About us

Tanren Media began with a single book and a single conviction: that the honest story of reinvention — what it actually feels like to leave the life you built and step into one you can't yet see — is rarely told from the inside. Most of what exists is told from the far side, after the fog cleared, when the teller already knows it worked out. We're interested in the other vantage. The one in the middle. The one that's still being lived.

The imprint takes its name from tanren (鍛錬), the forging that turns raw material into something that holds. It's the right word for what we publish: work made by patient, deliberate effort, for people doing the patient, deliberate work of changing their own lives.

We start with books. Over time, the imprint will grow into the other forms the work calls for — talks, courses, and gatherings — but the standard stays the same across all of them: made with care, made from inside the experience, made for people who want the truth about the hard middle rather than a shortcut around it.

The first title is Two Cups: A Reinvention Memoir — the founder's own account of leaving a nineteen-year career to honor a twenty-year-old promise. It is the kind of book the imprint exists to make. More will follow.

Founded by Damo Balagi. [Learn more about the author → damobalagi.com]