James O'Neill Guide

07/25/2026

Excited to share this new episode with Actor and Comedian Cory Jacob.

Cory Jacob moved to LA from a Wisconsin town of 3,000 to honor his ...

07/21/2026

A few nights ago, on a break at a channeling event, I pulled a card from an oracle deck someone had set out on a side table. Just for fun, the sign said.

I drew the Angel of Death. And I laughed, because it was dead on.

I'm in the hardest stretch of my adult life, and that card sent me down a road I'd been circling for weeks: what the word alchemy actually means. The real sequence, the one everyone skips. Why the oldest root of the word means "the black land," the dark soil where everything grew. And why the dark stretch you might be in right now is not proof that your desire failed. It may be the wish, working.

This one is for anyone in the middle of it. I don't write these from the summit. I write them from inside.

The oldest meaning of alchemy, and why the dark stretch you're in is just the soil

07/04/2026

The staff broke our silence one night to tell us the teacher had died.

I was days into a ten day vipassana retreat in Chestertown, Maryland. September of 2013. No phones, no books, no speaking. The outside world set down at the door like a coat.

Then someone stood before us and said S.N. Goenka was gone.

The next morning his recorded voice played as scheduled. There he was on the screen, teaching a room full of people who now knew something he did not say. Anicca, he kept telling us. Impermanence. Everything that arises passes away.

He spent his life teaching it. Then he demonstrated it. And his voice kept teaching anyway.

I have carried that night for thirteen years, and I finally wrote about it. The essay travels from a Loyola classroom in 1999, where I thought meditation was the dumbest thing I had ever done, through one of the most violent prisons in Asia, to the moment on day two when I asked to leave the retreat and a teacher showed me an open door instead of an argument.

It is about what presence actually asks of us, why it stays so elusive despite sounding so simple, and the truth I least wanted to hear from a man named Krishnamurti: there is no one to guide you.

That turned out not to be bad news.

Read it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/jamesoneilllcpc/p/the-is-no-one-to-guide-you

May you be well

S.N. Goenka died in the middle of my Vipassana retreat. His recorded voice kept teaching us anyway

07/01/2026

I said I wanted love for years. And for years I quietly made sure I never really had it.

I gave it away easily. I thought that counted. I thought giving it was the same as being in it. It took me a long time and some hard proof to see that it wasn't. I hadn't learned to love myself yet, so I showed up to everything about halfway, bracing for something I couldn't have named at the time.

I called that humility for a while. It wasn't. When someone told me I'd changed something real in their life, I'd brush it off. Change the subject. Get somewhere safe before it could land. I just couldn't take it in back then.

I don't think that was weakness anymore. I think it was doing a job. We move toward what we believe is good for us and away from what we don't, and most of the time we're not even doing it on purpose. What you actually do is the tell. Not what you say you want.

Which means the thing you keep beating yourself up about is probably protecting you from something.

That's the part that took me years. It isn't a flaw to fix. It's a question to sit with.

What is this doing for me. What am I scared would happen if I stopped.
I wrote the whole thing out this week. Where it comes from, and where it actually starts to shift.

May you be well

07/01/2026

The most powerful thing you can do is believe in yourself.

Colin Q Potts joined Make Your Own World to talk about what it actually takes to overcome adversity.

Not forced positivity.

Real mindset work: believe in yourself, don't bury what hurts, take care of yourself, raise your hand when you need help, and never give up on the version of you that's still becoming. Because we only fall off when we stop believing in ourselves.

If this is the reminder you needed today, save it and come back to it when the ground feels unsteady.

Full conversation at the link in bio.

06/24/2026

New episode is live.

What happens when you stop pushing and start listening?
Elizabeth Tripp is a spiritual midwife who channels a whale consciousness named Ohana, and in this episode, she does it live.

We talk about choice, her "trauma to gold" practice, the loss that sent her inward, and the messages Ohana brings on meeting change without fear and the courage to stop doing and simply be.

A conversation about transformation, presence, and trusting yourself.

Connect with Elizabeth: elizabethtripp.com | IG https://www.instagram.com/theunboundheart/

Watch Now: https://youtu.be/pYHcTiOBCAQ?si=8wvUJZT3o7CZzLxR

Spiritual midwife and intuitive guide Elizabeth Tripp joins James f...

06/11/2026

I almost didn't book this guest. She resisted.

Jordan Start is a practicing trauma therapist with a master's in clinical social work. She spent her clinical career working with survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and violent loss.
She is also a demonologist.

I know how that sentence reads. It's exactly why I wanted her on the show. Because when I asked her what actually protects a person doing work in the dark, her answer wasn't a ritual or a prayer or a crystal. It was the same answer I'd give a client in my office.

Do your inner work. Heal the wound. Because the wound is the open door.

We talked about why fear is an amplifier for the dark, what we surrender the moment we step into it, the law of free will, and what therapists and healers need to understand about the overlap between clinical work and the spirit world.

Whatever your beliefs about what's out there, the psychology in this conversation is sound. That's what made it worth recording.

Fear is an amplifier for the dark. That's not a horror-movie taglin...

05/25/2026

Maybe is the most polite thing in the room.

It is also, most of the time, bu****it.

It is what you say when you mean no but cannot afford the conversation. It is what you tell yourself when you mean yes but are not ready to pay for it yet. I want to think about it. The timing is not right. Alone, in a quieter voice, it sounds like someday.

I just published a new essay on Dark Night Alchemy about what happens when someday closes its doors.

About the corner you have been avoiding.
The decision you have been postponing.
The cost that accrues quietly, in the background, every year you stay in maybe.

It is also about something Mitch Horowitz wrote recently, that the problem with spiritual teachers is that they speak about things they are not, at that moment, experiencing. The equivalent of sharing vacation photos. What the culture needs, in his words, is exchange, not positioning.

I do not have a vacation photo. I am in a corner right now. So I wrote from inside it.

If you are on the cusp of a change you keep telling yourself you will make later, this is for you.

Most people wait to be cornered. The waiting is the cost

04/03/2026

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03/29/2026

Divorce is one of those things nobody prepares you for. Especially if you're a man.

Not the legal part. Not the logistics. The part where you wake up and don't recognize your own life anymore.

I've been there. And I've sat with men going through it for twenty years.

I wrote something honest about what actually happens inside a man during divorce, why most men go silent when they need to speak the most, and a practice called the divorce ritual that I wasn't ready for when I first encountered it but that eventually changed everything.

If this finds the right person today, please share it with them.

Divorce doesn't just end a marriage — it can shatter a man's identity. Licensed therapist and single father James O'Neill on how men can move through grief, anger, and isolation toward something real.