James O'Neill Guide

10/15/2026

What do you actually want?

It's a question I often ask the people I work with. And over the past year, it's one I've had to ask myself more deeply.

Sometimes we spend so much time working toward our goals that we forget to ask whether those goals still reflect who we are and the lives we genuinely want to live.

That realization became an important part of my own journey and eventually inspired my new book, *Magnetic Selecting: A Practice for Finding What You Truly Want and Living It.*

In my latest essay, I share some of the experiences that shaped this work, what I've learned along the way, and why I believe this question matters so much.

I hope it offers you something useful in your own journey.

Read: “What Do You Actually Want?” here:

On the choices that shape our lives, the courage to act on them, and why I wrote Magnetic Selecting

10/01/2026

Feeling invisible can make you question the work. Or yourself.

I know this well.

Lance Lewman sent out 150 resumes in New York and heard nothing. He started to wonder if maybe he wasn’t good enough.

Then his father told him:
“They don’t even know you’re there.”

That changed the meaning of the silence.

Sometimes the world hasn’t rejected you.

It just hasn’t seen you yet.

So make another move. Create anyway. Keep going. That is what I choose to do.

I loved this conversation with Lance.

Watch here:

09/29/2026

Magnetic Selecting is out today.

It is a book for anyone who has felt stuck, or quietly sure something is missing. It is about finding the want you set down, meeting what holds you back, and moving toward it anyway.

Available now in paperback and Kindle:
https://amazon.com/dp/B0HJN9H63Y

May you be well

Magnetic Selecting: A Practice for Finding What You Truly Want and Living It

08/20/2026

New Essay on Victim consciousness, and how to shift it.

On victim consciousness, and the kindness that interrupts it

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...