Over the last month, I got to share my life story with a number of new people. These are clients who were curious to know more about my personal life journey – something that usually happens after we’ve spent a few hours coaching together.

As I kept reciting my story half a dozen times, I realized how much of a difference there is in my experience of living now as opposed to a decade ago. A decade ago, I was a high functioning and successful person struggling with an existential crisis trying to understand the point of being alive. And this was still better than where I was a few years before that – thinking that there’s something inherently wrong with my being alive.

All of this seemed to be facts about my life. I’ve learnt to live my life with it until I had a spiritual insight in 2020 which changed everything. I’ll spare the details of that spiritual experience for now—some of it is impossible to communicate. It’s like trying to explain sex to a kid who hasn’t yet hit puberty—it just wouldn’t land.

Fast forward to the present, one client asked me last week how I’m experiencing my life now, and all I had to say was that “I experience it as an infinite game—a grand experiment—a lavish stupidity that can only be pulled off when there’s nothing at stake.” And I mean this in the best way. It is stupid because there’s no point to it, it is a game because it is fun to play a game when there’s no point to playing it and there’s nothing at stake in it.

And when we come into this game as babies, we don’t need therapy. We’re ready to play! Somehow, along the way, we’re told that there’s something at stake here and that it needs to be taken seriously. That misunderstanding causes a misunderstanding in how to use our equipment—our mind and our body. That misuse often takes us far from the simple joy we once knew as babies, bringing us to places where we think we need fixing. And even there, it’s often people who are on their own journeys, offering guidance from where they are.

You were a former baby. As babies, we’re born ready for the game of life.

There’s nothing to fix, nothing to heal—just pure joy and curiosity. You were happy and content except for your biological needs. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the layer of thought you’ve innocently added on top of it.

I invite you to take an honest look now at your life – not as a way to point out something that’s wrong, but to point out how you are still that – content and happy – just with a lot of extra thinking on top that gets in the way of you seeing it.

And this misuse includes thinking that your circumstances or outside people are getting in the way, rather than your thinking 😉

What would life feel like if you truly noticed that nothing was at stake—and that happiness was never waiting for you out there?

With all my love,

Rishi