About
I’m Bart. I’m 52, I live in London, I work in banking, and I have three teenagers who are better at most things than I am. I build contemplative tools in whatever time I can find between the day job and the school run - usually five to ten hours a week, usually early mornings or late evenings.
The name Prosoche comes from a Greek word that Pierre Hadot recovered from the Stoic philosophical tradition. Prosoche - attention to oneself, vigilance over one’s own mental impressions - was, according to Hadot, the fundamental spiritual exercise taught by Epictetus and practiced by Marcus Aurelius. Not “mindfulness” in the modern wellness sense. Something more specific: the deliberate, sustained act of watching your own mind before it runs away with you.
When I first read Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life, something clicked. I’d been practicing Buddhist meditation for years - satipatthana, the four foundations of mindfulness from the Pali canon. And here was a parallel tradition, developed independently (or perhaps not so independently - Pyrrho of Elis travelled to India with Alexander and encountered Buddhist practitioners there), describing the same core move: pay attention to what’s actually happening in your experience, right now, before the stories take over.
That’s what this project is about. Not teaching mindfulness - there are ten thousand apps and courses for that. Building tools that help me practice it. And sharing what I find along the way.
Why I Build These Tools
I started with ProsoPlate because I needed it myself. After years of diet cycling - counting calories, restricting, rebounding - I came across Dr. Judson Brewer’s research on reward prediction error at Brown University. His work showed that mindful awareness of actual eating experience, not restriction, is what updates the brain’s reward predictions over time. The craving doesn’t get suppressed. It gets seen clearly, and it loses its grip.
I built an app around that mechanism. I used it. I lost weight. Not because the app told me what to eat, but because it helped me notice what was actually happening when I ate.
ProsoStride came from the same impulse - I wanted to return to running but needed a way to stay in the contemplative zone rather than the competitive one. ProsoEase is breathing and walking meditation with your own voice guiding you. ProsoFlow is still in early development - attention state tracking based on a framework I developed called WIN-NOGO-LOSS-ACE.
What This Is Not
This is not a guru operation. I’m not a meditation teacher, a therapist, or a neuroscientist. I’m a practitioner who reads the research, builds tools around it, and writes honestly about what I find. When I cite Brewer, Analayo, Neff, Barrett, or Hadot, it’s because their work has directly shaped what I build and how I practice. When I get something wrong, I say so.
This is a long project - three to five years, not a product launch. One app at a time, one article at a time, one honest observation at a time. The site is where I share the thinking behind the tools. The journal is where I share the practice.
If any of it is useful to you, I’m glad.
Bart
Find me at: Instagram, BlueSky, LinkedIn, SmagaBakery .