Dear Reader,

When I was 10 years old, I started taking long train rides from my Brooklyn neighborhood to Manhattan’s upper west side. Those three-hour rides became my daily commute when I got the opportunity to attend private schools across the city. Without internet or downloaded music, deep meditation forcibly became a part of my daily experience. I had to learn at a young age to sit with my thoughts in the city’s surrounding chaos.

My world opened as I experienced different people and places through my youth, and I began obsessing over what made people and other living systems tick. I’d read philosophy and biology during my free-time, to better understand what moved perspective and health.

Eventually, I went off to Yale to study Biomedical Engineering, hoping to learn how biology could be understood to improve life. On weekends, I experimented with crossbreeding mycelium in our student kitchen to see whether it could filter heavy metals from water more effectively.

Towards the end of my first year, a family member’s mental health challenges made my questions about biology much more personal. At times, I would unexpectedly need to fly across the country and admit them into psychiatric hospitals. I began turning toward the mind, trying to understand an illness that was changing our lives.

I needed to show up for the people I love, despite the whirlwind of emotions I was experiencing. It made understanding the mind and body feel urgent. My engineering studies gave me a place to pursue that understanding, and I started researching both vocal biomarkers for mental health monitoring and somatic practices for stress management and regulation.

I committed to daily cold showers for a year, gradually adding breathwork, saunas, and other practices while noting what felt helpful when.

During this time, I often stayed up late combing hundreds of papers exploring methods to model the biological instrument that produces speech. I found it fascinating how subtle changes in speech production could help us diagnose illnesses and assess trajectories.

As I learned more, I wanted to build those tools myself. I began learning linguistics, software engineering, and machine learning. For my senior thesis, I designed a study exploring whether changes in someone’s speech, compared with their own baseline, were associated with changes in their mental health symptoms.

I knew my family stressors wouldn’t escape me any time soon, so I focussed on building tools to help recognize the internal changes that are invisible to us. Over time, the questions I was asking about my loved one became harder to separate from the questions I was asking about myself. I wanted insight into why they struggled, and got more invested in understanding what helps me stay well enough to manage my own life.

Sometimes, managing my own life comes easily. Other times, my nervous system seems to lead before I’ve even had a chance to consciously choose. I realized how much presence matters to me, and I want to understand what helps me close that gap.

We all build habits hoping they’ll help us be more fulfilled and aligned. But day to day, it can be hard to tell whether they’re working. Whether the actions we take are helping our mind, our body, our presence, or all three.

The desire to be more of oneself is a very human one. We know the gap between how we act and how we would like to act. We feel the fatigue and tension that shape our choices, even when we try to ignore them. Best does not exist, but better has a texture. We can feel it in how we move through a day.

I’ve been fascinated by whether our voices can carry the sound of returning to ourselves. To the ease, flexibility, and openness that comes with being able to show up again.

Every human voice has a unique frequency that changes as different loads interact with it. Kairos exists for you to notice load and return to the frequency that’s yours. So you can create, think, socialize, experience, and live with presence.

Kairos is here to help you know yourself.