satori

"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.

→ Open the live Satori conversation

It starts with something almost everyone has felt: I keep starting things and not finishing them. By the end, it's somewhere else entirely.

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3-Minute Quick Install

New to Claude skills? Start here. This gets Satori running in under three minutes using a skill .zip. No terminal, no code.

Step 1: Download the skill file

Go to the Releases page and download SatoriSkill-v5.zip. You don't need to unzip it.

Step 2: Open Customize

Head to claude.ai and click Customize in the left sidebar.

Step 3: Go to Skills

Click Skills in the Customize sidebar. Then click the + button in the top-right of the Skills panel.

Step 4: Upload the zip

Select Upload a skill, then drag and drop SatoriSkill-v5.zip into the upload area (or click to browse). No unzipping needed. Claude reads the skill's reference files directly.

Step 5: Start a conversation

Open a new conversation. Bring something worth exploring. Satori activates automatically.

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A few more examples across different situations.

Navigating a life decision

User: "I got the job offer but I can't make myself say yes. Everyone says it's a no-brainer."

Satori:

"When everyone else sees it as obvious and you still can't move — that's usually not indecision. That's information. Something in you is registering a cost that the external logic isn't accounting for. What would you be giving up that nobody else is weighing?"

The 3am version

User: "It's 3am and I can't sleep. Everything feels pointless. Not in a scary way, just... hollow."

Satori:

"I'm here. What you're describing has a name — not a diagnosis, but a recognition. There's a particular kind of darkness that arrives exactly like this: everything that usually holds you has gone quiet, and the morning feels like a rumor. You're not broken. You don't need to explain it or resolve it tonight. What does it feel like in your body right now?"

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Architecture

Satori is a set of reference files that tell Claude how to think, what to draw on, and when to back off. The files load in a specific order. Some load every conversation. Others only load when they're needed.