Sangha of Auspicious Companions

A Wall Street Refugee Finds His Poetry Again

He co-founded a global private equity empire, traveled to over 130 countries, and checked every box the world said mattered. Then, he looked inward and found, as he puts it, “the ego doing all of it.” Nguyen Phuong Lam offers a unique reckoning written from inside the machine, by someone who helped run it. Born in Vietnam, Lam traces a journey from refugee to financier to contemplative — and arrives at a diagnosis both personal and civilizational. The modern day fractures he names are real: spiritual disconnection, social rupture, ecological collapse. But his optimism for humanity isn’t the soft kind; it’s been earned through daily stillness on the meditation cushion, a genocide museum in Phnom Penh, and the slow dissolution of a very accomplished ego. He points to broader metrics of value-creation, noting that depth is a dimension of scale and that inner transformation is not a detour from changing the world but its very source.

Be The Change

Reflect on a habit or identity you’ve outgrown but haven’t yet released. For more inspiration, join a virtual Awakin Call with Lam this weekend.

The Origin Point of Stories

There are two places a story can come from, remarks filmmaker Nic Askew, who has sat with thousands of people over decades, being an authentic witness to their stories. One is the calculating mind, which speaks *to* someone with the notion of giving or getting or contributing something. The other is a deeper source that speaks *through* a person once they set that all down. In a short piece of raw, unedited footage, Nic describes the process of inviting people before the camera to “start with nothing … no thing — no act on your part” and simply wait for the experience to find them. “For this moment, let yourself be undone and speak from what remains. Trust the field. Trust life itself.” What emerges through the stillness is different in kind from the story we would have chosen to tell. His central provocation is quiet but transformative: “We’re not really the writer of our stories. We’re the page on which a story is written.” This is not a call for passivity; rather, it is pointing to a practice of listening so subtle and complete that the quality of something true can finally surface.

Be The Change

Before a conversation today — whether a meeting, a phone call, or even an informal chat — give at least one minute to be in genuine stillness beforehand. Set down what you want to get or prove, and ask instead: what wants to come through here? Notice whether anything shifts in what you say, how you listen, or the way the other person responds.

How a Spinal Cord Injury Seeded a Platform for Dancing with Wheels

After a 2018 road accident left her paraplegic, Priya Sharma sat in her wheelchair at her sister’s wedding and, at her siblings’ insistence, danced. It was “the first time I felt joy after the accident,” she observed. That moment became the seed of Dance With Wheels, a platform she founded in 2024 that connects women and girls with disabilities across 16 Indian states, offering not choreography so much as a place to be seen without explanation or pity. When nine of those women rolled onto a stage in Jaipur before an audience of 350, some were making their first solo journey away from home; one told Priya afterward, “Today I forgot I have a disability.” What the story quietly insists on is how much of disability’s weight is social — the shrinking invitations, the silences, the applause withheld – and how much can shift when someone decides to build the inclusive space that was missing. “Earlier, we would say I am someone with a disability,” says Priya. “Now we say we’re dancers.”

Be The Change

Take a few minutes to tap into and express joy today. Do a little dance, notice something beautiful in the landscape or the moment, or simply do an act that unfailingly brings you joy.

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A Minneapolis Cafe Removed Its Prices — and Business Is Thriving

Earlier this year, a Minneapolis café quietly removed the prices from its menu — and profits are up. Owner Dylan Alverson transformed Post Modern Times into a donation-only restaurant in February 2026, initially as an act of social activism after a series of community deaths he witnessed up close. What happened next surprised even him. Between 40% and 50% of diners pay nothing at all, yet the restaurant continues to operate and grow. “I have succeeded more than I ever did when I was running a conventional business employing 22 people,” Alverson told The New York Times. The staff work on a volunteer basis, a former violence interrupter keeps quiet watch outside, and the menu now functions less like a transaction and more like an invitation. Alverson calls it “a place of economic equality that doesn’t really exist in a business setting” — and he’s asking, with genuine curiosity, “What can we learn from this?”

Be The Change

Do something that steps outside market logic. For example: pay for the coffee of the stranger in line behind you, fix or mend a broken belonging rather than discarding it to purchase a new one, or spend a week prioritizing the wealth of time, presence, and relationships instead of money or material security. What surfaces for you, internally, in the process?

This Week’s DailyGood Digest

This week’s inspirations remind us of the interconnectedness embedded in our existence.

Storyteller Leena Wilde Ryan delved us into the power of standing at the threshold of a new story, complete with plot twists and the punctuation of our intentions. Following a World Cup match, we witnessed the selfless act of Japanese fans cleaning the stadium on their own accord, a testament to the ripple effect of consideration for others. In France, some companies offer a reminder of the humanity in everyone through the practice of sharing their office space with the homeless at night. Grassroots changemaker Christopher Lowman offers a window into the power of accepting life’s unplanned offerings — both the joyous and the devastating — as two sides of grace. In Copenhagen, the power of listening to a fellow human unlocks a movement of human libraries, where live stories unveil life’s opportunities for courage and creativity, consternation and caring. In Florida, the enduring kindness of an unassuming carpenter and the boy whose life he saved decades ago highlighted the lasting impact of compassion. Along the webs we weave, therapist Ashley Glowiak draws parallels between mycelial networks and the vital connections within our family lineages. Finally, the discovery of rare bongos that were thought to be extinct celebrated the resilience of wildlife. Seeped in the spirit of interdependence and hope, this week’s stories continue to seed new lenses of possibility in our lives and communities.

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Ireland Is Now Paying Artists a Basic income. Will the Idea Catch on?

When Cork multimedia artist Elinor O’Donovan was working part-time as a receptionist just to pay rent, an entire film career was waiting, unrealized, on the other side of financial precarity. Ireland’s newly permanent basic income for artists — the first such trial in history to become permanent — changed that, and in doing so, raised a question that reaches well beyond arts policy: who gets to create, and what does a society lose when the answer is mostly those who can already afford to? The scheme’s €25m investment generated €100m in measurable social and economic returns, but its subtler yield is harder to quantify — artists taking risks, making work that is, as O’Donovan puts it, “better and more ambitious.” As AI erodes creative livelihoods and arts funding collapses across the UK, the Irish model suggests that underwriting imagination is not charity but infrastructure. “Imagination and creation are products of time and space,” says Arts Emergency CEO Neil Griffiths, “but there isn’t the time and space anymore” — and in that absence, whole voices go quiet before anyone hears them.

Be The Change

Think of a local artist, musician, or creative whose work you’ve enjoyed — someone making things in your community, perhaps without much recognition — and send them a direct message today telling them specifically what their work has meant to you.

Necessary Losses: the Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

Maria Popova’s meditation on Judith Viorst’s Necessary Losses offers something quietly radical: the idea that loss is not the opposite of a full life, but its very architecture. Viorst maps the full terrain of what humans relinquish — “not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on” — revealing how each surrender, chosen or imposed, carves us more precisely into who we are. Like a sculpture shaped by what is chiseled away, the self is formed not only by what it accumulates but by what it releases. Popova extends this further, suggesting that all human creativity — every poem, every telescope aimed at the dark — is a response to the knowledge that we will one day lose everything we love. There is something both sobering and strangely freeing in that: to grieve well, to let go with intention, turns out to be one of the most distinctly human things we can do.

Be The Change

Think of one thing you’ve lost, such as a relationship, a version of yourself, or a dream you quietly set down. Sit with this loss for just a few minutes today, and invite yourself to reflect on what this loss unearthed or gave to you. Perhaps finish the sentence: “I lost _______, and in losing it, I became …”

At the Threshold of a New Story

Leena Wilde Ryan hadn’t written anything she felt proud of in years. An old life burned down and a new life still rooting, words seemed held hostage by questions of their worth in the world. Then an invitation arrived, carrying what she calls “the right code to bypass every self-inflicted firewall.” What follows is a letter about the architecture of personal stories: the world-building declarations we make (or inherit without realizing), the cast of characters we never auditioned, and the quiet tyranny of letting fear take the lead role. She writes with the specificity of someone who has actually lived this: a first marriage left behind with nothing but clothes, plants, and books; a daughter whose future memoir she already wonders about; a grandfather at the kitchen table before dawn, pen in one hand, cigarettes in the other, writing to friends like it was the most sacred thing a morning could hold. The piece finds unexpected grace in punctuation: the semicolon holding two truths at once, the em dash as pivot, the question mark as the only punctuation “comfortable with not knowing.” Her central provocation is simple and disarming — that the parts of ourselves we’ve outgrown aren’t the villain of the story; they are the story. She closes not with resolution but with a blinking cursor, patient as a heartbeat, inviting, “What choices will you make today that become tomorrow’s stories?”

Be The Change

Write a personal reflection on the story you are currently living. It could be a letter to a good friend, a stream-of-consciousness journal entry, or even a single sentence that names an invisible law you want to govern what comes next. Notice what surprises or disarms you.