Hey, I’m Jon – the founder of Pala.
The mission is simple, bring more presence to people’s lives. Sounds simple but the hard part is most people don’t know they are missing it. Trying to explain it is a bit like describing water to a fish. The water is everywhere, the fish just doesn’t know it’s wet. I want to tell you where this mission comes from and why I feel so passionately about it.
For most of my life I had no idea I was asleep, and if you had told me that, I probably would have thought you were mad!
When I say asleep I do not mean literally. I was functioning, going to work, participating in relationships and moving through the world like everyone else. But underneath all of it something was running on autopilot, a version of me that had been slowly built by every experience, every hurt, every belief I’d absorbed without ever choosing to.
I didn’t know that then, I just knew that however hard I tried, I kept ending up in the same place, feeling the same way and experiencing the same version of myself I was desperate to move on from.
What I didn’t understand was I wasn’t living my life, I was living my thoughts about my life.
Every reaction I had, every decision I made. Every way I felt about myself and the world around me was filtered by an identity that had been shaped by years of experience. I thought that identity was me, that the thoughts I had were me… I had no idea there was a difference.
The result for me was addiction. A way of coping with feelings I didn’t understand and couldn’t escape but I want to be clear about something, addiction was just where my particular set of experiences and beliefs led me. The underlying pattern isn’t unusual at all, we are all being shaped by our thoughts, constantly.
For some people it shows us as anxiety that plays in the background of an otherwise normal life. For others it’s anger and frustration that arrives faster than they can control it. Relationships that follow the same painful pattern. A sense of never quite being enough. The inability to be still without reaching for something. A life that looks fine from the outside but feels thin from the inside.
It’s a spectrum, and every one of us is somewhere on it.
The difference isn’t the thoughts themselves but whether you know they are happening. My moment of waking up came in the most ordinary setting imaginable. I was in the shower trying to relieve the symptoms of a panic attack when something shifted, for the first time I could see that the thoughts and feelings where there but I wasn’t… I was the one noticing them.
In that moment of awareness everything changed. The story I’d been carrying about who I was, what had been done to me, what I could do… lost it’s grip because I could finally see it for what it was, a collection go thoughts and beliefs…not the truth, not me.
I stepped out that shower different. Calm in a way I hadn’t felt before, and I knew that who I really was had nothing to do with any of it. What I’ve come to understand since is that this awareness is available to everyone, not just people in crisis, not just people who had hit a wall in the way I had. It’s available to the person who just feels slightly disconnected from their own life or the one who can’t remember the last time they felt genuinely present. The one who is doing everything right and still feels like something is missing.
The practice of noticing, waking up from automatic, unconscious running of thoughts and beliefs is the most important thing any of us can do. Not because it solves everything but because it changes the relationship between you and your experience. You stop being lived by your thoughts and start actually living.
Presence isn’t a luxury, it isn’t something for people who have time to meditate or the inclination to explore spirituality. It’s the most human thing there is, the simple fact of being here, in your own life, for the momemtns that make it up.
That’s what I lost for a long time and it’s what I’m building Pala to help people find.
Pala is a small wearable device to remind you, as many times as you need that the one who witnesses is still here.
No screen. No data. No connection to your phone. No subscription.
Three modes, each activated by a single button. Each one designed to bring you back to yourself in the moments you need it most.
Nothing is tracked. Nothing is measured. It simply does what it needs to, quietly and discreetly, wherever you are.
Pala is currently in development.
If this resonates please join below.