The One Gift We Carry Equally

I was flying down the hill that morning on my way to the clinic. A woman had stopped and rolled down her window to tell me I shouldn't ride a bike like that — I could get hit by a car. I remember the exact thought in my head: What does she know? I'm a great bike rider. A few minutes later I tumbled over the hood of a car, my head hitting metal, traffic stopping all around me.

I lay there and checked in with my body, and I was okay. It wasn't a near-death experience, but it felt like a moment where my life was spared. Three days earlier, I had told my wife I wanted to separate. I had grown up with a lot of trauma — constant yelling, screaming between my parents, the whole family — and I was carrying all of it fast down that hill. The collision was a wake-up call. Something in me said, I need to figure this out.

The Field in the Room

Not long after, I saw that Dr. Joe Dispenza was coming to Toronto. I knew he'd been a chiropractor, like me, but I didn't know anything about his meditations. I just showed up. It was September of 2016, and I fell in love with the process. I began meditating over an hour every day. In twelve months I went to six of his events, immersing myself completely.

And here is the thing that changed everything. When I meditated alone at home, I felt lonely. But when I sat in a room full of people doing the same meditation — eyes closed, not touching anyone, not speaking — I felt connected in a way I hadn't expected. My awareness was in a field. I came out of one of those sessions and turned to my friend Neil and said, I wonder if there's a way we could use technology to help us connect like this, even when we're apart. That was the spark.

Days later, an app developer I'd met once, a year before, emailed me out of nowhere, asking if I had any ideas he could help build. I didn't even know what I was making yet. The only thing I knew was that it would be a meditation app — but you meditated for someone else. We called it ZeroOne.

The logo was of the two o's coming together to form the Vesica Pisces, wrapped in six circles in a Fibonacci sequence. I was learning quantum physics at the time, a year-long course, and slowly everything started to converge. What I couldn't have known then was that it would take nine years to arrive at this moment — and that I would have to become the thing I was building before it could be born.

The Symbol and the Fire

The logo came alive faster than I understood. I printed temporary tattoos of it, first a handful, then a thousand for a workshop of five hundred people, thinking I'd hand them out and tell everyone about my app. Nobody asked about the app. They just fell in love with the symbol. It's a portal, they'd say. It feels like love. Can I have an extra one for my tattoo artist? Since then we've gifted more than 280,000 of them around the world, always in person, always as a small ritual of presence.

So I thought: I'll put it on the window of my clinic and give love to Toronto openly. I'd been on that main street for twenty-two years, with seventeen associates, doing high-level work in frequencies and brain health. And within three or four months, my clinic burned to the ground — not in flames, but financially. Money hemorrhaging every week just to make payroll. I found out it was over while I was at a festival in Costa Rica, when my assistant texted me a photo of an eviction notice on our door.

Twenty-two years, gone. I moved so fast I had nothing — no intake forms, none of the paperwork I'd always relied on. And that emptiness became the strangest gift. Over the years I had built something I call the system of the soul, a way of feeling what's happening in another person's nervous system by feeling it in my own body. Suddenly I had no choice but to use it fully. I went from being a chiropractor who needed all the information to one who needed none — who simply had to tune in. I lost the structure that had held me, and in losing it I found the deeper way to connect.

Being and Doing

I won't pretend any of this was gentle. I've cried more in the last nine years than I did in my first decades of life.

I went through the entire process of building this thing while going through it myself — the divorce, the remarriage, the blending of a family, the slow, painful education in what love actually is. I couldn't write the code for a platform about love until I had learned to love myself, so that every line of it carried that intention. And the person who held the container for me in that was Leena.

We were introduced by a mutual friend during COVID. She was in New York, I was in Toronto, both of us not looking for anything. For over a year we mostly talked on the phone — a playful, protective, brother-and-sister kind of friendship — before we ever met in person. When we finally did, hugging for the first time when she was visiting her parents, we were never really apart again. We call ourselves wholemates, because it feels like we complete each other as one. She turned out to be a tech wizard, too, with a master's in film and storytelling, and she quietly built out everything the platform became.

What Leena gave me, beyond her love, was a correction to how I lived. She taught me that being and doing are equal parts of a day. I used to feel shame when I wasn't producing something — as if my worth lived only in my doing. It took a long time to learn that being present is not the absence of work; it is the work. Some of my darkest months came recently, this past April, and what carried me through wasn't more effort. It was learning to completely trust, to fully surrender, to let go. That is where the peace comes from.

How a Wish Comes True

This is the heart of what we built. When you gift someone a wish, you hold the symbol on them and ask them to picture something they long for. Then you — the giver — hold the vision of them already in their joy. They hold the frequency of the wish; you hold the frequency of it coming true. There's a piece of quantum physics in this that took me years to trust, and it's this:

I can hold your wish for you better than you can hold it for yourself.

You are attached to the story of what you want — the wanting, the why, the fear it won't come. I'm not. I can simply hold the frequency of it, in the highest, without the weight of the story. Wanting and gratitude are two different frequencies, and it's nearly impossible to hold both at once for yourself. But I can hold gratitude for your dream on your behalf. That's why this only works in relationship.

I've watched it land in ways I can't explain. A waitress at a small hotel in Mexico, three months after we gifted her a wish, came running down the sidewalk toward us: My wish came true. Her wish had been to own her own restaurant — and there it was. At a festival in Texas, our whole setup fell through, and in that disappointment we met a woman named Kathy who runs a nonprofit called Joy's Kitchen in Denver. She'd come to raise funds and was running out. We didn't need to know her wish; we just held her in her joy. Within a few hours, a complete stranger gifted her fifty thousand dollars — enough, she later told us, to feed two million more families.

And I've learned to be careful about my own wishes. One year my word was freedom. Behind it, secretly, I meant money and travel and doing whatever I wanted. The universe had a different plan. Freedom came — through the eviction, through the divorce, through the de-anchoring of everything I was clinging to. The wish always comes true. It just doesn't always arrive in the way you pictured it.

The Most Valuable Thing We Own

We give our attention away all day long. It builds trillion-dollar companies; it's bought and sold on the open market. And because we hand it over for free, we've forgotten how sacred it is. Our feeds keep us afraid, showing us everywhere the world is wrong, until a kind of learned helplessness sets in — grief pouring in with no way to help. But the phone is already in our hand. What if the same device could carry intention instead of extraction?

That's what the WishWell app really is: a place to gift a minute of your presence to someone who needs it. When you give like that, your body knows. Within about forty seconds you release oxytocin, the belonging hormone, and serotonin — you actually feel more connected to the person you just gave to. We're hardwired for this. There are good books now, like Humankind, laying out the science of what the sages always knew: that we are, underneath it all, naturally kind. Our feeds have simply convinced us otherwise. So we wanted to build a different feed — a map of the world's giving, where you can watch kindness ripple instead of fear.

People ask why, if giving feels this good, we aren't all doing it constantly. The honest answer is that we're exhausted and dysregulated and busy. But everyone has a minute. And the beautiful part is what a minute does: compassion is love in motion, and the moment you offer it, you feel better and the other person feels seen. During COVID, my former mother-in-law was alone in a hospital, going through chemo, when strangers on our app began sending her notes. She didn't know their names. She only knew she suddenly felt less alone. That's the moment I understood what we were really making.

Presence is the one gift we all arrive on this Earth carrying in equal measure. Not money, not time, not talent — presence. I spent decades believing I had to do more and know more to be worth anything, and it took losing nearly everything to discover that the truest thing I have to offer is simply my attention and my intention, my heart turned fully toward another person. If you have a minute today, you have something precious. The only question is where you'll place it.

— as told by Scott Levine on a Story Booth. View 9 video clips from his Story Booth.