Hello from LA.
Here I am in my friend Max’s new Los Feliz home, watching the light move through the eucalyptus trees, an $18 Erewhon smoothie in hand, hating myself and missing this life in equal measure. Six tough years in Venice, and I woke up this morning realizing the east side was the answer the whole time. Dang. You live, you learn.
Maybe there’s a second LA chapter somewhere in the works. I just have to convince my wife to relocate, again.
I’m here for a few things: a private event with the music industry, time with old friends, some potential investor meetinga and then slowly making my way up to Big Sur for our Esalen retreat. This retreat always acts as a reset. Four days of deep meditation and dance, no wifi, the Pacific somewhere underneath. It feels like the kind of time that strips things back to what was always already there. I keep thinking about what drew Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, and Aldous Huxley to that particular stretch of coastline. Five years in, I think I’m beginning to understand.
Go at least once. See what you too can find.
Something to Practice: Finding refuge.
In Buddhism, there’s a foundational teaching called the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. For those of us practicing outside a monastery or religious connotations, that translates loosely to our capacity for waking up, a path worth walking, and a community that holds us to it. They’re not abstract ideals. They’re structures. Shelters the mind learns to return to when it’s no longer sure where it is.
But lately I’ve been contemplating something else: what do we actually take refuge in today?
Our phones, probably. The scroll. The inbox. The feed that never fully empties. The average person touches their phone over 2,600 times a day. We’ve built, without quite meaning to, a perfectly engineered shelter that asks nothing of us and returns just enough to keep us coming back. Dopamine without depth. The feeling of connection without the weight of it.
The ancient texts name false refuges too. Praise, gain, pleasure, status. The things we reach for believing they’ll finally settle something restless inside us. They don’t. But the reaching is so habitual it can begin to feel like living.
And we’ve added new ones. The news cycle, which offers the feeling of being informed while quietly replacing any real sense of agency. Celebrities, whose lives we track with an intimacy we rarely offer our own. And lately, AI.
There’s something worth examining in how quickly we’ve begun outsourcing not just our tasks but our thinking, our processing, even our loneliness to a machine that reflects us back without ever actually knowing us. These aren’t judgments. They’re just worth noticing.
What we take refuge in shapes us. Slowly, mostly without our permission. Real refuge is quieter and less immediately satisfying. The breath, when you actually feel it rather than think about it. The friend who tells you what you don’t want to hear. The practice you return to not because it soothes you but because it orients you. The community that holds a mirror rather than a mood board.
This week, once, when you reach for your phone out of pure habit, just pause before you get there. Ask yourself what you’re actually looking for. You don’t have to answer cleanly. The asking is the whole thing.
Something to Learn: Not being owned by our desires.
Or more precisely: not being quietly owned by it.
Every day in this hyper-individualist, instant gratification culture, we are seduced. Western thought has largely framed desire as the engine of a life well-lived: money, sex, power, status, followers, the right kind of recognition from the right kind of people. We’ve dressed it up beautifully. Called it ambition. Called it vision. Called it knowing what you want. Blah.
But sit with this honestly for a moment. Has being at the mercy of your desires actually worked out for you?
Most of us would rather not look at this directly: the root of our suffering isn’t the circumstances of our lives. It’s the relentless wanting that moves underneath all of it. The grasping. Desire, unobserved, has always worked this way. It shapeshifts. It relocates the horizon.
I’ve watched this in myself for years, read: the wellness industry version of it. The next project, the next launch, the next milestone that would mean something had finally landed. It never quite did. There was always another desire waiting just behind the one I’d just satisfied, patient, already dressed and ready to go.
Of course, this isn’t an argument against wanting things. Goals matter. Inspiration matters. Longing, real longing, can be one of the most honest things about life. The question is whether you’re moving toward something or whether something has its hand around the back of your neck.
Something to Enjoy: Watch Rental Family.
Set in Tokyo, it follows Brendan Fraser as a waffling American actor who takes up a job with a rental family agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers: a son, a husband, a presence at someone’s table. I won’t give too much away about the movie but I invite you to take a peek.
Director Hikari holds the movie with real restraint and what emerges is something devastating about what connection actually costs us and what it gives back.
The spiritual undertow runs through the whole film without ever being loud about it. Impermanence in every relationship that forms and dissolves over the course of a single afternoon. The idea of not-self, visible in the way Fraser’s character loses and finds himself inside each role he inhabits, until the boundary between performance and person becomes genuinely unclear. Underneath all of it, the idea that compassion, genuine compassion, doesn’t require permanence to be real. Somehow, you can show up fully for someone you’ll never see again and that this is not lesser love. Actually, It might be the purest kind.
Highly encourage a viewing!
gentle—noise update
Two sold-out events in New York the last two weeks, back to back, and honestly it’s been so amazing to watch a community beginning to take shape there. I’ve wanted to spend more time cultivating it but work and travel have had other plans. Stay tuned for June events, which will be shared with paid subscribers first in the coming days.
I’ll also be in Berlin in a few weeks, leading an experience at a venue I’ve been wanting to teach at since it opened. If you’re there, let me know.
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