My journey: Activist > Founder | Creating a sanctuary in NYC
š§āāļø @moonrisespace
š³ @lh.cannabis
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People assume wealth looks one way. Mine didnāt come from money. It came from an immigrant family who gave everything so I could build something meaningful.
Rich, to me, is helping others. Making an impact. Sharing great experiences with people I love.
@moonrisespace is built from that place. š
āØNever in a million years did I think Iād be part of organizing the largest event in a countryās history (Bhutan!) š§š¹
And I never imagined putting so much energy into supporting a leader I believe in deeply (the King of Bhutan).
The people Iāve met on this tripā¦ just wow. š
Recap videos coming soon! š„
Liquidated my 401k.
Sold my Meta equity.
Signed a 15 year lease in NYC.
All to build a space designed to help people regulate their nervous systems and reconnect to themselves.
Terrifying? Yes.
Worth it? I think so.
The world doesnāt need more distraction.
It needs better environments. š @moonrisespace
Carl Jung wrote in 1933 that the man who has not confronted his shadow by the middle of life does not become a better man in the second half. (Probably 45 now)
He becomes a more defended version of the same man.
And that defense, Jung observed, eventually calcifies into what everyone around him calls his personality.
Jung was not describing moral failure. He was describing developmental mechanics. The defensive structures built in boyhood to manage unbearable affect serve a legitimate protective function in the first half of life. They allow the man to function, to achieve, to build. But they do not dissolve automatically with time. Unused, they harden.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolkās research provides the neurological confirmation of what Jung identified philosophically. Unprocessed trauma does not remain static. The nervous system, attempting to manage unresolved activation, progressively recruits more cognitive and somatic resources to maintain the defense. Over time, the man is not using the defense occasionally. He is the defense. The distinction between the wound and the person collapses.
What Jung was identifying at 35 was the threshold where this process becomes increasingly difficult to reverse. Not impossible. Significantly harder.
The calcification is not a character judgment. It is what happens when a protective structure that was meant to be temporary becomes permanent by default, not by choice.
The men who break this pattern share one thing: they located the moment before the defense became the identity, and they chose to look at what it was protecting.
Most men never look. Not because they lack courage. Because no one told them there was something there worth finding.
What did your defense protect when you first built it?
What if this doesnāt work?
That thought doesnāt go away either.
You just stop giving it authority over your life.
Because going back to who I was before building Moonrise was never an option.
āBe fearlessā sounds nice in theoryā¦
Until youāre signing leases, raising money, and betting on something no one else fully sees yet.
Not when itās comfortable.
But when everything is unclear š
and you still decide to build it anyway. The movement is bigger than me - Iām just giving it a home @moonrisespace
I didnāt set out to build a wellness sanctuary in NYC @moonrisespace
I just kept creating spaces until I realized most spaces are built for escapeā¦ not presence
Moonrise is my answer to that
a place to come back to yourself
