Dear Permission to Be Powerful reader,

I went from being a copywriter for Tony Robbins—to being a janitor at a Zen Center.

And honestly?

I love it.

For years, I lived to perform.

To prove myself.

To get straight As.

To be superhuman.

I can’t understate how much pressure was placed on my back—writing to millions of people, trying to capture Tony’s voice, and sound incredible while I did it.

I ran up to twenty miles every Monday before work — to make sure I didn’t crack under the pressure.

That’s how seriously I took it.

And now I sweep floors.

Vacuum…

Scrub toilets….

I’ve dreamed of a simple life for a long time.

A simpleton’s life, finally.

Here, I don’t check news, I don’t scroll, I don’t even have access to porn or the endless stream of low-grade stimulation that used to eat my life in pieces.

The structure itself keeps me clean.

The shift is huge but logical. After a bitter divorce, after being fired by every copywriter’s dream client, what I really needed was not a rebound gig—it was healing. Early bedtimes. Early wake-ups. Predictable days.

Cleaning, here, is the perfect practice ground. The difference between cleaning mindlessly and cleaning with mindfulness is night and day. My supervisor can tell immediately when I’ve checked out—attention evaporates, corners get missed, detail dissolves. Mindless people are chaotic; they leave evidence. You can trace their thoughtlessness in the mess they leave behind.

The Zen Center is a transformation factory.

The bells decide. I don’t negotiate with myself anymore. I don’t lose time to indecision. I wake up, I bow, I work, I eat, I sit. It’s all handled. My mind can finally rest.

It’s funny—most people think rules are restrictive. For me, this place is freedom.

Predictability is freedom.

When I first got here, I realized something:

This is the order I’ve been seeking my whole life.

Everything here has a place—a flashlight next to every fire extinguisher, a label on every cabinet, a time for every sound. It’s beauty disguised as discipline.

This place is routine to the max—the exact structure my ADHD brain always needed but could never hold on to in the outside world. Every minute accounted for. Every task thought through.

They didn’t just build a schedule here; they built a system.

They thought of the best way to live and got everyone to agree to it up front.

Some days I meditate three hours…

An hour at dawn, half an hour at lunch, another ninety minutes at night.

It’s gruelling, but it’s also medicine.

I have complex trauma—layers of it—and Zen has reached places therapy never could.

After a seven-day meditation retreat, we’ll meditate from 4:30 am to at least 9:30 pm.

I feel like I’ve earned ten years of wisdom in just seven days.

When I meditate at dawn...

Breakfast follows.

We sit on cushions at a Japanese table barely a foot tall.

Everyone’s posture is perfect.

Nobody slouches.

The food is vegan, beautifully prepared, and you never waste a bite.

You leave no trace. That’s a Zen rule.

And at noon, every day, we meditate.

It resets my brain from whatever chaos accumulated during the morning.

Then we have lunch.

Someone spends two hours preparing that meal, and it tastes like care itself.

The conversations here are unlike anything I’ve known. Gentle, funny, quietly brilliant.

At breakfast, I sit with people who’ve been meditating for twenty years.

One man has been here three. He’s tired of the corporate machine, too. We understand each other.

And when I clean the Zendo—the meditation hall—I do it with reverence.

The Zendo is sacred. The lights are dim, almost dark, except during cleaning when they’re unnaturally bright.

You see every speck, every flaw. Everything must be perfect: each cushion fluffed, each surface dusted, nothing out of place.

When I finally sit there at night for evening meditation, it hits me:

I’m the one who prepared this place.

I scrubbed the place from top to bottom.I made this space ready for everyone, including me.

It adds weight to the moment.

At the center of the Zendo sits the Buddha statue. You bow before entering, bow before leaving. It’s not superstition, or worship—it’s devotion.

You learn that mindfulness isn’t just about thought.

It’s about how you move, how you touch things, how you close a door.

Mindless people are chaotic in a way that mindful people are not.

They leave evidence of their distraction—crumbs, dust, chaos.The mindful leave nothing.

Zen is a two-thousand-year-old practice.I think about that often.It’s humbling to realize we’re doing the exact same rituals our predecessors did centuries ago—same bows, same bells, same silence.

In a world obsessed with novelty, there’s something powerful about a tradition that never needed reinvention.Psychotherapy has been around maybe a couple hundred years; Zen has had millennia to mature. I trust that kind of age. It’s proof that it works.

The thing is, I used to think enlightenment would look like success.Turns out, it looks like sweeping the floor properly.

There’s a saying in Zen:

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

I used to chase transcendence.

Now I just clean the floor right in front of me.

Without thinking about what comes next.

People here see me.They call me by name—every single person.

They look me in the eye.

They bow.

They thank me for my work.

They don’t talk over me, or diminish me, or pretend not to hear.

But the truth is, I’ve always been a disciplined man.

My first career, my second career, my athletics, my writing—it’s all built on discipline.

You put me in a hyper-disciplined environment like this one, and it doesn’t feel unnatural; it feels comforting.

I used to think I needed freedom.

What I needed was structure.

I used to think I wanted approval.

What I wanted was respect.

And for the first time, I have it—across the board.

Everyone here calls me Tony.

No arguments. No debates. Just respect.

For once, I’m surrounded by people who follow the same program, who live by the same values, who believe that order and care are the same thing.

I came here tired of chaos. Tired of being defined by other people’s fears. Tired of the noise. I came here to rewire myself ten times over—and I did. This place is my transformation factory.

Yes, I jacked Tony Robbins’ name and started calling myself Tony.

He deserves it.But it’s not because of him. It’s coincidence.

Tony’s real name is Anthony, and mine is Anton.

Phonetically, they’re the same name.

Anthony is the British version…

Anton the Russian…

Antoine the French…

Antonio the Spanish…

Antonius the Roman.

And inside all of them—hidden but constant—is Tony.

So Tony has always been the root.

I just finally allowed myself to claim it.And I’m going to wear it better than he ever did. Just watch.

Anton was the Chauffeur.The Chauffeur was so deeply enmeshed in my mind, was so baked into my brain, that one day I, Anton felt synonymous with that old identity.I’d outgrown it.

When I moved into the center, they asked me what my name was and what I preferred to be called.

I don’t think anyone had ever asked me that question.

I have spent my whole life believing that my name wasn’t really mine.

I never felt like I had permission to call myself whatever I wanted.

My father, an abusive man, made a sport of mocking my name. He’s done it my entire life. And he’s the one who gave it to me.He never deserved that honor.He picked it carelessly.

Then, during my last meditation retreat, something cracked open. Memories flooded back. Painful ones. Ancient emotions that had been repressed for decades came pouring out.

That’s what these retreats do.Each time, they dissolve a few delusions and bring reality into focus.

Therapy tries to dig into the mind and fix it.

Zen strips the whole thing away bit by bit.

So I changed my name on Facebook. Quietly. No announcement. No explanation.And whoever doesn’t agree will have to deal with it.If they find me, they’ll have to face the new name.If they don’t—better still.

Anton was the Chauffeur.That’s someone I used to be.Tony is Mike Tyson — the opposite of my old self in almost every way.

Stronger.

Sharper.

Deadlier.

Until next time.

Tony

Dancer, Writer, Buddhist.

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