Newsletter

May 4th, 2025 Join the Community → Happy Sunday, Reader ☀️ I am back in Berlin, and am feeling justtttt fine! 🇩🇪 The whole city is absolutely pulsating with spring-time energy. Parks are packed with families and friends and lovers and dancers. It’s electric! This should come as no surprise, as Berlin is known for its party scene — all night benders supported by a copious amount of beer, horny teenagers and MDMA. In truth, I quite like being around this energy. Since I don’t partake in that…

April 26th, 2025 Join the Community → Happy Sunday, Reader ☀️ I just finished up a beautiful few days in New York City – hosted a corporate training, attended a friend’s wedding, and caught up with old friends. I never really “got” New York before. It was too loud – too…untamed. Now I get it. The diversity is unmatched, perhaps in the whole world. And that brings a unique wide-eyed awe and excitement that – on one level – produces a weird balancing effect on the mind, and – on another – is…

April 20th, 2025 Join the Community → Happy Sunday, Reader ☀️ I’m back in the States! 🇺🇸 What a wild ride the last 6 months were. Chiang Mai → Koh Phangan → Phuket → Varanasi → Rishikesh → Kuala Lumpur → Osaka → Kyoto. Just days removed and the whole adventure already feels like a distant memory. I’m experiencing serious reverse culture shock being here. I seemed to have forgotten that this is the culture my personality was forged through. It’s loud. It’s sloppy. It’s unapologetic. And the…

April 13th, 2025 Join the Community → Happy Sunday, Reader ☀️ I write this while cruising along at a smooth 100 mph towards Kyoto, contemplating the future of humanity. For one, the huge stock market plunge in the US has me wondering if everyone’s money is safe. Surely we all know that “the dollar” is just an idea we made up. But I suspect this understanding has been mostly intellectual, not a sock-in-the-gut realization that one’s life savings could hypothetically vanish in a matter of…

Who told you that this pain and confusion would last forever? No one. And yet you silently believe it; otherwise, you wouldn’t be so upset right now.

March 30th, 2025 Join the Community → Happy Sunday, Reader ☀️ Hard to believe the month has already passed by – I leave the Shaolin temple today. I’m feeling exceptionally grateful for my time here. I explored my limits, learned about Chinese medicine and culture, and made a few friends. Next will be a week in Nara, Japan where I’ll be working full time on my new website. Then my family visits for some site-seeing in Kyoto and Tokyo. Want to watch me perform the full kung fu form? I recorded…

March 23rd, 2025 Join the Community → Happy Sunday, Reader ☀️ I’m entering my last week of kung fu training in Osaka. Practice, practice, practice. It has been an absolute delight to push my body to its limits. My split is nearing the ground, I have stamina to spare, and I finally understand what the Chinese medicine practitioners refer to as the Dan Tian. These insights are not only improving my own health, but they’re also helping me be a better teacher and bodyworker. Understanding how…

March 16th, 2025 Join the Community → Happy Sunday, Reader ☀️ Kung fu training is going well — the moves are engraining themselves and my kicks are getting higher and higher. That said, I’ve been struggling immensely with maintaining my diet here. Working out five hours a day means having a nearly endless appetite with almost no energy for will-power. This has resulted in me buying lots of junk food from the grocery store and eating low-quality sushi and ramen at restaurants. It does not make…

March 9th, 2025 Join the Community → Happy Sunday, Reader ☀️ Week one of kung fu training here in Osaka is now over, and man am I sore! The schedule is rigorous: one hour of tai chi and two hours of kung fu in the mornings, and another two hours of kung fu and qi gong in the afternoons (equaling five hours of practice each day). Cleaning takes place four times per week and the Japanese rules and regulations are totally inflexible. I train with a ferocity, thanks to years of disciplined…

March 2nd, 2025 Join the Community → Happy Sunday, Reader ☀️ I arrived in Osaka, Japan yesterday! 🇯🇵 On the surface, the people are eerily similar to Americans – fashion seems to be important, everyone appears to be pursuing their own version of “making it,” and they’re all glued to their smart phones. For some reason, this fact makes me literally laugh out loud. I can’t help but see all of my friends in the strangers I pass by: “Oh look, that’s Joe having a deep conversation with his…