Founder & CEO @ Close
Steli Efti I’ve been spending the last few weeks of summer at the beach in Halkidiki and have made a daily ritual of swimming in the ocean each morning. While the water here is typically known to be gentle and serene, it recently has been much more turbulent and unsettled. I’ve had to adjust my swimming technique …
We won’t find truth outside of us. There’s no system, no organized set of teachings, no framework of thinking that will lead us to truth. Ultimately, the only place where we find truth is within ourselves. Reading passages from Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Total Freedom reminded me once again of this big adventure that awaits each of …
I’ve been having so many intense, vivid dreams lately – so intense that I feel tired and unsettled even after waking up. I knew these dreams were trying to tell me something about myself that I couldn’t see with open eyes during the day, but I didn’t feel like analyzing them or dealing with them …
I’ve been reading Demons by Dostoyevsky and there are two small anecdotes from the book that immediately resonated with me—two topics that many of us as humans deal with throughout our lives. The first is the impulsive act of judging others too quickly and the arrogance we must overcome to give one another a fair …
Today I want to share with you one of my favorite books of all time, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. I loved the experience of reading this book so deeply that I already can’t wait to read it again. It does a wonderful job of portraying many major life themes in a profoundly delightful way. …
Rather than feeling present and peaceful, I felt fragmented and frustrated in recent weeks. My nights were filled with uneasy sleep and weird dreams. And in the course of the days, I struggled with confounding urges: When I worked, I wanted to take a break. When I took a break, my mind kept thinking about …
I recently finished listening through about a hundred mini recordings from my week in total darkness, which was a very intense experience to relive. While reflecting on my dark retreat and the time since then, I’ve realized it’s been a very challenging and intense 3 months for me post-darkness. I also didn’t anticipate how different …
This topic is something we’ve touched on previously but it’s a theme that keeps popping up for me. It’s the notion of “you are not above this”. I keep finding myself in situations where a thought or feeling arises that I’m not comfortable with and my first instinct is to reject it. I think to …
We all know life is full of ups and downs, yet it’s so easy for us to get frustrated and torture ourselves when the pendulum of life suddenly swings from blissed out harmony to chaos and struggle. We must remember that life is a wheel that keeps spinning. These moments and feelings, both good and …
There’s a quote by Byron Katie that’s been stuck in my mind. It reads, “Don’t be spiritual, be honest instead. It’s very painful to pretend yourself beyond your true evolution.” I love it because it ties back to this inner work journey I’ve been on of going deeper within my own psyche and emotions and …
I recently came back to a book I read many years ago called Loving What Is by Byron Katie. She has a really great self-inquiry method called The Work that I’ve been putting into practice daily for the last couple of weeks. It’s a very simple 4-question framework that is so practical and pragmatic that …
I’ve been pondering a quote lately from my favorite Dostoevsky book, The Brothers Karamazov, which reads, “we ought to treat everyone like little children, and most importantly ourselves.” It got me thinking about the way we are with our children – how loving, patient, lighthearted and encouraging we are when we’re parenting these tiny little …
When I was 18 all I wanted to be was successful, which at that time to me just meant rich. I pictured myself with the fancy car, expensive apartment and crushing it as a business man like Gordon Gecko in Wolf on Wall Street. But something I’ve been reflecting on lately is how glad I …
Ever wake up and think of all the things you gotta do, and it just destroys you? I can’t tell you how many times I woke up feeling miserable because of everything I’d have to tackle on that day. In my younger years, it would actually make me cancel everything and fall into a depression. …
“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth”, wrote Dostoyevsky. And the longer I live, the more I realize this to be accurate. So many of life’s problems boil down to struggles with truth. It’s not just the lies we tell others: It’s mostly the lies we tell ourselves, the truths we’d rather …
How often in life are we hurrying from one task to another on any given day? Or rushing hastily to reach the next big milestone ahead of us? I’ve been pondering this recently and had the realization that when we are in a hurry to do something, it’s usually because there is an underlying fear …
I’ve experienced love in so many new ways over the past year, have deepened and widened my relationship with and understanding of love so much—I was almost tempted to call this episode “The Power of Love”, like a cheesy pop song. In this episode, I share some of these experiences, and how they moved me …
Spending a week in complete darkness would be an intense experience. That I knew. What I didn’t anticipate was how intense it would be to come out of the darkness. In fact, re-entering normal life was an even wilder adventure than the dark retreat itself, and it profoundly changed the way I view the world. …
Darkness has illuminated my inner world. With nothing to see outside of me, I began to see things clear within: fears I didn’t know I grappled with. My complicated relationship with love. Mysterious light visions. While I shared the physical aspects of my dark retreat experience in episode 144, in this episode I focus on …
I recently attended a dark retreat. I was in complete and utter darkness, alone, for an entire week. It was one of the most intense things I’ve ever done and I haven’t really shared much about it with anyone until now. In this episode, I will share the physical experiences of living in true darkness …
Recently I spent a week in complete darkness at a dark retreat. And very soon, I was faced with something I didn’t expect: Anxiety. I wasn’t even halfway through my first day of darkness, and out-of-control anxious thoughts kept appearing, and I had no idea how I’d make it through a week of darkness. Until …
I’ve been pondering a story for the last couple of days that I want to share with you. It’s a story I first heard at an ashram a few months ago about a young monk, a tiger and a barking dog. While it didn’t really move me at first, it’s been recently popping up in …
I just spent a week at a darkness retreat – all day and night for an entire week, I was alone in a room in complete darkness. It was a very intense experience – it felt like climbing Mount Everest with your mind. I knew returning to “normal” life after would be an adjustment, particularly …
An important point that I need to keep remembering is that it’s truly a miracle how adaptable we are. The capacity of a human being to heal and transform and overcome obstacles is tremendous. We are always healing, fixing and overcoming. We need to remember that no matter what difficult situations or feelings we’re experiencing, …