FAQs

Someone who helps you deepen the friendships in your life - starting with the one you have with yourself. That order isn’t a slogan; it’s the method. The way you treat your own inner life is the template for every relationship you’re in, and that template can be re-made. The re-making is called befriending, and it’s what we do together.

No - and I’ll be the first to say when therapy is the right door. Therapy treats; this work unfolds. I work with people who are fundamentally standing on their feet and want more depth, more contact, more aliveness - with themselves and the people who matter to them. If what’s alive in you is trauma that makes it unsafe to be with your own experience, a trauma-trained therapist is the right first company, and I’ll say so directly and help you find one. (The two also combine well - several people do both.)

It’s closer to coaching than to anything else with a familiar name, and my training is in a coaching lineage. But most coaching optimizes - goals, accountability, performance. This work goes the other direction: we stop trying to fix you. The operating premise is that nothing is missing in you, and that what feels like deficiency is usually disconnection. So: coaching-shaped container, very un-coaching-like premise.

The Buddha was asked whether good friendship was half of the spiritual life. He answered: it’s the whole of it. Aristotle wrote that the friend is “another self” and spent two books of the Ethics on it. In Buddhist tradition the one who accompanies your growth is called kalyāṇa-mitra - spiritual friend. Friendship is the oldest name for this work, not the softest. What’s actually soft is how we’ve come to use the word - and that’s rather the point.

I don’t use the word lightly - so no, working with me doesn’t automatically make us friends, though we might become friends, if we’re meant to be. While we’re working, I’m your facilitator, fully. What we become afterward, life decides.

We slow down. You bring what’s alive - a situation, a feeling, a pattern, a relationship - and instead of analyzing it or solving it, we get curious about what’s actually happening in you: the parts of you that protect, criticize, hurt, want. We pay attention to the body, because feelings are bodily events before they’re stories. Things unfold from there in a way that’s hard to describe and unmistakable to experience - which is why the first conversation is free.

The longer answer is here →

The method I’m trained in (Levels 1 & 2, under Steve March) - a depth-coaching approach built on parts work, felt sense, presence, and unfolding. The word is Greek for “truth” - literally un-concealment. I apply the method; I don’t teach or certify it. If you want the source, I’ll happily point you to it.

It’s not religious, and you don’t need to believe anything. It is unavoidably deep - the work touches meaning, purpose, and what you might call soul, because friendship with yourself eventually reaches everything. People of every faith and none do this work; your own frame is welcome and never corrected.

People who sense there’s more of them than they’re currently living - more depth, more contact, more aliveness - and who’ve noticed that self-improvement projects haven’t gotten them there. People who want deeper friendship, partnership, family - and suspect it starts closer to home. And people willing to commit to a season: three months of actually showing up.

Not for anyone looking for a system to install, this isn’t built for that. (When we step back and talk about how the work is going, I might offer a suggestion - sometimes even a technique or a plan. But that’s the exception, not the work itself.) If you’re looking for someone to fix you, the premise here will frustrate you. And if what’s most alive right now is acute crisis or untreated trauma, therapy is the right first door - see above, and I mean it warmly.

I won’t promise outcomes or timelines - not because I hedge, but because promising is the fixing paradigm wearing a suit, and this work runs on a different engine. What I can say: we work in three-month seasons because ways of being take practice, most people feel something shift within the first few sessions, and the deepest value tends to arrive in the second half of a season. The first conversation will tell you more than this paragraph can.

Three. Maitrī is a free monthly circle online - seventy-five minutes, no commitment beyond turning up. The Art of Friendship is a one-day workshop for six to eight people, also online. And a season of 1:1 sessions is the depth work proper: ten sessions over about three months.

Everything is currently online - 1:1 sessions, the circle, and the workshop. Video works better than people expect for this kind of attention. When in-person work happens, it happens in Goa, India.

The first conversation is free - a real conversation, not a sales call. Maitrī costs nothing. The Art of Friendship is ₹999. A first season of 1:1 work comes to ₹16,500 - that’s ₹1,500 for the intake session and ₹15,000 for ten sessions, payable in three monthly parts; ₹14,500 if you pay the season upfront. The full detail is on the sessions page.

This pricing is for clients in India - if you’re elsewhere in the world, email me (hello@franklobo.com) and we’ll discuss it directly. I also keep a few subsidized slots for people who can’t afford the full fee, decided case by case depending on my capacity; email me (hello@franklobo.com) if you’d like to ask. If money is the only thing in the way, say so in the first conversation - we’ll talk honestly.

My Substack - where I do this work in public, doors open. Some of it is raw and personal, where I turn the work on myself; some of it is about the art of friendship itself - its lineage, its practice, why it’s the thing that actually changes us. Either way, it’s the best way to sense whether my way of seeing fits you, long before we ever talk.