Next week I will be teaching Nature as the Foundation of Regenerative Design to the current Design Science Studio. This essay is a part of my own process of organizing my thoughts for this class, and sharing these ideas a bit more broadly, as I feel deeply that every single one of us can be practitioners of Regenerative Design within our own respective domains. I hope that this gives you a little bit more permission, clarity, or energy to explore what that uniquely looks like for you!

Leaves falling and breaking down into soil.Communities repairing after grief and harm.Water moving through land, reshaping it over time.Wounds healing. Forests burning and returning more resilient.Life growing, life dying, death becoming food for the life yet to come.

Regeneration is not something we invented.And it’s not something we can codify.It is a pattern we belong to.

And in remembering our belonging to this pattern—in learning to be students and participants in cycles of regeneration—we can, dare I say we must, transform the way we shape all human activity.

I believe every single one of us has a unique and powerful role to play.

It can be easy, I suppose, to regard regeneration as a trend, a buzzword, a meme. For many people encountering it for the first time, it means nothing really. It can be a bit nebulous, a little hard to grasp and pin down. For others, it’s absolutely everything. A paradigm shift in the way we think that reshapes not only how we see the world, but how we identify our unique place and role within the transformations our world is requiring of us, on every scale.

Somewhere in between those two poles, Regeneration has become a sort of specialized practice—something you learn from the right institution, and then apply through the correct methodology. There is work being done to establish regenerative industry standards in:

* agriculture and food systems

* real estate and the built environment

* tourism and hospitality

* finance and investment

* supply chains and manufacturing

* energy and infrastructure

* urban planning and regional development

* community development

* organizational design and governance

While there are excellent frameworks, institutes, and lineages that support this work (and I am a student-practitioner of several of them), in my personal and professional view, the most important thing to remember is this:

Regeneration is an essential quality of all living systems.

This means it belongs to all of us.

Every single one of us by virtue of being alive already participates in regenerative intelligence. Look at any child with an active relationship with the Living World and you will see the universal wisdom of of Living Systems at play, quite literally. This is all of our birthright. But living in an Industrial Growth Society in the midst of Late Stage Capitalism often requires us to forget this innate wisdom. My job is to help individuals and the living systems they belong to remember this.

Living Systems, At Every Scale

When I say “Living Systems,” I’m curious what comes to mind for you.

In 10+ years of studying and practicing with Living Systems, what this term entails is ever expanding for me. Living Systems is a term that includes:

CellsSoilBodiesFamiliesCommunitiesOrganizationsCulturesGardensForestsSuperorganismsFungal networksBioregionsThis whole incredible planet we call homeGalaxiesCosmos

None of these exist alone.

Each one breathes within a larger body.

Living systems are characterized by their capacity to self-organize, respond to feedback, and adapt within context. They are not static. They are not optimized once and for all. They live through cycles.

Regeneration is a principle of all Living Systems, and as a Living System yourself, anything you design can (and dare I say, should) be designed with regenerative principles at the core.

Regeneration is the Life–Death–Life Cycle

In its simplest possible terms, regeneration is the Life–Death-Life Cycle.

This is where many people get uncomfortable. We are addicted to, conditioned for, endless growth in our culture. We fear death, and see endings as failures.

But death is both the precondition and ultimate destination of life. The good news is that just as death always comes from life, life always comes from death.

And when we see death as the fertile soil for all vital beginnings, something deep shifts. We begin to loosen our grip. We begin to get curious about what is possible if we let things go with dignity:

Structures that no longer serve.Relationships that have run their course.Narratives that once made sense but no longer do.Ways of working that exhaust us more than they nourish.

Regeneration depends on allowing things to die, to fall away, to be decomposed, recomposed, transformed.

To be integrated, to be created anew.

Everything that appears as waste—food scraps, fallen leaves, dead roots, stale norms, old failures—becomes the substrate for new life. Everything is transformed. Everything comes from transformation.

Breakdown is the prerequisite for becoming.

In a moment I’ll get to the most practical, visceral, real-life teacher of this but before I do, I invite you to take a moment with the second stanza of one of my favorite poems by Antonio Machado, Anoche Cuando Dormía (Last Night As I Lay Sleeping):

Anoche cuando dormíasoñé, ¡bendita ilusión!,que una colmena teníadentro de mi corazón;y las doradas abejasiban fabricando en él,con las amarguras viejasblanca cera y dulce miel.

Last night as I was sleeping,I dreamt—marvelous error!—that I had a beehivehere inside my heart.And the golden beeswere making white combsand sweet honeyfrom my old failures.

I am curious, if you read this slowly, and out loud, either in the original Castilian, or in English, what sensations emerge in your body? What arises? What settles? What moves through you as you consider, that in your sleep, that on some dimension, golden bees are making sweet honey from your old failures?

When I sit with them, these lines often bring tears to my eyes, as they are doing now. I feel my heart beating in my chest as I bring to mind the shame I feel at things in my past that didn’t quite work out the way I’d imagined, the way I’d hoped, the way I’d worked for. And in bringing that shame forward, in a loving context, by imagining these chapters of my own life as nectar for transformation, a warmth rises in my chest. I feel tremendous gratitude for the opportunities and people that made those chapters possible. My mind sharpens to the lessons I can integrate into all that I am creating now. I feel excitement for what is coming.

I trust that I can make something even more beautiful, powerful, loving, life-affirming from what I have been required to release in my life.

What about you? I am genuinely curious, please share!

Enter Compost

Compost is one of the greatest teachers of regeneration both materially and metaphorically.

I cook a lot. I cook from whole foods, sourced from as close to home as I can manage. Which means there are always peels and husks and stems and seeds and squishy bits piling up on my cutting board. Some days I fill an entire compost pail before lunchtime. I feel grateful every time I carry it outside (though sometimes my executive function capacity is low and I put it off for a few days and end up with a few vessels I need to walk out with, alas).

I know not everyone lives in conditions where composting is easy or even possible. That, in itself, is part of the lesson compost teaches:

Compost is all about having supportive conditions for effective transformation.

This is regeneration in its purest expression. Breakdown and integration of what has been, in order to create the fertile soil for what life is asking to give life to.

The balance of browns and greens. Air. Moisture. Time. Movement. Stillness. When those conditions are right, what looks like waste breaks down and becomes what it was always capable of becoming: rich soil. Black gold. Food for future life.

Something discarded, transformed not by force, but by a nourishing context.

Take one half of a banana peel and shove it behind a toaster or into the back of a utensil drawer for four weeks. It doesn’t become soil. It becomes putrid. This can happen so slowly that, living in the midst of it, you hardly notice that something is rotten.

When you live inside those conditions long enough, you acclimate to the smell. It can take an outsider, someone with fresh eyes and a fresh nose, to say, “something isn’t right here.”

That’s true far beyond the kitchen.

Families. Organizations. Industries. Cultures. Internal psychological dynamics. There are ways of doing things that only look normal because we’ve been living with them for so long. From the inside, it’s hard to tell what’s rotten, but could be ground for a fertile beginning—if only the conditions were different.

Now take the other half of the same banana peel and place it in a well-tended compost pile. With heat, moisture, and the right mix of materials, in the same four weeks it can become potassium-rich soil.

The peel doesn’t change its nature. The context changes its outcome.

And I do hope you wouldn’t be angry at the banana peel for not fulfilling its potential to become soil when it was never given the supportive conditions in which to transform.

This is a critical shift regenerative design requires us to make: away from obsessing over what’s wrong, and toward understanding what wants to become possible under the right conditions.

This is just as true for people as it is for families as it is for businesses as it is for neighborhoods as it is for communities as it is for municipalities as it is for entire nations as it is for bioregions as it is for this entire planet. This is true at every scale of living systems.

I’ll add something else, in full transparency:

As much as compost teaches me, I definitely don’t do it alone. Yesterday, our friend Max who helps care for our garden and household in really essential ways processed our compost. They texted our whole household to let us know where to put the new scraps, and that we need to reroute the many eggshells we go through each day. That we need to add more browns. Really helpful adjustments to make sure our waste is composting well. And I noticed a flicker of old shame: the part of me that thinks I should have perfect compost all the time, that I should be handling it all myself, expertly. That if I write about compost and teach from it, I should somehow be an entirely self sufficient compost wizard.

Noticing this shame flicker up was so insightful, and honestly makes me laugh. Because it’s all about having supportive conditions, right? And that means help. I don’t feel ashamed of collaboration. Compost itself doesn’t work without community—microbes, fungi, bacteria, heat, time, relationship. Why would our human systems be any different?

That realization was liberating because it mirrors my work with the people and organizations I support. Helping them see what’s ready to break down. What’s ready to become soil. What new potentials are ready to take root. What kind of conditions would allow their unique regenerative capacities to flourish.

None of us do any of this alone. None of us are meant to.

Regeneration isn’t about fixing what’s wrong.It’s about creating the conditions where potential can finally be realized.

Should we Design for Problems or Potentials?

Much of modern design — whether in engineering, policy, product development, or organizational strategy — begins by identifying a problem and working toward a solution. Something isn’t functioning as intended, so we analyze what’s broken, isolate variables, and intervene to fix or optimize the system.

This approach has enormous value, especially in highly technical and bounded contexts. But Living Systems require a different approach. They are not static, predictable, or reducible to isolated parts. When design begins from the premise of “what’s wrong,” it often narrows attention toward elimination and control, rather than relationship and possibility.

Regenerative design represents a dynamic shift in orientation: instead of starting from problem, we begin from potential. We ask:

What unique potential, what unique essence is arising here? What is the system asking to become? What conditions would allow that potential to unfold over time?

This shift from fixing problems to cultivating conditions can be subtle but it is always profound. It changes not only what we design, but how we listen, intervene, and participate in the systems we touch.

Potential Lives in Context

One of the core principles taught in regenerative development and design work is that potential is never found in isolation. It is always found in relationship.

Nothing regenerates alone.

A seed cannot become a forest without soil, water, microbes, climate, and time. A wetland cannot regenerate without the health of the larger watershed it belongs to. A community cannot heal without attention to the broader social, economic, and cultural systems that shape it. A person cannot grow into their potential while embedded in a family that sees them as fundamentally broken.

This is why, in regenerative design, we look for what we call the next proximal whole: the larger system a given project is most immediately nested within.

If I’m regenerating a landscape, I look to the bioregion.If I’m regenerating a neighborhood, I look to the municipality or watershed.If I’m regenerating an organization, I look to the cultural and relational field it lives inside.

And if I’m working with an individual to support the regeneration of their life, I look to the relational field that shapes their everyday. That includes family, partners, friends, colleagues, and the more than human living world that surrounds them every single day.

Regeneration is context work.

And beyond that, it is essence work.

We ask: What is the deeper nature of this system? What is it here to express? What wants to live through it that cannot emerge under current conditions?

Application to Our Lives

All Living Systems are nested.

That means that yes, the regenerative potential is found within the larger context, but it also requires regenerative capacities within ourselves. The wider systems we belong to cannot regenerate beyond the capacity of the people shaping, holding, and participating in them. We hold the patterns.

Throughout our lives, we accumulate unfinished endings, unspoken grief, broken trust, and exhausted structures. When these are ignored, systems stagnate or even grow putrid. When they are acknowledged, processed, metabolized, something else becomes possible.

Families regenerate when fixed stories about one another are allowed to soften, but only when individuals are willing to acknowledge past harm, keep growing, and meet themselves in the present moment honestly.

Organizations regenerate when outdated roles and power dynamics are allowed to dissolve but only when the people inside them can tolerate uncertainty and loss.

Communities regenerate when grief is acknowledged and shared when individuals have the capacity to stay present with discomfort rather than rush to resolution.

Cultures regenerate when denial gives way to honesty. When enough people are willing to let cherished identities and narratives compost and meet the moment with full presence and a heart open to the potential of the Whole.

How we handle endings, what we allow to die, what we refuse to let go of shapes the soil future life depends on.

Design as Participation, Rather than Control

At its deepest level, regenerative design is not about mastery or control. It is about participation.

It requires listening more than asserting.Sensing more than fixing.Creating conditions rather than outcomes.

When we understand ourselves as living systems within living systems, we see that design gets to be less about imposing vision and more about stewarding relationship.

Every human project—every life, idea, organization, or community—requires fertile soil.

And soil is built slowly. Through attention. Through humility. Through willingness to let what is finished become the ground for what comes next.

I’ll leave you with a question I carry often, both in my work and in my life:

What is ready to compost, so its deeper potential can live?

If you feel called to live, work, or develop yourself and your world more regeneratively but feel you could use some supportive context, I warmly welcome you into a process of Regenerative Wayfinding. I’ve been working and collaborating within this field for years and love discovering the unique, authentic contributions that each of us can make toward regenerating the Whole.

I would be honored to support you.

Learn more here.

That realization happened because of Substack, because of you all here showing up and engaging meaningfully and beautifully with the ideas we share here. We are so grateful.

And it’s because of that, that I am stepping out with a little more boldness to clearly articulate the philosophy and principles behind our work, and to welcome you to deepen your capacity to steer and shape your life and our shared reality this coming year.

I would love to hear what this video stirs for you, and to have you join us in a steady, dynamic, adaptive year of shaping change through BeginWithin.

To see a bit more about the origins of this philosophy, see my recent essay Rewilding Cybernetics below.

I am writing this from the daybed in my office, curled up under a blanket, with the light of dawn coming in green, filtered through the leaves of my garden. My office used to be my bedroom, back when my mother lived on this side of the duplex, when I moved home after college, when my dad moved back to florida from india when he was diagnosed with cancer, when I didn’t know when or how my life would unfold. So much of my life has unfolded here in this room.

Here, I wrote academic papers on the false dichotomy of social narratives of Buddhist women, often categorizing them as either “monastic“ or “lay,“ erasing the tantric traditions of so many magical mystical women who have lived in the wilderness, practicing Dharma with their whole bodies.

Here, I first made love with the man who would become my husband.

Here, I conducted most of the first few years of my intensive study of Living Systems, reading books, checking what I was learning within my own living body, and then walking out into the garden to check it with the living body of the living world.

Here, I slept through the night when my father died, despite extended efforts by my mother and sister to wake me. That night a beloved friend, whose mother was also dying of cancer that summer, dreamt that she and I were sitting on the moon, singing the souls of the departing off to their next journey.

And here I am, now, seven years later, having made this room into my office, a jewel box sanctuary in motherhood, thickly cluttered with the erotic beauty I find in art, and artifacts, and art supplies, and heirlooms, and so many books spilling from their shelves. Here I am, in the morning light I love so much that comes in at a strange angle through the window which I have dangled with bits of chandeliers which make rainbows when the light is just right.

This is now the room from which I speak to clients, the room from which I do my work. And this week, I am working with mothers. I am working with people already leading regenerative development in their field, who didn’t have the language for it. I am working with someone going through a powerful spiritual initiation, and I am so incredibly honored to be walking alongside her. I am working with the community I was raised in, to begin to heal toxic patterns in order that we may have a future, and that that future could be one of thriving.

This week, I have had conversations on birth, and death, and sex, and organizational changemaking, and the lives and karmas our children choose when they incarnate through our bodies.

On Sunday, on my IG stories, I sent out a call for dialogue with people who, like me, fit the criteria below:

Ok friends, I am doing a bit of market research and would love to have a quick text or voice memo exchange with you if:

—You used to feel a strong sexual charge in your teens or twenties, and you miss that version of yourself.

— You’ve been through periods where your desire dipped, for weeks, months, or longer, and it bothered you.

— You want your sexual energy to feel alive again, but something hasn’t clicked yet.If this feels like you, and you’re open to sharing a bit more with me, just reply “me“ here and I’ll DM you a few questions.

At first it was quiet, and then, a flood.

The responses have revealed to me patterns that are so insightful, both to my own experience and to how the curriculum we have created in the EDGE can deeply support so many in coming to an empowered, alive relationship with their sexual energy.

I heard from strangers and friends, old colleagues and people I’ve hardly spoken to since college. Every experience completely unique, delicately nuanced, and yet following patterns I can discern.The people I heard back from included one woman I have felt enormous pain in relation to, the person with whom I unwillingly shared my most intense, painful, heartwrenching relationship with in college. Throughout this week we’ve connected about the intensity of that time, of that partner we both shared, and how concerned we still are for them while holding strong boundaries. It was deeply healing.

I feel incredibly human this week, and also very proud of the human I have become. It has not always been this way.

I feel grounded in myself and my values and my boundaries. It has not always been this way.

I feel confident and respected in the professional value I bring to my work. It has not always been this way.

In the hours after I gave birth, in the waves of pain and oxytocin and exhaustion and hunger and overwhelm, in the massive hormone cascade that was just beginning, and which would usher in my matrescence metamorphosis, I kept thinking one thing over and over and over again:

I would never look at another human being the same, knowing that someone had to go through some version of what I just did to do to bring them into this world.

Of course, like all psychedelic experiences (and childbirth certainly is one), the intensity of the realization gets muted over time. Integration into our daily lives is not a given. But I do believe that I have integrated this potent awareness of the sanctity and holiness of every life, including my own, into my work.

At every level, I am committed to our collective thriving. I am committed to the Living World. I am committed to healing the harm that so many of us are living with, in the survival patterns that live in the tissues and nervous system of our bodies, in the interpersonal patterns we keep playing out, in the organizational patterns that can and must change, of the cultural patterns that keep us trapped.

None of these things are fixed or permanent. Patterns can and do change every day. Some people call themselves pattern disruptors, but a system with momentum does not do well to be disrupted. There can be a lot of collateral damage. It must be regenerated. Regeneration takes into account the whole.

Regeneration is compost. We see what is still here which no longer serves and we compost it to create the fertile soil of better futures.

This is the nature of my life, of my work, and of the beauty I get to anchor in the world, every day, from this small, magical room.

There are two prayers we’ll say, from two different lineages close to our hearts. Two prayers, holding one vision of a healed world.

One prayer is the opening lines of the Sh’ma, a foundational prayer in Judaism which is said daily, in many sacred moments, including when one is facing death. The other is the Vajrayana Buddhist Dedication of Merit, a much longer prayer that we frequently recite as climax is building, a prayer that devotes all of the potent blessings of that present moment toward the liberation of the entire web of life.

Regardless of which prayer spontaneously arises, we both hold the same vision: a world that works for all of life, a future worthy of our children, the liberation and wellbeing of all sentient beings.

Right now, we’re finalizing the materials for the final phase of our course, the EDGE, where we teach many practices which have steadily transformed my entire relationship with sexuality. I specifically am teaching the practice of dedicating the merit of pleasure to the benefit of all beings, visualizing the best possible timeline for all life, and going there, fully, in my mind and body at the moment of climax.

This orgasmic prayer is a living process we will be teaching, for the first time, as Devotional Creation in this sixth and final phase of the EDGE.

It sounds poetic, maybe even abstract, but it’s strikingly simple once you begin practicing. As you approach climax, alone or with a partner, you turn your awareness toward the living world. Toward the beautiful potential of collective planetary regeneration. Toward the sacred. You offer up the vitality, the love, the clarity generated in that moment as a prayer.

You can find or develop your own words for this, but the essence is something like this:

May the power of this moment fuel peace.

May it support liberation.

May it bless others the way it’s blessing me.

May all beings know the beauty, love, fulfillment, and freedom I feel in this moment.

It hasn’t always been like this.

Like many, I know what it is to be shaped by a culture where sexuality was not a source of connection, but a source of control. I know what it is to inherit spiritual values that elevate celibacy while leaving entire generations fumbling in the dark with shame, secrecy, and silence.

The specific site of my youth was very unique, but the effects of religiously enforced sexual norms that I have had to desconstruct in my life are unfortunately not unique to me or my upbringing.

I was raised on an interfaith ashram where celibacy wasn’t just encouraged—it was required. Unless you were trying to conceive, the ideal was to conserve your sexual energy for higher, spiritual pursuits. Brahmacharya is the Hindu practice at the root of this norm within our community. A noble path, rooted in centuries of tradition. And I understand why it exists. I genuinely respect its power.

But when celibacy becomes a communal requirement, not a personal path, it changes shape. It becomes a rule that weakens the power of that individual choice and practice, and it weakens the bonds of families and couples, and it can be wielded as a weapon to carve out who belongs and who doesn’t. And over time, I’ve come to understand this not just as an overreach, but as a hallmark of high-control spiritual and religious environments which lays the ground for further abuse. Not just in the ashram of my childhood, but in many places where sexuality is tightly governed by those in power.

I want to be careful here. When I critique these dynamics, I’m not holding up “mainstream” culture as a healthier alternative to where I was raised. The dominant culture is often equally disconnected from the sacredness of sex—but often it is expressed in different ways. I’m not saying repression is worse than commodification, or vice versa. I’m saying both distort the truth of what this energy is.

For me, it’s been a lifelong unraveling.

There are seasons when my sexuality has felt like a wellspring, gushing forward, vibrant, alive, creative. And there are seasons when I have felt shut down, even repulsed by sex. Both are easy for me to judge and feel shame about.

I have learned to honor both as real and authentic expressions of where I am in that moment, and thankfully, out of more than a decade of swinging between these two poles, I have arrived at a state of dynamic equilibrium, and a more joyful, steady, connected, beautiful sex life than I ever thought I’d have for myself.

When you set out to teach others something that has made a profound difference in your own life, even after years of training to be a teacher of it, and years of refining one’s own pedagogy, you still don’t know if what you teach will actually make a tangible impact on someone’s life until they move through it. This is why, even as we’re still putting the finishing touches on the EDGE, we’ve opened the doors for early adopters and have offered some 1:1 correspondence to all of them, to be sure it’s truly serving them deeply.

Here’s a message we received from someone else who was raised in a high control religious community, a message that has fueled my confidence that this is something that has the effect we intend for it to have:

“I can’t properly express what has arisen and begun to move again in me from this practice. I don’t think I’ve tapped into this place in me for a few years now, it made me remember a time when I moved from my center, my genuine desire, and from a generous life force. This is the beginning of moving from that place within me again.”

When I have been in seasons of sexual dormance, which at times have lasted for up to and even a bit past a year, it’s always an invitation to do some deep inner work. Not because I owe sex to anyone (though in all honesty, these haven’t been the easiest times in my marriage), but I do owe myself a commitment to my own aliveness. I owe it to myself to understand myself and connect with this part of me that I really do love, and that brings me so much joy when it is flowing.

Many of us were conditioned—whether by religion, culture, or trauma—to believe that numbness is safer than fully feeling our desire. That shutting down was more acceptable than being fully alive. In nervous system terms, this can create a chronic pattern of dysregulation.

For me, that’s often looked like hypoarousal, a kind of flatness. Lethargy, emotional dullness, a desire to disappear. Sometimes it shades into depression. But dysregulation doesn’t always look like shutting down. For many, it swings the other way into hyperarousal. That might show up as constant anxiety, edginess, overfunctioning, or even craving intense stimulation just to feel something.

Many of us swing between these poles, and it really takes a toll on our lives.

I’ve come to see these patterns not as personal flaws, but as intelligent adaptations. The nervous system is always trying to protect us. But over time, these states can disconnect us from the very energy (our sexual life force) that makes us feel most alive.

This is what happens when something as natural and necessary as sexuality is stigmatized, controlled, or suppressed: it doesn’t disappear, it distorts. What should be a source of vitality and connection gets pushed to the margins, and over time, the pressure builds. The pendulum swings hard between extremes, leading to damage that ripples through bodies, relationships, and entire cultures.

We are living in a time when the deep, toxic distortions of sexual energy at the highest levels of power are being exposed in ways that are impossible to ignore. The ongoing release of Epstein emails just this week is just one example of how abuse, secrecy, and control have been embedded in the systems that govern us.

At the same time, Christian nationalism is resurging, with its long legacy of seeking to legislate sexuality, enforce purity codes, and punish deviation. And the hypocrisy is staggering. Again and again, we see that the most extreme accusations often reveal the accuser’s own shadow—projection as confession.

Wherever you fall politically, one thing is clear: distorted sexual energy is not a side issue. It’s at the root of so many of our collective ills—abuse, exploitation, disconnection, and the distortion of power.

That’s why, in creating the EDGE, we’ve focused on offering more than just information. Our pedagogy balances education, embodiment, and empowerment to create a path of practice for reclaiming sexual energy as something sacred, sovereign, and life-giving. Through the integration of both neuroscience and Tibetan Tantric wisdom, we guide students through a process of deepening embodiment and relational clarity.

This is not just for personal healing, it’s preparation for culture repair. We believe deeply that when individuals begin to shift their relationship with sexuality, the ripple effects touch the interpersonal, the intergenerational, and the institutional.

The individual work is not the endgame, it’s the starting point, the first step to reclaiming your personal power through direct relationship with your life force, your desire, and your pleasure.

The Ashram I was raised within was and is quite unique in the world. In many ways it was a place of healing of religious trauma for the many LGBTQ+ people who have found their spiritual home there, as the community was incredibly welcoming and affirming of their sacredness. But when you lived there, no matter your orientation, you were expected to be celibate.

Of course, like every celibate community, we’ve learned that there was still plenty of sex happening. Just hidden in shame and secrecy and double standards. What’s repressed doesn’t vanish, it leaks out in other ways. It gets twisted, contorted, and the distortion gets passed down to the next generation.

This is why it’s so important to look at the roots: culturally, spiritually, and somatically. Not to condemn religion or dismiss tradition. Not to shame anyone who find what they are looking for in a path of celibacy. But we must tell the truth about what happens when people are asked to sever themselves from their own desire in order to belong.

In our work, we’re trying to offer a different pattern. One where people can build an honest, empowered relationship with their sexuality rooted in physiological intelligence and spiritual integrity. The nervous system science and mystical traditions don’t contradict each other, they resonate in a dynamic harmony.

Our sexual energy, when it’s not co-opted or suppressed, is the current of life force energy. It connects us to ourselves, to each other, and to the greater field of life. And when we learn how to circulate it, how to direct it toward the world we long for, it becomes fuel for everything else. Our creativity. Our service. Genuine belonging to the family of life.

I don’t think we should always want sex. I don’t think we need to always feel turned on. But I do believe we can live every day connected with our own life force, our own creative birthright, our own devotional passion for the creation of a better world. And I believe, in every cell of my body, that bringing Devotional Creation into our arousal, into our orgasms, can help us to cultivate that world. Devotional Creation is in some ways a practice for the climax of a sexual encounter, but really it’s an opening, a beginning. It’s planting a seed of vision. It’s working with the incredible potency of the most beautiful, earth-shaking experience we can share with ourselves or another to orient and steer toward a better world for all.

When we dedicate the fruits of our blessings to something greater, we shift from scarcity to abundance. And when we bring spiritual practice into our sex lives we join a long, and too often forgotten lineage of ancestors who knew that pleasure and prayer were never meant to be severed from one another.

But the key is that you can’t do it in a way wholly dictated by an authority outside of you. You must find your own visions, integrate your own prayers, innovate your own practices to find what feels the most profound, empowering, and authentic to you.

I believe that pleasure, reclaimed as prayer, is one of many essential steps in the long walk to healing this world.

If this type of reclamation, experimentation, and healing is something you believe you or someone you love would benefit from, please join us at the EDGE. And if you have any questions, please ask them in the comments below!

These are themes I’ve been living into lately: vision, voice, syntropy, awe. What core ideas underpin the toxic ideologies rotting our culture, and how can we transform that rot into compost, into fertile soil for the future of life?

This one is more stars than soil, but it’s all the same. Syntropic forces shape the spark of life in the fertile darkness. As above, so in the womb.

I’m thinking out loud. Feeling my way through. It’s not tidy.

But I think you can join me in it anyway, and I want to know what meaning you make, if you are so generous as to share. In the audio voiceover I am speaking from a sleepy bed, with my toddler snoring nearby. I added Alpha Wave backing track an it may be soothing to listen to, if not my most polished.

Yesterday was a very stormy rainy day, and the power went out around four pm.

It’s interesting how the absence of light shifts things.

I’d had the instinct of making dinner early, in fact I’d prepared it for my lunch, so we finished eating (and thankfully began running a bath) moments before the power went out.

The sky was glowing a sort of muted golden yellow, and that color bathed the front rooms of our house in a strange light.

We all immediately got the message: rest.

So a candlelight bath for our toddler and some texts to neighbors and the utility company later, Seth and I passed shifts of napping and being with our child between us.

So, time and rest patterns being altered by the darkness and absence of wifi, we are now a bit disoriented in time, and I am wide awake at 2:46am.

And it is perfectly appropriate as I spent all day writing and thinking about stars, and vision, and voice. It seems fitting that I should be present with them tonight, even if they are heavily shrouded by the clouds here.

I am thinking and writing about stars so much because they are the final of four teachers of the Living World we are connecting with in the Reality Reorientation Experiment, and I am preparing the material that will be released on Saturday.

Why stars? At first glance, this is the only one of the four teachers (Stones, Trees, Waters, Stars) that is experienced on Earth, but not located here. But please, look down at your own hands.

The carbon in your cells, the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, all were birthed in a star’s ecstatic becoming, long before our sun, our local star, even existed.

So yes: stars are here, too. Within and all around us.

So many indigenous teachings tell us that the stars are our ancestors, and I have come to understand this is not metaphor, it’s the wisdom of deep time, the insight that arises from a cosmology aware that we live within a Living World.

As I’ve learned more about the subcultures brewing online that are behind a lot of the political violence we’re seeing, I’ve come to understand that a lot of the worst things happening right now are happening because scared, sad men and boys are convinced that entropy is all there is, that the inevitable fate we are all hurtling toward is chaos and heat-death. So the belief is that they must accelerate it or use the chaos to consolidate as much power as possible to secure their control and safety.

Of course, each of these strategies undermines the quality of life of many other people, and makes no one more safe, and it emerges from a tragically incomplete understanding of reality.

Some of the more disturbing ideologies gaining traction today—particularly in online reactionary spaces—treat entropy not only as inevitable, but as the truth behind all things. Curtis Yarvin, also known as Mencius Moldbug, is one of the leading figures in the so-called “Dark Enlightenment.” His worldview asserts that democracy has failed, that modern institutions are beyond repair, and that what’s needed is a hyper-centralized, authoritarian order—perhaps a tech-enabled monarchy—to restore control.

It’s a worldview of collapse as destiny. Of power-over as the only remaining tool. Of entropy not just accepted, but enthroned and managed by a rarified elite who abhor empathy.

This is entropy as ideology. A framework that sees disintegration as the natural end of all things, and thus places no faith in the human capacity to regenerate, to repair, to cohere.

It’s a vision of the world stripped of relationship, reciprocity, or possibility. It says: let it all fall apart, and let the strong survive.

This is a worldview dangerously ignorant of the reality of syntropy.

Syntropy refers to the tendency toward organization, coherence, and life—an orientation toward increasing complexity, cooperation, and beauty. It is not entropy’s enemy, but it’s dancing partner, the inhale to the exhale, the gravitational pull that brings together space dust to make new stars.

Here’s an essay I wrote about it because I felt frustrated that barely anyone I knew, knew this word, and I wanted to change that:

You don’t need to know the word to know the phenomenon.

Syntropy is present in every ingredient of every meal we eat, and indeed the meal itself. It is the living process of life coming together. It happens in the creation of spiral arm galaxies like our own, and the soil beneath our feet and the visions we bring to life.

Human activity is profoundly syntropic, most all of the time. Even when faced with devastating experiences of entropy: fires raging through a city, collapsing climate conditions, patterns of distrust and poralization, even so, so many of us choose to come together, to feed one another, to shelter, to organize, to love.

This is real, and this is possible, and this is happening everywhere.

Perhaps we can see it best in the dark, when syntropic visions and the will to move toward them are more vitally important than ever.

Movements that embody syntropic principles include regenerative development, mutual aid networks, restorative justice practices, sociocracy, and bioregional organizing. These aren’t utopian fantasies, they’re dynamic ways of being with one another, and with the wider Living World that can be easily adapted to your life, your place, your community.

They are grounded, emergent responses to collapse, and they are pathways to profound connection, joy, and healing.

And vision, I believe, is essential to human syntropy.

Vision is what begins our reorientation from fragmentation and collapse toward regeneration and mutual thriving.

Syntropy is not a passive process. One could argue that entropy is what results from passivity, and that is why people see it as the tragic fate we are all hurdling toward. But while we are living, we act, we engage, we create. We cannot help it.

The only people utterly passive are the ones for whom everything is done. It’s no accident that groypers and other entropy accellerationists are most often characterized as grown men living in their mothers’ basements, never needing to take meaningful creative action to truly care for themselves or those they love. This is a byproduct of a culture of hyper-convenience, a male loneliness epidemic, a total failure of our culture to nurture authentic potential and emotional capacity in our boys and young men, and a patriarchal sense of entitlement that leaves these lives profoundly empty when they should be full of love and meaning and connection.

Syntropy, on the other hand, arises through our active choice to bring things together. To weave. To remember. To reconnect what has been separated by fear or force. This is not just philosophical; it is practical. It requires our thoughts (our visions), our words (our voices), and our actions to align in order to shape change.

And syntropic living is available to all of us, each of us, every day.

Syntropy is a choice.

We must use our will and our energy to shape reality, and there is nothing more dignifying or beautiful than bringing a syntropic vision to life. A syntropic vision shows us what is possible when we stop waiting for harmony to arrive and begin participating in its creation.

Vision can be anything, and in fact, I invite you to look around. Look outside your window. With few exceptions, pretty much everything you see exists because someone had the vision to create it. Our objects, materials, social systems and norms, even most plants you encounter, someone had an idea, a vision, and they experimented until it took form.

So, knowing you have this incredible force, this incredible potential within you, what do you envision?

When we give ourselves permission to imagine a life-affirming future (not just for ourselves, but for all of life), the vision reveals to us who we are in relation to that future. Our unique longings, values, potentials, our particular way of loving the world.

I’ve felt this most powerfully through motherhood. Through giving birth and raising a child, I’ve come to know in my bones that life does not enter this world to destroy. No baby arrives wanting to exploit, extract, dominate. We are born with the capacity—and I believe, the call—to create life-affirming realities. We are living. We are meant to participate in life.

But we’re born into systems that confuse and constrict us. Systems that reward disconnection. That incentivize narcissism and sociopathy. That make it easier to dominate than to cooperate, easier to accumulate than to share. And so we forget. We begin to think that harm is just human nature. That oppression is inevitable. That our job is to survive in a system that profits from our disconnection, rather than to shape change toward the way we know, deep in our hearts, that the world can truly be.

That’s why vision matters so much. When we dare to imagine what a different world could feel like—what it might mean to live in harmony, in reciprocity, in co-creation—we begin to remember ourselves. We begin to locate our authenticity not in reaction to the system, but in relationship to the world we want to help birth.

So what helps us make this shift from entropy-focused resignation, burnout, and management to a vibrant, inspired, syntropic, creative way of life?

One essential element is awe.

Scientists studying awe have found that when people spend time looking at stars, waterfalls, or great trees, something profound happens in the nervous system. The brain’s default mode, generally looping in self-focus and worry quiets down.

Stress hormones decrease.

Empathy increases.

People report feeling both smaller and more connected — what psychologists call the “small self” experience, which paradoxically expands our compassion and creativity.

Awe is the body’s way of remembering scale, reminding us that we are part of something vast, ancient, and ongoing.

These are the states from which we are best able to connect with our authentic visions for life affirming futures.

Please don’t take my word for it, please go see for yourself. Take yourself outside some night this week and gaze at the night sky. The moon is bright and full right now, and many of you may live in cities or areas with light pollution, so if you can’t see many stars, you can still see the moon, and maybe some of our local planets.

If the night sky doesn’t do it for you, go to an ocean, a mountaintop, meet a newborn baby, watch a dang sunset, take time to appreciate the people you love. There are infinite gateways to awe and they all can help us connect with our capacity for vision.

Whatever you do, genuinely spend some time practicing presence, relaxing your body, opening up to the moment. Allow this moment to connect you with your ancestors, and therefore with the future, as deep time capacity is omnidirectional.

And from that place, invite your imagination to play.

Imagine best-case scenario futures, ones in which we’ve learned the hard and essential lessons of the times we are currently living through.

Futures in which we have agreed that all life truly is sacred, and have worked together to right the wrongs that had pit us against one another for so long.

Futures in which we remember our place in the family of life, and commit to supporting all forms of life to thrive.

Futures in which poverty and incarceration and hunger are distant memories.

Futures in which children are safe and know themselves deeply in relation to community and wilderness and their own dreams for the world.

Futures in which we’ve transitioned fully to restabilize the earth’s systems, and redesigned our cultures and built environments and technologies to support the whole system’s thriving.

When your brain is operating from its default mode (which it likely is now), you might find these ideas ridiculous, impossible, absurd. You may be scoffing or rolling your eyes now. That’s fine.

But you should still make time for awe, and in that awe, please revisit this question. Please see what elements of life affirming futures show up as essential and important to you.

There’s something for you there, in the visions that will come.

Some clue about what your unique contribution and gifts are.

Over the years, I’ve facilitated visioning sessions that have resulted in such beautiful, powerful visions and inspired big changes, pivots, repair, and growth steps. I’ve seen people connect dots of all the different things they’ve loved and longed for and worked on laying the groundwork for what they can uniquely do to serve life affirming futures.

And lately I’m deeply aware of how lost and disoriented so many of us are feeling as we feel the world hurtle toward a lot of worst case scenarios.

But the story is still unfolding, and we are co-authoring it.

When we commit to living into our vision, we find the world conspires to support us, and we may be surprised by the blessings that flow. A vision of deeper care, reciprocity, belonging, and collective healing brings those things about. You learn to live your vision, and the world responds in kind.

A big part of my own vision is to be in deep relationship with people I share strong mutual resonance. I am blessed that this describes all the work I do.

I’ve been quietly opening space in my calendar to offer more 1:1 support to those seeking grounded, clear eyed, open hearted reflection and/or strategic support.

A few nights ago, another rainy night, I stepped through Seth’s office doors, outside onto the driveway, barely dressed, and pulled him out after me. I was beaming with joy, present to the wonder and sweetness of one moment of far deeper awareness of sharing the blessings of place and time with stone (in the asphalt under my feet) and trees (the giant oaks surrounding my house, through whose branches thicker drops of water fell) and water (the rain falling, the rain puddling at my bare feet on the warm asphalt) and the stars (again made invisible by the clouds but present by virtue of darkness anyway).

All of these teachers, and so many more, coming together in that one moment, giving me such a jolt of aliveness, and from there, energy, will, and clarity.

And they’re always there. Syntropic forces are always here, all around us, inviting us to live into our relationship with all of life.

When we’re present and paying attention, we can see the small miracles in the everyday, even where others see things falling apart. We are, if we choose, to fall together, and to find ourselves again and again in a mysterious future of our own making.

May we continue to be able to delight and surprise ourselves as we stumble, and find rest, and create wonder, through the night.

The next two weeks mark what astrologers and skywatchers call an eclipse season, a window of time between a lunar and solar eclipse. It often turns out to be a quietly transformational stretch in many people’s lives, sometimes noticed only in retrospect.

Today is also the 14th day of the month of Elul, a beautiful and powerful month in the Hebrew calendar of preparation for the High Holy Days which begin just after this eclipse season closes.

On September 20th, we are beginning an experiment in relationship with deep time and deep ecology that will last four weeks and bring forth a lot of deep shifts for myself and anyone who joins us (click through if you’re curious, but there will be more on that later).

All of this has me thinking about transformational time.

Everyone has a different relationship with time.

Some people see it in blocks and lists. Some feel it rushing past. Others experience it more like fog, or tide, or pressure.

I’ve been learning more lately about how time works for me—how my particular neurodivergence shapes my perception of it, how my sense of “now” and “not now” affects everything from housework to how I prepare for travel, how I move through the world.

The way each of us experiences time tells us something about what time really is. Not a machine. Not a neutral container. But something alive. Relational. Shaped by context, nervous system, memory, ecosystem, lineage.

We’re shaped by time, yes, and we shape it in return.

There are many ways to connect with time as a transformational force. Some are given to us by the cosmos. Some are passed down through culture. Some we choose, intentionally, with others, as a path of learning or reorientation.

Today I want to speak about three such forms of time:

* Celestial time—the eclipse season we’re entering now.

* Cultural-sacred time—the High Holy Days of the Hebrew calendar, and the current month of Elul.

* Chosen time—the kind we create on purpose, like a spiritual practice, or a shared container for transformation.

These three forms of time are converging right now for me, and perhaps for many of you as well. And if we meet them with presence, they can reshape us. Help us reshape what comes next.

We begin with celestial time.

Eclipses have always held a particular kind of charge for me. Not in the astrological sense, though there are insights there, but more in the felt somatic experience of what they bring. They arrive like pressure systems—subtle at first, then unmistakable. Often disorienting. Sometimes exhausting. Always intense.

I got engaged on an eclipse. I’ve also often found myself literally breaking things, nearly always drawing blood on eclipse days. When I’ve ignored what my body needed and pushed through high-stakes experiences like creative directing a photo shoot, leading a ceremony, or giving a major talk, I’ve often paid for it afterward with days of rest and recovery. My system demands recalibration after trying to do too much in a time that asks for quiet presence.

This particular eclipse season begins today, September 7th, and ends with the solar eclipse in Virgo on September 21. I invite you to mark it by not only the astronomical alignments, but your personal and collective thresholds. Eclipses often reveal what was hidden, amplify what has been ignored, and accelerate change that’s already underway. Doors open. Doors close. Life’s curveballs remind us that there are larger forces that don’t follow our logic or our schedules. They ask us to pay attention.

In my own body, I’ve learned to stop trying to push through eclipse portals. I rest more. I simplify. I listen to what’s surfacing not just in my own field, but in the collective. For many of us, this may be a time of deep review, of shedding, of stepping into a more aligned way of being. There’s a bigger invitation asking for us to show up to life in a more authentic, present way.

Pictured above, an eclipse day nine years ago which called for stitches. Today, right now I have an ace bandage on the same exact wrist. I allow the injury to be a teacher, and am grateful I seem to only ever injure my right, non dominant hand on days like today. Pictured below, the painting of an eclipse I did after I came home from the clinic with my stitches, having realized it was an eclipse day (I wasn’t aware before). Writing this, and going back into these archives I’m realizing this was the last time we went through a cycle of Virgo-Pisces axis eclipses.

Celestial time reminds us that transformation doesn’t always come from striving. Sometimes it comes from tuning in to what is already happening.

We exist within the larger cycles and patterns of our solar system. That’s not woo, it’s a geospatial, gravitational, and biological reality. The earth spins, the sun sets and our bodies respond. The moon shifts and our tides follow.

You don’t have to believe in astrology to notice that you are part of something vast and rhythmic. But I do encourage people to learn the archetypes—the cosmological stories of the planets and lights that our ancestors mapped and named. Just notice what resonates. Notice how those patterns might reflect dimensions of your own experience.

Celestial time isn’t something out there. It’s something we’re already inside of. The invitation is just to listen a little more closely.

Next, we turn to cultural-sacred time.

In Judaism, the primary spiritual technology is the calendar. Not as an abstract framework, but as a relationship with time that is spiralic and rooted in the land, in memory, and in transformation. This time of year—Elul through the High Holy Days—is especially powerful.

The month of Elul is a time of preparation and reflection, a month where our dreams speak to us and we prepare for the most intense period of soul work in the year. Elul softens us, attunes us, calls us inward. And it leads into Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and the Ten Days of Awe that follow. A liminal time when the gates are open, when we are invited to remember who we are and consider with great awareness, who we are becoming.

The tradition teaches that during this window, our names are written in the Book of Life or the Book of Death in the year to come. In these ten days, it is understood that our actions, our prayers, our atonement, our generosity, our return to center, all of these can change our fate. These can shape the year to come.

This living ritual where millions of people around the world are living out ancient rituals in ways that are always, somehow both timeless and unique to the moment, the place, and the family or community in which they are unfolding, is a truly amazing thing to participate in. Yes, I cry sometimes when I sing this silly song with my husband and son and remember how connected and held we are in such a beautiful tradition.

Holy days are a sacred structure for transformation. If you are connected with a cultural invitation to slow down, get present within a larger community or context, take full account of our lives, and begin again, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Finally, we come to chosen time.

There are kinds of time that we intentionally create or step into. Retreats, journeys, deep practice containers. Sometimes these are guided by a teacher or held by a community. Sometimes they’re self-initiated. But they are always marked by intention.

We cross a threshold and say: I will move differently through these days. I will listen more closely. I will open to transformation.

Reality Reorientation Experiment: Living in Time is just such a container. Four weeks of simple, powerful invitations to slow down, to attune to the place you live, to reconnect with deep time and the living world. Rather than another thing to consume, it’s an invitation to remember our wholeness within the web of life, and repattern how we live.

And it begins soon.

I’ve been working on it for more than a month actually, but I wasn’t sure when I would offer it, just that it would be free, and the time would be right. A few days ago when I realized the timing of the eclipse that will close this season (September 21), and the day that Rosh Hashanah begins (September 22), it clicked that this will be something that will carry many of us into the new life we are able to choose and cultivate through these transformational times.

So Reality Reorientation begins on September 20th. Whether you’re observing the Chagim, feeling big changes in your life with the unfolding of the eclipses, or are feeling the call for transforming your relationship with time, place, ecology, self, or world, this is here to support you.

Each week we will connect gently with one of the great teachers of the Living World: Stones, Trees, Waters, and Stars. Each week there will be a brief lesson, an embodied meditation, and some prompts to help integrate the insights that organically arise from within you when you make time to connect with yourself and with life, into your life.

You can find more information here. There is no cost to join, and we encourage people to participate alongside loved ones: friends, lovers, family. Growing alongside one another nurtures intimacy, shared reality, affinity, and overall integrity. So feel welcome to invite your friends in to this process!

This morning, my son picked up the book that’s been sitting on my nightstand—Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman—and called it the "clock book." It’s a collection of imagined worlds where time moves differently in each one, framed as the dreams Einstein might have had while working on the theory of relativity.

I’ve always loved reading this book aloud, and I’m thinking of doing just that—hosting a little live storytime. Reading a passage and exploring what it might teach us about time, imagination, and the living world.

Would that interest you?

Let me know. I’d love to explore this with you.

And before we close: a reminder. Opportunities for transformational time are not limited to eclipse seasons or holy days or special containers offered by people on the internet. They are always here. Always available.

Every month in the Hebrew calendar holds deep teachings. Every moment astrologically is alive with motion and meaning. And every ordinary day offers us moments to listen, to share, to realign with what matters.

Whether or not you join us for this next round of the Experiment, know this: time is not something that happens to you. You are already inside it. You are already in relationship with it. And it’s listening and being shaped by you.

What kind of relationship with time do you want to have?

The tension between wanting community and feeling unsure of how to create it is real. We hold back, unsure of whether our presence would be welcome. We hesitate, fearing awkwardness or rejection or differences between us that we cannot overcome. Perhaps we fear that something we’ll learn about a neighbor will make us feel even more alone or unsafe. So we stay indoors. We seek likeminded people on the internet. We talk about the need for third spaces and we dream of the world we want to live in. But we too often feel too frozen to do what lies before us to bring that world into form.

I say we, because this is me. I crave connection but am deeply accustomed to solitude. I generally prefer it. This is why The Art of Disappearing by Naomi Shihab Nye resonates so deeply with me:

When they say, "Don't I know you?" say no.

When they invite you to the party,remember what parties are likebefore answering.

Someone telling you in a loud voicethey once wrote a poem.

Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.

Then reply.

If they say we should get together,say why?

It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.You’re trying to remember somethingtoo important to forget.

Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.Tell them you have a new project.

It will never be finished.

This poem evokes the way I feel much of the time, and I know I am not alone in this. When I host meetings of the emerging neighborhood village co-op, one of the first things most of us say about ourselves is that we are introverted, that we are hermits. “I could spend weeks on end with a fridge full of groceries and a book and netflix and not see another soul and I wouldn’t mind,“ is a verbatim quote from our last meeting this past weekend. Many of us nodded in self-recognition. There’s almost a need to disclaim it, as if to explain why this kind of gathering is an anomaly for us. And yet, they show up. We show up.

Something in us longs for this—not the noisy, performative kind of socializing, but a quieter, more intentional way of being together. A way of being seen and known without being overwhelmed.

James Crews’ poem Neighbors speaks to another way of being that exists alongside Nye’s, a way of being that is what so many of us long for:

Where I’m from, people still waveto each other, and if someone doesn’t,you might say of her, She wouldn’twave at you to save her life—

but you try anyway, give her a smile.This is just one of the many wayswe take care of one another, say: I see you,I feel you, I know you are real. I wave

to Rick who picks up litter while walkinghis black labs, Olive and Basil—hauling donut boxes, cigarette packsand countless beer cans out of the brush

beside the road. And I say helloto Christy, who leaves almond croissantsin our mailbox and mason jars of fresh-pressed apple cider on our side porch.

I stop to check in on my mother-in-law—more like a second mother—who buys ustoothpaste when it’s on sale, and callsif an unfamiliar car is parked at our house.

We are going to have to return to thisway of life, this giving without expectation,this loving without conditions. We needto stand eye to eye again, and keep asking—

no matter how busy—How are you,how’s your wife, how’s your knee?, makingthis talk we insist on calling small,though kindness is what keeps us alive.

The tension between these two poems speaks to the truth of where I live. It captures why I think it’s so important to take the first step, but not expect ourselves to do everything.

As I read these poems I sense that they’re pointing to the same thing, even if they seem at odds: they’re pointing to an attunement to awareness of the deeper tissues of the living world.

You’re trying to remember somethingtoo important to forget.

Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.Tell them you have a new project.

It will never be finished.

I see myself so completely in these lines. And for me, villaging is the remembrance of something too important to forget. And it is trees that we are tending and planting in our neighborhood. This deeper way of living is a new project. It will never be finished.

This is the essence of villaging: no one has to be the one who organizes the whole community. No one has to see it all the way through. But what we do have to do is show up, say hello, and be willing to connect.

What I have found is that by hosting a few initial gatherings and sharing a vision, the skills, gifts, passions, and connections of everyone involved begin to flow. The system begins to flow. People are introducing people to other neighbors, connecting the dots, and weaving the web of connection. There’s a lot of that going on that I don’t know about.

People are having conversations with one another that I don’t have to be a part of. Just yesterday I was thinking of what on earth to do with the dozens of squash plants that have spontaneously germinated from my compost recently. We don’t have the space or the sun for them. I googled some things and started imagining some of our neighbors who get way more sun than me building trellises, tunnels, all kinds of things where squash can grow. With the volume of little seedlings emerging right now, we could definitely have more than enough for the whole neighborhood for years if we distribute them and care for them just enough. I felt inspired and a little overwhelmed at this idea, and so I stepped outside to visit the little squash babies. Lo and behold, two of our neighbors who are the resident food-growing specialists here were just coming from a consultation with another neighbor a block over who is eager to do exactly that. The squash babes will find their home very soon.

People are collaborating and developing ideas for things they will create together, and I don’t need to be involved—but I will benefit because I live here. The genius of different people is coming forward in astonishing ways. We are all being pleasantly surprised, again and again, by the hidden talents and skills among us, and I don’t believe that any of us feel our solitude is being infringed upon, just enhanced.

The Gopher Tortoise

If you’re around me often enough, in person or online, eventually you’ll hear me talking about gopher tortoises. They’re big, beautiful keystone species that are critical in my home ecosystem here in the scrubland of Florida. They move slowly, live long lives, and dig deep burrows in the sandy soil, which provide shelter for more than 420 other species.

The way they provide habitat for so many other species is just by existing. Just by digging their own burrows. Just by living their lives, in their ecosystem, they benefit countless others, including all of us humans who live here, who depend on biodiversity in ways we will never fully understand.

Though gopher tortoises are primarily solitary, their burrows are often clustered near one another. Some tortoises visit particular burrows repeatedly, forming patterns of quiet companionship, especially the females who might go and visit one friend more often than others, even if others live closer to them. This reminds me of what’s happening among many of the women in my neighborhood. We each cherish our solitude, our self-sustaining little worlds, but more and more, we find ourselves wandering over to each other’s spaces, knocking on doors, going for walks, sharing tea.

Like the tortoises, we are creating a network—not through forced togetherness, but through gentle, chosen proximity. And as we make our homes and gardens more hospitable and fruitful for one another, we are also making them more welcoming to the broader web of life. What we build for ourselves inevitably becomes a refuge for others.

Not all solitude is isolation. Not all community is constantly social. The balance lives in the in-between.

I’d love to hear from you– how do you hold this tension? Where do you lie on the spectrum? What do you long for, and what feels like the next doable step for you to make it real? How can you begin where you are?

This culture degenerates both ecological integrity and human dignity in countless ways every day. This is the water we’re all swimming in, so we’re all wet. We belong to this culture. It is a system we are embedded within. There is no opting out. There is no sitting on the sidelines. There is only the degree of agency and consciousness with which we participate in transforming it from within.

I won’t go into the ways that this culture degenerates our water systems, our soil systems, our air quality, and the biodiversity that both depends upon and upholds the remaining integrity of all of those systems. I won’t go into that because I want to talk about us. I want to talk about you, and I want to talk about me. I want to talk about what we can do, who we can be, to be agents of regeneration from the inside out.

What I do want to focus on is the ways that our culture degenerates our self-trust, and therefore our trust in one another, and therefore our trust in our ability to effect meaningful transformation in our world. This is a much longer conversation that my writing will continue to explore.

Dignity, Belonging, and Unconditional Love

There are two core needs that I am always attuned to in my toddler, and in myself, and in the people I work with: dignity and belonging.

If we look at ourselves and one another throughout the course of a day or a lifetime, we can attribute most of our actions and choices to pursuing one or both of those core needs, dignity and belonging.

Early on in childhood, most of us get the message that there are things that are wrong with us, and we must adapt in order to secure our sense of belonging. From that moment onward, there is an internal struggle as we develop into ourselves, a struggle in which we are continuously hitting the gas and the breaks on our authentic desires, our authentic self-expression, our authentic interests.

We sacrifice our authenticity in order to secure a superficial sense of dignity and belonging, and therefore we sacrifice the potential for true dignity and true belonging.

This continues until and unless we are fortunate enough to find ourselves in a field of unconditional love, which can feel rare to those who are unfamiliar with it, but which is profoundly abundant where it has taken root.

There is much that I have to say about unconditional love, and to be frank in this moment, it’s something I am struggling with today. But I do believe that unconditional love creates the most supportive conditions for true regeneration to emerge, and is worth investigating and cultivating. Even, and perhaps most especially, when it’s hard.When I am within a field of unconditional love, I feel my own dignity and belonging deeply, and those I come in contact with rise into their own dignity, and settle into a deep sense of their own belonging as well. We would do well to nurture this as much as we are able.

Reclaiming Self-Trust

Regenerative living involves regenerating the self-trust that has degraded in our messy journeys toward finding dignity and belonging.

When we talk about regeneration, we’re talking about more than personal change. Regenerative living is about adding value to the larger systems we are part of. To do this, we need to see those systems–as well as our place within them–as whole and capable of evolution and healing. We need to identify our place within them not from a place of ego or control but from a place of essence—an understanding of our unique life’s contribution.

The way I approach this begins with a process of remembrance—a deep dive into who we are, where we come from, and the experiences that have shaped us. Remembrance leads us to reconnect with parts of ourselves that we’ve neglected or hidden away. The seeds of our regenerative potential are found in these parts—in childhood passions we set aside, in stories we inherited but never claimed, in moments of wonder we didn’t fully understand.

It is easy for those of us who have a deep drive to contribute to collective healing to put all of the focus on the systems outside of us that need changing. It’s particularly easy when looking backward on our past, our childhoods, our early conditioning (and often early trauma) is painful. But it is only from deep self-discovery and a willingness to recognize our true, unique place that we can begin to really know our true service within the world.

What parts of my story might hold seeds of potential for a regenerative life?

What forgotten or neglected pieces of myself are ready to be rediscovered and nurtured?

Regeneration and the Life-Death-Life Cycle

Regeneration is unfolding in all systems, all the time: internal, cultural, ecological, communal, cosmological. In simplest terms, regeneration is the cycle of life, death, and rebirth—the life-death-life cycle. In nature, nothing regenerates without decomposition. This means we must ask ourselves: What is ready to be decomposed here? 

In our culture, there are countless beliefs, systems, and practices ready for decomposition. But true decomposition is different from destructive, violent erasure. It’s not about burning everything down but creating the conditions for healthy decay—conditions that honor the value of what is passing while nourishing what is to come.

This is an approach that is explored with depth in the field of Integral Theory, where we practice “transcend and include“ rather than “transcend and abandon.“ This core distinction makes a world of difference, and helps us to examine the relics of our own past and the past of the collective with more curiosity, compassion, and creativity.

How might I compost old patterns within my life and within the larger world in a way that honors their contributions while making space for new growth?

Contributions to the Larger Wholes

For something to be regenerative, it must be value-adding to the larger wholes to which it belongs. Regenerative living is not just about personal growth but about contributing to the ecosystems—human, ecological, cultural—that we are part of. We need to see ourselves as integral parts of these systems, capable of both drawing from and contributing to their health and evolution.

This is why regeneration calls for understanding our essence, our unique contribution. It’s not about mimicking someone else’s path but finding our own ecosystem service—the niche where we can thrive and help others thrive. There’s no checklist. And to do that, we must bring all of who we are. The experiences we thought were too disconnected or unimportant may hold the key to our most impactful work.

What gifts or perspectives have I overlooked within myself that might add value to the systems I belong to?

How can I shift from viewing myself in isolation to seeing myself as part of an interconnected, evolving whole?

An Invitation to Regenerate

Regenerative living is about embracing our potential, discovering our essence, and living in a way that adds to the world around us. It requires the process of death and decay of old patterns, old systems, old ways of being. It’s about trusting that, no matter where we’ve come from—even if it’s from the very heart of the “degenerative machine”—we have something essential to contribute. It’s about working with all that we have been to create the fertile soil for new life to emerge.

There is so much more I’d like to say about this, but to be frank my energy is very subdued right now as I move through many layers of feeling in response to this election result. But I know, deep in my bones, that this work is now more essential than ever. The future needs all of us, and we need to be coming from our true essence, our true gifts, a deep place of authentic self-trust.

So, I invite you to live the questions, to find your place within this complex, beautiful, often chaotic, interconnected system. To remember who you are, compost what no longer serves, and allow your unique gifts to regenerate the world around you. If you would like personal support with your own journey of regenerative development, please feel welcome to reach out to me, or book a consultation with me here.

Let’s move into the future together, as our whole selves.

There’s something about those early postpartum days that opens you up to the rawness of life. I remember lying in bed, cradling new life in my arms, feeling overwhelming waves of wonder and vulnerability. I was suddenly aware of the intricate, fragile beauty of the living world in a way I hadn’t been before. Bringing life into the world deepened my awareness of my place within all that is so much larger than myself. It was from that place that I felt called to create this substack and return to the creative work of giving voice to the life that moves through me– something I’d honestly neglected in the high pressures of the consulting, strategic advising, creative production, and leadership training work I was eyeballs deep in in the two years leading up to the birth of my son.

The tender, unknowable vulnerability of motherhood called me back to my creative expression as a lifeline of remembrance of who I truly am, and I am so grateful to those of you who have come to join me in my exploration of the living wisdom of the living world over the last two years. I’m even more grateful to those who have expressed their resonance with financial support. Those few paid subscriptions each have gone farther than the dollar amount ever could; they’ve affirmed that my work connected to deep relationship with The Living World is valuable, which has helped me regenerate my own self-concept to recommit to the work I have known for a decade is mine to do, supporting the leaders healing the earth in the subtle dimensions of shaping change. That work is taking off in ways I could have hardly imagined even months ago, and it’s all in service to the integrity of this biosphere we call home, and the integrity of we humans as living, agentive, powerful lifeforms whose power and place within the living world, we are urgently called to remember.

And here I am again, feeling that same light, that same connection—a reminder that we are not separate from the living world. We are contributors, participants in its continual process of creation, growth, and regeneration. Becoming a parent was one of the most powerful reminders of that truth for me: I was in a contributing relationship with the life of the world, part of the web and the family of this earth in a new way, a way that required greater presence, maturity, and willingness to feel.

This reflection, this sense of interconnectedness, is at the heart of what I’ve been wanting to explore here; the meaning behind this title. When I speak about the living world, it’s an active choice to move away from the language of “nature.” The idea of nature often creates a false sense of separation. Nature is out there, a realm separate from us which we must visit and protect and fight for, but it isn’t us. The living world on the other hand, is everything—the air we breathe, the light that filters through the trees, the children we bring into the world, and even the technologies we create. All of it is part of an intricate, interconnected system, and nothing in the human experience is separate from it.

Welcome to The Living World, where we explore the living wisdom of the living world and seek to understand our place within it. I am your host, Ganga Devi Braun, and I work as a developmental partner and advisor to the leaders, visionaries, and nurturer’s shaping regenerative futures. To learn more about me and my work, please visit gangadevibraun.com.

Early this morning, I saw a note from Guy James that elegantly summarizes something that’s always on my mind: “You’re constantly, and mostly unconsciously, proving your myth of the world to yourself.”

This simple idea cuts to the core of what we’re going to explore here. The way we see ourselves in relation to the world—our self-concept—is not only shaping our individual lives but is also deeply influencing how we interact with everything around us. Whether we realize it or not, we’re continually reinforcing whatever dominant (often unconscious) worldview we’re operating from. Our worldviews become self-fulfilling prophecies. It’s essential we choose them mindfully, with hearts and eyes open to the world we long for for ourselves and all of life to come.

Ecosomatic Cybernetics

Recently with Gray Area, a San Francisco based based antidisciplinary cultural incubator, I’ve been delving into the histories of cybernetic countercultures, studying its evolution from Norbert Wiener who coined the term from the greek word to steer, to seeing how industry, history, and culture diverged into multiple branches of this discipline, including machine cognition and intelligence, but also including the study of Gaian cognition and intelligence.

What many people who study cybernetics in tech don’t know is that the animal body’s system, particularly the nervous system, was present at the roots of the earliest stages of cybernetic inquiry.

This was most famously developed within Psycho-Cybernetics, a book which has changed the course of the world. In Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz showed us how our self-concept determines the course of our lives. This book, written in 1960, is at the root of most self-development work, the human potential movement, and so many forms of leadership, manifestation, and self-help that have emerged from there.

Maltz’s work emphasized that our internal image of ourselves—the stories we hold about who we are—shape our actions, our limitations, and our potential. Th potentials that are unlocked with this work are profound, but the limitations of are becoming more and more obvious; the limitations of solely focusing on the power of your mind to affect change in your life.

My husband Seth Kaufmann has been experimenting on an expansion of this framework through methods he calls Psycho Somatic Cybernetics—which explores how our bodies carry and shape our beliefs, influencing the way we live and move in the world. The body remembers, the body stores, and the body participates in creating reality. This more embodied approach, integrates what scientific studies and the larger community of somatic practitioners are continuously discovering: the role of trauma in limiting what we believe is possible for ourselves, and the role of pleasure in expanding it.

On the trauma side, this includes inherited traumas, collective traumas, and often very subtle traumas that we may not even take seriously within ourselves, but which, when resolved, free us from the patterns of self-sabotage that we as individuals, as families, and as a collective humanity have been stuck in for far too long.

On the pleasure side, this includes sensual and sexual pleasure, the pleasure of good conversation, the pleasure of intellectual stimulation, the pleasure of time spent in nature and within community, the pleasure of intergenerational relationships, the pleasure of ritual, the pleasure of meaningful accomplishments, the pleasure of rest.

Just this morning Seth published his Sunday Substack exploring this idea in the context of grounded expansion.

In my experience of motherhood meeting my return to the deeper regenerative work that moves through me, there’s a piece I’ve been longing to express that is ecosystemic in nature. Last night I began thinking of framing it as Eco Somatic Cybernetics, which we are seeing as a larger whole that can and must contain the nested frameworks of Psycho Somatic Cybernetics and Psycho Cybernetics and the Cybernetics of mainstream computational development in the machines that we, living humans, have created and which now belong to the living world.

The essence of what is emerging with Eco Somatic Cybernetics is remembrance that we belong to the living family of the living world. And when we shift our self-concept to remember that, the potential of our lives and what we can accomplish from a place of embodiment, love, deep listening, and profound care is immense.

Just as the work Seth is bringing forward with Psycho Somatic Cybernetics helps us understand the feedback loops between our mind and body, Eco Somatic Cybernetics invites us to see how those loops extend beyond the individual—into the ecosystems and living networks we belong to.

Becoming a parent awakened this understanding for me in a visceral way. Holding new life in my arms, I could feel my place in the ongoing dance of creation, the way my body and actions were part of a larger system of care and continuity. The light coming through the window, the trees outside, the child in my arms—we are all part of the same process.

Healing Ourselves, Healing the Living World

It’s no coincidence that so many of our physical, personal, and societal struggles stem from disconnection—from ourselves, from one another, and from the living world. And it’s no coincidence that restoring connection is key to healing, whether we’re looking at poisoned soil that heals through mycoremediation, or injury in the body that heals through the many ways we can restore connection to the body.

Fascia is essential for the body’s coherence—it’s an interstitial network that keeps everything functioning as a whole. Fascia connects and coordinates within our bodies, allowing communication between muscles and organs, we are connected to and constantly in conversation with the living world. Similarly, mycelium in forests forms an underground web that connects all plants and all decaying matter, facilitating the transfer of nutrients, information, and energy, ensuring that the entire ecosystem thrives together.

Both fascia and mycelium remind us of the importance of interconnectedness. They show us that nothing functions in isolation—not our bodies, and not the ecosystems we live in.

But here’s the critical piece: the way we conceptualize ourselves in relation to these networks determines how we interact with them. If we hold a worldview where we see ourselves as separate from the living world, we disconnect from these essential networks. Our choices and actions, whether conscious or unconscious, reinforce that disconnection. And just like a body with damaged fascia or a forest without a healthy mycelial network, we begin to see breakdowns—dis-ease, imbalance, and fragmentation.

On the other hand, when we shift our self-concept to remember that we are an integral part of the living world, everything changes. Just as fascia allows for the body to move as a coherent whole, our sense of belonging to the earth allows us to act in ways that regenerate and restore the interstitial connections between ourselves and the living systems we depend on. We move from disconnection to participation.

The mental models we hold—whether we view ourselves as connected or separate—create profound feedback loops. These feedback loops are cybernetic by nature, constantly shaping and reshaping our actions, which then ripple out into the ecosystems around us. When we embrace a self-concept rooted in interconnectedness, our actions begin to heal and restore the webs of life that sustain us. We no longer see nature as something “other,” but as a family of life that we are actively contributing to.

Just as fascia can regenerate and repair itself through movement and care, and just as mycelium can re-knit the forest after disruption, we too can regenerate our connection to the living world. By continuously attending to our self-concept, we can begin to participate in this ongoing process of creation and regeneration—both within ourselves and within the larger ecosystems of the earth.

Motherhood taught me this in a way I couldn’t have anticipated. In nurturing new life, I was not just caring for my child—I was participating in a larger movement of life itself. And that’s what each of us is called to do, whether we’re parents or not: to recognize that in healing ourselves, in tending to our bodies and our hearts, we are also tending to the living world. And that when we remember ourselves as belonging to the living world, our bodies, hearts, minds, and relationships begin to naturally heal as well.

When we live from this place, we are no longer just individuals seeking self-actualization. We are agents of change within the larger systems of the earth, participating in its healing and growth.

Listening to the Living World

So how do we live this truth? How do we move from seeing ourselves as separate to experiencing ourselves as integral to the living world? It starts with simple practices of reconnection.

One of these practices is what my friend Dajé Alōh, The Story Doula, teaches as a Listening Walk. It’s a way to move through the world with attention, listening not just with our ears but with our whole selves. As we walk, we notice the light filtering through the trees, the way the earth feels under our feet, the sounds of birds and wind. We allow ourselves to be present, to listen for the messages that the living world is constantly offering.

Another practice is to sit with the land. Whether it’s by a tree, a river, or a simple patch of grass, we can sit and let ourselves sink into the natural rhythms around us. These moments remind us that we are part of a longer, ongoing story of life, one that stretches back long before us and will continue long after us.

And finally, we can start to pay attention to the natural cycles that pulse through the living world—the phases of the moon, the changing of the seasons, the cycles of growth and decay, and how these cycles show up within our own bodies. When we align ourselves with these rhythms, we begin to see that our personal healing is inseparable from the healing of the world.

At the core of Eco Somatic Cybernetics is the simple remembrance: we are the living world. Our bodies, our actions, our choices are all part of a larger system of life. When we remember this, we stop seeing ourselves as isolated individuals and begin to understand that every action we take ripples out into the ecosystems around us.

Whether we are nurturing new life as parents or simply walking through the forest, we are participating in the continual process of creation, healing, and regeneration. The living world is not separate from us. We are its agents, its participants, and its caretakers. And when we live from this understanding, we participate in our collective healing—one moment, one breath, one action at a time.

Indian River County is the heart of the Treasure Coast, named for the gold and jewels that the Spanish Crown stole from the indigenous peoples of South America. It was all reclaimed by the sea in 1622 when a hurricane sunk a fleet of ships holding what would have been in today’s accounting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stolen treasure. Even now, after big storms, beachcombers can find galleons and jewels in the sand. Hurricanes are, in every sense, a force of redistribution. They redistribute heat, water, attention, gold, nutrients, awareness, gratitude. 

Growing up in this place, I’ve learned that hurricanes are more than just destructive forces; they are teachers, ceremonies that demand our attention, our presence, and our humility. They teach us about the delicate equilibrium the Earth seeks, and they remind us of the vital importance of community and interdependence. Hurricanes have shaped my understanding of the land and my place within it. Over time, these storms have come to symbolize much more: the necessity of bioregional resilience, the power of communal care, and the opportunity for regeneration after destruction.

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One of the most profound lessons hurricanes have taught me is how easily we are geared to fixate on entropy—what is broken, what is threatening, what feels unstable. But when faced with a hurricane, I become so aware of what is whole, what is still standing strong. I become keenly attuned to syntropy, the counterforce to entropy, which brings things together, which enables life, which makes our wholeness possible. In the anticipation of destruction, there is an opportunity to pay attention to what is still intact: solid land, the standing trees, the unbroken homes, the blessings of community, and the forces that are still alive, holding us together.

The Land as Teacher

The wisdom of this land teaches me every day. It has shaped my entire life, both personally and professionally in my work of shaping regenerative futures alongside brilliant people and remarkable organizations creating positive, life affirming change every day. When I teach about Buckminster Fuller’s concept of trim tabs—the idea that one small, well-placed action or agent can create immense change—I can’t help but mention the gopher tortoise every time. This small creature, native to our area, plays a crucial role in the ecosystem, digging burrows that offer shelter to hundreds of other species. When I speak about the resilience and growth patterns and power of trees, it’s not an abstraction; I’m speaking of the oak trees around my home, those strong, flexible protectors that buffer us from the wind. They are some the greatest teachers of the living systems dynamics I’ve been studying and teaching for nearly a decade.

This land, this incredibly diverse bioregion, constantly teaches me about dynamic equilibrium. Hurricanes, though often seen as destructive forces, actually play a key role in maintaining the regenerative flow of life. They redistribute heat, moving it from the equator toward the poles, helping to regulate the planet’s temperature. This Earth, in its wisdom, is always dynamically changing, seeking equilibrium. Hurricanes are part of that living process. Humanity must be too.

And while it’s easy to see the devastation hurricanes bring, they also redistribute nutrients, clear space for new growth, and remind us to pay attention to the ever present forces of life that are so much bigger than us. Amid the fallen branches and floodwaters, there are always trees still standing, land that remains whole, and the strong roots that hold steady. In these moments, I am reminded that life is not only about what has fallen apart but what remains and grows stronger.

Hurricanes as Ceremony

Every time a hurricane approaches, it brings with it a ceremony. 

Like all ceremonies, hurricanes transform us. They require preparation, surrender, and radical presence.

I learned about ceremony from my parents, who were the head ceremonialists at the Ashram I was raised on. They led rituals throughout the year, including Durga Puja / Navaratri, which is a powerful 9 nights of honoring the Goddess in many forms, a ceremonial time that always overlaps with the heat of hurricane season. They taught me that ceremonies require deep preparation and our full presence. During the storm, we must show up for every moment: sometimes in action, sometimes in stillness, sometimes in connection, and sometimes in solitude. The lessons we learn during these times are ones that we carry forward, long after the storm has passed.

Hurricane Milton has taught me lessons of responsibility, leaning into the new experience of navigating the choices that a hurricane presents us with, now as parents of a toddler. The physical preparations are straightforward: we move potential projectiles, put up shutters, ensure we have enough water, prepare food, and charge our devices. We check on neighbors and prepare for the potential loss of power—sometimes for weeks.

But the mental and emotional preparations are just as important. I often remove social media from my phone to stay focused and grounded. It’s a time for discernment—being incredibly careful about the information we take in, tuning out the fear-mongering, and attuning to what is real. I pay attention to the data from NHC NOAA, and I also attune to the signs in nature, the wildlife, and my own instincts. I listen to the wisdom of my body, the signals of my nervous system, and the voices of those who are in it with me. There is a fine balance between understanding what we know intellectually and what we feel on a deeper, intuitive level.

And here, again, hurricanes remind me of the power of paying attention to what is intact: the strength of my home, the resilience of my family, the community that holds together in the face of uncertainty. It’s easy to fixate on what might go wrong, but hurricanes teach me to stay present to what is still holding, what is still working, what is syntropic.

And hurricanes, like any ceremony, are about not only the dissolution they bring but the potential they reveal. In the aftermath of a storm, when everything feels shaken, community comes together more than at any other time. It is truly a powerful, beautiful thing. I am reminded to look at what is still standing, what continues to support life, and what roots us in place. There is always something strong to anchor to if we pay attention.

Community and Interdependence

No one can survive or recover from a hurricane in isolation. Whether the storm leaves behind devastation or passes with little damage, it is always a reminder of our need for one another.

I remember the sense of togetherness that came after the hurricanes of 2004. In the wake of four major storms in rapid succession, our community came together in ways I had never experienced before. We shared meals, resources, and care. FEMA support was essential and as a middle schooler I ate MREs for weeks alongside friends and neighbors, and though the devastation was real, the bonds and strength of the community is what I remember most.

Years later, during Hurricane Matthew as a young adult I found myself throwing on galoshes the morning after and riding my bike around our community, checking on neighbors and friends, and serving as a messenger and a good neighbor. It was an honor to be part of that web of connection. Hurricanes demand that we put aside our differences—be they political, religious, or economic—and face the storm together. They remind us that we are all on this same ground, praying for safety, for rootedness, for the well-being of our homes and each other.

And again, while it’s easy to focus on the chaos, hurricanes remind us of the power of community—the people who remain, who show up for each other, who rebuild together. The integrity of community, much like the integrity of the land, is something to celebrate even amidst the storm.

Birth Story

Perhaps the most transformative hurricane I’ve experienced was Hurricane Ian, which arrived just days after we moved to my hometown, and two weeks before I was due to give birth. It became an undeniable part of my birth story.

At a time when most people expect mothers to rest and nest, I found myself out in the mounting winds, nine months pregnant, moving projectiles and putting up shutters. My family urged me to stop, but I stood firm, finding tremendous energy and repeating to myself and anyone who would listen, “I am strong. I have to be strong for what I’m about to go through.” The storm felt like an initiation into my strength as a mother. It was a powerful reminder that when life requires it, we often discover new reserves of power within ourselves.

And as Ian passed, I was again reminded that while some things break, other things hold. We lost electricity for 6 days, and on the 7th day, right in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, during the Days of Awe, the power returned, and I gave birth the next day. This transformative, liminal time is one in which we can change our fates through prayer and generosity and atonement. This year, Hurricane Milton came through during this same window of transformative time, and now on the eve of Yom Kippur, I feel deeply how this storm has shifted my own life.

Regeneration & the Life-Death-Life Cycle

Hurricanes bring devastation, loss, and death. They remind us that life is fragile and impermanent. Yet in the aftermath of destruction, there is always the opportunity for regeneration. Just as hurricanes redistribute heat for the planet, they offer us the chance to shift stagnant energy, redistribute our own energy and resources, and to connect more deeply with the land and with each other.

In the face of devastation, we can choose to become jaded and shut down, or we can open our hearts. We can offer support, receive it in turn, and commit to living in a way that supports life, equilibrium, and the well-being of our communities. Hurricanes invite us into a consciousness shift—a chance to realign with the Earth and each other.

They teach us to focus not on what has been lost, but on what is still here, still holding, still offering life.

Hurricanes remind us of our radical interdependence. They teach us that we are all in this together, interdependent within our bioregions, and responsible for the common ground which gives us life. Whether or not you have experienced a hurricane, the lessons they offer are universal: stay connected, stay present, and work toward a world that supports life in all its forms. It’s an invitation to live with greater consciousness, to recognize our role in supporting the equilibrium of the planet, and to move toward a regenerative culture in every aspect of our lives.

Along the way, I discovered that I’m in good company in this inquiry. Edward Abbey, the environmental philosopher and author, famously wrote, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” His words echo the patterns I’d observed in both societal systems and individual lives. This idea was likely first planted in my mind through my early readings of Joanna Macy, who describes our current era as “late-stage capitalism”—an unsustainable system focused on expansion without concern for the destruction it leaves in its wake.

I am personally very interested in how these institutional dynamics play out and are reproduced in our internal, interpersonal, and intergenerational patterns. This is an inquiry that my husband and I are in constant co-development and inquiry around.

As my partner, Seth Kaufmann and I have reflected on patterns we see in the many different communities and industries we belong to, and we’ve both seen firsthand how this obsession with one dimensional growth manifests in people’s lives:

* Consider the husband who is so focused on breadwinning for the family that his wife and children leave him because he’s completely unavailable emotionally, practically, and physically.

* Or the spiritual seeker who dives so deeply into their chosen path that they develop spiritual narcissism and become intolerable to the people who know and love them.

* Or the biohacker so focused on getting the strongest, sexiest, most fit body from a fantasy that that will attract their dream partner that they lose the skill of deep presence and listening.

* We see this in those who become addicted to self-improvement, hopping from one plant medicine ceremony to the next, bouncing between high vibration communities and trainings, always seeking the next level.

What if we approached our growth process the way that all healthy living systems grow? Multidimensionally, ecosystemically, in many directions, with phases for stabilizing, integrating, and rest?

This is the essence of the work Seth and I do. We bring to our clients a regenerative, multidimensional approach to growth that includes not just the self, but also the people, communities, and ecosystems that nurture us. We work with three dimensions of self: the internal, the interpersonal, and the intergenerational. To bring this beyond theory and into practical embodiment, Seth will contribute his perspectives throughout this essay. I see firsthand how his clients experience truly multidimensional transformations, and it’s this kind of growth that inspired this essay.

The Dangers of One-Dimensional Growth

Seth and I work with clients who have experienced the fallout of one-dimensional growth. They’ve become so focused on excelling in one area—whether it’s fitness, career success, or personal transformation—that they’ve unintentionally created rifts in their relationships. This is what happens when growth becomes uncontrolled and harmful. Like cancer, it overtakes the environment and damages the very ecosystem that sustains it.

We must ask ourselves: In what ways does our singular focus on growth harm the people and connections that sustain us? What if, instead, we approached growth from a multidimensional perspective—one that considers how our personal growth impacts those we love and the communities we live in?

Seth: A huge lesson I’ve learned from Ganga Devi’s regenerative work over the years is that sometimes, it’s about pruning—letting go of old patterns, habits, or beliefs that are no longer serving you. Pruning is essential because without it, the tree becomes overgrown and unbalanced.

In our lives, pruning might mean letting go of unhealthy relationships, old ways of thinking, or routines and regimens that aren’t working anymore. We do this not only through making conscious choice, but working at the level of psychosomatic patterns that are keeping you stuck, and releasing them.

This is essential in regeneration. You compost what no longer serves, and in doing so, you make space for new growth—growth that’s healthier, more intentional, and aligned with who you are now and who you are becoming.

Our intention in developing this piece is that it might help you to consciously prune and compost any beliefs or strategies within your own life in which you may still be approaching growth as a one-dimensional endeavor.

Growing in All Directions

One of the most remarkable things about trees is their ability to grow in all directions simultaneously. They don’t just stretch upward, reaching for the sun, which is the most obvious form of growth we can see. They expand outward, building their trunks and branches, and they root deeply, establishing a strong foundation to support their height and breadth. This multidirectional growth is vital for their health and resilience.

Trees grow steadily—widening their trunks, deepening their roots, and expanding their branches, all at once. This is what makes them so strong. It’s not just about growing taller or producing more leaves; they’re stabilizing as they grow, grounding themselves deeper into the earth while reaching higher toward the sky. Without this balance of upward, downward, and outward growth, trees would either topple from weak roots or fail to thrive with limited height.

This principle of multidirectional growth applies to our lives as well. Like trees, we need to grow in all directions—wide, tall, and deep. We need to expand our relationships and connections (our outward growth), reach for higher goals and aspirations (our upward growth), and at the same time, ground ourselves by healing from the past and creating strong foundations (our deep-rooted growth).

Seth: When you take the time to honestly assess how you’re doing in multiple dimensions of your life, the clarity that follows is unavoidable. You can’t help but begin to make strategic changes to improve the whole system. I begin this way with all of my clients because it provides a baseline from which we approach your growth to ensure you’re truly well rounded. Feeling solid in career, money, and fitness but struggling with sex and spirituality? Great, it gives us focus and clarity. With this approach, we see how all dimensions are connected, and it’s easy to make subtle shifts in daily rituals and routines that help benefit multiple dimensions at once.

Stabilize and Expand

Trees grow in all directions because they have natural cycles of stabilization and expansion. They root deeply, establishing a strong foundation before stretching upward. This balance of stability and change is essential to all living systems and is reflected in systems theory as fließgleichgewicht, or flux equilibrium—a state where stability and transformation coexist to support life.

This cyclical growth applies not only to trees but to our bodies and lives as well. Just as trees require periods of rest to gather strength before expanding, our bodies and minds need time to recalibrate and integrate. In fitness, for example, constant effort without recovery leads to burnout or injury. True progress requires honoring the cycle of growth and stabilization.

Seth: In fitness culture, we often see this obsession with constant growth and improvement—more reps, faster times, bigger muscles. It’s the same cancerous mindset, and it’s actually completely contradicted by the science. What we need is a regenerative approach to fitness, and to all areas of life.

The body, like all living systems, requires periods of rest, stabilization, and recovery. If you’re constantly pushing yourself to grow without giving your body the time to stabilize, you’ll burn out, get injured, and ultimately lose the balance you need to thrive. Regenerative fitness is about honoring those natural cycles—growing, then stabilizing, and then growing again. It’s about becoming stronger and more resilient over time, without sacrificing your long-term well-being for short-term gains.

When approached this way, the inputs, routines, and rituals we create for our fitness, health, and wellbeing become tools of greater connection and cultivation. They support the development of our consciousness and our ability to live a life of true intimacy and integrity.

Each year, trees go through seasons of growth and rest. In the spring and summer, they expand; in the fall and winter, they stabilize, conserving energy and preparing for the next cycle of growth. When we slice a tree, the rings reveal this story of steady, balanced growth. These rings are circular, of course, because trees grow in all directions at once.

Seth: One of the concepts I bring into our work is called periodization. Periodization comes from the world of exercise science, where it’s used to structure an athlete’s training into cycles of work, rest, and recalibration. Originally developed by Eastern European sports scientists to maximize athlete performance, periodization breaks down goals into smaller, manageable phases—each with its own focus—allowing athletes to peak at the right moment without burning out.

But periodization isn’t just useful for physical training. It’s applicable to all areas of life. I apply this framework to help people align their goals across multiple dimensions—physical, emotional, relational, and even spiritual. Whether you’re working on building a business, strengthening your relationships, or improving your fitness, periodization helps you stay focused, avoid overwhelm, and create sustainable progress. When you’re clear on your goals, periodization becomes essential for success, helping you balance growth with recovery and focus with reflection.

And of course the multidimensional growth of trees is not just horizontal, as seen in the rings of their trunks, but also vertical—growing both deep into the earth and high into the sky. This mirrors how we, too, must grow in all directions: healing from the past (our roots), stabilizing in the present, and expanding into the future (our upward growth).

This is how we believe we are meant to grow—like trees, not cancer. In cycles of expansion and stabilization. In a way that contributes to the health of our personal ecosystems, rather than depleting them.

Whole-System Benefits

True regeneration requires a holistic view of growth beyond one singular metric. It’s about how we nurture the entire ecosystem of our lives. When trees grow, they don’t just do it for themselves—they give back in countless ways, enriching the soil, providing oxygen, offering shade, and supporting countless other species.

Our personal growth should be no different. We should aim to grow in a way that benefits not only ourselves but our communities, relationships, and the environment around us.

Seth: Growth isn’t just about what you can achieve for yourself. It’s about how your growth impacts the people around you, your relationships, and even future generations. True well-being includes internal, interpersonal, and intergenerational dimensions. Just as trees support entire ecosystems, we can grow in a way that uplifts everyone connected to us. This kind of growth—where we expand and stabilize in all dimensions—leads to lasting fulfillment and a life in which everyone thrives.

We can choose to grow like trees— in all directions, stabilizing, expanding, giving back, and regenerating. Growth doesn’t have to be about relentless optimization or self-improvement for the sake of it. It can be about flourishing in balance with the world around us, contributing to the ecosystems of our bodies, relationships, and communities.

This morning we read this poem by Nikita Gill to one another, slowly and out loud. We welcome you to do the same:

Every Day

Is not an opportunity to improve yourself.Some days are just there for you to accept yourselfand look at the clouds.This too is growth.This too is rising.The flowers do it everydayand make the world more beautifuljust by being there.

So do you.

Rest today.There is tomorrow.

– Nitika Gill

This poem reminds us, there are days for growing and days for simply being. Growth, like life, is cyclical, and on some days, resting and accepting ourselves is just as important as striving for more.

We hope that whatever your growth trajectory, that it be dynamic, multidimensional, integrative, and most of all, that it supports the thriving of not only you as an individual, but everyone you love.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic through the comments below, and we have been loving connecting with those of you who have been reaching out directly to us. We’ve begun some incredibly rich coaching relationships through people we’ve connected with here on Substack. The depth that is possible through relationships begun here is powerful, and we look forward to connecting with more of you.

You can connect with Seth via his website here. Seth thrives when connecting with people, so he offers 30 minute discovery calls, totally free, for anyone interested in exploring working together. His passion is helping people get the right support for them, which may or may not be working with him, so don’t expect a hard sell, just a clarifying conversation with someone who wants the best for you.

I don’t offer discovery calls, but I have recently begun offering Regenerative Development Consultation sessions for people interested in regenerative development either personally or professionally. You can book that here.

This is an essay I wrote originally on Valentines Day of 2019. I’ve recently been revisiting it for multiple reasons, including recent work I’ve been doing with Stephen Bau who I first connected with in 2020 because of this essay. It’s an honor to be spiraling back in time to this meditation.I welcome you to tune in and listen in a space and moment in which your body can be fully at ease and resting in gravity.

Take a moment, close your eyes, breathe deeply, and think about what you love most in the world. What are a few words to describe how you feel?

I feel grounded and steady, like I’m rooted to the earth, or have a blanket, heavy and soft, wrapped around my shoulders. I feel a smile coming over my lips, a joy that feels like laughter and tears washing over me, astonishment that what I love exists. I feel a tugging, from deep within my belly, a yearning to be close to what I love. I feel excitement because I know that when I am immersed in what I love, the opportunity for creation is endless.

Love shapes our human bonds, our choices, and whatever we may identify as our purpose in life. Love is a reason for tremendous creation and destruction in our species, and the boundaries of who is included within our love create the lines in the sand beyond which lies the land of “other,” the land of “them.” If I asked any cross section of humanity to precisely define love, I would receive mostly frustrated, confused responses. If I asked you to describe it, the answers would come flooding in, full of adjectives, poetry, strong feelings, and just by thinking about love, your body would physiologically change.

Buckminster Fuller, beloved American architect, systems theorist, polymath, poet once wrote, “love is metaphysical gravity.” To some this is a statement that lands naturally, for others it’s an idea that seems alien and confusing. After all, the meaning of metaphysics has changed tremendously in the last few hundred years, and we don’t really know much about gravity either. To make a statement equating something so deeply personal that our motivations are shaped by a longing for it from the morning we are born with something as abstract and impersonal as our grade school lessons about Newton’s law of universal gravitation seems, to some, at first absurd. This disconnect is because our culture doesn’t tend to cultivate awareness about gravity as much as, perhaps, we should.

If I asked anyone at all to precisely define gravity to me, just as with love, it wouldn’t be easy and it wouldn’t be precise. If I ask you now, to be fully where you are, and observe how gravity feels, after a moment of contemplation, you would have something interesting to say.

For me, now, as I write this, and stop to notice- I realize how much of my body is resisting gravity. I’m sitting in bed, but most of the muscle groups in my body are tensed, holding me in an alert and slightly uncomfortable position to be working on my laptop. I take my hands off the keyboard, move the computer to the side, and spend a few moments moving the joints of my hands, arms, and shoulders in circles. I allow my head to fall to the side, and then down, and slowly bring it back to center, leaning it back against the pillow behind me. I scan my body for any tension, resistance, any muscle activity at all. As I scan, I notice the compression of my pants around my hips, I feel the weight of my dog’s head resting on my ankle, and the subtle pressure of the blanket between us on the rest of my legs. More subtle still, I feel my body settling into the mattress and pillows beneath it, feel myself being pulled to this planet.

This relationship with gravity, this ability to drop the physical tension in my body in an instant is new. A few years ago I took a movement course from Matthew Nelson which completely changed my relationship with gravity and my body. This course came during a time of my life when I was spending a lot of time with my father, a psychologist and author who only ever talked about love, who was dying of pancreatic cancer. The course was a tool that I chose to use during this time to allow me to process and express the deep feelings of dread, longing, confusion, love, and sorrow that come with anticipatory grief. Most of the movement practice had to do with surrendering to gravity, yielding, noticing what it feels like to not be straining, even if just for a moment. The word ‘yield’ was carefully chosen by Matthew in this practice, because of its dual meaning. Yes, it means to surrender, but it also describes harvest. In yielding to gravity with consciousness every day, I was able to begin to understand in an embodied sense what Buckminster Fuller might have been talking about.

I began to know the felt experience of being held gently to my place on this planet, I felt the love that I have for this earth more strongly than ever because I felt that love as a mutuality. Through gravity, I felt the earth as alive and beloved, and that I was beloved by the earth. A poem by Raymond Carver which describes this was pulsing through my heart during this time, and I made art with that poem, writing its words on my heart. I began to felt a deeper commitment to making good use of my time here on this planet. I noticed my anxiety lessen, and my mind expand.

A few months into this practice, I visited the California Institute of Integral Studies to explore the option of a Masters in Cosmology, Consciousness, and Philosophy. While in the building, I had three hours worth of conversations about this beautiful correlation, and learned about the presence of great bands of gravitational waves at the outer edge of our galaxy.

Spiral arm galaxies, like our Milky Way home, are shaped by the forces that make stars. There seem to be vast gravitational arms that spiral through the cosmos, bending space-time, and concentrating space dust into new forms. Sometimes, this results in the precise concentrations of hydrogen and helium atoms needed to begin the process of nuclear fusion, and new stars, new gas giants, new planets and moons begin their cosmic dance.

The most simple interpretation of “love is metaphysical gravity” is that the two invisible forces pull things together.

In Systems Theory terms, the two forces bring about emergent properties, systems that are created from two or more other systems coming into contact. We, for example, are an emergent property of our biological parents, but not only them. We are an emergent property of all of our human ancestors, the cultures they built, the meaning and purpose that fueled them, the love and care they provided their children so that we, one day, would live. We are also an emergent property of the rest of the species of the earth, every single organism that has lived to transform matter on this planet for the last 4.54 billion years. We are also the emergent property of the pulsing, breathing metabolizing forces that have been shaping this cosmos for at least 13.82 billion years.

Every creation is an emergent property, of not just two, but infinite dynamic systems throughout time and space giving rise to all that we know in creation.

Love and gravity both generate the conditions for this creation, and, given time, evolution. I believe that when Bucky wrote “love is metaphysical gravity” he was helping us to understand two different ways that we experience syntropy, the universal force that counterbalances the entropy of an ever expanding universe. Syntropic forces, including love, gravity, life, and evolution, are difficult to identify, because it’s much easier to see when things fall apart (entropy). When things are operating harmoniously, whether they be our bodies, our households, our social networks, or our biosphere, our solar system we hardly notice them.

The forces of syntropy in our lives regenerate chaos back into harmony, they support us in finding meaning and coming home to ourselves. I believe we have the responsibility to understand and embody these principles, not merely to understand them.

To that end, today is Valentine’s Day, and I am committing my life ever deeper to the path of love, and I do not begrudge being held close to the body of this earth. I am grateful you are here with me.

This essay is the beginning of an exploration. This is an invitation to others who feel a connection to both Bucky and Maharaji, or who have been influenced by their teachings. I’d love to hear from people who are living in this same space, who see the ways these legacies continue to shape the world today.

Last week, on the anniversary of Neem Karoli Baba’s Mahasamadhi, something unexpected happened. I had a conversation with Mirabai Bush that opened up a whole new perspective for me. She shared that after Buckminster Fuller’s death, his funeral reception was held at the Cambridge house where she and others from Neem Karoli Baba’s satsang were living at the time. Ram Dass visited that house often, and my father did as well. Hearing that absolutely blew my mind.

For years, I’ve been deeply connected to Buckminster Fuller’s work. His vision of a world that works for 100% of humanity without ecological offense or to the disadvantage of anyone has been a driving force in my life. His ideas have shaped how I see possibility and change in the world. At the same time, I’ve been connected to Neem Karoli Baba’s lineage for as long as I can remember—not just because I was born into a family devoted to him, but because I’ve witnessed how his legacy has truly shaped the world for the better.

One powerful example is how Neem Karoli Baba set Dr. Larry Brilliant on a path that made him instrumental in the eradication of smallpox, one of the greatest public health achievements in human history. And the work didn’t stop there—the SEVA Foundation, which Dr. Brilliant co-founded, has gone on to reverse blindness for countless people in India and Nepal. These are just a couple of the ways Maharaji’s legacy continues to reduce suffering and create meaningful change in the world. The more I reflect on this, the more I see how deeply connected this is to everything Buckminster Fuller taught and worked toward in his life.

What really brought it home was when I saw a photo of Bucky in front of a picture of Neem Karoli Baba in that same house. Seeing that image of these two figures—one whose mind was always reaching toward the future, and the other whose heart was fully present in the now—felt like a revelation. It sparked something in me that’s been unraveling ever since.

The more I sit with this, the more I see how these two have shaped my life, not just in different ways, but in ways that are starting to converge. One of the most powerful links between them is how both were deeply motivated by love—and how grief, in different ways, acted as a doorway to that love.

For Bucky, it was the death of his young daughter that cracked him open. He hit rock bottom and contemplated ending his life, which opened his mind to a profound realization: that his life wasn’t his to end, that his life belonged to the universe. From that moment forward, he devoted himself to the idea of making the world work for everyone. He referred to himself as “guinea pig B,” committing his life to this massive project of love for humanity. That love, born out of grief, became his driving force.

Neem Karoli Baba, on the other hand, lived in a constant state of love. His presence was love. There are many beautiful books written about the effect he had on people, both while he was alive in Miracle of Love and Love Everyone. And even since he died, he keeps showing up in peoples lives in astonishing ways. Many of these stories are recounted in Whisper in the Heart, and the stories continue to be written.

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One thread of connection I am making, is how both of them have helped me to have a clearer and more empowered relationship with Jesus. As a young girl growing up on an Ashram surrounded by churches that demonized us and made us feel unsafe, my relationship with Jesus has not often been easy. (This, despite the fact that there is a beautiful Christ garden on our Ashram and my mother raised us with a deeply interactive and joyful Sunday School to learn both the stories of the Torah and of the New Testament.)

Maharaji would often tell people to go away. Sometimes he would tell them to go away and meditate like Christ, which seems to have confused the westerners who thought they were there for something different. So one day, a devotee asked him how to meditate like Christ. Maharaji stopped, got very still, and tears began to roll down his face. He simply said, “He lost himself in love.” That story has always stayed with me. For Maharaji, love wasn’t just an ideal or a feeling—it was a state of being, a total surrender to something greater than the self.

Buckminster Fuller had a continuous project of rewriting the Lord’s Prayer as a way to deepen into its wisdom. Many people often only learn one rigid version, many times translated by the church, but I learned in my Interspiritual Seminary training that the Lord’s Prayer emerged from a disciple asking Jesus how to pray, and he said, “Like this…“ and spontaneously spoke, in Aramaic, at the time, the original version of the prayer that so many know different versions of.

In Seminary we were given many different translations, as well as a transliteration and phonetic breakdown of what it would have been in the original Aramaic, which I practiced reciting aloud for some time to connect with it more deeply.

So Bucky’s project of continuously rewriting the Lord’s Prayer seems to me to be in the spirit of what Christ was instructing, and from that work came the phrase, Love is Metaphysical Gravity. That concept has become central in my life. It’s this idea that love is what holds everything together—it’s the force that binds us to one another, to the Earth, and to the future. And then there’s Maharaji, who in that moment of weeping over Christ’s love, showed a profound respect and connection to Jesus that’s helped me come into a more open-hearted relationship with him as well.

What’s even more interesting is that as I explore these connections, I’m starting to see how the people devoted to each of their legacies have so much in common. There’s this shared commitment to making the world better—not just through ideas or technology, but through love and service. I think there may be even more overlap between the two than I ever realized, and that’s something I’m just starting to uncover.

The more I reflect on all of this, the more I see these two legacies—Buckminster Fuller and Neem Karoli Baba—not just as separate influences, but as threads that are weaving together in my life. They both, in their own ways, acted as trim tabs—small but powerful forces that have steered the larger ship of humanity toward love and transformation.

This essay is really just the beginning of an exploration. I’m not trying to cover everything here, and I’m sure there’s so much more to uncover. I’m putting this out there as an invitation to others who feel a connection to both Bucky and Maharaji, or who have been influenced by their teachings. I’d love to hear from people who are living in this same space, who see the ways these legacies continue to shape the world today.

Their work isn’t over—it’s still unfolding. And by starting this conversation, I hope we can keep revealing the deeper connections between these two remarkable beings and the love that continues to ripple out through all of us.

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We were also seeing so many connections between the worlds of Environmental Activism and Social Justice work, but feeling that our peers in these spaces often were at odds with one another, competing for a sense of which was “more important“ and often also competing for resources. We were studying Environmental Justice at the time and seeing just how completely intertwined all of our broken systems are: that the issues of our culture that perpetuate harm along lines of race and class and gender and ability are inextricably connected with the issues of environmental degradation, and that we must approach them all together.

As we discussed our frustrations, we also noted the shortcomings of the word “sustainable.” To us, sustainability was toothless. In an ever changing world, what is ever actually sustainable? We wondered: what if, instead of trying to restore or sustain, we aimed to regenerate? What if, rather than looking backward to an imagined state of perfection or simply preserving what is, we focused on creating conditions for new life and possibilities to emerge?

We wondered: what if, instead of trying to restore or sustain, we aimed to regenerate?

So, we began a thought experiment: every time we encountered the words “restoration” or “sustainable,” we replaced them in our minds with “regenerative.”

This simple mental shift changed everything. It transformed our thought patterns and opened up new ways of seeing solutions and potential. It helped us see that every problem and every possibility was interconnected. We began to recognize how every system of inequality, every ecosystem, every social system, and even our body systems are all deeply entwined.

Regeneration is, in simplest terms, the life-death-life cycle.

All Living Systems are regenerative.

From the tissues of our bodies undergoing autophagy every day, to the life-giving process of decay and decomposition that creates fertile soil, to the releasing of creative ideas to make space for new ones, to the passing and creation of new life within our family systems, to even how releasing old models and norms in business is necessary for long term survival, innovation, and thriving.

A regenerative approach allowed us to compassionately observe the systems and dynamics that have been so harmful for so long, because rather than raging against them, we began to see that they could be composted. Laid to rest. I began to see that if we can find the ways to compost the old systems, the old patterns, that which is decaying and ready to die, we will create fertile ground for new life, new meanings, and new connections to emerge. It wasn’t just about fixing or maintaining but about evolving and transforming. This shift in perspective felt like discovering a new language for understanding and engaging with the world—a language that could hold the complexities and potentials of our time.

However, when that relationship ended, one of the many lines of grief I felt was a sense of isolation in this new worldview. I didn’t really have anyone to talk to about it, but it was pouring out of me. I was also deep in the study of Living Systems Theory, the work of Joanna Macy, and biomimetics, and receiving a great deal of wisdom from my direct relationship with the earth around me. The soil, the mushrooms, the insects, the trees. I wanted to shout from the rooftops about the ways I was seeing things, but I didn’t know how to own my voice yet, and I didn’t know who I could even really speak to about this.

I now have the language of “Visionary Crisis“ from my business partner Dajé Alōh to name what I was going through at the time. Visionary Crisis emerges when you have powerful visions for what can be in the world, but lack the capacity, the relationships, the means, and a pathway to bring that Vision to life. (This is what we are solving for in the Vision Midwifery work we do within The Vision Society.)

It was in this Visionary Crisis that I met Seth Kaufmann, the man who would become my husband, and after just observing and listening to me for a time, one of the first things he said to me was, “Whatever you’re here to do, I want to support it.“ That was a life changing moment for me, and I have felt held and seen and supported by him in countless ways since that day.

I began to share my Regenerative Visions with Seth, which met his incredible expertise in the realm of physiology and kinesiology as well as his passion for human potential and performance, and even more connections began to spark. (Our work together in this field of intersection continues to evolve, we’re actually developing an entire model of regenerative fitness, which you can learn a little big about here.)

A few months after meeting Seth, I met another person who would change my life: David McConville. David and I met at a gathering that I’d been invited to because of my deep relationship with the land it was hosted on. He was invited because he was the Chairman of the Board of the Buckminster Fuller Institute which at the time gave an annual prize to an organization best fulfilling the brief of Bucky’s World Games:

“Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

This event was the first ever gathering hosted at ChoZen Retreat, sacred land that I was raised on. (ChoZen is now a leading presence in the emerging world of regenerative retreats). This gathering hosted 30 brilliant, visionary people, with no overbearing objective other than deep connection and emergent collaborations. Some of the people there, as they heard me speak, were surprised that they hadn’t met me before, as I was so fluent in the vernacular flowing amongst them. I was surprised as well, with how easy it was to connect around concepts that I had been holding in some degree of isolation for some time. I was asked if I’d studied at this place or another; if I’d been to this conference or another; how much time I’d spent in the Bay Area, etc. My answer to everything was, “no, I spend time in the garden.“

David and I really connected deeply, and he opened my eyes to an entire universe of Regenerative Practitioners around the world already doing the things I was so anxious to get done. I felt such relief.

He gifted me a copy of Regenerative Development and Design from the Regenesis Group, a leading organization of brilliant elders who have been doing this work for a long time. The book had only recently come out, and they had begun a school for Regenerative Practice.

The following day, Seth drove me down to Miami where I was reunited with my father who I hadn’t seen in years as he had been living in India at the mountain Ashram of his Guru, Neem Karoli Baba. My father had just returned to the states when he received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and he was scheduled for a whipple surgery the following day.

I read much of this textbook in the hospital courtyard and chapel while my father was undergoing an 11-hour surgery for cancer the next day. The next year was a profound journey through my father’s dying process, during which I found myself confronting another layer of crisis—what I now recognize as “spiritual narcissism.”

My father was an extraordinary man, full of devotion, wisdom, and insight. Yet, despite these qualities, there was often a disconnect between his spiritual ideals and his daily life, especially in his relationships with our family. His ability to channel profound spiritual insight didn’t always translate into a presence of loving, committed relationships. As I grappled with the grief of his impending loss, I also began to see this dynamic mirrored in my own life and in the spiritual community I was raised in—a community founded by a spiritual leader who, despite immense wisdom, exhibited narcissistic and abusive tendencies.

This dual experience—my father’s journey and my reflection on the spiritual community’s dynamics—led me to question what makes it possible for someone to have so much wisdom and still cause harm. Why do these patterns of spiritual insight without relational integrity arise? How can we hold both the light and shadow in our spiritual paths without causing harm to those around us?

In seeking answers, my now-husband Seth and I enrolled in a two-year-long interspiritual seminary. Our core intention was to cultivate spiritual maturity and to learn how to meet those who come to us for guidance with groundedness, humility, and integrity. This seminary, rooted in integral theory, spiral dynamics, trauma, somatics, and a deep study of many spiritual paths, became a crucible for transformation.

Every stage of that seminary process was an opportunity for me to think about regeneration. Whether designing rituals or engaging in spiritual companionship, I found myself drawn again and again to the principles of ecological wisdom and the spiritual dimensions of regeneration. I realized that true regeneration isn’t just about ecological systems; it’s about the subtle, inner patterns that shape our world—the spiritual, the interpersonal, the inner work that supports the larger systemic change-making needed in our world.

This journey taught me that to serve the integrity of the regenerative movement, we must attend to these subtle dimensions. We must support the spiritual, inner, and interpersonal work that underpins systemic change. That is what I am here to do: to weave together the threads of spiritual maturity, relational integrity, and ecological wisdom, to support the larger regenerative movement, and to remind others—and myself—that we are not alone.

This year has brought my journey full circle. After years of growth and exploration, I graduated from the Regenesis Group’s Regenerative Practitioner Series—a program I had known about since David gave me that book all those years ago. The timing had to be right; my own development needed to unfold in its own way. As I completed the program, one of the most profound lessons I learned was the importance of “friends in the work.”

My teachers emphasized that no meaningful change happens by an individual acting alone. Systemic change requires collaboration, and friends in the work are essential not just for organizing and being effective in our broader efforts but also as mirrors and reflections for our internal work. These friends are there to support us in our personal growth, to help us see our blind spots, and to encourage us to continue evolving.

In nature, nothing regenerates in isolation. The very process of composting, for example, is a dance of relationships. It is about connection, exchange, and mutualism. The decaying matter, microbes, fungi, and invertebrates all work together in a complex network of interactions to break down organic material and create fertile soil. This same principle applies to the body: our cells regenerate through a constant exchange of nutrients, oxygen, and waste, all facilitated by the relationships between our bodily systems. Even soil regeneration is about the intricate relationships between plants, fungi, bacteria, and countless other organisms.

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Reflecting on these natural processes has made me realize that I, too, have exhibited a form of visionary narcissism. For years, I thought I could just give and give to the people, organizations, and communities I loved and believed in without asking for anything in return. I assumed that I would receive support naturally, without needing to articulate or honor my own needs. This was a form of narcissism—a belief that I could exist outside the reciprocal, relational dynamics that underpin all healthy ecosystems.

Over time, I’ve learned the importance of knowing what I need, asking for it, and allowing myself to be resourced. This process of maturation has helped me realize that the effectiveness of my work and the depth of my relationships grow in direct proportion to how well I am supported and resourced. This has been a challenging lesson, especially as someone raised on an ashram and who has been critical of capitalism. But I’ve come to understand that resource exchange—especially through money—can make healthy relationships more possible. It creates a clear structure for support, value, and mutual respect, which is vital, especially now as a mother, when my time is precious, and my commitment to regenerative work is deeper than ever.

Today, I continue to engage deeply with this work. I regularly meet with my beloved cohort of regenerative practitioners, where we act as friends in the work, supporting each other in our growth and efforts. Next week, I will meet with some of my clients—leaders in the regenerative world—who I am beginning to support with this deeper, subtle work. It’s an honor and a homecoming to step more formally into the role of counselor and supporter for these leaders, helping them cultivate the depth, integrity, and resilience needed for the regenerative changes they seek to make.

Since those early days of exploring regenerative thinking, I’ve come to understand that no one makes change alone. Regenerative practice is inherently interdependent. It thrives on community, collaboration, and the recognition that we are all part of a larger whole. This work is not about individual heroes making grand changes in isolation; it’s about a collective effort, woven from countless connections and relationships.

The three lines of development in regenerative practice—personal growth, relational dynamics, and systemic impact—are all interwoven. Each supports and is supported by the others. As I continued my journey, I realized the importance of doing my own inner work, cultivating authentic relationships, and understanding the real-world challenges of regenerative work.

Through this process, I also found a personal touchstone in an unexpected place: a song. When my son was a newborn, I began singing “No One Is Alone” from Into the Woods to him as a lullaby. The lyrics,

You are not aloneBelieve meNo one is alone (no one is alone)Believe meTruly

People make mistakesFathers, mothersPeople make mistakesHolding to their ownThinking they're aloneHonor their mistakesEverybody makesOne another's terrible mistakesWitches can be right, giants can be goodYou decide what's right, you decide what's good

Just remember, just rememberSomeone is on your side (our side)Our sideSomeone else is notWhile we're seeing our side (our side)Our sideMaybe we forgot, they are not aloneNo one is aloneSomeone is on your sideNo one is alone

This song has become more than just a soothing presence at bedtime, it’s an embodied reminder of our interdependence. No one is alone.

In regenerative practice, and in life, we need friends in the work. We need allies who will challenge us, support us, and remind us that our visions are not ours alone to carry. They are shared dreams, born of collective wisdom and nurtured through shared effort. Together, we have the capacity to transform not only our own lives but the world around us.

As you navigate your own path, remember: You are not alone. No one is alone. And together, we can create the change we wish to see in the world.

I'll close by sharing that as I continue to deepen into this work, I am opening a couple of spots of, of one-on-one work at a couple of different levels of price points experimentally to see what works, seeking to strike a balance between what I can offer that is as generous and accessible to others as possible while also feeling like a healthy boundary for myself. 

I always seek to structure anything that I do in business to be deeply aligned with my own values, which means that it's often experimental and iterative. So if you are connecting with my work and are interested in receiving some one-on-one support, I would be more than happy and honored to talk with you about what that can look like. 

Finally, I want to just encourage all of us to remember the context that we are moving within. Remember that we have many different friends and allies and guides and teachers available to us, not just among the humans that were in connection with, but everywhere around us throughout the living world.

Thanks for reading The Living World! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Note: This is an original piece of writing by me, Ganga Devi Braun. However, it would not have come to life without the thought partnership of my husband, Seth Kaufmann, who has developed brilliant frameworks for dynamic masculinity from a trauma-informed, multidimensional perspective. His insights have opened my eyes to the immense compassion and potential within men and men’s work, and because of his contributions, he is listed as a collaborator on this piece.

This is a letter to men. (But if you know men, especially if you love men and believe in their potential, this can also be for you.)

For many years now, there has been an essential, often imperfect conversation about patriarchy and patriarchal systems—a conversation that is long overdue. When we don’t have language for something that’s real, something called hypocognition happens—it’s when we lack the words to articulate an experience, and therefore struggle to fully understand or address it. It’s crucial to name and recognize the things that would otherwise be hard to see. (Gratitude to my teacher Kelly Diels for giving me this language!)

Right now, patriarchy is making a massive power grab, manifesting through movements like Christian nationalism and autocratic technocracy, seeking to control everyone—especially women’s bodies—in the most vile ways. This is in full force in the powers behind the current Trump candidacy (if you don’t know who Peter Theil or Curtis Yarvin are, look them up). Patriarchy is also present in the violent war machine, and it manifests differently across cultures: in the United States, it shows up in ways that are harmful and pervasive, for example in places like Iran and Afghanistan, it takes the form of gender apartheid with devastating consequences.

I want to be very clear: these are the waters we’re all swimming in, and we’re all wet. Patriarchy is a system that lives through all of us. Some are more oppressed than others, suffering different forms of violence and control. But it is violent and controlling toward everyone, including those who “benefit” from it. Let’s be honest, in the truest sense no one benefits from a system that suppresses and controls freedom, including and especially the freedom to feel. However, and this is crucial—it’s not who we are. These patterns might show up in our lives, but they don’t define us. We all have choices. You have choices.

What if, instead of viewing patriarchy as a machine that controls everything or a poison inside all men, we took a different approach? What if we saw it through the lens of living systems? Imagine liberating yourself from patriarchal patterning with a mindset that recognizes the natural processes of entropy and syntropy—letting old, harmful patterns die and making space for new, healthier ones.

Take a moment to connect with your breath. Feel the in-breath, an act of gathering energy, up-regulating your nervous system—this is syntropy, forces coming together. Now feel the exhale, the release, downregulating—this is entropy, letting go. Your body already knows this dance of life. By bringing these unconscious processes into consciousness, you can learn to engage them intentionally, transforming not only yourself but the world around you.

Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” Think of this as our challenge. We can create new ways of being that make the old ways—those that limit and harm us—obsolete.

I’ve seen this transformation in men I know and work with, including my husband and my clients. These men are devoted to their families and to being a genuine force of goodness in the world. They are committed to unlearning and repatterning the dynamics of patriarchy. This message is for you, for all men on this journey. Change is possible when you embrace the rhythm of release and repatterning.

A Multidimensional View

Let’s talk about how patriarchy shows up in three key dimensions: institutional (which can also be viewed through an intergenerational lens), interpersonal, and internal. These layers help us understand the ways patriarchal patterns manifest and how deeply they can run through every aspect of life.

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1. Institutional (Intergenerational) Dimension

At the institutional level, patriarchy is embedded in the systems and structures that shape our societies, such as laws, educational practices, economic policies, and cultural norms. These systems perpetuate gender inequalities and often place men in positions of power as the default while marginalizing everyone else. Patriarchy is passed down through generations, teaching each one to follow the same patterns, whether through direct indoctrination or the subtle reinforcement of “traditional” roles. This is the intergenerational aspect—how the norms and behaviors tied to patriarchy are inherited and normalized over time, creating a cycle that can seem impossible to break.

2. Interpersonal Dimension

On an interpersonal level, patriarchy manifests in our relationships with others. It shows up in the dynamics of power and control, often dictating how you interact, how you communicate, and certainly how you love. It can lead to dominance in relationships, expectations of emotional stoicism, or assumptions about gender roles in households and workplaces. These patterns affect your friendships, romantic partnerships, and family dynamics, often causing harm and perpetuating a lack of genuine connection and empathy.

3. Internal Dimension

Internally, patriarchy manifests in how we view ourselves and our roles in the world. It’s in the inner critic that tells men you must be strong, unemotional, and always in control. It’s the guilt or shame men might feel for not living up to these impossible standards. It’s the suppression of emotions and the fear of vulnerability that keeps many men from fully expressing yourselves. These internalized beliefs can be some of the hardest to recognize and unlearn because they feel so personal and ingrained.

Understanding these three dimensions of patriarchy helps us see that while these patterns are pervasive, they are not immutable. They are not who you are—they are simply learned behaviors and systems that we can choose to change.

Entropy and Syntropy

Think of entropy and syntropy as two natural forces that are always at play in life. Entropy is about breaking down—letting go of the parts of yourself that don’t fit anymore, the old beliefs and behaviors that are ready to die. It’s like the forest in autumn, shedding what’s no longer needed to make way for new growth.

Syntropy, on the other hand, is about creation. It’s the energy that brings new life from the old, that transforms decay into fertile ground for something fresh and vibrant. In your life, syntropy is about choosing to embody new values and ways of being that align more closely with who you truly want to be.

This is the rhythm of life, and it’s already happening in you with every breath you take: the in-breath gathers, the out-breath releases. When you tune into this natural cycle, you can apply it to your personal growth, learning to let go of what holds you back and embrace what moves you forward.

Repatterning

Each of us has a responsibility to look closely at how the systems we live within show up in our lives. This includes recognizing the patterns we’ve inherited from institutions, the intergenerational dynamics passed down from our ancestors, and the culture we were raised in. These influences can be hard to see, especially when we’re still immersed in them. It’s often much easier to notice the flaws in other cultures and people than to see them in ourselves.

But here’s the thing: even in the areas where we feel we lack privilege or think we’re not part of the problem, there’s often deeper work to do. It’s humbling to realize this—I think about how many white women supported Donald Trump in 2016, even though he’s been incredibly clear about the kind of man he is, the way he treats women, and the policies that have unfolded, drastically and devastatingly reducing the civil liberties of so many people across this country. It reminds me that no one is exempt from this work. We all have repatterning to do.

Your journey is unique. You are shaped by countless choices, stories, and ancestors, each influencing who you are today. This complexity can’t be distilled into simple categories based on gender, race, or demographics although all of these things intersect and shape who we are. You are so much more than that. You deserve an approach to repatterning that is as unique and dynamic as you are.

In my work, I’ve found that what really matters is diving deep with each individual person—understanding the unique nuances of your ancestry, your childhood, and the experiences that have shaped you. This gives us rich, clear material to work with, so we can approach the repatterning process honestly and courageously. It’s about creating a space where you can let go of old patterns that don’t serve you and embrace new ones that align with who you truly want to be.

Repatterning isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. It’s about finding your rhythm—composting the old patterns that hold you back and nurturing the new ones that help you grow. Every breath you take is a reminder of this process. Every decision you make to embrace or release is an opportunity to repattern your life. By doing this work, you not only transform yourself, but you also contribute to a broader transformation in the world.

The Challenges of Change

As you begin this work, you might find that within the institutions you belong to, the relationships you have, and even within your own inner narrative, you come up against resistance to change. These familiar patterns often represent places where you’ve found safety, identity, and belonging in the past. It’s natural to feel a pull to stay within these comfort zones, even when you know they no longer serve your growth or align with who you want to become.

This is why it’s so important to approach this work with compassion and not to do it alone. When you’re lovingly held and witnessed in your transformation, the process of repatterning can deepen. Accountability is crucial here—not in a punitive or judgmental way, but as a commitment to your higher self, to the person you are becoming.

Sometimes, this accountability is hard to maintain within the confines of your existing relationships. Even those closest to you, like a spouse, might resist your changes, not because they don’t want you to grow, but because they are accustomed to the way things have been. They may not even love all the patterns, but they’re familiar with them, and familiarity can feel like safety.

This is why having support and guidance outside of your daily existence is so essential for doing this kind of repatterning work. It provides a space where you can be truly seen, where your transformation is encouraged and nurtured. When you have a safe environment to explore these changes, you can start to let go of the old patterns that no longer serve you and embrace the new ones that do.

Regenerative change isn’t about perfection; it’s about potential. You might encounter setbacks or find yourself slipping into old habits, and that’s okay. What matters is your commitment to keep moving forward, to be gentle with yourself when things don’t go perfectly, and to stay open to the journey. This work is about creating a life that feels aligned with your true, whole, authentic self, a life where you can thrive in all your relationships and within yourself. From that place, new futures, new worlds are made possible.

Creating New Models of Masculinity

I want to genuinely ask you: What does a repatterned masculinity look like to you? What does a dynamic masculinity feel like? What does it mean for masculinity to be responsive, caring, and present? We often talk about toxic masculinity and can easily identify its traits—dominance, suppression, emotional unavailability. But what about the masculinity we want to see in the world? What does that look like for you?

Let’s take a moment to really get clear on this. If we don’t have the language for something, it’s hard to fully grasp its potential. This is where hypocognition comes into play again: when we lack the words to articulate an experience, we struggle to recognize it as real. The potential for a healthy, dynamic masculinity is real, but we have to make it so. We have to be committed to it.

Imagine a masculinity that embraces vulnerability as strength, that finds power in empathy, and leadership in service. A masculinity that values collaboration over competition, that nurtures relationships instead of dominating them. This is the kind of masculinity that aligns with the principles of syntropy and entropy—letting go of what no longer serves us and actively cultivating what does.

This isn’t just about redefining masculinity; it’s about reshaping humanity as a whole. By choosing to repattern yourself, you’re helping to create a world where everyone can thrive. You’re not just building a different model; you’re building a better one, one that honors the interconnectedness of all living systems and reflects the best of who we can be.

So, what kind of man do you want to be? What kind of world do you want to help create? These are the questions we must ask ourselves, and we must be willing to do the work to find the answers. The change starts with you, with each of us, embracing the rhythm of release and repatterning, and committing to a masculinity that is as dynamic, compassionate, and authentic as we are capable of becoming.

Participating in Evolution

You are here because of billions of years of evolution, and every choice you make is part of that ongoing dance of life. As a species, we live within and have created systems and patterns that shape our world, but we are not bound by them. All living systems are interconnected, and the changes you make in your life have the power to ripple out in ways you might never fully understand.

I’m inviting you to recognize the power you have to influence these patterns. By choosing to let go of what no longer serves you and embracing what does, you’re not just changing yourself—you’re contributing to the evolution of humanity and the planet. The potential for a healthy, dynamic masculinity is real, but it requires each of us to commit to creating it. We have to be willing to let go of the old and nurture the new, to envision and embody the kind of masculinity that is caring, responsive, and present.

Thank you so much for reading this. Would be open to sharing it with someone who came to mind as you were reading?

This episode is an excerpt from a private podcast feed hosted exclusively within The Vision Society, a mastermind and incubation community for spirit-led founders building vision amidst global polycrisis.

In this series, Ganga Devi and Dajé Aloh, aka The Story Doula are weaving their respective wisdom threads around the Seven Principles of Regeneration, originally articulated by Carol Sanford.

They share insights on how to shift from problem-solving to potential-focused strategies in small and micro businesses. This episode gives listeners a glimpse into the ongoing experiments within the Vision Society, where the principles of regeneration are applied to business development.

The episode emphasizes the uniqueness and limitlessness of potential within living systems, and how these concepts can be practically applied to entrepreneurial settings. Ganga and Daje provide actionable advice on nurturing potential in environments that are often challenging. They stress the importance of rooting into one's ecosystem, the necessity of gratitude, and the power of structural support and discernment. This content-rich episode is not just a theoretical dive but offers concrete steps for actualizing regenerative principles in daily life.

Key Takeaways:

* Potential is Unique and Limitless: Every person or project holds unique and boundless potential, which can be realized under the right conditions.

* Rooting into Your Ecosystem: Effective growth in both personal and professional realms requires strong connections within one's wider environment and community.

* Boundaries and Discernment: Setting boundaries and having high standards for yourself and your environment are crucial for nurturing and realizing potential.

* Gratitude as a Tool: Regularly practicing gratitude helps you focus on the supportive elements of your current environment, empowering further growth.

* Embracing Life's Challenges: Rather than viewing challenges as setbacks, consider them essential growth opportunities within the life-death-life cycle.

Resources:

* The Vision Society

* Carol Sanford

* Regenesis Group

* The Inner Circle (Free Private Community)

Note: This was originally published on Medium, Dec 17, 2018. This core phrase has been resounding in my mind recently again, so I thought I’d revisit this piece and I’m so glad I did.

“This is a new life, and I am not afraid.”

Walking along the dirt road path between my home and the temples of Kashi Ashram, the community in which I was raised, the steady rhythm of my footsteps gave rise to this sentence. All I could hear in my mind were these words, “this is a new life, and I am not afraid, this is a new life, and I am not afraid, this is a new life, and I am not afraid.” This became a prayer I breathed as if it were an oxygen mask handed to me as I was drowning in an ocean of sorrow.

At the time, I had just come through months of grief and solitude following a painful two years of severe emotional and sexual trauma. For five months, I had retreated into solitude, become friends with my own company, reclaimed my sovereignty, and let go of most of my ideas of who I was and where I was going in life. There is beauty and terror in such times.

I did everything possible to release old versions of myself. I gave clothes away, I shaved my head, I released treasured books, I changed positions at work, I lived with new roommates, I lost friends, I stopped going out, I bought myself a big bed, and I stayed in it most of the time. I became acquainted with the tenderness of my raw and vulnerable self, heart cracked open, drinking deeply of the well of grief.

On hard nights, I felt my body and heart wracked with terror and pain, not knowing how to cope with any of my fears, and I would numb myself often with at least three episodes of Star Trek. On good nights I focused on discovering what pleasure I truly desired, which often looked like long hot showers, oiling and blessing my body, and expanding my mind by watching at least three episodes of Star Trek. It’s curious how thin the line between depressive self indulgence and tender loving self-care can be. The primary medicine for my wounds were daily walks to the Sarasota Bay where I watched and photographed the light on the water at sunset.

These times of withdrawal, grief, and seclusion come to pass in our lives, and we rarely see them as a blessing. Grief is a sledgehammer that cracks open the structure of our lives and leaves us feeling naked in wide open spaces we never knew existed in ourselves. These spaces are frightening and full of possibility, full of glass shards and diamonds. In order to harvest the blessings, we must stop running, get low to the ground, and look carefully at the wreckage around us. Until we do this, we cannot know what will cut us and what will turn into riches beyond imagination.

It’s hard to feel gratitude for anything so brutal as grief when we are immersed in it. I was fortunate to have four walls around me to retreat to, and grateful that my classes and work schedule were such that I was able to spend much time alone. This was four years ago, and I am writing about old grief because I am still navigating the pain and potential of the intense grief I feel from the deaths of my father and one of my most respected elders this summer. Their passing from this life profoundly transformed my understanding of my place in this world. I am still bringing patience, breath, and light to the far corners of the places inside of myself that this grief has cracked open.

We cannot know who we will be on the next edge of life’s spiraling evolutions, and we cannot predict what loss and sorrow we will be faced with next. We can, however choose to seek to understand our selves, to go into the frightening places and bring our love with us, to be willing to allow our being to grow into these wide open spaces, to clean them up and make of them a new home, a new being, a new life. We can transcend and include all of our life’s experiences as we grow into the full potential our lives have to offer us.

This is a new life, and I am not afraid.

I say this to myself now on the border of my twenty-sixth year, while resting in a garden with the sun on my face. I say it with you, whoever you are, on the border of our new year on this garden-planet with the sun on her face.

We have an unknowable amount of grief and beauty and living ahead of us. May we remember that we are in it together, and may we explore the open possibilities of existence together during beautiful, brief shared time and space that we have on this earth.

The Living World is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Resources + References

* Multidimensional Thriving: Seth Kaufman's Substack, specifically the article “From Shadow to Light”.

* Regenesis Institute: The school of regenerative development and design which Ganga Devi has been studying within.

* Story Doula (Daje Aloh)

* Paulo Coelho’s "The Alchemist": A key literary reference mentioned by Ganga.

* Bill Plotkin’s "Nature and the Human Soul"

Ganga Devi introduces listeners to thought-provoking perspectives on financial security and the role of money in empowering communities. She highlights innovative strategies in agriculture that could realign the flow of resources to support both ecological sustainability and economic growth. Through her storytelling and deep dives into the intersections of money with trust and values, the episode challenges listeners to reconceptualize their relationship with currency in a way that aligns with their deepest values and the collective good.

Key Takeaways:

* Money and water share similarities in their ability to flow and perpetuate life, with the concept of currency deeply rooted in the movement and utility of both.

* Our relationship with money can mirror the stagnation or flow of water; when money is hoarded, it can become toxic, but when moving, it can grow and nurture societies.

* The control and allocation of money and resources, like water in drought situations, are critical issues that affect communities and require thoughtful management and reallocation.

* Ganga Devi introduces Change Finance, a company that manages an ETF with the intent to pressure companies into better environmental practices and human dignity.

* She calls for a collective conversation about Money, Sex, and God—three taboo topics that are crucial for personal empowerment and broader societal change.

Notable Quotes:

* "I believe that money is at least neutral and at best, actually a very positive thing."

* "Money enables choice. What does that do to you? What does that do in your body?"

* "To change the way that agriculture is done will take public will, public pressure, people understanding that it's something that is going to require policy change."

* "We are more weather pattern than stone monument."

* "The more we talk about it, the more we destigmatize the truth of wherever it is that we are in the moment."

Resources:

* The Hunger Project

* Kiss the Ground

* Trigger Warning with Killer Mike

* Greenwood Financial - Founded by Killer Mike

* 'The Soul of Money' book by Lynne Twist

* Emunah Living Course 'Sex, God, and Money'

In this episode of Living World with Ganga Devi Braun, we explore the pervasive beauty of the sun and its parallels with the concept of God. Kicking off with Mary Oliver's poignant poem "The Sun," the conversation opens up to discuss the cosmic and spiritual significance of the sun, as well as its foundational role in life on Earth. This episode interweaves this celestial appreciation with a deep dive into various perceptions of God, including transcendent and imminent perspectives.

Expanding on the idea of "transcending and including," we explore Ken Wilbur's integral theory into spiritual thought, challenging listeners to embrace a holistic view of existence. The podcast traverses through the journey from discomfort with the concept of God to finding resonance with panentheism, a perspective that sees the divine in everything yet acknowledges a greater mystery. Through personal experiences and studies, Ganga Devi opens up a reflective discourse on the structure and nature of faith across different traditions.

The powerful imagery of the sun serves as a pivotal theme in this episode, with Ganga Devi's narrative further reinforced by the implications of solar energy in our lives. From the cellular to the global scale, she highlights our profound and often unacknowledged connection to this life-sustaining star. As she eloquently draws parallels between ecological systems and spiritual frameworks, listeners are encouraged to ponder their own relationships with the world's esoteric energies.

Key Takeaways:

* The beauty of the sun represents the awe-inspiring interconnectedness between us and the cosmos, prompting contemplation on the spiritual aspect of natural phenomena.

* Transcending and including, a key concept from integral theory, encourages us not to forsake our humanity but to integrate our experience as we evolve.

* Panentheism, a model of God, emphasizes the divine within all and the inexhaustible mystery that transcends it—an idea that can be found in the mystical branches of all religions.

* Emunah, or deep trust in the divine, is enriched by Ganga Devi's personal journey through pluralistic spiritual environments and intellectual rigor.

* The episode inspires listeners to recognize and express gratitude for the countless contributions of the sun and to embrace a holistic spirituality that honors both the physical and spiritual realms.

Notable Quotes:

* "Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun... floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills or the rumpled sea and is gone?" (from Mary Oliver)

* "I don't think it's possible for us to conceive of what we owe the sun. I don't think it's possible for us to feel or know the gratitude that this earth is constantly calling out and expressing toward the sun."

* "I believe that panentheism is present in all religions' mystical branches."

* "Can we transcend and include, can we embrace the fullness of the human experience? Can we recognize the importance of integrating all aspects of life?"

Resources:

* Mary Oliver's poem "The Sun"

* Ken Wilbur's integral theory

* Ganga Devi Braun's previous podcast episodes and discussions on Instagram

* EMUNAH

Key Takeaways:

* Personal change often comes with struggles such as anxiety, uncertainty, and overwhelming feelings, marking the beginning of a transformational process.

* Metamorphosis in humans is akin to the molting of insects, where the gradual outgrowing of one's old self allows growth and the emergence of a new self.

* Two types of metamorphosis are highlighted: "holometabolous" for complete transformations and "hemimetabolous" for gradual, subtle changes.

* Morphogenesis, a biological process, is used as an allegory for human psychological growth, driving the point that evolution in form and psyche is interconnected.

* Ganga Devi Braun emphasizes the importance of embracing change and encourages listeners to actively participate in their own lives' unfolding narratives.

Notable Quotes:

* "Morphogenesis is relevant to all species across biology, including, for us, humans."

* "This process of growth, this process of metamorphosis is no less valid than the big, massive changes."

* "We probably have many different types of these types of changes throughout our lives, and I don't think that we often make space for these more subtle ones."

* "The core of the being that's going through that change doesn't change. It's not what gets lost."

* "The core of the organism, the core of the being that's going through that change doesn't change."

* "I think that we're here to grow. I think that we're here to move through threshold. I think that we're here to change and to make change and to respond to change within ourselves, within the people that we love, within the world around us."

Resources:

* Resources for Pleasure: A self-guided mini-course created by Ganga Devi Braun and Seth Kaufman exploring sexual education, nervous system involvement in arousal, and guidance on touch.

* Sex, God, and Money Course: Join us in this 12-week, trauma informed journey through the sexual, spiritual, and financial dimensions of your life.

* Seth Kaufmann: Seth integrates his expertise in physiology, sexology, performance coaching, relational intelligence, interspirituality, somatic nervous system work, and more into Holistic Systems Coaching. For a limited time, he’s taking on new clients.

* Rae Halder: Somatic coach and host of the Slow Burn course Ganga Devi mentions in this episode. A deeply supportive space for gently moving through somatic blocks in sex and beyond.

Notable Quotes:

* "The slower you go, the deeper, stronger, and faster it can become when the time is right."

* "Real, true, good sexual experience...isn't about getting one partner to want sex so that the other one can be satisfied...It’s about dropping the shame and the belief that you should be different than you are in the moment."

* "What I would recommend is to continue being present for real intimacy, continue showing up with real presence."

* "Under the surface, the roots find one another. They embrace one another, entangling in the wet, dark, fertile soil."

Key Takeaways:

* Responsive Desire: Many individuals experience arousal that is responsive rather than spontaneous, necessitating patience and presence to facilitate pleasure.

* The Importance of Slowness: For individuals with vulvas, full arousal takes 20 to 45 minutes, a fact not widely portrayed or understood in society.

* Mollusks as Teachers: The slow mating rituals of mollusks offer profound lessons on mutual exchange, balanced relationships, and the necessity of taking one's time.

* Sexual Trauma and Growth: Ganga Devi shares her personal journey through sexual, reproductive, and birth trauma, affirming the potential for deepening pleasure over time.

* Rooted Intimacy: Like trees whose roots entwine beneath the earth, long-term relationships can cultivate hidden depths of connection and erotic fulfillment.

In this episode, I examine the critical need for change in human activities and systems of oppression with illustrative examples from nature, philosophy, and personal experiences. These reflections bring attention to the urgency of conscious change-making, drawing inspiration from thought leaders like Buckminster Fuller and poetic wisdom from Rilke. The essence of this theory of change hinges on the relationship between having a regulated nervous system, effective communication, and visioning for collective thriving. The recursive loop that is possible between these three practices can catalyze genuine transformation in widening circles, stressing the idea of humans as 'trim tabs' in the larger ship of society: small but essential parts that can steer us toward thriving futures.

Key Takeaways:

* Change is an inevitable and powerful force that can be harnessed with consciousness and awareness to create the world we envision.

* Humans have the potential to be 'ecosystem engineers' like the gopher tortoise, capable of nurturing biodiversity and impacting their environment significantly.

* This theory of change emphasizes the importance of a regulated nervous system, effective interpersonal communication, and holding intergenerational visions for creating meaningful transformations.

* Challenging the conventional ways of activism by proposing a more intimate and profound method of change – starting within oneself and one’s immediate relationships.

* The episode invites listeners to envision the role they can play in creating better futures and to take actionable steps towards those visions, just as ecosystem engineers shape their environments.

Notable Quotes:

* "Everything you touch, you change. And everything you change, changes you." – Cited from Octavia Butler

* "You never change anything by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." – Reflecting on a Buckminster Fuller quote.

* "I believe that we really need each other. I believe that we really need to be willing to encounter one another with really open hearts."

Resources:

* EMUNAH Multidimensional Living

* United Religions Initiative

* Buckminster Fuller

* Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects

Key Takeaways:

* Lichen represents a model of symbiotic relationships, highlighting how collaboration enables survival in challenging environments.

* The principles of symbiosis found in lichen can inspire human partnerships, advocating for slow, steady progress and shared creativity.

* The concept of interdependence is crucial to understanding ecological systems and can extend to inform societal structures, including marriage and community building.

* Ganga Devi Braun's community platform, EMUNAH, offers an exemplar of mutualism in practice, providing a forum for collective growth anchored in ecological insight.

* By embracing the living world's wisdom, individuals can create fertile grounds for personal and collective development.

Notable Quotes:

* "Mutualism enhances survival. So by combining their capabilities, lichen can survive in extreme environments... where each of them would actually struggle on their own."

* "Slow and steady, we go far."

* "Symbiosis and collaboration are the truest forms of what I call magic in this world."

* "The closer we get to lichens, the stranger they seem. To this day, lichens confuse our concept of identity and force us to question where one organism stops and another begins."

* "Lichens are living riddles... they have provoked fierce debate about what constitutes an autonomous individual."

Resources:

* Ganga Devi Braun's platform, EMUNAH: emunahliving.com

* Discount code for EMUNAH subscription: LICHEN

* Book reference: "Entangled Life" by Merlin Sheldrake

* Poem: "The Third Body" by Robert Bly

Key Takeaways:

• Lichen represents a model of symbiotic relationships, highlighting how collaboration enables survival in challenging environments.
• The principles of symbiosis found in lichen can inspire human partnerships, advocating for slow, steady progress and shared creativity.
• The concept of interdependence is crucial to understanding ecological systems and can extend to inform societal structures, including marriage and community building.
• Ganga Devi Braun's community platform, EMUNAH, offers an exemplar of mutualism in practice, providing a forum for collective growth anchored in ecological insight.
• By embracing the living world's wisdom, individuals can create fertile grounds for personal and collective development.

Notable Quotes:

1. "Mutualism enhances survival. So by combining their capabilities, lichen can survive in extreme environments... where each of them would actually struggle on their own."
2. "Slow and steady, we go far."
3. "Symbiosis and collaboration are the truest forms of what I call magic in this world."
4. "The closer we get to lichens, the stranger they seem. To this day, lichens confuse our concept of identity and force us to question where one organism stops and another begins."
5. "Lichens are living riddles... they have provoked fierce debate about what constitutes an autonomous individual."

Resources:

• Ganga Devi Braun's platform, EMUNAH: emunahliving.com
• Discount code for EMUNAH subscription: LICHEN
• Book reference: "Entangled Life" by Merlin Sheldrake
• Poem: "The Third Body" by Robert Bly