Welcome, I’m Domenic Ashburn.

Who I'm looking for Someone who has shipped real products on small teams, who cares about how an app feels in the hand, and who would rather build one thing slowly and well than ten things fast and forgotten. You don’t need ten years of experience. You need taste, calm, and the kind of seriousness that doesn’t need an audience to maintain. What you'd work on • The iOS app (SwiftUI + a tiny native bridge layer) • The Bun + Hono backend that wraps AI meditation generation • The contemplative prompt engineering itself — the AI is the practice's voice; we treat it as a discipline • Whatever needs building. We’re small. Boundaries between “product” and “engineering” are mostly fictional here. What I’ll bring • A product I’ve been building with care for a year • Funding to make this a real r

Who I'm looking for Someone with a PhD in neuroscience, cognitive science, or experimental psychology, with a real research history in contemplative practice. Not dabbling in mindfulness as a side interest. Someone whose work has actually measured what sitting does to the brain. Published research in the field matters more than seniority. Whether your line of work is default-mode-network suppression, attentional regulation, interoception, HRV-and-meditation, or oscillatory EEG signatures of advanced practice — what I'm looking for is somebody who already knows the literature and can write a study into it. You should also be willing to design and run one rigorous study end-to-end, not supervise from a distance. What you'd work on • Designing a controlled study on how The Sacred Act's AI

Who I'm looking for Someone with a PhD in religious studies, Buddhist studies, contemplative studies, or comparative philosophy — and deep reading in classical contemplative texts. Reading ability in at least one of Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, Classical Chinese, or Classical Japanese, in a tradition you've actually published on. Broader range welcome, not required. You hold both halves of the work at once: scholarly precision and lived seriousness. You've studied the texts and you've sat with them. You can tell when sati has been collapsed into "mindfulness" and lost the recollection-and-discernment that made it sati in the first place. You can name the missing half. You can read where convenience or marketing has eroded the source, and you care enough to say so. You've also read the exist

Who I'm looking for A designer who codes, or an engineer who designs — the line doesn't matter. What matters is that you can hold the whole experience in your head: the way a glance complication should feel on the wrist, the way a widget rests on a Mac desktop, the way the iPhone app breathes in the hand. And you can build it yourself in Swift. You're fluent in Swift and SwiftUI. You've shipped a real iOS app to production — not a course project. You know Apple's Human Interface Guidelines well enough to know when to follow them and when the practice we're building demands a quieter, slower deviation. You probably have opinions about haptics, motion curves, and font metrics, and you can defend those opinions in code reviews. Bonus: production experience with WidgetKit, watchOS complicat