Before the World Gets You

It is 6:15am, Your alarm went off fifteen minutes ago. You have already checked your emails. You are already thinking about the meeting, the deadline, the thing you said yesterday that you are not sure landed right.

You have been awake for less than fifteen minutes and you are already performing.

This is not a morning routine problem, or a discipline problem, it's what happens when you have spent years training yourself to be functional before you have even had the chance to feel what is actually here.

And the cost of that is not just tiredness.

It is the slow, persistent disconnection from your own life, the flatness that follows you into the evenings. The sense of watching yourself go through the motions of something that looks right and feels hollow.

I KNow this because I lived it

Ten years on a trading floor at JPMorgan, up before six, in the office by seven, running on adrenaline and ambition until the day I lay in savasana at a yoga class with a six-figure bonus and cried my eyes out. I had everything and, yet I could not feel any of it.

So I started waking up fifteen minutes earlier, an attempt to take my life back and have time for me before the world got hold of me.

It was the most important fifteen minutes of my day and it changed everything.

Slowly but surely, something shifted in those fifteen minutes that ten years of trying had never touched.

I started to feel again, slowly, quietly, and the world started to sparkle again.

What you will notice:

You will feel calmer and not in the performed calm of someone holding it together, and actually boiling inside. Actual calm, the kind that comes from your nervous system registering, maybe for the first time today, that you are not about to be killed by a lion (yes, that's what our nervous system thinks when we are constantly under stress).

You will feel more like yourself and not the version of you that shows up in meetings and manages everyone else's emotions. The quieter, realer, more incredible one underneath.

You will feel alive, briefly, gently and unmistakably.

And you will want more of that.

This is free, it will always be free.

Because this is the thing I wish someone had handed me in year one on the trading floor.

And because fifteen minutes is all it takes to remember who you actually are.

A 15-Minute Morning Breathwork Practice for the One Who Has Forgotten What It Feels Like to Be Alive

It is 6:15am, Your alarm went off fifteen minutes ago. You have already checked your emails. You are already thinking about the meeting, the deadline, the thing you said yesterday that you are not sure landed right.