Dan Bartlett: coach, writer, engineer & founder

Q&A call

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 11:53:31 +0000

Please read me! 👇

Hi! I’m Dan, a 2x founder, engineering leader and mentor.

I’ve been building businesses for the better part of a decade, which has taught me to value any opportunity to listen to the folks I’m serving.

During our call I’ll be asking you some questions that you can find below (after selecting a date/time).

If you’re feeling particularly proactive, you can add some notes on those questions now, so that we can make the most of our time together. But otherwise I’ll guide you through it all on the call.

Day 100

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 17:52:16 +0100

I’ve published something new every day for the last 100 days. I originally started with the goal of publishing something every day in Q2, but extended it to 100 days because that sounded cooler.

I have a longer piece in the works on the lessons learned. But here are some off-the-top-of-my-headlines.

Writing challenges are best thought of as a way of understanding your style. Not producing a particular output. When I was forced to hit publish each day, my patterns, both good and bad, became pretty obvious. The way I would turn abstract on particular topics, bloating sentences or mixing metaphors.

A discomfort with delay

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 09:59:12 +0100

Impatience is on my mind a lot since I came back from retreat.

I’ve thought about it before, but it struggled for airtime against the more ominous-sounding problems of ignorance and delusion, where I focused my efforts.

Is impatience really a problem? What’s a little rush? Can’t I see things clearly whilst sprinting past everyone?

Unfortunately, the crux of it is that when you’re impatient, you’re constantly wishing away what’s here in favour of what comes next. We know we’re doing this, but justify it as a worthy trade-off. Get through the problem now so that we can spend more time in the Good Place.

Revelation and reverence

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 09:06:22 +0100

Meditation can be boiled down to two things: revelation and reverence.

Revelation is not a divine intervention. It’s something much simpler: when we sit still, everything is freely revealed to us. If you shut your eyes now, sights, sounds, thoughts, suffering, peace and irritation all continue to arise.

Revelation means to lay bare or unveil: reality is continually disclosing itself, overflowing from moment to moment without interruption. What’s more, this takes no effort on your part. You couldn’t stop it if you tried.

The hidden cost of self-optimisation

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 11:15:54 +0100

We usually reserve the term objectification for the process of sexually objectifying a person. When we do this, we can only see them as an object of desire or aversion.

But there is a wider meaning to the term. It includes any way of seeing ourselves or others as a tool—a means to an end.

Relating to yourself in this way might be useful for ramping up your work performance or training for a race. It helps you see things through a performance lens, bolstering strengths and identifying weak spots. The more you can optimise and perfect these qualities, the better you perform.

This is shit, but...

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 16:56:35 +0100

Many diverse worldviews can be boiled down to variations of the following statement:

“This is shit, but…”

This is shit, but there’s a perfect heaven coming next (Religion)
This is shit, but I can accumulate enough status or wealth to make it bearable (Materialism)
This is shit, but if I tell myself it means something, I’ll be ok (Relativism)
This is shit, but when I find the Perfect Partner, they’ll make everything ok (Romanticism)
This is shit, but when I get enlightened I won’t have to deal with it anymore (Spirituality)
This is shit, but when technology get sufficiently advanced, we can just remove all the difficult stuff (Techno-optimism)
This is shit, and I don’t give a fuck (Apathy)

While they all focus on their unique solution, they agree on the initial diagnosis.

Meaning is built into reality

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 16:37:30 +0100

Another barrier to meaning is the idea that it only exists inside of human heads, and that we need to project it over the world. In trying to resuscitate meaning, it dooms the entire project before we even set off.

But to discover meaning is not to engage in positive thinking or affirmation. We don’t have to pretend that loving relationships bring fulfilment or that sunsets and bonfires speak to some deep part of us. It’s built in.

The enemy of meaning

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 13:16:28 +0100

One enemy of meaning is an over-reliance on one mode of knowing. John Vervaeke calls this propositional knowing: knowledge in the form of facts, beliefs and concepts. Iain McGilchrist would identify this approach as left-hemisphere dominant, focusing as it does on abstractions that we can grasp, over open-ended, lived realities.

This propositional fixation is rampant throughout modern culture, no matter where you look. It’s why a rich debate around religion is reduced down to the question of whether someone “believes” in God, why political debate is reduced to repeating slogans from your preferred corner, and why self-help fixates on positive thinking as a means of growth.

Meaning is central to what I do

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 09:19:21 +0100

I’ve been thinking more about legacy after listening to an inspiring talk a couple of weeks back.

I’m always trying to group the things I do together under one banner. This is doomed to fail on some level, but the term that kept coming up was meaning.

I help people find purpose on a personal level through coaching, help them develop emotional coherence through bodywork, and offer meaning in the bigger picture through my writings.

A history of training, III: burnout

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 15:40:08 +0100

(Read Part 1 and Part 2 first.)

One of the toughest parts of burnout was losing running, right when I needed it most. Burnout robbed my energy whilst depression cleaved away my motivation.

Moving my body was a key aspect in getting through burnout. I walked every morning and spent long periods walking through nearby woods. I took up tai chi, lifted weights again and started rucking.

I started hiking and wild camping more frequently, culminating in a 5-day hike along the Beacons Way.

Invite the tension

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 22:20:21 +0100

We often find tension in the body. The jaw is held tight, the shoulders are bunched up, the chest constricted.

In exploring ourselves through yoga or other healing modalities, we learn to approach the tension softly and gently, trying to create a sense of safety. In these conditions, we give the tension a chance to naturally uncoil.

This is a sound approach. But there is another counter-intuitive way of approaching stubborn tension: demand more of it.

A history of training, II: endurance obsession

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 19:40:41 +0100

(Read Part 1 first.)

At some point in my teens, I started lifting smaller weights to gain some muscle. I have some vague memory of sprinting up a hill, too. But this must have been a one-off after reading something on Reddit; I never owned running shoes or any other kit.

It was new to think of myself as fit. Those bottom-group PE vibes took a long time to fade. In this hippie phase, I started to care more about moving and breathing well, and I would also go on long walks into any green area I could find.

A history of training, I: the school years

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 20:38:54 +0100

My first memories of physical education involve a girl called Claire.

Claire was taller than most girls. She had the wit of someone 10 years her senior and—most importantly—the handwriting to match it.

Her sick notes saved me from several PE (physical education) lessons. But many were inescapable. Some days we were all crammed onto the sputtering carcass of a bus to be driven to a nearby field for the most dire punishment: athletics. Worst of all: running. 100m up to 1500m. The movement brought me no joy, only pain and embarrassment.

My three pillars

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 10:52:10 +0100

A good day for me is built atop three pillars: meditation, movement, and writing.

The meditation helps me reconnect to a sense of presence. It gives me a window into seeing how often I’m interfering with experience, and an opportunity to drop that.

The movement starts each morning with a walk. Either without headphones or listening to an audiobook. I also train 5 or 6 times per week. I can’t imagine life without training. I love the challenge of it and my general well-being drops significantly when I’m not working out—I feel achey and ratty. I don’t know how others live without this.

Why most intellectuals avoid the inner life

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 16:11:30 +0100

I spend an enormous amount of time thinking about consciousness and wisdom, whilst engaging in practices that help me clarify my own experience.

I also have a strong intellectual bent. I love ideas. Elegant ones, controversial ones, ones with big explanatory power. I like to put them next to each other to see where they overlap and diverge.

These two interests don’t often go together. At least in this culture, to be an intellectual is to be dismissive of inner exploration.

An alternative to fleeing the bad

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 21:00:11 +0100

In the far-reaching conversation between John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist and Daniel Schmachtenberger, Iain makes the following point, which I’ll paraphrase:

We need to notice the things that draw us from the front, not just the things that push us from behind.… Values are an example of something that pulls us forward - towards something greater than ourselves.

This comes up often in coaching too.

At first, the idea rarely lands. Why?

When naming emotions backfires

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 10:45:47 +0100

One benefit of growing mental health awareness is our ability to communicate, to ourselves and others, what we’re feeling with less social inhibition.

For someone who has rarely expressed these things, being able to say “I’m sad today” or “I’m feeling really anxious right now” is a leap forward. Suddenly, a bridge of understanding opens up, both for the individual and for those around them.

However, the same words that reveal our inner selves to others can ultimately limit us.

Launching The Tech Coach

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 10:46:51 +0100

3 years ago, I was in a bad place. I was depressed, I’d worked myself into the ground, and I thought I was leaving Tech for good.

I started again from scratch—this time rebuilding from meaning, not metrics. That path led me to coaching.

At first, I coached anyone who needed help, from yoga teachers to YouTubers.

But over time, a pattern emerged: engineers, product people and founders kept showing up at my door.

Why ultramarathons are different

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 17:03:53 +0100

I’ve run 6 ultramarathons and I often get questions about them.

Ultras are defined by their distance—any race beyond marathon distance. But they’re different in a few fundamental ways.

Nearly all ultras take place off-road, on trails, and frequently pass through AONBs (Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) like the Mendips, Cotswolds, Snowdonia etc.

This makes them very different to running on roads. Trail running requires more attention to the ground and, for me, it’s much more engaging. The feeling of gliding over an undulating single-track trail is magical. It takes some practice at first, but I don’t know anyone who’s been left craving tarmac afterwards.

Race to the King: Castle 50k report

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 09:25:54 +0100

Yesterday, I ran my first ultra in nearly 5 years. Here are some visual highlights.

I ran a hilly 50k along the South Downs, part of the Race to the King series, which included 3 races all starting and finishing at the same base camp.

I started out well enough, walking the scorching climb of the first hill like everyone else, but managing to jog the second part. I found my flow after 40 minutes or so. I always find the first 30 minutes unpleasant: I feel heavy and sluggish as my body wakes up from its taper.

Alignment unlocks impact

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 08:45:15 +0100

Many people come to coaching in search of impact. They have goals to achieve and situations to turn around.

Inevitably, as we explore together, certain behavioural patterns begin to emerge. It could be a habit of avoiding difficult emotions, distrust of teammates or a long-standing fear of rejection.

They realise that this pattern seems to have a life of its own, independent of particular situations.

Failing to address the pattern is like walking into the same meeting with a parrot on your shoulder, squawking and shitting everywhere. Refining your PowerPoint skills or improving your public speaking is not going to help. Nothing will be heard over the parrot.

Beyond obeying and struggling

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 09:32:24 +0100

Lots of people I support each week struggle, in one way or another, with difficult thoughts.

They don’t often describe the problem that way. They call it perfectionism, self-judgement, spiralling anxiety or imposter syndrome.

But each of those is built on a particular set of thoughts, a narrative around what should or shouldn’t be happening.

We fuel these thoughts in two ways¹:

We obey. When we obey, we are fused and identified with the thought, taking it as truth.

Meeting Mr Cool

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 09:22:07 +0100

In my late 20s, I was struggling with anxiety. I’d started having panic attacks out of the blue. After trying to fix it myself, my partner sat me down on the bed and told me I needed some help.

Before my first Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) session, my therapist gave me a questionnaire to complete. It covered things like how much I worried and whether I thought my thoughts were out of control.

Freewriting vs note wrangling

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 08:52:18 +0100

Yesterday’s post was free-written. That means I had a rough idea and then started typing quickly. It took a few twists that I didn’t expect and didn’t have a neat conclusion.

But it was a rush to write like this. Even though I’ve been publishing every day, the content for many of these pieces was defined by existing notes. I have a note-taking problem and I already have notes on nearly any topic that interests me.

It’s easy to forget

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 22:42:59 +0100

I was listening to James Low on the Waking Up app, as I walked to the shop today. He was talking about equanimity and something clicked in my mind. Oh yeah: I don’t have to react to this experience. I tuned into a background tussle that had been dragging on and let it drop. Relief.

It’s an insight I’ve had thousands of times. Sometimes it’s very alive for me and I feel like teflon—everything comes and goes without much fight. Other times, it feels distant.

Beyond purpose

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 12:40:55 +0100

As a coach, you hear the word purpose rather a lot.

The narrative is that purpose is what many people lack, and that discovering it can bring us meaning and fulfilment.

Purpose is important, but inadequate on its own. The idea that we have or don’t have a purpose is also too simplistic.

John Vervaeke outlines 4 aspects that together grant meaning. I think they’re interesting to explore:

Purpose is the first aspect. It means having goals beyond the present moment. It gives you direction by helping you organise your actions over time. But purpose alone is dangerous; indistinguishable from cult-mentality. It can become brittle and disconnected without the other aspects.

Acceptance is not resignation

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 21:51:43 +0100

Acceptance is often mistaken for resignation.

As if by dropping our resistance, we’ve agreed to stay exactly where we are—frozen & passive.

But this misses the point entirely. To accept something is not to endorse it. It’s to see it clearly. To stop, just for a moment, the exhausting war against things as they are—whether through denial, protest, or pretending.

The truth is, we can’t move wisely until we’ve come to terms with what is—not how we wish it were, not how it used to be, but how it is right now. Whether irritating, liberating or perplexing.

Full contact means wholeness

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 21:31:57 +0100

Having published so much recently, I’ve been thinking about my voice. I have a tendency to go abstract when I start talking about ideas that I think are important.

I’ve been reeling between “this is all intellectualising and useless” and trying to drag it forward with some more personal elements.

It led me to write another introduction to the idea of Full-Contact Living:

When I was young I felt drawn to the depths. I haunted subcultures—first, as a hacker hanging out in IRC rooms, and then as a metalhead playing bass guitar, then as an anarchist trying to identify the source of social inequities, and later as someone drawn to esoteric spirituality as a means of transformation. (I say esoteric here because “being spiritual” is pretty normal these days; the kind of practices I was embarking upon were not.)

Merlin is what apps could be

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 10:55:03 +0100

Every now and then, something pops up on HackerNews that you did not expect to pop up on HackerNews.

Recently, that was Merlin, an app that lets you ID birds from their songs. I’ve been using this app for a few years and have recommended it to many people.

When I hear something I don’t recognise, I get Merlin out. You can see the sound signatures in real time, and pictures of birds will start appearing below as they’re IDed.

You are equal to reality

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 20:57:34 +0100

People seek out spirituality and other esoteric disciplines to find the deepest truths about human nature.

In doing so it’s easy to feel like a novice at the gate of the great unknown.

And yet the material for a full understanding of the human condition is latent inside each human being—an open book for inquiry. Why would it be otherwise? Whatever profundity or mundanity is at play, we should expect to find it present in each and every person. Whatever divine scheme is afoot, we are already participating in it, right now.

Practice is stupidity prevention

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 09:49:03 +0100

Practices which cultivate wisdom often have a solemn air about them.

They focus on the ascent towards what’s right and true. This feels good! Finally, some solid ground for me to stand on. Some answers.

But it also creates a pomposity as you strain towards the right answer.

Instead, think of practice as a way to reduce stupidity.

Starting with stupidity means being honest about where we are—the multitude of situations in which we already know what’s right, but do something else anyway.

The beyond within

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 18:01:30 +0100

Full-contact living is a contemplative, first-personal attitude that is centred around practice—the repeated return to what matters.

You could call it introspective, a way of “going within”, but I hope to show that contemplation is something much bigger than this, a profound understanding of reality that comes about by turning towards the limited self perspective, and seeing its edges feather out into something more mysterious, yet directly knowable.

In this sense, contemplation is just another way of attuning to reality. Not to find the propositional truths we often attribute to the external world, but to acclimate to the murkier, more ambiguous truths of our interiority.

The collapse of conversation

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 15:59:25 +0100

When I was growing up, we used to poke fun at a moralising certainty that was the purview of stuffy conservatives on the Right.

Matt Taibi wrote in 2020, “We laughed at the Republican busybody who couldn’t joke, declared war on dirty paintings, and peered through your bedroom window. Now that person has switched sides, and nobody’s laughing.”

Taibi’s point was that much of that moralising has migrated to the Left. I see it a lot, and as someone who generally leans left, it’s frustrating to see people shooting themselves in the foot.

Cultivation over control

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 21:57:52 +0100

When you want to grow a plant, you don’t crack the seed open and yank out its leaves. You place the seed in the soil, water it, and protect it from pests. This is cultivation.

Good practice is about cultivation, not control.

Control assumes you already know the outcome and how to get there. It’s another way of inflicting our personal will on reality. But if everything is controlled, we often exclude the very transformation we seek.

Being best friends with yourself

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 09:44:55 +0100

In one of Oliver Burkeman’s talks on the Waking Up app, he discusses the idea of being best friends with yourself.¹

He explores why, for many people, this term is more powerful than self-compassion or self-love, which can evoke a certain kind of New Age narcissism or secular self-absorption.

Burkeman makes some important points about why this phrasing is useful:

Firstly, everyone has a model of friendship they can refer to. You know how you would treat your friends. If I ask you how you’d respond to a friend who’s just been through a break-up, or just completed a marathon, it’s no mystery.

Practice alters perception

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 11:15:17 +0100

Practice changes how we attend to the world and what we see.

We learn to attune to subtlety, and in doing so we notice more of what is already happening inside and around us. Some things leap into relief and others fade into irrelevance.

For example, one day you start meditating. You learn to pay attention to the changing nature of things, whilst recognising your tendency to conceptualise your experience. This takes time and patience—in short, practice.

The primacy of practice

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 15:20:33 +0100

“I am the same kind of moron as the rest of you, it’s the method that does the work, for me as well as for you.”

—Alfred Korzybski

I’ve read, achieved and learned a lot over the years. But it is my ongoing practices that have had by far the biggest impact on my life.

We readily accept that mastery in music, sport & art comes from years of practice, but still balk at applying the same method to our inner life.

Contact brings us home

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 11:16:18 +0100

Yesterday, I wrote that:

I’d love to pretend I’m reporting from a place of enlightened awareness, but the truth is that 90% of whatever wisdom you might find here was stumbled upon through crisis and catastrophe. I’m always trying something, and after a few decades, you get a definitive sense of what does not work.

When I was a teenager, I felt a pervasive sense of yearning for “something more.” The default story of status and success was already ringing hollow and I found myself drawn to figures like Carl Jung and traditions like Taoism.

Why me?

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 16:59:49 +0100

Full-Contact Living is explicitly ambitious. It aims to foster meditative realisation, psychological well-being, creative energy, relational harmony and philosophical discernment.

So why me? I’ve no academic background, I’ve been through my fair share of mental health crises, and I’m not part of any spiritual lineage.

I’m just a guy who meditates, reads, and thinks a lot while possessing a strange collection of personality traits that both enable this inquiry and make it highly enjoyable.

Navigating the depths

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 21:09:05 +0100

I grew up discontent with much of the story I was told about human beings and the cosmos. It felt like a flattened caricature with little appreciation of the inner depths I spent most of my days exploring.

At some point, I felt called to the depths. Through a mix of wonder and frustration, I began inhaling esoteric content and practising meditation.

These practices changed me, but there were many questions left unanswered, many undesirable ideas floating around these communities and little shared language for articulating these experiences.

Full-contact living

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 21:40:01 +0100

I have spent my life constructing a big picture in my head.

This picture was born in a struggle to understand myself and the world. Or perhaps, more candidly, to find a better way to engage with a world that felt overwhelming and intrusive (hello fellow 5s 👋).

This picture was not just written in words or captured in ideas; it was shaped through experience and tended to through practice. It’s a living view—something enacted, not just understood.

If you’re not publishing, you’re just journalling

Sat, 31 May 2025 17:29:52 +0100

Derek Sivers once wrote that if you’re a writer who’s not regularly releasing your writings, you’re actually journalling.

Obviously, I’m feeling pretty smug in light of this, having published for the last 60 days straight.

But it is an important reminder. When left to my own devices, I will happily ruminate ad infinitum: threading together connections, creating new narratives and learning, learning, learning, without necessarily producing anything.

This is partly personal: I get loads of intellectual energy from it, even at 4am. It’s how I make sense of the world. But there’s a nagging sense when I look back on a clutch of caffeine-fuelled notes, and still feel unable to articulate the importance of an idea to someone else.

I can’t stop staring at my hand

Fri, 30 May 2025 10:57:34 +0100

In his talk, Already Free, Adyashanti highlights the way we fixate through an amusing example.

It’s like you got mesmerised by the movement of one of your hands in front of your face. And now you can’t stop following it wherever it goes.

So you go to the doctor and say, “Doc, I’m confined to my hand! It’s hard to see anything else and I’m tired of having to follow it around.”

Own your brand of happiness

Thu, 29 May 2025 17:19:31 +0100

This morning I naturally woke up, excited, at about 4am.

After letting my confused dog out, I made a flask of tea and took my pre-made breakfast out of the fridge. (Thank you, me.)

I have no calls on the calendar today. I love coaching, but I equally enjoy the days I keep clear for deep work.

I spend a couple of hours organising some notes in Obsidian on a new essay series about “Full-Contact Living.” I have 4 or 5 notes that I’ve been frantically updating over the last few weeks, and I need to distil them down into one index.

Sometimes I crave one-dimensionality

Wed, 28 May 2025 11:12:59 +0100

Now that I have a presence on multiple internet platforms, I am continually trying to figure out where to say what I want to say.

I have a lot of interests. My background is as a software engineer and leader, but I’m also fascinated by consciousness, meditation and awakening. The main way I earn money is as a coach and consultant to techie folks, but I also teach people how to shake to release tension from their bodies. When left alone, I explore the edge between psychology, philosophy and spirituality. I’m also passionate about the therapeutic power of writing itself, drawn to cultural critique, still obsessed with running and still reading obsessively. I usually sum this up by describing myself as a geek, mystic and malcontent.

Attention is not a spotlight

Tue, 27 May 2025 19:35:26 +0100

The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

Attention is often described as a spotlight: a narrow beam you control to reveal different parts of the world.

This metaphor makes some intuitive sense but it obscures more than it reveals.

A way with words

Mon, 26 May 2025 12:05:35 +0100

Words have always been important to me.

I love to read and write. Learning to write in peculiar languages that only computers—and a select few humans—understand, has changed how I think and gifted me a successful career.

As that career shifted, my love of writing returned to the fore and I saw the thread of language, running from early life to the present day, asking to be much more of who I am.

What problem do I have, in this moment?

Sun, 25 May 2025 21:16:44 +0100

Eckhart Tolle offers an interesting pointer in one of his books.

When you are struggling with some issue, the instruction is to ask:

What problem do I have, in this moment?

The initial response will likely be a thought: I’m stressed, I slept poorly, I ate the almond croissant etc.

But the question is to ask what problem you have, right now, in this moment. Not just then or in a few minutes.

Hypothermia or embarrassment

Sat, 24 May 2025 15:44:43 +0100

I’m standing on a frozen lake at 5,400 metres, halfway across the Cho La pass. My heart is hammering—not just from the altitude, but because each step sounds hollow and brittle, like something might give out.

Ahead, Pasang turns and grins. “We’re good,” he says, casually, like we’re strolling to lunch, not traversing a sub-zero lake on a remote pass.

12 hours ago, my alarm went off at 4am.

My clothes and water are wrapped around me in my sleeping bag to keep the clothes warm and to stop the water from freezing.

The tyranny of anticipation

Fri, 23 May 2025 17:03:50 +0100

The brain, as Lisa Feldman Barrett shows, is a prediction machine—forever forecasting and assembling from educated guesses. It’s narrative as survival. Large language models mirror this, stringing together probable words to simulate coherence.

But meditation breaks the loop. It halts the brain’s automatic storytelling, interrupts the fiction of certainty, and calls us back to sensation—to perception before prediction. Like Wittgenstein’s call to free philosophy from the snares of language, meditation frees consciousness from the tyranny of anticipation.

Remembering you have a choice

Thu, 22 May 2025 12:42:07 +0100

There are practices—small, inward gestures—that help us return, not to some ideal self, but to the unadorned reality of our experience.

Mindfulness, at its heart, is an invitation to notice how you’re holding yourself in any moment, in any action.

With time, a gap opens. You notice the pull toward reactivity—the impulse to rush, to distract, to grasp—and in that noticing, you find some space.

Where once you might have moved irritably through the world, treating others as obstacles, now you catch yourself. You feel the rising tension, but you no longer merge with it. You remain near to yourself.

Sarah is very pretty

Wed, 21 May 2025 09:18:51 +0100

When I was 13 years old, I went on a school trip to the Forest of Dean.

The entire year came on the trip, and we all stayed in a wooden bunk house with 3 or 4 kids in each room. The teachers had their own quarters down the hallway.

We’d go on trips to nature reserves and railway stations during the day, and have lessons in the afternoon. In the evening, we’d all eat together in a tall hall with long wooden benches.

Everything we think of as self is made up of not-self

Tue, 20 May 2025 21:27:17 +0100

Look again.

The body breathes and the heart beats without your input.

You think your thoughts are private—yet every word is borrowed from a common tongue, inherited from others.

You feel your feelings—but they arise unbidden, in shapes we all seem to share.

Your senses reach outward, but what they show you is what’s outside of you.

You believe in a solid self, a “me” at the helm—but look for it directly, and it slips through your fingers. What you find is a rotating cast, not a lone actor.

We’ve forgotten how to contemplate

Mon, 19 May 2025 16:14:09 +0100

Last night, I was listening to Adyashanti’s Process of Self talk on the Waking Up app.

He says that our culture doesn’t really understand contemplation anymore: what it means to sit and contemplate something.

Our cultural view of contemplation is thinking hard on something until the right belief pops out. We hear “know thyself” and immediately latch on to our beliefs, our past and our narratives.

But that’s just ruminating, not contemplating. We think everything has a solution and that the solution takes the form of a propositional belief: facts, rules, theories and beliefs.

Nobody is born wise

Sun, 18 May 2025 21:19:20 +0100

Everyone arrives naked and screaming.

Whether priest, plumber or politician—we all begin in blood and chaos.

The emergence of new life is a miracle, but the weight of life swiftly asserts itself upon the new arrival.

Our eventual freedom must begin in total dependence. The sharp edges and tough truths of life are kept at arms length for us. This process of dependency lasts longer for human beings than for any other animal, and means we possess potential at the cost of vulnerability.

The thinker and the connoisseur

Sat, 17 May 2025 08:58:52 +0100

I spend a lot of time thinking about better ways to explain coaching, ideally without using the word coaching at all.

Here’s one that uses the letter C a lot.

We have a lot of chats day to day. They are usually brief, involving information exchange and a repetition of niceties.

Then there’s a real conversation. It lasts longer, and there’s some give and take—a natural buoyancy that carries you both along. Your partner didn’t talk over you half the time or cram unwelcome advice down your throat. You might have walked away feeling lighter. It felt good to get those thoughts out of your head and share them with someone else.

Name the narratives out loud

Fri, 16 May 2025 09:09:32 +0100

Whilst on retreat, I read Pema Chödrön’s Living Beautifully. In it, she outlines a practice that I’ve called interrupting the narrative.

Each time you notice yourself providing commentary or narrating your experience, interrupt the flow. Stop mid-sentence and notice what’s going on around you, in the senses. See how parts of yourself re-appear and your view widens.

This practice is direct. It quickly drops you back into a more expansive and open sense of being. It’s also accumulative: when you next narrow or narrate yourself down into something smaller, you’ll feel the visceral contraction that this requires, and perhaps think twice.

The difference some space can make

Thu, 15 May 2025 12:32:03 +0100

I recently facilitated some spontaneous shaking with a client, using the TRE exercises.

This was a Zoom session, so I asked how things were from my sunny conservatory, and he answered a few hundred miles away in his flat.

He’d had a tough week, and he reported pain in several places. I could see the grimace on his face and his wariness about shaking painful areas.

We’d shaken before, but this time things developed differently. The shaking moved from his legs, to the hips and abdomen, where a lot of the pain was felt. I’m always amazed how the shakes will spontaneously chart a course to where they’re needed most.

Booking my first ultra in 5 years

Wed, 14 May 2025 10:26:10 +0100

I miss racing.

I spent Saturday as a cheerleader at the Bristol Half/10K and, boy, do I miss racing.

Running has always brought me immense joy, but I’ve not been able to do much of it the last few years, in the long wake of burnout.

Yesterday, I entered an ultramarathon.

This isn’t something new to me, but it’s the first race I’ll be running in 5 years. So there’s a mix of trepidation and excitement.

Clarity, focus & momentum

Tue, 13 May 2025 09:43:06 +0100

Many people come to coaching with a clear sense that their direction needs to change, but not knowing what the exact destination will be.

It could be the dream of building their own business, changing their career or just a lingering sense that something’s off.

Coaching tackles this by strengthening 3 qualities. These are the 3 qualities I talk about in my discovery calls, because anyone can understand them, no matter their familiarity with coaching.

My solitary Hermitage retreat review

Mon, 12 May 2025 19:35:12 +0100

I recently came back from a 6-night solo retreat at the Hermitage, part of the Barn retreat centre, which itself is part of the Sharpham Estate.

The accommodation was excellent. It was a perfect mix of seculsion, with support if I needed it. The coordinators were kind and available but otherwise let me do my own thing. The space was beautiful, quiet (if you discount the wrens & blackbirds) and very conducive to going deeper. The views are wonderful. You can see what my daily routine looked like here.

Solo retreat reflections

Sun, 11 May 2025 19:20:13 +0100

Here is a collection of reflections written as I left my week-long silent, solo retreat at the Hermitage:

It’s remarkable how much time I spend telling myself what I like and dislike and then having endless hypothetical discussions with other people about those likes and dislikes.
I’d neglected to notice the depth of this mind-wandering over the last few years, but the retreat setting brought it into clear relief. My previous philosophy had been something like “see the impermanence and emptiness of the whole show.” This was powerful, but somehow it doesn’t address rumination on the right level. Empty thoughts still proliferate.
It’s remarkable how powerful it is to gently interrupt these internal narratives and drop back into a wide-angle, present-moment awareness. Sometimes it’s easy to overlook this space as a waiting room for the next thing. But this unremarkable middle is your open, groundless nature.
Present moment awareness is powerful for 2 reasons: 1) it reveals incessant change, and 2) it disrupts the narratives that constantly narrow your sense of being.
I can see more clearly how popping up into thought is often an exit strategy when there are difficult feelings (unease, stress, fear) in the chest.
Stop watering old seeds, and the rest takes care of itself.
It feels like 90% of my practice is returning to things as they are (and welcoming them warmly) vs any kind of “seeing through”—basically, the opposite of how I used to practice. What I notice is that when I take care of the welcoming, the realisation and revelation take care of themselves. I think TRE has been a huge help in allowing me to inhabit my body and experience more fully.
I’m increasingly sceptical of meditative claims of attainment that mean you’ve seen something “for good” or that you’re “done” in any sense. All of this stuff has to be tended. Whatever your nature, you’re still a distractible, fallible human who is likely to try something stupid within the next 30 minutes. This retreat was transformative for me, and all of it came about through returning to simple practices with sincerity and fresh eyes.
I hereby relinquish any and all attainment claims I’ve made in the past.
Being best friends with myself is the alpha and omega of practice. That means welcoming the restless, tired, fearful, anxious, irritated, embarrassed and distracted selves.
Besides the Pema-inspired practice, I was also working with shi-ne, or “remaining uninvolved.” This has a very different flavour from the Vipassana I used to practice. I noticed that I have to explicitly welcome the many strands of my experience for some time before I can authentically settle into remaining uninvolved. “Not out but through.” If I try and skip this, there tends to be all kinds of subtle denial and resistance still in play. In other words, my sense of what I’m accepting is way off. Explicitly welcoming anything uncomfortable, even if you think you’ve already done that—and seeing how the weight of your experience changes—is a powerful way of seeing where you’re still holding on.
Notice when you’re craving The Big Stuff like Being or Stillness or Emptiness, in some abstract way. Wanting the one simple, safe step.
Instead of reifying no-self, just notice how any apparent selfing process is discontinuous from moment to moment. Just random thoughts joining the dots post-production.
I thought leaning into tightness would never result in spaciousness. I was wrong. I thought that what felt like 3 super-magnets lodged in my throat, forehead and crown would need to power down to experience sublime peace. I was wrong. It was my resistance to the magnetic density that kept me stuck.
One lingering reflection: I want to get out of my own way. So much of this inner narration is meaningless, judgmental stuff that no part of me believes or wants to pursue.
“The only opposition is the next thought” — Adyashanti, somewhere. No thought can distort or clarify the fundamental nature of this. No thought is coming to save you. This is terrifying and liberating once grasped.
So avoid nothing and don’t buy into any thought.

Metta is sanity

Sat, 10 May 2025 18:04:20 +0100

I often feel bad for not having more compassion for others. I’ve done a lot of meditation, and whilst it’s helped me better relate to others and myself, I still find my default narratives crammed full of less-savoury judgements about other people.

On retreat, this was hard to ignore.

Here are some real things that crossed my mind, without having ever spoken to these people: “she’s too tall, that’s probably why society rejected her and she ended up on the Buddhist path”, “he’s too tender”, “he’s too old for dreadlocks”. Another time, I found myself explaining how a compost toilet works to an in-law, even though I don’t understand the process.

It's not all routine

Fri, 09 May 2025 17:43:20 +0100

There is a beautiful footpath from The Barn retreat centre to Totnes. It flanks the River Dart, undulating in and out of tree cover and bringing you nose-to-nose with the local sheep, cows and ponies.

This is my second time walking into Totnes. The first time, I came out with a steak and stilton pasty. This time, I’m off to purchase more pasties for my parents—the golden treasure from the south of the south.

Interrupt the narrative

Thu, 08 May 2025 17:32:30 +0100

On retreat, I’ve been reading Living Beautifully by Pema Chödrön. I’d already been inspired by several of her books, and David Chapman’s review pushed me to read this one.

The title feels almost entirely irrelevant to the content. In it, Chödrön talks about interrupting our internal narratives and returning to present-moment awareness. She chooses the word interrupt carefully—we’re neither trying to suppress the thought nor buying into its message wholesale. It’s something in between; a little nudge to bring you back to yourself.

Are meditation retreats relaxing?

Wed, 07 May 2025 18:03:03 +0100

Oftentimes, people associate a meditation retreat with relaxation.

This is usually my clue they’ve not been on one. It’s a fair assumption, though.

There are plenty of emotions I feel on retreat, but they tend to be on either side of the relaxing middle. There is a kind of homecoming that “relaxation” doesn’t begin to capture. And on the other side, there can be plenty of struggle and suffering.

So what happens on retreat?

Life as a hermit

Tue, 06 May 2025 17:29:46 +0100

This morning, I watched sunrise on the can. The compost toilet, to be precise. Yes, the door was open. The only things around me are bluebells, bees and beech trees.

The toilet is a few metres away from the Hermitage cabin where I’m staying. It’s made to support one solo lunatic. It’s the depth of a double bed and about 5 metres long.

It has a bed, sink, gas hob, cooking supplies, a woodburner and some meditation cushions. It’s been too warm to light the fire so far. I’m meditating (sitting) 3-5 hours a day and walking a lot too.

Hello again, Rob

Mon, 05 May 2025 15:30:56 +0100

“Blessing, infinite in its modes and colours, often seems to me to be the very nature of all things, of all existence.”

—Rob Burbea, in one of his final emails

I arrived at The Barn yesterday for a 6-night solo retreat at the Hermitage. Walking along one of the garden trails, one of the coordinators asked when I was last on retreat.

“It must have been 10 years ago, at least”, I said, surprising myself. Had it been that long?

On retreat

Sun, 04 May 2025 09:41:29 +0100

Today, I’m headed off on a silent meditation retreat for a week.

No news

No phone

No internet

No scrolling

No ChatGPT

No podcasts

No electricity

No light conversation

No popping to the shops

No AirPod Pro 2s with active noise cancellation

Just a journal, a pen and a cushion.

I originally planned to queue up 7 days of writing in advance of going away. I have since decided that’s ludicrous and not worth the effort.

Meditators have a warped view of acceptance

Sat, 03 May 2025 12:20:38 +0100

I sat against the wall feeling overwhelmed.

”Is there a part of your body that feels ok right now?” asked Susan, holding gentle eye contact.

I struggled through the fear and sadness in my chest to find somewhere safe.

“My hips”, I said.

“Ok, let your awareness sink into your hips”, she replied.

“I feel better, but it’s still painful up here,” I said, gesturing to my chest.

“Just hold the awareness down there a little longer”, she said.

On the purity of coaching

Fri, 02 May 2025 09:15:48 +0100

When you learn coaching, one thing that gets hammered home is the non-directive nature of the inquiry. The coach is not an advice-giver, but a facilitator—someone holding space to serve the client’s goals.

In the coaching container, we begin the dance of bringing things into light and form. Coaches are passionate about the dance, knowing first-hand what’s possible. They talk a lot about the dance, often dumbfounding others who’ve yet to dance.

Save it for the start of the week

Thu, 01 May 2025 09:17:14 +0100

It’s 8am on Monday, and I’m in my office at my standing desk with the Sun streaming through the window.

I’m kicking off the day with a frenzied triage of email, meeting prep and multiple to-do lists. Yesterday was bad enough that a second to-do list was created to manage the first one.

Slack is lit up with messages from Indian developers who were busy working while I was sleeping. They need my input on how to proceed.

It’s 21:41

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 21:54:26 +0100

It’s 21:41. This is the latest I’ve left my daily post since I started.

Over the last few days, I started raiding my notes for ideas that were mostly-formed, instead of writing something fresh. It only happened once or twice, but it feels icky.

To be fair, this was a difficult week. I was upset and exhausted. Writing from that place is hard.

I’m writing this fresh, and I’ve no idea where it’s going.

The one-week experiment

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 13:09:27 +0100

Another theme during my interview with HUM4NS Unplugged was the power of personal experiments. This website is full of them, whether in sobriety, training or digital detoxes.

Experiments get plenty of lip service in startup culture, but we rarely utilise them in our personal lives.

For a while, I added a “One-Week Experiment” header to my weekly review. It was a place where I could move distant dreams into something I could try this week.

Starting a daily story log

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 18:02:17 +0100

A few days ago, I started a story log, as part of learning to tell better stories. Or rather, tell stories better.

Here’s how Matthew Dicks describes it in his book, Storyworthy:

At the end of every day, take a moment and sit down. Reflect upon your day. Find your most storyworthy moment, even if it doesn’t feel very storyworthy. Write it down. Not the whole story, but a few sentences at most. … What is my story from today? What is the thing about today that has made it different from any previous day?

We have no home in our own story

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 18:58:18 +0100

Our material bodies have a place in physics, subject to its laws.

Our biology has a place in our textbooks and the story of evolution.

Our behaviours receive attention in psychology.

Our habits garner coverage in self-help bestsellers.

Yet you as a conscious subject—a living presence—do not have a place in this story.

Somehow, we have all but written ourselves out of our own story.

Boundaries = dignity

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 09:52:47 +0100

On Thursday, I was interviewed by Olly and Darrell from HUM4NS.

We talked about my background, lessons learned the hard way, and advice for others in leadership.

A repeating theme was the necessity of boundaries.

It’s one of those topics that everyone agrees is important yet frequently gets overlooked.

Most people think boundaries are a line you draw between yourself and others. That’s true, but it’s only half the story.

Your primary relationship is with yourself. You talk to yourself more than you talk to any other person. Some research says that we spend, on average, 25% of our conscious lives in internal dialogue.

Curiosity is stress relief

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 10:26:07 +0100

Yesterday, I talked about widening the view.

This is a simple pointer for escaping the tunnel vision of beliefs. You’ll see similar practices promoted by modalities such as the Alexander Technique.

Earlier this week, I found another way of widening the view.

As I worked myself up into a stress about how much I had to do, I saw something else happening—my sense of possibility was narrowing. This is not something I’d noticed before. Neither had I realised that the increase in stress and decrease in possibility were inversely correlated.

Widen the view

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 10:44:03 +0100

A big part of coaching is helping people make their belief systems explicit.

They want one thing to happen, but they end up doing something else.

Somewhere in between, the wires are getting crossed. This is usually where the belief lives.

It might be something like: “I’ll look stupid”, “It’s never worked before” or “I’ll get found out.”

Challenging the worldview of the belief is one way to proceed. A coach might help trace its operating assumptions and ask if they’re really true.

I am a degenerate Daoist

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:21:41 +0100

I love to tweak and refine on my own. Whether that’s playing with code, words or routines—self-experimentation is how I learn. Growing up as part of the first generation with reliable home Internet access had a big impact.

School curriculums didn’t work for me, but if I could study a book in my own time, I could make things stick. My law teacher wrote in my yearbook that “Daniel has an inimitable style of learning” which involved 50% attendance and top marks.

The practice works, you’re just not following it

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 12:04:03 +0100

You’re exhausted.

You heard meditation might give you some peace. Your therapist nods frantically when you tell them you’re giving it a go.

The practice is to “let things be as they are, moment to moment.”

You try it but it “doesn’t work.” You’re still exhausted and conflicted! So you get up early.

This is pretty common. And it’s not just because the practice is hard: it’s because you’re not doing the practice.

Easter reflections and a book

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:37:42 +0100

Easter is often a time of reflection.

As I crammed hot cross buns into my gob and baked a lot of sourdough, I thought a lot about how quickly things have changed for me.

At the end of 2024, I was looking for full-time work in Tech again. It did not go well.

As 2025 rolled around, I doubled down on coaching and consultancy. Today, I have a steady stream of coaching clients arriving and I earn enough to stay afloat.

The Counterfeit Culture

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 17:22:38 +0100

I’m listening to another Adyashanti audiobook where he’s talking about the emergence of a true individual.

It’s not often this gets talked about in spiritual circles, focused as they are on the unity of all things and the illusion of the self.

Contemporary spirituality often asserts the whole by denying the individual. The goal is to offer something more collectivist and perhaps spiritual in response to modern culture.

But this misses something obvious.

How’s that working for you?

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 11:58:45 +0100

I walked into the library at Gaia House, 1 week into a 3-week meditation retreat.

The library was my favourite place, holding thousands of books and looking out across the garden. I’d spent many happy hours here, curled up on a chair next to the 30-foot windows.

This time, I was pissed off. I was here for my weekly teacher interview. I’d struggled to maintain mindfulness throughout the day, trying this technique and that, and getting frustrated with the other jobs I had to do.

Small hinges, big doors

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 09:26:18 +0100

Yesterday I wrote about tending to your state, over trying to force actions.

It’s not such an either-or. Tending to state is just more indirect: you sacrifice some precision but trust that the breadth of effects will benefit you.

Take walking for example.

Walking daily primes the heart, reducing blood pressure and coronary disease risk. It helps regulate glucose and insulin; lubricates joints and builds bone density; boosts immune function and stimulates memory; lowers cortisol and tames anxiety; and sparks divergent thinking and creative insights.

Tend to your state and good things follow

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:17:49 +0100

A few days ago, I was struggling after lunch.

Tense and tired, I tried to pry a few more tasks from my to-do list. If I could just squeeze those out, the day would be a success, and then I could finally rest.

It didn’t work. I managed a little more, but it was low quality. It left me feeling drained and unsatisfied.

Yesterday, the same impulse arose—to push through. Instead, I paused and took the dog for a long walk.

The world needs you to consume less news

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:50:32 +0100

It’s considered good and upstanding to stay on top of world affairs. You want to be educated about the world, right? But there is so much to keep up on. So much injustice to counter.

I’m here to tell you that the world needs you to consume less news. I know you’re doing it from a good place but I think you should take a break.

First, the expectation to “stay on top of things” is a modern invention. Something only possible during the most recent fraction of human history. For most of history, news travelled slowly—by word of mouth, by post, by pigeon. Now it shrieks at us from every screen, 24/7. This is not normal. It’s not neutral either.

Vipassana: A Recovery Guide

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 14:44:12 +0100

Last updated: 18 Apr, 2025

Vipassana: A Recovery Guide is a deep-dive into a practice that changed my life—and then sent it into a tailspin.

Drawing on 18 years of meditation, bodywork, and lessons learned the hard way, I’ll explore both the promise and the pitfalls of Vipassana. This isn’t a takedown, but a candid and compassionate look at what happens when powerful practices are over-extended in isolation.

Vipassana is known for its secular accessibility and speed of insight. Things can transform quickly. But it’s also a high-risk, high-reward approach. It drills straight down through the foundations of self, chasing freedom at full tilt. And if you keep drilling without support, the tunnel starts to collapse.

I woke up at 20 percent

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 09:41:35 +0100

I scan my calendar to see what breathing room I have today. Not much.

I feel the physical fatigue aching in my body. But there’s too much on today—questions to answer, engineers to unblock and meetings to attend.

So I make more coffee. I’ll reward myself by numbing out later. And I lock in.

This was a familiar feeling during the burnout phase of being a founder. It happened day after day, week after week.

7 days of training

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:38:13 +0100

My favourite part of working for myself is reclaiming my calendar. Derek from Finance can no longer decide he wants a 90-minute emergency meeting this afternoon.

That allows me to build my schedule around the things I love. Like training.

This week I worked out 7 days in a row. I used to regularly train 6 or 7 days a week when I was ultra-running. But after burnout, it’s been a real struggle to ramp back up. I’d feel exhausted after a couple of short runs and then need to recover for a few days.

Fire tender, bottleneck detective, deadwood collector

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 12:46:24 +0100

Coaches are called upon to play many roles in their work.

Here are three I find myself occupying frequently:

Fire tender. Many people show up with glowing embers—unmet desires, protean ambitions or a growing dissatisfaction. But they’re unsure how to breathe these embers into life. Sometimes they feel a growing heat in their bellies before their eyes have registered anything.

My job is to honour the ember—to witness its warmth, to grant it some air, and fan it into a confident flame.

Sometimes you just need to be asked

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 07:56:18 +0100

I’ve always appreciated the spontaneous answers that pop out when people ask me questions. It leads to responses that it’s hard to manufacture on your own.

But it was rare. You’d have to wait for an interview, some client work or a thoughtful friend to show up.

Until now. Open your AI of choice (I used 4o in this example) and share an idea you’re interested in. Tell it to ask you 4 questions.

When the goal gets in the way

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 11:39:26 +0100

People often come to coaching with a clear destination in mind—write the book, change careers, start the company. The goal is usually externally visible and socially legible.

But as we dig deeper it’s not really about the goal. It’s about confidence, boundaries or burnout. It’s about internal struggle and external distraction.

Coaches have a saying for this, to be delivered with a self-satisfied smile: coach the person, not the problem.

Undistractability is a superpower

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 08:36:51 +0100

I recently saw this popular note on Substack:

90% of writing is:

Taking long walks

Blocking the internet

Doing interesting things

Capturing ideas everywhere

Listening to people’s questions

When you do these every day, strong writing is simply a byproduct.

It resonates with my own experience: when I tend to my physical movement whilst intentionally engaging with ideas and people, the writing flows naturally.

But “blocking the internet” strikes me as a unique point.

Acceptance is what we call clarity as it dawns in a person

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 11:04:43 +0100

Acceptance is your most potent ally in meditation. It’s not a beginner’s experience on the way to something better. It still shows up to teach me every day, after 18 years of practice.

Acceptance is not a slide into passivity. Instead, we see how we’re already actively resisting parts of our experience—pushing away nagging thoughts, clenching against unpleasant emotions.

Acceptance is the dawning realisation that we can let go of that struggle without the world imploding. We can even lean into it—noticing, as Mark Manson put it, that facing the negative is a positive experience.

Publishing every day is a full body workout

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 09:50:07 +0100

When designing a workout programme for someone time-constrained, you focus on compound exercises that work multiple muscle groups at once. These exercises work the full body through a small number of movement patterns.

Publishing each day is a full-body workout for anyone looking to improve their craft and create something new.

Every day I have to:

Write, knowing something has to be online in the next hour
Delete, because there’s not enough time to fart around with every idea
Access the courage needed to continue to share, even when I think I’m a worthless slug
Refine my metaphors so that people “get” my ideas
Refine my structure so there’s some narrative flow
Give the piece a good title, so people are intrigued
Run through my publishing loop, from writing in Obsidian to migrating it into Hugo to viewing it on the Internet
Repurpose the content according to different social networks; emphasising productive takeaways in some places; personal reflections in others
Stay disciplined on social networks, so I can do this all without developing intense misanthropy
Engage with people who are interested in my ideas, understanding what calls to them and what they want more of

These are a lot of different skills.

Deploy your writings every day

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 08:51:04 +0100

Software engineers can quickly become anxious about deploying new changes.

Each successive deployment brings the risk of something blowing up and blame falling on them. Better to hold off for now.

There is an effective and counter-intuitive solution to this: get them to deploy more often.

A rare event that causes high stress becomes a frequent event that becomes more familiar. Avoiding the scary thing only makes it loom larger, whereas leaning into it forces you to confront the issue and make improvements as you go.

80/20 writing

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 10:58:43 +0100

A popular approach to running is the 80/20 philosophy, popularised by Matt Fitzgerald. It says that runners improve most effectively when 80% of their running is at low intensity, with the remaining 20% done at higher intensity.

This approach recognises the value of high-volume, “easy” runs and aims to avoid what’s known as the “grey zone” of training. These are runs that are too hard to be easy and too easy to be hard. Research shows that this way of training provides limited aerobic benefit, whilst contributing significantly to fatigue. It’s a poor return on investment.

A return to social media

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 10:56:33 +0100

I talked about the upsides of publishing on your personal website yesterday: ownership, SEO, algorithmic immunity & creative freedom.

But the downside is the risk of shouting into the void; of no-one actually discovering your words, as they can more easily on Medium or Substack; products with discoverability built-in.

I consciously left nearly all social media after my experiments in Digital Minimalism, which are currently the most popular writings on this website (here and here).

Why I'm publishing every day on my personal website

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 10:07:28 +0100

I’m publishing something new every day, until June 30.

I already have a Substack and a few social networks which begs the question: why am I sharing these posts here?

I’m leaning into a strategy known as POSSE—Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

The primary reason is that I control the content by sharing it here first. I retain all ownership and I am not subject to the trials and tribulations of other websites closing down or minor algorithmic changes wiping out segments of my audience.

Why what's interesting is so interesting

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 08:27:05 +0100

On Day 1, I said I would be writing about what’s interesting to me.

Maybe this sounds a little trite. If you write online, there is often an expectation to mould your writings into short, punchy essays, layered with hot, contrarian takes.

But following what’s interesting is deeper than this.

To follow what’s interesting is to trust your sense of salience. Salience is an exquisitely complex way of pulling meaning from the world. It’s fast, yet utterly personalised. A lot of it happens beneath your awareness. You don’t know all the inputs and you never will.

The places that have not known love

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 08:15:12 +0100

Writing every day, for 90 days. How did I get here?

A few months ago I went to one of many regional meetups for Sam Harris’ Waking Up app. The organiser mentioned a talk by Francis Weller that had changed her life. It took me a few months to watch it, but I was transfixed.

I bought his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, which talks a lot about loss:

We are designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance. This is at the very heart of our grief and sorrow. The dream of full-throated living, woven into our very being, has often been forgotten and neglected, replaced by a societal fiction of productivity and material gain.

I'm publishing something every day in Q2

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 12:19:46 +0100

I’m going to be publishing something every day in Q2.

I made this decision about 48 hours ago and I’m writing this half-way through Day 1. I don’t know whether I’m including weekends or not. There are lots of unanswered questions.

I’ve been writing a lot more this year, particularly on LinkedIn, and across two newsletters. The momentum has been building.

Several things happened recently:

I read a book on grief and thought on “the parts of myself that have not known acceptance.” This made me realise how many of my interests I still keep quiet about.
I watched a few Tyler Cowen interviews and was moved by his uninhibited geekiness (and his own daily publishing on Marginal Revolution).
I spent too much time on LinkedIn, which is many ways the antithesis of everything I hold dear.

Tyler mentioned in one interview that Substack often becomes too personal and full of emotion. It encourages longer-format, original reflections and discourages people from being editors of other peoples ideas. I bristled at first, but it brought me back to the original model of blogging: writing whatever you want on your own quirky website. I did this for years as a teenager and I loved it. Here I am again.

My name is Dan. I am a coach and writer. This page is an ever-expanding list of authors, books, apps and products that I’ve found useful in anything from anxiety attacks to awakening; home-working to long-distance running. I often recommend things in person and on calls and realised it would be easier to have all my recommendations in one place. Where the product I’m recommending is available on Amazon, I’ve used an Amazon affiliate link. That means if you click through and buy something I recieve a pitiful commission with no downside for you. This is an easy way of supporting my work whilst you get to buy cool stuff. Thank you!

Do I need coaching or mentoring?

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:18:14 +0000

Each way I work with people contains some balance of coaching and mentoring. Coaching is about drawing out, whereas mentoring focuses on putting in.

For example, life coaching is mostly drawing out what you want and what’s standing in the way. Only you can know these things. Generic advice isn’t going to cut it. It is empowering rather than directive. It allows you to think freely, and as a result coaching carries the biggest potential for transformation.

What can I get coached on?

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 11:35:33 +0100

The short answer to this question is: nearly anything.

Coaching is a dialogue that is led by your sense of where you want to be and where you feel stuck.

That might entail a change in work, relationships or any part of your life.

Examples can be helpful, so here are some issues people turn to coaching for:

Work

Feeling burned out at work
Feeling unappreciated at work
Feeling like your career has stalled
Struggling with a current place of work and/or manager
Wanting to change career
Wanting support as you start a new venture
Struggling with difficult feedback or a redundancy
Re-aligning your work with your values
Getting a sense of where you want to be in 5 years

Family and relationships

Struggling in a relationship
Commitment issues
Parenting issues
Recurring family dramas
Wanting to better balance family, life and work
Fears of letting people down
Balancing self-care and care for others

Personal

Feeling conflict between “what I should do” and “what I end up doing”
Feeling stuck in the same thought loops
Wanting to learn something new
Wanting to improve your organisational habits or routines
Support on a spiritual path
Struggling with finances
Addressing a difficult relationship with money
Struggling to say no to anything
Refocusing on health and wellbeing
Feeling unsupported by friends
Feeling unable to let go of something
Wanting to shed old masks and labels

Events

A difficult conversation you’re avoiding
A big event you’re preparing for (maybe a public talk or demo)
Whether to say yes or no to an opportunity
Difficult people reappearing in your life
Travel plans and anxieties
Something hurtful that happened to you recently

Sometimes, people just feel stuck or have a gnawing sense of wanting more. This is fertile ground to begin a dialogue, and a coach can help you better define what’s behind the stuckness and how you might move forward.

Spirituality is a celebration of your full stature

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 13:17:16 +0000

We are all giants, raised by pygmies; taught to walk with a perpetual mental stoop.

—Robert Anton Wilson

What is spirituality?

Is it an identity?

A new way of seeing the world?

A soothing retreat from materialist culture, a call to kindness?

I want to suggest that these ideas are a passive and timid reflection of what spirituality should be.

Authentic spirituality is a celebration of the depth and mystery of who you are and a reminder not to take yourself for anything less.

Adi-Da: notice the self-contraction

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 14:12:06 +0100

If I ask you to pay attention to any tension in your shoulders, something interesting usually happens.

They will spontaneously drop, with little intent on your part.

What happened? You paid attention and the holding broke into awareness. You realised you were actively maintaining it. The truth became apparent.

Becoming aware of a contraction is all that is needed to release it.

Adi-Da often talked about the self-contraction in this way. He would often use his fist to illustrate the contraction in action.

Buddha and Parmenides on the deathless

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 21:36:15 +0100

The Buddha was not one to mince his words.

One of his most powerful quotes is recorded in the Udana—the “Inspired Utterances”:

There is that sphere of being where there is no earth, no water, no fire, nor wind; no experience of infinity…; here there is neither this world nor another world, neither moon nor sun; this sphere of being I call neither a coming nor a going nor a staying still, neither a dying nor a reappearance; it has no basis, no evolution, and no support: it is the end of dukkha. (ud. 8.1)

A rational awakening to the mystery

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 12:34:46 +0000

One way of describing what I’m writing about here is as a rational awakening to the mystery.

This contains a few seemingly contradictory elements: mystery, awakening… rational?

Mystery: the mystery is not just something that “hasn’t been solved yet,” either through the scientific lens, or through the lens of the meditator obsessed with penetrating all appearances.

“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”

I am not a spiritual person

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 12:34:46 +0000

For those concerned or confused by my use of terms like spirituality, mysticism & awakening, I’d like to make something clear up front.

I am not a “spiritual person”.

I work as an engineering manager in Tech. I love writing code and leading teams. I get excited about typography and blockchains. I don’t speak slowly, or with an uncomfortable level of eye contact. My jeans fit well, I never smell of incense and my political views are moderate. I am punctual and organised. I love learning about history & science and indulging in unashamedly intellectual philosophers.

What I'm doing this year—modern mystic

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 19:19:16 +0000

In 2023, I’m trying something different.

Instead of covering the usual cornucopia of productivity, tech, social commentary & mental health, I will be doubling down on what I care most about: meditation, wisdom and awakening.

I will be doing this on my personal website, but under a new banner: modern mystic. This takeover will last a year. I have other themes that will follow in the coming years. This is a long game.

Digital minimalism: Two years on

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 20:26:09 +0000

In November 2020, I read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport and decided to try what Newport calls a Digital Declutter. This is a 30-day cleanse of your attention, with thankfully no colonic in sight.

I wrote about my experiences in Digital minimalism in action: the 30-day digital declutter. In that post, I shared my struggles, what worked and the simple changes that had the biggest impact.

I considered the experiment a success. But that was nearly 2 years ago. How much of it am I still practising now?

Winter holidaying in Cwmystwyth

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 10:12:00 +0000

I needed some time off. As part of an effort to spend less and explore more of what’s around me, I booked a week away near a village called Cwmystwyth in Ceredigion, Wales.

It’s easily drivable from Bristol and I also have friends a little further North, near Machynlleth. I picked it as I wanted to be somewhere remote, near mountains and running water. Check.

Airbnb near Cwmystwyth

Cwmystwyth is a small village nestled alongside the river Ystwyth, which flows all the way west to Aberystwyth. Cwmystwyth literally means “valley of the river Ystwyth.” It sits in the middle of the Cambrian mountains. It is the exact centre point of Wales, according to Wikipedia. This is also West Wales, so it’s pretty wet.

Not out, but through!

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 07:06:08 +0100

When I was a teenager, some of my earliest spiritual interests lay in Gnosticism. Jung also felt a strong kinship with the Gnostics. It was through this tangent that I eventually came across this story of one of Jung’s patients:

The fifth conclusion is that the alienation of consciousness, along with its attendant feelings of forlornness, dread and homesickness, must be fully experienced before it can be overcome. The detractors of classical Gnosticism forever accuse it of gloomy and “world-denying” tendencies. Jung’s psychology has also had its share of accusations of gloominess and of an excessive emphasis on darkness, alienation and evil. Once again it must be recalled that there are empirical reasons related to the dynamics of spiritual liberation which make such attitudes imperative. A delightful story regarding a patient of Jung’s points this up. She saw herself in a dream sinking into a dreadful mire. Overhead appeared the figure of Dr. Jung serenely floating in the aether and sternly addressing the distressed patient with the following words: “Not out, but through!”
— Stephan A. Hoeller: The Gnostic Jung, Kindle Edition (pp. 67). Quest Books

Those words left a strong mark on me. Although, for about 10 years I could not remember the book I read them in. Regardless, this simple orientation has bubbled back up for me a thousand times, in therapy, journalling and meditation.

Logos

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 07:06:08 +0100

Coming soon to a psyche near you.

Orientations

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 07:06:08 +0100

I have meditated and written down my reflections for nearly 15 years. Some of the most useful scribblings have been the pointers I’ve left myself—my orientations to the highest truths, or what Rob Burbea called “ways of seeing that free.”

Contemplation often brings profound yet tantalising insights. One moment it all makes sense, and the next day you feel robbed. Yet, certain words and phrases can “bind” the insight and deliver us back to the understanding. The process of putting words to these experiences is often downplayed, with some justification: it’s easy to reify our insights and so divorce ourselves from what is actually happening now. But the power of the right words offered in the right mindset is not dissimilar to an incantation, and we must practice wisdom for it remain alive.

My favourite Huel porridge recipe

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 10:00:12 +0000

I’ve written a lot about Huel before. These days, I mostly eat Huel with overnight oats: a Huel bircher or protein-packed porridge, if you will.

Why?

Texture. Mixing Huel with porridge oats gives it a different texture and soaking overnight makes it creamier.
Cost. Bulking Huel out with oats makes it much cheaper and makes that Huel bag last a lot longer.
Protein. I use Black Edition for the extra dose of protein; you’ll get about 20g protein from the single scoop alone. The oats and milk will get this closer to 30g total.
Extra carbs. I often run in the morning so want to refuel with cheap, healthy carbs.

Recipe

My go-to Huel porridge recipe is:

How to delete Facebook

Sat, 06 Nov 2021 09:02:33 +0000

1. Realise you’re sick of it

Even before my 30-day digital declutter, I hadn’t really used Facebook in months. I increasingly felt like it offered nothing and just filled up my attention with things I didn’t really care about. Since then I only checked in on it once or twice and each time there were 20+ “pretend” notifications that felt like Facebook was getting really needy. Time to cut the cord.

My favourite engineering management books

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 22:00:55 +0000

Engineering management is still a somewhat esoteric discipline. I’ve never met an engineering manager who had formal management training, and most people have the position thrust upon them and figure it out day-to-day.

That said, there are some excellent reads out there that will make you feel less like you’re losing your mind in the first year.

My first recommendation to newly-minted managers is The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo. It’s not specifically about engineering management, but it is the best general introduction to the kind of problems you’ll be encountering when everyone starts looking to you for answers. Julie starts out from the beginning—of suddenly being thrust into a position of leadership and not having a clue what’s expected. The advice is free of jargon, down-to-earth and very practical. It should give you the confidence that what you need to learn is not some crazy new ideas, but a structured way of helping people. The People—Purpose—Process trifecta is one I still refer to frequently.

Upgrading the Prysm Eth2 client from binaries

Thu, 04 Nov 2021 16:28:34 +0000

The tl;dr for this is: yes, you can just upgrade Prysm by stopping your services, copying the new binaries and then restarting your services.

I had to do this recently as the Altair fork required all clients to be running V2.

Unfortunately, the official docs on upgrading only provide instructions based on three different ways of installing: Prysm.sh, Docker and Bazel. I did not set up Prysm via any of these routes. As I mentioned in my original article, I followed Somer Esat’s instructions, which involved simply downloading binaries and copying them to /usr/local/bin.

Growth in wisdom is symphonic, not linear

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 13:24:05 +0100

The way we grow in wisdom is not linear.

The things that often nourish us are perennial and we have been engaging them since day one, in ever more complex and beautiful forms; love, loss, joy, pain, bliss and suffering.

In fact, wisdom often flourishes in the patient return to these same themes, each time revealing new aspects of something already intimate. In spiritual practice, these basic themes are things like: attachment, compassion, emptiness, judgement, insight, acceptance, faith and doubt.

Robert Anton Wilson on the consciousness transformation at the heart of religion

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 12:50:22 +0100

Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus and St. Paul. What did these four men have in common?

As Aleister Crowley points out, “No point of doctrine, no point of ethics, no theory of a ‘hereafter’ do they share, and yet in the history of their lives we find one identity amid many diversities.”

Buddha was an ordinary Hindu nobleman, and then he experienced a rapid brain change, after which he became a great Teacher.

Anattā does not mean 'there is no self'

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 15:44:28 +0100

Buddhism is well known for its idea of anattā, often translated as “no self.” As a result, you might often hear that the Buddha claimed “there is no self.”

However, the Buddha very rarely made such binary statements, and others familiar with his teachings point out that he never actually said “there is no self.” One at least one occassion, when asked about existence of the self, he remained silent.

How I set up this website

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 13:45:38 +0100

A few notes on the technology behind this website:

It uses a static site generator called Hugo. Writing content offline and then generating a static site works very well for hand-written, non-dynamic content. It also means the generated website is very, very fast and eliminates many security issues. This simplicity makes it far easier to maintain over the long term.

As the content is just a collection of Markdown files that are generated into HTML and then uploaded to GitHub Pages, I’ll never lose my website, as it’s not owned by any third party. The Hugo code is open source, so I can use and modify it even if the maintainers abandon the project.

What is a mystic?

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 07:21:29 +0100

I owe you an explanation: why am I using the term mystic, and what does a mystic do? In reading this, what on Earth have you signed up for?

Pick your pain

To talk about anything relating to inner work, meditation and self-realisation requires the adoption of some unsavoury term, complete with several hundred years of unwanted associations.

Sam Harris wrangled over this whilst writing Waking Up and decided to embrace ‘spirituality’ for his purposes.¹

This is not a blog

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 07:20:27 +0100

The rapid ascent of the blog

You are not reading a blog.

But the blog has taken over the Internet. In 2000, there were a few thousand blogs. As of 2021, there are around 600 million.

Before the blog, homepages had to be manually stitched together by people who knew how to code. As a result they were relatively unique and the authors came up with their own quirky ways of curating the things they thought most interesting.

Setting up an Eth2 Node on DigitalOcean with Prysm and Ubuntu

Sat, 15 May 2021 12:21:59 +0100

Recently, I set up an Eth2 node with a friend. Eth2 refers to a series of upgrades planned to make Ethereum more scalable, secure and sustainable. The main part of this upgrade is a move to the beacon chain which operates on Proof-of-Stake (PoS), as opposed to the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus used by Bitcoin, amongst others.

As you have likely already heard, Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work consensus currently consumes more energy than all of Argentina, which is one of the many reasons for newer cryptocurrencies considering the less energy-intensive Proof-of-Stake mechanism. Here’s a good FAQ on Proof-of-Stake, if you want to learn more.

Hello Hugo, farewell Middleman

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 12:29:01 +0100

Previously, I had been using Middleman to power my personal website. I had also been using Ghost to run a separate blog which has now been merged into this one as of October 2021.

Middleman wasn’t the fastest but it was written in Ruby. Thus, I reasoned that I could modify it as I pleased when I needed to. Of course, that time never came and each time I returned to the blog after a few months absence something else seemed broken or slow. I didn’t want this kind of maintenance for an application that mostly generated HTML from Markdown files.

Using a reverse proxy to integrate WordPress into Rails

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 14:05:25 +0100

Sometimes you need to get two separate applications to play nicely together under the same domain.

If one of these applications is especially greedy with regards to the routes/URLs it wants to control, then it can become a tricky project. Using subdomains can often help, as the subdomain can explicitly address the other application. However, if you need content from both applications under the same domain, and you don’t have access to or the desire to fumble with the routing (e.g. you use Heroku) then a different approach might be required.

Digital minimalism in action: the 30-day digital declutter

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 11:40:00 +0000

2023 note. I’ve published a two-year follow up to this experiment: Digital Minimalism: Two years on.

In November 2020 I started reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Newport’s compelling writing style alongside the logic of his argument quickly moved me into action and I decided to embark on what he calls a 30-day Digital Declutter.

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

The philosophy of digital minimalism is not simply to rid ourselves of technology but to be clear on what we use and why, so that we can free ourselves of the compulsive use that apps are so effective at fostering. This is not a case of simply removing a few apps, but instead:

The two faces of polarisation and one remedy

Sun, 06 Dec 2020 23:34:12 +0000

The last 5 years have been a showcase in political theatre: people screaming past each other, the devolution of reasoned debate, and the rise of social media mobs who often trade in volume rather than sense.

There has been much talk of unprecedented polarisation and a “divided Britain”. Most of us agree with this assessment and see evidence of it each day.

But what are we polarised about exactly? The assumption might be that we simply cannot see eye-to-eye on issues. This is known as issue polarisation: the divisions around what policies we should enact to deal with various issues, from immigration to the environment.

Roger Scruton on why beauty matters and the cult of utility

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 09:44:23 +0000

I first came across the name Roger Scruton through his books being recommended to me on Amazon. Make of that what you will. One book was entitled How to be a conservative, which I found unpalatable and so I avoided exploring further.

That is until I found a video of Sir Roger in conversation with Douglas Murray. Murray’s book—The Madness of Crowds—was one of the funniest and most incisive books I had read this year, so I thought I might be missing a trick.

Less but clearer: coming back to simplicity in meditation

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 19:53:23 +0000

Despite the minimal instructions for meditation—sit still and pay attention—it somehow becomes much more: watching for this, avoiding that, practising this technique, taking that attitude. A new avenue of self-improvement.

Each of these attitudes comes with its own expectations that can drag us away from the core directive of meditation: doing less but seeing things more clearly.

The idea of “less but clearer” was something I recently came across again in Pema Chodron’s poignant When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, which I highly recommend if you’re struggling with any kind of upheaval in your life.

Coastal Quarter race report (2020)

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 08:13:01 +0000

On September 5th 2020, I ran the Classic Quarter 44 mile ultramarathon from Lizard Point to Land’s End, which is the most Southerly tip of England to the most Westerly. The race is organised by Endurancelife and includes around 5500ft / 1600m of ascent. It was my first race of 2020.

Preparation

I felt relatively confident going into the race. Lockdown had meant a very good training block, although I may have peaked a month too early and then started getting reoccurring knee and ankle issues.

More black voices to pay attention to

Sun, 30 Aug 2020 06:37:00 +0000

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the surge of protests around the world, there was a call for education: for all of us to carry out our own research, so that we could dismantle the racism that continues to cause so much hurt and suffering.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you will have seen a lot of book recommendations. These are books like White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and, if you’re in the UK, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge.

I’m back

Sat, 29 Aug 2020 08:36:00 +0000

It’s been nearly 2 years, but I’m back writing again.

What happened? Well, I cofounded Almanac with some very smart people, and then this year we raised $9m in seed funding. Which was great news, but of course, also the reason I stopped writing.

Things are no less busy now, but I would like to share more thoughts, spurred on by so much of what is happening in the world at the moment: racial violence, global pandemic, political polarisation and an increasing intolerance of open discussion.

Go Long: BTU56 West Loop Recce

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 08:16:23 +0000

A sub-zero 36km run. It took 3 hours 52 minutes at an average heart rate of 150bpm and an average pace (with auto-pause) of 6:25 min/km, leaving a 2305 calorie hole.

‘Go Long’ are short reports from my weekend mini-adventures on bike and foot, as I continue to train for more ultramarathons and Ironman. They are most likely of interest to other endurance masochists, as well as those looking for new running and cycling routes around Bath and Bristol.

The 3 stages of Insight Meditation

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 17:29:28 +0000

A few days ago, I found myself on the train and full of coffee. I did what I often do and started doodling: about meditation, awakening and how I would teach the progress of insight to others.

This resulted in 30 minutes of furious scribbling that I’d thought I’d share and explain a little.

Pedagogy of awakening

In short, there are three waypoints on the journey:

Learning to ground
Learning to see clearly
Just sitting

1) Learning to ground

Learning to ground relates to what we generally call mindfulness. It is a way of engaging with appearances (the content of your mind), accepting them and building your ability to concentrate. It’s a practical way of cultivating conscious presence.

The conversational present

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 08:58:24 +0000

I’ve been continuing with Power of Now, and that has provided some respite. As I read it I do admire its simplicity and elegance. Sure, there are parts of disagree with, and places where he says too much (vis-a-vis “all illness is mental in origin”)

But it is effective and it moves people. Sometimes I become overly concerned when it comes to meditation and awakening, with outlining a perfect system, rather than just putting something out there that is helpful and liberating. It can grow, as I grow.

10 ways to upgrade your Huel game

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 11:41:47 +0000

I’ve been using Huel for over 2 years now. If you’re new to Huel, it’s a nutritionally complete meal replacement. I recently wrote about all the reasons you might want to give it a go.

Whether your goal is weight loss, training for an event, or just making healthy eating more convenient, there are plenty of reasons to consider Huel.

But doesn’t it get boring? Not in my experience. There are lots of different flavours and flavour sachets to keep things interesting. Personally, I stick with the Original Vanilla most of the time.

Go Long: Shitlaning

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 13:30:54 +0000

A wet, muddy 70km ride. It took 3 hours 15 minutes at an average heart rate of 113bpm and an average speed of 22 km/h, leaving a 900 calorie hole.

Pyramid of effect

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 08:32:03 +0000

I’ve been thinking over a concept for a while, which I’m going to call the pyramid of effect.

It provides a map for change. It places our emotions, our habits, our choices and our bare participation in reality in one spectrum, and identifies the pecking order.

We need something like this to place things like habit change and life hacking in their appropriate context. The current situation is that people are reluctant to observe their deeper patterns—or see how those patterns are already shaping their lives—and so they reach for a hack or a tip.

Kettlebells and the Anti-blog

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 10:00:15 +0000

Just could not be assed to work out yesterday. After writing down that I felt lacklustre, it clarified things—brought the resistance to rest—and I realised I could take a break. As a result I got loads of other blog work done and felt less pressure throughout the day.

And then just before dinner I felt a spontaneous urge to do a little strength. I haven’t used the kettlebell for a while, and have perhaps overlooked it whilst focusing on carefully increasing power lifts.

Learn more and blog better with Readwise

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:34:45 +0000

My Kindle is one of my favourite gifts from my wife. I resisted the idea of an electronic reader for a long time, but after seeing Gina use hers on holiday and at home, my curiosity grew.

Besides the convenience, a big selling point for me was highlighting—being able to select and save passages from what I was reading. I rarely read without taking notes, so being able to save and review notes digitally was an irresistible proposition.

Skip the swim

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 08:22:00 +0000

Not sure what to write today. I’m more pulled towards writing on specific topics again, as it’s an easy way to get a blog post into draft form.

But I also don’t want to remove the freedom and lack of expectation with these 700 word writing sessions.

I skipped a swim day yesterday to go for a trail run. I just could not be assed with the driving, parking, paying, changing, swimming and back again. Also I really don’t want to swim. I’m finding it hard, and the fact that it requires more preparation, cost and travel than any other training does not help.

The blog formula

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 21:34:42 +0100

I have to say, there are a lot of duplicate blogs out there. I don’t mean they are being copied and pasted, but they do seem to be written according to the same formula.

The language and voice is overly-friendly and ‘yo’ and ‘heya’ and here’s 27 different pictures of me. The blog posts themselves seem to cover all the same topics, just in a slightly different voice, according to who actually wrote it. But really, anyone could have written it.

Blog development

Sat, 27 Oct 2018 08:09:39 +0000

I’ve been setting out some goals and related practices for the blog. Getting systematic about it.

It’s really powerful to see the WHY I’m doing all this, and then directly below it the HOW.

HOW is broken up into goals, “reach 100 subscribers”, and then an associated practice to get me there. In this case there would be a few: “sharing daily”, “adding first email capture content” etc.

This helps to keep things focused, and ensures that my actions are helping achieve the goals that push me in the direction I want to go in.

Rekindling the ancient

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 07:47:04 +0000

I’ve thinking a lot about rekindling the ancient.

About how we can bring back what was good in the ancient worldview, and teach it to people today.

I’m talking about the fundamental shift in values, from ancient to modernity to postmodernity. Ken Wilber talks about this a lot, and the distinction comes up in various other writers’ works too.

Meditation has had a bigger impact on my life than any other practice, and it is distinctly ancient. It has the hallmarks of being completely inclusive (no segregation), not reductionist and putting the soul (human experience) at the forefront.

Write your worries down

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 08:02:15 +0000

Too much of our time is lost struggling with painful feelings that we cannot express.

We try to move forward, try to put up a good fight, but there is something malign and pervasive colouring our mood. It drains our energy, saps our motivation, but remains out of sight. It’s uncomfortable, but even more important than that, it’s unclear.

Whether fear, worry, sadness or doubt—it is this lack of clarity that keeps us feeling stuck.

On being a donkey

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 09:15:11 +0000

Nice routine this morning: straight downstairs to prepare everyone’s breakfast. Didn’t eat; had a decaf coffee and did my stretches.

Then I went up to meditate just as they were heading out for a walk. Got about 40 minutes in! Then had first coffee and did my 700 words. Made breakfast when Gina left.

I feel that I’m going to bed enlightened at the moment, then acting like a fool the whole day until I sit again. So I think I’m going to try this more. A morning sit should really give a little direction and focus.

Go Long: Callum and I

Sat, 13 Oct 2018 15:33:51 +0000

A 105km stormy ride to Glastonbury, Cheddar and Chew Valley Lake. It took 4 hours 22 minutes at an average heart rate of 140bpm and an average speed of 24km/h, leaving a 2,092 calorie hole.

Hit the button

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 08:44:57 +0000

When you start writing its natural to obsess over the quality of what you share. You’ve read good writing—and this is not it. Your words look feeble and forced. Better to postpone your noble endeavour until you are worthy.

Here’s the underlying belief: these words aren’t good enough to publish, yet. I’ll keep going until they are. Procrastination, recalibration.

Here’s the truth:

It’s not about the right words; it’s about using your voice.

Go Long: Portisnever

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 14:05:43 +0000

An 80km loopy ride around Chew Valley Lake and Bath. It took 3 hours 15 minutes at an average heart rate of 121bpm and an average speed of 25 km/h, leaving a 1,205 calorie hole.

Drinking after being 6 months sober

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 12:03:05 +0000

As we took off for our honeymoon to Switzerland, I had already decided that I’d probably have a drink.

I hadn’t drunk any alcohol in 6 months. I’d originally planned to stop drinking for 3 months, but felt so good that I just stuck with it.

I’d never planned to stay sober forever, and as the honeymoon approached, it felt like a time and place I wanted to enjoy a drink.

I want to be more active, but...

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 08:53:36 +0000

One of my first posts on this blog was Why Fitness Matters. It was a bit of a manifesto that talked about how taking responsibility for your physical well-being is one of the most empowering things you can do for yourself.

This post moves from WHY to HOW: how to get started, because that’s the toughest part.

Fortunately, this is a great time to start. Tomorrow is National Fitness Day! There are events and offers being run up and down the country so check out what’s happening in your area.

hthb newsletter 03

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 13:53:55 +0000

Hello September 🍁

It’s been a busy few weeks on the blog!

How Restrictive Diets Actually Work—The 5 Principles of Weight Loss. A look at how we really lose weight, and the principles that can get us there without “dieting”
A Whole Lot of Reasons To Try Huel. Huel is a nutritionally complete shake that I’ve been a fan of for 2 years now. There are a lot of reasons to consider trying it out. Plus: £10 off your first order. You’re welcome.
How To Breathe Well. Kick stress in the balls by learning what it means to breathe well.
Why You Should Be Writing in Markdown. Do you write content on the Internet? Then you need to meet the saviour of the web, Markdown.
Organising Your Blogging With Trello. Looking for a more visual way to organise your world-changing insights? Meet Trello.

Bonus: I wrote a blog for the mental health charity, Mind. I talk about anxiety and how running has helped my mental health.

A whole lot of reasons to try Huel meal replacement

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:38:14 +0000

I first tried Huel about 2 years ago. I’d seen that more and more people were experimenting with meal replacements. The simplicity of an all-in-one shake and the idea of engineering a nutritionally complete food appealed to me.

If you want £10 off your first order, keep reading!

But most of the initial offerings seemed pretty unhealthy. After some research, I came across the Huel website and was impressed. Short for “human fuel”, the Huel brand looked professional and clean and the core ingredients seemed much more nutritious: oats, pea protein, flaxseed, brown rice protein, coconut oil, and sunflower oil.

How to breathe well

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 06:51:18 +0000

This is a simple post about something that you participate in every day. You rarely intervene, and in general, you’re not required to.

Even so, 20 to 30 thousand times a day, you breathe.

Breathing is unique in that it occurs automatically—even when we’re unconscious—but is also able to come under conscious control.

Our breath sits at the intersection of mind, body, blood and brain, unifying them in one living rhythm, and finally binding our bodies into a much greater reciprocity with outside and Other:

Why you should be writing in Markdown

Tue, 21 Aug 2018 13:22:21 +0000

It’s time to break the tyranny of note-taking apps and blogging platforms: write your online content in a universal language that encourages flow and keeps you focused on the content.

When you’re writing for the Internet, you want to be able to save and move your writings around as easily as possible. You don’t want each new app loosing bits of your formatting. After you’ve published your words, you don’t want them locked into that one particular presentation forever, right?

Organising your blogging with Trello and Sublime Text

Wed, 15 Aug 2018 07:19:32 +0000

Organising anything with Trello is a joy:

Web and mobile versions of Trello mean you can easily edit your projects from anywhere. A lot of writing apps aren’t so portable.
Simple to use: intuitive, visual and very low barrier to entry
All backed up to The Cloud ☁️
Really easy to drag and drop images into cards, as well as adding checklists
It’s freeeeeee

You might use Trello to manage projects, weddings, holidays… but a blog?

How restrictive diets actually work: the 5 principles of weight loss

Tue, 07 Aug 2018 11:16:23 +0000

You found a new diet. It’s the low-x diet.

x might be carbs. x might be fats. x might be meat. x might be processed foods.

It has a compelling story: x is now known to be the secret underlying cause of our health and obesity crisis. By reducing x, we can lose weight, reverse chronic disease and in 6-8 weeks probably definitely look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. That fat will literally be dripping off your abs.

how to human being newsletter

Thu, 26 Jul 2018 14:48:36 +0000

Are you interested in being the proud recipient of a short, infrequent newsletter which includes:

Notifications about any new articles on how to human being
Other interesting things I’ve come across: mind-blowing blogs, insightful podcasts, life-changing purchases and more.

The newsletter is formatted in easy-to-digest bullet points and can be scanned in about 30 seconds. I’m sure you’ll find something alluring in each email.

Sound good? I knew you’d be interested. You can subscribe today.

hthb newsletter 02

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 14:05:00 +0000

Seven blessings friends,

First off, a big thank you to everyone who supported me as I ran my first 100km along the Cotswolds. We raised over £1200! It was bloody hot.

New on how to human being

Of course, race reports! Part 1 deals with my training preparation for running 100km, along with everything I learned about running in the heat 😅
Part 2 is a hill-by-hill account of how the race actually went. It was my first Top 10 finish! 🏅
Finally, I jotted down my Lessons From 3 Months Without Booze, following on from my Sober Spring.

#TransformationTuesday

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dan Bartlett 🏃🏼‍♂️ (@dan_s_b)

How to Run 100km, Part 2: The Cotswold Way Challenge

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 07:30:37 +0000

In Part 1 I shared my preparation for my 100km fundraising run, with a focus on the heat, as this race was due to take place in the longest heatwave the UK has seen in 5 years 🔥

This is my race report of how it went on the day I ran the Cotswold Way Challenge 2018.

Royal Crescent, Bath

Cotswold Way Challenge 2018: Royal Crescent, Bath

I woke up at 5am and immediately peeked out the window. Thank the gods, it was overcast. It was actually quite cool out, about 13°C.

How to Run 100km, Part 1: Preparing for a Heatwave

Thu, 05 Jul 2018 12:00:00 +0000

At the end of last year, I sat down and drew up my 2018 race calendar. It would be my first year of running ultramarathons, and I knew I wanted one race to also be a fundraiser for mental health.

The Cotswold Way Challenge seemed the perfect candidate, as the mental health charity Mind were already involved. It would be my first 100k—with a daunting 2400m of elevation—and definitely the pinnacle of my running year. As a bonus it was a point-to-point race (no loops) starting in Bath, traversing a large part of the beautiful Cotswolds, and finishing in Cheltenham.

Ultramarathon fundraising for the mental health charity, Mind

Tue, 03 Jul 2018 10:36:33 +0000

Yesterday was a special run for me. I got to do something I love whilst raising £1254.50 for the mental health charity, Mind.

Last year I wrote:

As you may have guessed from my frequent running spam, I love to run. Fewer people know that alongside my passion for sadistic feats of endurance, I have also struggled with panic attacks and anxiety for a few years now. They arrived suddenly with no apparent cause, and have been by far the toughest things I’ve ever had to face. An anxiety disorder is a horrible, horrible thing that over time makes you doubt everything from whether you can leave the house, to your own sanity.

Lessons from 3 months without booze

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 09:31:59 +0000

Earlier this year I read Catherine Gray’s The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober and decided to stop drinking for 3 months: a Sober Spring.

It seemed to arrive at the perfect time for me, as I’d become fed up (again) with drinking, hangovers, and the effect of both on my anxiety.

Well… the 3 months have gone quickly and smoothly! Here I want to talk about my biggest lessons, and how shit-faced I got the day it all finished.

hthb newsletter 01

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 14:01:00 +0000

Hello sunshine ☀️

It’s been a little while since I sent out an update. This is the first edition of an expanded newsletter that will go out less frequently, but with more interesting links and reads. Let me know what you think, and what else you want to see!

New on how to human being

There is a profound joy in being able to make a staple like your own bread. And sourdough is the king of breads. Now you can knock some up yourself by following my guide to making sourdough.
“Do not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” — check out my 2 minute summary of Hanlon’s razor, and how it can make you a happier human.
The low down on why I started reading obituaries 💀
I shared my unjustified fears about writing & publishing online, also detailing the explosive viral growth how to human being has witnessed since launch.
And finally a short piece on why I chose Ghost to run my blog, and why they are a company worth paying attention to.

What I’ve Been Reading

We’re used to our phones and laptops improving with updates, but recently Tesla released a software update that improved the breaking distance of their cars by almost 20 feet.
Can you think yourself fit? “The journal Health Psychology recently published a fascinating (and well-written) scientific study suggesting that how fit you think you are affects your risk of death more than how fit you actually are.”

Listening To On Loop

Defender — Simian Mobile Disco

Running Ridiculous Distances

A week today I’ll be nervously packing my gear ready to run 5 half marathons back-to-back across the Cotswolds, with 8 Eiffel Towers worth of hills thrown in for fun. As if that wasn’t enough, we now have a “mini-heatwave” en route to add a whole other layer of difficulty.

Why to choose Ghost for your blog

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 10:17:01 +0000

2021 update: I no longer use Ghost to power this blog! But I still think it’s an outstanding project and that the company are pioneering many practices that should be more widespread. I still frequently recommend it to others. Alas, the nerd in me got hooked on blogging via writing offline and committing changes through git. This blog is now powered by Hugo.

Up until now, every time I wanted to start writing I’d expend 97% of my energy thinking about how I could build a blog, which features I want, testing fonts, browsing themes and saving colour schemes. The remaining 3% went towards some writing. It’s the curse of being a developer.

6 unfounded fears about writing & publishing online

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 11:06:43 +0000

It’s been five months since I launched this blog. I’ve written 14 articles, generated a whopping £2.68 in Amazon referral fees, and built a staggering 19-strong subscriber list.

But I wasn’t an overnight success. It’s taken me a long time to get to the point of publishing these posts. For years, I amassed notes and shared nothing. I was held back by a multitude of fears that pin most people down when they consider sharing their creative work.

Reading obituaries

Wed, 30 May 2018 14:21:01 +0000

I recently read Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work! It’s a short book of excellent advice on getting your creative work out there, and particularly on sharing your ongoing creative process rather than just presenting your final product.

Early on Austin talks about the habit of reading obituaries each morning as a gentle way of re-focusing on what’s truly important to you.

I have many weird habits as it is so I was happy to add this to the heap.

It's easy to be stupid: Hanlon's razor

Wed, 23 May 2018 16:06:00 +0000

You may have heard of Occam’s razor: the principle that given many competing explanations we should prefer those that make the fewest assumptions.

Today we meet Hanlon, the lesser known of the razors.

But why all the razors in the first place? The term “razor” in this case means a mental shortcut that helps us to “shave off” unlikely explanations. Razors are intended as a guide—a first line of defence—rather than anything final or definitive.

How to make a sourdough tin loaf

Wed, 16 May 2018 08:17:52 +0000

Sourdough is the old-time bread: delicious, nutritious, and easy to make. So on-trend that even your barista will be left in awe at your yeasty adventures.

If you’re a millennial you’ll already be spending 50% of your salary on avocado on toasted sourdough, and as such will be familiar with its chewy texture and complex taste. This flavour is all the more impressive considering it’s made with just flour and water. Salt is often added, but it isn’t required.

How to Run 50 Miles, Part 2: The Butcombe Trail Ultramarathon

Fri, 04 May 2018 07:17:33 +0000

In Part 1, I talked about my inspiration for running 50 miles and the injury-ridden preparation for my first ultramarathon. This is a report of how it went on the day of the Butcombe Trail Ultramarathon 2018, my first ultramarathon.

Photo credit: Jeremy Hutchinson

The Night Before

Prepared power porridge: 50g oats, 200ml milk, 2 tsp honey, a banana, and some whey protein.
K-taped my knee, essentially making my quadricep a quinticep. My physio had taught me how to do this a while back, when I got my patellar tendonitis diagnosis. It’s a handy way of distributing some of the load.
Drank an SIS hydro, to make sure my electrolytes were topped up.
Checked my GPS app had the map loaded, and printed off some navigation pointers.

Morning registration

My alarm went off at 5 am. I was awake before anyway. Demolished the porridge by 5:30 am, giving it two hours to digest before race start. Necked a small coffee, as I wanted the option to take on some caffeine during the race. Took another SIS hydro to top-up electrolytes, applied Bodyglide to any potential rubbing areas, and headed off into the windy, wet morning. Application of sun cream was not deemed necessary.

How to Run 50 Miles, Part 1: Preparing for an Ultramarathon

Wed, 02 May 2018 15:59:09 +0000

How to run 50 miles. It’s probably not a question that keeps most people up a night. But it’s something I’ve wanted to do for the last year.

These two posts are a detailed rundown of my preparation and experience of my first ultramarathon, as well as an informal and hopefully entertaining guide for anyone looking to run 50 miles, or just push their running further.

The Butcombe Trail Ultramarathon (BTU) is a 50-mile loop that visits 6 pubs on the Mendips. It’s mostly off-road and pretty hilly, clocking in at over 1500m of ascent with some very steep climbs. Part 2 covers my experience of the race itself.

5 tips for anxiety and panic attacks

Thu, 12 Apr 2018 12:27:56 +0000

This post outlines the five pointers for dealing with anxiety that I wish I’d had to hand a few years ago.

While it’s targeted at people who struggle with high anxiety—such as panic attacks or generalised anxiety disorders—this line of contemplation can work for other negative emotions, because it deals with the basic difference between thoughts and feelings.

We all worry about what to eat, what to wear and who likes us, but high anxiety tends to be more physical and intense in nature, easily fooling you into thinking you’re having a heart attack or brain seizure. It’s not unusual for someone experiencing an attack to admit themselves to A&E under the assumption that they are literally dying.

Change the behaviour, keep the reward

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 12:19:31 +0000

We are what we do, consistently: our days are strung together through the momentum of our habits, both good and bad.

Well-intentioned habits can easily become stale or harmful, so being able to spot and remodel them is perhaps one of the most valuable life skills we can learn.

A habit is automatic: it often flashes past our eyes before we know what’s happening. But with a little amplification of awareness, we can break the habit down into three parts:

10 reasons why I’m not drinking this Spring

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 15:29:47 +0000

It’s already been 2 weeks since I had my last drink, and for the next 3 or so months, I won’t be drinking any alcohol.

So far my war medals include surviving an afterparty with a free bar, living with 6 bottles of leftover wedding wine, and managing to eat a delicious leg of lamb without a red wine chaser. I know, right? #FirstWorldProblems

But why?

I’m not here to preach or convince you—these are just my reasons for trying Sober Spring, with a little extra information thrown in for the curious.

When choice turns to compulsion

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 09:15:14 +0000

When our own choices turn to compulsions, we suffer a loss of meaning.

It’s when “I choose to” becomes “I should” or “I have to”.

Perhaps a habit felt great at first, but now we’re squeezing everything possible out of it. Perhaps our situation has changed.

Regardless, the inner judge takes up the war cry, constantly nagging and attacking. Keep moving, keep pushing, this is important. It can easily become a cruel tyrant, a thoughtless momentum.

What do I write about?

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 18:12:39 +0000

My writings tend to revolve around a few reocurring themes:

Investing in perennial practises over short-term lifehacks. This means cultivating the slow habits that really make a difference to our minds and bodies. This is achieved through prioritising consistency and cultivating a skepticism towards the immediate solution.
Protecting ourselves against the misdirection of attention from things that appear to provide fulfilment and instead focusing on those timeless sources of fulfilment under our noses. This involves: 1) discovering those practises that are worth investing in and 2) embedding them in our lives via ritual.
Prioritising basic fitness as your primary health insurance and mental health aid. This comes with the happy consequence of looking good naked.
Indulging in regular solitude and finding ways to carve silence into your life. Each of us— especially if we wish to be creative and productive—has to balance consumption with enough reflection to metabolise incoming information into insight.
A reconnection with the body—the ancient emotions, intuitions and cues that are so often left behind. Questioning the tendency to live life exclusively through the medium of thought.
Finding the sacred in the everyday. Discovering not just the practical but the profound. Giving ourselves to the friction of flourishing as a wellspring of meaning and wisdom instead of the one-dimensional struggle to maintain a state of happiness.
Regularly reconnecting with your values and virtues, and building them into your daily life through ritual. To be fulfilled and productive you have to know what you’re shooting for, point yourself in that direction, and find ways of regularly course-correcting. Being the weird you want to see in the world
Practising minimalism as a means of removing the bloat that prevents your values shining through more clearly. Minimalism is a noise reduction system.
Understanding that every path has some pain. Pick the one you know will make you a better person by the end. Be vulernable and honest.
A reckoning with suffering. Suffering is what is often most real to us and orchestrates a large part of our lives, yet we rarely discuss it. A conscious relationship with the simple and all-pervasive nature of suffering can remake our lives in ways we can barely imagine. By default we push suffering away but this distance creates a host of other problems for us and separates us from one of the most important source of wisdom and growth.
- We’re surrounded by wildly different surroundings compared to our ancestors of 10,000 years ago, but our internal struggles with fear, craving, jealousy, love, bliss and deceit have remained remarkably constant.
Practising forgiveness—towards others but most importantly for ourselves. Each of us is fallible and liable to err. Avoiding political ideologies that place the blame with certain groups or economic policies.
The joy of reading great books—their ability to help us to correct errors in thinking and open up new vistas and possibilities in us. Reading classics allows us to participate in the great conversation we as a species have been having with ourselves for over 5,000 years.
The therapeutic gift of writing and journalling in making what is cloudy and chaotic within us visible and meaningful.
The prevalence and challenge of anxiety. Why it matters, how it happens to the best of us, and how to standup to it and grow into someone better because of it.
How to use technology with intention and care, instead of following the multi-tasking path of least resistance.

Just come back

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 13:00:00 +0000

Meditation can be summed up in one directive: just come back.

When we first learn to follow the breath, the instruction is simple:

Pay attention to the sensations of the breath.
When you get lost or distracted, just come back.

People naturally tend to judge their success by the amount of time they can consistently follow the breath.

Staying with the breath seems like a win, and too often the instruction to “come back” is seen as a mere stepping stone back to the real work of meditation.

Calories count, but you (probably) don’t need to count them

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 19:20:50 +0000

A new weight loss study was released this week, reported by various news outlets with the following headline:

Counting calories not key to weight loss, study finds.

The description went on to explain:

People in the study who cut back on added sugar, refined grains and highly processed foods while eating plenty of vegetables and whole foods — without worrying about cutting calories or portion sizes — lost significant amounts of weight over the course of a year.

Act, or don't—the key to productivity

Tue, 20 Feb 2018 13:00:00 +0000

Some decisions are really tough.

Especially those that involve challenge, risk, and the potential for failure.

As a result, we are swamped in doubt. Fear. Hesitation. Guilt. Frustration.

The end result is often an awkward stumble in no particular direction.

It seems so complicated. There’s so much to weigh up. How will I know if it’s the right decision?

It’s not complicated. In fact, there are only two options: Act or don’t.

Why meditation matters

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 17:00:00 +0000

Meditation continues to soar in popularity.

From the ever-expanding body of scientific research to the numbers of prominent leaders professing to practice meditation, we are living through a contemplative renaissance.

Your Mum might have even got a Zen colouring book for Christmas.

In an age of distraction and shallowness, the simplicity and stillness promised by meditation draw more and more people into its centre of gravity.

Apps like Headspace and Calm have opened up the basics of meditation to millions of newcomers, providing bite-sized guided meditations to help people relax and de-stress. If people stick with it long enough, they find themselves on a deeper journey, and often a completely new way of approaching life.

Why fitness matters

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 10:12:00 +0000

When most of us think of “fitness”, the images that arise are often not pleasant: sweaty gyms, restrictive diets, and the thought of fitting even more tasks into an already busy day.

If we summon the courage to visit the gym, we get home to catch the latest news about that new thing that causes cancer, and how we all need to eat less, move more, and eat five a day.

How I trained and ran my first 10k: Bath Two Tunnels

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 09:45:00 +0000

In September 2016, I ran my first race: a 10k. Afterwards, full of enthusiasm and zeal, I wrote this blog for an old website. I remember wanting to sign up for a half-marathon, but nothing beyond that. Two years and two ultramarathons later, I’m re-publishing it as a guide for beginners, and something for me to smile back on.

On September 18th 2016, I ran the Relish Running Two Tunnels 10k. I finished a whisker under 50 minutes, which I was very, very happy about.

Meditation reading recommendations

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 23:00:00 +0000

2021 note: I often get asked for recommendations on meditation books and teachers. This was my response around 2014! There are still some great books and websites listed, so I’ve kept it around.

I started meditating when I was 22, a couple of years after taking an interest in Taoism. Not long after beginning my practice I came across Daniel Ingram’s Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. I was very impressed with the openness and clarity of the book, and immediately dedicated myself to Vipassana meditation as outlined in the first few chapters. It didn’t take long before I stumbled across the first of many events that have convinced me that this kind of mind training is something truly invaluable and deeply empowering. I wrote more about my meeting with meditation in Answering the Demand.

7 reasons to start a meditation journal

Mon, 05 May 2014 23:00:00 +0000

2021 note: this post was written 7 years ago, when I was the founder of a meditation community known as OpenSit. Times have changed and OpenSit is no longer online. If you’re looking for some way of starting up a meditation journal today, many meditation apps have some journalling functionality built in. Failing that, any paper pad will do!

So you’re already sold on meditation right?

You read all those convincing studies. Your own personal experience has been resoundingly positive. And you saw those pictures on the Internet of beautiful yoginis basking in effortless full-lotus serenity next to waterfalls, beaches and other scenes of outstanding natural beauty.

Meditation on the breath

Wed, 04 Sep 2013 23:00:00 +0000

To see to the bottom of a pond, the water needs to be clear and still. The same applies to your mind. Until the mind is stilled, it defaults to stirring up debris in the form of stories, doubts and endless self-narrative. This debris clouds your experience, distorting the true nature of your mind.

By focusing on the breath, we give the mind something to fully apply itself to. With the mind focused and absorbed in the breath the debris settles, our clarity increases, and our experience becomes still. Clarity and stillness are the prime conditions for insight.

What is meditation?

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 23:00:00 +0000

Meditation is the practice of freedom through insight

Through the practise of paying attention to our moment-to-moment experience, we gain insight through seeing how we are not free. Each moment of awakeness helps us understand how we create friction in our experience by resisting it, and how this habitual resistance is stressful and draining.

Furthermore, by learning to recognise the primary characteristics of our experience, we notice our ignorance about the nature of things – bestowing ‘mind’, ‘world’ and ‘self’ with a solidity and essence where none can be found.

Because we care

Thu, 02 May 2013 23:00:00 +0000

Because we care, we choose to practice.

We yearn for peace, for genuine happiness. And so we come to the cushion and engage with the crux of our predicament: what does it mean to be here?

The feeling of being here is the gateway to all life’s vicissitudes, from the ever-shifting sensory landscape around us to our personal thoughts and emotions. It all arises right here.

We often neglect the fullness of presence in favour of a reliance on thought. But thought is only one small part of being here, and it tends to ride on the back of a lot of unconscious emotional conditioning that we pick up through parents, culture and complete accident.

Answering the demand

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, “Who are we?”
— Erwin Schrödinger

I have always been obsessed with the Big Picture. It’s why my most valued possessions are the years of notes I’ve gathered on everything from physics, to psychology, to psilocybin. They are my flags and reminders as to why the world I live in looks and acts as it does—my own take on higher education.

Preconquest Consciousness

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 11:00:12 +0100

This is an web version of Preconquest Consciousness by E. Richard Sorenson, from the book Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology, including full references and correct footnotes.

Precursory Considerations

Anthropology as an epistemological problem

Most anthropologists are aware that what comprise the standard habits, inclinations, and activities of humankind in one culture may seem quite exotic in another. When the separateness of peoples is extreme, incompatible modes of awareness and cognition sometimes arise, as occurred between the preconquest and postconquest eras of the world. Basic sensibilities, including sense-of-identity and sense-of-truth, were so contradistinctive in these two eras that they were irreconcilable. Even core features of life in one era were imperceptible to people in the other. While such disparate cognitive separation may be rare, a single occurrence is sufficient to make anthropology an epistemological problem.

The self is always implied, never experienced

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When you sit down to practice Vipassana meditation, you observe your moment to moment experience with the intention of seeing the three characteristics: anicca (impermanence, change), dukkha (unsatisfactoriness, suffering) and anatta (not-self).

More accurately, you are tuning into the 3Cs, as they are always already the case. This is not a philosophical exercise – the practice is to stay at the immediate sensate level of your experience, with a degree of mental calm that allows you to observe manifesting reality without getting caught up in it.

Three-week meditation work retreat at Gaia House

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:00:00 +0000

On Sunday night I got back from a three week work retreat at the stunning Gaia House in Devon.

A month or so back I’d been looking for a job, and also wanting to go on retreat, so I decided that I could wallop two birds with one stone, whilst also lending a helping hand at a world-renowned retreat centre.

According to the Progress of Insight map which I’d found very useful since I started meditating, I’d been lurking in the equanimity phase of my first insight cycle since my first retreat in January. I’d experienced formations, tasted the formless realms, but now just seemed to be going round in circles. To make matters slightly more uncomfortable I’d also slipped back in the dukkha nanas a few times. Not fun, and a powerful incentive to go on retreat.

Snake Arising

Fri, 01 May 2009 07:06:08 +0100

I sat on a cushion in my bedroom, in darkness. I was 22 years old and like any normal kid my age I had resolved to meditate on an imaginary green triangle in my head for 45 minutes.

This was my third week of practising concentration meditation, a precursor to vipassana. The idea was to hold my focus on an object to quiet the mind. This had already resulted in tantalising bursts of rapture and bliss, but I wanted more, and felt curious about how much energy I could channel into this.

10 day Vipassana meditation retreat at Dhamma Dipa

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been back from Dhamma Dipa for two days now. Here is a report of how it worked out for me, for those interested.

The first 3 days were hell, and I don’t use the term lightly. Physical pain, mental judgements and overwhelming emotional attachments all quickly came to the surface thanks to prolonged meditation and the Noble Silence. The whole retreat experience is set-up so as to facilitate this kind of coming-to-terms: there’s no-one to speak to, nothing to distract yourself with. You just sit there in your own self-created misery, until you learn how to understand and work with it. All those fears, aversions, cravings, judgements, negativities are out in the open, and you can do little but sit back and watch them push and pull you around.

The magicians

Thu, 24 Jan 2002 19:44:12 +0000

I wrote this in my early 20s under heavy doses of Robert Anton Wilson and Aleister Crowley.

Awareness contracts to focus
they say it’s not hocus pocus
to them it is just a thought.

Through invisible incantation
matter dances to mentation
the conscious rewrites the Points.

But quickly they lose their way
emotion and thought carry them astray
while the birds scream Attention! Attention!

They take note but never remember
“stay strong and never surrender!"
the fools never realise “I am.”

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A brief, semi-professional introduction

I’ve worked in early-stage startups for 10 years, usually wearing the CTO hat. In 2019, I became a cofounder and Head of Engineering at Almanac through their $9m seed raise and in the lead up to a $34m Series A raise in 2021. I was also the founder of a meditation community called OpenSit which was acquired in 2017. Before taking on leadership roles, I worked as a Ruby engineer. I’ve also worked as an EM at GoCardless.
I’ve meditated for nearly 15 years, starting out with Insight Meditation (vipassanā) but moving over into Western wisdom traditions. These practices have remade my perception of self, world and the sacred, and I spend a lot of time thinking about this.
I’ve had various mental health struggles—mostly anxiety/panic disorders but also depression after I went through divorce and severe burnout simultaneously in 2020.
For a few years I got hooked on running ultramarathons. I ran 100km in a day and raised £1200 for the mental health charity, Mind.

Add all that together and you get an attitude of enduring curiousity, geeky rigour and contemplative heart.

AI Coaching for Founders & Business Owners in Bristol & Bath

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and exhausted trying to “AI all the things”, another YouTube video isn’t going to cut it. You need someone to sit with you, answer your questions, and build workflows that actually fit your business.

Consultancy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I am passionate about early-stage companies and have spent most of my career working inside of them; first as an engineer and manager, and later as a founder.

I draw on all of this experience to support startups and scaleups in the many challenges of getting an idea off of the ground: from MVP development and technology choices up to user testing, roadmapping, hiring and go-to-market. Most of my experience has centred around SaaS applications, both B2C and B2B. My involvement can take on different formats, from time-boxed support to longer-term advisory roles. I sometimes work as a Fractional CTO.

Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The best way to get in contact is email:

Copy my name from the URL above
Add @gmail.com to the end
Send me a delightful email

You can also find me on:

X and Bluesky for snippets and deep thoughts.
Instagram for pretty pictures.
LinkedIn for occupational reveries and hot takes.
Strava for if you also like running & rucking.
Keybase for validating I’m really me.
GitHub for code.

Contemplative guide

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

"Just read The Power of Now", they said.
"Just try a 10-day retreat", they said.

Now, you can't ignore the impermanence of life and it's 50/50 whether you'll have another kundalini awakening on the train. You can see this spiritual stuff has no off-switch and you want support.

→ Book a free discovery call

What I do

I partner with people as a contemplative guide, pointing to the deepest truth of this moment and seeing through the dream of separation. This is for those who are—through choice or otherwise—pursuing the journey sometimes known as awakening or enlightenment. Along the way, there are many confusing and contrasting messages. I help people make sense of what’s happening to them and deepen their insight, drawing on my own engagement with various traditions and the process of awakening itself over the last 15+ years.

How having a guide helps

Reading 100s of books and watching 1000s of YouTube videos is helpful, but speaking with someone about your particular struggles is the most effective way to move deeper.
This journey is often a lonely and solitary one; an intoxicating yet confusing ride of insights, energies and awakenings. Being able to speak clearly about what’s happening for you right now can be a powerful catalyst.
Having a solid practice funnelled through limiting beliefs about what awakening is or what you need to do can leave you feeling confused and burned out. The tool of meditation is powerful. But a skilful conversation can remake our sense of what it means to practice at all.
Past a certain point, most people hit a wall following one or two practices. I can help you refine your practices to better release reactivity and tension from the body.

Who I work with

People feeling washed out after extensive Vipassana practice.
Those with a solid practice and maybe even some awakenings under their belt, but who feel that things have stalled.
Those looking to balance their meditation practice with a more varied ecology of practices.

Why me?

Unlike many meditation guides, I am also a trained transformative coach. Coaching is a powerful way of unhooking the beliefs and ideas that keep us (apparently) locked out of this undivided reality.
I learned the hard way: bypassing, fixating on awakenings, getting stuck in emptiness, repressing emotions, trying to meditate it all away, spiritualising poor mental health, dissociating, side-stepping trauma, following unquestioned beliefs and ignoring my own needs and boundaries.
I am confident teaching both inquisitive, effortful practices and more open, heart-based approaches. I draw inspiration from traditions as varied as Burmese vipassana to Christian mysticism.
I’m not here to tell you how it is. But we can explore this unfolding reality together and see what comes up.

About me

I was drawn to spirituality at a young age, for reasons that I did not understand. I did the practices and things started to happen. Quite quickly. I went deep into the Vipassana / Insight Meditation tradition via Daniel Ingram’s book Mastering the Core Teaching of the Buddha and the wider Pragmatic Dharma scene. Later, I explored Western wisdom traditions (particularly Magia), alongside self-inquiry, “non-meditation”, devotional practice and heart work, which helped me counter a long-standing sense of inadequacy that insight meditation did not touch.
I spent the next decade trying to understand what was happening to me whilst working in Tech, building companies, struggling with mental health, running ultramarathons and plenty more in between.
Later in the journey, I came to appreciate the importance of somatic work in releasing deeply held, unconscious reactivity and trauma in the body. I found meditation was powerful and transformative, but that my energetics and body were out-of-whack.
Some teachers I’ve found most useful have been Alan Chapman, Rob Burbea, Adyashanti, Peter Kingsley, A H Almaas, Joan Tollifson, Suzanne Chang, Angelo Dillulo, Peter Brown and a bunch of Zen patriarchs.

My approach

My relationship with each person is different, depending on their background and current struggles. I do not have a fixed program or Best Method that I inflict on people.
I don’t work from a particular tradition. I mix pointers to an already-present wholeness alongside strategic practical advice. I like helping people return to a living intimacy with just what’s happening.
I believe developing fluency in both emptiness and fullness practices helps prevent fixation on one aspect or the other.
Alongside your daily practices, we can inquire into the beliefs and assumptions underlying the journey: beyond practice and progress to our very ideas of time, life and being itself. Meditation alone does not always expose these beliefs.

→ Book a free discovery call

Psssst! If you are looking for support on practical matters like career, relationships or personal effectiveness, visit my main coaching page.

Engineering career coach & mentoring

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Coaching & mentoring for engineers and managers who want to improve their craft, reach the next level and expand their horizons.

→ Book a free discovery call

Maybe you’re…

Wanting to accelerate your growth and earning potential as an engineer or manager.
Feeling like your career has stalled and you’re hitting a ceiling.
Feeling comfortable but not fulfilled. Let’s be honest, the salary is decent. But you’re struggling to stay motivated.

I can help you

Land a new role: whether you’re curious, applying or struggling with interviewing processes.
Get promoted: whether you’re still struggling for recognition, taking on more responsibility, or putting together a promotion case.
Plan out where you want to be longer term, whether progressing to senior roles or considering management/leadership opportunities.
Find your groove as a manager. The first few years of management are often intense and tricky to navigate as your responsibilities look very different.
Hone your craft. This might include regular discussions and feedback on communicating your ideas, better advocating for yourself, working with shareholders, managing work/life boundaries or finding an operating mode that is suited to you, sustainable and deeply satisfying.
Share my experience and give candid feedback on your own struggles and aspirations. Because I’m not your manager, feedback can be given and received in powerful ways.

→ Book a free discovery call

Why me?

I’ve been writing code for 20 years and spent 10 of those years building companies and products. During that time, I’ve worked all roles from junior engineer to cofounder, in anything from 3-person startups to Fintech unicorns.
I have interviewed hundreds of people. I know what separates good from great, what makes people stand out and how to avoid raising flags.
I’ve also built several teams from scratch, including the first two engineering teams at Almanac. The work of these teams was essential in helping us raise $45m to compete with the likes of Notion and Google Docs.
I have mentored junior developers; supported mid-level developers in becoming seniors and overseen senior to principal promotions in larger companies. I’ve also supported many developers in moving from IC to the management track.
Unlike other mentors, I am also a trained transformative coach, which means I’m equipped to go deeper: identifying & unhooking limiting beliefs; releasing emotional blocks and making real progress in recurring difficulties.

Founder coaching

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Coaching for founders, by a founder.
I help technical founders transition from experienced builders to high-impact leaders.

→ Book a free discovery call

Why coaching: The short answer

Building something new and leading your team is deeply rewarding. But it’s also intense: burnout is rife, boundaries are porous and overwork is the norm. How you show up for your team makes a huge difference. I’ve been there and I’ve supported many founders on the journey.

Why coaching: The longer answer

Performing at a high-level calls on all of you. Coaching can amplify your strengths and fortify your areas of struggle so that when the next crisis arrives, you’re ready and waiting.
You’re under pressure to deliver impact and to show up for your team. Your energy is a critical resource for your company. In the rush of it all, it’s easy to lose contact with yourself and what drives you.
Being a founder is 120mph each day. Bad habits and sloppy thinking can quickly set in amidst the chaos. We have so little time to personally reflect, even as we dedicate so much time to reflecting on what we’re building. Coaching is a space to check if your current approaches are working for you. If not, why not try something different?
It’s lonely at the top. Yes, your calendar is back-to-back. But it can often feel like you’re struggling in silence. Being able to speak candidly to someone outside of your bubble frees up your energy and creates renewed focus.
Many founders arrive where they are with zero training. This is a testament to their skill and execution, but it can also leave them feeling unprepared when others begin to look to them.

How coaching helps

Levelled-up leadership. How you show up has a massive impact on the rest of your team. Coaching can help you grow as a leader, deepen your sense of meaning and purpose in work and inspire those around you.
Accountability amplifier. Founders are often driven by accountability, and coaching can provide a potent support for setting and achieving goals.
Deep clarity. The coaching relationship bestows a foundation of clarity that will help you find the signal in the noise; to hone in on the deep work that makes a difference and resist the temptation to be doing it all.
Find your anchors. Leading a company rarely has neat boundaries. In the frenzy, we lose touch with the rest of our lives and what fuels us from the bottom up. You can’t show up for everyone if you lose contact with yourself. Coaching is a way of re-establishing your personal anchors.
Leading with courage and compassion. Strong, modern leaders unite courage and compassion so that we know when to listen and when to surge forward. Show up as a better leader for your team, whether through confident decision-making, improved emotional intelligence or just leading by example.
Honest feedback. Because of how people treat The Boss, leaders often struggle to get candid feedback. Having a coach as a neutral sounding-board can challenge perspectives, identify patterns and uproot assumptions.
Vertical development. Leaders are often skilled at filling their cup, but struggle to expand the cup itself. Coaching can help cultivate what Nick Petrie calls “vertical development”; a level of growth beyond the acquisition of skills and knowledge.

→ Book a free discovery call

Why me?

I spent the last 10 years building teams and companies and I’ve been writing code and building software for nearly 20 years. In 2019, I cofounded Almanac and together we raised $45m to change the way we do remote work. Prior to that, I was also the founder of an online meditation community which was acquired in 2017. Before taking on leadership roles, I worked as a Ruby engineer. I’ve also worked in larger tech companies like the Fintech unicorn, GoCardless. You can view my LinkedIn profile here.
I am familiar with the intensity and excitement of founder life, not to mention how all-consuming it can become. After going through burnout and divorce simultaneously in 2019, I decided to share my story. It was the most difficult piece I’ve ever written, but it was deeply rewarding and set me on to a new path in life.
Coaching for founders by a founder means you can talk to someone who understands MVPs, GTMs, and OKRs. If you’re moving fast and iterating weekly, you need someone who knows that environment, not a run-of-the-mill corporate or business coach.

How I’m different

I am honest about the highs and lows of leading and love supporting leaders to succeed without losing touch with the rest of their lives. I learned the hard way and forged a set of tools in the furnace of those environments.
Alongside my skills as a founder and technical thinker, I’ve supported myself with an eclectic range of other practices, like meditation, bodywork and daily writing. This experience—alongside my training as a transformative coach—means I’m comfortable supporting people in both the inner and outer work required to succeed.
My coaching is always personalised. There is no 3-step programme or 4-point protocol. While they sometimes sound appealing, they are often a disservice to the breadth of what we’re bringing into the world. Likewise, I draw on what feels salient and useful for each client rather than locking into one coaching modality.

Who do you work with?

I often work with founders in early-stage startups (pre-seed to Series A) because that’s where most of my experience lies. But I also enjoy supporting non-executive leaders in larger companies. If people are looking to you, there’s likely some powerful work we can do together.

You might be…

Grappling with a change in what’s expected of you or unsure how to incorporate difficult feedback.
Struggling with cofounder friction or difficult people on your team.
Struggling with anxiety and indecision; unable to balance work and the rest of life.
Feeling more tuned out, burned out & resentful—slipping into patterns of people-pleasing or feeling like what you do is never enough.
Craving more fulfilment and contentment amidst your daily work.

What it looks like

I work on a monthly retainer, with a minimum 3 months engagement. That’s two 1-hour sessions each month. This can be adapted if you need more frequent support or longer sessions.
I also offer email support during our engagement for things that come up between sessions.

→ Book a free discovery call

Psssst! If what you’re looking for is primarily advisory, I also work with teams and found as a consultant & advisor. Having built many products from scratch, sold side projects, and founded and grown teams of engineers, I can provide a wealth of experience that will help your product succeed.

Now

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Last updated: Thu 8 April, 2026

My main work is coaching founders and engineering leaders looking to deepen their purpose whilst increasing their impact. I share a newsletter every fortnight and post (almost) daily on LinkedIn.
I’m also a consultant supporting early-stage startups, alongside some work in helping founders with AI upskilling.
I’m serving folks as a TRE (Trauma/Tension Releasing Exercises) provider, after shaking had such a big impact on me. If you’re feeling tightly wound, chronically tense or just want to explore somatic work, you can learn more here.
My last experiment was to publish new writings for 100 days straight. You can read my reflections on the challenge.
This year I’m back to running ultramarathons! I missed my 30-miler due to injury, but won a 25km race instead! Next races: a 50 mile race (Ultra X Spring Series) and a 100k race (Race to the Stones).
I’m living in Bristol, UK, with my dog Reuben.

Resume

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent the last 10 years building teams and companies and have been writing code for nearly 20 years. Here are some highlights:

Co-founder and Head of Engineering at Almanac (now Blaze). I built the initial product, contributed to our roadmap and vision, created our hiring pipeline and brought on 15 engineers. Together, we raised a $9m seed round followed by a $34 million Series A. I also provided technical leadership on our version control and real-time, multi-user editing features. Day-to-day, I worked as Head of Engineering, leading our small engineering team to build a platform that competed with Google Docs and Notion.
Founder of OpenSit, an online meditation community where people could share public meditation journals. Starting as a solo passion project, OpenSit was acquired in 2017 and I went on to work with the new team as CTO. We developed a mindfulness app to assist people struggling with chronic pain in the US.
CTO of SchoolGuide.co.uk. I was responsible for new feature development, product roadmap, managing engineers, data quality, and delivery of 30,000 UK schools worth of data. Technical point of contact for both Rightmove and Mumsnet, two of the UK’s biggest property and parent sites.
Engineering Manager at GoCardless, a Fintech unicorn based in the UK. Managing two high-performing engineering teams whilst deputising as Product Manager, working closely with high-level stakeholders in company-level objectives & contributing to strategy around Open Banking and reconciliation.
Wrote a Perl script at the ripe old age of 14 that was featured in a Linux magazine.
I’m fluent in Ruby and still use it to build personal projects and in some hands on consultancy work.

You can view my LinkedIn profile here. If you’d like a detailed resume, please drop me a message.

This is a heading 1

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Filed under posts • Tagged: digital, mental health

Next level skateboard bruh organic internal links fanny pack listicle swag pork belly blog aesthetic you probably haven’t heard of them.

Here is a bold text. I hope you’re also ready to deal with italic too. Oh and don’t forget external links.

This is a heading 2

Coloring book sus distillery twee enamel pin chicharrones pop-up letterpress vice tumblr hella prism. Salvia hell of coloring book, shabby chic marfa hashtag banh mi.

Ultramarathon race reports

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I started running ultramarathons in 2018, after reading Born to Run.

I’m not alone: The Guardian ran a good article on the phenomenal rise of the ultramarathon.

If you’re curious but understandably daunted by the idea of running that far, ultra-veteran Damian Hall’s 10 things no one tells you before you run an ultra-marathon is an excellent read. I also wrote a piece on why ultramarathons are different.

Personally, I love running hills and trails and most of my races are on those types of terrain.