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BY DEREK THOMAS
I had built the life I once dreamed about, and I could no longer find myself inside it.
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The realization arrived while living in Topanga Canyon and driving across Los Angeles between rehearsals for one of three bands. My days were consumed by writing, recording, booking, managing, performing, running a music school, and intensive study with a private mentor—work that often required ten-hour days. From the outside, life looked productive, even successful. Inside, exhaustion had replaced the sense of purpose that once drew me to music.
Like many men, I had quietly confused carrying more with becoming stronger.
That night, I called my mentor and paused our studies. Two of the bands were told that I had taken on more than I could carry. For the first time, letting go no longer felt like failure. It felt like the beginning of finding my way back to myself.
Within a month, I booked a four-week trip to the Maldives. The need was simple: surf, clear my head, and return to the meditation and yoga practices that had been crowded out of my life. The solitude, open water, and almost impossible beauty of the islands began to reset something in me. Four weeks became a season after I accepted a position managing private yacht charters for a boutique surf-travel company in the northern atolls.
After a lifetime of making my living through music, stepping away felt both liberating and terrifying. The possibility of losing momentum, opportunity, or even the identity built over so many years was difficult to ignore. For reassurance, I kept telling myself the departure was only temporary. There was no way to know that the decision would open the door to an entirely different life.
Over the years that followed, life unfolded through remote parts of Indonesia and the Maldives before eventually leading to Nicaragua. I hosted surf-travel experiences in isolated places, searching for the right waves and creating encounters that felt personal rather than manufactured. Helping people step outside their normal lives offered a sense of purpose different from performing, but no less meaningful.
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With guests during one of his hosted surf experiences. Photo courtesy of Derek Thomas.
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Between trips, weeks or months sometimes passed almost entirely alone. There were no meetings, no rooms to impress, and no constant reminders of what should be accomplished next. Surfing and meditation became daily anchors, and the Eastern arts that had fascinated me for much of my life took on greater depth. The practice became one of noticing the silence behind every moment—what I came to think of as the art of collaborating with the universe.
The music never disappeared. Songs continued to surface, but without the pressure to turn each one into a product or opportunity. The contrast exposed how much of my former life had been built around acquisition: more knowledge, recognition, performances, and progress. Solitude taught through removal instead—fewer distractions, expectations, and identities to maintain. At last, there was room to notice what remained when the noise fell away.
But the no-plan plan did not always feel courageous, spiritual, or inspiring.
One night, after two seasons abroad, I woke with my heart racing and a question I could not silence: Had I lost the dream—had I lost myself? Music had felt like my calling for more than twenty-five years. What if I had been wrong? Beneath the questions of purpose was a practical fear: What was I going to do when reality caught up with me?
The uncertainty that had once felt so welcome suddenly seemed less like freedom and more like evidence of a terrible mistake. No sign appeared to explain what should replace the life left behind. The only choice was to remain inside the uncertainty without rushing to escape it. That may have been one of the most important lessons of those years.
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Men are often taught to associate strength with control: keep moving, solve the problem, achieve more, and appear certain of where you are going. We are praised for staying the course long after the course has begun hollowing us out. Discipline and determination matter; none of what I built would have been possible without them. But determination can also become a refusal to listen—and a path of avoidance.
Sometimes we hold on not because something is right, but because releasing it would force us to question who we are without it. For years, strength had meant continuing at any cost. Slowly, another possibility emerged: strength could also mean admitting when a life no longer fits—and standing in the empty space before the next one takes shape.
What first appeared to be a detour eventually revealed a direction. Solitude, surfing, meditation, music, and hosting began to converge. Roughly five years ago, that convergence became Casa Soul Water, the holistic retreat center I founded on Nicaragua’s Pacific Coast.
Casa Soul Water did not begin with a master plan. The idea emerged gradually around a simple intention: to create a place where people could step away from the speed and repetition of everyday life and listen more closely to themselves—without needing to disappear for a decade, as I had.
Over the years, Casa Soul Water has also become a collaborative home for co-facilitators from around the world—including wellness leaders, men’s-work coaches, professional surfers, entrepreneurs, and therapists—while welcoming individuals, couples, families, and private groups seeking restoration, clarity, and meaningful transformation.
The retreat brought the parts of life I value most under one roof: nature, surfing, personal exploration, holistic modalities, service, and even music. Through retreats, breathwork, meditation, and ocean-based experiences, another way of creating space for reflection began to take shape. Music had always provided that outlet. Now the same intention could be expressed in more personal and communal ways. One did not replace the other. They came from the same source.
At their best, music, surfing, meditation, and meaningful human connection ask the same thing of us: complete participation in the present moment. Whether writing a song, paddling into a wave, listening to another person, or sitting alone, the invitation is to stop standing outside the experience and enter it fully. To me, that is where creativity begins.
Creativity is not limited to people who call themselves artists. Every one of us is creating a life. The choices we make, the relationships we nurture, the risks we take, and the things we hold or release become part of the work. Everyone is an artist. Our lives are our art.
Returning to the stage revealed something I had never fully recognized. During an intimate gathering of friends and travelers, I clearly noticed my energy shift the moment ‘the performer’ stepped forward. The ego involved was not inherently negative, but it was a distinct identity built to hold attention. Solitude and spiritual practice made it possible to observe that transition with curiosity rather than judgment. That same emotional intelligence offered a profound awareness of how we often unconsciously become attached to our identities and patterns of energy—patterns that shape how we interpret reality, engage with each moment, and ultimately influence the potential of the lives we are creating.
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Abandoning music was never the answer. What needed to change was my relationship to attention, ambition, identity, and the need to be seen. After nearly a decade abroad, that pull brought me full circle, back to living in Southern California.
The return came with a different relationship to momentum. Reacting to every movement of the industry—or forcing a career into a shape that merely looked successful from the outside—had lost its appeal. The goal became creating work that reflected an actual life: its beauty, uncertainty, mistakes, and contradictions.
Life, of course, has continued to offer reminders that not everything meaningful must be planned and that, when we are at our best, we are collaborating with the universe. Having just returned, I was offered a last-minute solo show at the Laguna Beach Cultural Arts Center. The evening evolved almost effortlessly: the right musicians became available, the room sold out, and someone asked to film the performance the day before. We later discovered that the audio had also been captured through the house soundboard. An unplanned evening suddenly became my new live EP.
Playing live and relatively unrehearsed leaves room for something unexpected to enter. To me, this is where some of the greatest art comes from: when the universe seeps into the experience and something new and unknown is created. You prepare, practice, and bring everything you have, but eventually control must be released so the moment can become what it is. That evening and the recording felt like the culmination of the previous decade: preparation meeting uncertainty—the same tension that had shaped so much of my life.
For years, I believed the task was to design the right life and work relentlessly until it had been forced into existence. Discipline, commitment, and wholehearted effort still matter deeply. But effort and control are not the same thing. Sometimes the most important work is done by giving everything to what matters while leaving room for what could never have been planned.
Letting go did not mean abandoning my dream. It allowed me to discover that the dream was larger than the version I had been trying so hard to protect.
About the Author
Derek Thomas is a singer-songwriter, surfer, holistic facilitator, and founder of Casa Soul Water, a holistic retreat center on Nicaragua’s Pacific Coast. Internationally certified in breathwork, meditation, and yoga, Derek has created a uniquely integrated life centered on his passion for the Eastern arts, music, and the ocean.
For the past decade, he has hosted holistic surf experiences aboard yachts, on private islands, and in remote locations throughout the Maldives, Indonesia, Hawaii, and the jungled coastlines of Central America. Through his company Soul Water Surf, he has hosted and collaborated with men’s-work coaches, therapists, professional surfers, private groups, and foundations from around the world.
His live EP, Derek Thomas: Live at the Laguna Beach Cultural Arts Center, will be released on August 14, 2026. Follow him on Instagram at @derekthomasofficial.
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