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.

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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.

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

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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 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

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

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

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

May I introduce The Aliveness Practice.

You may already know mindfulness. Most people do.

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

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

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

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

But Aliveness goes further than that.

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

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

Here is what outcomes the Aliveness Practice produces.

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

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

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

Here is what I have watched the Aliveness practice do.

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

The same words was repeated.

“Thank you, the session created real clarity.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the Aliveness Practice (also available in TOOLS)

The Aliveness Practice

1.99MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The Ultimate Meditation

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

Which means I need you.

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

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

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

One more thing.

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

Live happy,

Hoppy

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

Tools & Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I watch them go.

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

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

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

It feels extremely comfortable. Like a womb.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some days that still doesn’t feel real.

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

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

The pool gives me that too.

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

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

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

Aliveness is not always found in the extraordinary.

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

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

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

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

Live happy,

Hoppy

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Tools & Updates

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

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

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

I would like to tell you how the word arrived.

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

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

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

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

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

And then one evening, it just appeared.

Aliveness.

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

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The Thing Most People Feel But Don’t Say

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

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

Sound familiar? We all do it.

What Aliveness Is

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Aliveness Practice

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

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

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

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

The Benefits of Aliveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Keystone Practice

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

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

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

It amplifies everything.

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

What’s In The Works

There’s a lot coming…

I’m deep into planning the Aliveness book.

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

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

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

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

Thank You

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

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

A Simple Reminder

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

That’s where the magic begins.

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

Live happy,

Hoppy

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

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Tools & Updates

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

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

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

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

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

Full website with all content: Here

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

More testimonials here

Aliveness Manifesto (short Version)

3.7MB ∙ PDF file

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Your weekly dose of living fully

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Strange Drift Into Existence

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

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

Mortality Changes The Question

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

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

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

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

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

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

Existing Versus Being Alive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Present Moment Is Where Life Is

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

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

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

A Gentle Question

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

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

Am I really living, or am I mostly existing?

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

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

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

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

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools & Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full website with all content: Here

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

More testimonials here

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

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

Subscribe now

Sleep is often the first place where truth shows up.

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

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

My mind was stuck in the future.

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

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

What Good Sleep Actually Feels Like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mind That Cannot Rest

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

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

We talk constantly about productivity, innovation, disruption.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Mortality Changes the Equation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Own Turning Point

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

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

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

A Simple Thought Before Sleep

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

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

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

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

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

Live happy,

Hoppy

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Tools & Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full website with all content: Here

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

More testimonials here

Below this paywall is a Sleep-boosting Breath Exercise.

The Deep Sleep Breath

280KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

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

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

We are turning mortality awareness into a wellness movement.

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life begins to feel more real.

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

Live happy,

Hoppy

Tools & Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full website with all content: Here

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

More testimonials here

Subscribe now