politics may win votes, but it erodes trust, cooperation, and social cohesion over time.

A society that cannot face mortality struggles to plan beyond the next crisis.

A politics shaped by fear begins in individuals who have never been taught how to sit with mortality.

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity.” (Ernest Becker)

Why We Are So Easily Controlled

There is a simple truth that rarely gets spoken out loud.

Deep down, if you are scared of death, you are easier to control.

Anyone who understands your fear can manipulate you. They can rush you. Corner you. Offer safety in exchange for obedience. Promise protection while quietly removing agency.

This is not just about war or foreign threats. It happens at home. In the language of law and order. In the framing of economic fear. In the suggestion that without this policy, this leader, this party, everything will fall apart.

A Different Starting Point

The antidote to fear driven politics is not denial or bravado. It is honesty.

When we acknowledge mortality as a shared human condition, something softens. The story shifts from survival at all costs to care for what matters.

We stop asking who must be defeated and start asking what kind of world we are leaving behind.

Research shows that when people reflect on mortality in a calm, meaningful way, rather than through threat based messaging, empathy increases. Cooperation increases. Long term thinking returns. Fear loosens its grip.

Facing death does not make us passive. It makes us less manipulable.

What This Asks of Us

This is not just a leadership issue. It is a personal one.

Every time we react from outrage rather than curiosity, fear is at work. Every time we dehumanise those who disagree with us, death anxiety is silently steering the wheel.

Mortality awareness invites a different posture. One rooted in humility. Shared fragility. Responsibility rather than panic.

Politics does not have to be a battlefield. But it will remain one as long as fear is the primary fuel.

A Short Reflection

Take a quiet moment. Notice what political issues trigger the strongest emotional reaction in you. Not intellectually. Physically.

Ask yourself gently: What am I afraid of losing here?

Safety? Belonging? Control? Identity?

Then ask: If I remembered that everyone involved is mortal, including me, how might I respond differently?

This is not about changing your views. It is about changing the place they come from.

A Final Thought

A society that refuses to face death will always be governed by fear… and a society that remembers mortality has the chance to govern with wisdom.

When we stop denying death, we stop being so easily divided by it.

And from that place, a more humane politics might become possible.

If this newsletter landed with you, please comment, like, re-stack, or share it with a friend. My mission is to turn mortality awareness into a recognised wellness practise.

Subscribe to get weekly essays, videos and tools to help you live a life of no regrets.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Subscribe now

Tools & Updates

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

Tools: For guided exercises to help you live these ideas day to day.

Go deeper: The Fear of Death and What it is Really Teaching Us / Abraham Lincoln, Famous Last Words / How Death Denial Impacts The Environment

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: “So glad I was guided to find your writings John - this resonates deeply with me and I am craving more deeper conversations around death. At 54 looking at my young adult daughters, elderly mother and my aging process contemplating death has very much become a frequent visitor in my thoughts. On one hand I am fearful in the other it has opened me up to gratitude for the present moment and living an awakened life. Thank you for this reflective sanctuary.” (Julie)

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The Memory That Taught Me I Am Always Safe

It was around 2016 that I began listening deeply to the words of philosopher Alan Watts.

Alan had a way of dissolving the edges of things. Through him, I started to question my concept of reality.

I began to see that existence was not something happening to us, but something happening through us. That we are part of nature, not separate from it. That we are waves, not separate from the ocean.

Around the same time, a new question began to take root in me. It would appear while I worked. While I drove. While I drifted off to sleep.

Why are we so afraid of death?

At first it felt like a quiet, almost innocent question. But it kept returning. Again and again. I did not know then that it would become the most defining inquiry of my life. The thread that would slowly pull me deeper into everything I now do.

In the summer of 2018, guided by instinct more than logic, I found myself drawn toward a traditional plant medicine ceremony.

I was nervous about what might happen. I had never experienced ceremonial psychedelics before. And yet, something in me sensed there was wisdom hidden in the unseen.

And I wanted to listen.

The Womb

One night, in a large teepee in the Devon countryside (UK), I prepared for the ceremony. The air smelled faintly of sage and woodsmoke. The medicine, ayahuasca, was offered by an experienced shaman who had travelled from the Amazon.

Earlier, the facilitator had told us that at some point during the night, we might be invited to ask a question from the heart. The answer would come, he said, but not necessarily in words.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I felt the moment arrive.

I asked softly into the darkness:

Should we be fearful of death?

The answer came, but not in the way I expected.

The darkness shifted into a warm red orange glow. Soft. Alive. It wrapped around me like a blanket.

My body began to move on its own. I curled up instinctively. Baby like. Foetus like.

A slow, steady heartbeat filled the space. Rhythmic. Familiar. Tender.

And in that instant, I knew where I was.

I was back in my mother’s womb.

I was home.

At first, my mind tried to explain it away. Wow, what an incredible vision, I thought. A beautiful hallucination.

But then something deeper landed.

I recognised the moment.

This medicine had taken me back in time into a memory of being in my mother’s womb.

Cradled in perfect safety, floating in a sea of warmth and silence. The pulse I heard was both hers and mine.

The boundaries between us disappeared. I could feel life moving through me, and through something far greater than me. The universe itself seemed to breathe, and I was part of its inhale.

Tears of joy began to fall down my cheeks. I understood that my mother’s love, and the love of the universe, were not two different things. They were one. They are one, and always have been.

Inside the womb, there was no fear. No time. No thought.

The Message

In that sacred space, the place I had come from, I understood something without needing it explained.

There was nothing to fear in death.

Before we are born, fear does not exist. Worry does not exist. These are ideas - human constructs - we learn later, once we arrive in the world and begin to think ourselves separate from it.

The message was simple. Almost tender. As if the universe was telling me:

“There is nothing to worry about.”

I saw then that the same love that carried me into life would one day carry me out. Not as an ending, but as a return. A homecoming.

Life was no longer a straight line in my mind. It was a cycle. Birth, death, and rebirth, like the waves Alan Watts spoke about. Rising, falling, returning to the ocean. All part of one vast, living rhythm.

And within that rhythm, nothing is ever truly unsafe.

That memory has stayed with me. Not as a belief, but as a felt truth. A place I can return to whenever fear creeps in.

It taught me that love is not something we earn or deserve.

It is the ground we come from.

And it is where we return.

"Life and death are not opposed but complementary, being the two essential factors of a greater life that is made up of living and dying just as melody is produced by the sounding and silencing of individual notes". (Alan Watts)

The Sanctuary

In the years since, this womb memory has become my ‘safe space’ meditation.

Whenever I feel fearful, lost or uncertain, I close my eyes and remember the orange glow of the womb, feel that heartbeat again, the ancient rhythm beneath all things, reminding me that I am held.

I breathe myself back into it, reminding myself that I am safe. That we all are safe. That we all came from a place where fear does not exist.

And from that place, I feel connected again, to the love that sustains everything. To the pulse of the universe moving quietly through every living thing.

Because the truth is, we were loved long before we learned what love was. And that love has never left us.

No matter where we go, or what we face, that love stays with us, in every breath, every heartbeat, every quiet moment of surrender.

Try This

If you ever find yourself feeling anxious or unsettled, close your eyes, take a breath and return to your mother’s womb.

Feel free to use the description and details in this newsletter to guide your vision. Let this womb memory become yours. This meditation can bring great comfort and peace.

Remember that you came from a place of pure love, where fear does not exist.

If this newsletter landed with you, please comment, like, re-stack, or share it with a friend. Subscribe to get weekly essays, videos and tools to help you live a life of no regrets.

Live happy,

Hoppy

p.s. If you are ever considering ceremonial plant medicine know what is involved, choose experienced and ethical facilitators, and be honest with yourself about your mindset. These spaces deserve respect and preparation.

Tools & Updates

The Ultimate Meditation: A guided practice designed to help you slow down, reflect on mortality, and reconnect with a life of no regrets. Many people tell me it helps them discover greater calm, gratitude, and clarity.

Tools: For guided exercises to help you live these ideas day to day.

Community call: I’m afraid due to terrible connectivity where I am living in Nicaragua this month, our guided meditation on Wednesday Jan 14th @ 7pm UK time will be postponed to February.

Go deeper: Carl Jung Famous Last Words / How Death Denial Impacts The Environment / How Mortality Awareness Can Transform Christmas

Full website with all content: Here

What people are saying about DTLWP: Hoppy, I think you’re on to something big and really important.” (Laura)

Updates:

• If you are interested in the teachings of Alan Watts, you can find many podcasts or youtube videos with his wisdom, or visit the official website.

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I’m John Hopkins (Hoppy), Aliveness Guide, acclaimed creative and founder. I’ve built companies and spent much of my career at the leading edge of creative industries, but it was through near death experiences, studying natural philosophy and supporting others at end of life that I discovered something unexpected:

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Most people unconsciously drift in life. They stay busy. They make safe, sensible decisions. They do what’s expected and quietly postpone what actually matters. They live by default, rather than by design.

Life looks fine from the outside but something inside starts to feel off. Sound familiar? The question becomes: “Are you existing, or are you living fully?”

Aliveness is for people who don’t want to wake up later and realise they lived the wrong life.

Through this work you will:

• Avoid years of drift and the regret that comes with it

• Make decisions quickly without second-guessing

• Spend less time worrying and more time living

• Wake up clear on what you’re doing and why

• Have more honest, closer, more intimate relationships

• Stop avoiding change and follow through

• Sleep better and feel more at ease

• Have more energy, a healthy body and lower baseline stress

• Move toward work and a life that genuinely fits you

It starts with a simple shift:

Remembering you are mortal. Your time is limited.

We live in a society that avoids the conversation around mortality. But when that fact becomes real, you achieve radical clarity and your priorities sharpen.

This is a space for thoughtful people ready to step out of autopilot and design a richer next chapter of life. Read the testimonials.

Are you ready to say goodbye to another year of drift? Subscribe now.

Subscribe now to receive your FREE copy of the Aliveness Practise.

Want to know more?

Start with the ABOUT section.

Read more about my STORY.

Explore the TOOLS with 14+ self guided exercises and an AI chatbot.

Or dive into the full WEBSITE.

Live happy,

Hoppy