The only prison was my thoughts.
For most of my life, I was waiting. Waiting to graduate. Waiting to finish military service. Waiting to get my green card. Waiting for the next accomplishment to finally make me feel like I'd arrived.
On paper I had it all — an Ivy League degree, engineering roles at Apple and Disney, a stable career. But inside, I was suffering. Each milestone I reached just revealed the next one I needed. The prison wasn't my circumstances. It was my mind.
In 2020, my sister introduced me to life coaching. I was skeptical — isn't that for people with problems? My life seemed fine. But through that experience I discovered something: my thoughts were running my life, and I'd never questioned a single one of them.
That discovery led me to hypnotherapy, NLP, and eventually to the dharma of the Buddha. Not as religion — as a technology for ending suffering. I trained, got certified, and started coaching others through the same awakening.
But even coaching wasn't the final answer. I could solve problems, but new ones kept appearing. I could manage my thoughts, but the thinker remained. It wasn't until I went deeper into Buddhist practice — meditation, prostrations, seeing through the ego entirely — that I found what I was actually looking for:
Complete freedom. Not from circumstances. From myself.
