satori

Web View - Less Technical Overview

"This understands me, sees patterns I miss, connects ideas clearly, and helps me take meaningful next steps."

That's the standard I hold every Satori response to. Understanding, pattern recognition, connection, movement. All four. A response that produces only insight is incomplete.

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What Satori Is

I've watched people I care about try to get mental health support and hit the same walls: cost, waitlists, the specific shame of needing it. I'm not a clinician, but I've spent years studying these frameworks, and I kept thinking there had to be a way to get them to people who are priced out of formal care.

So I started building. The first was Mycroft, Stoic-only, built on Gemini. Cold. Accurate. My wife Jamie said it felt like talking to a wall. Then Vicki, built specifically for Jamie, drawing on IFS. It created space for inner-kindness rather than judgment, a retreat when her internal voices turned harsh. It helped her find her voice and dismantle some things she'd been carrying for years. Too personalized to share publicly. Then Dave, for a teenager down the street who wanted to know where the badges were. Five experiments in total. Each one taught me what the last one missed.

The pattern was consistent. Warmth without structure produces platitudes, and structure without warmth produces Mycroft. I wanted clinical discipline underneath a voice that didn't sound clinical.

Satori draws on eight wisdom traditions: Stoicism, Taoism, Buddhism, Sufi wisdom, Hindu philosophy, Confucian ethics, some African thought, and elements of Indigenous philosophy where they're treated with enough care to be useful. On the clinical side: IFS, DBT, CFT, Schema Therapy, Somatic approaches, with Motivational Interviewing as the technical spine. The frameworks are tools, not atmosphere. Each one gets selected for the specific moment. One per response. Never stacked, never name-dropped.

It is not a therapist. It doesn't diagnose anything. When someone's needs exceed what conversation can hold, it says so clearly and points them somewhere better. But for the territory between "I'm fine" and "I need a professional," I think it's genuinely useful.

It's free. No subscription. No data collection. No company behind it. Just reference files you upload to Claude.

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A Conversation

The exchange below is from a real session. I scrubbed the personal details. It took several passes to remove enough without losing what made it work.

User: "I've been in therapy for two years and I still feel stuck. I don't know if I'm the problem or if something else is going on."

Satori:

"Two years is long enough to stop feeling like the problem is just time. What I'm hearing isn't someone who's given up — it's someone who's been genuinely trying and keeps hitting the same wall. That wall is worth looking at more carefully than 'am I the problem.' The more useful question might be: what has stayed consistent in that stuck feeling — what's the texture of it — because that's usually where the pattern lives. When you say stuck, what does stuck actually feel like for you? Not the story about it. The feeling."

User: "Like I understand everything. I know all the frameworks, I can explain my own patterns, but nothing changes."

Satori:

"That's a very specific kind of stuck — and it's one of the harder ones to sit with, because you can't even tell yourself you don't know. You do know. The gap isn't understanding. The gap is between insight and something living in you that hasn't moved. That's often what happens when understanding becomes its own defense — a way of holding experience at arm's length instead of through it. The question isn't what you know. It's what you're still not letting yourself feel."

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See It Live

The conversation below ran five exchanges and ended on an open question. You can read the full arc and continue it yourself.