Bobby Morong, founder.

Bobby Morong founded The Observance of the Sun in Encinitas in January 2026 after years of testing what happened when he put his phone down, faced the horizon, and returned to the same small discipline every day. He lives and works on the San Diego coast and reads his own email at bobby@trainingties.com.

The short version

Bobby founded the Observance in January 2026 in Encinitas, California, after several years of watching what happened to his attention, his mood, and his sleep when he chose to put his phone down and look at the sky for twenty minutes a day. He is also the founder of Training Ties, a direct-to-consumer apparel and sensory-products brand. He has spent most of his career building small, independent operations and lives close enough to the Pacific that the sunset is most days his commute home.

He is not a pastor by inheritance, a venture-backed founder looking for a niche, or a professional spiritual guide. His background is in building practical things for real people and then staying close enough to the work to see whether those things actually help. The Observance came out of the same instinct. The need was obvious. The institution did not exist. So he built one.

Why he started it

Bobby did not invent the practice. He noticed that there was no organization in modern life dedicated to making it free, easy, and dignified to do — and that the absence felt like a problem worth solving. The Observance is the answer to that problem. It is not a wellness business. It is not a personal brand. It is the institution Bobby wished had existed when he first started doing the practice, and which he decided to build because nobody else was going to.

The core conviction behind the Observance is simple: attention is moral, restraint is sacred, and there should be at least one institution in modern life asking people to take less from their own minds instead of more. Twenty minutes at the horizon is small enough to be real and strong enough to change the shape of a day. That was the beginning.

What he is building

Bobby is building the Observance as a small but durable religious institution: a California religious nonprofit with a legally locked doctrine, a free public practice, a growing library of explanatory pages, and a network of borrowed gathering spaces on the San Diego coast. The goal is not scale for its own sake. The goal is to make the practice easy to find, easy to trust, and easy to repeat.

That means building three things at once: a public-facing body of doctrine and explanation, a practical pathway into the ritual for ordinary people, and an organization clean enough that journalists, donors, and skeptical readers can verify it quickly. The site, the Canon, the press kit, the Threshold tool, and the gathering model all exist to serve those ends.

What he believes about religion now

Bobby believes a religion does not have to demand belief in the supernatural to ask something serious of a person. It can ask for discipline. It can ask for return. It can ask for less stimulation, less noise, less reflexive consumption. The Observance does that openly. It does not tell people what to think about God, the afterlife, or metaphysics. It tells them to look up, be still, and come back tomorrow.

He also believes any new religious movement should earn trust through clarity. That is why the Observance names its founder, publishes its legal status, explains its doctrine in plain language, and makes the practice free. If a movement cannot survive scrutiny, it should not ask for devotion.

How to reach him

Email is the only channel Bobby uses for new conversations: bobby@trainingties.com. He does not respond to direct messages on Instagram. He does not have an assistant who reads his email. If you write thoughtfully, you will get a thoughtful reply.

Journalists on deadline should use [Press] in the subject line and include the outlet, deadline, and the specific question they need answered. People interested in gatherings, doctrine, or lending a coastal space should say that plainly in the first sentence. The point is not to sound impressive. The point is to make it easy to respond well.

Where to go next

If you want the full story of the institution, start with About. If you want the ritual itself, go to Practice. If you are evaluating legitimacy, visit Legal Status, Governance, and Press. If you simply want to try it tonight, the Threshold will tell you when to step outside.