Ancient > Artificial

On one side was the path of Bhakti: heart, devotion, deep presence, and unconditional love. On the other was the Buddhist practice of clear inquiry, observing the mind, and mapping the inner landscape. Together, they represent what can only be called Ancient Intelligence. Thousands of years of human devotion culminating in an understanding of what it actually means to be grounded, aware, and awake.

It struck me as a funny bit of cosmic irony that both share the same acronym: AI.

Yet while one AI runs on silicon, neural nets, and massive energy-dependent server farms, the other has run for millennia on human consciousness, breath, and inner inquiry.

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In my work as an executive and leadership coach, I’ve been holding space for deep conversations on artificial intelligence and human potential. I’ve brought together leaders across tech, medicine, and the arts to explore a central question: As this technology rapidly reshapes the world, what does the future of human potential look like, and how do we engage these tools mindfully?

Ancient Intelligence Applied to Artificial Intelligence

Sitting at the retreat, watching the light filter through the trees outside the window, another dimension of that question surfaced for me: What happens when we bring the first AI –Ancient Intelligence– into our conversation about the new one?

Across every industry, we are consumed by how fast external computing power is evolving. But as machines grow more capable, a very real leadership risk is being uncovered at the same time. We aren’t just building tools to process data faster; we are building systems that imitate human thought and decision-making.

The danger isn’t simply that the technology might be wrong. The greater danger is that we might stop exercising our own internal intelligence that allows us to notice when it is.

The fast-moving world of modern technology and advances in artificial intelligence aren’t making ancient intelligence obsolete — it’s making it essential.

The Fluency Trap

In my podcast interviews, I hear a familiar mix of wonder and anxiety. People worry about AI replacing jobs, eroding skills, and even out-pacing human intellect.

But as a coach, I see a more immediate risk unfolding right now: the fluency trap.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t just deliver information; it delivers it with extraordinary confidence, speed, and yes, even linguistic elegance. When a system sounds that persuasive, human psychology just sort of glitches.

Cognitive scientists call it automation bias. It’s our tendency to trust fluent, automated outputs and dismiss our own critical evaluation.

Essentially, when an answer feels effortless and assured, we passively accept it. So, the risk isn’t just that AI will give us incorrect answers. The risk is that we will stop asking the right questions.

The Mirror of Conditioning

This brings us to an even more uncomfortable mirror: our own conditioning.

As the scholar Robert Thurman has pointed out, much of human life runs on programming we didn’t consciously choose. We operate through layers of habit, family patterns, cultural expectations, personal fears, and unexamined biases. These narratives are repeated so often they begin to feel like objective truth.

AI has its own form of conditioning. Its responses are shaped by input data, design parameters, human constructs, feedback loops, and the prompts we feed it.

Trapped in an Echo Chamber

When an unconditioned human mind interacts with an algorithm designed to align with user intent, a subtle feedback loop forms — a sort of echo chamber:

• Unexamined human conditioning shapes how they prompt the AI;

• AI mirrors assumptions back in polished, highly persuasive prose;

• Users read that output and take it as confirmation that we were right all along.

If we do not recognize what is shaping our own thinking, we end up trapped in an echo chamber of supercomputed validation and confirmation bias.

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The Ancient Toolkit: Discernment and Witness

This is precisely where ancient traditions offer a radical antidote.

Over two thousand five hundred years ago, the Buddha arrived in a small town called Kesaputta. The villagers—the Kālāmas—were exhausted. Teacher after teacher had passed through, each claiming to hold the ultimate truth while dismantling the teachings of those who came before.

Confused, the villagers asked: How do we know who is telling the truth? The response was preserved in the Kālāma Sutta and feels strikingly relevant here.

The Buddha didn’t tell them to follow his authority, nor did he tell them to blindly trust their own unexamined feelings. Instead, he cautioned against accepting ideas simply because they are repeated often, handed down by tradition, delivered with eloquent rhetoric, or backed by an impressive title.

His advice was to: Examine it. Test it in practice. Look at the fruit the idea bears in real life.

When interacting with artificial intelligence, this level of intentional inquiry is essential. In contemplative traditions, this inquiry is rooted in becoming the Witness - the practice of cultivating sati, or clear meta-awareness. It is the ability to step back, observe the movement of the mind, and recognize a thought as a mental event rather than absolute reality.

Psychologists refer to this as metacognition, which is basically just knowing what we know, and having the self-awareness to recognize when we don’t.

AI agents are engineered to eliminate friction, generating instant, confident responses — but human wisdom happens in the hesitation.

Becoming the witness creates a crucial, conscious space between AI’s output and our acceptance of it. In that essential pause, we move from passive consumer to active discernment. This gives us room to consider why we are so quick to agree with the response. To think about whether it’s offering genuine insight or just confirming what we wanted to hear, and what might be missing from the answer they so eloquently provided.

The space between output and acceptance may become one of the most vital human capabilities of the digital age.

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Ancient Intelligence in an AI Age

We are living through a historic paradox.

On one hand, we are building increasingly powerful, intelligent computational tools. On the other hand, the defining questions of this age are profoundly human.

In my work coaching leaders struggling with implementing AI in the workplace, my focus has never been on how AI can make us better or faster. Instead, the question I bring to these conversations is: What does the future of human potential look like, and how do we use these tools intentionally and mindfully?

AI Raises the Stakes for Ancient Intelligence

If we want to live mindfully in an age of artificial intelligence, we must cultivate the inner discipline that keeps us awake, grounded, and discerning.

When technology makes answers effortless, it demands that we become far more intentional about cultivating ancient intelligence like agency over our attention, discernment in an age of rhetoric, and a capacity to withstand uncertainty, leaving room for — I don’t know.

Meditation, mindfulness, ongoing inquiry, and cultivating the witness are the essential foundations for remaining conscious, intentional leaders operating in the age of AI.

We do not need to fear artificial intelligence, nor do we need to yield agency to it. As AI tools become more sophisticated, so must our self-awareness and discernment deepen to match them.

Artificial intelligence will not make ancient intelligence obsolete. Instead, it is more necessary than ever.

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Mindful Minute: Have you noticed yourself surrendering quickly to the information AI gives you? Are there ways you can increase your discernment or introduce pause before taking AI guidance at face value? Have you picked up any tips to share with others on how to approach AI information more critically? Let’s help each other become more discerning. I love reading your comments, thank you!

AI Champions Big FREE Virtual Conference, 29 October

One of the things I believe is that AI is here to stay, at least for now. It reminds me of when the internet was just becoming a useful tool for everyday people. It created a technological shift that would go on to remake the world.

Now, I’m not sure if AI is going to have the same impact, but I know that I don’t want to be left behind in this brave new world of artificial intelligence. So, keeping tabs on it is important. That’s why I was thrilled to learn about this upcoming conference on the topic. I hope you’ll join me in learning more!

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This week’s subscriber meditation is an invitation to stop and ask that question, not with your thinking mind but with your body.

This mindful meditation is just over 11 minutes long, and it’s yours! Thank you for subscribing.

Together We’ll Practice:

• Arriving with ease and p…

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I ask because I’ve spent much of this year on the patient side of that question, and I know how it feels to talk to someone who is typing away. Barely listening. Hardly engaged.

Appointments are hard enough to get to begin with. Then, once you’re in the room, your time together is short, and the person across from you is often looking at a screen, hunting for records that should already be there.

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I recently sat down with a friend of fifteen years to talk about exactly this. Dr. Pankaj Rajvanshi is a gastroenterologist and liver specialist who also works in obesity management. What I admire most about him is his curiosity, so I wasn’t surprised that he’s excited about AI in medicine. What surprised me was his reason. It’s not efficiency or insights. He’s excited because he wants his patient back, and he thinks AI can help with that.

What Happens in a 15-Minute Appointment

Pankaj walked me through what happens in a fifteen-minute visit. Before and during it, he’s pulling together a chart, checking which tests were run and when, considering insurance coverage and prior authorization, and watching the clock, because a visit that runs long probably won’t be paid in full by insurance. That’s why he’s busy looking at the computer and not always at you.

He hopes AI will be able to absorb that work: the data gathering, the synthesis, the insurance paperwork. In his words, the intelligence layer goes to the machine, and the judgment and connection layer comes back to the doctor. Imagine walking into a treatment room, and your doctor already has ten years of your medical history distilled into a paragraph with suggestions for things to discuss relevant to your particular health conditions. They will be free to spend the focus of the visit on you.

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What Can I Do? What Should I Do?

This was the part of our conversation that stuck for me. Pankaj says a physician asks themselves two questions. The first is what can I do? AI can help with that, and increasingly it will have better suggestions than any of us. The second is what should I do?

That question depends more on the patient than the doctor. This is when they must consider not only who you are, the things you fear, the family support you have, and other factors that no amount of testing can lay bare. Pankaj described how the real questions in the patient’s room are rarely about actual results and more like: What’s going to happen to me?

That’s where wisdom and compassion come in, the two wings of mindfulness. AI can supply an enormous amount of information, but knowing what to do with it still takes the judgment and consideration of a person.

Hopeful, Not Naive

I don’t want to oversell Pankaj’s optimism. Instead, we talked about risks on both sides of the exam table.

For doctors, the danger is over-reliance on AI. If a young physician leans on the tool from day one, when do they built the judgment they need to ask the right questions and take the right actions?

For patients, no AI system gets everything right. The goal is for it to make you a smarter patient, but not replace seeking medical treatment altogether.

Next, there’s access. Will these tools bring better care to people who already have the best in the world, or will they finally reach people who’ve been left out of the healthcare equation? In our conversation a good answer to this inequality question didn’t surface. It’s important for healthcare leaders to choose carefully what is automated and what is protected.

Going Beyond Medicine

You don’t have to be a doctor to feel the weight of this shifting technology. Every field is deciding what to hand off to the machine and what to keep innately human. Dr. Pankaj Rajvanshi’s answer – let the tool help us decide what is possible and let the human decide what should be done.

I came away from the conversation feeling hopeful actually. Obviously the risks of implementation are high but there’s emotionally available people like my friend, Pankaj, who are wrestling with these big ideas. He still believes the best version of our future is one that brings doctors and patients closer together with improved technological resources.

The full conversation just went live on the Mindful Momentum Leadership Podcast. I’d love for you to listen.

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Mindful Moment: What are some of the ways that you hope AI can improve healthcare outcomes? If you’ve seen something that fills you with optimism about how the tool can be used, please share it with the rest of us!

I’m not talking about freedom in the way we usually mean it — like having freedom to speak my mind or to choose my own path. Instead, I mean something a little more profound. I’m talking about freedom from judgment. Freedom from the need to prove my worth, or to behave a certain way to be liked.

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That kind of freedom, I’ve come to understand, can only be uncovered from within.

This week’s meditation is an invitation to find that place within you where you are already free.

So, settle into a comfortable place and together, we will find freedom once more.

I hope you enjoy this meditation on finding personal freedom.

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An important note before you go to meditation…

This practice is a companion to good psychological care. It is not a replacement for it.

If at any time this practice feels like too much, let it go. It is not for today. You can always come back to it another time. Let there be gentleness and compassion for yourself.

And now, if you are ready, please find yourself a seat and click on the audio recording above to go deeper.

Mindful Minute: If something arose for you after listening, I’d love to hear about it! Let’s talk about freedom. What does it mean to you? Are there different ways you are free with different people? Different circumstances? Different situations? Share as much as you are comfortable with — your thoughts help others.

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The Real-World Dilemma: When the Ego Gets Triggered

It is easy to feel love on a fairly comfortable plane ride, while seated on a retreat cushion, or while watching videos of gurus preaching about and raising awareness of it. But the real test begins when we step back into the real world. Into our living rooms, into the office, or even around the family dinner table.

Inevitably, life offers us people who push our buttons. They might be a friend, a loved one, or a colleague who might act in a way that ignites irritation, defensiveness, or even outright anger in us. In what feels like a fraction of a second, the old programming we’ve internalized takes over.

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Our ego wants to get back at them. It wants to defend its territory, prove its point, or sulk away in seething resentment.

We are often advised to simply enforce our boundaries. And, while boundaries are necessary, running away every time our buttons are pushed leaves us trapped in a perpetual loop.

The funny thing is, the people who trigger us are almost always acting as mirrors—reflecting our own unhealed shadow material, our unexamined projections, and even past wounds back to us.

The Engine of Healing: Integrating Kelly Schwegel’s Framework

Though she was not present at the retreat, my teacher, Kelly Schwegel, has recently taught me a practical formula that I had already begun applying in my daily life. Sitting at the retreat provided a profound container where her teachings and the retreat’s wisdom converged, showing me how this framework operates in real time.

When a trigger flares, Kelly teaches four foundational principles of emotional alchemy:

• Drop the Guilt (Immediately): The moment you feel anger or defensiveness, do not judge yourself. Self-condemnation such as, “I should be past this by now,” only creates a secondary wall of ego.

• Observe and Go Through It: Do not suppress the feeling or pretend to be spiritually above it. Feel the heat in your body, observe the contraction, and go all the way through it.

• What You Can See Is What You Can Heal: A trigger is a diagnostic revelation. Shadow material cannot be healed while buried. The moment it rises into your awareness, it becomes visible—and therefore healable.

• Surrender to the Higher Self: Stop trying to solve the dynamic with your defensive ego. Instead, hand the reaction entirely over to your Higher Self, asking Divine Awareness to take over in the moment.

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Along with this framework comes the practice of Radical Forgiveness. You cannot heal if you are anchored to the past—whether that past was twenty years ago or the past that just happened thirty seconds ago.

Radical forgiveness means completely letting go of the past — even the past that just happened. Wipe the slate clean and start fresh once more.

Turning Triggers into Presence

Here is how these principles of emotional alchemy translate in the messy real world:

The Self-Inquiry Audit (Kelly Schwegel & Shadow Work)

When someone irritates or wounds you, pause before responding and ask:

The Programming: Am I subconsciously expecting or programming them to show up this way based on my past scripts?

The Reflection: Is what irritates me about them an unacknowledged part of my own shadow or past conditioning?

The Hand-Off: Can I stop trying to win this with my ego and consciously ask my Higher Self to take over right now?

Sound & Sacred Anchor (Krishna Das & Devotional Practice)

When your nervous system is hijacked by anger, logic fails. That clinch in your stomach. Your rapidly beating heart. That’s somatic witnessing. Interrupt the story in your mind using sacred repetition.

Practice: Repeat silently or even out loud: I am Loving Awareness.

Effect: The repetition breaks the reactivity loop, pulls your consciousness out of an angry narrative, and anchors it back into a witness point of view.

Compassionate Boundaries (Sharon Salzberg & Metta)

Practice: Ground yourself in universal compassion.

Direct four simple wishes first inward to release guilt, then outward to the person triggering you. Think something like:

• May you be safe.

• May you be peaceful.

• May you be healthy.

• May you live with ease.

Effect: Practicing loving-kindness allows you to draw firm boundaries when needed, and speak from self-respect rather than defensive anger.

Act from spacious presence either by letting it go completely or by setting clear boundaries with love and without hostility.

Radical Forgiveness (Presence in Action)

Practice: When someone acts out of ego, I can let go of what just happened. That’s radical forgiveness.

Effect: This releases the urge to harbor resentment, allowing you to meet the next second renewed, without lingering emotional debt.

When in doubt or unable to consider a way forward, surrender the ego’s desire to outsmart the situation. Let your Higher Self take over in this moment.

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It’s not always easy to know what to do when you have allowed yourself to be triggered by someone else's actions or statements. I hope these suggestions bring you some relief in those moments.

Mindful Minute: Are there ways that you talk yourself back into alignment when you are triggered? Tell us about it. Your experiences could definitely help others who are struggling. Thank you for reading and sharing.

Note: We are touching on some emotionally sensitive topics. If any of this struck an especially sensitive chord with you, I encourage you to speak with a professional.

Tears gently spilled from my eyes. Over four beautiful days at the Ram Dass Legacy Retreat, I sat in a hall filled with his enduring spirit. Though Ram Dass is no longer alive in physical form, his presence was vibrantly alive in every room. Through intimate anecdotes shared by those who walked closely with him, archival video footage of his talks, and sessions led by teachers holding his lineage, his core transmission felt as immediate and urgent as ever.

Lineage of Love

Underlying every talk, song, and story was the unmistakable presence of Maharaj-ji (Neem Karoli Baba)—Ram Dass’s guru. Throughout the retreat, Maharaj-ji was acknowledged as the ultimate driving force behind Ram Dass, Krishna Das, David Nichtern, and so many of the masters present. It was his lineage of unconditional love and service that set this whole energetic river into motion.

Listening to these teachers across their varied traditions, I realized that beneath the different terms and languages they use, every single speaker bowed to the same truth.

If I could distill everything gathered into one high-concentration elixir, it would simply be Love.

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Ego in Drive

Flashing back to that airplane seat and that ride home from the retreat when my mind played through my whole life on rewind. I saw all the places where I had struggled, fought, and hurt. I saw how often my ego was driving the situation. There it was, haughtily demanding to be right. To be the one holding onto hurt, the one wanting to retaliate when I was wounded, and even sometimes withdrawing into defensive armor.

I thought I was growing over the years, but a part of me was still holding on, still insecure, still measuring my worth by achievement, by pleasing others, or by trying to appear in a certain way.

On that plane, a real shift occurred for me. I realized I no longer care about validating my life with external achievements and carefully curated personas.

What matters is making my life count by plunging into my own capacity to love.

What is important is to drop the feeling of clinging, possessiveness, and any hidden motivations, and simply become love.

What Real Love Is (And What It Is Not)

So then, What is Love? Before we can embody this presence, we have to untangle what real love actually is.

Modern culture has conditioned us to confuse love with attachment. We often say -I love you- but what we often mean is “I need you to act a certain way so I feel safe,” or “You are mine,” or “Remember that time you hurt me?”

True love has no room for jealousy, control, or keeping score. It is not a fleeting emotion; true love is an indestructible field of non-dual awareness.

And, as the retreat leaders and spiritual traditions remind us, this field of true love goes by many names:

• Maharaj-ji (Neem Karoli Baba) embodied it purely through radical action and unconditional presence: unconditional service, total acceptance, and the simple, profound command to “Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God.”

• Ram Dass called it Loving Awareness—the unconditional witness within us that watches life unfold without judgment, a legacy sparked by Maharaj-ji and kept alive through his teachings and community.

• Krishna Das points to love as our essential, underlying nature—channeling Maharaj-ji’s presence through sacred sound to strip away our personal armor.

• David Nichtern describes the field as a vast, sacred one of inclusive compassion, deeply shaped by his own path and the wisdom of this lineage.

• Acharya Shunya speaks of it as Param Prem-Roopa—the ultimate Vedic non-dual love that powers the entire universe.

• Sharon Salzberg calls it Real Love—an inherent capacity of the heart cultivated through deliberate loving-kindness (Metta).

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Becoming Love

Clearly, Becoming Love, is not a weekend to-do task. It is a life’s work. It is the goal of a lifetime. And it’s something you never get done.

So, I don’t write this as someone who has mastered it. I write as someone who is choosing to learn out loud, with an audience. I am someone stepping into this arena with all my humanness laid bare, with my past conditioning and even my moments of shortcoming.

I am choosing to make this practice of becoming love my life’s work.

I want to make my time on this beautiful earth count. And not with achievements, appearances, or outcomes — but by choosing to become love.

It doesn’t matter how many turns on the wheel we get or what lies beyond this life. What matters is choosing, right now, to let everything be Fuel for Love.

I invite you to practice right here, right now —with me.

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Mindful Minute: Think about all the ways in which you can recognize the presence of Loving Awareness in your life. Maybe share one or two with other readers.

Now, consider ways that you can amplify these moments. Try to squeeze as much goodness from these juicy moments as you can so they can grow and sustain you.

They were two of the three guides who had led our group to Everest Base Camp —and they were missing. They had been guiding a group to Kailash Mansarovar when all contact with them was lost.

At the time, I wrote:

When I was struggling on that mountain, they held hope for me.

Now, we hold hope for them.

And for two weeks, we did.

We prayed. We waited. We hoped.

Today, I return with words I did not want to write.

Avi and Ranjon are not coming home.

Even though their bodies have not been found, their families have begun their last funerary rites.

The Mountain Chose

For the past two weeks, I have been walking with them once more in my mind. Together we journey from Kathmandu to Lukla, from Lukla to Everest Base Camp, and all the way back.

Every single step I took on that journey was a step they also walked with me.

So as I retrace those steps, I keep returning to the words that began my Everest journey: The mountain chooses.

Six weeks before we left for Nepal, my right hip gave way during a training hike. Suddenly, the journey I had prepared for seemed impossible.

I called Dipak, the owner of Nepal Trekking Planner, and told him I might not be going.

He said something I carried all the way to Everest Base Camp and that stayed with me long after. He said, “Come. Let the mountain choose.”

And the mountain did.

It let me come.

And at the start of my climb, in Kathmandu, that’s when I met Avi.

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Avi, the Wise One

Avi was our lead guide.

Day after day, he walked with me.

I was slow. He asked me to slow down even more.

Vistare, vistare.

Slowly, slowly.

“It is not a race. You don’t have to reach at a certain time.”

On difficult mornings, when the exhaustion and pain of the previous day were still needling me, Avi would remind me to “Leave yesterday on the mountain. Today, we begin again.”

One breath. One step. Then another. One after the other.

I came home and wrote about that lesson. It became one of my five lessons from the mountain: no matter how hard yesterday was, we can begin again.

But there were other things I never wrote about.

They Knew the Mountain Differently

I didn’t write about what happened when we reached the unstable sections of the Khumbu Glacier.

You could hear avalanches in the surrounding mountains. Rocks were falling. The glacier itself is constantly changing.

Before we crossed an unstable section, Avi and the other guides went first. They moved quickly to the other side, checked that the terrain was solid, and only then signaled that it was safe for us to cross.

I once asked why they would risk their lives for us.

“The mountains are home to us.”

There was awe. Respect. Belonging.

Avi talked often about how unstable the area was becoming. He told me that even the location of Everest Base Camp was changing more frequently as the glacier changed.

“Anu ma’am, you are lucky you came now.”

He wondered what this place would look like in ten or twenty years.

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The Heartbeat of the Mountain

I was with Avi almost exactly three years ago. I keep wondering how much more he had learned in those three years. Because Avi didn’t simply guide people through the mountains, he listened to them.

He knew their heartbeat.

He listened to their songs and their cries.

Recently, Avi published a detailed investigative article about the Broad Peak avalanche. He examined what happens when things go terribly wrong in the mountains — investigating the dangers, gaps in preparedness, and the agonizing hours when lives might still be saved.

He asked difficult questions. Questions like:

• Why was the rescue delayed?

• What caused the delay in communication?

• What might have happened if the avalanche had been reported sooner?

• Could those lost hours have cost lives?

Reading those questions now feels almost unbearable because only weeks later, Avi himself would disappear in yet another natural disaster.

Avi knew the mountains. He knew how fragile life could be there.

He knew how quickly the line between safety and catastrophe could shift.

He knew their unending beauty. And he knew their danger.

Perhaps that is what it means to know the heartbeat of a mountain—to hear not only its songs, but its tender cries too.

The Magic at Tengboche

At Tengboche, we meditated inside the monastery. Prayer wheels, prayer flags and mani stones were everywhere. I remember sitting before the colossal Buddha and wondering how something so enormous had reached a place without roads.

Eventually, I stopped needing an explanation. There are moments when explanation gives way to wonder. I called it magic.

The next morning, Avi gave us another mountain lesson. From this point onward, he told us, no matter who was walking beside us, we were walking alone.

I asked him what he meant.

At this altitude, he explained, it becomes a journey of mental strength. It is you and your thoughts. How you respond determines the rest of your journey.

I laughed saying “Dipak says the mountain chooses. You are telling me the choice is mine.”

Avi smiled. “Yes ma’am. Mr. Dipak is right. And I am right.”

I understood the paradox only later. Dipak was inviting me to surrender where I had no control. Avi was reminding me to understand where I did.

And Then There Was Ranjon

Ranjon was different.

He didn’t speak English. His Hindi was broken. This was his first time with an English-speaking group, and sometimes I could sense his nervousness. But Ranjon didn’t need many words.

He was vibrant. Full of life.

He sang. He danced. He reminded me of my two sons. And somewhere along that long journey to EBC, he began to feel a little like one of our own.

Maybe that’s part of the reason it’s all the more sad to know that because of this glacier collapse, he leaves behind a pregnant wife.

A child will come into this world knowing a father through photographs, through stories, and through the memories of those who knew and loved him.

There are some losses for which language feels inadequate.

This is one of them.

Remembering Avi and Ranjon

A couple of weeks ago, I shared photographs of Avi and Ranjon because I wanted to surround them, and everyone who loved them, with light, prayer, love, and hope.

Today, I share their photographs for a different reason.

I want you to know them.

Not as two names among the thousands lost and missing.

Not simply as two guides.

But as Avi and Ranjon. Men with dreams and goals and whole lives beyond and a part of the mountain.

They were two young men who laughed with us.

Walked with us. Waited for us. Protected us.

When the terrain became dangerous, they went first.

When I wasn’t sure I could take another step, they believed I could.

Three years ago, Avi taught me that there are things we can choose and there are things we must surrender.

The Mountain Chooses

Avi. Ranjon.

You walked beside me for only a few weeks, but you touched my life forever.

So, I will keep looking for the magic.

I will keep beginning again.

When the path becomes difficult, I know I will still hear you gently guiding me.

Vistare, vistare. Slowly, slowly.

One breath.
One step.
Then another.

Thank you, my friends.

Support Nepal

This disaster has struck Nepal to the core, leaving thousands still missing and now presumed dead. The need inside the country is still great. Not only were lives lost, but now they are suffering an economic crisis as a result of the fallout. So, if you’d like to make a contribution to help people in need, please consider a financial donation to one of these organizations that are on the ground helping:

• Government of Nepal, Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund

• Red Cross of Nepal

That’s what happened when I met Noeyoni.

Parallel Pathways to Poetry

We’d crossed paths before, years earlier, and reconnected only recently. When we did, we discovered that around the same time, in the same stretch of upheaval, we had each written a book of poetry. Neither of us knew the other was writing. Neither of us knew the other’s book existed until we sat down together and opened them side by side. There we noticed the same themes. Courage. Joy. Abundance. Written a world of experience apart, yet somehow saying the same things.

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I don’t have a neat explanation for it, and I’m not sure I want one.

What I do have is Noeyoni’s words resonating with me long after we met — she shared the difference between living with intentions and intentional living.

They sound like the same phrase, but they are not.

Living a Checklist Life

Living with intentions is a checklist life. You set the goal. You track the goal. You measure your every day against whether it’s moving you toward the goal. It’s regimental — you’re always on your toes, always auditing yourself against the plan. We’ve all watched people build entire lives this way and arrive somewhere in their advanced age having done everything right, but still asking whether it was enough.

Intentional living, as she puts it, is different in one crucial way: you set the intention, then you let go of the timeline.

You don’t control when it arrives. It might take years. Decades even. It might take a form you don’t recognize until it hits you. But you stop trying to control the outcome, and you stop believing the path you’ve mapped out is the only one that gets you there.

I’ve spent a long time as a recovering checklist-doer. Most of the leaders I coach have too. We were trained to believe that control is competence — that if we plan hard enough, track closely enough, grip the KPIs tightly enough, the outcome is guaranteed. Noeyoni’s own body, it turns out, helped to teach her otherwise. Seven accidents over six years and every single one impacted the same vertebra — one she later learned corresponds to the communication chakra.

She calls this experience a blessing now. At the time, I imagine it felt like anything but.

Turning Adversity into Blessings

What she did with that forced stillness from these injuries suffered over time, was to write. Every morning she awoke and from 4-6am, for six months, she wrote. No rough drafts, no do-overs. She just wrote what showed up when she let it. The book that came out of it, As You Be, reads less like something she wrote and more like something she took dictation for.

There’s one line she said in our talk — almost in passing: where do we actually have control? Genuine control? Because the checklist life is an illusion of control laid over the same uncertainty everyone else is living in. The only real choice, Noeyoni suggested, is whether you spend your energy gripping the wheel or if you notice where the road is already taking you.

Some of what Noeyoni and I talked about — the anger she carried toward the divine, her becoming an unwitting therapist to a therapist, and the years it took her to stop mistaking control for care — these things really resonated with me.

If any of this is landing the way it landed for me, I encourage you to listen to the full interview. When you’re ready for more, Noeyoni’s collection As You Be is a great place to explore. It’s currently available in digital form — the limited edition print run sold out — it’s the kind of book you don’t read in one sitting, so much as return to over and over again.

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CORRECTION: Around minute 23:30, Noeyoni references Vinyasa Yoga when she was referring to Vipassana Yoga.

Mindful Moment: Are there ways you have learned to let go of control? Are there timelines you have released? What steps are you taking to live more intentionally? I’d love to hear them!

Poetry Collections: Check out the two poetry collections that we read from in this podcast. Both have inspired so many people. I hope you enjoy!

• Noeyoni’s As You Be

• Anu Arora’s Ignite Your Light

A quick note: This piece touches on bodily injuries and spiritual struggle as part of someone’s story. If any of it stirs something up for you, you don’t have to sit with it alone. I encourage you to find a trusted advisor who can help.

There’s a particular kind of tired that comes from seeking permission outwardly. Permission to feel good, permission to know what’s happening next, and even permission to trust yourself.

This week’s practice is an invitation to turn that permission-seeking gaze inward.

We b…

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Does it ever feel like life is coming at you in waves?

Not the neat, Taoist metaphor where every descent is followed by an equal and opposite rise. You are probably most familiar with them embodied as the classic yin-yang symbol.

No, this time I’m talking about real waves. The ones that are messy and uneven and churning ceaselessly. The ones that threaten to drag you down and hold you under until you emerge thrashing for the surface, gasping for breath while you struggle to find sure footing.

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I’ll be honest, in this most recent season, it’s been these types of waves that have been more commonplace. And, for me, there are really only three things I can do when one begins to pull me under:

1. I can fight it. I can claw toward the surface, force the wave to retreat, strain to get back to fine. And when I do, the next time I fall even harder; the steep crash is always worse than a gentle descent would have been.

2. I can endure it. I can brace myself, armor up, grit my teeth, tell myself to be strong and to suffer through. This one is the trap, because it looks like strength. But the truth is that you’re still fighting, just with more armor.

3. I can accept it. Acceptance is not endurance. Accepting the wave does not mean gritting through the pain, romanticizing it, or making suffering noble. Acceptance is gentle. It is allowing. It is release.

The Two Arrows

Let’s revisit the Buddhist teaching about the two arrows. The first arrow is the pain itself. It’s the illness, the loss, the wave that pulls us under. That arrow flies on its own, released without our awareness. We don’t get to choose where it strikes, and it hurts.

But then most of us reach back and jab a second arrow straight into the very same, gaping wound. We do this with our own resistance, with fear of being afraid, with unanswerable questions like why is this happening to me, and with the idea that I should be handling this better than I am.

The first arrow is the injurious and often unavoidable pain. The second arrow is the suffering we add to it, and that one’s completely avoidable.

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Acceptance Not Endurance

When we are enduring, we are forcing that second arrow into our wound and calling it courage. I must be strong, I must not break, I must suffer… That line of thinking becomes its own kind of wound, thrust haphazardly on top of the one that was already there.

Acceptance means I notice what’s rising before it can begin to build its whole story. It means I let the feeling actually move through me instead of calling it into my core and making it a part of me. It means I reach out for help, for another set of eyes, for the people who can see what I cannot see on my own.

That is the whole difference. Enduring fires a second arrow. Acceptance lays the whole quiver down.

Making Space for Forgiveness

Acceptance makes space for forgiveness. For a gentler approach to what is happening. It allows me to forgive my own body. The body that is not betraying me, even when it feels that way sometimes. No, my body is carrying me through something hard. It’s doing the challenging and invisible work of remaking itself from the inside out. It deserves my tenderness, not my blame. It deserves my love and my appreciation for the hard work it is doing.

Finding acceptance allows me to forgive myself. To give myself grace on the mornings I fight back against the wave with all my might, and for the times I endure when I meant to accept.

With acceptance, I can let go of the frustration about how long all of this is taking. About how I have a new sense of normal that looks unlike anything I experienced for most of my life.

I used to meet those moments of recognition and endurance with a kind of scolding. I’m learning to meet them with compassion instead. Besides, the scolding was only ever a second arrow, aimed directly at my already fragile, wounded body. And forgiveness is how I finally put it down.

And in the end, acceptance means I get to choose the story I tell about all of it. Because the story we tell about our suffering is another chance for that second arrow to get fired, or when we finally get to set the bow down.

Mindful Minute: Are there stories you tell that are firing a second arrow into your already wounded self? Are there ways you can reframe those stories to protect yourself from the avoidable pain of the second arrow? Could forgiveness of self and others be a part of it? Share as much as you feel comfortable. I know that other people will benefit from your observations, and I love reading your comments.

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If you want to read more of the 5-part series on grief, start with denial here. And remember that we are touching on some emotionally sensitive topics. If any of this caused you to reconsider your own painful arrows and personal conflict, I encourage you to speak with a professional about it.

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You see, two of the three Sherpa guides who expertly led our group of intrepid explorers to Everest Base Camp — Avi and Ranjon — are both missing in the floods in Nepal. When it happened, they were guiding a group to Kailash Mansarobar Tibet, and they haven’t been heard from since.

I am struggling to find the words to write this.

I made that journey with three extraordinary Sherpa guides — Avi, Ranjon and Binod. They started out as expert guides, and along the way, we became close friends. With my hip injury, I honestly don’t know that I would have reached Everest Base Camp without their encouragement, patience, strength and care.

There were moments when I didn’t know if I could take another step. That’s when they were there for me. Cheering me on, helping me, and sometimes simply believing that I could do it, even when I wasn’t so sure myself.

Today, two of them — Avi and Ranjon — are still missing.

They are young. They are strong. They are kind. So deeply kind. And funny!

And we are holding on to hope.

When I was struggling on that mountain, they held hope for me.

Now, we hold hope for them. And maybe a few “bunny ears” when they finally make it home again.

I am sharing these photographs because I want to surround Avi and Ranjon, and everyone who loves them, with light and with every prayer, every blessing, every bit of love and hope we can send their way.

Please pray that they are safe.
Please pray that they come home. 🙏

Avi and Ranjon, we are holding you in our hearts. May you find your way home.

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Thank you to everyone who is lifting the Nepalese people up in prayer. May universal love and light guide them home.

If you’d like to make a financial contribution to help people in need, please donate to one of these organizations who are on the ground helping:

• Government of Nepal, Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund

• Red Cross of Nepal

She is describing Indian classical music — the ragas she has studied since childhood, the harmonium, and now the sitar she is learning in Seattle. She is talking about what the practice has taught her about leadership, and she says, “It’s not just what you are playing. It is understanding what is not being played.”

In a raga, she explains, the musician learns to hear the gaps between the beats. The silence between the notes. The space where the music breathes. A beginner plays the notes they have been given. A seasoned musician listens for what is missing and finds the music there.

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Rebel With a Cause

Shalaka spent two decades leading product at Amazon, GE, and Honeywell before founding CareGrid Health, an AI consulting company helping independent clinics reduce the administrative burden that suffocates both doctors and patients. She is an engineer by training, a musician at heart, and — by her own description — a rebel.

As you can imagine, the rebel part started early. Growing up in India, she was told explicitly what paths were available to women in technology. Still, she chose differently. Then she and her husband gave up their jobs, went to graduate school together, had a baby, and started over — moving from, as she put it, net negative to net positive. When she finished her first master’s degree, her infant was in her lap.

I asked her about that image. She smiled and said it wasn’t about defiance for its own sake. It was about something simpler: I cannot be put in a box. And so she kept walking through doors that weren’t supposed to be open to her because she genuinely could not see the walls others saw.

What strikes me about Shalaka’s story is that her rebellion was grounded in something deeper than just being a rebel for the sake of rebellion. It came from a systems thinker’s instinct, inherited from a father who liked to take apart VCRs to see how they worked, and a mother who taught her that every problem has inherent beauty. Engineering gave her the discipline to follow the signals. Music gave her the instinct to listen to what wasn’t being said.

Bridging Music & Engineering

When she describes her work as a product leader, she returns again and again to the music metaphor. A product team is an ensemble. The product manager is listening to every instrument at once, noticing when one is rushing, feeling when the rhythm is pulling apart, knowing when to bring the whole thing back together. This is not something you learn in a workshop, she says. It is a practice. It is built slowly, over years, through the accumulation of attention.

What she is describing — though she doesn’t use this language — is what researchers like Lisa Feldman Barrett would call interoceptive awareness extended outward: the capacity to notice subtle signals, in yourself and in others, before they become crises. It’s a type of perception that comes from presence and from awareness.

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Play to the Music

The Bhagavad Gita offers a concept that Shalaka returned to at the end of our conversation. Focus on right action. Do not attach to outcomes. It is ancient wisdom that sounds, on the surface, like it might excuse passivity. But Shalaka’s life is its own argument against that reading. She has taken big risks — left stable careers, founded a company in a complex industry, committed herself to changing a healthcare system that has resisted change for decades. None of that is passive.

This is also, I realized listening to her, what the raga teaches. You learn the notes, you learn the constraints, and then acting within those constraints, you play with everything you have. You do not play to the outcome. You play to the music.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Shalaka what mindful leadership means to her. She paused before answering and said it is about building conviction in your team that you are moving in the right direction. This is done not by telling them what to do, but by helping them understand how they fit into the larger picture. It is about speaking your mission until it becomes the way your team thinks. It is about knowing that in ambiguous spaces you cannot promise outcomes. You can only promise the quality of your attention, the clarity of your values, and the willingness to learn like a beginner every time the situation changes.

Beginner’s Mind Leaves No Room for Ego

Learning a new raga, she told me, means starting from scratch, even if you already know ten others. The musician who arrives with past songs as luggage cannot hear the new music. The new leader who arrives with certainty cannot hear their team.

I left that conversation thinking about what I listen for in my own work. As a coach, as a writer, as someone who has spent decades practicing mindful attention — am I hearing what is being played? Or are there ways for me to hear what is missing, too?

If you want to hear more from Shalaka, I encourage you to watch the conversation, check out her business CareGrid Health, and to connect with her on LinkedIn.

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Mindful Minute: What is the one thing you consistently practice in your life that has most shaped how you lead? I’d love to hear it in the comments and I’m sure others would too!

For a long time, I kept waiting for this season of health challenges to end. I was impatiently more than ready to return to the version of myself who felt fine.

Lately I’ve been making peace with a new reality: I’m not here to go back. I’m here to go through. The goal is to come out of the experience feeling like more of myself, not less.

What I want to write about this week isn’t about a diagnosis, or unending hospital visits, alternative health modalities, or even any singular moment in this healthcare season.

I want to write about the shifts I’ve experienced underneath all of the outward interventions. No doubt, the fear still comes. Old thought spirals definitely still threaten to begin. But something has changed about how they unfold and in how long fear holds me in its grip.

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The Butterfly Fairy Tale

I keep returning to the imagery of a cocoon. The caterpillar tucks itself snugly away and, some time later, emerges completely transformed, as if it had simply gone to sleep one day and woken up with wings. But that’s a fairy tale and simply not what happens.

Inside a cocoon, the caterpillar literally comes apart. It dissolves. What was is unmade so that what will be can form anew. New connections, new architecture – a whole new body reorganizing itself from the inside out.

In no way is this metamorphosis rest. It is the most violent, most aggressive thing that will ever happen to it. And there is no version where it gets the wings without first completely falling apart.

That’s the part we tend to leave out when we say that growth is beautiful. The truth is, growth doesn’t come without pain. The reorganizing is the pain.

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No Going Back

This is a distinction that I’ve started to make that has helped me see that change is different from transformation. Change happens all the time. Plans are rearranged, routines are adjusted, expectations shift. Change is more surface-level, and usually it’s reversible. Water freezes into ice and melts back into water. Though the surface changes, the core is untouched. The molecular makeup remains the same.

Transformation is not change. There is no going back with transformation. The caterpillar doesn’t get to go back. It’s permanently reborn, and it pays a heavy price to take flight. I think that is one of the harder things this season has asked of me – not to simply change, but to allow myself to be transformed. To be made anew once more.

Slipping Into the Groove

For me, so much of this is happening in my body — in my nervous system, in the old grooves of fear that were indelibly carved so long ago I’d mistaken them for me. I’m learning that they aren’t me. They’re just patterns. The patterns keep showing up, but now they have nowhere to go.

I observe the patterns faster. When I feel fear beginning to rise within me, I name it before it can build and grow stronger. Fear arises, finds no purchase, and gently dissipates. Of course, sometimes this is easier said than done. On tough days, when I’m tired and hurting or even afraid, I can slip straight back into the old grooves as if I’d never left them.

The relief I’ve found even then is in noticing that I’ve slipped into the groove. The awareness itself is doing the work. I don’t have to fight the fear. I only have to observe it early and name it clearly enough so that it has nowhere to take root.

That moment of awareness, that observation, is enough. In fact, it’s everything.

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Building Awareness Together

Some mornings fear emerges before I’ve even opened my eyes, but the way I handle it is different now. I can shift through the fear faster. I’ve learned, with very practical applications, that recognizing fear and acknowledging it means that at least I can stop adding to my own pain. I can manage the fear before it manages me.

We are all somewhere on our individual journeys of transformation. Some of us are in the process of dissolving, others are still cooking in the cocoon, while some are almost ready to emerge shiny and new, wholly transformed from the inside out.

Mindful Minute: Are there tools or tips that you’ve found helpful to build awareness and mindfulness while on your own journey? Perhaps you have experience with exercises that interrupt your negative thought spirals. If you do, please share them with others in the comments.

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I know others will benefit from learning about the awareness you have gained, and I love reading every single comment!

I’d love your input.

This publication exists to help you become a more mindful and effective leader. As we plan the next season of content, I’d love to know what would be most valuable to you. Your answer will help shape what comes next. If you have something more specific in mind, please leave a comment!

Quick note: This essay touched on transition and the emotional terrain of significant change. If anything in here surfaced something for you, please don’t sit with it alone. Speaking with a trusted person or a mental health professional is always a good idea.

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Not — will I lose my job. Not — will AI replace me. The harder question for both of us was: what happens to human intelligence itself if we keep outsourcing the actual effort of thinking?

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Ashish Singh is a technology leader with about seventeen years in the industry, including at Amazon. He speaks here in a personal capacity; his views are his own and not those of his employer. Lately, a lot of what he's been writing and thinking about is AI — what it's like to actually build with it, to teach his kids with it, to learn music with it, and what it means for how teams work. So, I expected him to have an answer ready for this one. Spoiler alert: he didn’t.

He told me this fear worries him more than anything else. The image he offered was blunt: if you keep making photocopies of photocopies of photocopies, eventually the copy isn’t legible anymore. That’s what happens, he said, when we stop doing the real, effortful thinking ourselves — and AI has made it very easy to stop.

There are no good answers to this question. At least not yet. Ashish said this is the fear he hasn’t solved for himself either.

What we landed on together, in the moment, was something simpler than a solution: we agreed that we should protect certain spaces — like ideation, first drafts, real conversation — as places AI doesn’t get to go first. Let humans generate the raw material. Then bring the tool in to sharpen it, research it, stress-test it. Credit to humans first, help from AI second.

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That was the one that stuck with me longest. But it wasn’t the only fear we sat with. I’d noticed this fear — in some form — in almost every conversation I’ve had lately, whether I'm coaching a senior leader at another company who's terrified for her team, or talking to a friend who doesn't know if the skill she spent fifteen years building even matters. So, I asked Ashish to go through the rest with me, one by one.

Here’s what we discussed.

1. What happens to us — to human intelligence itself? That one’s unresolved, and honestly it’s the most important question.

2. Will AI take my job?

This is usually the loudest fear, even if it isn’t the deepest one. Ashish's answer wasn't reassurance — it was a comparison. He pointed back to the arrival of computers in the workplace: that transition did displace people who weren't able to adapt to it. History says the fear isn't irrational, he told me, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What's different this time is the speed.

His answer to the fear wasn’t a five-year plan. It was: start small, start personal, start tonight. He told me about the bedtime stories he used to make up for his daughters — until he ran out of ideas. So on his own time, for his own family, he built a small app in a matter of hours where his daughters could pick their own characters and settings, and he could quietly slip in whatever lesson he wanted to teach that night. That’s it. That’s where his AI fluency began — with a bedtime story.

That same instinct led to something bigger: a song he and his daughter wrote and produced together for a local festival performance, something that would have taken a studio, connections, and thousands of dollars a few years ago. With the help of AI, it reached 5.4 million views. He was careful to say the hard work was still theirs — the tool didn’t replace the effort; but it did remove gatekeeping.

3. What happens to managers, coaches, leaders — do we even need them?

I asked this one for selfish reasons. I’m a coach. If AI can “coach,” what’s left for me?

Ashish’s answer reframed the question. He doesn’t think the role disappears — he thinks its shape changes. He talked about becoming a manager again in a way he hadn't been in years: able to prototype an idea the same evening he has it, instead of waiting weeks for something to come back through the usual channels. Leaders getting their hands dirty again, he said, is "the fun part."

And for coaches and solopreneurs specifically, his view was that AI is a scale tool, not a replacement. Everything a coach has learned over years of practice can now reach far more people than one-on-one sessions ever allowed.

All of this in service of reaching more people who need it. That’s a version of the fear I can actually sit with. It’s less about obsolescence and more about expanding the scope of usefulness.

4. AI could be used to harm people — scams, impersonation, worse

Ashish didn’t minimize this one either. Voice cloning is easy now. Easy enough that someone could call a loved one, sound exactly like their child or parent, and ask for money in a moment of manufactured panic. His advice was almost old-fashioned in its simplicity: if something urgent and emotional comes in asking you to act fast, hang up and call back through a number you already trust.

Don’t let urgency force you to abandon your judgment.

There is an upside to these new scams, though — every new way to cause harm creates new work to defend against it. That’s not comfort exactly, but it’s not nothing.

5. What does this mean for anything that requires real feeling — art, music, connection?

I asked Ashish about this one last, because I know this part of his life personally — he’s a devoted student of Hindustani classical music. He told me he built a tool that reviewed twenty of his recorded lessons and rated his progress: stability of his notes, how well he represented each raga. It did a genuinely good job.

But when he checked those ratings against his teacher’s actual feedback, his teacher told him the tool graded him more strictly than she would have. And that gap — between measurement and feeling — is where he thinks the real boundary is right now. AI can teach fundamentals. It cannot yet hear the intention behind a note, the life in a voice, the thing a teacher hears that a rubric can’t capture.

His closing line has stayed with me since we recorded this: human intelligence is still the supreme one — AI is a tool to enhance it, not replace it. As of today.

💬 Chances are, if you’re reading this post, you’ve wrestled with some of these fears about the use of AI. I’d love to hear some of the ones you have considered and the way you’ve worked through those fears too, if you have.

Anything you share will only help others.

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👉 The full conversation is posted up now. I think you’ll like it.

***Remember, the views expressed by Ashish are his own and do not reflect those of his employer.

We have been spending a lot of time in the world of artificial intelligence lately. There is plenty to explore in that space, and we have some amazing thought leaders in that space that you will hear from soon.

But today, I want to pause and offer you something older than any technology. It’s a practice that has become the cornerstone of my own healing journey and one that I hope can help you too.

For the past year, I have been living with pain. My spine, my knee, my hips have been my teachers. I’ve sat in waiting rooms and on treatment tables for hours. I have iced, I have stretched, I have surrendered, and I have hoped.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, I discovered that the most powerful medicine is not a pill, an injection, a supplement, or even a healing modality. For me, it has been attention. Specifically, a way of being with the pain rather than being at war with it.

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The Two Arrows

Buddha taught us about two arrows.

The first arrow is the pain itself. This is the sensation that’s raw and real. Something hurts when you move, and you wince through the pain.

The second arrow is everything else we mentally add to the physical pain. It’s questions like – What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get better? And statements like —It’s my fault. It’s their fault. The medical system is at fault.

The first arrow is unavoidable. The second arrow is the one we are firing at ourselves, again and again. And those are totally avoidable.

I know the second arrow very well. I watch it whizz by every time I worry about my aches and pains, blame myself or my circumstances, and when I haunt myself with worst-case scenarios — especially those that arrive in late-night ponderings.

I’ve noticed the impact that the second arrow has on me. I’ve gone into negative thought spirals. I’ve become contracted. I’ve shrunk from myself. From others. Lost connection with my own equilibrium… with my own soul. The one that surely knows how to be joyful in any circumstance!

Pain is a Messenger

There is another way.

The aching body is not the problem. Its nature is to be in touch with reality. It stays in the present moment. It feels what it feels, and it tells us the truth about it. It doesn’t hold back, and it can’t do anything else but be.

So, pain is not a malfunction or a misfire. It is a messenger that is begging us to listen. Beckoning us to be attended to, not abandoned, not numbed, and most definitely not ignored.

The more we ignore pain, the louder it speaks. Pain does not increase as a way to punish us. Pain escalates because no one is listening. No one is taking action to address it.

Pain can be a Portal

When I stopped opposing pain and started meeting it with curiosity, kindness, and space instead of dismissing or ignoring it, the pain became a portal — a doorway to a deeper presence and wholeness I had not known before it arrived.

I opened this portal to presence through a meditation I learned during mindfulness meditation teacher training. I never thought I would need this particular tool, but it has brought me relief nearly every single day these past months. I hope it brings you relief too.

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An important note before you go to meditation…

This practice is a companion to good medical care. It is not a replacement. Sometimes the message of the pain is to go see your doctor. When that happens, please do.

If at any time this practice feels like too much, let it go. It is not for today. You can always come back to it another day. Let there be gentleness and compassion for yourself.

And now, if you are ready, please find yourself a seat and click on the audio recording above to go deeper.

If something arose for you after listening, I’d love to hear about it! Please share. I read every comment!

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“You do not have any other competition in the world than yourself.”

That’s how my friend Mudita Nigam closed our conversation on our podcast.

I want you to sit with it for a moment before I say anything else about it, because I think it’s easy to hear a sentence like that and stash it away as just another pithy motivational quote.

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But coming from Mudita, it didn’t feel like just another hanging kitty poster. It felt impactful. Mudita is an engineer leading teams of teams at Amazon while moving — in her own words — at supersonic speed. In an industry that runs almost entirely on comparison with performance cycles, promotion committees, and stacked rankings – the next rung on the ladder is being climbed by the person next to you and there’s only one ladder. If anyone had reason to believe she was in a race against others, it was Mudita. But here she was telling us explicitly that she isn’t.

The Silent Comparison

Almost none of us think of ourselves as being particularly competitive in a basic sense. We don’t picture ourselves elbowing a rival or hurting someone’s shins before competition. But, comparison inevitably sneaks in anyway.

It shows up as the internal scorecard you keep against the peer who got promoted faster. It’s the team that seems to ship more, complain less, and burn out slower. Lately, it even shows up as comparison against machines and technology like AI.

In our discussion, we consider whether this comparison is even fair.

Crystal vs Rubber Balls

The only comparison that might serve us is knowing which things to prioritize and what can wait for later. Together, Mudita and I discussed a helpful framework for prioritization. That is, understanding the difference between the types of balls you are juggling is key.

Ask yourself – are they crystal balls or rubber balls? Some of what you’re juggling — like your physical and mental health, your closest relationships, and your own sense of who you are — is crystal. Drop that ball and it shatters. You’ll spend a long time picking up the pieces and it may never be recovered.

Other things like soft deadlines and deprioritized projects are rubber balls. They bounce. You can drop them and pick them back up when you have more time.

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Human First Leadership

Mudita talked about how she learned, as a young girl in a small town in India, that the “sub-caste” other kids kept asking her about didn’t apply to her. When she came home confused with questions, her father answered simply: you are human first.

And that was everything. This perspective formed the foundation of Mudita’s growth and development. Long before she ever walked into a workplace ripe with internal and external comparison, she’d already been taught that her worth was intrinsic.

That grounding belief shows up later in a skill often overlooked by today’s developing leaders, and that’s self-advocacy. Mudita talked about learning, sometimes the hard way, that your work doesn’t always speak for itself. Sometimes you have to speak for it.

Helping your management team understand the impact of your performance is key. Not necessarily because you are competing with the person next to you but because if you aren’t your own best advocate, no one else will be.

Consider the Crystal

So, is there a race you are running against a competitor who never actually was one? Is it a peer? A co-worker? Maybe even an earlier version of yourself that no longer is…

Because here’s the thing. You are replaceable at your job. Everyone is. You are not replaceable in your family or in your friendships. And isn’t that the whole point?

Your job — the fancy title, the varying promotion cycle, the stacked rank ratings — that was never the place of irreplacability. Your job is like a bouncing rubber ball that you will rebound from if it falls. Your family. Your friends. The people who love you. You are irreplaceable in that space. That’s the crystal ball that will shatter once you check out. Your presence is the glue that holds that crystal ball together.

So, this week when you’re moving at supersonic speeds again, observe moments when you catch yourself measuring your self-worth against someone else’s and ask yourself whether that race is even yours to run and whether the competition itself even serves you. Chances are, the answer will be a resounding “No!”.

If you’re open to it, share some of the ways in which you catch yourself in competition. Are there ways that this comparison can be reframed? I love catching up with you and I look forward to reading your insights.

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If this resonated, I’d encourage you to listen to the full conversation with Mudita. Her journey from a small town in India to leading engineering organizations and building teams of teams at Amazon is a perfect jumping-off point for exploring the role of AI in leadership and prioritizing humanity in a dynamic technological landscape.

While I was reflecting on it, a companion piece crossed my desk. KPMG’s Global AI Pulse is a survey of more than 2,000 senior executives distributed across 20 different countries.

Remarkably, 1/3 of these leaders cite a limited understanding of AI costs and economics as a barrier to deploying it. Nearly half say they have already scaled back AI agent deployments because the costs outweighed the benefits. And yet, roughly 75% indicate that AI will remain a top investment priority, even in a recession.

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So, basically, AI expense is increasing. Commitment to the technology is unwavering. Yet, the results are underwhelming.

What the Numbers Really Say

Here is what I have come to realize: this dynamic moment is not a story about machines or even technology. It’s a tale as old as time. A parable of minds and hearts.

Consider the conditions the survey describes. Leaders adopted AI before they understood it. They acted from a position of fear of being left behind rather than having a firm idea of where they were going. They believed that AI could be dropped into an organization like a coin into a vending machine, and progress would come tumbling out.

But reactivity is not strategy, and reactivity is expensive. The survey shows that expense in dollars, but dollars are the least of it. In my conversations with industry leaders, the real costs of AI show up somewhere else — in teams exhausted by shifting mandates and unclear focus, people wondering whether they are being stacked up against a computer, leaders who profess that they cannot always tell whether they are leading the AI revolution or being dragged along by it.

These are examples of fear just below the surface of all the decision-making.

The Perspective We Are Missing

The AI debate has plenty of lenses from which to view it. It has the technical lens, the financial lens, the competitive lens, the doom loop lens, and even the utopia lens, all clamoring for perspective.

What it is missing from the debate is the mindfulness lens. The innately human perspective.

Mindfulness is not just something you tack on as an afterthought. It is a fundamental foundation in approach. It’s something you carry with you into every moment. Because what mindfulness actually helps with is the capacity to pause between stimulus and response. To recognize the fear driving the decision, even before the decision is made.

Mindfulness helps you ask the right questions even in the middle of the moment when there’s a risk of being swept away. Mindfulness helps you regain control and consider: What is the objective? Who does this serve? What are we trying to accomplish?

In my talk with Dr. Sandeep Krishnamurthy last week, he gave us a sentence that centers this thought: intelligence is not consciousness. AI acts like it is intelligent. But acting as if isn’t real.

An organization can act as though it has a strategy, but, as the KPMG survey suggests, very few act in alignment with that strategy.

What I Hear in the Thick of It

Consider the engineering leader who told me her team had been handed five AI tools in one quarter plus a target for “adoption metrics” but there was no conversation, not one, about the objective of these tools.

I think of the executive who admitted the AI mandate came from the Board of Directors and that he was translating panic downward while calling it vision. And then there’s the nagging question still being asked by mid-career technologists — will AI replace me?

Every one of these is a person experiencing reactivity. But here’s what I know from my training and research into mindfulness over the years: you cannot think your way out of reactivity. You’ve got to pause your way out.

The moment of pause is one where the plural intelligences Sandeep spoke of come into play. It’s the intuitive intelligence that senses something is off. It’s the relational intelligence that notices the team is scared, not just resistant. It’s the moral intelligence that asks not can we do it but should we. These are exactly the intelligent capacities that reactivity shuts down, and exactly the ones the moment requires.

Artificial intelligence is singular. The wisdom to deploy it well is plural. And this ability is something that only humans can offer.

It’s Both-And, As Always

I am taking courses to learn more about AI. To be honest, AI even helped with this essay, suggesting plenty of edits. But I kept my discernment close, taking only the suggestions that served the writing and releasing the rest. Ironically, that is the practice at its core. It is about embracing AI while remaining anchored in the humanity of who you are. Both, together.

The invitation is to stop choosing between rushing and resisting – the only two options the current conversation seems to offer, and to stubbornly stand in a third place while remaining engaged, curious, and awake. Stay present so that you can adopt AI with intention. Stay grounded enough to know when pausing is wisdom and discerning enough to remain focused on the goal of the tool and objective of its use.

The executives in that KPMG survey are no dummies. They are reporting on the outcome of moving fast without intention.

And that’s just one of the reasons that I > AI. Not because we are faster or more precise but because we can be more mindful. We can pause mid-momentum and choose differently. No system can do that.

And Sandeep, since I know you will read this, consider this essay my half of a conversation that is clearly not finished. You gave us the concept of AI as the neighbor’s boy. The data is starting to roll in on AI effectiveness and implementation outcomes. There is more here for us to explore.

So here is my question for my audience this week: Where are you in your relationship with AI? Are you adopting it, resisting it, or learning about it? Are you reacting to it, or responding mindfully?

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I hope to hear from you. I appreciate the insights that we can share together and enjoy reading every comment.

🎧 If you missed my conversation with Dr. Sandeep Krishnamurthy — listen here.

Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse Survey. Full quarterly reports at kpmg.com/aipulse.

Maybe it wasn’t a boy in your house. Maybe it was a girl, a cousin, a neighbor three doors down. But if you grew up in an Indian household, you know exactly who I mean. He got the best marks. He got into the good college. And every auntie, every uncle, every well-meaning relative at every family gathering would eventually turn to you and ask some version of: why can’t you be more like him?

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I hadn’t thought about that boy in years. But, in a conversation with my dear friend Sandeep Krishnamurthy, Dean of the College of Business Administration at Cal Poly Pomona, a person who has spent his whole career thinking about intelligence, technology, and what makes us human — he said “Today, AI is that boy.”

I was struck when he said it, because he's right, isn't he? AI writes faster. It never gets tired, never has a bad day, never needs a weekend. (It does, famously, make things up with total confidence — but then, so did the neighbor's boy.) Somewhere underneath all our talk about productivity and career disruption, a niggling voice has started asking the same question our aunties used to ask: why can't you be more like AI?

Unfair Comparison

Here’s the thing about the neighbor’s boy: he was only one kind of smart. He could ace an exam. He probably could not have told you why you were crying, or noticed when you needed someone to simply sit with you and say nothing at all.

Sandeep named the deeper problem in a single line:

“Artificial intelligence is singular. Human intelligences are plural.”

Artificial intelligence is, by its nature, built to produce whatever answer is most likely to satisfy you in the moment. But human intelligence was never singular. It’s plural. It’s the friend who can perform two hours of Shakespeare from memory. It’s the leader who walks into a room and somehow makes everyone in it feel more at ease. It’s the person who notices, before you’ve even said a word, that something in you feels off.

You cannot hold the same ruler up to that kind of variety and call the measurement meaningful. It wasn’t fair to compare you to the neighbor’s boy, and it isn’t a fair comparison now.

Intelligence, Not Consciousness

There's a second distinction hiding underneath the first. Intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing. Sandeep put it simply: AI acts as though it's intelligent. It performs understanding. It does not hold what he called, in Sanskrit, the jivatma — the living presence, the animating spark that enlivens us all.

No AI has ever made you feel instantly at ease the moment it walked into a room. No AI has ever made you feel truly seen and loved in an unconditional way. That is not insignificant. In fact, it might be the whole shebang.

This is Not a Competition

You don’t have to compete with the neighbor’s boy. You never did. That burden wasn’t yours to bear then, and it’s not yours to carry now.

So notice the places where your humanness — not your productive output — is the thing that actually matters. Lean into it. Be the one who sits with a struggling friend instead of rushing to fix them. Savor the moments when you are simply, fully present with another person, in a way no algorithm could ever be.

Sandeep left me with a phrase I haven’t been able to put down, and I’ll leave it with you:

I > AI.

The human is greater. Not your output. Not your speed. You — the whole, plural, conscious human that no system, however magnificent, can act its way into becoming.

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So I'll leave you with a question, and I genuinely want your answers: What is one human quality you will never outsource — the thing you'll lean into as this world keeps changing? Share it in the comments. I have a feeling we'll learn more from each other's answers than from any algorithm.

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If I > AI resonates with you, Sandeep and I go much deeper in the full conversation — what AI really means for your career, and why he believes artificial intimacy may prove more dangerous than artificial intelligence. Check it out!