Surrendering Toward Sovereignty
The shift from white-knuckling through, to letting life happen to you
Hi party people,
I hope you are well.
I fear I may be getting everything I’ve asked for.
The last time we spoke was nearly six months ago — I was boarding a flight from Tokyo to Bombay (a flight I look forward to taking again) to voyage on a five-week trip to bring Sovereign Studios to life.
In one week’s time, Sovereign Studios will be available to you. I’ve been documenting the journey on Instagram, trading writing for voiceovers. I’m still sharing, just in a different form. If you’re not there yet, I’d love to connect with you there — or have you join our waitlist to get more of this in your inbox.
It’s been about a year since I really started a transformative journey of going within myself. I feel so lucky I shared that with you. Thank you for being here. It really is perpetual evolution - so perhaps this is Stepping Towards Sovereignty, part two.
My Surrender Experiment
I think about how wound up I used to be. How convinced I was that everything had to be forced, and that white-knuckling was just the price of making things happen.
I wrote down last July that my calling was to be at the intersection of fashion, culture, travel, and wisdom. I had no idea that four months later it would lead me to the idea for Sovereign Studios.
Rick Rubin writes in The Creative Act that ideas find you — that we become vessels for them. I strongly believe this business found me. That I get to bring something through, not just build something up. And I really hope I get to do this for many decades to come.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand: the genesis of Sovereign Studios, every good thing that has happened to this business, came from a moment of receiving. Not pushing. Receiving.
And that shift — from forcing to receiving — has become the quiet experiment of this past year. What happens if I take my foot off the gas and just let myself cruise? Let things come to me too? Stop thinking about everything when I sleep — because guess what, it gets done. It always gets done.
The right people keep showing up in front of me. In airports. In workout classes. In rooms I’m not even in. It stops feeling like transaction and starts feeling like exchange. I’d like to stay here for as long as I can.
A year ago I took what I’ve been calling “the door from liminal space.” I had been stuck in a numb rhythm for a while. Finally, enough was enough. I turned inward and began a beautiful, transformative, difficult, and rewarding year. I think I now understand what trust the process actually means.
I’ve also been learning a lot about humility. I used to think I had most of the answers. These days I wave a white flag often. It’s okay to say I don’t know. I find myself changed by it in ways I’m still discovering.
I moved to LA about three months ago and am rebuilding community here. Leaving New York meant leaving the people, which was the hardest part. But now I just get to keep adding faces to the journey. I discovered hobbies last year and I’m obsessed with trying new things and getting better at them. Still measuring myself against myself — just a bit more gently now.
My entrepreneurial spirit is still fully intact. It’s just no longer the whole story. Work is a passion. And when I’m with the people I love, I actually turn off. Mostly.
What is God?
About six weeks ago, something strange started happening. I had an impulse to pray.
I’m a meditator. That has been my philosophical and spiritual home for years — Buddhist lineage, Vipassana retreats, the power of the mind, dharma, thoughts shaping reality. I’ve sat with teachers, danced between different lineage. I’ve found a home in it.
But something shifted. The impulse was specific and physical — I wanted to kneel. I didn’t know what to say. I tried it one night before bed and wept streams of tears. Not from sadness. From something else entirely.
So I’ve been sitting with a question I can’t answer yet: What is God?
I grew up agnostic — believing in something, uncertain of what. Hinduism was the cultural backdrop of my childhood, more than a lived practice. When it was time to pray at a puja, I’d open one eye to see what everyone else was doing. When I tried from the heart, it sounded something like: heyyy Godddd, what’s up?? We’re about to go on a trip, hope we’re all safe, okayyy thank you byeeee.
As an adult, I’d found Buddhist lineage as my spiritual home. I dance between a few different schools and haven’t given myself a place to land yet — and I’m okay with that for now. I’m just soaking things up, learning, doing it my way.
Most of the books I read are spiritual or philosophical anyway. I read the Autobiography of a Yogi while I was in India and only realized at the end that I’d dragged a friend (hi Sarah) to the Ananda Church in high school because I felt drawn there, it was his church. I’m fascinated by dream state as a canvas for consciousness, so I’ve been reading about the Tibetan Yoga of Sleep and Dream. I love how Goenkaji spread dhamma, one of true Dāna (charity). I love the approach Rick Rubin takes to a modern relationship with Buddhism. I’ve been going into the Yoga Sutras to tap into my roots. And my cousin gifted me C.S. Lewis — yes, the Narnia one — and I’ve begun reading Mere Christianity.
When I moved to LA, I knew I wanted to go deeper. I’d been plateauing and wanted more structure. And then the impulse to pray arrived, uninvited and specific. I got on my knees and wept, and I didn’t know who I was praying to, and it didn’t matter.
There is something about surrender, devotion, and reverence that is so sacred, and such a part of the human experience. Every religion and culture gets to it in their own way.
In our capitalistic society, we’re devoted - but to brands, celebrity, and politician more than something actually larger than ourselves.
So in addition to my meditation practice, I’ve begun to be in dialogue. With whom, I’m still figuring out. In a Buddhist lens, it would be my highest self, my future self, a teacher — a holy being that is a projection of mind. But the label matters less than the practice.
Is God a being? A man upstairs? A white ball of light we all come and go from? Our spiritual teachers? A set of values that different religions simply dress up differently?
I don’t know.
There’s an entire vocabulary that has always existed behind a curtain for me. Words that belong to religious practice in a way I never fully claimed — and I’m curious about them now.
What does it mean to be syncretic? To believe in perennial philosophy?
But I’m 100% certain there is something. And in the practice of asking — in the not knowing — I’ve found presence. Protection. A place to rest and be grateful for everything I’m given to experience. I’ve asked to live from more empathy, compassion, patience, and acceptance. For peace and forgiveness and connection. To live a life of service from a stronger foundation. To become more unshakable in myself so I can keep showing up fully for others. To rest. To receive. To create. To find a gentle place to land.
I give thanks for friends, family, Uber drivers, ducks, butterflies, food, the opportunity to create. For beauty, taste, and laughter.
I show up with skepticism, with questions, with awe, with pleas, with faith, and with service.
I don’t plan on subscribing to any one religion. I remember being at a mosque in Oman and getting stuck in the bookstore talking to people for an hour until my friend came looking for me, wondering if I’d converted. No — I’m just curious about what people believe, how they practice, how they find it, how they shape their lives with it.
I want to stay connected, and find connection, without needing to drift off into a particular sect. I want to find my version where I can be in relationship with something divine, feel like I’m “doing it right” without sacrificing what I’ve already learned and practice. Where I can tie it all together and let that be enough. Not to mention, I have a strong aversion to how every religion and faith has found a way to be weaponized and divisive all over the world.
For now, I look forward to being in inquiry, and seeing where it takes me.
My Inquiry
Here is what I keep returning to: Buddhism teaches there is no soul — but that your conscious mind and mental imprints carry forward lifetime to lifetime, bearing fruit. That is karma. How is that different from character? A soul? The thing that makes you feel alive, that gives you your particular flavor — what is that then? How do your mental imprints differ from a soul? Different words for the same echo. Is it, or is it not?
I read a quote by C.S. Lewis that immediately registered as the same thing I have heard in Buddhist teachings: you cannot make men good by law. And without good men, you cannot have a good society. That transformation is an inside job. That transformation of society starts within each individual.
I keep wondering: is what Christians call heaven and what Buddhists call enlightenment — release from suffering, the end of the cycle — two books describing the same return? To source, to the collective, to God by whatever name? I don’t know how Hinduism or Judaism or Islam would answer that, and I want to. Even the biohackers chasing immortality seem to be reaching for the same thing — except they’ve mistaken it for prolonging pleasure and outrunning death, when the bliss they’re after might be waiting at the source itself.
On reincarnation vs one life: I believe I’ve lived multiple lives. On a small scale, I’ve lived a million versions of me in the last 27 years. I live different lives every time I go to sleep. Why wouldn’t that keep happening? That there are flavors of me that have traveled through time. But how does that differ from what others believe?
And underneath all of it, the same hunch: that living with integrity, waking up, becoming Christ-like, touching your Buddha nature might be one motion wearing different clothes — a turning back toward true nature. Maybe God isn’t a man upstairs but a direction: the paramitas, morality itself, the most whole version of us we keep reaching toward. Not to become God. To grow closer to source.
Maybe I’m not articulating it perfectly yet. I’m okay with that. I’m at the start of my journey and I love not knowing what’s coming.
What I’m certain of is that we are all united by something. That the different books, religions, and practices are all doors to the same room. That prayer and meditation might share the same mental mechanisms. That there is one underlying system, and we’ve just found different ways to describe it.
I want to learn more about how different people find faith, find solace, find their path.
And I’ll keep finding ways to practice along the way.
It seems like maybe prayer, business, and the question of divinity are all doing the same thing in me right now: loosening my grip. Teaching me to receive. And letting myself just be along for the ride.
I’d love to know more about the questions you live inside of — and talk to you about it. Really. Let me know.
Thank you for being here.
With love, A