The Aliveness Practice
A simple framework to step out of drift and start designing a life you won’t regret.
Welcome!
Aliveness is for self-aware people who don’t want to wake up too late and realise they lived the wrong life.
My name is John Hopkins, but people call me Hoppy. I am a former CEO, acclaimed creative, soul midwife and druidic bard.
My life transformed when I finally stepped out of my comfort zone. I am now living my authentic life and each week I share stories, a simple practice, and a challenging question, to help you do the same.
What is Aliveness?
A philosophy and practice for living fully in the awareness that life is finite.
Aliveness emerged from the intersection of ancient wisdom traditions, my own near death experiences, supporting people as an end of life guide, and contemporary research into consciousness and human flourishing.
Mindfulness teaches awareness of the present moment. Aliveness teaches awareness that the moments are finite. Both matter, and each makes the other deeper.
The Problem: Drift & Regret
Many of us don’t consciously choose our lives. We drift into them. A temporary job becomes a career. Important conversations get postponed. Dreams get delayed. A routine becomes a decade. From the outside, life looks fine. Inside, a nagging question grows louder: Is this how I want to spend my one life?
The real danger isn’t drift. It is reaching the end of your life and regretting you never fully lived it. Aliveness exists to help you avoid that fate and start making the important decisions you’ve been putting off.
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” (Marcus Aurelius)
Here’s What You Receive
Free subscribers:
The Aliveness Practice mini-course. A simple daily practice, two minutes a day to help you design a life you won’t regret.
The Aliveness Questions guide. Eight honest questions to return to whenever you sense you’ve drifted off course.
A weekly essay. A story or reflection each week to keep you living awake, not on autopilot.
Paid subscribers also get:
A live monthly group coaching call and Q&A to keep you focused, plus your questions answered on big life changes and living differently.
The full Aliveness Practice eBook. The complete philosophy and practice in one place, to read slowly and return to whenever you feel lost.
My AI guides, Reverstory and LivePurpose. Two tools I built to help you see the life you’re heading toward, and uncover the one you’re actually here to live.
My Story
For most of my adult life I was in service to myself. I chased success and recognition, and I was good at it. I directed high-profile TV commercials and feature films, then founded a drone art company creating aerial light displays around the world.
From the outside, it looked like I’d made it. A family, a house, an award-winning business. But underneath, a deeper sense of purpose was waking in me, and my resistance to it was slowly making me mentally and physically sick.
In my mid-forties, the panic attacks began. Each one made me feel like I was dying, resurfacing a terror I had known in earlier near-death experiences and locked away. This time, I chose to face it.
I trained as a Soul Midwife (end of life guide), sitting with dying people in their final days, and turned to indigenous earth-based wisdom traditions that treated death as a teacher for millennia. I learned about the regrets of the dying, and the closer I studied the subject most of us spend our lives avoiding, the clearer one truth became.
When we stop avoiding death, we start living fully.
So I reverse engineered my life from how I wanted to feel aged ninety. I let go of the old version of success, sold the house, and set off travelling around the world with my family, to finally live a dream my wife and I had been postponing for years. Somewhere in that movement, the word arrived that brought all these ideas together. Aliveness.
I now work fewer, flexible hours in a soul-aligned career and my life’s work is to help people build braver, more meaningful lives through the Aliveness practice I’ve created.
I believe Aliveness can become for this generation what mindfulness became for the last: a simple daily practice that helps us live with greater courage, fewer regrets, and deeper presence. If that speaks to you, I’d love for you to subscribe, join the Aliveness community and become part of this movement.
Why Aliveness Works
We live in a death-phobic society. When you don’t acknowledge your mortality, you assume there will always be more time. So you postpone what matters, play it safe, and take life for granted. This is how we drift.
But the moment you remember your time is limited, the postponing stops. The false life loses its grip and the real one starts knocking. You begin to feel grateful for ordinary days, and you finally act on what matters.
What Changes When You Practise Aliveness
You make the decision you’ve been avoiding for years. The job. The conversation you keep circling.
You become more present with the people you love. Less distracted. More able to appreciate moments that used to pass unnoticed.
Anxiety fades. Less energy spent worrying about what you can’t control, more spent acting on what you can.
Conversations become more honest. You stop performing who you think you should be, and show up as who you are.
Radical clarity about what matters. Big and small decisions get easier, measured against something real.
You stop waiting for permission. To start, leave, say, or become the person you keep postponing.
Your body notices too. Better sleep, lower stress, healthier choices, more energy for a life worth participating in.
What Others Say
“John has a rare ability to guide people beyond their fear of death and into a deeper connection with life. His work doesn’t just inspire, it transforms, helping others awaken to their true purpose and live with greater courage and clarity.”
Marc J. Francis, Sundance Filmmaker
“Hoppy’s vision is profound, important and joyful. He is truly committed to sharing his life-changing insights with others, reminding us that by facing death we can meet ourselves with integrity.”
Dr Rosalind Watts, Clinical Psychologist & TED Speaker
Going Deeper
For most people, the practice and the weekly essays are everything they need. Some want closer help through a bigger life change.
I coach a small number of people privately. Mostly self-aware founders, creatives and leaders in midlife who can feel called to change, but haven’t yet made the decision their life is asking of them. Not lost, but successful, capable, and caught where I once was, trying to solve a misaligned life with the same patterns that created it.
I’ve also begun teaching Aliveness workshops, helping groups face the one subject we tend to avoid, and leave braver and more alive.
If either calls to you, get in touch at hello@aliveness.be, or simply reply and tell me where you are. If you’re ready to stop drifting and start building a life you won’t regret, I’d love to hear from you.
If you want to read my essays, dive into the full WEBSITE.
Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.
Live happy,
Hoppy
I agree. Only when we become aware of our mortality do we truly begin to live!
love this!!