About the Path of Shabazz
This space exists because I decided to stop running.
For many years, I embodied the hustle. The power hustle, ambition hustle, attention hustle. I made things constantly. I succeeded publicly. I was richer than I’ll ever be again. I had billionaires, Fortune 500 CEOs and luminaries on speed dial. And quietly, I lost my ability to be present with my own life - maybe I never had the ability at all. What I called connection had become compulsion. What I called productivity had begun to hollow me out.
I also lost all my hair. Literally - 99% of my hair, eyebrows, and beard - gone. Some doctors called it alopecia totalis. Some doctors called it repressed trauma and overwhelming stress.
That was my first wake-up call. So I quit. I dropped out of the hustle.
I left NYC and moved to Nashville in search for greener pasture.
I felt the call to slow down.
The move didn’t heal me. Or meet my suffering, it just moved it to the another state. But the space out of the city, did open up room to focus on a repressed studio practice. I began working more and more on making art instead of climbing corporate ladders.
I learned to be still. I learned to care for myself. I sat retreats. I learned to practice my artforms instead of performing them. I practiced meditation, day after day, year after year. I studied Buddhist teachings alongside the realities of modern life, fatherhood, and family responsibility. I began asking different questions than “How do I succeed?” or “How much can I get?” or ”How special am I?”
I began asking, How do I wake up?
I got still. I began taking note of a much darker reality lurking beneath the surface - All my babysitters: addiction to making money, addiction to making connections, addiction to being needed by people, addiction to being perceived as successful, addiction to external validation, addiction to likes, addiction to social media, addiction to streaming media, addiction to anything that made me avoid the pain and fear and self-hate.
This is what led me into the rooms for recovery. And somewhere along this path, a decision settled in me - not all at once - just a little at a time:
I want to be a Bodhisattva.
Not as an identity. Not as a title. But as a practice of returning to my true nature—choosing, again and again, to stay present with my suffering rather than escape it, and to use whatever skill I have in service of liberation for myself and my people.
This Substack is a notebook for the path.
Here, I share what i’m uncovering along the way and the practices that help me toward this illumination:
meditation practices
art practices
writing practices
dharma discoveries
This work is shared freely, in the original spirit of sharing the dharma, set by the Buddha.
I’m here to practice in public. To tell the truth about what I’m learning in my art studio, in my meditation room and in my library. To make work that comes from presence rather than hustle. To build a small community of people to walk with.
If that resonates, you’re welcome here.
With gratitude for my ancestors,
the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha,
and my two sons,
let’s walk.
—
Shabazz Larkin
