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

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ALIVENESS

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

Free subscribers receive The Aliveness Practice, designed for a life of no regrets. Paid subs also get access to live meditations and AI guides.

Subscribe now

Most of us spend our lives protecting what we have. Not because we are selfish, but because we are unknowingly acting from a place of fear. This newsletter explores Bob Marley's famous words on living for others, where that fear actually comes from, and the incredible changes that occur when we stop letting it run the show.

“Live for yourself and you will live in vain. Live for others, and you will live again.”

Bob Marley didn’t put these twelve powerful words on a poster. Like so much of his timeless wisdom, he wrote them it in the middle of a song called Pass It On, tucked between the other verses, not announced or explained.

Bob Marley grew up with almost nothing in Trenchtown, Kingston. His Rastafarian faith was built around a specific idea: that Babylon, the system of accumulation and self-interest, was the root of human suffering, and that the only way out was through community, sharing, and living in service to something larger than yourself.

In 1978, Marley organised the One Love Peace Concert in Kingston to try to unite Jamaica's two warring political factions. Two days before a previous concert he had been shot for attempting exactly this. He performed anyway. On stage that night he brought the two political leaders together and joined their hands above his head. That is what service looks like when it costs you something.

Before we explore what Bob’s famous quote means, we need to understand why most people are inclined to protect our own interests first, before those of others.

The reason is fear.

At its deepest level, fear is not about the thing you think it is about. Not money running out. Not status disappearing. Not failure. These are the surface forms.

Research on Terror Management Theory, has demonstrated something uncomfortable: underneath our everyday anxieties, driving more of our behaviour than we realise, is the awareness that we will die. The unconscious mind responds by prioritising survival above almost everything else.

The equation the unconscious runs is: more resources means greater safety. And so we accumulate, rather than share. We actually hoard not just money but time, energy, attention and love. We have become conditioned to hold things close in case we run out.

This pattern does not stop at individuals. The same fear that drives a person to accumulate beyond what they need also drives communities and nations to do the same thing.

Countries who prioritise their own self-interests, stockpile wealth and military power for the same unconscious reasons people fill their houses with things they never use. Even thought we live in a world of abundance, with easily enough resources to go around, the fear of future scarcity keeps attention fixed on getting rather than giving.

The result is a world where vast amounts of human energy go into protection and control rather than generosity and collective flourishing.

I can trace this in my own life with uncomfortable clarity. For most of my adult life I had been building a career for myself.

As a film director I wanted to make great art, but I was also interested in status, accumulating wealth, ambition. There was a joyful frivolity to the films I made and I enjoyed success in what I did, but there wasn’t much deeper purpose at play. In fact, one of my best friends once said to me: “Why don’t you make something that actually means something?” That hit hard, and I am still grateful to this day for those words.

When I started my drone entertainment company Celestial in 2020, my spiritual horizons had shifted. I wanted this new, epic artistic medium in the sky to inspire people from within. I wanted the art to be in service to something larger. But I made a fatal compromise with my co-founder at the very beginning.

I agreed to prioritise commerciality over artistic integrity, rather than insisting on a balance between the two. It seemed very sensible at the time... get the business making money first, then make great art. But that compromise had a knock on effect that the company was, at its foundation, oriented around building value in the business rather than creating art that inspired.

That self-protective decision shaped a lot of serious issues that followed, both with the business and inside myself. On reflection, even though I though my desire to serve others had changed, I realise I had unconsciously remained in service to myself. Still acting from fear. Still protecting. This lead me to becoming physically and mentally sick over time, and ultimately onto the path I am on today.

Bob Marley’s sage line is not just philosophy. It is a description of something structural. The self-focused life is, in the end, less durable than it appears. And this is not just my experience talking. The science backs it up.

Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton published a study in Science in 2008 tracking people’s happiness in relation to how they spent their money. Across countries and income levels, they found that spending on others produced significantly more happiness than spending on oneself. The effect was consistent whether people were wealthy or not. This is not a spiritual claim. It is a measurable one.

Generosity becomes easier not because people become more virtuous, but because they are no longer quite so threatened by the fact that life is finite.

It is no coincidence that billionaires are often the same people most obsessed with living the longest. The very people who have hoarded the most resources are now spending fortunes funding longevity companies, trying to outrun the one thing their wealth cannot buy them out of.

At its heart, this is not about health. It is about the fear of ending. The same fear that drove the accumulation in the first place.

And this is where Bob Marley’s vision becomes something larger than personal transformation.

When this shift happens not just in individuals but in communities and nations, something changes at a different scale. The scarcity mentality that drives so much of what is wrong with the world has, at its root, the same fear that drives a person to hoard what they don't need or postpone a conversation they know they should have.

A world that has made genuine peace with their mortality would share more readily. Communities would become less territorial. The inequality we have built is, in no small part, the architecture of collective fear.

Which brings me to what Bob Marley actually understood about living again. When you begin to live for others, the experience of your own life changes in ways that are hard to describe without sounding like a greeting card.

When you are in service to others, you come back to life. I know this from my own experience, as someone who spent almost twenty years putting myself and my family first.

The work feels lighter as there is less of the grinding resistance that comes from doing something primarily for your own benefit. A certain emptiness inside disappears. The successes carry more meaning because they carry someone else’s weight alongside yours. The setbacks feel less personal because the thing you are building is no longer just about you.

There is an abundance that comes from this shift that surprises people. Not always more money, though often that too. More opportunity. More connection. More of what actually makes a life feel worthwhile.

Plus - living for others does not have to be grand. Most of the time it isn't.

• It is making eye contact with the person serving your coffee and actually seeing them.

• It is asking someone how they are and waiting for the real answer.

• It’s volunteering in your local community.

• It is giving your children your full attention rather than half of it while your phone glows in your hand.

• It is remembering what a friend told you last week and following up without being asked.

• It is putting someone else's need ahead of your own schedule for ten minutes, even when ten minutes feels like something you can't spare.

None of this costs a thing. All of it is felt.

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” (Gandhi)

Which is the whole point. Because your legacy is not your house, your wealth or your status. It is how you made others feel. The people who live longest in memory are never the ones who accumulated the most. They are the ones who gave something.

Thank you Bob, for having the strength to overcome your struggles, for seeing the love in humanity, and for everything you gave. It wasn’t easy.

Thank you for the lives you touched, and continue to touch today.

Your truth lives again each time I play your most excellent tunes.

This week’s question.

Where in your life are you still protecting something that could be given away instead?

Not money necessarily. Time. Honesty. Presence. The thing you have been holding back. What would open up if you let it go?

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

Live happy,

Hoppy

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Tools / Essays / Instagram / Manifesto / About

John Hopkins (Hoppy) is the founder of Aliveness, the practice of living fully in a finite life. A former CEO, acclaimed creative and Soul Midwife, he helps people stop drifting, make braver decisions and build lives with fewer regrets.

ALIVENESS

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

Dear readers,

Over the past few months I’ve written about mortality, regret, purpose, courage, presence, relationships and what it means to live fully. This has evolved into Aliveness.

The problem is that these Aliveness ideas are scattered across dozens of essays and videos. It means it’s never been very clear where to begin. So I’ve simplified everything and wanted to sum everything up in a more practical newsletter this week.

Why Practise Aliveness?

Many people don’t consciously choose their lives. They drift into them. A routine becomes a decade. A dream gets postponed. An important conversation gets delayed. We assume there will be more time. But “later” has a habit of becoming years.

This is how drift happens. And drift eventually becomes regret. Regret slowly eats you up from the inside.

Aliveness exists to interrupt that trajectory.

By bringing mortality back into view on a daily basis, life becomes more precious. Priorities sharpen. Decisions become easier. We stop taking life for granted and stop postponing what matters. We start living fully.

START HERE: THE ALIVENESS PRACTICE

This is a simple six-step pathway designed to revitalise your life. Please note: these sections have been designed to work best when done in this order.

1. Why We Drift

2. Limiting Beliefs

3. What Is Aliveness?

4. The Ultimate Meditation

5. The Aliveness Practice

6. Go Deeper

Subscribe now

What’s Free?

I’ve made a conscious decision to keep the core practice itself accessible to free subscribers. I want as many people as possible to benefit. Free subscribers receive:

• Weekly essays

• The complete six-part Aliveness Practice

• The Aliveness Questions guide

What’s Included In Paid Membership?

Everything above, plus:

• The extended Aliveness Practice eBook

• Monthly live Ultimate Meditation sessions (first one this Sunday)

• The extended Ultimate Meditation audio, recorded by me

• Access to my bespoke AI guides Reverstory & LivePurpose

These are all available on TOOLS.

My intention is simple: Free helps you begin the practice. Paid helps you deepen it.

If you haven’t explored the new sections yet, I’d encourage you to start with Part 1:

Why We Drift

Understanding why we drift is the first step towards changing it.

Thank you for being here. Don’t postpone your life.

Live happy,

Hoppy

P.S. I’m also launching a coaching programme designed to help senior leaders make the first irreversible move toward a soul-aligned life before drift, burnout, or crisis makes the decision for them. If this is you, get in touch (hello@aliveness.be). I’ll share more about that soon.

Subscribe now

Events

Guided Ultimate Meditation for Radical Clarity - the live meditation will be Sunday 7th June @ 6pm UK • 1pm ET • 10am PT. Link HERE

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

Most people do not consciously choose their lives. They drift into them.

The reason is surprisingly simple: without a conscious relationship with mortality, it is easy to take life for granted. We assume there will be more time. More time to pursue the dream, repair the relationship, take the trip, start the business, or become the version of ourselves we’ve been postponing.

• A temporary job becomes a career.

• A new relationship becomes a routine.

• A city that was meant to be a stopover becomes the place you’ve lived for fifteen years.

Nothing dramatic goes wrong. Nothing is exactly wrong at all. And yet a quiet question begins to form:

Is this it?

Most people don’t say it out loud. From the outside, life looks fine. From the inside, something feels missing. They are postponing important things, making safe decisions, and drifting as though time were unlimited.

The real danger is not drift itself. The real danger is feeling dead inside, and over time, regret starts to form.

This is not a personal failing. It is not weakness or a lack of discipline. You are running ancient software.

For hundreds of thousands of years, the human brain evolved with one primary objective: keep you alive. Stay safe. Avoid danger. Avoid death. Today that same software still runs beneath the surface, shaping decisions through:

• Fear of failure
• Fear of judgement
• Fear of rejection
• Fear of change
• Fear of uncertainty

Most people think they are making conscious choices. In reality, they are often following ancient instructions designed for survival rather than fulfilment.

To make matters worse, we live in one of the few cultures in history that hides mortality from view. Death is taboo - rarely discussed, rarely contemplated, and rarely treated as a teacher. Yet mortality is the very thing that gives life urgency, meaning, and perspective.

→ Continue: Limiting Beliefs

1. Why We Drift 2. Limiting Beliefs 3. What Is Aliveness? 4. The Ultimate Meditation 5. The Aliveness Practice 6. Go Deeper

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” (Joseph Campbell)

When fear runs your decisions for long enough, something quiet happens. You stop believing certain things are possible for you.

You don’t notice it as fear anymore. By the time it has been running your life for a while, it doesn’t feel like fear at all. It feels like reality. It feels like who you are. It feels like simple, sensible truth about what you can and cannot do.

These are limiting beliefs. And almost everyone has them.

None of these are facts. They are stories our outdate operating system (aka Ego) has been telling you, often since childhood, to keep you safe inside a smaller life.

The Ego does not want you to leap. It wants you to stay safe. So it builds a wall of beliefs around the edges of who you think you can be, and tells you the wall is the world.

The wall is not the world. But here is what happens when you live inside it long enough. You start to feel a bit dead inside.

Not depressed exactly. Not unwell. Just less.

• The morning has less in it.

• The conversations feel slightly hollow.

• The weekend ends and you can’t quite remember what was in it.

You catch yourself going through the motions of a life that, somewhere deep down, you know is not the one you wanted.

This is the deepest cost of running this ancient software. Not just that you make safe decisions. Not just that you postpone what matters. But that, slowly, you stop being fully alive inside your own life. You shrink to fit the wall. And the wall keeps shrinking.

And the question that has been sitting underneath everything finally has space to surface.

Am I actually living the life I want - or just the life I drifted into?

That question is where Aliveness begins.

→ Continue: What Is Aliveness?

1. Why We Drift 2. Limiting Beliefs 3. What Is Aliveness? 4. The Ultimate Meditation 5. The Aliveness Practice 6. Go Deeper

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

Aliveness is the practice of noticing our limitations, and stepping past them, on purpose, in the time you have left.

You don’t need a new productivity system. You don’t need to optimise your morning routine, biohack your sleep, or read another book on purpose.

What you need is something older and simpler. A relationship with the fact that your life is finite.

When you remember, really remember, that your time is limited, things shift. Decisions become easier because you know what actually matters. The small daily compromises you’ve been tolerating start to feel intolerable. The conversations you’ve been avoiding start to feel urgent. The big questions you’ve been postponing start to feel like the only questions worth answering.

You stop drifting. You start choosing. That is what Aliveness is for.

Most wellness practices ask you to be more present, more positive, more productive. Aliveness asks something different.

It asks you to remember that you will die - and then to live as if you do.

Not to frighten you. To free you.

There is a difference between mindfulness and Aliveness worth naming.

What Aliveness is NOT

Aliveness is not hustle culture. It is not toxic positivity. It is not an instruction to quit your job, leave your life, and move somewhere exotic. It does not ask you to blow anything up.

It asks you to look honestly at the life you have, decide what actually matters to you, and then live it with more courage and less postponement.

For most people, the changes it asks for are smaller and braver than they expect.

What changes when you practise Aliveness

When mortality stops being a taboo in your own life, the change is not subtle.

People describe a kind of clarity they had forgotten was possible. The kind that makes decisions easier, because you know what matters and what doesn’t. A reduction in low-grade anxiety, because you stop trying to control what was never yours to control. More presence - in conversations, with your partner, in the ordinary moments you would previously have moved through without noticing. More courage. Less procrastination. Less performing.

Aliveness is not another wellness tool.

It is a philosophy and a practice that sits above all of them - bringing together mindfulness, purpose, courage and conscious life design into one simple framework, built on the one conversation the modern world forgot to have.

It is what gets left when you take out the performance and the pretending and ask the question underneath everything.

What does a life well lived actually look like for me?

The next page is where we find out.

→ Continue: The Ultimate Meditation

1. Why We Drift 2. Limiting Beliefs 3. What Is Aliveness? 4. The Ultimate Meditation 5. The Aliveness Practice 6. Go Deeper

Most people make decisions from where they are now.

They look at the next job, the next year, the next relationship, the next decision - and try to choose well from the middle of their own life. It rarely works. From the middle, everything looks urgent. Everything competes. Everything matters.

There is a better place to make decisions from: the end. Not in a morbid way. In a clarifying way.

If you imagine yourself at the end of a long, well-lived life, looking back with a feeling of peace and completion, something happens that does not happen any other way. The noise drops away. The competing priorities become quiet. The things that actually matter rise to the top, and the things that do not fall away on their own.

This is the central insight of the Aliveness Practice.

Design your life from the end, not from the present.

The Ultimate Meditation is how you find that vantage point. It is the single most important practice in the entire Aliveness Practice, the one everything else flows from. Once you have done it, even once, you have a compass. A sense of what a life well lived actually looks like for you. Everything else, the daily practice, the weekly review, the annual redesign, is in service of that vision.

This is why it is called the Ultimate Meditation. Because it is designed to be the only meditation you will ever need and it asks the ultimate question:

What does a life well lived look like for me?

You can do it now. Read slowly. Read as if you mean it. If you can, find somewhere quiet, sit comfortably, and read it like a soft voice you are following.

An expanded audio version of the Ultimate Meditation, recorded in my voice, is available to paid subscribers at the bottom of this page, and in TOOLS.

Subscribe now

Recording Insight

Write down what came. The feeling most of all.

What does a life well lived look like for you?

And then ask yourself the harder question: What am I currently doing - or not doing - that is taking me away from that life?

What are you postponing? What decision are you circling? What version of yourself are you not yet living?

That answer is your compass.

A note on this practice

The first time you do this, the vision may come clearly. Or it may not. That is normal. Some people see the room, the people, the feeling all at once. Others sit with very little for a while, and then something quiet surfaces, a single image, a single word, a single feeling. Either is right. The practice is not the picture. The practice is the orientation.

Return to this meditation regularly until your vision feels clear. Then come back to it a few times a year. On your birthday. At New Year. Before a major decision. On retreat. Whenever you feel lost. The compass needs occasional recalibration, but once you have it, you have it.

Going deeper with this practice

An expanded audio version of the Ultimate Meditation, recorded in my voice, is available to paid subscribers below and in TOOLS.

Many people find the meditation lands more deeply when they can close their eyes and follow a voice rather than read.

For those who want to take the practice further still, paid subscribers also have access to Reverstory — an AI guide that reverse-engineers your life from the end in conversation form. It does what this meditation does, but in dialogue. It helps you see the regrets you may be heading toward, so you can course correct now.

Once a month, paid subscribers gather on Substack Live for a guided Ultimate Meditation together. Join us for the next one.

→ Continue: The Aliveness System

1. Why We Drift 2. Limiting Beliefs 3. What Is Aliveness? 4. The Ultimate Meditation 5. The Aliveness Practice 6. Go Deeper

Below is the extended Ultimate Meditation audio, recorded by John Hopkins.

Read more

The Ultimate Meditation gives you the destination. The compass. But a compass on its own does not get you anywhere.

You need rhythms. Small, repeated moments that bring you back to that vision before life pulls you away from it. Otherwise the meditation becomes another beautiful experience that slowly fades - and a few months later, you are drifting again.

The Aliveness Practice prevents this with three simple rhythms.

One for the day. One for the week. One for the year.

You design the year. You course-correct the week. You live the day.

That is the whole architecture.

The Daily Practice

Many people lose their lives one ordinary day at a time. Not dramatically. Just slowly. A Tuesday becomes a Wednesday becomes a year, and very little of it leaves a trace.

The Daily Practice prevents this with two short moments - one in the morning, one before sleep. Each is built around a single question. Both together take less than two minutes.

Courage does not have to be dramatic. On most days it is small. Sending the message you have been avoiding. Saying no to something that does not serve you. Starting the thing you keep putting off. Telling someone what you actually think. Small acts of courage, practised daily, are what change a life over time.

The key is taking action, each day, no matter how big or small. Do one thing that scares you. That is progress.

The weekly practice is about small course corrections.

A week is short enough that nothing has gone too far wrong, and long enough that real patterns are visible. Done consistently, this single habit prevents most of the drift that ruins a decade.

The whole system

Lifetime. Year. Week. Day.

Four rhythms. One direction.

That is the Aliveness Practice.

Making it stick

The most common failure point is not difficulty. It is forgetting.

The daily practice takes less than two minutes. The weekly review takes twenty. Neither is difficult. What is difficult is remembering to do them when life is moving fast.

Start with the morning question only. Do it for one week before adding the evening. Attach the weekly review to a fixed time — Sunday evening works for most people. And when you fall off the practice, which you will, do not treat it as a failure. Simply return. The practice is not something you complete. It is something you come back to.

The people who benefit most from Aliveness are not the ones who do it perfectly. They are the ones who keep returning to it.

Going deeper with the practice

For paid subscribers, three things support the practice over time.

The Aliveness Practice eBook - a beautifully designed, expanded guide of the full practice, formatted to print, keep, return to. The companion document to everything on this page.

LivePurpose AI - an AI guide that supports the bigger reflective work the Annual Practice points at, particularly around purpose and direction.

Reverstory - the AI guide that reverse-engineers your life from the end, in dialogue form. A natural companion to the Ultimate Meditation.

These are all available in TOOLS, alongside the expanded Ultimate Meditation audio track, recorded by John.

→ Continue: Go Deeper

1. Why We Drift 2. Limiting Beliefs 3. What Is Aliveness? 4. The Ultimate Meditation 5. The Aliveness Practice 6. Go Deeper

You have now been through the whole of the Aliveness Practice.

That is all of it. The whole practice. There is nothing else to learn.

What remains is the harder part. Living it.

That is everything you need to begin.

A note from me

If something on these pages has reached you, I would love to have you stay close.

The free newsletter is genuinely enough. Many readers have been with me for a year or more, reading every Saturday, and never paid a thing. That is fine. The work is the work.

But if the practice has moved something in you, and you want help staying connected to it - the audio in your ears on quiet mornings, the monthly gathering, the AI companions, the printable companion, then the paid version is there. It is not a deeper level of the practice. It is a closer relationship with it.

Whatever you choose, do not let this practice fade.

Most people read something that moves them and return, within a week or two, to the life they already had. The drift continues. The vision quietly closes.

Begin the daily practice tomorrow morning. Do the weekly review on Sunday. Put the annual practice in your calendar for your next birthday. Return to the Ultimate Meditation whenever you feel lost.

Live consciously in your one finite life. That is the whole point of everything I am building.

Do not postpone your life. Become fully alive before you die.

Live happy,

Hoppy.

← Return to The Aliveness Practice

1. Why We Drift 2. Limiting Beliefs 3. What Is Aliveness? 4. The Ultimate Meditation 5. The Aliveness Practice 6. Go Deeper

Subscribe now

ALIVENESS

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

Free subscribers receive The Aliveness Practice guide. Paid subs also get access to a growing exercise library, live meditations and AI guides designed to help you stop drifting and start living consciously.

For most people, nearly half of your waking life is spent in your head. Worrying about tomorrow. Replaying yesterday. Missing the only moment that actually exists. Not because you lack discipline. Because underneath the restlessness is a fear so ancient and so buried that most people never name it.

This newsletter is about that fear, our outdated relationship with time, and why confronting the one thing most people spend their lives avoiding might be the next step in human evolution.

I used to spend most of my adult life somewhere other than where I was. Physically present, mentally elsewhere.

Anxiously planning tomorrows, replaying conversations from yesterday, figuring out future problems, managing a relentless to-do list. Does this sound familiar? Most of us do this so automatically we don’t even notice it’s happening.

However, I noticed something had shifted in me a few weeks ago. I was sitting under a tree, watching the kids playing nearby, with the world going gently by. A kind of simple bliss settling in that I didn’t manufacture or meditate my way into. Just there. The moment stretching on without me trying to hold it or improve it or plan what comes next.

My mind wasn’t somewhere else. And I realised that this had been happening more and more over the last few months since practicing Aliveness.

A 2010 Harvard study (by psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert) tracked 2,250 people throughout their days and found that we spend nearly half our waking hours thinking about something other than what we are doing. The study found that mind wandering was a better predictor of unhappiness than the actual activity the person was doing.

We are not unhappy because of what we are doing. We are unhappy because of where our minds are while we are doing it. In short, we are almost never present… and the present is where peace can be found.

“Forever is composed of nows.” (Emily Dickinson)

This quote from Emily Dickinson echoes wisdom through the ages. Dickenson is not saying that forever is a distant destination, or that eternity is something that comes after. Forever is the accumulation of present moments. This one. And this one. And this one. The eternal now.

This is where I want to say something that most conversations about presence and mindfulness never quite reach. We have been told to be present for decades. Meditation apps, wellness retreats, breathwork classes, mindfulness curriculums in schools. “Be here now” (Ram Dass). The advice is everywhere. And yet most people are still not here. Still spending nearly half their waking hours somewhere else entirely.

Which suggests that telling, or teaching, people to be present is not enough. Because the obstacle to presence is not a lack of technique. I believe it is fear.

Think about where your mind actually goes when it wanders. Not usually into pleasant daydreams. Your mind often wonders into worry. About things that might go wrong. Money issues. Whether you are doing enough, being enough or have enough.

The Western mind has been conditioned (thanks to the Ego) to wander forward into threat and backward into regret. It is almost never neutral. And underneath all of that worry, if you trace it back far enough, is one fear. The oldest fear. The fear of ending. Of not mattering. Of running out of time.

The Terror Management Theory, one of the most significant bodies of research on this topic, has demonstrated that our fear of death shapes almost everything we do. And yet most of us are not aware of this. The fear operates quietly, underground, driving our behaviour without announcing itself.

When that fear goes unacknowledged (which happens when you live in a death-phobic society), it keeps us perpetually in the future. Always preparing. Always managing. Always trying to secure a tomorrow that will never be quite safe enough because the real threat, the one we will not name, cannot be made safe.

This is why the present is so hard to inhabit. Not because we lack discipline or the right app. Because we are unconsciously running from something we have never stopped to face.

Here is something worth sitting with: what is the difference between a Tuesday and a Saturday? Not philosophically. Actually. In reality. In the fabric of existence.

There is no difference. There is no Tuesday or Saturday. There are only words us humans invented to organise stretches of time that flow continuously without interruption. The sun does not know it is Wednesday. The present moment does not recognise the weekend.

We gave Saturday permission to feel relaxed and Tuesday permission to feel pressured. We decided collectively that some moments were for living and others were for enduring until we could live again. And in doing so, we handed over half our lives to a fiction.

You have a limited number of Tuesdays left. Not just Saturdays. Tuesdays. Ordinary, unremarkable, slightly pressured Tuesdays that feel like they don’t quite count.

They count. They are all the eternal now.

What I have found, after a year of living outside of the regular routines, is that when you genuinely make peace with the fact that your time is finite, something unexpected happens. You spend less time in the future. And with that simple shift, the quality of my sleep has dramatically improved.

I now find my mind stops running calculations quite so frantically. The worry about tomorrow fades because I am actually here today. The contentment I found recently sitting outside with my children playing is not the bliss of having solved anything. It is the feeling of not being somewhere else.

"Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life." (Eckhart Tolle)

Eckhart Tolle, one of my favourite philosophers, has spent decades teaching people to be present. Mindfulness has spent fifty years teaching the same. Both practices are extraordinary and I believe in them deeply.

What Aliveness adds is the why. And when you understand the why, when you face the fear underneath the wandering mind, presence stops being something you practise and starts being something you inhabit.

There might be a bigger idea underneath all of this.

Humanity has evolved physically. We have evolved intellectually. But our relationship with time has barely changed since we started to disconnect from nature centuries ago. We are still running the same fear-based operating system. Still living mostly in a future that does not exist, driven by a fear we will not name.

Finitude is not the enemy of a full life. It is the condition that makes a full life possible. When we finally understand that, not as an idea but as a felt truth, everything changes. Not just for individuals. For the species.

That is the vision of Aliveness is building toward.

The Aliveness Practice is is something simple you do every morning, every week, every year. A daily returning to the only moment that exists.

Have you tried it yet? Click here.

One question this week.

Where does your mind go when it wanders?

Follow it back to its source. What is it actually afraid of?

Sit with that answer.

That is where the practice begins.

Thank you for being here. Don’t postpone your life.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Events

Guided Ultimate Meditation - live meditation will be Sunday 7th June @ 7pm UK • 2pm ET • 11am PT

Tools

Free subscribers receive the Aliveness Practise guide: a simple daily, weekly and annual practise for living fully in a finite life.

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

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

ALIVENESS

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

Free subscribers receive The Aliveness Practice guide. Paid subs also get access to a growing exercise library, live meditations and AI guides designed to help you stop drifting and start living consciously.

I need to start with an important warning before I tell you this story. If you ever work with psychedelic plant medicine, do it with experienced guidance and people around you. Working with these medicines deserves the utmost respect and proper integration.

My one-man magic mushroom ceremony began at 8pm on an autumn night in 2020. I was at home in Somerset, UK. My wife and children were visiting family abroad so the house was still. I had fasted during the day and spent time in reflection and prayer, setting my intentions for the session.

After consuming a ‘heroic dose’ (coined by Terence Mckenna) 5g of fresh, locally picked liberty cap mushrooms, I was in my bedroom. Lights off apart from a candle.

I had done a sacred mushroom ceremony the year before on my own. I had crafted a ritual for myself, set meaningful intentions, and it had been one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. In 2018 I had a similarly transcendent experience with Ayahuasca where I was gifted the exquisite memory of being in my mother’s womb.

I lay down on my bed, feeling the effects of the mushrooms beginning to come on. And then an unexpected question popped into my head, the way questions sometimes do in those states, not summoned, just there. The same question that has followed me for much of my life.

Should we be scared of death?

At that point in life I had had a couple of near death experiences and had been pondering mortality for years. Like many people, I thought I understood my relationship with death. I thought I had made peace with it. I thought I wasn’t scared of it.

The mushrooms answered my question immediately and silently: To answer to this question, you will die now.

What followed was not a vision. It was not a metaphor. It was four utterly excruciating hours of dying.

The physical sensation was of my body beginning to shut down. First a weakness I had never felt before, not tiredness, something deeper, something that felt like systems going offline one by one. My mind began to go with it. Then stomach cramps. The boundary between mental and physical pain dissolved and what was left was just anguish, formless and total.

I tried to vomit but nothing came out. I turned on the lights and paced the room. I just could not shake this growing physical and mental feeling that my body was shutting down. Every cell in my body cried out with the certainty of dying.

My good friend who had picked the mushrooms from an ancient magic mushroom field earlier that day is a fungi expert. He had told me that he suspected he had found a new species of bright orange liberty caps not yet recorded in any mushroom books.

Remembering this, I wondered if I had eaten poisonous mushrooms. Or perhaps I had just eaten too many and it was now killing me. Either way, it seemed I was dying of an overdose.

After thirty minutes of this I did the only thing I could think of. Be responsible. Tell someone. Get help. I woke up my flatmate who was sleeping upstairs, a lovely Argentinian guy living with us at the time on the Workaway traveller programme (I will keep names anonymous for this story).

He had been a guide in the Amazon and had been around people on mushrooms before, so he was calm. But my conviction was so absolute, My body seizing up, the certainty that I was dying so complete, that even he was shaken. He wasn’t sure either. I watched him trying to stay calm for my benefit and I could see in his face that he wasn’t certain I was wrong.

I telephoned my good friend who had picked the mushrooms. He drove over. And for three hours there were three of us in my kitchen in the middle of the night. I was lying on the floor. In total agony. Time began to distort. Breathing became laboured, my body forgetting how to function. I watched myself from a distance, feeling panic yet curiously detached, as if both present and fading.

But I eventually told them both to say goodbye to my family. I meant it.

I was grieving myself. Grieving that I would not see my children again, my wife, my friends. Grieving that this was how it ended, not meaningfully, not peacefully, but foolishly, on a kitchen floor at forty something years old because I hadn’t been careful enough. The shame was almost worse than the fear. I had done this to myself. I had done this to everyone I loved. As I confronted my death I realised this event would bring shame onto the whole family once I was gone.

But eventually even the Ego lets go. After four hours I had no more fight in me. In floods of tears, my surrender into death happened on the kitchen floor.

The resistance simply ran out, not a decision, more like a battery finally dying, and I stopped. And in that act of surrender, something extraordinary happened.

It felt like a big bang going off in my chest. An explosion of something that was not pain. A new universe born inside me. I could see myself living in multiple dimensions, multiple versions of myself across multiple timelines. And it all felt, I don’t have a better word for this, wonderful.

The terror was instantly gone. The shame was gone. The grief was gone.

For months afterwards it was hard to make sense of what had happened. It didn’t fit the narrative I had built about plant medicine being beautiful and transcendent. It didn’t fit the careful, philosophical relationship with mortality I thought I had developed. It was ugly and shameful, torturous and frightening and I didn’t know what to do with it.

Then slowly, a year or two later, something shifted. I was going through a crisis at work. I experienced panic attacks for the first time. The feeling of dying returning, uninvited. And somewhere inside that darkness a question arrived… what if I wasn’t supposed to resist my mortality? What if I was supposed to work with it? With death. With the fear of it. With what I had learnt on that kitchen floor and in every other brush with mortality I had survived.

That was the moment my purpose deepens and I decided to wholeheartedly step into this work, training as a Soul Midwife, sitting with dying people, studying mortality and building more of what would later become the ‘Aliveness’ philosophy.

And as time passed, the lesson of my torturous ego death became clear. Now I see it as an incredible blessing. I had been shown something that cannot be taught any other way.

I had discovered, this is the thing I could not have understood any other way, that everything I thought I knew about my relationship with death was still partly performance. Partly philosophy. Partly a story I was telling myself.

The mushrooms cut through all of it. They showed me the real thing.

The truth is, our fear of death is baked into our DNA. It often lies dormant. Silent. Many people say they are not scared of death. But what I learned was that when death is suddenly thrust into your face, that fear surfaces. And boy is it brutal.

And the real thing was, beyond the terror, beyond the fight, beyond the shame and the grief and the exhaustion, something that felt like coming home.

That experience gives me confidence today. The memory of that night is sharp. I think about it when I am with someone who is frightened of dying. I think about it when I talk about what Aliveness actually means, not the philosophy, not the practice, not the framework, but the felt truth underneath all of it.

Because you cannot live fully until you become aware that your life is finite. Not as an idea. As a felt reality.

Most of us will not have four hours on a kitchen floor to figure that out. But we have other thresholds. Other moments when the ego is asked to loosen its grip. Other invitations to stop fighting and simply surrender into what is.

The ego will resist. That is what it does. It has been doing it since the first human became aware of their own mortality. But on the other side of that resistance, every time, in every form, is the same thing I found on that kitchen floor. Something that feels like the beginning of everything.

One question this week.

Where in your life are you still fighting something that is asking you to surrender?

Not give up. Surrender. There is a difference.

Thank you for being here. Don’t postpone your life.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Events

Guided Ultimate Meditation - Apologies as there was a technical error this week and the invitation to the meditation was not sent to everyone. I will schedule the next one soon.

Tools

Free subscribers receive the Aliveness Practise guide: a simple daily, weekly and annual practise for living fully in a finite life.

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

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

ALIVENESS

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

Free subscribers receive The Aliveness Practice guide. Paid subs also get access to a growing library of exercises and AI guides designed to help you stop drifting and start living consciously.

My old friend Lucy once gave me a quote sometime in my early twenties.

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”

I felt the truth of those words land in a way you sometimes hear something and know, immediately and without being able to explain why, that it is going to stay with you. Those words have stayed with me for almost three decades.

The quote is often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, but exactly who said those exact words has been debated. So when I decided to write a newsletter on that quote and sat down to dig a little deeper into Eleanor’s life, I found another cracker of a quote. Something we know she did say. Something that summed up how she led her life.

That is the thing Eleanor was talking about. That’s where the treasure lies.

Eleanor Roosevelt was not born courageous. She lost her mother at eight years old. Her father, whom she adored, died two years later. Orphaned before she was ten she went to live with her grandmother. She described her childhood as one long battle with fear. Shy, anxious, told repeatedly she was plain and awkward.

Her marriage to future US President Franklin Roosevelt was complicated in ways she rarely spoke about publicly. When he contracted polio in 1921 and lost the use of his legs, her entire life shifted. She stepped into a public role she had never sought and was terrified of.

She stepped in anyway, and what followed was one of the most remarkable second acts in modern history. She became the First Lady to hold press conferences, to write a newspaper column, to speak openly on civil rights at a time when doing so was genuinely dangerous. She championed human rights on a global stage. She redefined what a woman in public life could be and do and say.

Her biographer David Michaelis wrote that her true identity didn’t really emerge until she was in mid life. That everything before that was preparation. Held back again and again. Learning, painfully and slowly, that the only way out of fear was through it.

“Eleanor just kept opening up. Her life kept opening outward.”

That opening didn’t happen despite her fear. It happened because she kept doing the thing she thought she could not do. Again and again and again... courage practiced until it became the shape of her life.

This makes me reflect on the moments in my own life when I instinctively chose fear as my compass.

At sixteen, I was almost too scared to attend my first audition for a theatre group going to the Edinburgh Festival. I walked in and got the role. That decision led me to discover I had a talent for entertainment.

At twenty six I started my own film production company. Plenty of people told me setting up a company with so little experience was a mistake but it led to over a decade directing films as a living.

Aged thirty eight, I founded a drone display company a tonne of trepidation about how to fly hundreds of drones safely in front of people. A couple of years later Celestial was on national TV flying the countdown show for London New Year.

And more recently, I trained as an end-of-life guide and now I am building a mainstream wellness practice around the one subject most people firmly refuse to discuss. The ultimate taboo: Mortality. The very thing that becomes a catalyst to a life fully lived when we stop avoiding it. The key to Aliveness.

The challenge of normalising the conversation around Death felt so incredibly vast (and still does), I spent months too nervous to tell anyone what I was up to. In fact, the day I released the first newsletter, and went public with my vision, I was so scared of being judged I spent most of the day crying.

None of these ventures seemed possible before I tried. But if I didn’t I knew I would regret not trying. And the more projects I have attempted, the more confident I become at creating something out of nothing.

I realise on reflection that I have experienced the truth in Eleanor’s words… and I trust in this wisdom now.

Roosevelt understood this not as a philosophy but as a practice. Something you do every day. Not waiting until you feel ready or the conditions are right. The thing in front of you that your mind is already finding reasons to avoid.

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself... I lived through this. I can take the next thing that comes along.” (Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living, 1960)

Courage is not a personality trait. It is a muscle. It grows the way muscles grow. Through use. Through being pushed slightly past what it has managed before. Through doing the thing, and then the next thing, and discovering each time that you are more capable than you knew.

Roosevelt lived to seventy eight. By all accounts she never stopped opening outward. Never stopped doing the thing she thought she could not do. Growing.

The quote Lucy gave me years ago may or may not have been Roosevelt’s exact words. But it came from the spirit of everything she believed and everything she lived.

And what she definitely did say cuts even deeper.

“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

One question this week.

What is the thing you have been telling yourself you cannot do?

Not the thing that makes you uncomfortable. The thing that when you imagine it, some part of you says... not that. Not me.

Thank you for being here. Don’t postpone your life.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Events

Guided Ultimate Meditation — Tuesday 19th May @ 6pm GMT / 7pm CET / 1pm EST / 10am PST. A pause in the middle of your week.

Tools

Free subscribers receive the Aliveness Practise guide: a simple daily, weekly and annual practise for living fully in a finite life.

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

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

Go deeper: Chat with Paul Musso PhD / Schools Don’t Teach Kids How To Live / The Aliveness Practice

Think back to everything you were taught at school: maths. Science. History. Geography. Languages…

Now consider what you weren’t taught.

How to face fear. How to process grief and trauma. How to make scary life-changing decisions. How to choose meaning over status when everyone around you is chasing status. How to love someone well. How to sit with change and uncertainty without it eating you alive. How to understand that your time here is finite and let that truth empower you rather than terrify you.

Stripped right back, we were not taught about the only thing in life that is guaranteed: our mortality. And most of us have spent our entire adult lives trying to figure it all out on our own. That is not an easy task, and when you’re not educated on the subject, it’s usually messy.

Modern education is extraordinary at preparing children to perform, compete, and produce. The system is genuinely impressive if you measure it by those outcomes. But it sends young people out into the world with almost no preparation for the things that will actually shape their lives.

Heartbreak. Loss. Uncertainty. The slow creep of doing what is expected rather than what is true. The strange, disorienting moment somewhere in your thirties or forties when you look up from a life that looks completely fine on paper and think… is this actually what I wanted?

Is this it?

The result are generations of highly capable adults who are, underneath the capability, deep down, adrift and misaligned. I’ve been there. Have you?

“An awareness of death encourages us to live more passionately.”(Dalai Lama)

At the heart of this educational dilemma is one conversation we are still not having. Death.

This does not have to be a morbid conversation. Not in a way that frightens children or sends them spiralling. But an honest, truthful and natural one. After all, isn’t death just part of nature?

Every older culture before ours had a closer relationship with death, until we decided somewhere along the way, as we slowly disconnected ourselves from nature, that the right thing to do was to look away.

When death remains a taboo, fear silently shapes everything (our fears grow from the fear of death). We play safe. We conform. We chase approval and accumulate status and avoid vulnerability and numb whatever discomfort tries to surface. We postpone the things that matter and fill the space with things that don’t.

And we teach our children to do the same. Not intentionally. Just by example. Unconsciously.

Here is what I have come to believe after years of sitting with dying people, studying this question, and building a practice around it.

Death is the only thing in life that is guaranteed. Why then, are we not taught more about the only thing in life that is a certainty? And why are we not educated about the incredible benefits that wisdom can have?

"Death is the greatest teacher in all of life…" (Michael Singer)

So here is the question I keep coming back to. If death is the greatest teacher (as so many of the wisest humans have echoed across time) then…

What if we taught this wisdom to young people?

And I don’t mean teach it as a religion or an ideology. Not as anything heavy or frightening. But as a natural part of what it means to be human. Woven through learning the way maths and science are woven through learning. A human curriculum running alongside everything else.

Imagine generations of young people raised to know that time is precious. Generations who choose work that means something. Who love more openly because they have learned that holding back is a waste of the time they have. Who fear death less and therefore fear life less. Who build healthier families and wiser institutions and care more genuinely for the world they are inheriting.

Less anxiety. Less greed. Less numbness. More aliveness.

I get goosebumps.

“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing.” (Seneca)

I believe that our unconscious fear of death, and avoidance of this conversation, is a central blocker to human evolution.

The instinct that kept our ancestors alive, the visceral evolutionary drive to avoid death at all costs, has ironically become, in a world of relative safety, the very thing preventing us from living fully. Our brains are still running caveman survival software designed for a world full of danger, in a life that no longer has wild sabre-tooth tigers hunting us down.

And the thing we are now unconsciously surviving against is the full experience of being alive. Fear of death creates avoidance of life. The desperate clinging to existence produces the half-lived life.

Humanity has evolved physically. We have evolved intellectually. The next leap, if we are paying attention, might be something else. A more conscious way of living. A shift from surviving to actually inhabiting the lives we have been given.

From fear to meaning. From drift to intention. From looking away to looking clearly at the one life we have and deciding, deliberately, what to do with it.

The highest expression of aliveness requires one to have a relationship with mortality. Otherwise, life is being taken for granted.

That shift does not have to wait for a school curriculum to change. It can start now. With you. With the way you talk to your children, if you have them. Or your family. With the questions you are willing to ask yourself. With the things you are willing to stop postponing.

A couple of days ago my four year old was talking about her grandfather, my dad, a man she never met, saying how she missed him. I observed her older brothers (9 and 10 years old) comforting her without my wife or me saying a word. We just never made death a forbidden subject in our house. And in that moment I felt deep down that we’d done something right as parents.

Normalising mortality with your kids is perhaps the greatest gift you can give them. It means they grow up without inheriting the fears of most adults. Imagine your kids as fearless children, unshackled by limiting beliefs, who step deeper into their talents and potential. Able to live life fully and pass that on to their children. What a gift to them and what a powerful gift to humanity.

One question this week.

What is one thing you are living on autopilot right now that deserves a conscious choice?

Let the honest answer come. Don’t rush past it. This is exactly where the Aliveness Practice begins. Each morning, before your phone, before the day gets its hands on you, you pause. You remember this day will not come back. And you choose one thing that would make it matter.

That daily act of choosing, rather than drifting, is the beginning of the education nobody gave us.

Thank you for being here. Don’t postpone your life.

Live happy,

Hoppy

Events

Live chat: "Philosophy, Mortality and the Art of Living” - join my live conversation with philosopher Paul Musso PhD. Wednesday 13th May @ 9am EDT / 2pm GMT / 6AM PT / Link here.

Guided Ultimate Meditation — Tuesday 19th May @ 6pm GMT / 7pm CET / 1pm EST / 10am PST. A pause in the middle of your week.

Tools

Free subscribers receive the Aliveness Practise guide: a simple daily, weekly and annual practise for living fully in a finite life.

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

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

Go deeper: How Mortality Awakens Happiness / Maya Angelou: Famous Last Words / My Story: learning how to live and die

ALIVENESS

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

Free subscribers receive The Aliveness Practice PDF guide. Paid subs get access to a growing library of exercises and AI guides designed to help you stop drifting and start living consciously.

Recently actor Nicole Kidman announced she was training as a death doula.

Wow. I felt something shift when I read it. The recognition of a lost profession I can see becoming a huge industry in the next decade.

Because this work is not a trend. It is as old as human consciousness itself.

Since the first moment our ancestors became aware of their own mortality, there have been people whose role was to guide others through the crossing. At birth and at death, threshold guides, or doulas, have always existed. Perhaps the most ancient and sacred of all human callings.

And yet the role of the death doula has been almost entirely forgotten. Which is extraordinary when you think about it. Because death is the only thing in life that is guaranteed. The one certainty every single one of us shares. And we have somehow managed to build an entire civilisation around looking the other way.

The cost of ignoring mortality is bigger than most of us want to look at.

When we push death out of sight we don’t escape the fear of it. We just drive it underground. And underground it mutates.

And it doesn’t just affect us individually. When whole societies are run by people who have never made peace with their own mortality, you get what we have. Fear-based decision making. Short-term thinking. Status addiction. Hoarding. Xenophobia. Conflict.

Bringing death back into the conversation doesn’t mean becoming morbid. It just means becoming honest. I’ve seen what happens when people do that. Something loosens. In them and in the world around them.

For a period of my life I volunteered through the NHS and Dorothy House as a Compassionate Companion, sitting with dying patients at the Royal United Hospital in Bath. People who had no one else beside them. No family. No friends. No hand to hold. This is the sad truth for a lot of deaths in the west.

I had trained as a Soul Midwife, a type of end-of-life guide. Soul Midwives are non-medical. We don’t try to ‘fix’. We provide loving presence.

I walked into that ward knowing exactly what I was doing. I had trained for that moment. But it was scary, none-the-less, and a threshold, of sorts, for me.

The one thing I learnt in my training with the amazing Felicity Warner (head of the Soul Midwives) was this… if you don’t know what to do in a situation, just ask one question: “What would love do?”

I thought I was going to sit with dying people to help them. But I had no idea how much they were going to help me. Help me discover things about myself I hadn’t been able to see before. And help me understand the work I am doing today, using mortality as a key to unlock a life fully lived.

The first person I ever sat with was an elderly woman I will call Jane.

She was unconscious. Fading. I sat beside her and took her hand.

What happened next I wasn’t expecting. Holding her hand, I felt her as I feel my daughter when she was very small. That same quality of vulnerability. That same complete defencelessness. As if all the layers that adult life puts on us had fallen away and what was left was just a person, at the beginning and the end of everything, needing only one thing.

Unconditional love.

Jane could feel my presence. I know that. I felt it in the hand I was holding. Not in any way I can point to on a diagram. But she was not gone yet. And I held her hand like it mattered.

Because it did.

Most of what I did in those rooms was stillness.

I sat. I breathed. I listened. Sometimes I sang. I read their favourite poetry. I played their favourite music.

Sometimes I would go inward, building what felt like an invisible bridge between us. Sometimes I matched my breathing with theirs. Breath meeting breath across the space between us.

To find the right quality of presence I would call to mind my daughter as a toddler. Small, trusting, clinging to me in the way small children do when they think you are the whole world and the only safe place in it.

When I let her face appear in my mind, something in me shifted into a different kind of attention. Not clinical. Not trying to manage anything. Just love, without any agenda at all.

Often I cried. I believe that mourning is part of what I was there to do. Not grief for myself, but something closer to celebration. I would think about all the things this person had brought into the world.

The people they had loved. The moments they had lived. The particular way they had moved through their one life. Crying felt like the most honest response to all of that. It still does.

What those rooms taught me cannot be learned any other way.

One of the biggest inspirations of my life, philosopher Ram Dass, once said: “Dying is like taking off a tight shoe.”

I’ve thought about that line more times than I can count.

The dying don’t regret the risks they took. They regret the love they held back.

I want to be honest about something.

Those rooms showed me a blockage in myself that I still find hard to admit.

I don’t always express love easily. To friends. To family. To the people who matter most to me. I feel it. But somewhere between feeling it and saying it, something gets stuck. Some old habit of holding back. A gap between what I carry inside and what I let out.

I recognised it for the first time in those hospital rooms. Watching people at the very end of their lives reaching for a connection they hadn’t allowed themselves to have.

I recognised myself in them.

I am working on this. Not always successfully.

The Aliveness Practice is part of how.

When you sit with the truth that your time is finite, the things you’ve been holding back start to feel less safe to keep holding. The love you haven’t expressed. The conversations you keep finding reasons to postpone. The people who deserve more of you than they’re getting.

It doesn’t fix this overnight. Nothing does. But it makes the holding back harder to justify.

I think of my work now as threshold guiding.

Standing with someone at the most significant crossing of their life. Not pushing them forward or pulling them back. Just present enough that they don’t have to cross alone.

The threshold isn’t always mortality. It might be midlife. A career that no longer fits who you’ve become. A version of success that turned out to be someone else’s definition. A life that looks fine from the outside and feels hollow from within.

Different thresholds. The same crossing.

It is the work I feel most called to do. Writing this newsletter is part of it.

One question this week.

Is there someone in your life who doesn’t know how much they mean to you?

What’s stopping you from telling them today?

Not tomorrow. Today.

Don’t wait until it’s too late to say it.

Thank you for being here.

Live happy,

Hoppy

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

Tools & Updates

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

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

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

Go deeper: The Aliveness Practice / Improve Your Sleep / The World Beneath The Surface