When Corporate Success Feels Like Spiritual Death
How I left Meta's burnout culture to build businesses guided by a renewed vision and inner alignment
I sat at dinner with my family celebrating my performance review at Meta. Glowing feedback. Substantial bonus. Stock options growing.
I felt sad.
Not disappointed or ungrateful. Sad. Like I’d won a prize for a game I no longer wanted to play.
That night changed everything. I was seeking completion and wholeness in places where they couldn’t exist. No amount of money, no climb up the ladder, no award would fill what felt empty inside.
The burnout wasn’t coming from working too hard. I was working toward the wrong thing.
The Layoff That Felt Like Liberation
When Meta laid off 11,000 people in 2023, I was among them. Everyone around me experienced grief and stress.
I felt relief.
I’d spent seven years as a creative strategist. The last year and a half, I’d been teaching meditation to Meta’s internal community while still doing my corporate work. The dual existence kept me functional but split.
The layoff didn’t end my career. It ended a version of myself that was dying anyway.
I posted a poem on LinkedIn instead of a goodbye message. Not celebrating achievements, but celebrating freedom and what might come next.
Then I deleted my entire portfolio so I couldn’t go back to advertising.
What Non-Duality Means in Business
Non-duality sounds abstract until you apply the principle to decisions. There’s only one mind, and every experience originates there.
Negative experiences come from unhealed thoughts. Aligned experiences come from healed ones.
Here’s how this played out for me.
My wife and I signed a franchise agreement to open an infrared fitness studio. Then costs escalated. The economy shifted. The numbers stopped making sense.
I surrendered the entire dream. Not as defeat, but as release. I shifted focus to finding retreat space for meditation workshops instead.
During my first real estate meeting, I mentioned the abandoned studio plan to the agent. She said she’d wanted to open the same franchise and knew of one for sale at a location we hadn’t been told about.
We bought the studio for less than building from scratch.
Surrender didn’t mean giving up. It meant creating space for what was aligned to appear.
Teaching Meditation Inside the System That Made Me Sick
The strangest part of my Meta years was becoming a meditation teacher while still working there. I was healing inside the wound.
Teaching meditation created space for groundedness and collaboration. It affected my presence, my projects, my relationships with cross-functional teams.
I started working less but producing better results. My reviews consistently exceeded expectations. I won the global partnership award.
Studies show mindfulness training reduces burnout while improving performance and team cooperation.
But here’s what the studies don’t capture: I had the courage to let initiatives fall apart if they weren’t meaningful. Past me would have hustled harder to save failing projects. Present me recognized the mirage of impact everyone was chasing.
Everyone was anxious about performance reviews, compensations, bonuses. I’d already seen money grow in my accounts and felt nothing. This freed me to focus only on what mattered.
The Identity Death Nobody Warns You About
Shifting from overachiever to someone more aligned feels like death. A series of deaths.
I was wired for perfectionism and external validation. Suddenly becoming laid-back about competition wasn’t a personality adjustment. It was identity dissolution.
The hardest part wasn’t the internal work. It was communicating the change to everyone around me. My wife. My children. Colleagues who knew the old version.
A Course in Miracles says you’ll look the same but carry more stillness and smile more. True. But it leaves out the conflict, the heated conversations, the alone time on my meditation cushion forgiving myself for the illusion of separation and the need to justify myself.
The undoing required patience, journaling, prayer, inner reflection. Not more effort, but more release. Taking responsibility for my perceptions instead of blaming external circumstances.
Why I Opened a Fitness Studio as a Meditation Teacher
People ask why I run both a meditation coaching practice and an infrared fitness studio. They seem unrelated.
They’re the same thing.
One of my biggest challenges as a meditation teacher was embodiment. Talking about spiritual power is different from living it. The HOTWORX studio became my laboratory for translating mind work into body work.
Working out in infrared heat creates moments of complete stillness. The intensity and heat demand focus. Members report overcoming chronic conditions the medical system couldn’t touch.
I understand this deeply. My own sickness healed through meditation when medicine offered nothing. The studio provides physical space for the same principle: healing originates in mind, manifests in body.
Now I host meditations in the heat. Combining both practices feels more aligned than separating them ever did.
Success Redefined
The dinner celebration where I felt empty despite achievement taught me what success isn’t. The years since taught me what it is.
Success now means flow, alignment, and integrity. A state of inner stillness and open receptivity to what shows up.
When something negative appears, I acknowledge I’m creating it. I go inward, release the projection, forgive the past perception generating the experience. This brings me back to joy.
The expression of this: I feel one with greater power. Never alone as a body. Released from body-identity limitations into expansion as one mind, one source.
From there, grace becomes accessible. What follows is wholeness and creation born in the present moment, filled with self-love and alignment.
Studies show purpose-driven businesses achieve 2.3x faster revenue growth. But I didn’t choose this path for the numbers.
I chose it because chasing external metrics felt like dying slowly. Aligning with internal wholeness feels like finally being alive.
The businesses I’m building now serve as vehicles for expressing deeper values, not generating profit alone. Every client session, every meditation in the heat, every business decision becomes practice for staying present and aligned.
This is what spiritual entrepreneurship means. Not abandoning business for spirituality, but recognizing business itself becomes prayer when aligned with source.
The corporate world taught me what success looks like from the outside. The journey since taught me what it feels like from the inside.
I’ll take the inside version every time.