The Radical Comfort of Not Being in Control

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Based on a conversation with Stuart Masters and Philipp Kobald

Most modern spirituality is basically project management with incense.

Track your habits. Optimize your nervous system. Curate your belief set like a Spotify playlist. Then, when life still feels like a browser with forty tabs screaming at once, we assume we’ve “failed” at the whole inner-peace thing.

Quaker spirituality turns up with a quieter, more irritating proposal: you don’t get to control the spirit. You don’t get to summon it on demand. You don’t get to treat transcendence like a customer-service chatbot.

“You can’t control the spirits… we are making ourselves available, but we are not in control.” — Stuart Masters

If that line lands with a small internal eye-roll, good. That’s the point. It exposes the hidden deal most of us make with spiritual seeking: I will be open, but only if I stay in charge. I will surrender, but with a safety clause. I will trust, but with a return policy.

Quaker “waiting worship” doesn’t offer a return policy. It offers a room. A bench. A community. And the insistence that the deepest work often starts when you stop trying to be impressive about it.

The Age of Decision-Fatigue Saints

We live in a culture that treats every choice as a moral identity statement. Not just the big ones. The small ones, too.

What do you eat? What do you buy? Who do you follow? Which causes do you publicly care about? Which ones do you quietly ignore because you’re exhausted and the dishwasher is leaking again?

In the conversation, Philipp Kobald names the modern problem without romanticizing it: people are “overrun with decision making,” to the point where even buying sneakers can become a half-hour ethical and existential debate.

That’s not enlightenment. That’s burnout with better vocabulary.

Quaker practice doesn’t pretend the world is simple. It refuses to add performative complexity on top of already-complicated lives. It asks for something more direct: step back from the noise often enough that you can actually hear what you’re doing.

Stuart points out that Quaker spirituality traditionally requires what’s been called “times of retirement” — deliberate stepping back from busyness to be open, attentive, listening.

Not a glow-up. Not a transformation arc. Just space. Regularly.

The Paradox Nobody Likes Posting About

Here’s the snag: the modern self is built around being in control.

We build routines, brands, boundaries, and strategies. We train ourselves to be “high agency.” Then we bring that same posture into spirituality and call it discipline. But there’s a difference between discipline and domination.

Stuart goes straight for the uncomfortable paradox: spirituality is “about giving up yourself rather than being in control of yourself.”

Philipp’s response is more human than theoretical. He doesn’t deny the paradox; he reframes it as consent, as chosen surrender rather than forced submission: “I make my free will choice to give up, but it’s my choice.” — Philipp Kobald

That’s the modern nerve, isn’t it? We don’t mind surrender, as long as we authored it.

Quakerism, at its best, sits in that tension without trying to tidy it up. It doesn’t demand you switch off your brain. It asks you to notice what your brain does when it can’t run the show.

“Anti-Technique” in a World of Techniques

A lot of contemporary spirituality is technique-forward: breathwork, mantras, protocols, hacks. Quakers historically were “quite anti technique,” Stuart says, not because practice is pointless, but because technique can become a substitute for truth.

And yet — this is where the conversation gets refreshingly honest — busyness is real, and people do need help transitioning from “crazy buzzy life” into stillness.

So Stuart offers something that sounds almost too ordinary to be spiritual content: set aside time, accept you won’t stop thoughts, and practice turning the volume down.
He even describes combining embodied practice with inward practice — walking prayer first, then sitting — because the body and mind aren’t separate departments.

The relief here is subtle but huge: the goal isn’t to become a person who never has thoughts. The goal is to become someone who isn’t bullied by them.

And then comes the best punchline of all: as soon as you try to still your mind, you realize how busy it is.
Spiritual practice as the awkward moment you finally hear the room you’ve been living in.

Community Without the Sales Pitch

Modern seekers often want community the way we want a gym membership: access without obligation, belonging without awkwardness, intimacy without inconvenience.

Quaker worship doesn’t run on charisma or spectacle. It runs on presence. And it quietly exposes how difficult it is to do presence when your whole life is structured around distraction.

Stuart notes that the depth of Quaker worship depends, at least partly, on whether individuals are willing to practice attentiveness outside the meeting as well.

Translation: one hour on Sunday won’t fix a week designed to numb you.

But there’s also compassion in this realism. He points out that many Quakers today are the only Quaker in their family, balancing community commitments with family life.
No spiritual cosplay here. Just actual lives.

The Future Might Be Quiet (And Slightly Inconvenient)

At one point, Philipp asks whether Quakers could be “one of the havens of the future” because “you can’t be a Quaker and let a machine think for you.”

That line stings in the right way. Not because machines are evil, but because outsourcing inner life is the easiest trend to miss while it’s happening. We don’t notice it until we can no longer sit in a room without needing input.

Quaker practice is basically an intervention: stop feeding the machine with your attention long enough to discover you still exist without it.

And yes, the conversation also takes the modern turn: online worship. Stuart explains that Quakers have long experimented with online meetings, and that Woodbrook runs multiple online meetings for worship each week.
The point isn’t nostalgia for the “real” way. The point is the spirit can work among people whether they’re in a room or in a virtual space.

So the future might be quiet. It might even be online. But it won’t be optimized.

It will ask the one thing modern life hates offering: unproductive time that changes you anyway.

The full episode can be watched on the @HolisticCircle YouTube channel.

Guest bio: Stuart Masters is a Quaker teacher (for the best part of 20 years) who worked for Woodbrook, a Quaker education organization, and has a book published at the end of last year. www.stuartkmasters.com

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