You have two invitations.

Saturday 14 November: The Aliveness Practice at The Carl Jung Center

A reminder that my next live workshop, produced by The Jung Center (in Houston, Texas), is coming up in November.

BUY TICKETS

I will be presenting the simple two-minute Aliveness practice. This technique has been built on ancient wisdom traditions, modern psychology, and what I learned sitting with people at the end of their lives, where hindsight makes it piercingly clear what mattered in their life, and what never did.

The Aliveness practice brings that clarity into today, so you can make wiser, braver decisions and stop postponing the things that matter most in your life.

Hundreds have now attended my Aliveness workshops. People report being more present with the people they love, feeling totally revitalised, and finally able to act on decisions they’d been circling for years.

Here’s what people say:

“A colossal reframing of my existence. What I got from the workshop is that I can stop making and remaking the decision to commit my life to art, and just honour that decision. To give myself to it with love, glee and a sense of adventure.”(Jeremy)

“Looking at life through the awareness that our time is finite did not feel dark or confronting. Quite the opposite. Looking back from the perspective of an older version of myself brought a remarkable simplicity to questions that can otherwise become incredibly complicated. What matters? What am I postponing? What would I regret not becoming?” (Monica)

Saturday 14 November · 2 hours · 10am CT / 4pm UK · $40

BUY TICKETS

Friday 30 October: I’m going live with Anu Arora

This Friday I’m having a Substack Live with Anu Arora, author of The Mindful Leader. Anu Arora is an executive leadership coach and former Microsoft director integrating mindfulness, neuroscience and ancient wisdom into modern leadership.

We’ll be talking about mindfulness, mortality, and what it really means to lead and live fully in a finite life. Two practices, one honest conversation.

Free, live on Substack… put it in your diary.

Friday 30 October, 4:00pm UK / 10:00am CST

JOIN LIVE HERE

Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO & filmmaker, as well as a trained Soul Midwife and Druidic Bard. Aliveness emerged from my own near death experiences, sitting with the dying, and the wisdom of the Stoics, Buddhists and great thinkers on mortality. My dream is that Aliveness will become as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice helping people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and create a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

The planet is still recognisable. The oceans continue to move with the moon. The rivers make their way towards the sea. People still fall in love, raise children and work. We continue to create, celebrate, make mistakes and grieve.

We are still human. However… our perspective on life has shifted.

Death is no longer hidden away or treated as something too uncomfortable to talk about.

We grow up understanding that it is a perfectly natural part of the cycle of life. And so, instead of making us fearful, this understanding has taught us what an extraordinary miracle it is to be alive.

These ordinary moments that we once hurried through become the very moments we treasure most.

This is the essence of ALIVENESS - the practical philosophy of living fully, in the awareness that we are mortal.

This small but powerful change in human perspective begins to ripple outwards, through our family, friends, and societies.

We begin to live in deep gratitude and naturally take better care of ourselves. We become more conscious of how we spend our time, and we intuitively stop postponing the things that matter most.

For centuries, much of human behaviour was shaped by fears we were barely aware of. We made death a taboo and something to avoid at all costs, and because of this, we protected ourselves. We accumulated and competed and clung to what we had.

We prioritised safety and self-interest above all else. This is the place from which mistrust thrives and greed and inequality grow. But as our fear of death diminished, so did some of that extractive mindset, and obsession to protect ourselves.

In this future, self-interest did not disappear… we simply stopped building so much of our world around it.

Now imagine children growing up in this world. These are children who learn that time, relationships, and what they give to the world matters.

These kids do not spend decades waiting for permission to become themselves.

In this future, education is not simply preparation for capitalist employment. Schools teach children self-care and care for others. Kids value building relationships, and they relish contributing to the communities around them.

Which leads us on to our relationship with work.

Companies are launched and money is made. People want to do extraordinary things with their lives… however, success has grown beyond accumulation.

Instead of the thing life has to fit around, work becomes part of a life well lived. And all the while, machines have transformed what we once called ‘work’.

In this future, machines have not made humans less important. They have helped us focus on what it really means to be human. Technology frees up more of our time to be better parents and closer friends… leading to us becoming more engaged members of our communities

Now let’s imagine our relationships. When we understand that our time with each other is limited, the people we love suddenly become harder to take for granted.

We find it easier to forgive and tell people we love them. We prioritise time with our loved ones and communities.

Men and women plant avenues of trees, knowing future generations will sit beneath them. We restore rivers whose full recovery we will never witness in our lifetime. Institutions and communities are designed to serve people we will never meet.

And this all fundamentally changes our relationship with the Earth. Because once we stop taking our own lives for granted… it becomes harder to take life itself for granted.

We realise a forest is no longer timber to use. A river is more than water… The living world stops looking like an endless supply of resources for humans to use.

That is because we remember that we are one with it.

And over generations the Earth responds. Forests thicken and rivers become cleaner. We see wildlife return as cities become greener. Places that have been stripped of life recover.

Mankind finally understands that enough can actually be enough, and we begin to regenerate.

Please note: none of this means humanity has become perfect. People still argue and get things wrong. Jealousy and selfishness still exist. We still experience heartbreak, disappointment and loss. But we can all manage this better, because we are more grounded, connected and supported.

Fear still exists too. However, fear no longer silently drives so many of our decisions as individuals and societies.

Through practicing Aliveness, we have become better at recognising the subtle difference between the fear that keeps us alive and the fear that is pointing us to where we should be growing.

Humanity spent a long time believing that an awareness of our mortality would diminish life.

But it actually did the opposite… it woke us up to life.

This world does not suddenly appear a hundred years from now. There is no single moment when everything changes.

It happens through small, brave choices, in service to something bigger than ourselves.

One loving, courageous choice influences others. Children grow up with different values, with more kindness and less fear. They build things differently and eventually, a different way of living becomes normal.

Eventually, enough individual choices become a culture, and a culture becomes a different kind of world. A more alive world.

And somewhere, that future has to begin…

It might as well begin here…

It might as well begin with us…

It might as well begin with...

YOU.

Come and practice Aliveness with me

On Saturday the 14th of November, I’m thrilled to be teaching the Aliveness Practice at the Jung Center in Houston. Famous psychologist Carl Jung has been a huge influence on the development of Aliveness, so this is a real honour.

The two hour session is online, so you can join from anywhere in the world. If there’s a stone in your chest, or you feel yourself being pulled towards a change you’ve been too afraid to make, this is the work that helped me put my own stone down.

As well as simple 2-minute daily practice, the novel techniques in this workshop are designed to give you radical clarity, so you can make the decisions that will set you on the right path, towards your life’s deepest purpose.

Please join me live on Saturday November 14th

10am–12pm CT / 4pm-6pm UK / $40

Book Your Ticket Here

“A colossal reframing of my existence. What I got from the workshop is that I can stop making and remaking the decision to commit my life to art, and just honour that decision. To give myself to it with love, glee and a sense of adventure.”(Jeremy)

“Looking at life through the awareness that our time is finite did not feel dark or confronting. Quite the opposite. Looking back from the perspective of an older version of myself brought a remarkable simplicity to questions that can otherwise become incredibly complicated. What matters? What am I postponing? What would I regret not becoming?” (Monica)

Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO & filmmaker, as well as a trained Soul Midwife and Druidic Bard. Aliveness emerged from my own near death experiences, sitting with the dying, and the wisdom of the Stoics, Buddhists and great thinkers on mortality. My dream is that Aliveness will become as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice helping people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and create a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

This week I want to tell you about the period of my life when I went through a prolonged experience of dying a slow death.

The weeks of fear… two trips to hospital, and the thing I finally understood about the heavy stone I’d been carrying in my chest.

I recollect sitting at my desk in my office, during a particularly high-stress period of running my start-up business, certain that something was wrong with my heart. There’d been a heavy pressure sitting in my chest that I’d been aware of for a while.

I could feel irregular heartbeats from time to time, and a scary thought began to arrive. I’ve got to get my heart checked out… I’m in my 40s and I might be on the verge of a heart attack.

I lived in fear for weeks, my mind filling in the blanks and I’d often lie awake monitoring my own chest in bed, as if it were a machine about to fail.

Some days I’d come home from work and burst into tears upstairs, where the kids couldn’t see me crying. It felt like the whole world could crumble at any moment. That’s what my mind was telling me. I was firmly stuck in worst-case-scenario mode.

My wife Linnea was an unflappable rock in those moments, and I was, and still am, so grateful for her steadiness. I remember once saying to her “If I lose the business, we won’t be able to pay the mortgage”. She calmly said, “Well, we’ll just sell the house and figure something else out”.

Wow. Love her for that.

But even those sage words didn’t stop me from feeling like I was physically dying. So I went to hospital to have my heart checked. When you’ve got a weight in your chest like this, the doctors will prioritise you. And over about a year and a half, I actually ended up going to hospital twice, because the feeling wouldn’t leave, and because a weight in the chest is not something you should ignore.

I was terrified as I waited for the results… terrified they’d come back and tell me my heart really was failing. Both times, the tests came back clear. There wasn’t an issue with my heart.

The relief, however, was short-lived, because the heaviness remained. What was this stone sitting in the middle of my chest that no scan could find?

The answer was anxiety. And my anxiety, over time, had manifested into a physical, bodily sensation. A heaviness I carried every single day. One that I eventually realised was my body telling me something I’d been refusing to accept for years.

What I was really afraid of

I was running Celestial, the drone company I’d built with my own two hands, and something I was extremely proud of. The business was doing amazing, pioneering work, flying shows around the world, using hundreds of drones in the sky as a new artistic medium, in front of thousands of people.

Every time we flew a show, roughly a million pounds’ worth of hardware would go up into the sky, and the team and I would spend the next ten minutes praying nothing failed, no one got hurt, and the whole swarm of drones would land safely again.

No one ever did get hurt, and we gained one the best safety records in the world. But building a start-up company on new technology, with all the associated glitches, hiccups and live-audience risks, was inherently anxiety-inducing, especially stretched over many years.

It’s worth noting that I’ve always been attracted to pressure. Something about how being in pressure environments makes you feel alive.

I directed high-profile films for fifteen years, and that was very intense. On a film set, time is money, with every hour on a big-budget TV commercial costing anywhere between twenty and fifty thousand pounds.

As the director I was making quick decisions under pressure all day long, and I thrived in it. But running a drone company was different. Film had decades of precedent behind it. This was a brand-new industry built on early-stage technology, which meant the risks were very high.

So part of the heaviness I was carrying was born from the nature of the business itself. But there was something else underneath it that made the heaviness far more frightening.

I was being pulled in another direction, away from my business. Quietly, and powerfully, towards an exploration of mortality.

My panic attacks were triggering memories of near-death experiences I had across my life…. and I started to realise that perhaps I was meant to explore mortality. But I was terrified of this. Death, after all, is a taboo in our society.

So I kept this calling a secret. I ended up training as a soul midwife (death doula) on the side and I wasn’t telling anyone, because I was so scared my business might lose sales if people found out the founder was sitting with dying people in the local hospital in his spare time.

And the more I pushed this calling away, the heavier the stone in my chest became.

I flirted with leaving my own business for two or three years. But it was a mixture of loyalty and fear that kept me going. I was loyal to the business I’d built, and felt responsible for its wellbeing.

I was also frightened of losing my paycheque, my security, my safety. At one point, a doctor was so concerned about my health that he wrote a letter signing me off work altogether. The letter told me to stay home, but I kept going to work anyway. Not out of toughness. It was the fear and loyalty that kept me stuck. That’s how deep the denial ran.

If you’re carrying something similar, please know how common this anxiety can be. The World Health Organisation estimates that around 470 million people globally were living with some kind of anxiety disorder in 2023. It’s the single most common mental health condition on earth. Whatever the stone in your chest is, you are not broken, and you are very far from alone.

How I broke free

I won’t pretend I have a cure for the stone in your chest. All I can tell you is what happened to me.

I made a change. I stepped away from my career in entertainment. I stepped away from that identity. I walked out of my comfort zone and into the unknown. I explored mortality, following a breadcrumb trail of instinct that eventually led me down the path to the work I now call Aliveness.

The relief was intense, but it didn’t come after it all worked out perfectly. The relief came the moment I decided to make the change. The simple act of choosing a different path brought a lightness I hadn’t felt in years, and I could sense the heaviness lifting from my body, as if I was finally putting down a very large stone.

The panic attacks stopped, and I don’t get those anymore. I do still feel the occasional wave of anxiety from time to time. But I can recognise it for what it is, and I’m able to witness it rise, remember that it will pass, and then watch it go, as if it’s flowing down a river into the distance.

I now sleep better than I have in my whole life. My health and energy have come back, and my mojo has returned. And the best bit is that I now trust my own instinct more than ever. That trust is carrying me somewhere I couldn’t have imagined when I first started making films as a teenager.

These ideas are at the heart of what Aliveness is, and why I teach it.

The stone in my chest wasn’t a warning that my body was failing. It was a sign that my body was refusing to let me keep betraying myself. My fear of death, my fear of change, my fear of the unknown, had kept me frozen in a life that no longer fitted the person I’d become.

The moment I turned and faced the very thing I’d been avoiding, my fear began to lose its grip. And in its place, life came rushing back.

That’s the essence of the Aliveness practice. It’s not to think about death morbidly, but to use the fact that our life is finite to stop postponing the life we’re actually meant to live.

Come and practice Aliveness with me

On Saturday the 14th of November, I’m thrilled to be teaching the Aliveness Practice at the Jung Center in Houston. Famous psychologist Carl Jung has been a big influence on the development of Aliveness, so this is a real honour.

The two hour session is online, so you can join from anywhere in the world. If there’s a stone in your chest, or you feel yourself being pulled towards a change you’ve been too afraid to make, this is the work that helped me put my own stone down.

As well as simple 2-minute daily practice, the novel techniques in this workshop are designed to give you radical clarity, so you can make the decisions that will set you on the right path, towards your life’s deepest purpose.

Please join me live on Saturday November 14th

10am–12pm CT / 4pm-6pm UK

$40

Book Your Ticket Here

“A colossal reframing of my existence. What I got from the workshop is that I can stop making and remaking the decision to commit my life to art, and just honour that decision. To give myself to it with love, glee and a sense of adventure.”(Jeremy)

“Looking at life through the awareness that our time is finite did not feel dark or confronting. Quite the opposite. Looking back from the perspective of an older version of myself brought a remarkable simplicity to questions that can otherwise become incredibly complicated. What matters? What am I postponing? What would I regret not becoming?” (Monica)

One important note before you go. If you do have a weight in your chest, please get it checked out, like I did. Doctors will look at it straight away, and it’s not worth taking a risk. And if the fear or heaviness is persistent, remember that making a change in your life can be powerful medicine, but it isn’t a substitute for the actual care some of us need. There’s no shame in needing it.

This week’s question:

If there’s a stone in your chest right now, what do you think it’s trying to tell you?

Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO & filmmaker, as well as a trained Soul Midwife and Druidic Bard. Aliveness emerged from my own near death experiences, sitting with the dying, and the wisdom of the Stoics, Buddhists and great thinkers on mortality. My dream is that Aliveness will become as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice helping people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and create a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

Carl Jung is one of the most influential psychologists of all time. He spent his life exploring a single question: how do you become who you really are before your time runs out?

Jung had a description for the gap I was living in back then… the distance between the face you show the world and who you actually are underneath.

I mention him because of what happened recently. The Jung Center of Houston (Texas), the institution in America that carries his name, has invited me to teach the Aliveness Practice, live.

Jung’s ideas helped me shape Aliveness. Now I get to teach Aliveness at the institution that bears his name. Feels like I’ve come full circle.

And I want you in the room.

Book Your Ticket Here

Please join me live on Saturday November 14th

10am–12pm CT / 4pm-6pm UK

$40

Book Your Ticket Here

Around two years ago, I made the biggest change of my life and left behind an identity I had been growing for almost thirty years.

After training as a Soul Midwife (a form of end-of-life guide) and sitting with dying people in hospital, I started a mission to explore how an awareness of our mortality can allow us to live in deepest purpose.

And still, I had no idea where this road was taking me. All I know is that Aliveness was curing me, and helping lots of others too.

I want to thank the whole team at the Jung Center for the invitation. Special thanks to , former director of their Mind Body Spirit Institute, who opened this door.

This is one of the most significant milestones for Aliveness, bringing serious credibility to the project, and I feel genuinely honored to be acknowledged in this way.

A few testimonials from my last Aliveness workshop

“The Ultimate Meditation helped me re-envision my life as it stands and what needs to change. John’s thoughts on fear and how that relates to death have propelled me forward in the weeks since, and I feel I am already moving towards something or someone that is more me.” (James)

“A colossal reframing of my existence. What I got is that I can stop making and remaking the decision to commit my life to art, and just honour that decision. To give myself to it with love, glee and a sense of adventure.”(Jeremy)

“Looking at life through the awareness that our time is finite did not feel dark or confronting. Quite the opposite. Looking back from the perspective of an older version of myself brought a remarkable simplicity to questions that can otherwise become incredibly complicated. What matters? What am I postponing? What would I regret not becoming?” (Monica)

This week’s question:

What’s the one thing you’d regret not doing, if your time turned out shorter than you think? Please reply below.

Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO & filmmaker, as well as a trained Soul Midwife and Druidic Bard. Aliveness emerged from my own near death experiences, sitting with the dying, and the wisdom of the Stoics, Buddhists and great thinkers on mortality. My dream is that Aliveness will become as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice helping people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and create a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

In this newsletter I would like to take you on the same journey, and land you somewhere unexpected.

When someone says ancestors, you probably picture human faces. A grandmother. A great-uncle in a photo. Go back far enough and the faces turn into strangers and somewhere around a few hundred years, unless you do an official ancestry search, the trail goes cold.

I want to take you a lot further back than that.

Beyond faces.

Beyond people altogether…

Going waaaaay back

Four and a half billion years ago there was no Earth. There was only matter in the form of dust and gas. The leftovers of dead stars that were drifting about in the dark.

Gravity started pulling all this matter together. Rocks slowly merged into a spinning disc, which in turn formed into a young molten planet. That was our planet, forming around an ordinary star.

Then, somewhere in the first billion years, something happened that we are only just beginning to understand. In a warm volcanic pool, a cluster of chemicals did something nothing had ever done before. It copied itself. One single-celled organism, but alive.

Our first ancestor. And the lineage it started never broke. Not in nearly four billion years.

Over millions of years those cells became more and more complex. They clustered, they specialised, they learned to swim.

For a stretch of time so long (the number is ludicrous to a human mind), everything that was alive lived in water.

Then about 375 million years ago some beast dragged itself out of the shallows, onto the mud and took a breath.

Every animal that ever walked came from that creature. Fish into amphibians. Amphibians into the beings that became reptiles and mammals. And eventually a small, clever, upright ape that became… US.

Every one of the animals in this lineage is your ancestor. The cell. The fish. The creature in the mud. The ape.

This is not a pretty metaphor. It is an actual chain of parents and children, each one hanging on just long enough to pass life down the line, all the way back to the dust of dead stars.

For you to be here, right now, in this life… every single ancestor in that chain had to survive long enough to have the next offspring.

The cell. The fish. The thing in the mud. Every mammal. Every human, right down the line, through ice ages and famines and predators and plagues and wars. And not one of them died first. One break, anywhere, at any point in four billion years, and you’re simply never born.

Take a second now to imagine how many beings had to live and die, struggle and survive, so that you could be here today, reading this newsletter.

The odds of you existing are absurd. I asked Chat GPT to calculate the odds and at first it said it couldn’t… the calculation was too hard. After pressing, the AI came back with this:

Wow. And here you are anyway, conscious, breathing and reading a string of little black symbols called words and turning them into meaning in your head, which is itself a miracle we never once stop to be amazed by. And yet, we often do not appreciate this miracle because we are conditioned to take life for granted.

Why do we take life for granted? Because we are not aware of our mortality. We live in a culture that avoids thinking about that subject at all costs… even though it is the only certainty in life.

Last Sunday when I sat in the workshop and did the cosmic ancestry visualisation, I felt what I always feel. A wave of gratitude for the miracle of existence… against all the odds.

That the whole crazy, impossible ancestral line held, and the thing it produced at the end of it was a life. Mine. Yours. The person two seats down who you’d never have met if a fish had made a different decision 375 million years ago.

And then I drift back and forget

Remember for a second that you are the end point of the most improbable winning streak in the history of the universe. And last Tuesday, if you’re anything like me, you spent half of it on your phone, mildly annoyed about something you won’t remember by Wednesday, putting off something important I know I need to do.

That’s something I kept spotting when I sat with dying people as an end-of-life guide. Almost nobody at the end holds regrets about what they did in life. It’s what they didn’t do. The risk not taken. The words left unsaid. The life they were too afraid to live.

They'd been given the rarest thing there is… a life, against impossible odds. And they spent it believing there'd always be more time, until the morning came when there wasn't.

Knowing you’ll die isn’t morbid. It’s the only thing strong enough to make you stop sleepwalking through the one impossible gift you were ever given.

That’s what Aliveness is all about. Living like you mean it, because you know it ends.

Before you go

The two-minute aliveness practice. Try it tomorrow as you awake in bed, before you reach for your phone.

Remember you are mortal. Remember to be grateful for being alive. Then pick one thing to do today that the whole long chain of ancestors would be glad of. A phone call. An honest sentence. One thing off the shelf marked someday.

Then go and do it.

This week’s question:

If you really felt that not one ancestor in four billion years broke the chain to get you here, what would you stop putting off?

Please reply and tell me. It might be the nudge someone else needs.

Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO & filmmaker, as well as a trained Soul Midwife and Druidic Bard. Aliveness emerged from my own near death experiences, sitting with the dying, and the wisdom of the Stoics, Buddhists and great thinkers on mortality. My dream is that Aliveness will become as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice helping people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and create a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

We’re all forty-seven now. I’ve known these three men (Charlie, Tom and Christopher) since I was eight years old, and we’re still close.

Long walks with very old friends turns out to be one of life’s great gifts.

The landscape rolls away beneath us for miles, and the familiar banter has us going. I remember thinking, with these people and in that landscape, that there was nowhere on earth I would rather be.

Walking as a ritual

The four of us have walked a different ancient footpath somewhere in the UK every year for the last seven years. We’ve covered a lot of ground and seen a lot of the best the these lands have to offer.

The four of us met at school. But somehow, through all the decades and the jobs and the marriages and the children and the general chaos of grown-up life, we’ve stayed in touch.

And for the last 7 years we kept putting one foot in front of the other together, once a year. It’s steadily become one of our favourite weekends of the year.

Where the walking started

Long walks has been a big part of my life for years now. When I moved to the neolithic south-west of England in 2018 I started heading out on the old pilgrimage routes around Somerset.

These are ancient paths people have walked for thousands of years, past standing stones and burial mounds, in the shadow of places like Glastonbury Tor and Stonehenge.

Not long after my wife and I settled there, I made a strange discovery. The town in Somerset that we’d moved to, Frome, turned out to be my ancestral home (read that story here).

My family had lived on that land for centuries, before immigrating to the US in the late 1300s. I hadn’t known this amazing fact when we chose Frome, and finding out changed how it felt to walk those lands.

In fact, it was that discovery that drew me onto the trails.

Those weren’t just ancient paths anymore, they were paths my ancient ancestors had trodden. The same ground and hills, the same views. The same connection.

So I started walking these paths on purpose, wanting to feel the roots I never knew I had. And as I walked, the lands began to feel genuinely alive to me.

These footpaths gave me something I hadn’t expected. A sense of roots… of being one small link in a very long chain of people who’d crossed the same ground before me.

The joy of barefooting

I like to walk barefoot when I can... not with barefoot shoes. Proper SHOES OFF.

There’s something amazing about feeling the variety of texture of the living land under your feet. Its a delightful sensory experience you lose walking with shoes. The cold wet mud, the soft moss and grass, the sharp stones, the warm rock... all have their own extraordinary felt characteristics.

Let’s not forget, humans evolved to walk barefoot.

Our feet are extraordinary tools, and every time I do six or seven miles without shoes I’m amazed by how resilient my feet turn out to be.

It makes me remember that we spend most of our lives disconnected from the ground by a slab of rubber, called the shoe’s ‘sole’. This separation has come to represent, for me, man’s disconnect from nature.

There’s a lot of research suggesting that direct contact with the earth may help lower inflammation and stress and improve posture amongst other benefits.

What I can tell you for certain is how it feels. It’s a real sensory experience that leaves you with more respect for the earth. It makes you feel grounded and more present with nature.

Walking becoming a healing modality

It’s not only my three old friends I walk with, either. Over the years I’ve walked with all sorts of wonderful mates, and more often than not it’s been with other men.

There’s something about men walking shoulder to shoulder, rather than sitting face to face, that lets men actually break out of their shells and talk.

The rhythm of it and the hours with nowhere to be. Often it’s a much-needed break from the hectic-ness of family life and kids.

Things are spoken on a hillside that would never come out across a table. I’ve watched men work through grief, marriages, their fathers, their fears, all of it, one step at a time.

It might be the most natural therapy there is.

And all these walks are made all the more precious precisely because they won’t go on forever. Each landscape you pass through may be the one and only time you see it.

I started walking barefoot with my kids too. To get them to appreciate nature in this simple but powerful manner. And they love it, especially when you walk in a big group with other families and kids. We used to do one long 8 mile walk each summer and raise money for local charities.

How many more footsteps?

I’m forty-seven. I have no idea how many more walks I will get to make with my three oldest mates. At some point one of us won’t be able to make the hill. But I suspect we’ll keep going for many a year, and I sense that the walking will keep us alive for longer.

Bronnie Ware, the amazing palliative nurse who spent years recording the regrets of the dying, found one that one regret came up again and again…

I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.

Well, there’s no better way to catch up properly and connect with friends than a long walk.

It can become a beloved ritual - an excuse to be together, moving through beautiful country, holding whatever each of us is carrying that year. The griefs. The worries. The joys. All of it said out loud on a hillside in a way it somehow never gets said anywhere else.

One of my favourite philosophers, Ram Dass, once said about life and death that “We’re all just walking each other home.”

I know where I’ll be next summer. On a hill somewhere, barefoot, with three old friends, eating a sandwich, laughing at something daft.

I can’t think of a better way to spend the time we have.

This week’s question:

Who could you start a walking ritual with? Could just be a walk around the park.

Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO & filmmaker, as well as a trained Soul Midwife and Druidic Bard. Aliveness emerged from my own near death experiences, sitting with the dying, and the wisdom of the Stoics, Buddhists and great thinkers on mortality. My dream is that Aliveness will become as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice helping people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and create a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

What if it also helps you live longer?

Perhaps true longevity is not achieved through supplements, cold plunges or the latest bio-hack, but through accepting, on a regular/daily basis, the only certainty in life?

Sounds crazy, right? Think about your mortality and live longer? But there might just be a wonderful irony in this idea. Please bare with me…

You stop drifting and start paying attention and in this headspace, you intuitively begin to want the things that a long life is actually built from.

When you stop taking life for granted and start to live in gratitude, you begin to look after your body. That’s because it’s the only life you get and you’d like it to carry you a good while yet. You also desire to feed your mind rather than numb it, so spending hours of your life doing things like Netflix bingeing, suddenly becomes less appealing.

On top of that, the relationships that matter to you begin to mend and you let go of the ones that drain you, and you stop postponing the things that matter most in life.

Physical and mental health improves. You start to sleep better and above all, you want to spend your days living a purposeful life, because it’s the only life you have.

In short, an awareness of your mortality means you start living your life in its fullest expression of ‘aliveness’.

That’s the part I find fascinating. Because when you look at what the science says actually keeps people alive, that list is almost exactly what comes up.

Here’s the science:

Take purpose. In 2014, researchers Hill and Turiano tracked thousands of adults and found that people with a clear sense of purpose simply lived longer, across every age group.

A later study in the medical journal JAMA found that a low sense of purpose was significantly linked to earlier death in people over fifty. It’s one of the threads running through the world’s longest-lived communities too: the Blue Zones.

The Okinawans have a word for it, IKIGAI, your reason for getting up in the morning.

The people of Nicoya in Costa Rica call it plan de vida. In both places, people carry a strong sense of why they’re here well into their nineties and beyond, and they last.

Then there’s connection. The longest study of human life ever conducted, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, has followed people since 1938, tracking their health across entire lifetimes. When the researchers went looking for what predicted who would grow old healthy and happy, they expected cholesterol, blood pressure, the usual suspects.

What they found instead was that the single strongest predictor was the warmth of your relationships. Not wealth or fame or IQ… the people most satisfied with their close relationships at fifty were the healthiest at eighty.

And it cuts the other way too. A major review by the researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad, pooling data from over three hundred thousand people, found that strong relationships improve your odds of survival by around 50%, and that loneliness carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking.

Just sit with that for a moment… purpose extends life. Connection extends life. Looking after your body and mind extends life. These aren’t wellness slogans, they’re some of the most robust findings out there.

Now back to my hypothesis

Most approaches to health go after these things one at a time. For example, a diet for the body. Or therapy for the mind. A course on finding your purpose. A push to see friends more etc etc. Useful, but piecemeal, and easy to let slide.

Aliveness doesn’t work like that as it doesn’t target one lever. It reaches underneath and flips the master switch. Because when you truly understand your time is limited, you don’t have to force yourself to eat better or call your brother or find your purpose. You want to. The motivation stops being discipline and becomes clarity. One shift at the root, and all the branches move.

I’ve felt this in my own life. Since I started practicing Aliveness I sleep better, I move more and I’m a nicer human being. I’ve cut out the things that were quietly poisoning me, not because I’m trying hard, but because wasting a finite life on them stopped making sense. The self care came as a side effect of waking up.

Please note, this longevity idea is just a hypothesis, not a proven fact. As far as I am aware, nobody has run the study that isolates “practising mortality awareness” and measures the years it adds.

The science confirms each ingredient separately. The claim that Aliveness switches them all on at once, from a single root, is an idea I’m am going to start testing and thinking through.

But I sense it points somewhere hopeful, and delightfully upside down.

The irony would be quite something. That to live long, you first have to make peace with dying. Because when you do that, you intuitively begin to step into your deepest potential and purpose in life… the very energy that fuels your aliveness.

This week’s question:

If you knew that facing your mortality could help you live longer, what is one thing you would start doing differently today?

Please reply in the comments - your answer may inspire others.

Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, filmmaker, Soul Midwife and Druidic Bard. Several times in my life, the life I was living no longer aligned with the person I had become. Finding the courage to make difficult changes led me closer and closer to my purpose, and eventually to work I could never have imagined doing today. Aliveness grew from that journey, with a dream that it might one day become as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice that helps people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and build a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

ALIVENESS

A practical philosophy for living fully in the awareness that life is finite.

A few days ago I watched my two sons walk off down a jungle path on their way to a neighbour’s house to play Dungeons and Dragons with their new friends. No lift needed, or supervision. Just two boys heading off into the afternoon, buzzing with excitement and freedom.

As I stood there watching them skip away I suddenly realised that this was exactly what my wife and I had been dreaming of these last few months. We had wanted to find a modern, intentional community, close to nature where our kids could be free to roam where they want. And here it was, happening in front of me, living in a place I’d never heard of eighteen months ago.

Let’s rewind for a sec. We’re now living in the Costa Rican jungle, in a regenerative community called La Ecovilla, about an hour and a half west of San José.

The vegetables are grown on site in a gorgeous garden shaped in geometric patterns. There are fruit trees everywhere. Clean water you can drink straight from the source.

There’s a shared pool, a yoga shala for events and a posh co-working space. Once or twice a month there’s a potluck dinner with the neighbours. There are regular men’s groups, women’s groups and wellness modalities. I played volleyball two days ago and padel the week before. Most people here are entrepreneurs who quit their 9-to-5 lives, and it feels like a nurturing place to build our new lives and careers. We have been living here for three weeks now.

The jungle around us doesn’t stop moving. Creatures of all varieties everywhere. Toucans landed on the tree next to our house a couple days ago. Rivers crash over boulders bigger than houses. There’s noise and colour and something living in every direction you look. We even had a tarantula in our kitchen the other day which was super exciting!

The kids have settled into the community school, with classes of 7 or 8 kids max. We are sleeping very well and my body seems healthier than it has in ages.

A while ago, our life in England looked good from the outside, and parts of it genuinely were amazing. Awesome friends. Family. A home we renovated with love. A regular paycheque. Living in a vibrant town that turned out to be my ancestral home.

But some parts weren’t working, and we knew it. We could feel a pull toward a life closer to nature, with more freedom for the kids, more real connection with the people, more ceremony and meaning in ordinary days.

We had been flirting with a wild dream for years… to go travelling the world as a family. Because of my work with mortality, we became increasingly aware that we only have one life, that time is short and we made a decision that scared us.

We sold the house, let go of the version of life we’d built, and set off travelling the world as a family. It was hard. It was frightening. We grieved heavily. And there were plenty of moments we questioned it.

Were we crazy…?!

But as we travelled, the fog started to clear. We began to reflect and understand what we were actually looking for from life. And somewhere along the way we discovered these modern, regenerative communities… places built around exactly the things we’d been missing: deeper connection to the land, shared meals, children running loose and safe. Ultimately a rhythm of life that felt more alive to us.

I just want to be clear. The dream we had been postponing was to travel. Your dream might be very different. And sometimes the biggest changes in life are not big dramatic logistical shifts. They can be subtler, yet significant inner changes.

One brave decision led to a discovery. That discovery led to another brave decision. And each one carried us closer to a life that actually fit us. A life we could never have designed on paper because we didn't even know it existed. We just had to keep following the pull of instinct. Even when it frightened us, and trust that the next breadcrumb would appear.

One of the things that came clear on this trip was my work, and where Aliveness was actually heading. Before we set off travelling I didn’t have half the clarity I have now. If you remember, this newsletter used to be called ‘Dying To Live With Purpose’. I just knew I had to keep putting my ideas out there and trust it would take shape.

Last weekend, something happened that told me we’re exactly where we’re meant to be. I put my hand up to run an Aliveness workshop on my first weekend here, in front of my new community. I didn’t know a soul. Around fifteen strangers showed up. The response was great. They asked me to make it a monthly thing!

So now, because I threw myself into the deep end, I’ve got a living laboratory for Aliveness, right here among the people I’m starting to share this life with.

I know how this might sound. Like I’m describing some perfect dream from a distance. I’m not. It’s real, it’s ordinary, there are mosquitoes and mud and things that go wrong. But the foundation of it: the freedom, the nature, the connection, the aliveness of the place… are everything we set out to find without knowing we were looking.

It all comes when you step outside one’s comfort zone. Into expansion.

Watching my boys disappear down that path to play with their new mates, I thought about how far back the trail went. All the way to one scary decision we almost didn’t make.

One question this week.

Are you following any breadcrumbs? Do please share as it could inspire others.

Practice Aliveness HERE.

Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, filmmaker, soul midwife and druidic bard. Several times in my life, I realised the life I was living no longer aligned with the person I had become. Each time, I found the courage to make a difficult decision, and each change led me closer to my purpose. I could never have imagined doing the work I do today. I created Aliveness with a dream that it becomes as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice that helps people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and build a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

ALIVENESS

A practical philosophy for living fully in the awareness that life is finite.

We can unconsciously spend our precious time making decisions based from fear.

Arguably the most powerful man who ever lived understood this, from inside a plague-ridden war camp two thousand years ago.

Picture the absolute ruler of an empire of fifty million people. Armies at his command… cities bearing his name… his face on every coin.

Now picture this man alone in a military tent on a freezing frontier, a plague tearing through his ranks, writing private notes to himself by candlelight that he never intends anyone to read. These notes go on to influence millions of people over hundreds of years, and his ideas are still as relevant as ever.

That man was Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome. A bit like the reluctant character ‘Maximus’ from the film Gladiator, Marcus didn’t want the emperor job. He was pulled into power through adoption, and spent much of his twenty-year reign not in marble palaces but on the Danube, waging brutal war against Germanic tribes while the Antonine Plague killed scores of people.

His co-emperor died and his authority was challenged. He took up writing to steady his nerves and he wrote for an audience of one. Those notes survived by accident. We call them the ‘Meditations’, and people have turned to them for eighteen centuries.

One line is attributed to him above all others.

“It is not death that a man should fear. He should fear never beginning to live.” (Marcus Aurelius)

These words were written by a man surrounded by death every single day. There was plague in the camp, bodies on the battlefield and his own health failing.

He had every reason to fear dying. And yet, he’s telling himself the dying was never the thing to be afraid of. The real danger was reaching the end without having truly lived.

Here’s what I like so much about these words. Marcus was not obviously afraid of death, and when you look closer at your own life, it’s rarely death you’re actually avoiding. It’s something subtler… something that often seems responsible… and it’s called ‘postponement’.

I know this because I lived it. There was a period of about eighteen months when I was leading my company by day and secretly training as an end-of-life guide on the side.

I told almost no one what I was doing. I was terrified of being judged and of what people would think if they knew. I was worried if people found out the CEO was a death doula we’d lose sales. People would think I’d lost the plot, because in our world, death is the one subject you don’t raise. Even though it’s the only thing in life that’s guaranteed.

So I wore a mask to work every day. The ‘confident founder’, while the real me, the one being pulled toward mortality, presence, the things I actually cared about, stayed hidden underneath.

It made me physically and mentally ill. For weeks I sat in my car in the morning and cried before I could walk into the office, working the feelings out of my body so I could function, lead, be ‘responsible’.

I knew I had to change and yet, I delayed, and delayed, and delayed. Because I was scared. Not of death, but of being seen in my truth.

I believe this is the fear Marcus was pointing at. The fear of judgement, of stepping out of line, of being cast out for living as yourself. And these fears are astonishingly good at keeping us from ever beginning… which in turn keep us from really living.

What broke it for me was a casual curry night with very, very old friends. The kind of evening where you finally say the true thing. I told them how I felt going into work each day. And one of my friends simply said, “Mate… just change it.”

Boom. I drove home lighter than I’d been in a year. A few nights later, after practicing the Ultimate Meditation for several days, the whole path forward arrived in radical clarity: selling the house, taking the family around the world, stepping fully into this work. But it started with an ordinary sentence from someone who knew me and who I trusted.

Marcus Aurelius died in a military camp, far from home. But he had begun to live long before that, because he refused to let fear run the show, and he reminded himself, in the dark, what was actually worth being afraid of.

Most of us have the fear backwards. We’re frightened of the ending but I believe we should be far more frightened of never actually beginning.

One for your diaries

Friday 11th Sept, a live conversation with Jada Butler, author of Midlife Nomad. 7am PT / 10am ET / 3pm UK. Link is HERE, and will be sent out to all subscribers prior to call.

This week’s question:

Where are you wearing a mask, and what would it take to drop it?

Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, filmmaker, soul midwife and druidic bard. Several times in my life, I realised the life I was living no longer aligned with the person I had become. Each time, I found the courage to make a difficult decision, and each change led me closer to my purpose. I could never have imagined doing the work I do today. I created Aliveness with a dream that it becomes as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice that helps people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and build a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

ALIVENESS

A philosophy and practice for living fully in the awareness that life is finite.

On Wednesday and Thursday this week I ran my first virtual event… and I’m still coming down from it.

Thirty people gave up time to sit with me and do something most of us spend our whole lives avoiding. We looked at the fact that we’re going to die, and how that fact - paradoxically - can be a catalyst to unlocking our fullest potential in life.

We did the Ultimate Meditation, where you look back on your life from its final moments. We wrote letters from our ninety-year-old selves. We then did a Life Audit, an honest look at where the time is actually going. And we talked about the things that usually stay locked away. Grief. Fear. The rituals we’ve lost. The relationships we keep meaning to tend to. The playfulness that goes missing somewhere in adulthood.

We finished with the Aliveness practice itself. A simple daily check-in that keeps you acting on what matters, instead of quietly drifting away from it.

What struck me most, across both days, was how much lighter people seemed by the end. Not because we’d avoided the hard stuff…. because we’d finally turned and faced it. I am grateful for all those who attended. There will be more to come.

A man called Jeremy messaged me right afterwards to say:

Braving The Bright Side Podcast

The same themes ran through a podcast I was lucky enough to be a guest on recently. Daniel Bradley, the charming host of Braving the Bright Side, opened our conversation with these words, and I loved them.

“It’s funny. Every single one of us shares one really shitty habit. At some point on our journey through this weird, beautiful, mystical little planet, we postpone our lives.

We’ll call them tomorrow. We’ll chase that dream once there’s a bit more money. We’ll tell them we love them next time, because it feels kind of weird to say it right now. And somehow, later quietly stretches into years.

I’m wildly guilty of it myself. I’ll put off making a phone call so I can watch the same episode of Parks and Rec or Modern Family for the eighteenth time. Or I’ll wake up to a gorgeous summer day thinking, I should go see my dad, call up some old friends, head to the beach. But then Michael Scott starts his own paper company, and suddenly, well, I’ve got plans.

Maybe the problem isn’t that we don’t know our time is limited. Deep down, we all know that. Maybe the problem is that we keep living like it isn’t.

Because the moment mortality quietly pulls up a chair, it starts asking some uncomfortable questions. Are you spending your time the way you actually want to? Are you becoming the person you hoped you’d be? Are you still waiting for someday?

And strangely enough, that’s where life gets brighter. People matter more. Dreams get louder. Ordinary Tuesdays start feeling a whole lot less, well, ordinary.

Because that series finale is probably a lot closer than we’d like to believe. So maybe it’s time to start releasing some absolute banger episodes of your own life. The kind that’ll leave you with as little regret as possible.”

— Daniel Bradley

Huge gratitude to Daniel for having me on his show. Please click below to watch or listen to the full podcast. I’m afraid the audio quality is not the best for some reason.

Spotify:

Youtube:

Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, filmmaker, soul midwife and druidic bard. Several times in my life, I realised the life I was living no longer aligned with the person I had become. Each time, I found the courage to make a difficult decision, and each change led me closer to my purpose. I could never have imagined doing the work I do today. I created Aliveness with a dream that it becomes as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice that helps people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and build a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

ALIVENESS

A philosophy and practice for living fully in the awareness that life is finite.

Last Sunday I gave my first major Aliveness workshop, at Medicine Festival in the UK. I would be lying if I told you I was not nervous.

If you don’t know it, Medicine Festival is a gathering of 10,000 people and the largest wellness festival in the UK, built around connection, nature, indigenous wisdom and healing.

People come to learn from elders and traditions from around the world, eat healthy delicious food and generally reconnect with something deeper than everyday life.

You can enjoy experiential workshops, inspirational speaker and beautiful music of multiple genres (from world to house). It’s a place to talk about what it means to be alive, and I was honoured to be invited to present my work.

I was even more grateful to discover I had been allocated a prime time on the ‘Haven’ Stage which is a very generous venue. I had no idea of how many would turn up, but there was a massive queue and 170 people appeared!

I’ll let you in on a secret… I have always had a fear of public speaking. It’s not really the speaking, it’s the being seen. All those eyes on you, and the voice in your head narrating what you imagine they’re thinking. Makes me feel frozen inside as my mind comes up with stories like: Who does he think he is? What makes him qualified to stand up there and talk about such things as death, about how to live? Etc etc.

It’s a fear of judgement and for a long time it’s kept me postponing the very thing I most want to do, step into my truth, and have conversations about mortality and living fully. I find this conversation to be utterly fascinating, and I come alive inside because because it turns into a chat about human consciousness and evolution.

So this fear of judgement… if you follow that fear all the way down, you reach something older than any stage. The fear of being judged is really the fear of being cast out. For most of human history, to be exiled from the tribe meant you didn’t survive. Alone, you died. So we’re wired to dread the disapproval of the group as if our life depends on it, because once, it did.

Which means even this, the fear of me standing up and being seen, is at its root a fear of annihilation. This is the same for all fears. If you trace them far enough back they all grow from a need to survive.

So this wasn’t just a workshop. It was me practising aliveness in real time. Stepping straight into the fear I’d been avoiding.

The morning of my workshop I made sure to do the Aliveness practice. I lay in bed and pictured myself at the end of the day, lying back down in that same bed, satisfied, knowing I’d done the talk, and done it well. I held that warm fuzzy feeling for a while. Then I got up and went to make it real.

Just before I walked on stage, my wife and children found me. They wrapped me in a hug and wished me luck. Wow did that feel good. Then I stepped up in front of around 170 people, and we began.

We explored what Aliveness actually is. We did the practice together. We did the Ultimate Meditation, the one where you reverse engineer your life from how you want to feel at the end and see what truly matters most in your life.

A room full of strangers, going to that place together. It was beautiful.

And my fear? It lifted the moment I started. The dread was in the buildup, as usual.

What I hadn’t expected was what came afterwards. People stayed behind to talk. A whole queue of them, wanting to tell me what had shifted or arisen in them during the session. And it didn’t stop when the festival did. My phone has barely gone quiet since.

What people keep describing is the powerful clarity. Something about looking back at their life from the end shook loose an answer they’d been circling for months, sometimes years.

And with the clarity comes the rest of it. Relief. A lightness they hadn’t felt in a long time.

That’s what Aliveness does when it lands. It doesn’t just make you think differently. It changes how you feel, and what you do next. It’s the first step towards deeper potential and purpose in life.

That’s why I am dedicating my life to this and I’ve still got a LOT work to do. I want to grow Aliveness into a recognised philosophy and practice like mindfulness.

Thank you, Medicine Festival. I hope to be back.

LAST CALL FOR MY FREE EVENT - 26 & 27th Aug

Next week I’m running a free two-day event to help people standing in front of a big, daunting decision they haven’t yet made. Together we’ll find the first real step out of anxiety and toward your authentic life.

August 26th and 27th. 2x 90 min sessions. FREE.

Reserve your seat here

Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, filmmaker, soul midwife and druidic bard. As I entered midlife I realised I was living a life that no longer aligned with the person I had become. So I changed direction and created Aliveness. I have a dream that Aliveness becomes as impactful as Mindfulness. A daily practice that helps people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and build a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

ALIVENESS

A philosophy and practice for living fully in the awareness that life is finite.

This summer I took myself to a small island in the Swedish archipelago, alone, and didn’t eat for three days, taking on minimal fluids.

It was my version of what people call a ‘vision quest’. Humans have done vision quests for thousands of years, across almost every indigenous culture.

You take yourself into the wilderness, without food and water, to sit and meditate and enter a state of deep insight. Aboriginal walkabouts, Druids in the forest, Yogis in caves. The term vision quest actually originates from Native American traditions.

I did my first vision quest three years ago in a forest in Somerset, with no tent, just myself, the trees and the wildlife. It was one of the most powerful experiences of my life and one that made me appreciate being alive, and all the daily comforts I often take for granted. This summer I felt the pull again.

I was scared, but my fear was all in the build-up. The days before, second-guessing, imagining what might go wrong, getting anxious as I ran the worst case scenarios. What if I couldn’t handle the hunger? What if something happened out there with no one around? What if, what if … ?

Any remaining anxiety dissolved away once I was dropped off on the island, found my spot, sat down under some lovely oak trees, and set my intentions for the days ahead.

Above all, I wanted to meditate on a concept that’s been growing in me for some time: how fear can point us where we need to go in life.

Sitting in nature like this is beautiful. Three days of extreme quiet, the kind you almost never get in our world of stimulation. The nights weren’t frightening so much as thrilling, lying there alone listening to the sounds of the island.

The second day was physically challenging as the the body begins to starve. Nausea and headaches creep in. There’s something else that happens when you go without food and water for days. Your body starts to register it as a threat to survival, because it is.

An older awareness begins to reveal itself. This is because, on one level, your body starts to die. As someone who is actively exploring mortality and aliveness, that’s why I am doing it - to exist for a while in the liminal space between life and death. To be deliberately out of my comfort zone and to gain the powerful insights, the ‘visions’ that are available in these liminal states. This is where life becomes super vivid and flow states of thought can occur.

Out there on the island, with nothing to distract me, one exhilarating idea arrived with a clarity that gave me goosebumps.

Before I get to that, let’s consider some everyday fear scenarios for a second. There’s the awkward conversation you might mentally rehearse for days, that takes three minutes. The email to your boss you stare at for hours before sending. The first time you step onto a stage, or press publish, or say the true thing out loud.

Fear can be overwhelming beforehand and almost always an anti-climax. You do the ‘scary’ thing, and then you realise it was not as scary as your mind led you to believe. And you often feel much better once you’ve done it.

We treat fear as a wall… a thing to break through, or a set of limiting beliefs to dismantle. But sitting in that forest, I started to think that fear might be something else entirely.

Here’s what I mean. Fear evolved to keep us alive. For most of human history the thing you feared could genuinely kill you: sabre-tooth tigers used to hunt our ancestors, for example.

So fear was survival, plain and simple. But today most of us have lives where almost nothing threatens us physically. However, the old wiring is still working in us, pulling strings. It just has very little real danger left to point at. It therefore floods the body with the same alarm our ancestors felt facing a predator in the dark, over things that can't actually hurt us.

Now let’s frame this through an evolutionary lens.

Think of the flying squirrel. Somewhere in the past a normal squirrel leapt from a tree to escape the bite of a snake. Over time the species grew the skin between their forearms and back legs that became wings. To make escape from death more effective this creature became a flying squirrel. The threat to the squirrel’s survival is what forced the adaptation.

You can track any adaptation of mortal creatures the same way, from plants to animals.

Humans are no different. We grow as individuals and societies when something frightening pushes us to do something brave that we’ve never done before. Without the fear or threat, we stay put. We never step into the unknown, and we never find out what we’re actually capable of. I believe that is how life works.

So our fear points at other things now. The new venture. The honest conversation. The change of career. The public speech. And we feel that ancient, full-body alarm and read it the way our ancestors did: Danger! Turn back!

But it isn’t danger. It’s just your edge of the known. The place where you stop repeating your life and start expanding it.

Which makes me wonder whether fear isn’t a wall at all, but an evolutionary force. At one end this force grows from our fear of death, the survival instinct, keeping us alive. At the other, the force pulls us towards where we’re meant to grow.

Ignore it, refuse to let this force lead you, stay safe inside the comfort zone, and life slowly contracts and withers. Resentment and regret build over time when we do not follow the pull of this force. And eventually we develop a fear of expansion itself.

Follow it, and it works like an inner gravity, pulling you toward the very things that would stretch and blossom you into someone larger and more beautiful.

‘Fear’, as a word, to me, has negative connotations. I am starting to wonder - are we even calling this force by the correct name? This ‘force’ feels bigger and more significant than the definition we have historically given it.

Every time my life has expanded for the better, it started with fear. The best decisions I’ve ever made were always the scariest ones. My mind always making things out to be worse than they were. And every scary decision, once made, turned out to be the doorway to a bigger life.

The pattern is so consistent in my life I’ve started becoming suspicious of prolonged comfort and started trusting fear. When something frightens me now, and it’s the type of fear that pulls me toward it (rather than just experiencing a recoil), I’ve learned to treat that as a sign post.

Fear is a compass you can tune into.

When you break the barrier and do the new thing, you discover it wasn’t the cliff edge your mind imagined. And on the other side is a version of you that’s more capable than the one who was afraid. This becomes a practice. The more often you step towards your fear, the braver you get, the more you expand.

I believe that's where our potential lives, both as individuals and as a species. Fear isn't the enemy and safety isn't the friend. Fear (or whatever this force might get called in the future) might be the very thing pointing us toward who we're meant to become, and toward the answers we're all looking for.

If this newsletter resonates, there’s a good chance you already know the decision your fear is pointing at.

In a couple weeks I’m running a free two-day event for exactly this - to help people standing in front of a big, frightening change they haven’t yet made. Together we’ll find the first real step out of anxiety and toward your authentic life.

August 26th and 27th. FREE.

Reserve your seat here

This week’s question

What are you dreading right now that you are also feeling drawn toward?

That combination - the fear and the pull together - is worth paying attention to. It might be your inner compass speaking.

Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, filmmaker, soul midwife and druidic bard. As I entered midlife I realised I was living a life that no longer aligned with the person I had become. So I changed direction and created Aliveness. I have a dream that Aliveness becomes as impactful as Mindfulness. A daily practice that helps people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and build a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

I’m launching my first virtual Aliveness coaching event! It’s FREE to all subscribers and I’d love you in the room.

Drop the Mask, Reclaim Your Life

August 26th & 27th (2x 90min sessions)

8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm UK

watch my video and learn more

Who is the event for?

This event is aimed primarily at founders, leaders and creatives who have built an outwardly successful life and can quietly feel it no longer fits the person they’ve become.

Does this sound like you?

The difficult conversation you keep circling. The trip or sabbatical you earned years ago and still haven't taken. The passion project or career change that remains postponed. The anxiety that sits in your chest like a stone. The nights of poor sleep. The dinners where you're present in body but somewhere else entirely. And beneath it all, the fear you don't say out loud, even to those closest to you. That you have built a life that does not align with who you have become and the time to change it is running out.

The point is to face your big decision before a crisis or your health makes a change for you.

The event is constructed from the foundations of the Aliveness philosophy, and everything I’ve learned about how acknowledging our mortality can completely transform a life.

Here’s what to expect at the event:

• You’ll understand why we unconsciously drift in life, and how drift leads to inaction, regret and anxiety.

• You will then reverse engineer your life from how you want to feel at the very end, and write yourself a letter from your ninety-year-old self. This perspective brings radical clarity, and makes the decision you’ve been circling impossible to ignore.

• You will then work out what another five years of doing nothing really costs you in your time, your health and the people you love. This might just be the most important thing you ever do.

What are the outcomes?:

• You’ll get clarity on what your next chapter looks like and leave lighter than you felt in years.

• With this clarity on the path forwards, your sleep returns.

• No more Sunday evenings with dread.

• Your most important relationships improve.

• The revitalised version of you has their mojo back.

• You’ll also leave with the 2 minute daily Aliveness practice, so the clarity doesn’t fade by Friday.

This is all geared to help you make a considered decision, made properly. Most people find the change they need is smaller, and closer, than the one they’ve feared.

August 26th & 27th (2x 90min sessions) - FREE

8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm UK

Reserve now

I have been incredibly grateful for your support as subscribers on Substack and I’m looking forward to finally meeting some of you in person at this event!

Don’t postpone what matters most as we don’t have unlimited time. This is what living with aliveness actually asks of us.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, filmmaker, soul midwife and druidic bard. As I entered midlife I realised I was living a life that no longer aligned with the person I had become. So I changed direction and created Aliveness. I have a dream that Aliveness becomes as impactful as Mindfulness. A daily practice that helps people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and build a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

ALIVENESS

A philosophy and practice for living fully in the awareness that life is finite.

Let’s start with this reminder: it is easy to unconsciously drift in life.

We unconsciously drift in life because it is easy to unconsciously take life for granted.

We unconsciously take life for granted because we are not in relationship with our mortality, so we therefore assume we have more time to action the things that matter most.

By not acknowledging, on a regular basis, the one thing in life that is guaranteed (death), we forget that life is short, and precious, and we unconsciously… drift. And the things that matter most get postponed.

And then there’s the fear that tells you not to take risks. Just play things safe. Over a life these harden into beliefs about who you are and what you’re capable of, beliefs that were never true, only protective.

All these fears grow from the oldest fear of all, the fear of death. We don’t feel it directly anymore, because most days nothing threatens our lives. But it’s still there, underneath, keeping us small.

Subscribe now

So - you take a job that’s meant to be temporary, and somehow it turns into the thing you’ve done for fifteen years. Your passion project remains permanently postponed. There’s a conversation you know you need to have, and you keep not having it.

Or maybe you built something, a business, a career, an identity that once suited you, but over time you changed, but the role didn’t.

You’re not failing while this happens. In fact, you may be busy and you’re good at what you do. It’s just, sometimes, you wake up and find yourself wanting to head in another direction. And after long enough, that realisation can have a way of dimming your spark for life. Your aliveness.

Maybe that describes you right now. Maybe it doesn’t, and you’re happy. Either way these questions are worth sitting with. This isn’t about beating yourself up over the years behind you. It’s just that you always get to choose what happens next, if you’re paying attention.

I call these the Aliveness Questions. They’re not supposed to be comfortable. And they’ve got nothing to do with productivity… they’re about direction and Aliveness, which is exactly why most of us dodge them, because some part of us suspects the answers will ask put us out of our comfort zones.

I come back to these questions every month or so. Before anything big or whenever I get the feeling I’ve drifted. Read them slowly, and don’t rush to get through them. The questions that sting a bit are the ones to stay with FYI.

If you have time, take 10 minutes and write down answers to these. You will be glad you did.

One for your diaries: Live coaching for paid subscribers. If you want a simple 2 minute daily practice to help you step into your fullest life, I will be hosting this live 45 minute session this Sunday August 2nd. Zoom link click here.

And if you haven’t tried the Aliveness practice mini course yet, here it is:

The Aliveness Practice

The pages below are designed to be read in order, one at a time, across a few sittings.

1. Why We Drift

2. Limiting Beliefs

3. What Is Aliveness?

4. The Ultimate Meditation

5. The Aliveness Practice

6. Go Deeper

One request this week, instead of a closing question.

Out of the 8 Aliveness Questions, which one unsettled you most? Please reply and tell me which, and why. It will inspire others.

Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

John Hopkins is a former CEO, filmmaker, soul midwife and druidic bard. As I entered midlife I realised I was living a life that no longer aligned with the person I had become. So I changed direction and created Aliveness. I have a dream that Aliveness becomes as impactful as Mindfulness. A daily practice that helps people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and build a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

I’m writing this newsletter from Frome, the town in Somerset we left a year ago. My ancestral home (read that story here). Over a year ago my wife and I sold our house In Frome. We sold almost all our possessions. We took the children out of school and went travelling the world with one backpack each.

Being back on these Frome streets to visit friends is nostalgic and wonderful, and it has me thinking about the night the big change came knocking.

October 2024. For months I’d had a heaviness in my chest that wouldn’t shift. I had it checked at hospital thinking I might have heart problems. It wasn’t. I know now that the stone of anxiety in my chest was the cost of being pulled two directions.

Back then I was running a drone display business in financial trouble that I’d lovingly built over years, and I was fully committed and responsible for its survival and wellbeing. At the same time I’d trained as a Soul Midwife and was volunteering to sit with dying people at hospital in whatever hours I could find.

It was slowly dawning on me that exploring mortality was the work I was being called to do. Two futures pulling in opposite directions. I was walking into the office each day feeling physically and mentally sick. I knew that if I did nothing, my body would make the decision for me. I was sure I would develop a chronic physical illness, like cancer.

At the same time, my wife Linnea had spent several months applying for jobs that deep down felt compromised. There was a general feeling between us of misalignment with our careers, but we remained grateful for the life we had.

Then one night I was lying awake, restless, as I had been for months. BOOM. I was shown something surprising. A vision. Clear as day. Like watching a movie. I saw us selling the beloved house we had renovated. I saw us stepping away from our mortgage and debts. I saw myself stepping away from my business after a successful handover.

This decision would solve Linnea’s interview loop. We could travel the world as a family, the dream my wife and I had talked about for years and always filed under ‘someday’. This would be an investment into ourselves as a family. And the big one - after almost 25 years of hard work, we could have a well-earned pause.

One move that answered several problems at once.

I lay there until dawn turning the idea over, hunting for the flaws. But I couldn’t find them. The first challenge was to tell my wife, and there was no guarantee Linnea would like this radical concept.

On many levels we had a privileged lives. We loved Frome. The children were happy. We had friends we adored, an income, a home.

What if Linnea thought I was mad? Perhaps this was mad? It might end the relationship?

These were the fears moving through me.

A vision at three in the morning proves nothing on its own. Plenty of exhausted people fantasise about running away and it’s just avoidance in better clothes. So how do you tell the difference? Looking back, several factors marked it out.

It came after an invitation for change. For months I’d been designing a meditation where I could see myself at the end of my life, sitting with the feeling of a life fully lived, complete and without regret. I call this the Ultimate Meditation, and it is the foundation exercise of the Aliveness Practice (available to all subscribers in Tools). Back then the meditation was something I was doing to stay sane.

The vision of leaving Frome solved more than it dodged. A fantasy removes you from one problem. This solution potentially answered our misalignment and a dream we’d deferred for years, all at once.

Psychologist Carl Jung mapped this territory better than anyone. He wrote about the second half of life demanding something different from the first.

“We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” (Carl Jung, ‘Collected Works’, volume eight. )

The morning after the vision came, I woke Linnea and told her I had something important to share.

We sat in bed while I laid it out. I painted the losses as vividly as the gains. What we’d feel from following our dream, but what we would also be giving up. How much leaving our home would hurt. But what an amazing adventure, full of opportunity, we could have.

We then remembered the feeling that called us to Frome in the first place. Following our instinct to move to a town where we knew no one had been a giant leap into the unknown. But that call ended up being the best decision and we both recognised that the energy of this moment, this moment of instinct, contained the same DNA.

So, despite the feeling of loss, Linnea heard the truth in the idea, and in her usual courageous manner, agreed that going travelling was what we needed to do. We don’t have unlimited days. It was now or never. Leave while the chips were up.

Somewhere in the middle of that chat we were both crying, grieving a life we hadn’t left yet but already knew we would.

We agreed to sit with with the idea for a month. To see whether we changed our minds. Over the coming weeks we both wobbled at times, but the idea held.

After the idea had passed our test, we needed our children to buy in. Not an announcement, an invitation to co-create. We wrote the kids a letter explaining the concept of travelling as a family, outlining the pros and cons. They read the letter aloud in a family meeting. It was a unanimous ‘yes’.

The sense of relief of a shared decision was powerful. And then came a feeling I hadn’t had in many years: revitalisation… as renewed energy poured into us.

These moments of clarity come to everyone if we remember to invite them in. And the solution to life’s biggest problems can at first seem frightening, or ‘impractical’. But fear isn’t evidence the decision is wrong. Usually it’s evidence that something matters.

Every time my wife and I have been brave enough to act when instinct calls, we’ve been rewarded in ways we could never have planned for. This is something we have come to expect.

Are you feeling misaligned, sick and stuck in life right now? If you know deep down that a big change is needed, here is some advice summarised as best I can:

• Invite clarity. These moments favour minds that have been asking. Try the Ultimate Meditation (free with all subscriptions). Spend time at the end of your life looking back, to gain radical clarity on your life direction.

• Notice when a big idea appears. Then test the idea for relief. Excitement is unreliable. Relief is a better signal. Notice which one you feel.

• Give the idea time. Don’t act the same day, and don’t dismiss it the same day either. A big decision survives at least a month of doubt. A fantasy usually doesn’t.

• Say the losses out loud. When you tell the person it affects most, describe what you’d be giving up as vividly as what you’d gain. Grieve it together before you decide. That conversation is where you find out whether it’s real.

• Bring people in, don’t announce. Anyone whose life this changes deserves to be part of the decision, not informed of it. See it as a co-creation.

One for your diaries: Live coaching session for paid subscribers. If you want a simple 2 minute daily practice to help you step into your fullest life, I will be hosting this live session on Sunday August 2nd. Zoom link click here.

I want to conclude by expressing deepest gratitude to my wife and kids for being brave and intrepid travel companions on this adventure we have had. It’s been a powerful experience.

Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, acclaimed creative, soul midwife and druidic bard. I have a dream that Aliveness becomes as impactful as Mindfulness. A daily practice that builds braver lives, fewer regrets and a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

Poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, Mary Oliver, spent four decades in one small town at the end of Cape Cod, walking the same salt marshes most mornings with a notebook in her pocket.

She never chased a bigger life. She wrote small, exact poems about grasshoppers, herons and wild geese and became the best-selling poet in America.

One summer day, Mary watched a grasshopper eat sugar out of her hand. She watched it wash its face. And then she wrote the question that has ended up on more tattoos than perhaps any other line of American poetry:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”(Mary Oliver)

It’s easy to hear that as a pep talk, but it’s a question. The kind you’re not supposed to answer quickly, or comfortably. The kind of question that takes time to land.

This question landed on me last weekend out of left-field. I was at a festival in the UK, standing in a glorious sunlit crowd with some of my oldest friends, music loud enough to feel in my chest. For a while I felt as alive as I’ve felt all year. Fully in it.

Then, without anything changing, something shifted. The joy drained out and the question rushed in. Is what I’m building real, or just a story I’m telling myself? Do I actually know what the heck I’m doing with my life?

One minute I was inside my life completely. The next I was standing outside it, auditing it, finding it suspect. Same field. Same music. Same friends beside me. Nothing had changed except the voice in my head.

I’ve learned to recognise that voice. It visits everyone. When a life has slipped onto autopilot, it comes quietly, asking is this really it? That version is a wake-up call. It wants you to move. But there is a second version, and that’s the one that found me in the field. Louder. Sharper. It doesn’t come to wake you. It comes to stop you. It arrives when you’re already moving, right before the things that matter most.

That second voice is fear. And fear never announces itself as fear. It dresses as prudence. As maybe slow down. As who are you to do this? Imposter syndrome… Its whole strategy is to make you pull back from what you love, to protect yourself in advance from losing it.

Mary Oliver’s instruction is the exact opposite:

“To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes, to let it go.” (Mary Oliver)

This is not caution. This is a licence. Because everything you love is mortal. Your people. Your body. This summer. This morning. Even this universe was born and will one day die.

Oliver’s instruction is not to pull back from any of it. It’s the opposite. Love it harder because it won’t last forever. Hold it against your bones. Let the fact that it ends be the very reason you give it everything.

That’s what our mortality can be harnessed for. Not a shadow over life. The powerful force that makes life vivid. The deadline that turns someday into today… that turns postponement into action.

One for your diaries: Live coaching session for paid subscribers. If you want a simple 2 minute daily practice to help you step into your fullest life, I will be hosting this live session on Sunday August 2nd. Zoom link click here.

Years before she died, Mary Oliver wrote a poem imagining the moment death would come for her, and what she hoped to say when it did:

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” (Mary Oliver)

Married to amazement. Taking the world into her arms. That’s not a woman bracing for the end. That’s a woman so fully alive that death becomes almost beside the point.

Mary Oliver died in 2019, at eighty-three, at home. Nobody recorded her final words. She didn’t need any. She’d written her answer forty years early and morning after morning, marsh after marsh, poem after poem, she’d lived it.

Her big question isn’t waiting for your deathbed. It’s being answered right now, in what you choose today, in how much of yourself you actually bring to this one wild and precious life.

Standing in that field the other day, I realised the doubt wasn’t evidence I was on the wrong path. It was evidence I was close to something that matters. The fear shows up precisely because I’m stepping toward more aliveness, not less.

That’s the invitation. Not to think more about death. To let the awareness of it wake you up. To stop postponing the conversation, the decision, the dream.

What would it look like this week to bring your full self to the decision you’ve been circling?

You already know. Go and be amazed.

Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, acclaimed creative, soul midwife and druidic bard. I have a dream that Aliveness becomes as impactful as Mindfulness. A daily practice that builds braver lives, fewer regrets and a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

We went straight to that awkward question around mortality, and how, when we stop running from this awkward subject, we can discover the secrets of living fully.

Sammy and I talked about why success without purpose leaves you restless, and how facing the fact that life is finite makes you braver, clearer, more present, and far less willing to postpone the things that actually matter.

We got into reverse-engineering your life from the end to avoid living with regret, and the difference between mindfulness and living with aliveness.

We also touched on a growing hypothesis of mine… that fear might just be an evolutionary force!

Have a watch or listen below.

Spotify:

Youtube:

I’d love to hear how this podcast resonated with you. Please comment below.

Leave a comment

Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, acclaimed creative, soul midwife and druidic bard. I have a dream that Aliveness becomes as impactful as Mindfulness. A daily practice that builds braver lives, fewer regrets and a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

UPCOMING EVENTS - Please put these in your diary

July 24th: Aliveness Workshop at Connect Festival, UK

Aug 2nd: Live online coaching session - The Aliveness Practice. For paid subscribers only.

Aug 13th: Aliveness Workshop at Medicine Festival, UK

I grew up in the UK feeling I had no roots or heritage in that land. My parents are American. They moved to England in the late seventies and I grew up aware that all our relatives lived across the Atlantic.

At Christmas we relied on the kindness of friends to take us in, because we had no aunts, uncles or cousins to celebrate with. In my childhood I used to long for bigger family vibes, for a motherland, for the feeling of belonging to a place and a lineage.

Over the years, almost without noticing, I became British. I fell in love with the eccentric and colourful culture, I built a life and made friends who felt like family. But that early sense of not fully belonging to a place never fully left me.

Years later, when my wife and I were living in London raising young kids, we wanted to live closer to nature and in deeper community. So we began to search for our new home. For nearly two years I researched towns and villages, mostly across the southwest, where I’d grown up near Oxford. I always loved the energy of the land and the people of the southwest.

Then, on a bright spring morning in 2018, I visited a town called Frome, in Somerset. The most mis-pronounced town in the whole of England, apparently.

It was maybe the tenth or twelfth town we’d visited, and we’d felt nothing particular about any of the others. But walking through Frome, I instantly felt something I can only describe as a life force. People were out in their gardens building things. Tinkering. There was art everywhere. The coffee shops were jammed, the park was full of families, children playing, the streets alive with people. The town had a vitality to it that went straight into my body.

A sensation starting burning in my gut. I rang my wife from the park and told her that I had the strongest feeling we’re meant to live here. She felt it too.

Live coaching session for paid subscribers. If you want radical clarity on how to live with no regrets join the live meditation I will be hosting on July 5th. Zoom link click here.

Making the decision to move to a town where we knew no one was frightening. It was a big leap. We knew almost nothing about Frome, other than a reputation of a thriving local community and creative scene. We were uprooting our young family and moving to a town on the strength of a feeling we couldn’t fully justify or explain.

This is the thing I’ve come to understand. Instinct and fear are often two sides of the same coin. The pull toward something that matters and the fear of reaching for it tend to show up at the same moment. And most of us make the same mistake. We read the fear as a stop sign. We treat it as a reason to stay where we are.

But the fear isn’t always a warning. It can be a signpost. It tends to be strongest precisely where something meaningful is waiting.

We moved to Frome anyway. Frightened, and certain at the same time.

What happened next still sounds, to me, like something I’d have rejected as too far-fetched if I’d tried to write it into one of the far-fetched film scripts I used to write in my days as a film director.

We moved to Frome and fell in love quickly. We made great new friends, the kids settled in fast, my wife got a great job and we all felt a real sense of home. And then, after about six months, my brother sent me a photocopied page from a family history book he’d come across.

Turns out our ancestors had lived in Frome in the thirteen hundreds, before they sailed to colonise America.

The same passage in the book said my ancestors had built a chapel in one of the town’s churches, with money from the king, in the 1350s. I immediately made an appointment to meet the vicar of that church.

I stood together with the vicar in this grand, ancient church, and for an hour he told me the history of my own family. He knew everything. It turned out his former wife was a distant relative of mine. And then he told me my ancestors were buried in the crypt directly beneath my feet.

And then I saw it. A brass plaque on the church wall that said JOHN CABELL of FROME.

My first two names are John Cabell. And there I was, living in Frome.

It’s hard to find words to fully describe how I felt after this experience. It felt well beyond any kind of coincidence.

For the week that followed I felt high, lifted. I walked around the town as though I were floating. Synchronicities happened frequently. I felt my ancestors close, a sense of belonging I had been missing my entire life, arriving all at once.

For the first time, I understood in my body what roots and heritage and lineage actually mean. And it happened because I had listened to my instinct.

Soon after arriving in Frome, I started a company called Celestial, and we made drone light shows in the night sky, and it grew into something beyond anything I’d imagined. We made shows around the world. The opening of Glastonbury Festival. Eurovision. London’s New Year. A headline show at the Adelaide Fringe working with Aboriginal elders and artists.

But the proudest moment of all happened in my ancestral home. Two years in a row, eight thousand people gathered in the centre of Frome one night to watch a show we made for our home town itself. And at the climax of each drone show, we wrote the name of the town in enormous letters across the sky. FROME. Vast, and glowing, above the very streets my ancestors had walked six hundred years before. You could see it for miles around.

Both times I stood in the crowd and looked up at that name in the sky, and I suddenly felt my ancestors standing beside me. The people who had built a church here with a king’s money, whose bones lay in the crypt across town, whose name I carried. I had wandered back by instinct, not knowing any of it, and now I was writing our town’s name across the heavens above our home.

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” (André Gide)

That same instinct that called us to Frome is the one my wife and I now live by. It’s the feeling that has called us back out on the road right now, fulfilling a long held dream to travel the world with our children.

So we sold the house and let go of the version of life that was safe and known. And sometimes it feels frightening, just as moving to Frome was frightening. We still feel trepidation every time the instinct calls. The difference is that we’ve learned that the fear usually leads to treasure.

So now, when that pull comes, the one we can’t quite explain and are slightly afraid of, we’ve learned to treat it not as a threat, but as a direction. And every time we’ve trusted it, something has been waiting that we could never have planned or imagined.

This week’s question

What is the pull you keep talking yourself out of, because it frightens you?

Sit with the fear for a moment, and then ask a different question of it - what if this fear is simply showing me where my life is trying to take me?

If this resonates please write your answer here, your words will inspire others.

Leave a comment

Thank you for being here. Being alive, right now, is amazing. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Events / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, acclaimed creative, soul midwife and druidic bard. I have a dream that Aliveness becomes as impactful as Mindfulness. A daily practice that builds braver lives, fewer regrets and a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision by subscribing

Subscribe now

On New Year’s Day 2023, actor Jeremy Renner was crushed beneath a snowplow weighing more than fourteen thousand pounds.

He had stepped out of the machine to help his nephew and it began to slide. He climbed back on to stop it and was pulled under. Thirty broken bones. A collapsed lung. He nearly died on the ice while waiting forty five minutes for help to arrive.

Since the accident Jeremy says he invests only in love and in his relationships, because that is the only thing that ultimately matters. He describes himself as more open, more loved, more connected. And he said something in passing that is almost the whole of what I want to say to you today. Talking about the way he now lives, he remarked that you don’t have to be in an accident to do any of this.

He is right. You don’t. But almost everyone waits for a crisis to arrive before they make the change in behaviour.

Kylie Minogue was thirty six when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, at the height of her career, days before she was due to headline Glastonbury. She went through eight months of treatment and came out the other side.

Years later she described what the experience left her with. Not bitterness. Not fear. An acute awareness of her own body, of the love that surrounded her, of her own capability. She said that having had cancer, you are stripped down to near zero, and yet she felt more themself than ever before.

When Jeff Bridges came through non-Hodgkin lymphoma and a near-fatal bout of Covid, he said the very things you are trying to avoid, cancer, death, taught him the most about love and purpose.

Sir Chris Hoy, the Olympic cyclist now living with terminal cancer, speaks not about grand bucket-list moments but about the intense daily gratitude, the mundane fun of life, a coffee, a laugh with a friend, pausing to look out of the window and appreciate the day. He has said plainly that you do not have to be facing a terminal diagnosis to live this way.

And this message only reaches the mainstream when it’s a famous person talking. For every name you recognise here, there are millions you never will. Ordinary people, in hospital beds and on roadsides and in doctors’ offices, who will tell you that the hardest day of their life cracked something open and let the light in. That afterwards, the deep gratitude emerged. The petty worries fell away. The people they loved became almost unbearably precious.

Psychologists call it ‘post-traumatic growth’. Studying thousands of cancer patients and survivors, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun (University of North Carolina) found the same pattern again and again: a deeper appreciation of life, closer relationships, and a renewed sense of purpose. The people who come closest to losing life often value it most.

I have spent years studying mortality, and this is one of the most consistent findings in all of it. Proximity to death reliably produces gratitude, presence, and a reordering of what truly matters. It is a law of human nature.

If you want radical clarity on how to live with no regrets join the live meditation I will be hosting July 5th. Available to paid subscribers. Zoom link will be shared nearer the time.

I have had brushes with death too. In Madrid 2002, the night Real Madrid football team won the Champions League, I was walking home after filming the celebrations when someone attacked me from behind on a dark street. The man pinned me against a car and strangled me until I passed out, never saying a word. As I lost consciousness, I was certain I was being murdered (read the full story HERE).

I woke on the street, dizzy, the horror of the attack flooding back. And underneath the shock was something I have never forgotten. A gratitude so total it was almost physical. I was alive. That gratitude stayed with me for weeks, and in truth some of it has never left.

Years later, during a sacred psilocybin ceremony I spent four torturous hours convinced I was dying, and came out the other side with the very same gift of deep gratitude (read the full story HERE).

I have had other brushes with death beyond these episodes, which led me to train as a soul midwife, and all of these experiences made me realise how often we unknowingly take life for granted. This is because we are not aware, on a deep and regular basis, that our time on this earth is limited. We forget that every moment of life is a precious miracle not to be wasted.

So why does it take a catastrophe to wake us up?

Everyone reading this already knows, intellectually, that they are going to die. It is the most certain fact of your life. And yet that knowledge sits in the head, abstract and weightless, changing almost nothing about how you spend your Tuesday.

What a crisis does is drag that knowledge out of the head and into the body. The diagnosis, the accident, the hands around your throat, these things make mortality real in a way that thinking never can. And the moment you remember your mortality, everything reorders itself. The trivial falls away. The precious becomes obvious. You wake up.

The tragedy is that most people only get this when something terrible happens. They wait, without meaning to, for a catastrophe to do the work for them. And some receive the gift only at the very end, with little time left to live inside it. But it does not have to be that way.

Gratitude is only the first half of what these people closet to death describe.

The second half is what they do with it. Jeremy Renner did not simply feel thankful. He rebuilt his life around the only thing he now believes you take with you, love, and let the rest fall away.

Chris Hoy, living with a terminal diagnosis, has not retreated. He still sets goals, still plans adventures with his family and friends, still reaches for what is ahead, while holding it all more lightly. The gratitude is the feeling. Living fully is what the feeling makes possible.

This is the entire reason Aliveness exists. While Mindfulness is a practice that teaches you presence, Aliveness is a practice for living fully. Aliveness moves the knowledge of your mortality from your head into your body, deliberately and gently, a little every day, without needing a snowplow or a diagnosis or a stranger on a dark street to do it for you.

The outcomes: that deep gratitude you know, returns. Your vitality comes racing back. The people you love become precious again. And alongside it comes the other gift, the courage to stop waiting. To choose the life you actually want while you still have the time to live it.

This week’s question.

If nearly losing your life would make you both grateful for it and brave enough to truly live it, what would change if you let yourself feel that way starting today?

Please share your answer below. It will inspire others.

Thank you for being here. Being alive, right now, is amazing. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, acclaimed creative, soul midwife and druidic bard. I have a dream that Aliveness becomes as impactful as Mindfulness. A daily practice that builds braver lives, fewer regrets and a more present and generous world.

Please support this vision

Subscribe now

When I launched this newsletter in October 2025 I spent part of the day crying.

Not from sadness. From fear. I was about to put something into the world that I cared about more than anything I had made before, and I was terrified of how I would be judged.

What would people think of me, talking openly about life and death? What would old friends and family make of it? Colleagues from my creative careers? People who had known me as one thing, now watching me become another? There was a loud voice in my head saying: “everyone is going to think you’re crazy”.

I suspect you know the feeling. Almost everyone is carrying some version of this.

The job you took because it looked right to your parents. The thing you didn’t say at dinner because you didn’t want to seem difficult. The dream you shelved because you could already imagine the look on someone’s face if it failed.

We are social animals. If you wind back human history far enough to our caveman days, being cast out of the group meant death. Exclusion from the tribe was not a social inconvenience, it was a survival threat.

In a landmark study at UCLA, published in Science in 2003, the psychologist Naomi Eisenberger put people inside a brain scanner and had them play a game in which they were deliberately excluded by the other players. The scans showed that social rejection lit up the same regions of the brain that register physical pain. Being left out doesn't just feel bad. The brain processes it as genuine injury, as a threat to survival.

So the instinct to monitor what others think of us, to stay inside the circle of approval, is wired deep inside us. It is not a personal weakness. It is our ancient operating system.

When you trace that fear all the way back to its root, you find the same thing waiting there that sits beneath almost all of our fears. The fear of not surviving.

Once you see that, the fear starts to look different. The eyebrow raised at your choices is not actually a threat to your survival. It only feels that way because the wiring is old.

“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.” (Lao Tzu)

It is rarely strangers whose judgment we actually care about. It is the people closest to us. The peers we measure ourselves against. The parents whose approval we are sometimes still chasing decades into adulthood. The invisible standards set in school, where we first learned to rank ourselves against the room. The friend who is earning more. The sibling who took the safe path and seems, on the surface, to be winning.

We carry an invisible scoreboard, and we have appointed all of these people as judges. The trouble is, most of them are not thinking about us nearly as much as we imagine. They are busy worrying about their own scoreboard, on which we appear as one of their judges. Everyone is performing for an audience that is too anxious about its own performance to be watching closely.

Sadly, as a result of this, a great deal of human potential goes unspent. Not because people lack the talent or the desire, but because the fear of being judged for trying is stronger than the pull of trying the thing itself.

This is where the Aliveness practice can shift something fundamental.

When you begin to live each day with a sense that your time is finite, the scoreboard starts to look different. You begin to ask a sharper question about the people whose judgment you fear…

Will their opinion matter to me in the final reckoning of whether this was a life well lived?

For most of the judges on the invisible scoreboard, the honest answer is no. The opinions that genuinely matter come from a very small number of people. The ones who love you. The ones who will be in the room at the end. And, most importantly, the version of you that will one day look back on the life you actually lived.

That last judge is the one worth fearing. Not the peer. Not the critic. Not the colleague who raised an eyebrow. The 95 year old version of you at the end of your life, looking back, asking whether you had the courage to live as yourself or whether you spent your one life managing other people’s impressions of you.

You can try this now with the Ultimate Meditation, which brings radical clarity into your life.

I have now learnt that the deeper I go into the work I was most afraid to be seen doing, the less frightening the judgment has become. Partly because I keep discovering it is survivable. And partly because the messages now arriving from people whose lives are changing remind me that the fear I felt was never the thing that mattered. The work was the thing that mattered.

So what actually helps, when the fear of judgment has its hand on the wheel? Notice whose face appears when you imagine being judged. Name them. Often, simply seeing that it is one particular person, or a vague composite of people who are barely thinking about you, drains some of the power from it.

Then ask whether that person will be standing beside you at the end of your life. If not, their vote on your choices carries far less weight than you have been giving it.

Then ask the only question that reliably cuts through. Not what will people think. But what will I regret. The fear of judgment shouts loudly in the moment and goes silent at the end. Regret does the opposite. It is quiet now and deafening later.

This is the work at the heart of the Aliveness Practice. Each morning, before the day and its invisible audience get hold of you, you pause and remember that your time is finite, and you ask what would actually make this day matter to you. Not to your peers. Not to the scoreboard. To you. And each evening you ask whether you lived the day as yourself or as a performance for other people.

Done daily, this slowly rewires whose opinion you are living for. The voices of the judges grow quieter. Your own voice, and the voice of the you at the end of your life, grow louder. The full practice is below, and it is free. It is the most direct way I know to loosen the grip of other people’s expectations and start living as yourself.

I still feel it, by the way. Every time I publish something that goes near the bone, there is a flicker of how will this be judged. I don’t think that ever fully disappears, and I’m not sure it should. Perhaps the fear is just the price of doing something that matters.

The difference now is that it no longer gets a vote on whether I do it.

This week’s question.

Whose judgment are you still organising your life around, and would their opinion really matter to you at the end?

Sit with the honest answer. It might show you exactly where your life is waiting for you.

Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools / Essays / Instagram / Manifesto / About

I am a former CEO, acclaimed creative and Soul Midwife. I have a dream that Aliveness becomes as impactful as mindfulness. A practice that helps people stop postponing what matters and build braver lives with fewer regrets.

Please support this vision

Subscribe now