wanna hear my story?

Okay, I’ll tell ya.

And I’ll even include some music to enhance the vibes in case you really want to get into it.

I was a weird, joyous, and creative little kid — a relentless tinkerer, deeply curious, and naturally expressive.

I’d obsess over things like Rubik’s cubes and skateboarding. When YouTube came out, I obsessed over that. Hardcore.

I started filming skate videos in my basement, editing them & posting them to YouTube when I was 10 years old.

And I absolutely loved it.

However, as I grew older, I started to dread “becoming an adult”, which I thought meant:

• getting serious 😐

• getting a “real job” 💼

• doing sh*t I didn’t want to do 😞

• leaving my fun, creative hobbies behind 😢

  
  Like many of us do, I learned that in order to receive love, acceptance, success, & happiness in this life, I had to do things I didn’t want to do, and I had to become someone other than who I was.

So, I started to dim my light.

I became shy & reserved.

Even though I had so much to say, I almost never raised my hand in class.

I became embarrassed about my YouTube Channel.

I poured my energy into things I didn’t really care about.

Hiding, mask wearing, and people-pleasing became my second nature.

Rather than doing what felt natural & energizing to me, I judged my inner leanings, questioned if they were “right”, usually decided “no”, and did the thing that I thought I had to do instead.

I put myself into a box.

And I really just thought that was life!

(This actually gets me super emotional to type out. It’s sad, isn’t it?)

In college, I majored in computer science. Not because I loved it, but because I was decently good at it, and I thought I had to choose a major that would lead to a high paying job. (More of that conditioning).

Luckily, the thought of having a 9-to-5 job in a field I didn’t care for was so dreadful, that I made my first earnest attempt to “break free".

My soul seems to have a good indication system when I’m going off course—deep internal pain. How about you?

I decided to take my YouTube channel seriously.

(Thank you Josh Katz, Andy Schrock, John Hill, Brett Conti, and others, for showing me that it was possible to make a living doing something I enjoyed).

So, during my college years, desperate to escape a 9-to-5 job I hated, I got back on my YouTube channel and hit it hard—for four years straight.

It was definitely a grind, but it was also really fun. I actually look back on this time in admiration of my past self, for being brave, breaking the mold, and following my soul. As I’ll share, however, I still had much to learn (or un-learn, I should say).

By the time I graduated, I had 100,000+ people subscribed my skate videos, and I was earning plenty of YouTube ad-revenue to move out of my parents’ place.

I did it! I broke free!

So I thought.

As it turns out, this was just the beginning of my journey into the soul.

The joyride of being a full-time YouTuber lasted about 1 year before burnout, dread, lack of purpose, anxiety, & confusion started to creep in.

I felt like I was on a hamster wheel. Now that I “escaped the 9-to-5”, the goal that focused all my energy & efforts, I was purposeless.

I didn’t care about the videos I was making anymore, and frankly, I was growing less passionate about skateboarding, but I kept doing them because that was my job now.

And moving beyond career & creativity for a minute: the way I was living (the performing, the mask-wearing, the people-pleasing) created a whole myriad of problems in my young adult life, ranging from crippling social anxiety, to relationship anxiety, to sexual anxiety, to crippling indecision, I was smoking weed every day, drinking too much, the list goes on.

I was really f*cking unhappy, existentially dreadful, & really f*cking confused.

It hit even harder because I thought I did everything I was supposed to do (good grades in high school & college), and then some (achieved an unconventional “dream job”).

For the first time in my life, I started questioning whether I might have serious mental health problems.

Then, by the Grace of God, came my next obsession:
meditation & spirituality.

Through a loooong—we’re talking years—process of inner spiritual practice, study, and eventually gaining the courage to share openly about my spiritual journey online, I discovered something that changed my entire life. I’m talking a 180 degree flip from how I used to see the world.

What I understand now is this:

We are all completely perfect. Yes, you too. You are absolutely perfect. The only thing that limits us is the limiting stories we carry in our minds, which are not even our own. We learned them from someone else.

And there is a way out.

[I could see a drawing here]

For my entire life until that point, I thought things like meditation, spirituality, & religion were corny as f*ck.

In fact, when I went to therapy for the first time to try to address my mental health crisis, and on our first appointment my therapist assigned me to read The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhartt Tolle, I dismissed him as woo-woo and cancelled the rest of our sessions.

I thought the answer to my problems looked like getting better at skateboarding, getting more YouTube subscribers, moving to a different apartment, or making more money. (I was still stuck in that worldly thinking).

But at this point I was completely lost & confused why doing everything I thought I was supposed to didn’t work, I was willing to try anything.

And I was blessed to have a teacher like Chad Caruso in my life, a fellow skater, who could speak my language, and introduce me to the benefits of looking inwards with practices like meditation.

Following my tendency to obsess over my interests, I started meditating every day. I read about 100 spiritual books and listened to countless hours of lectures by teachers like Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Eckhartte Tolle, Osho, Abraham Hicks, Chögyam Trungpa (you can check out my full book list here, and a full list of people I consider to be my teachers here).

I started questioning everything. And I mean everything.

I questioned every facet of my identity.

I experimented with psychedelics.

I finally understood why people love The Beatles so much 😂.

I feel like I had my own personal 1970’s hippie movement.

This was a formative and liberating time for me, where I questioned and unraveled many of the outdated stories I was conditioned to believe, but it still wasn’t the end of the road.

Even though I started a podcast where I shared my experiences on my inward journey, I was constantly overcome with fear & doubt, and a feeling that I was throwing my life away by choosing this alternative “crazy” path that was so counter to anything I had ever known.

I gaslighted myself, thinking that I was crazy and that the things I experienced in meditation weren’t real.

At some point, I went back into hiding.

I stopped sharing my journey on my podcast.

I went back to the safety of posting skate videos, even though my heart wasn’t in them.

Do you see how this was another round of the same cycle?

Thankfully, we come with an internal guidance system that can’t be missed. When we are living deeply out of alignment with our truth, our soul will tell us. We will experience great internal suffering. This is the signal.

Sort of like how I “snapped” when I decided to take my YouTube channel seriously, I experienced another “snapping” point and signed up for a Meditation Teacher Training.