The card, heavy green stock, is embossed with gold letters, reading:

“Money is Power”

When I first read this, I had a visceral reaction, and not a good one. At that point I was years deep into my continuous process of clarifying and reconciling my relationship with power. For a long time, when I thought about power, all I could think about was abuse, control, and extraction. And, frankly, the association with money was not too different. The trouble is that in order to be a mature, effective adult in this world, you need to have a conscious and healthy relationship with both.2

For a while, I tucked that card away in a drawer in my office, sometimes glimpsing it when I would be searching for a pen or a paperclip. I would side-eye this green-and-gold paper provocation, and it would stir up thoughts and feelings within me that I knew needed more attention.

So one day, I decided to take a walk and think it through. I leashed my dog, I put on my shoes, and I headed out toward the seawall near my apartment, actively opening myself to the exploration of what troubled me about this and what I could learn from it. I walked along the water and thought actively about the nature of power, of money, and of love.3 On returning to my apartment, I opened the drawer, pulled out the card, and placed it on my desk.

Fast forward, five years later, I am now a certified Trauma of Money practitioner, I am currently studying with the Right Use of Power Institute, and I keep that card on my desk still to this day as a reminder of how I want to wield, circulate, and share the power, money, and love that I have with the world.

What is Power?

The working definition of power from Cedar Barstow and the Right Use of Power Institute4 is simple, clear, and speaks to the reconciliation that I came to on that walk along the water so many years ago:

Power is the ability to have an effect or to have influence.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Power is not, in itself, domination. It is not, in itself, control. It is not, in itself, abuse. Power is the capacity to make something happen, to leave a mark, to shape what comes next.

Sitting with this definition, I am genuinely curious to hear what comes up for you.

Last Thursday we held our first Living Wisdom Salon in EMUNAH, and the topic was Personal Power and Collective Wisdom. It was wonderful, and a great model we will be building on for more salons to come.5 We were a potent group, mostly convening due to substack connections, diverse in age, ethnicity, and lineages of wisdom and belief, delighted in the resonance we all felt with one another and the way we all grew through deep listening and sharing from our authentic selves.

I shared some frameworks I am working through and playing with in my own work and through the learning I am doing with the Right Use of Power Institute presently, and then we opened up the space for everyone to weave wisdom.

shared that for much of her life she did not see models of non-abusive power in the world around her. The word power had become so tangled with harm that for years she could not let herself be powerful, because integrity seemed to require its refusal. But she is wise enough to know that refusing something is not the same as developing a healthy relationship with it. She has since developed a framework she calls elegant power: power that is grounded in wholeness rather than in woundedness, the power of someone who fully belongs to themselves rather than someone trying to fill a hole inside themselves through control over others. We can feel the difference in our bodies when we encounter someone in either state.

I share this because Donna’s experience is not unusual. Many of us have had to build our understanding of healthy power from scratch, because what we inherited was the abusive version. The work of cultivating non-abusive forms of power is itself a process of composting and regenerating the power that exists, as pure potential, within and between us.

Power in itself is morally neutral as a capacity. Power is the ability to have an effect or to have influence. A seed has power. A river has power. A grandmother has power. A bee has power. A word spoken at the right moment has power. A choice not to act has power. Every living thing in the web of life has the power to affect what is around us, simply by being, acting, choosing.

The ethical question arises by how you use your power and what kind of effects it creates. This is the central inquiry of right relationship with power. Not do I have power (yes, you do) but what am I doing with it? What is the shape of my influence? What is the effect I am leaving on the people, places, and systems I am part of?

The reason most of us have such fraught relationships with power is that the dominant culture has shown us mostly the abusive, extractive, and dominating versions of it. We have seen power-over so much more than we have seen power-with that the word itself has become tangled with harm.

But power-with is real. This is the power of a community organizing to protect and advance something it loves. This is the power of an ecosystem stabilizing and expanding itself toward thriving. This is the power of two people in a loving connection, attending to each other, shifting one another by the quality of their attention. This is the power of a parent’s steady presence stabilizing a child’s nervous system into a felt sense of safety and belonging. This is the power of a body of water reshaping its banks over centuries. This is the power of a teaching or a realization that arrives at the right moment and changes the trajectory of everything in your life, forever.

Power, in this sense, is not something we should either fear or refuse. Power should be cultivated with heart, cultivated widely, and directed toward our collective good.

What is Money?

The thought that helped me to reconcile and see clearly that provocative statement, “Money is Power” as I walked along the seawall that vivid day five years ago was making the simple connection that money enables choice.

I realized then that common aphorisms of “money is the root of all evil” and “money can’t buy you happiness” really dissolve when you see money this way.

Money enables choice.

What you do with your choices, like what you do with your power, really fucking matters. A simple example of this that comes to mind to me often is hearing a client that worked with Seth for 6 years say to him one day that when he first considered hiring Seth, he was debating whether he’d spend that money on new rims for his car or the initial coaching engagement. He looked around at his life as he said this, in amused disbelief at how deeply and positively his life, his relationships, and his body had changed for the better, remarking that he now realized that there are no material objects that come close to developing yourself.

The other common aphorism, “Money is the root of all evil.” is a misquotation of 1 Timothy 6:10. but most people who say this don’t realize they are misquoting the Bible. The actual line, is “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil" This presents some vitally important distinctions.

The original critique was not about money itself necessarily. It was about the love of money as an end in itself. This is talking about what we would now call hoarding, accumulation, the prioritization of money over social relationships, collective responsibilities, and the living world that we owe everything to.

The original critique was about exactly what the Prosperity Doctrine and late-stage capitalism have built this entire civilization around: the substitution of money for love, the worship of money as if it were the thing rather than a tool to help us shape our world in a way that would truly serve us all.

David Graeber’s enormous and rigorous book Debt: The First 5,000 Years traces this distinction across human history.6 He documents that money throughout most of history has functioned as a record of credit and debt within communities, embedded in relationships, regulated by social and religious obligation. The harm starts when money gets severed from this relational substrate and starts being used to violate it instead of document it. Graeber tracks the recurring pattern across thousands of years.

When debt and money become tools for dispossession, when they get hoarded by elites and used to extract from the rest, the result is violence, slavery, the destruction of social fabric, and eventually social collapse.

But this is not the only way, and we would do well to learn from different cultural practices as we go through the current cycle of collapse and regeneration of our culture, economy, and social institutions.

Around the world and throughout history, our ancestors developed solutions to the problem of accumulating debt and concentrating wealth. 7

It is insane that we live in a system that dams the flow, keeping 99% of us dying from thirst while the 1% drown in their own misery. We must reset the flow.

There are ongoing seismic shifts in our world right now. Every upheaval opens a field of potential, that is the nature of chaos. In liminal times like these, everything we do can have unimaginable ripple effects.

Each of us is holding patterns of the overculture.
Each of us can change those patterns in our own lives.

The internal, interpersonal, institutional, and intergenerational patterns we live in can only be changed when we commit to a multidimensional approach.

Each of us has resources that we steward that are unique to us. Money, sure, maybe, some more than others. But also energy, attention, time, relationships, access, and creative life force energy.

All of our life’s resources are valuable, and when we realize what he have, when we realize just how much we can do with what we have, the world opens up to us.

There are many currents of resources that we can begin circulating in small ways to create ripples in the waters we are all swimming in. In a system moving through a chaotic moment such as this, small ripples can have massive impacts.

To dramatically change the world for the better within our lifetime, we’re going to have to start learning how to make better (bolder and more life-affirming) choices and get used to seeing radical and positive transformations in our life as a consequence.

Enter Love

To recap:

• Power creates effect.

• Money enables choice.

I first had that thought come to me, “money enables choice,” as I sat by the seawall watching a manatee mother and her calf come up for air.

I knew that phrasing felt familiar, but it wasn’t until I was home, back at my desk, pulling out the “Money is Power” card to re-assess how I felt about it that I recalled why.

It’s similar something that philosopher and systems thinker Forrest Landry says within my favorite book of his, The Effective Choice.8 At the heart of this book of immanent philosophy is the aphorism,

“Love is That Which Enables Choice”

He expands on this that “the quintessential meaning of Love refers to the quality of enabling and nurturing choice, joy, connectedness, and freedom.”

I found it striking that my relationship with money, which has often been fraught with fear and frustration, with motivation and mortification, with privilege and windfalls and deep betrayals, that this question about money would give rise to an association with core wisdom about Love.

And both are true.

Love is an understanding that enables choice.

Money is a record of choice, and a fuel for the choices we make.

Money is a choice accelerant: the more you have, the faster or further a choice can often take you. That makes a big difference in life, but acceleration isn’t everything.

There is far more to navigation than speed.

We need to know where we’re going, who we’re going with, and what we want to be sure to savor along the way. We need to be nimble and prepared for inevitable challenges, willing to learn from them.

We need to compost the old maps and models that no longer work, dust of the ancestral wisdom that does work for this moment, come into healthy relationship with all of the currents and faces of power that shape our lives, here and now, and together work toward futures far more beautiful than any one of us could imagine on our own.

We have choices in what we do with our power and what we do with our money.

How nice that we can, and perhaps must do all of this overflowing with love for ourselves, for one another, and for the living world to which we all belong.

If you want to move through a process of deep recalibration and empowerment in your life this summer, join us for Sex, G⟡d, & Money.
Registration closes on May 16. We begin May 31st.

It’s 6:27 on May 1st and I just woke up, rolled over, and began writing this. I’ve been building up to write this all week, I have notes on notes of what I want to say, but this week has been incredibly full, and the moment was not right until just now. This is a micro-example of what I will be writing about.

I am putting on this playlist I made in the last few days in honor of today, May Day, Beltane, the Flower Moon, International Worker’s Day. It’s a playlist full of soft, lunar, springtime, floral energy. It feels like a sonic snapshot of who I am if I’m being honest. It’s 44 minutes and 40 seconds long, and I’m going to try to write this within the timespan of the playlist, hoping that my son sleeps long enough to allow me to finish here.

This is part three, The True Nature of Abundance, a follow up to part one, Scarcity is a (Very Real) Illusion, and part two, Deconstructing the Prosperity Doctrine.

Abundance as a word has developed a particular association in public conversation lately. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s 2025 book titled Abundance has brought this framing into the center of mainstream political discourse, focused on the material and political conditions of building more — more housing, more energy, more infrastructure.

There are abundant think-pieces about this book, about what it gets right, what it gets wrong, what the implications and potentials of the policies it recommends would be. I’m not getting into that today. I want to look at the structural pattern of abundance itself, the way it moves in living systems, and what that has to teach us about how we can transform our lives, work, and world.

The word Abundance comes from the Latin abundare, which means “to flow in waves.”

Built right into the word is a structural truth about how life actually works: abundance is neither a flat plateau of endless supply nor an ascending arrow of continuous growth. Abundance is a rhythmic flow that includes withdrawal and return, death and regeneration, entropy and syntropy.1

The dominant culture has trained us to imagine abundance as accumulation. We picture abundance as something accumulated and held on to for security. But that is not what the word indicates to us, and it is certainly not how living systems actually work.

Life moves in waves. The seasons are a wave. Your breath is a wave. Your heartbeat is a wave. Birth certainly is a wave, and in my experience death is too. Tides, hormonal cycles, migrations, the rise and fall of populations, the growth and decay of forests, the patterns of relationship and creativity and energy, all waves. A nervous system that has lost its capacity to move in waves is a nervous system in a chronic trauma response.

Life is not organized around accumulation, sustainability, or stasis. Life is organized around circulation and regeneration. And the structure of circulation and regeneration is the wave.

The Shape of the Wave

To really sense into the nature of abundance, let’s take a look at some ways that the wave moves in the systems we can observe directly.

Take a forest. In spring, the canopy fills in. Sap rises. New leaves unfurl, photosynthesis ramps up, the whole forest is breathing in light and turning it into sugar. By midsummer the forest is at its peak biomass, every niche occupied, the understory thrumming. In autumn, the trees pull their resources back into themselves, drop the leaves to the forest floor, and the canopy thins. Through winter, the dropped leaves are broken down by fungi, bacteria, springtails, mites, and earthworms into the soil that will feed next year’s growth. Nothing is wasted. The death of the leaves is the food of the spring. The trough2 of winter is what makes the peak of summer possible.

A honeybee colony, as with all life on Earth, works precisely with these seasonal waves. There are weeks in late spring, including now, when the bloom is peaking and the bees are bringing in nectar faster than they can process it. The hive is full. The bees are working long hours. This creates abundant honey flow. Then there are stretches of dearth when little is blooming and the bees live on the honey and bee bread they have stored. The colony size may contract. The queen slows her laying. Fewer bees forage. The hive conserves its energy. Then another flow comes. The bees ride these waves all year, and by the end of a good year the hive has both fed itself and produced a surplus that can carry it through the deeper trough of winter, with enough left over for the beekeeper, the bears, and whoever else benefits from honey in that bioregion.

Watch a river. Watch a tide pool. Watch the way deer move across a meadow over the course of a year, or the way blue jays cache acorns in autumn and forget enough of them that they accidentally plant the next forest. Watch the way a salt marsh breathes with the moon, twice a day, every day, exchanging nutrients with the open ocean and the upland forests on either side of it.3

This is what abundance actually looks like. Waves, rhythms, a flow that includes the lean season, the contraction, the dormant phase, the death, because all of those are essential elements of how the abundance gets generated.

When we try to extract and dominate a living system out of its wave structure, demanding constant productivity, output, growth, and availability, we do not produce more abundance. We engineer collapse in the name of false and temporary abundance, for just a very few people, at the expense of all.

This is what is happening to the forest stripped for monoculture timber. This is the soil farmed continuously for a single crop until it is dust. This is the bees worked too hard and dying off with severely compromised collective immune systems. This is the river dammed and drained. This is the marsh paved for a development. This is the body in burnout. This is the economy in cancer-pattern endless growth at the expense of the body of the Whole. This is each of us in chronic stress, unable to rest, disconnected from our own agency and our true nature as brilliant creatures of the Living World.

Regenerating our Agency

Many years ago, on a Wednesday night, sitting on a phone call with the women’s circle I’d been meeting with on the phone weekly for years, the topic of Abundance was presented at the heart of the circle. This women’s group was highly structured. We were on the phone for one hour, and the call always opened with a meditation, a wisdom question, and precisely time-kept shares from each of us. This structure created a concentration of honesty, wisdom, and authenticity in each of us.

I will always remember what my dear friend Haris Adele said on that call,

I think of this kernel of wisdom all the time. I think about it when I clean out a cluttered corner of my home and find things that enrich my life that I had forgotten I already have. I think about it when I gather with my neighbors and we all become sources of immense blessing and generosity to one another, often in ways that cost us nothing. I think about it when I’m feeling stressed about money, when bills come in faster than revenue in our small business, and my brain starts tunneling.

I take a breath and ask myself, “what can I do with what I already have?“

This question, this frame of abundance is a tool that returns me to my agency, and to the reality of potential before me. It also turns me toward immense gratitude, It also turns me toward immense gratitude, which is itself a profound nervous system practice.

The research on gratitude is rigorous and well-established, and I have been doing a deep dive on this recently in order to support a client who struggles with rumination on what isn’t going well. Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough’s 2003 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is one of the most-cited papers in positive psychology. They found that participants who kept simple weekly gratitude journals showed measurably heightened well-being, better physical health, and stronger relational behavior compared to those who tracked hassles or neutral events.4 The neuroscience of this is fascinating.5 Gratitude practice activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the branch responsible for rest, restoration, and the capacity to perceive reality accurately rather than reactively.

In other words: gratitude is not a platitude. Gratitude offers us a measurable shift in nervous system functioning that returns the brain to the executive capacity scarcity has stolen from us. It is, quite literally, a tool for stepping out of tunneling.

The question Haris presented, “what can I do with what I already have?” is a gratitude practice in the form of an agentic prompt. It moves the nervous system toward what is present, toward what is possible, toward what is moving in your life right now rather than what is missing.

This is a lesson that is hitting close to home for me. You may have seen my shares last week that after nine years of internal preparation, two weeks of hive prep, and just a few days after sending the lemongrass signal, I attracted a wild swarm of honeybees to make a home in a hive that was gifted to me by a neighbor.

I was ecstatic, truly. In awe and in love and overflowing with energy and excitement about this new relationship with one of the wisest teachers of the living world, the hive. They arrived two Sundays ago.

But just as quickly as they came, and I write this with a lump in my throat, they left. They drank the nectar, left the bee bread, and were gone by Saturday.

When I first realized this, I was in shock. It touched a nerve of unworthiness and fear of being, or being perceived as, a fraud in me. My heart aches, and I feel a genuine longing in my whole body for them to return.

But “what can I do with what I already have?” is a question that reorients me to a stable field of reality. The truth is, the hive is now much more attractive to the next swarm. The truth is, I still have two bottles of lemongrass essential oil from my wonderful neighbors to signal to the same or a different swarm that they are welcome here. The truth is, the changes I had to make to the structure of the hive which probably triggered their leaving were necessary, and it is now a better home for the next inhabitants.

The truth is, it’s healthy for me to feel and move through this grief as I contemplate the wave nature of reality, and abundance, and the cycles of regeneration that are endemic to this planet’s life forms.

I know that bees are powerful teachers of death and loss as well as life and abundance. I know that these things flow together.

The Three Currents and The Wave

Every summer we work with an intimate cohort in developing a transformed relationship with Sex, G⟡d, & Money as three currents of power that shape all of our lives. These are the three currents in our lives where the dominant culture has trained us most thoroughly out of the wave.

Embracing the wavelike nature of all three is profoundly liberating, clarifying, and empowering. Let’s take a look:

Sex is a wave. Wavelike undulations move through our bodies as arousal builds toward orgasm, the sensations that bring the life force energy latent in our bodies into circulation and expression, whether solo or in partnership.

The arousal cycle is itself a wave, moving through rising excitement, plateau,6 peak, and resolution. The resolution, or refractory phase is essential, and deserves loving attention. It is the completion of the wave that allows the next wave to form. Trying to last longer or treating orgasm as a goal you are seeking to maximize does not lead to better sex, it can actually lead to dysfunction and disconnection. Being with the full spectrum of the wave as it naturally flows in the moment creates the best opportunities for pleasure, connection, and intimacy through authenticity.

At a longer timescale, libido moves in waves across a life. Stress, hormones, sleep, age, life phase, relational dynamics, illness, grief, joy, seasons of life, all of these shape what desire is doing in your body at any given moment. You do not need to maintain a constant baseline level of libido, in fact, that is a sure way to kill it long term. Sex drive is a wave that responds to what is actually happening in the body and the life around it.

So much shame and panic gets generated when libido shifts. People treat the low points7 as evidence of relationship failure, personal brokenness, or aging out of vitality. We try to force desire back to a previous baseline. We blame our partners or ourselves. The pressure makes it worse.

The guidance we give to our clients navigating this is specific to everyone, but the core is this: learn from the wave, know this is not a fixed state. Tend your body. Tend your relationship. Tend whatever is actually asking for attention right now. Your desire, your life-force will return as the conditions shift.

G⟡d is a wave. Spiritual experience moves through cycles of intimacy and distance, presence and absence, the felt sense of being held and the felt sense of being alone. Every contemplative tradition names this. The mystics call it the dark night of the soul,8 the cloud of unknowing, the wilderness, the desert.

The traps of the Prosperity Doctrine and the spiritual bypass cultures both come from refusing the wisdom that can be found in the low points, they insist on the frame that to be anything other than constantly accumulating is failure rather than part of the cycle.

A stabilized and expanded relationship with the sacred is able to includes the dry seasons, the doubts, the quiet, the questions. Grief and mystery and not-knowing are not oppositional to the sacred, they are a part of the phenomenon of divine wholeness.

Money is a wave. Income is not constant or guaranteed for anyone throughout life. Cashflow is often inconstant, and the costs of things rise and rise and rise until, at some point, whether through market correction or civilizational collapse, they fall.

The seasons of a business, a career, a creative life all move through phases of expansion and contraction. The dominant economic culture treats every contraction as failure and every expansion as success, which produces enormous suffering in people whose actual financial lives are healthy but moving through a normal trough.

Real financial wisdom must include the lean season as part of the cycle. If we can see these phases as time to consolidate, to compost, to rest, to lean into interdependence and mutual aid, to cultivate the village, to prepare for the next flow, we would suffer less and thrive, together, more. Money in living relationship moves like every other living thing. In waves.

When a wave recedes from the shoreline, you can see the ground underneath it more clearly. This is the potential that all so-called low-points invite us into, but we cannot see clearly if our brains and nervous systems are tunneling from scarcity.

Somatic tools, good questions, and an actively interdependent relationship with community all help us to shift from that tunneled brainstate and into grounded presence with what is real.

In all of these domains of life, and beyond, a low-point can welcome these questions:

• What is this cycle asking of me?

• What can I release right now?

• What am I being asked to learn here?

• What choices do I have?

• What can I do with what I already have?

I am writing this on the morning of the Flower Moon.9 At sunset tonight the moon will rise full beside Spica, the brightest star in the constellation Virgo, the maiden holding the sheaf of wheat. Spica means “ear of grain” in Latin. Across many ancient traditions this star has been known as the star of abundance. Tonight the moon is full beside her, in the season of the bloom, on the day the workers of the world have claimed for 140 years as our own.10

The sky tonight is showing us the power of the wave. The peak of the bloom. The harvest standing in the dark beside the moon’s full face. All of it part of the same flow that includes the empty hive in my garden and the swarm that will, or won’t, come next. There is mystery, hope, beauty, and motivation for right relationship for me in all of this. I wonder if you can feel that too.

The wave is real. You are inside it. You did not have to earn your place in it, and you cannot be exiled from it. If you are in a low point, it is not evidence that you have done something wrong. If you are in a high point, it is not evidence that you are more worthy than others, but rather that you have the ability to do something meaningful with what is in your care. The wave comes through all of our lives, time brings blessings and challenges to us all.

What can I do with what I already have?

Sex, G⟡d & Money early enrollment11 closes tonight. SGM is, at its heart, a course about learning to live inside the wave with your pleasure and desire, your spirituality, and your resources. You will see how these currents are all flowing together in your life, where they may be dammed, and how their waves can support your thriving in every dimension of your life. If this series has resonated, we would love to have you with us this summer.

Learn More & Join Us Here

And if you are not certain yet, but considering joining us, a good way to get a sense of the way we do things at EMUNAH is to join us in some of our upcoming public gatherings including next week’s Sacred Sex Salon with and the following week’s Living Wisdom Salon on Ancestral Eros with Nisha Moodley.

Whatever you do next, I do hope you will go outside tonight. Look up. The moon will be there, full and bright, with the ancient star of harvest shining beside her. Let the moon remind your body of the cyclical, reciprocal, circulatory flow of abundance. That it is already here, it is everywhere, it is our true nature, and we all may in fact have far more than we realize.

This is part two of a three-part series. Part One examined The (Very Real) Illusion of Scarcity. Part Three will explore the Nature of True Abundance as found in Living Systems.

In Sex, G⟡d, & Money, we call the first month of the course Excavation. The work of looking carefully at each of these three currents in your life — sexual energy, spirituality, resource flow — to see where your patterns came from, what you inherited, what you were taught, and what you actually want to keep. We begin with Excavation because it gives everyone a baseline of where they’re coming from, and begins at the root cause of many of our lived distortions.

A lot of people come to us mid-excavation already. They have been deconstructing for years. Some people are coming from a childhood spent in evangelical Christianity. Some are coming from New Age and manifestation cultures. Sometimes from both, layered on top of each other. Most of our students are very aware of some core cult dynamics. Nearly everyone arrives having mostly figured out what they no longer believe but not quite yet feeling fully embodied and empowered in what they do believe.

What many people don’t realize until we point it out is that there is a shared root to a lot of what people deconstruct when it comes to the merging of Spirituality and Money, even if the way they manifest1 looks vastly different at first.

That shared root is the Prosperity Doctrine, one of the most successful belief structures in modern history.

The Prosperity Doctrine has shaped how billions of people relate to money, to morality, to their own worth, and to the suffering of others. It is presented as the wisdom of spiritual empowerment and enrichment, while it functions structurally as a tool of extraction and abuse, even when the people teaching it believe they are helping.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And you may start to see it everywhere.

To see the root clearly, it helps to trace where it came from.

The Claims of the Prosperity Doctrine

Stripped of its religious or spiritual packaging, the Prosperity Doctrine claims something like this:

Material wealth is the natural result of correct inner alignment.

Lack and scarcity are the result of misalignment with the divine.

The remedy for scarcity is to correct your relationship with the divine, often through specific practices, mindsets, or financial offerings to those who can teach you how.

In Christian prosperity gospel, the alignment is faith and tithing, and the result is God’s favor expressed as material blessing.

In New Thought metaphysics, the alignment is positive thinking and right belief, and the result is the universe matching your vibration.

In the manifestation and abundance-mindset cultures that followed, the alignment is high-frequency emotion, gratitude practice, and visualization, and the result is the law of attraction delivering what you have called in.

In the success-literature tradition that runs alongside all of this, the alignment is mental discipline, focused intention, and the cultivation of a wealth consciousness, and the result is achievement and accumulation.

These streams may look different from the outside. They use different vocabularies, cite different scriptures or sources, attract different demographics. But the underlying claim for all of them is identical: your material conditions are evidence of your inner state, and you can change your material conditions by changing your inner state.

Once you see the structure, you can see why someone deconstructing from one form often lands, unwittingly, inside another. You can leave the prosperity gospel of your childhood and find yourself a decade later doing manifestation work that runs the exact same logic in differently spiritualized language.

The History

I always find it helpful to trace the origins of something like this to help me see it more clearly. There are important kernels of truth in a lot of the ideas that streamed into this history, so please don’t read this thinking that I’m dismissing everything named here, or saying that there is nothing valuable to be found in the institutions I’m referring to.

I think there is actually a lot of value and some important truth here, and we need to do the work of excavation in order to filter out what is abusive or harmful from what is good and valuable.

Here is what I’ve learned:

The 19th century New Thought movement in the United States synthesized mesmerism, transcendentalism, and a particular reading of Christianity into the foundational claim that thought directly creates material reality. These were the headwaters of the Prosperity Gospel. Early metaphysical churches, the founding of Christian Science and Unity, and the broader mind-cure movement all arose from this foundation.

In the early 20th century, this thinking moved out of explicitly religious settings and into business and self-improvement contexts. Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937, is the watershed text of this transition. The success literature that proliferated in its wake codified the doctrine for a popular audience and gave it a secular vocabulary that would prove extraordinarily portable.

The mid-20th century saw the explicit fusion of these ideas with American Christianity, producing what is now called the prosperity gospel. The doctrine that financial wealth is evidence of divine favor and that giving to the ministry generates a return became central to large segments of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity. The televangelism boom of the 1970s and 1980s industrialized this at a massive scale. By the 1990s, prosperity gospel preachers were among the most-watched religious figures on television, and ministries were generating enormous revenues by promising followers that their tithes would return to them multiplied.

The late 20th and early 21st century saw the doctrine repackaged for spiritual-but-not-religious audiences. The Secret, released in 2006 as a film2 and book, was a critical moment for this turn, but the broader manifestation, abundance mindset, and law of attraction culture had been building for decades and continues to expand. Today this thinking is fully ambient in the wellness industry, the coaching world, and significant portions of the spiritually-engaged-but-unaffiliated population.

It is important to understand that these movements evolved into being because they were useful. They were useful to those teaching/selling them, certainly, but also, structurally, to the broader economic order. A doctrine that explains massive wealth disparity as a function of individual spiritual alignment is enormously convenient for systems that produce massive wealth disparity by design.

The doctrine locates the cause of suffering in the sufferer. It gets ahead of structural critique by making it an individual issue.3 The doctrine also generates a constant supply of paying customers seeking alignment. The doctrine and the system it serves have been growing together for over a century, directly contributing to the growing disparity of wealth in this world, under the guise of spiritual empowerment.

The Kernels of Truth

Before we look at the abuse, we have to parse out the truths that the abuse is built on. The Prosperity Doctrine is not pure fabrication. It is a distortion, and like all distorted frameworks that shape our current reality, it’s based on nuggets of reality.

Here is what I believe is actually true:

Inner state shapes outer experience. A nervous system in a chronic threat response perceives the world as hostile, narrows attention to immediate danger, and acts in ways that often confirms the perception.4 A nervous system that has known safety perceives more accurately, attends more broadly, and acts in ways that tend to expand the field of what is possible. This is not inherently mystical, though the strategies to get there tend to be. This is how human cognition and behavior work, and the science of it has only deepened in the decades since these ideas first entered popular culture.

Focused attention produces powerful effects. When you orient your awareness consistently toward a goal, your nervous system begins to recognize opportunities aligned with that goal that it would otherwise have filtered out as noise. This is a function of the reticular activating system, the part of the brainstem that controls what your conscious mind notices out of the enormous flood of information your senses are taking in at any given moment. People who write down their goals, visualize their desired outcomes, and rehearse mentally toward them genuinely do perceive opportunities others miss. This is well-documented in performance psychology, athletic training, and clinical visualization research.

Maxwell Maltz’s 1960 book Psycho-Cybernetics is interesting in this lineage. Maltz was a plastic surgeon who noticed that patients who got physical procedures often did not experience the psychological transformation they had expected. He realized that self-image was operating as a controlling system, and that lasting change required steering that system rather than just changing its outputs. The book is, at its core, a description of how to engage the nervous system as a feedback loop. The science underneath what he was describing is now what we would call neuroplasticity, mental rehearsal, and the role of self-concept in behavioral consistency.5

I also believe that there is also something real, mystically, about provision. Many of us have experienced moments when resources arrived at the right time, when an opportunity appeared exactly when needed, when help came from a direction we had not thought to ask.6 I do not believe that this is fantasy or magical thinking. If it is a confirmation bias, then it is one with real effects in the world. This is how reality operates when we are paying attention and operating in alignment with something larger than our individual will. Money does flow through grace. Provision does come. Most people who have lived a spiritually attentive life have experienced this directly.

The Prosperity Doctrine takes these real phenomena and packages them into a transactional formula. It claims that what is actually a property of nervous system orientation is a spiritual transaction, and it often strongly positions the institution selling it as being the only source of effective mediation.7 This positioning of an institution as the necessary mediator between you and your spiritual or worldly flourishing is one of the defining features of high-control groups across history.

The Prosperity Doctrine claims that what I would call mutually emergent grace is a result the practitioner can engineer. It claims that what is actually a function of attention and behavioral consistency is a function of faith and worthiness.

Because we live within a system that restricts and encloses the flow of mutualism and circulation, the Prosperity Doctrine in the current culture impacts many people the way a slot machine does.

The visualization bears fruit sometimes. The tithe is followed by an unexpected check sometimes. The manifestation comes through sometimes. These wins are often very real, and they arrive unpredictably, which is exactly the pattern psychologists call a variable ratio reward schedule. This is the most addictive reinforcement pattern there is. Random rewards keep you trying, because the next attempt might be the one. This is the same mechanism behind gambling addiction.

But the Prosperity Doctrine brings a dimension of pain that the slot machine does not. When the machine doesn’t pay out, the gambler eventually walks away poorer. When the doctrine doesn’t pay out, the failure gets reframed as the practitioner’s fault. Insufficient faith. Low vibration. Blocked alignment. It’s never that the cultural system we live in has failed, the failure is fully placed on the individual. This reinforces the common cultural message, especially within this economy, that you’re somehow broken.

So the addiction and the very real urgent, tunneled8 need to shift out of the experience of scarcity gets married to shame.

This is one of the cruelest things one human being can do to another in the name of love or G⟡d.

And this is what entire religious and spiritual institutions are built on.

The Mechanisms of Extraction

Here are the different mechanisms that are employed by institutions to extract resources from people in the name of growing prosperity:

The seed. You give money first, and the divine or the universe will multiply it back to you. This is the structural core of prosperity gospel tithing and it shows up across the manifestation world, online coaching, and cults of all kinds, repackaged as “investing in yourself” or “demonstrating your readiness to receive.” Regardless of the external veneer, the pattern is the same. Pay first, receive in proportion to what you gave + a special cocktail of faith, alignment, or worthiness.

Each seed offering deepens the practitioner's investment in the institution, both financially and psychologically. This is called the sunk-cost fallacy. The more you have given, the harder it becomes to acknowledge that the giving is not working, because acknowledging that means you have to reckon with what you’ve lost.

The ladder. There is always a next level of increasingly high risk investment. Another course, another mastermind, another certification, another retreat. The promise of arrival is perpetually deferred. The breakthrough is always one program away. This serves the institution because it monetizes hope, and it serves the doctrine because as long as the practitioner is still climbing, they have not yet had time to notice that the climb has no top.

The bypass. Your suffering is a vibration problem, a faith problem, an alignment problem. It is not a wage stagnation problem, a healthcare access problem, a racial wealth gap problem, a housing problem, a gendered labor problem, or a problem of the specific configuration of power and resources we were all were born into.

This bypass exploits the just-world fallacy, the deep human need to believe that people get what they deserve. It is comforting (at least to those who have resources) to believe the wealthy earned their wealth through right alignment and the poor are responsible for their poverty through misalignment, because it makes the world legible and protects us from the fear of random misfortune.

This fallacy keeps those who do have resources and privilege from seeing clearly that they can actually do something to seriously improve the lot of others through mutual aid, direct giving, advocating for policies that change institutional patterns of systemic inequality.

Instead, where the doctrine has taken root, just the act of naming these systemic mechanisms is treated as low-vibration thinking. It’s considered taboo or disempowered to talk about such things.

This spiritual bypass is one of the most consistent features of the doctrine across all its forms, because it buffers the institution against critique by relocating all responsibility inside the individual.

The targets. The Prosperity Doctrine is not marketed evenly across the population. It is marketed most aggressively to people in scarcity. That scarcity can include financial, relational, medical forms, it can be targeting those who are grief-stricken, recently divorced, recently bereaved. People whose nervous systems are most vulnerable to a promise of relief. These are people whose cognitive bandwidth has already been narrowed by the conditions of their life. This is what we looked at in Part One: that when our executive function has been compromised by scarcity, we are particularly susceptible to the doctrine’s promise of relief.

It’s this combination of factors that makes this doctrine abusive and predatory: the doctrine targets the people least equipped to evaluate it, in the moments they are least able to think clearly, with promises that exploit the exact neurological vulnerabilities scarcity has already produced.

This is precision-engineered extraction from people who are already hurting. People are leaving their bodies, their relationships, and their material lives in worse condition than they started, and they are doing so while being told they did not believe hard enough.

This is one of the largest patterns of spiritual and financial abuse in the modern world.

Remembering & Regenerating the Truth

After all of this, I want to return to the ground, to the truth that I believe the Propserity Doctrine is a distortion of.

It is not my goal to instill in you cynicism about money, spirituality, or the relationship between them. I want us all to be empowered with a deeper understanding of how resource flow, grace, and divine love can actually flow, and become active participants in shaping that change internally, interpersonally, institutionally, and intergenerationally.

So here’s what I believe, I’m curious to hear what resonates with you:

Grace is real, and often ineffable. Money does flow through it. Provision and blessings do come through unexpected sources. I and many other people have had mystical experiences of resources arriving at the right moment, opportunities appearing exactly when needed, help coming from directions we had not thought to ask. Despite what many people assume, this is not a result of the Prosperity Doctrine working. This happens through a flow of reciprocity and relationship that is truly sacred, the web of interdependence that we all belong to.

The Prosperity Doctrine treats grace as a transaction the practitioner can engineer, it’s an artifact of the clockwork universe paradigm, not a living systems paradigm.9

What is actually true is that grace and resources flow reciprocally through living systems, including human ones, when those systems are operating in alignment with the larger flows of life. You do not engineer it; you contribute to it with your presence, your passion, and any power10 you hold. Rather than extracting all you can from the world, you become nourished by it as you nourish what is around you. This flow is the inheritance of being alive, and it requires no institution to mediate it.

I will go deeper into this in Part Three.

A Note on How We Navigate This

I can’t really express in words how cathartic it is for me to write all of this, because developing our work with awareness of these patterns has been a process of holding a lot of generative tension.11

EMUNAH is a business. We make this explicit because we have seen what happens when spiritual work is offered through structures that obscure the financial relationship. This happens through churches, ministries, ashrams, lineages, and certain kinds of coaching containers where the money flows are present but unspoken and untransparent, and where the spiritual authority of the teacher gets entangled with their economic dependency on their students. This is fertile ground for the Prosperity Doctrine and its many abuses. It’s how a lot of spiritual organizations stay afloat while their leaders hoard as much wealth as possible while they can get away with it.

EMUNAH is a constant experiment in developing different structures to make those predatory dynamics obsolete. We don’t pretend that the world is just, but we do take seriously the responsibility we each have to make it more so. We do offer a range of courses and deeper coaching work, but it’s a garden ecosystem rather than an ascending ladder. You can enter from any direction, and leave whenever you are ready to.

We intentionally don’t ever get people started off the bat with something like a high-ticket retreat, because we don’t want to start people off with the sunk cost fallacy. We welcome people in to test the waters of our pedagogy and approach through the Reality Reorientation Experiment which is free, and slow over four weeks, and locates the source of wisdom and authority squarely within each of us and our relationship with the Living World. This introduces people to our clear pedagogical structure of Educate, Embody, Empower, and Enquire.

When you do work with us with a financial exchange, we do our best to be very clear about what you will be receiving and what you can expect, what our expertise is and isn’t, and where your money goes. That last part is simple. We’re the definition of a mom-and-pop microbusiness. This work is how we feed our family and pay our bills. We have not yet made much money from this work, though we very much want to because money enables choice. Money is power, and we want to circulate as much as we possibly can to change the systems of the world we live in.

As we grow, we want this work to feed many families, to contribute to systemic change on many levels, and to nourish and activate many communities where reciprocity, wisdom, and empowered embodiment flow.

We are working toward EMUNAH becoming a truly regenerative business that flows more resources, wisdom, and blessings out into the world than it hoards. We don’t want to be a ministry,12 nor a guru lineage, nor an exclusive container.

This clarity is important to us, it keeps the work clean.

The relief of a clean and clear exchange is something I wish more people in this field would speak about openly. I find that there is real freedom in transparent transaction. When I trust that all parties are informed and empowered to make the choice that is right for them, I know we’ve started on the right foot.

Our students know what they are buying. We know what we are selling. The relationship is not muddied by unspoken financial flows or implied spiritual debts. The grace and magic that moves through our work flows because every single person knows that they are a node of a vast web of interdependence, and finds their dignity, authority, and sense of belonging in that.

Where We’ll Go in Part Three

Part Three of this series is about the nature of true abundance. The word abundance itself comes from the Latin abundare, to flow in waves. In this next essay, we’ll explore the actual structure of reciprocal flow, how it operates in living systems, how it operates in our intimate lives, and how it operates in the way we move resources through community and economy.

If you have spent time in this essay recognizing patterns from your own life, please be tender with yourself. The Prosperity Doctrine is everywhere. Most of us have absorbed some version of it. Recognizing it is the work of excavation, and excavation is the first step to getting free.

Sex, G⟡d, & Money early enrollment closes this Friday, May 1st, and includes 3 deep support 1:1 calls. SGM is fundamentally about doing this excavation in the three domains where these patterns do the most damage both personally and systemically. By the end of the summer you will have a much more clear relationship with all three of these currents in your life, and be less susceptible to the lies and manipulations that abound all around us.

Learn More & Join Us Here

This is part one of a series I am writing this week.

Part 2 will be about Deconstructing the Prosperity Doctrine, and Part 3 will be about The Nature of True Abundance. All of this is particularly alive in me as we are currently enrolling our summer course Sex, God, & Money.

This kind of systemic (and ecosystemic) analysis of these 3 powerful currents of our lives is, I believe, imperative for our individual and collective reclamation of power.

I remember when I learned that some economists define and describe their field as “the science of scarcity.” I remember where I was sitting. I remember the quality of the afternoon light. I remember how frustrated it made me feel. I still feel heat rising from my belly to my ears when I think about it right now.

It was the Summer of 2023.1 Seth and I were enrolled in the practitioner pathway of Trauma of Money, an in-depth training that would end up reshaping our work forever. We were in the early phases of building EMUNAH,2 newly postpartum, learning hard lessons about money, life, and trauma faster than either of us had expected. A lot of those lessons were shaped by the very real scarcity we were experiencing. Scarcity of time, scarcity of energy, scarcity of money. Neither of us was bringing home a steady income since we took some big leaps of faith guided by the spirit of our child. Both of us were exhausted. And both of us were being asked, by the training and by life, to grow up and show up to life in ways that would challenge, stretch, and expand us deeply.

I had been studying alternative economic systems for years by then, shaped largely by the work of Satish Kumar, who traces the word economics back to its Greek root. Oikos, household. Nomos, management. Economics, in its original sense, was the practice of managing collective resources. This approach views economics as a relational discipline. It asks us to tend to a web of interdependence.

I had also spent years studying the living world directly. First formally, studying entomology in college alongside anthropology and sociology classes, and then as an independent researcher studying Living Systems at all scales after my mind was transformed through the work of Joanna Macy who featured heavily in my academic thesis. I was committed to an ongoing practice of attention to the ecosystems I live within.

What I observed, over and over, in the colonies and superorganisms I studied, was something Tamsin Woolley-Barker captures exactly in the subtitle of her book Teeming: superorganisms work together to build infinite wealth on a finite planet. Her work focuses on ants, termites, and fungi. I am incredibly interested in all of those, especially, the soil web, as mycelium beneath old growth forests helps to transport the resources of carbon and a wide range of nutrients between all that is decaying and all that is coming to life. This was the foundation of my early theories of regenerative economics.

From my time studying entomology, I was also deeply fascinated by the eusocial3 organizing system of beehives, and how in their multigenerational labor distribution and the elegant ways they’ve co-evolved with the flowers of our garden planet, they have managed to make truly limitless wealth, medicine, food, and beauty not only for themselves, but for the ecosystems they belong to, and for the humans who steward them simply by tending to the needs of the whole. These models of ecological economics feel profoundly intuitive and sensible to me, and to anyone I’ve ever shared them with.

So to encounter an official definition within the dominant culture: economics as the science of scarcity, sent a chill down my spine. It also clarified why we’re in such a fucked up collective economic nightmare. The gap between what I knew was possible from the living world and what had been codified within the field fact was vast. And as a new mother and an entrepreneur, I was living in that gap. To be honest, it often felt like I was drowning in it.

This gap has consequences for all of us, consequences that are invisible to most of us living inside of it. But there is a strange and delicate truth here, that though the scarcity we experience in this current system is real and serious, but a critical path out of it, is in realizing that it is also an illusion.

The living world is not organized around scarcity. It is organized around circulation.

We are told that scarcity is the fundamental condition of life on a finite planet, and that the current system of economics is the best and most rational response to this condition. From there, the logic of the system follows: competition is natural, hoarding is prudent, extraction is simply necessary and inevitable.

But this is not what the living world actually teaches us.

Scarcity exists in the living world, sure. Winter in many places presents real challenges of scarcity. Drought is certainly scarcity. The lean weeks before the harvest comes in are scarcity. These are real, and they are cyclical, and they are always embedded inside a larger pattern that assumes return and reciprocity. The winter ends. The rain comes. The harvest arrives. Our ancestors knew, like the bees, to prepare for this. Stored grain, fermented foods, fat reserves, and dormant seeds carry the community through until circulation resumes.

Scarcity in the living world is weather.
But the larger climate is one of mutualism, circulation, and abundance.

What our dominant economic system has done is take scarcity out of this context. It has severed scarcity from the larger cycle of return. Modernity has made the lean season a permanent condition of manufactured scarcity as if we’re in a perpetual winter, while demanding that we remain productive as if we are living in a perpetual summer. When you see it this way, you can see how extreme these distortions are.

The result is intense social, psychological, physical, and economic sickness.

We waste roughly a third of all food produced globally, not by accident, but as a mechanism for maintaining price stability.4 But the prices aren’t stable, are they? They are rising all the time, when we could actually feed everyone on earth and drive prices down and compensate farmers better, all with some sensible policy change.

We design products to fail so that constant demand replaces durable circulation. We patent life-saving medications until they price themselves out of reach. We privatize water. We structure economies around profitability rather than around meeting the basic needs of the people living inside them. And one of this system’s most reliable effects is that it turns vulnerable people against each other, competing for what little filters down, rather than toward the structures doing the extracting.

The scarcity we experience is real. But it is not actually evidence of a finite planet with too many people on it. It is evidence of a system that has weaponized our disconnection from the living world against us, a system we were born into so we struggle to see it clearly.

Scarcity and the Brain

The effect of scarcity on cognition is one of the best-documented findings in behavioral science. In a landmark 2013 study published in Science, Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, and Jiaying Zhao demonstrated that financial scarcity directly impedes cognitive function.5 They tested this two ways. In the first, they gathered shoppers at a New Jersey mall and asked them to consider a hypothetical financial problem, some easy, some difficult, paired with other questions that had nothing to do with money. Lower-income participants performed significantly worse on unrelated reasoning and attention tasks when the financial problem was hard. Higher-income participants were unaffected.

In the second study, they tracked sugarcane farmers in Tamil Nadu, India across the planting cycle. The same farmer was tested before harvest, when money was tight, and again after harvest, when it wasn’t. He showed measurably diminished cognitive performance in the lean period. The drop was the equivalent of losing roughly 13 IQ points. A 13-point IQ drop is roughly equivalent to the cognitive impact of losing a full night of sleep, or to the difference between normal cognitive function and the effects of chronic alcoholism.

Scarcity hijacks the brain and destabilizes the nervous system. It pulls cognitive resources toward the scarce resource and leaves less available for everything else. Mullainathan and Shafir call this tunneling. The brain narrows its focus toward the immediate threat and loses capacity for long-range thinking, planning, and self-regulation. This is critical for our understanding of how cycles of poverty perpetuate themselves.

One of tunneling’s most consequential effects is zero-sum thinking. The brain under scarcity perceives all resources as fixed, all gains as someone else’s losses, all relationships as competitions for limited supply.

The nervous system does not distinguish between actual scarcity and perceived scarcity.

Mullainathan and Shafir were explicit that this mindset is not exclusive to those in material poverty. They define scarcity broadly as the gap between one’s needs and the resources available to fulfill them.

The cognitive effects of scarcity show up in anyone who feels they have too little, whether or not the feeling corresponds to their actual material conditions.

This matches what Seth and I have observed in our practice for years. We have worked with clients whose material resources exceed ours by orders of magnitude and who are nevertheless operating from a habituated fear of not-enough. Their perception is tunneled. Their capacity to see what is actually available and make clear decisions about how to use what they have is measurably compromised. These are people who could meet their needs and those of their loved ones many times over, yet they struggle, from inside the scarcity mindset, to see that clearly enough to live a thriving, authentic life.

Money trauma can arise in many different forms. Family patterns, ancestral inheritance, cultural conditioning, and lived experience can all signal to our animal bodies that resources are scarce. Our neurology will run that program whether or not the current conditions reflect that belief.

This comes at a tremendous cost, not only to us as individuals, but to our species as a collective, and therefore the entire planet that gives us quite literally everything we need.

A species cannot do long-range planning from inside a tunneled brain and a destabilized collective nervous system. We cannot think in centuries when we are all constantly bracing for the next threat, the next bill, the next crisis. We cannot coordinate across generations when our collective executive function has been remodeled toward urgency and self-interest. The same mechanisms that compromise an individual’s capacity for long-horizon thinking compromise our entire civilization’s capacity for it, at great peril. We have become a civilization that has lost the ability to plan for our collective future, or even envision that a good future, a thriving future, a future that includes all of life, is possible.

This is why climate response stalls even when we have all of the solutions, we just need the collective will to implement them.6 This is why the coordination problems we would need to solve in order to thrive across the next several centuries read, from inside our current cognitive state, as impossibly complex.

What we need to do is not actually impossibly complex.

But it is cognitively inaccessible from a collective nervous system that has been destabilized in a manufactured threat response for generations.

The tragedy has compounding effects. A scarcity-activated population produces scarcity-activated leaders, who make scarcity-activated decisions, which manufacture more scarcity, which further narrows the cognitive bandwidth of the population. The feedback loop is the predictable result of a system that runs on tunneling and is so embedded in this operating system that we consider that tunneling realism.

What we need, as a species, is the capacity to do the opposite of what our current conditions have trained us to do. We need to think in centuries. We need to plan for grandchildren we will never meet. We need to cultivate ourselves to be good elders and good ancestors. We need to make decisions whose benefits accrue to species and ecosystems we are not even aware of yet. This is exactly the kind of cognition a stabilized nervous system can do and a scarcity-activated one cannot.

We all know, or know of, people who have more than enough, but it never feels like enough.

The work of metabolizing and transforming our relationship with scarcity is imperative for those who hold structural resources. Whether it’s wealth, or land, or knowledge, or privilege, or access, we cannot fully see or steward the potential of what we have from inside a contracted nervous system.

Living Differently, Starting Now

When our personal struggles are understood in a systemic light, sometimes the response is to throw up our hands, feeling that the shape and scope of the problem is so far beyond us that we are powerless to change it.

We are not powerless.

One of my core takeaways from beginning my studies with the Right Use of Power Institute this last month is a deepening understanding that our personal power is limitless, and always present within us. And that collective power, the only power that can change systemic power, is dependent on the cultivation of personal power within the individuals that make up the collective.

We are so much more capable than we know.

The patterns of our culture live within and through us, as we live within the system. This means that it’s hard to see the patterns, but it also means that when we do, and we begin repatterning, everything begins to change around us.

The first task is nervous system stabilization.7 You cannot build a regenerative life from a scarcity-activated brain. The executive function you need to make good decisions, to think in systems, to act with generosity rather than contraction, requires a stable nervous system.

Blessedly, the living world itself offers this freely. Connecting with the ecosystems around you is, among other things, the most accessible and effective nervous system stabilization tool available. Go outside. Pay attention. (If you want some structured support to do this, get started with our Reality Reorientation Experiment, a free four week experience we host in our academy, you can get started right now.)

From that more stabilized place, you can begin to make different choices. Some of the most impactful choices we can make are about where our money circulates.

Every dollar you spend truly is a vote for the kind of world, the kind of life, the kind of economy you want to live inside. Dollars spent at locally owned businesses recirculate inside your community at roughly three times the rate of dollars spent at chain stores, meaning the same dollar feeds more livelihoods, supports more local employment, and stays inside the web of relationships that actually make a place thrive. The same logic applies online. Supporting small and independent creators, microbusinesses8, and cooperatives keeps money flowing through a broader, more distributed network rather than concentrating upward into a few extractive platforms.9

These choices may feel small in the moment. There might even be some friction in choosing, like I am doing today, to go to a locally owned pharmacy instead of ordering something on Amazon. These choices compound enormously over time.

Beyond spending in a way that circulates resources toward what you want to enrich, what can you do? First of all, you tell me! Genuinely, please write in the comments things you think are impactful toward shifting our economic system. It’s going to take all of our creativity. But here are some other ideas that are meaningful to me:

Advocate for the structural conditions that make individual flourishing possible. Fair wages, access to basic needs, policies that stop manufacturing scarcity for the many while concentrating abundance for the few. Normalize these conversations. Know that you, and I, and everyone are worthy of having basic needs met, and that we can truly fulfill those needs for everyone within our lifetime.

What Interdependence Makes Possible (Everything)

Here is what I want to say clearly, because everything within your conditioning and within our culture will try to tell you otherwise:

The deepest lie embedded in our economic and cultural inheritance is that thriving is zero-sum. That your gain is someone else’s loss. That self-care is taken from collective care. That rest is selfish. That healing your nervous system is a private indulgence. That doing the inner work of metabolizing generations of inherited scarcity is somehow separate from the outer work of building a just economy.

This is not how living systems work.

A honeybee tending her own body is also tending her hive and her ecosystem. A gopher tortoise building her own burrow is also building habitat for hundreds of other species. An old growth forest’s decaying fallen trees are all feeding the new life that will emerge next. In a living system, the question is not whether to choose self or other. The question is how to operate in such a way that your own thriving and the larger web’s thriving become the same activity.

This is the truth of interdependence, it’s what reality actually looks like. And it is a dynamic, circulatory, mutualistic system that our dominant culture has trained us to disbelieve.

When you stabilize your nervous system, you become capable of clearer decisions, and those decisions ripple. When you metabolize your inherited scarcity, you stop passing it to your children, your community, your clients, your colleagues. When you learn to actually perceive the resources available to you, you can steward them in ways that feed more than yourself.

Your thriving is not in competition with the collective’s thriving. Your thriving is how the collective thrives, when you are operating from your own undistorted nature inside a web of interdependence.

The work of repatterning is real work. It is slow. It happens in your body, in your relationships, in the way you decide to spend a Thursday afternoon. It may not be dramatic or flashy. Your inner work will not, by itself, save the world.

But the world is not healed through dramatic revelations. It can only be healed by enormous numbers of people doing the unglamorous work of returning to their own nature, inside communities that grow collective power, inside economies that reflect the potential of mutualism and resource circulation. That is how superorganisms build infinite wealth on a finite planet. Through coordinated, regulated, interdependent participation.

My Invitation to You

The intersection of the spiritual, the somatic, the sexual, and the systemic dimensions of our lives is the territory Seth and I have been working in for years, and it is the heart of our course Sex, G⟡d & Money. SG&M shifts how you relate to these three domains within yourself, within your relationships, and in the wider systems we are all swimming in.

Enrollment is open through May 18, and those who register by May 1st will receive three 1:1 deep support sessions.

Whether or not you join us, I do hope you will go outside today. Find a place where you can connect to the living world and spend some time communing. Let it remind you what abundance actually looks like when manufactured scarcity isn’t running the script.

This planet has been doing this, without interruption, for a very long time.

Ganga Devi Braun is a living systems theorist, writer, and co-founder of EMUNAH Academy of Multidimensional Living. She and her husband Seth Kaufmann are certified practitioners of the Trauma of Money Method and the co-creators of Sex, God & Money.

Let me know if you want more bee time, I will be spending as much time there as possible either way, so I may sometimes take y’all with me.

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For the first twenty years of my life, that tension was mostly invisible to me. I simply lived within a community that I loved, a community that loved me. I would hear comments sometimes from people outside of our community, but I didn’t think much of it, because I was raised to warmly embrace difference while being very aware that the rest of the world did not know well how to handle difference. We didn’t talk about, think about, or mention the C word much at all. I didn’t realize until adolescence that to much of the rest of the world, that’s all they could see or talk about when they looked at us.

For a while, the C word was scary, I felt a conditioned response to deny and reject any suggestion that our community was a cult. But I quickly realized that I was coming from ignorance of what makes a cult, and that I needed to really understand these dynamics if I wanted to have an honest and productive relationship with both myself and the community I was raised in.

In my twenties, I began to lean into curiosity about this question that has led me to see a core through-line in all of my work: what is the line between a community and a cult? I carry this question with an intense commitment to creating actual, genuine community in every way I can. I bring this question with me in the development of my own business, and every community, family, and organization I work with.

The impulse that drives people toward alternative community, toward spiritual movements, toward intentional culture-building — that impulse is not naive, and it is an impulse that lives within so many of us. It comes from a deep sense that what we are living within is not the only way, and has not always been the way.

And.

That impulse can generate a lot of energy that a charismatic leader or an organizational structure operating from the dominate-disempower-extract logic of Empire can manipulate, leading to abuse and betrayal.

So if we want it to be true that a community we are a part of isn’t, in fact, a cult, we have a responsibility to understand cult dynamics and do what is within our power to address them.1

In the last 13 years I have learned lessons about power that have shifted my worldview toward interdependence and infinite potential; an understanding of the specific mechanisms of cult dynamics at all scales; and a years-long process of building the ground of my work from a very different place so that I can fully trust that I am not reproducing the harms of the systems that all of us were born into. This is not something one can do on one’s own. We need partners and teachers and elders and continuous growth do to this well. I am grateful to be rich in such relationships.

What I have found is that most of the cults that we call cults are small and insular and weird enough that we can point to them. We think we can see them clearly. What we often fail to see is the larger cultural pattern the cults are nested in, that they arose out of. We tend to fail to ask ourselves if we could possibly be in a cult and not be aware of it.

That pattern comes from the control dynamics of the larger culture we were born to, namely, Empire. Due to the legacies of colonization we are living within, that larger culture has spread to nearly every place on Earth, manifesting in unique ways everywhere. Empire is an operating system for humanity that has taken over our world, and it is a shapeshifter. It has taken on the forms of religion, commerce, even philanthropy.

I am particularly interested in examining the pattern of systemic disconnection from three sources of immense personal power that the cult of Empire — and therefore every cult that arises within it — seeks to undermine:

• Our relationship with our most intimate partners

• Our relationship with our sexual energy

• Our relationship with the Earth

I am writing this while preparing for three weeks of teaching Seth and I will be doing together at The Thread Interfaith Seminary, specifically on what it looks like to reclaim and proactively cultivate these three relationships within the context of our own spiritual lives and practice. Money and direct relationship with the Sacred are two other important areas of disempowerment/reclamation relevant to this conversation, both of which we explore in great depth alongside sexuality in our upcoming summer course, Sex, God, & Money. I’ll probably be exploring those currents with more focus in the coming weeks.

The Frameworks That Help Us Understand Cults

Cult researchers have documented, across wildly different communities, a remarkably consistent set of control mechanisms:

Steven Hassan’s BITE model2, mapping control of Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion identifies intimate relationships and sexuality as primary leverage points in virtually every high-control group.

Robert Lifton’s foundational work on thought reform3 identifies “demand for purity” as a core mechanism, one that almost always operates first through the body and through intimate bonds.

Alexandra Stein’s attachment theory framework4 goes further: cults work by systematically disrupting secure attachment.

Cults target intimate bonds specifically because those bonds are where people most naturally turn for reality-testing, comfort, and the kind of honest reflection that makes critical thinking possible.

Across these various expert’s models, the pattern is consistent: control the body, control sexuality, control the mind, control relationships, and you have largely controlled the person.

We can see this clearly in small countercultural subgroups, even entire “other” cultures, as in Robert Lifton’s research on brainwashing in the PRC. But we tend to struggle to see the pattern we ourselves live within, which is the wider context that those subgroups arise out of.

Daniela Mestyanek Young’s5 work helps us to see that connection. Here is her (abbreviated) bio from her own website:

Her perspective has been incredibly helpful to me because she researches something that cult research tends to sidestep: that these dynamics do not originate in the cults. Cults inherit and adapt them. Cults are concentrated expressions of a logic that runs through the most normalized institutions of our society — the nation, the military, the corporation, the university, the family.

The small cults are legible to us precisely because they are strange enough that we can see them clearly. The macro-institutional versions are invisible because they are the water we swim in.

I personally feel that in scrutinizing this pattern only in countercultural groups and not within the larger overculture is negligent. In doing so, we neglect the very real opportunity available to us to develop new models that could render this larger cultural pattern which harms us all, obsolete.6

What follows is a deeper analysis of the cult dynamics I am tracking and how their roots show up within the larger culture. I am focusing on these three patterns because they are the focus of what Seth and I are teaching at The Thread Interfaith Seminary in our 3-part workshop series on Sacred Relationship7 which begins this week.

Our goal in this series is to empower direct, grounded connection in all three dimensions: with partners, with sexual energy, and with the Earth for the rising spiritual leaders enrolled, and for anyone seeking more resilience against the manipulations of high-control groups. If you want to learn with us, register here.

But first, we need to zoom out.

The Older Pattern: Empire as Macro-Cult

I am using the word Empire here carefully. I don’t mean only specific historical empires — Roman, British, Mongol, American. I mean empire as a structural logic: the organization of human life around extraction, hierarchy, and the concentration of power at the top of a pyramid. Empire is a shapeshifter. It does not stay in one form. It moves through whatever container offers it the most reach.

Empire wears the form of religion.8 Christianity was born as an explicitly anti-empire movement: a peasant teacher executed by the Roman state for threatening its order, whose followers organized around radical equality, shared resources, and the dignity of the poor. Within three centuries, the empire that killed him had rebranded itself in his image. The Council of Nicaea in 325 CE was a political act, not a theological refinement. This was the moment Empire absorbed Christianity and Christianity became the ideological infrastructure of Empire. As we will see, this has shaped the dominant culture’s relationship with marriage, sexuality, and the Earth in ways that have been distortions from the beginning. This should be the ultimate outrage to the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. It is instead the waters we and our ancestors have been swimming in, so thoroughly normalized we can barely see it.

Islam emerged with genuine liberatory roots, seeking to extend rights to women and the poor that surrounding cultures denied. Empire absorbed it too, across centuries of caliphates, sultanates, and eventually modern theocracies that use religious language to organize the same old pyramid. The current Iranian regime which continues to publicly and secretly execute its young adults every single day.9 Under Taliban rule, lack of rights for women is state policy.10 The systematic restriction of women’s lives wherever Islamic law has been fused with state power.

Empire also wears the form of commerce. Colonialism as an economic operating system that extracted wealth from land and people and concentrating it at the top. That system did not end when colonies gained their independence. It reorganized into global capitalism, debt, the supply chains that connect the manufactured poverty of one continent to the abundance of another.

Empire now also wears the form of philanthropy. The billionaire who extracts wealth from workers and ecosystems across a lifetime and then endows a foundation to solve the problems his extraction created is Empire’s most sophisticated move yet. The pyramid legitimizes itself through the charity that flows down from its apex.

Empire shows up in the east and the west, in the north and the south. It continuously undermines the ability of indigenous and colonized peoples everywhere to live meaningful, connected, resourced lives on their own terms. There is no culture that has been fully immune to it except those who have resisted contact and insist on keeping the integrity of their indigenous lifeways alive.

Those born into Empire who seek to create alternative countercultural models who neglect to see this larger pattern, will inevitably reproduce it.

What we call western civilization is empire’s most recent and most globally dominant expression. But the pattern is older than any of its containers, and it is not just in the systems “out there,” but present within the very structure of our brains.

How Deep Does It Go?

The Written Word, the Brain, and the War on Belonging

To understand why Empire’s control mechanisms are so effective and so hard to see, we need to go deeper than political history, into the history and science of how human beings think.

Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess makes an argument that changed my life when I first read it over a decade ago: wherever alphabetic literacy spread across cultures, goddess worship declined, feminine authority contracted, and embodied relational knowing was displaced by abstract linear thinking. Shlain’s argument is that alphabetic literacy (sequential, abstract, left-hemisphere dominant) restructured human consciousness itself, and therefore culture. It privileged a particular mode of knowing over others. What was documented by authorities became Truth, and the more relational modes of knowing became secondary, sentimental.

Shlain was a surgeon, and the idea that gave rise to his research on this topic arose directly from his work with human brains. Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary goes deeper into the neuroscience of this pattern. McGilchrist spent decades studying the divided brain and arrived at a civilizational argument: the two hemispheres attend to the world in fundamentally different ways. The right hemisphere is relational, contextual, embodied, attuned to wholes. The left is linear, abstract, categorical, focused on parts it can name and control.

Of course, we need both.

The problem is that Empire has been built on the elevation of left-hemisphere knowing while marginalizing right-hemisphere knowing. The result is a civilization increasingly skilled at controlling the world and decreasingly capable of belonging to it.

We need to understand that Empire’s grip is not only institutional “out there”. It’s neurologically conditioned within us. Many of us are literally thinking in Empire’s preferred mode (hierarchical, sequential, disembodied) without knowing it. We didn’t choose this. We and generations of our ancestors were shaped into it.

What both Shlain and McGilchrist ultimately point toward, and what makes their insights exciting to me is that the brain is plastic, and culture is designed. What has been organized in one direction can be organized in another. If we understand the mechanisms of how Empire restructured consciousness to serve extraction, we can consciously design against it. We can build practices, relationships, organizations, and communities that rewire in the other direction.

We should not aim for a new hierarchy, but a dynamic harmony that would support the development of egalitarian, regenerative culture that recognizes our inherent wholeness.

I approach this kind of work not from naive optimism, but from a serious commitment to the work of liberation. We have to understand the system we’re living inside before we can build something genuinely different, but something genuinely different is, in fact possible. By the end of this essay we will turn toward history more ancient than the written word to help us to remember and imagine a different way.

But first, let’s look to the three sites of sacred relationship that cults of all scales seek to disconnect us from: Partnership, Sexuality, and Earth

Partnership as a Training Ground for Equals

If relationships are where Empire and Cult control runs deepest, they are also where that logic can be most thoroughly dismantled.

Cult researchers have documented that the control of partnership and sexuality is the primary leverage point in nearly every high-control group. In NXIVM, founder Keith Raniere used a system called "Jness" that explicitly controlled women's bodies and choice of partners. In the Children of God, founder David Berg dissolved traditional marriage bonds, mandated "mate-swapping," and coerced women into sexual activity under the guise of spiritual practice. In virtually every documented cult, the control of intimate relationships and family structure was the mechanism through which the leader maintained absolute authority over members' sense of reality and choice.

Empire does the same thing but its normalized through both tradition and law. The dominant model of marriage we’ve inherited was designed to give the husband11 ownership of the wife’s body, labor, sexuality, and reproductive capacity. That model persists in the norms of our culture and the economic structures that many marriages default to: unpaid domestic work, the legal entanglement that makes leaving dangerous, the way a woman’s sexual availability has historically been assumed as part of the marriage contract.

In a partnership of equals, there is no single authority figure. This creates friction, because equals challenge each other. That friction gives rise to mutual refinement, each person becoming more capable, more honest, more themselves through the demanding work of real relationship.

This kind of partnership requires intentional design. It doesn’t happen by default. We need to actively be conscious of the norms we might seek to make obsolete in a marriage, the default patriarchal template, the way control masquerades as love. It requires ongoing reflection and course-correction. It requires that both people stay awake to the ways Empire’s logic tries to creep back in.

It also requires honoring and protecting what belongs to each person alone. A partnership of equals means each partner maintains sovereignty over their own spiritual life, their own inner work, their own relationship with their body and sexuality.12 Such a partnership does not own either person, marriage serves the development, dignity, and belonging of each party within it.

This kind of partnership can take many forms. It can be a marriage. It can be a deep committed friendship, an intellectual partnership, a creative collaboration, a chosen family that functions with the same principles of equality, mutual accountability, and protection of individual autonomy. The form matters less than the commitment.

The communion of equals when cultivated in a way that builds both personal and collective power can be antidote to Empire’s control. And when that partnership holds romantic and sexual connection, the power potential grows even stronger.

Sexuality: Reclaiming the Erotic as Power

Cults control sexuality. This is so well-documented across high-control groups that it barely requires argument. But we need to take some time to understand why. The control of sexuality is not primarily about morality, or about the leader’s personal pathology, though both are often present.

This is about power. Specifically, it is about severing a person from one of our most direct sources of personal power. At scale, this keeps a group disconnected from their ability to grow collective power.

A person’s relationship with their own sexual energy does not require another person. It is a relationship with one’s own body, desire, life force.13 Sexual energy exists whether you are partnered or celibate, in community or alone. This is why cults control it regardless of whether members are in relationships. A person who has a conscious, empowered relationship with their own erotic energy is a threat to those who would control them.

Audre Lorde named this in 1978 within her classic essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,”14 she argues that the erotic is the deep felt sense of aliveness, of internal authority, of knowing what is true in the body. It is, she writes, a source of power and information. And it is precisely because it is a source of power that it has been systematically suppressed,“used against us,” in her words, “rather than for us.”

A cohort from my community of origin began learning with The Right Use of Power Institute this week, and one core thing that they teach is that personal power is not something granted by institutions or teachers. It already lives within each of us. The work is not to acquire it but to reconnect with it, to clear the distortions that prevent us from feeling living from that power.

What Empire has built, over centuries, is a sophisticated system of distortion for the purpose of mass disempowerment.

It begins with shame. The theological conflation of flesh with sin, of sexuality with moral failure, of the body as obstacle to spiritual life, these are the substrate of modernity. We still very much live within a purity culture and abstinence-only education that leaves young people without the language or framework to make conscious, responsible choices about their own bodies.

We live in the normalization of sexual trauma as an acceptable feature of cultural life. In our current media landscape, a brutal rape scene passes without comment while a scene of genuine sexual pleasure is censored. We have been conditioned, systematically and over generations, to be numb to sexual harm and suspicious of sexual joy, many of us not really truly knowing what true sexual empowerment would look or feel like, authentically, for them.

And then there are the Epstein Files. Daphne Delvaux, a trial attorney and public educator has detailed how and why the method of the release of the Epstein Files is psychological warfare waged upon the entire world. And of course what they reveal is the complicity of the leaders of every major kind of institution shaping and ruling the world today.

In the absence of any kind of justice or accountability, the majority of the world simply does not know what to do with this, and in the absence of useful guidance back to our true source of personal power, we tend to numb ourselves. For many women, that numbness leads to years of diminished sex drive, disconnecting us not only from the site and center of so much personal and collective violence, but also the source of incredible creative power, joy, and love. To heal this, we must take a multi-modal approach: insisting on justice, accountability, and laws that actually protect all of us from sexual violence and exploitation, as well as proactively reclaiming our sexual power as fuel for meaningful lives and for our capacity to generate energy toward the institutional work that must be done.

Every person raised in this culture has absorbed some version of the shame, the numbness, the disconnection from one’s own body as a source of knowing and authority. The question is not whether we have been affected. The question is whether we are willing to look at it directly, and do the work of excavation, connection, and choice.

The point I want to drive home here is that reclaiming your sexual power, authentically and on your own terms is a courageous and important part of taking our power back from these systems that depend on keeping us numb, shameful, and disconnected from ourselves and one another.

And that brings me to the biggest form of disconnection of all.

The Earth: Returning to the Living World

Years ago, on the evening of Guru Purnima, the full moon festival where Hindus around the world honor their guru, I was sitting on the floor of an earthship Airbnb outside of Taos, New Mexico, speaking with a dear friend. We were there because of our connection with Ram Dass, and Neem Karoli Baba, the paraguru of our shared lineage. I was raised with deep love and devotion for Neem Karoli Baba. And yet something came out of me that evening that felt, even as I said it, slightly taboo.

“I think my biggest, truest guru is the Earth,” I said.

It was lovingly received. And I sat with the question of why it had felt taboo at all.

The Earth is the context of everything we know. Earth is the parent, the partner, the living body within which all of human history has unfolded. Every religion, every revolution, every love story, every meal, every relationship that we know of is of the Earth.

Earth neither backdrop, nor resource, nor entitlement. Earth is life itself. The living world has always been the primary teacher, and it has been teaching us continuously, whether we have been paying attention or not.

As a collective, we have not been paying attention. Not for a very long time.

The Earth disconnection piece is less explicitly documented in cult research than relationship control or sexual control. I would love to see a serious study done in this area. But the mechanism of control is visible when you look. Cults control time. They fill every hour with labor, study, practice, meeting, devotion, and leave no room for the kind of open, unstructured, unmediated presence that a genuine relationship with the living world requires. You cannot develop a relationship with the Earth on a schedule that serves the cult. And so, whether intentionally or by default, Earth connection is one of the first casualties of high-control group membership. But we don’t notice it, because the overculture tends to sever that relationship long before a cult forms.

Late-stage capitalism runs the same mechanism at civilizational scale. When people cannot work enough hours in the day to afford rent and food, when the pace of survival leaves no room for rest or presence, when exhaustion is the baseline condition of ordinary life — a meaningful relationship with the Earth becomes a luxury. A fantasy.

Theologian, artist, and activist Tricia Hersey addresses this directly. Rest, she argues, is resistance, a direct disruption of systems that depend on treating the body as a machine and equating worth with labor. Grind culture needs us exhausted. Exhausted people cannot feel. They cannot listen. They cannot attend to anything beyond the next task, the next obligation, the next thing the system requires of them. And they cannot hear what the living world is saying.

We have been taught to feel separate from the web of life. That separation is not natural, it is induced. And it produces exactly the kind of numbed, compliant, isolated person that extractive systems require.

This is Empire’s logic applied to time itself. When our time and our rest is stolen, Earth connection is stolen with it. This is the same dispossession, and it is vitally important to the future of life itself that we reclaim this relationship.

Joanna Macy spent decades building the Work That Reconnects, a practice framework for helping people transform the despair and numbness that comes from living within ecological collapse into constructive, grounded action. Her legacy provides us with tools for the practical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of this reclamation work.

The consequences of this disconnection are enormous. They are written in the climate. In the collapse of ecosystems. In the disappearance of species. In the way the living world is registering, in every measurable dimension, the cost of a civilization organized around extraction rather than belonging.

But the invitation here is not primarily about climate activism, though that matters enormously. The invitation is something that will look differently for all of us, and can meaningfully transform quite literally every dimension of our lives.

Someone who maintains a genuine, ongoing relationship with the living world, who belongs to a place, who knows the names of the plants and the rhythms of the seasons, who can sit in silence with the Earth and receive what it offers, has access to a teacher that no human system can corrupt.

The Earth does not flatter, or love bomb, or manipulate. The Earth won’t tell you you have to leave your husband or stop talking to your family or have sex on its own terms or take your money.

The Earth offers something that every high-control system ultimately cannot: a reference point that is entirely outside of human hierarchy.

This is why, when I said I think my biggest, truest guru is the Earth, it felt taboo. Because in a lineage organized around devotion to a human teacher, claiming a non-human primary teacher is unusual.15

It is a genuine relief to me to find my highest spiritual teacher in that which is beyond the reach of any human’s authority. It means there is always somewhere to go that no teacher, no community, no institution mediates or controls.

That is exactly the kind of power Empire cannot afford to let us remember.

Joanna Macy called this remembering the Great Turning, the shift from an industrial growth society to a life-affirming civilization. The Great Turning is not guaranteed. But it is possible, and it begins, as all reclamation begins, in relationship.

Last fall I developed a four-week process to support the reclamation of that relationship, called the Reality Reorientation Experiment. You can learn more and get started for free here.

Longing for A Different Life

Communities that reach toward a transformed culture often become cults. They are made up of sincere and goodhearted people seeking a better, more connected way of life. This is certainly true of the majority of the students, and even likely true at the start for the charismatic leaders who found them.

I don’t think that this impulse is coming out of naivety or fantasy. I actually believe that it’s ancestral memory reminding us that a different world is possible.

The archaeological record is increasingly clear on this point. An archaeological site in my own bioregion, Windover, points toward a sophisticated, egalitarian civilization flourishing here for over a thousand years beginning 9,000 years ago. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything lays out evidence across the globe: large-scale, complex societies organized without hierarchy, without domination. With genuine equality between genders. With a radically different relationship to land, labor, and each other.

These were civilizations. Sophisticated, intentional, and profoundly different from what we are now living in. This isn’t the best we can do.

The longing that people feel to build something different, to create communities based on genuine equality, on Earth connection, on the sacred value of all people, that longing may be ancestral memory encoded in our genes, passed through generations, alive in the people who sense that what we are living within is not the only way, and has not always been the way.

The error is twofold. It comes both when we try to build something new without seeing clearly what we’re living in, as well as not really understanding what is truly possible when we create from a different paradigm.16 Learning from the deep past can help us to do this.

I believe we can experiment with this in every area of our lives. Our families, our neighborhoods, our businesses, our civic engagement.

This is what Seth and I have attempted in our slow and deep process of developing EMUNAH. We don’t expect perfection in this, we are continuously learning, adapting, co-creating with the people who enter into our little developmental pocket universe.

We are committed to going as upstream as possible of our cultural systems to creating something meaningfully different. That has to come not through good intentions, but good design, solid structure, and a field that supports integrity and accountability.

I am happy to report that I am increasingly confident that we are not creating a cult, and I’m committed to not getting cocky about it, but staying humble and continuously learning to make sure that continues to be true.

The proof is in the lived experience of the people who work with us, in the feedback, the transformations, the collective power that gets generated when people begin to see clearly and design consciously for themselves.

If you want to learn with us, here are some of the links again:

About EMUNAH

Sacred Relationship

Sex, God, & Money

These learning opportunities are a part of an ecosystem, meaning they complement one another deeply while standing well on their own. We do not have a funnel of increasingly high risk commitments we shuttle you on.

We simply have a living, evolving ecosystem of educational and developmental opportunities designed to meet you where you are and empower you to take your next step toward reclamation of your own wisdom and power.

We’d be honored to get to know you as we co-create (less culty, more empowering) life affirming futures together.

Your grandmothers and mine.

Generations further back than our imaginations can go.

They kneel on the earth with soil covered hands.

They work by the fire with both knives and spoons.

Their devotion made our lives possible.

We are here because of them.

I am an ordained interspiritual minister and I speak and facilitate internationally and often the greatest place I feel my ministry is when I’m in the garden and kitchen, and when my life is a bridge between these two holy sites.

This is something I find myself hesitant to express, because women being relegated to the kitchen, or overworked on the homestead, has been a significant source of our disempowerment in recent generations. This kind of labor being expected of us has specifically been used to distance us from other forms of spiritual leadership, the kinds that center books and public speaking and more traditionally acknowledged expressions of power. The forms of spiritual leadership, frankly, that are more likely to be valued, with money and accolades.

We can add this to the list of things I am reclaiming from tradwifery. It infuriates me that the tradwife movement has been so very appealing to millions of women because it’s the only onramp they can find that helps them to reconnect with something that many of us genuinely do long for.

We long to reconnect with the ancestral magic, the dignity, the love, the joy, the beauty, and the erotic power that can be found in the garden and in the kitchen.

I am not saying this is the only place we belong.

I am saying that it’s time we reclaim these centers of life as sources of spiritual power and leadership.

For those of us who love the garden, who love the kitchen, who love to feed the soil, the bodies, and the spirits of the people and places where we live and whom we love, to recognize the incredible power that is found here.

Holy Week (which, when I say it, includes Passover and Hanuman Jayanti as well as Easter) in the springtime, is one of many beautiful concentrated pockets of sacred time in the year where we have the opportunity to experience the beauty of the Earth and the transformational potential of spiritual technologies moving through ourselves, our families, our communities, and our world.

This year, Holy Week was incredibly full for us. We hosted two Passover Seders, one Easter brunch, birthdays, memorials, and a Community Garden Day all within five days. It was energy intensive and deeply gratifying.

And running underneath all of it, the erotic charge of spring.

When I use eros here, I am using it in a sense that transcends and includes the sexual charge we tend to associate it with. Yes, I mean sex, and I mean the intense green shoots coming up from trees that seemed dead from the frost of winter, and I mean the intense vegetal smell of the parsley I chopped fistfuls of for the seders, and I mean the intense beauty of the tables I set with all of our ancestral china, flatware, and linens for all of these sacred beautiful meals.

Spring is the temporal birth canal of the Living World.

Every tradition that has lived close to the land knows this.

The Hebrew word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, literally means the narrow place. Passover Seders are a spiritual technology to move us through the embodied experience of constriction, the labor, the impossible crossing, and then liberation, celebration, Miriam on the other side with her tambourines, already dancing, already certain that there is something worth celebrating, here and now.

The Easter story moves through death and grief and sacrifice, arrives as a woman walking through a garden, finding an empty tomb and spreading the good word forever more.

Hanuman, reminded by Jambavan of a power he had forgotten he possessed, crouches and leaps across an ocean in service of liberation of a woman who sits still, steadfast, within a garden.

An impossible challenge, a narrow place, a crossing, emergence into freedom from bondage. And all the while, the Living World as the site of of women’s leadership.

The season is doing this whether we ritualize it or not.

The holy days are how we do it consciously, together, at the table.

On Monday evening of Holy Week, I attended an HOA meeting for our small, unincorporated, dirt road neighborhood held in the meeting room of our small local library. I went as proxy for my mother, who owns the multigenerational duplex we live within. I was the youngest person there by many decades, and there is no doubt that there was a wide spread of political orientations represented in the room that day.

It was not a terribly formal meeting, and the nine of us present, not even enough for a quorum, had many meandering discussions in the 90 minutes we were gathered. I share this because I truly do believe that our civic engagement is an essential, devotional, and sacred responsibility. But this was more than a civic duty, it was truly a civic joy.

What struck me in that meeting was the shared values that all of us were coming from. We were all concerned for the neighbors who are struggling with the challenges of age and illness. We were all sick of the state and federal government’s overreach, violations of our privacy, policies that drive up cost of living needlessly. We seemed all in agreement that the most important thing was for us to know and care for one another.

At a certain point, one neighbor was expressing his grief that as a boomer, the privileges he was granted in the arc of his life will not be experienced by his children and grandchildren. Many layers of the polycrisis were named, even if with different language than I might have used. Nearly everyone said, in one way or another, that the political divisions being manufactured by the billionaires are a manipulation tactic to keep us from trusting one another.

It was astonishing, really, how much we agreed on.

I listened. And in a lull in the conversation, I asked them all if they’d heard of the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, or the Fourth Turning. Most hadn’t, some had, but I summarized what to me is the most essential piece of it all: that consistently, what moves us out of a Crisis cycle is enough ordinary people deciding that we will roll up our sleeves, coalesce around civic duty, new institutional norms, and grassroots movements of radical care, often centered around gardens and feeding people.

As I spoke, heads nodded vigorously.

I told them that in my read of the theory, it’s the rising generation, specifically now Millennials, who are called to build the new institutions, not to restore what was, but to construct new systems that are actually life-affirming.¹ That it would take all of us being civically engaged, often in ways that might be new to us. And that by knowing one another, helping one another, and making sense of the times we’re living in together, we can withstand far more than we otherwise would alone.

I walked out into the Florida evening, still chatting with my neighbors, exchanging numbers and making plans, with a sense of deep civic pride and excitement about my community.

Before we dispersed, I invited every one of them to come to the community garden many of my other neighbors and I have been tending for the past year.

On Tuesday evening of Holy Week, my mother and I made our way to the Ashram across the street gathered at the Hanuman Temple on the Monkey God’s birthday to honor an elder and beloved friend who had recently passed. Swami Narayana was a deeply devoted man, and his devotion to the Hindu tradition he committed his life to only ever deepened his love for the Christian tradition he was born into.

The Ashram has garden-temples to many different traditions, including a beautiful Christ Garden where my family would meet up with him and his every Easter and Christmas for decades to sing hymns. So the night of his memorial, we were asked to sing a favorite Hymn (his and ours), “In the Garden”.1

This song is quite erotic and deeply controversial. I’ll get to that in a moment. First, the grandmothers:

American Southern author, musician, and commentator Sean Deitrich calls this song “America’s Grandma’s Favorite song“ because, well, everywhere he goes, everyone tells him, “that was my grandma’s favorite.” I picture old women across this country icing buns, harvesting herbs, putting on their best hats, humming and singing this song. I think of the fact that the only thing that makes these women old is the passing of time, and that the same life force, the same erotic charge that brought them into this world, and that brought them pleasure and joy and delight, and that brought their own families into this world, is still within them.

And I think about how that erotic charge being embedded in a song about Jesus gives them permission rarely granted in our culture to tap into that beautiful energy.

It is, if you listen to it, a love song. It’s about the private moment that Mary Magdalene had with Jesus after his resurrection. It was harshly criticized and picked apart by the church for its romantic and erotic undertones, but its massive popularity could not be slowed or denied.

I imagine that for more than a hundred years now, this song has kindled in the bodies of millions, a truth that the theology of those in power always want us to forget: the sacred, when it is contacted directly, can go beyond mere intimacy and into an erotic flow of life force through us.

With that life force, we can create immense beauty.

With that life force, we can know our true power.

As the sun was setting, my mother offered a beautiful eulogy before we sang together. The night was warm and soft, the light and the air and the beautiful sense of togetherness honoring this gentle man perfectly.

Afterward, chai and strawberries and chatting with community members we hadn’t seen in a while about people we love and are remembering with full hearts.

On Wednesday and Thursday nights, Seth and I hosted two Passover Seders. A few months ago, when we realized we’d be stepping into this role of leadership within our family, we agreed that Seth would take the lead on the Haggadah portion of the Seder, and I would take lead on the food.

This was a source of joy and excitement for us both. I absolutely love to make fresh, delicious, seasonal meals, and to add layers of spiritual meaning is my favorite. I enjoy working within limits and constraints, I find them powerfully inspiring for my own creative imagination.

There is a book by György Doczi called The Power of Limits, in which he argues that beauty is not the product of unlimited freedom but of the dynamic tension between freedom and constraint. He calls this dinergy — the generative power that emerges when opposites share a boundary.

Passover is literally entirely about freedom and constraint. It’s about the escape from Mitzrayim, the narrow place, into liberation and the promised land. The seder is full of dinergy: precise structure, but you lean and rest on pillows, eat the bread of affliction, but sweeten it with the charoset that integrates and solidifies connection. Take a massive risk you may not survive, but pack the tambourines because you know, deep in your heart, you will make it through.

Passover gave me my limits. No chametz. The ritual requirements of the seder plate. The season itself. Rather than seeing these as restrictions, they formed my palette — the colors, flavors, and ideas I would work within. My creativity exploded within this container.

The reality is that the majority of Jewish life does not happen in a synagogue, but in the home. The Jewish mother has taken on many tropes within the modern western imagination, but rarely do we give credence and honor to the reality that it is the household that is the site of identity, tradition, memory, and meaning.

This is certainly true within Jewish households, particularly as we have had to survive and keep the spirit of our people alive throughout diaspora, often in the absence of a formal congregation or centralized leadership. I believe this has been a blessing, giving rise to incredibly diverse expressions of Jewish life and meaning across time and space.

After our first night, I sat down to read some of the parts of the New American Haggadah that we usually skip over. Johnathan Safran Foer curated such a beautiful artifact with this Hagaddah (which I was able to buy 10 copies of for $20 a few years ago, BH) and I wanted to sit with it while still in the glow of the first night’s seder, knowing that all around the world, the wide and diverse family of the Jewish people were doing the same. I was so deeply inspired, that Seth asked if I wanted to lead the second night, and we ultimately led it together, nourished by a rich and beautiful springtime menu that I enjoyed cooking throughout that Thursday. I moved in and out of the house all day, going from kitchen to garden, preparing a ceremonial meal. I thought to myself often throughout the day how much I’d rather do nothing else in the world that day.

The seder was beautiful, we shared our second night with a group of friends who were new to the tradition and it was rich, and meaningful, and nourishing to our bodies and our hearts.

On Friday our dear friend Rabbi shared with us some beautiful passages from the scholar , writing on Kabbalistic understandings of spring2:

…the components of any soul (In the Lurianic texts they are called sparks) can wind up in any form of being – human, animal, plant or mineral. This connection of soul and nature, both animates the natural world and subjects the soul to the dynamics of nature. (See Sha’ar HaGilgulim, Hakdamah 22) Souls move between forms when these forms are consumed, so for example, soul-sparks in the grass will become part of an animal or human that eats the plant, and soul-sparks in an animal become part of the human who eats it.

You are what you eat can be seen as a nutritional statement, but Ebn Leader makes it cosmological. When I cooked the bright green soups, the collard greens dressed in lemony white balsamic, the pistachio dukkah I put on everything, I was not just nourishing the bodies at my table. According to this framework, I was the vehicle through which soul-sparks moved from the waking earth into the humans sitting at my table.

The kitchen is the middle of the journey, a journey that truly has no beginning and no end, but if we had to choose a beginning, it would be, of course, in the garden.

On Saturday of Holy Week we gathered in the Community Garden as we do every Saturday morning. We plucked strawberries and mint, I brought chamomile honey cakes I’d made to honor a birthday of one of our beloved neighbors. That morning, another beloved neighbor shared that she had a beehive and all of the supplies needed to begin beekeeping and asked me if I’d like it all. (Some other time, I will share the beautiful miracle of this, the many layers of bee magic unfolding in this neighborhood, and within my work.) The flow of love, and care, and beauty, and resources was potent. It was a beautiful day, and full of rest.

On Easter Sunday of Holy Week, we went to the Ashram for an egg hunt. My child could not have been more beautiful. On my desk I have a cherished photo of myself, eighteen months old, with my five year old sister, sorting eggs from an easter morning in the exact same place.

It was a beautiful morning, and we came home for me to make one final meal, a brunch for the six of us who live within my mother’s gardens all together.

Feeling both full and exhausted from our many celebrations of the sacred, I rested for the rest of the day.

For many of our ancestral lines, the cook has historically been a woman, and she would have often maintained a kitchen garden to support her work of nourishing the family, nourishing the community, nourishing herself.

This is a tremendous form of service.

Nothing happens, no great books are written, no radical ideas are developed, no movements take off without everyone being fed.

This requires substantial inputs: time, energy, attention, money.

Neem Karoli Baba famously said, that God comes to the hungry in the form of food. His biggest doctrine was “Feed Everyone.” We begin with feeding the people at our table, the people in our neighborhood, the people we can reach.

What I made this week was not separate from the spiritual work of the week. It was the spiritual work. The green food, the full table, the chai and strawberries in the twilit moonlight, these were the rite.

I am interested in what happens when we take that seriously. When we stop treating the kitchen as the place adjacent to the sacred, and start recognizing it as one of its primary sites. When we stop treating the women who work there as support staff for someone else’s transformation, and start seeing them as leaders, as priestesses, as central to the spiritual technology unfolding in sacred time.

This is one thread in a much larger weaving. The relationship between the body, nourishment, spiritual power, and the domains of sex, god, and money — this is the territory we’ll explore together in Sex, God, & Money this summer.

For now, let us go eat something that has just sprouted up from the earth, and express gratitude for the generosity that is this Living World.

And if you are interested in further exploring the threads of eros, earth, and partnership, please do join us at The Thread Interfaith Seminary the next three Wednesdays for our workshop series, The Practice of Sacred Relationship.

• On April 15th, we will be going deep into the topic of marriage and partnership, with a focus on integrating diverse spiritual paths within one partnership.

• On April 22nd, we will be honoring Earth Day together by exploring our sacred relationship with the Living World.

• And on April 29th, we will be looking specifically at the relationship between sexual energy, spiritual connection, and the potentials and responsibilities that lie in that intersection.

All three workshops will be recorded and shared with all registrants, in case you cannot make a session live, and we will also be offering all registrants a $120 credit toward Sex, God, & Money, should you decide to join us and go deeper in our summer journey.

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Birkat HaIlanot

Of the seasons of the year, only Spring has its own blessing…

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a month ago · 10 likes · 10 comments · Ebn Leader

Wont you help to sing these songs of freedom? It’s all I ever had.

Friday morning, after a fitful night of semi-sleep, I woke up with these lines of Bob Marley’s last song on his last album asking to be sung through me. Whenever I wake up with music in my mouth, I pay close attention. I have a whole playlist of these songs, and I will be adding Redemption Song to this list before I publish this essay.

What struck me about this line, the line that kept repeating in my mind, is that he’s inviting us to hold the responsibility of these songs together.

He’s asking for help.

We all could practice asking for help a little bit more.

Asking for help is a profound act of relationship. It’s showing where you’re vulnerable, where you’re tired, where you cannot hold something alone any longer, and trusting another enough to not make it harder for you when they learn of your need, but to hold it with you.

My God, what a powerful thing.

I am tired as I write this, bone tired. It’s been a week full of ritual: memorials and seders and many ways we’ve honored the dead and the living.

A week full of holiness and a part of me feels anxious that I am not doing enough.

Not enough for democracy, not enough for earth-healing, not enough for my community, not enough to share what’s emerging and being offered in our business.

Promotions, marketing, sales as such don’t come easily for Seth and I, even though it’s the #1 factor in our ability to feed our family, grow in our generosity, cover the basic and increasing costs of living amidst crumbling modernity. The one factor that emboldens us to do so is the confidence that what we offer is of genuine help to others.

We can see over the course of the last few years the profound growth that has emerged in the lives of the students of ours who have gone through our summer course Sex, God, & Money. The true and lasting development of empowered maturity in these three arenas is a process that unfolds cyclically, which is why we always open the course with awareness that we too are students of this material, that we benefit from it deeply every year, and that no matter where you are with these three areas of life, there is something deeper to learn, conditioning to release, and empowered choices to claim.

And none of us can accomplish any of this in isolation.

We need one another as mirrors, as guides, as friends in the work.

The concept of “Friends in the Work” is one of my favorite ideas from my studies at the Regenesis Institute. My teachers there insist that regenerative work cannot be undertaken solely alone, that it emerges through the tension and resolution possible only through two or more practitioners wrestling with questions together.

I absolutely love this, and find it to be true.

But it’s not always easy to find friends that hold the tension of difference and resonance with your own thinking just right to be meaningful and productive.

On Thursday, in the midst of a ton of Passover cooking, I had two appointments on my calendar. One was with my therapist, and one was with a group of people that Adam French of had introduced me to.

On the call with my therapist, I had some breakthroughs in appreciating just how deep and rare the co-creative dynamic between Seth and I is. I was bursting with appreciation and gratitude for our differences and our intense alignment in our biggest visions for the work that we do in this world.

It was this strong awareness that I believe helped me to recognize a similar intense co-creative collaborationship between my new friends at Earth Regeneration Alliance, with whom I shared my second appointment that day,

Mandy Magill, Jarrod Ferstl, and Ben Clark have been building something I and many others have been envisioning for a long time: a purpose trust, a living commons, a model for bioregional finance that’s designed to flow like water. We talked for almost two hours and already have more time set for next week.

I’m still absorbing some of the potentials that were surfaced during our call. But the through line is that the quality of relationship is the quality of the work. In fact, on the Earth Regenerators Alliance website, there is a simple statement:

It’s absolutely true that you cannot regenerate anything—land, community, economy—except through relationship.

I’ve been sitting with a question for years about what truly regenerative finance actually would look like in practice and a lot of relationships in my life are pointing me toward new solutions, structures, and potentials. That’s what brought me to my call with the ERA founders.

Every year when we lead Sex, God, & Money, we level up in our relationship with all three currents in our lives, and I see very clearly the institutional level learning I’m about to be initiated into when it comes to regenerative finance this summer.

Regenerative Relationships are those in which everyone has the genuine possibility of receiving more than they put in, while the whole gets stronger rather than more depleted. This can express itself in infinite different ways.

For ERA, a couple of the ways they are institutionalizing this model include creating a purpose trust structured so that all kinds of assets can be stewarded in support of regenerating life, the living commons as the culture hub that holds it all, their spend-for-regen model, where every purchase becomes a small act of circulation, even when transacting with extractive industries as we all must do within the current system.

After the call, while preparing soup, an idea came to me. We give 25% of revenue back to anyone in our community who shares our work—students, collaborators, people who believe in what we’re doing.1 It’s how we’re trying to grow regeneratively ourselves. It occurred to me I’d never thought to extend this to another organization. When we meet again next week I’m going to offer it to them, that that revenue share can go directly to their purpose trust. A small experiment in deepening relationship in a way that benefits everyone involved.

What I want to get across today is that regeneration is not a technique.

It’s what happens when relationship is restored.

Mandy has spent years working in land restoration and holistic management, and what she understands at the structural level is that broken ecosystems are broken relationships. The land near where she lives in the four corners could be holding more water, more life than it does. It isn’t, because the coevolution of the living community there was severed. You can’t fix that from outside. You can only reenter relationship with it, ask what it needs, and listen.

This is, in the field of Regenerative Development, referred to as Sourcing from Place, and it requires a continuous process of deepening our relationship with the Earth.

Most of us were not taught that we belong to the Earth, to a living family of all of life. We were taught perhaps to own it, to manage it, maybe to steward it, be responsible for it, but all of this language keeps us subtly above it, in the position of the one who decides. What shifts when we ask instead what the land needs from us, what it’s offering that we haven’t learned to receive. What does it have to teach us? What is it asking us to remember?

This approach changes everything about how we move through the world.

In my experience, deeper relationship with the Earth awakens something in our bodies, and welcomes a deeper relationship with our own sexual energy.

I don’t mean sex, necessarily, though yes, that too. But there is a life force that sex is one expression of—the current that moves through all living things, that makes the salmon run and the sap rise and the creative impulse arrive at 3am uninvited.

We all know this energy. Most of us have a complicated relationship with it.

On our call, Ben described the moment it clicked for him that his inner healing and the outer healing he was seeking for the world were the same thing. Not just related, not intriguingly parallel—the same. He’d been following his aliveness from working in wetlands ecology to life coaching to a spiritual awakening he hadn’t planned on, and the emergence of a pretty massive instagram following, and throughout the process, he kept finding the same current running through all of it. That current of his life force led him to the work they’re doing now.

Our relationship with that current can be either collaborative or controlling. When we manage it, contain it, try to produce from it on a linear trajectory, it dams. When we follow it, trust it, let it lead even when it’s inconvenient—things get made that couldn’t have happened any other way.2

It’s the same relationship as the one with the earth, felt from the inside. Relationship here can be both with your own body, and with any partners you may have that you share your life force or your sexual energy with.

Which brings us to partnership. Which is the hardest one, because it involves actual specific humans who might disappoint you.

On the same day that I was on a call recognizing what Seth and I have built together, I got to witness something similar in Mandy, Jarrod and Ben. Mandy described it herself: she’s the pollinator, all fire and vision, ideas arriving faster than she can ground them. Jarrod is the root steward who can take the fire and develop the structure to hold it. Ben tends the mycelial layer—the trust-based community field that everything else grows through. None of those functions work without the others. And none of them pretend to be something they’re not. That kind of relational honesty is itself a regenerative act as it opens space for greater ownership of each of our unique and limitless potential.

But this kind of relationship carries the most risk. The earth won’t abandon you. Your own life force won’t reject you. But people might. That’s what makes partnership the most scary, and most powerful of these three layers of relationship.

I really love that everything we’re sharing with you all this month is about relationship, and I feel blessed by the reminder from Bob Marley that we can ask for help, that we must sing together.

Won’t you help me sing these songs of freedom. It’s all I ever had. Redemption song.

It was his last song on his last album, and what he wanted was company.

Not an audience, but a community to carry the prayer he sang, and lived, with him. Everywhere I go, every conversation I have, every office hour I hold, I find the same longing. This month we’re going deep into these places.

In April, over the course of three consecutive Wednesday evenings, Seth and I will be teaching three sessions at The Thread Interfaith Seminary on relationship with the earth, with our sexual/life force energy, and in partnership. This is offered at a seminary, but you do not have to see yourself as rising in spiritual leadership to learn with us, you just have to be interested in the idea of Sacred Relationship within your own life. You can learn more and register here.

If you’re interested in Sex, God, & Money, you can learn more and register here. This is the first year that we are offering this at a sliding scale range, as well as offering an option for a further discount for groups of 2 or more (because, well, realationship), and we are eager to see who joins us this year. As always we offer extended payment plans with zero interest and no hoops to jump through.

And one more reminder that if you are interested in sharing our courses with people in your life that you think would benefit from them, we would be honored to share 25% of any revenue that comes through you, with you. This is our current experiment in bringing actual material flows into the regenerative relationships we seek to build with you, our emerging community.

Thank you for your help, for your relationship, for your time and energy in being here, reading, listening, and loving the living world. I do not take it for granted.

Seth knew he was going to marry me the night we met. It took me a few years to catch up. With a decade between our ages, he was wise enough to be patient and allow me the time to arrive fully to the biggest decision any of us can ever make.

I remember the afternoon I decided I was ready to step toward marriage with him. We were in the Hudson Valley in early summer at a retreat center that felt like summer camp, sharing a weekend intensive with the 40 or so peers with whom we were moving through our two years of Interspiritual Seminary. This weekend intensive marked the midway point on our journey of training to be of spiritual service to people coming from unique, diverse, and nonlinear paths.

That afternoon there was an exercise in silence. A brief session after lunch began the silence, and it would break just before dinner. A practice for all of us in deepening presence and listening before a ceremony that evening that would mark a threshold crossing on our journey toward becoming ordained Interspiritual Ministers.

For many, this open, silent afternoon offered a glimpse of monastic life. Solitary spiritual practice to pass the hours, respectful head nods to fellow seminarians as you pass them on a path, reading, meditating, resting under a tree.

For Seth and I, it was a glimpse into married life. We spent the whole silent time together, and it was wonderful. Relying on hand gestures, body language, and what we knew about one another to make our plans of what to do next, we first headed off to our room to grab books and a blanket (reading books on a blanket outside is a core part of our origin story, and a beautiful part of our lives to this day). I won’t lie, we definitely stopped in the room for a little while to make out before heading back to the commons, a moment of intimacy that was only heightened by the challenge of silence and the importance of our own integrity for keeping with the commitment to silence, even if only we would have known if it was broken.

Flushed with love and closeness, books and blankets under arm, we set out to the green and found a spot under a flowering tree to lay down in. I don’t remember which books we read, but I remember the feeling of being nestled in Seth’s arms, I remember the quiet laughter we couldn’t help but surface in one another, the intense bond between us that just grew deeper and deeper in the silence.

It was that afternoon that I sensed what a marriage between us would be like, and I began to long for it with my whole being.

Anticipation of marriage, like anticipation of entrance into any major life change, is very different than the thing itself. The roller coaster that can be preparation for marriage is full of truths about the experience of marriage itself, sometimes shrouded and sometimes laid bare.

Daily life is full spectrum: sweetness and irritation, comfort and frustration, the ebb and flow and friction that makes growth, and life, possible.

Marriage isn’t for everyone, but for those of us who are in one, or have been in one, or will be in one, there is much to be gleaned from regarding marriage as the grounds of spiritual, personal, and collective development.

Seven years after that afternoon, and six years into our marriage this Sunday, life has presented us with many challenges and opportunities to listen deeply, to grow spiritually, and to shape the world that we choose for ourselves and our child to live within.

Marriage is not (always) a bucolic afternoon of silence and kisses and deep belly laughter and total attunement to one another every moment. If you want it to be, you must put in a great deal of loving effort to make it so.

Marriage is a vehicle made of and fueled by choices.

Marriage is a vessel that carries its passengers through time.

My work getting at the root of cybernetics,1 (the science of steering a system) has made me partial to maritime metaphors. At the risk of being corny as hell, I will remind us that a marriage is a relationship. It’s a boat we must co-captain through the uncharted waters of a wildly unpredictable world. The family we then grow, through birth and choice and love, are precious passengers, as well as valued crew. The work is not just in staying afloat, but in navigating toward a life that we imagine into reality together.

Creating an entire world, an entire life, with continuous choice and the need for regular re-orientation as the world and the options before us change is no small feat.

Marriage takes patience, courage, forgiveness, self-respect, clarity on what is my personal responsibility, what is theirs, and what is our collective responsibility.

In marriage, all your worst qualities are dumped in the lap of your partner. I leave a trail of little messes everywhere I go in our home. I feel weepy and needy when I have a cold, as I do now at the time of writing this. I get pulled in to projects and ideas that draw my mind completely and I lose track of things that are important to us both. I don’t always listen as deeply as I want to when he is sharing something important to him. There are many things I would like to improve.

I flinched while writing that. I think if we’re being honest, if any marriage is honest, there’s going to be a lot of flinching, at least some of the time. Flinching not (one should hope) from the danger of a physically or emotionally aggressive partner, but from the self consciousness that comes from realizing that the person you want to give your best to, is also the one who will inevitably get your worst.

I think if we’re honest, a lot of us will try to avoid this reality. We might bypass it with our spiritual jargon, or hide from the discomfort, pretend these qualities aren’t there, or try to find a way to blame it all on the other person.

But like in the silent afternoon, you have to be still enough to listen. Listen to what is working and not working. Listen to the longings and dreams that both of you are holding, even in the most secret places of your heart.

And in listening, you can come from love, no matter who just goofed up or how badly. And in coming from love, you can find the wisdom and humor and spiritual lessons in quite literally anything.

You do find the depth of love, nestled in their arms, laying outside, years later, and it is even deeper and more comforting and conveys a stronger sense of home and belonging because of the challenges you’ve moved through, the fact that even in the face of your worst and most challenging qualities, you choose to stay, to grow, to protect the vessel that you’ve created together. And you may find yourself looking around at the garden you are laying in, one you have made together, and find that the world has become more beautiful, more life-affirming, more vital because of your love together.

If you’re in a committed partnership, you already have this path. The question is: How deliberately are you tending to it as a spiritual practice? How consciously are you using your marriage as a way to shape the world?

This April, Seth and I are offering a three-session workshop series called The Practice of Sacred Relationship: Marriage, Earth, & Sexual Energy in Spiritual Leadership through The Thread Interfaith Seminary. We will be exploring these three very different, very interconnected access points of Sacred Relationship over the course of three weeks, and we would love to see you there.

What we explore within this series will be particularly insightful for people in or stepping into spiritual leadership, but not exclusively so. If you value your relationship with the Earth, with your own Sexual Energy, or with a partner you are devoted to, there will be something powerful for you in this.

Learn More & Register Here

And for those of us ready to go deeper, to reclaim our relationship with sexuality, spirituality, and financial power as one integrated force we’re excited to announce that we’ve opened enrollment for Sex, God, & Money: a 12-week developmental journey we lead each summer. This year, it begins on May 31st, and for the first time ever, we are offering it at a sliding scale range.

Sex, God, & Money

We will be sharing a bit more about these two offerings in the coming weeks, and look forward to connecting with those who feel drawn to join us. Everything we ever teach is shaped by the collective wisdom of those who show up to the process, and we are always blown away by the wisdom of the students and community that enter the EMUNAH universe.

This weekend I did my best to tune out the noise and tune in to the needs and the pleasures of my intimate home life. I rooted into place more wholly than I have in a long while, and it has nourished me deeply. This is what I am sharing with you today.

On Saturday morning, I woke up achy and sore, not uncommon in this body that has been managing chronic pain and fatigue since I was five or six years old.

Just before 9am, I was preparing to draw myself a bath, when I was reminded that Saturday mornings is when we gather to tend to our neighborhood garden together. I had forgotten, as I always forget, and as always was grateful to be reminded. I put on pants, I coiled my hair up with a paintbrush, I put on my faded blue hat, and set off to the garden that lies two and a half blocks from my house.

After a nice meandering conversation on the back porch, and some sampling of strawberries plucked fresh from the ground, the task of the day was simple weeding, like last week, of the Dollarweed and Florida Betony that function as a living mulch, metabolizing the dry mulch, making it soil, and which periodically need clearing out to give the other plants we placed there on purpose a bit more of a chance to thrive. As I went, I pocketed the small glowing white tubers from the Florida Betony, anticipating the mild crunchy snack of them later once I had the chance to rinse them and my own hands from the soil of the day.

By the time were done, I was feeling the many documented benefits of having one’s hands in the soil. My body still hurt, yes, but my mind was clearer, and my heart wide open.

My two weeding companions these last two weeks were Donna, a friend of my mother’s who I’ve known my whole life and who has been the greatest source of village support in her weekly two hour playdate with my child, and Ani-la, a Tibetan Buddhist Nun of my mother’s lineage who moved to this area a few years back. We talked about the gardens of Donna’s Portuguese ancestors, childhoods marred by the mental health struggles of parents, and the grace that flows from setting boundaries and finding our mature authority in adulthood.

As we wrapped up, Donna headed out to the library where she’d donated a ton of art supplies for an art swap, and she was going to see what treasures she could find. Ani-la asked if I could give her a ride home. The subtle shame I had felt on choosing to drive dissolved, and strangely as we piled ourselves and the Collard Greens, Kale, Mint, and Mizuna that we had harvested into my electric car, I noticed that somehow the car had gained 10 miles worth of energy while we were gardening. Small strange miracles abound.

On the short drive to bring Ani-la home, we discussed the once beautiful, currently defunct garden in her community that was made for low-income seniors, a garden we had named the Wisdom Garden about 3 years back. It had been managed by someone paid by a USDA grant which was DOGE’d last year, and so the beds lay mostly empty and fallow now. I asked what it would take to get it up and running again, and imagined that when my own business is running well enough that I may have some greater resources of time and attention and energy and money, that I would love to somehow support its regeneration. She expressed prayers that my business reach the fullness of its potential.

I returned home to my child and husband, and after a time, I did take a bath. Later in the afternoon, when my mother took my son out on an adventure to local farmstands, garden supply stores, and the Italian ice joint opened up as a joyful service to the community by the owner of a local roofing company, my husband and I were both able to take a blessed nap together.

When we woke up, we put on our finest pajamas as a family and headed to the synagogue for a Pajama Havdalah where elders and children sang songs and ate cookies and honored the closing of Shabbat together as the first stars appeared. Rabbi Rose wore a unicorn onesie and pink heart barrettes in her hair. It was a very good day.

On Sunday, I woke up with some anxiety to get some work done, and was in a deep focus through the early morning and into 10 o’clock when our friend Allie came over with a mason jar of honey harvested by a beekeeper she and her partner Max met at last year’s Florida Permaculture Convergence. By all accounts, this beekeeper is a magical woman whose wisdom we will glean from when the time comes to welcome our own hive into our world. It felt amazing to receive this honey, pure sweet medicine. Later today, I will use some of it to make medicinal marshmallows for the cough and sore throat that is once again making its rounds.

Allie needed wifi and a quiet space to zoom in to her part of the opening proceedings of a weeklong series of virtual events co-hosted by the Design Science Studio and the Vision Train, honoring the sixth anniversary of both communities of visionary artists and changemakers working together across distance and difference for regenerative futures. I am so honored that Allie, a friend from preschool and high school first discovered these communities through my sharing of them in 2020, and now has become an integral member of the Vision Train’s team, as well as a core part of our neighborhood village life.

I was pleased to envision her conducting the train from my cozy office which I’ve designed to feel a bit like a luxurious train car from ages past, complete with a curtained daybed, a space that is full of altars and art supplies and reminders to go slow in the form of a snail magnifying glass and a brass tortoise tape dispenser. The altar that is my desk is one of my favorite places in the world, and it is a gratifying experience of intimacy-via-solitude to welcome a friend to spend an afternoon from that perch. And if my office is a train car, it is one that has been parked in the midst of a jungle garden for long enough that the Giant Crinum Lily, richly purple and green and just outside, is often taller than the windows themselves.

I spent a few minutes tidying for her and made us both frothy mugs of cacao. Her arrival pleasantly reoriented me back to the dimension of reality beyond the screen, and I felt the dead leaves of the garden beckoning to me to finally tending to the plants that had been shocked back to their roots by a sudden frost a few months ago.

I brought my child outside and spent the next four hours tending to the winter garden, guided by the green buds of new life beginning to show up on the branches of trees that for the last many weeks have looked entirely dead.

Since the frost I had been craving the task of relieving our plants of their dead leaves and branches, seeing what the light would show me in the garden with less obstruction, making space for the new life to emerge. We were told to wait till after the Ides of March to do this deathwork, and finally the day had come. So I spent Sunday pruning bushes, loppering trees, sweeping pavers, and neatly clipping the large unruly branches into wands for a tidy-ish pile we could more easily move.

It was deeply satisfying.

Moreso, was the satisfaction of the mirror Allie and I served in each other that day. Normally I am the one sitting at my desk, looking out to the back garden, doing the work of supporting the planet’s regeneration through the worlds and lives that the digital realm serves as a portal to. I often look out to the garden, and long for the days where the garden under the oaks is my only domain, where the rest of the world can fall away and I can be wholly present to the place that I call home. Allie and her partner Max help us with garden work, help us tend this land, and often I sit at my desk, watching them do their work, and feel a tinge of fraud when my days are more inside than outside.

But seeing her in there, with her candle lit, in joyful facilitative dialogue, meditation, and deep listening to folks around the world, I felt her as a beautiful mirror of myself in the work I deeply love, and felt tremendous appreciation of our interwoven experiences. I remembered that it is all the living world. The trees and the fish and the birds and the soil and the glass of the windows and of the computer screen and the beeswax of the candles and the minerals of our batteries and the electricity that flows through the home to make miracles possible every day and the intelligence that is our interface with it all.

All of this is the living world.

Allie wrapped up as I settled back inside the dining room for a visioning session of what the future of that room could be, enchanting it even deeper as an extension of the garden that the large french windows invite it to be.

Within an hour my child would ask for a tea party in the garden, and he, myself, my husband, and my mother would all go out to his picnic table in the garden, newly swept, where we enjoyed mizuna salad from the community garden, potato salad, tuna salad, and garden mint tea sweetened with the honey that Allie had brought over that morning.

By late afternoon, our child asked to take a bike ride, and he and my husband were out long enough for me to nap on the daybed in my office, wake up, and watch an episode of Outlander while making dinner and cleaning the kitchen.

It was a beautiful weekend. Through social and solitary gardening, I became more deeply rooted into place. I feel greater reciprocity with the living world to which I belong. I feel greater grounding into the reality that I am able to shape, where I am with what I have.

I write this for myself as much as for you, for the reminder that such days, such neighborhoods, such families, such rhythms of reciprocity do still exist. We can choose them any time.

There are deeper threads weaving a cocoon in my mind, and I feel I need to share those tendrils before they enclose me completely. So, at the risk of mixing my insect metaphors, like a webspinner tossing out threads of silk, I am going to share some fragments as they emerged from me today.

I trust they will catch on something.

• There are so many things that we cannot control. War, climate change, the injustices of the entire civilizational framework, the absence of accountability, these hyperobjects we are all grappling with are beyond our capacity to wrap our minds around.

  • Sometimes we must dissolve into the vast web of our interdependence, and feel the heartbreak, despair, joy, longing, to be found in the whole before we reconstitute ourselves anew.

• The animate, intersubjective, interdependent, multidimensional worldview is the paradigm shift all of life on earth is calling for.

  • The title of this publication, The Living World is a prayer and a mirror and a name for reality. Everything I do is to that end. I am so grateful I am not alone. In fact, to know we are not alone is the greatest gift of this worldview.

• The amazing and challenging thing is that there is no one single thing that will usher it in. There are so many different approaches to world healing that must have their own timelines, their own developmental arcs, and also to be dynamic and adaptive enough to recognize when it’s time to collaborate and merge and exchange resources, knowledge, power.

  • This is also how all of my friendships are.

• Women coordinating amongst ourselves are the buffer that enables civilizational regeneration in the face of collapse. Always has been. We are building the new systems with incredible love and amazing efficiency and we are tired. Our bootstraps are shoestrings. We need resources.

  • I have visions of the hoarded money of the world, like water in a dam, longing to be downstream, to quench the thirsty earth, to make the soil fertile again.

  • I am working on developing bridge institutions to facilitate the transference of excessive wealth in the service of life. I am eager to share this, but will do so privately until it’s mature enough for the public. If you’re interested in this, feel welcome to reach out.

• Embodied Intelligence is something I believe we all have the capacity to cultivate. I am surrounded by people with not only Embodied Intelligence, but Embodied Wisdom. It may be my situational bias, but I can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t as rare as many people say it is. And it certainly can be cultivated. I see it cultivated every day.

  • I don’t think that having a relationship with AI inherently undermines this.

• Bottom up, power-with, circular organizational models are incredible and it is possible to shift to this model even when entrenched in the old model. I am doing work right now supporting the transformation of a 50 year old organization deeply entrenched in top-heavy, deeply dysfunctional leadership model. It takes real will and stamina, but it is possible.

  • And structure, facilitation, and leadership are essential for these kinds of organizational models. Lack of structure enables the holding patterns to perpetuate themselves, and abuse often camouflages itself in chaos.

• I am tired. Bone tired. And lately I am hungry, deeply hungry, and I cannot seem to find satiety for very long. I come alive and feel nourished when face to face with the work I do, with clients, and challenges, and real human presence. And then the fatigue and hunger washes over me again.

  • I feel my body as the body of the whole. I seek to nourish and tend to it the way I would have us nourish and tend to the whole. I feel hot tears welling up with the prayer that we may collectively remember ourselves whole.

• There is a patch of our community garden, a garden that didn’t exist one year ago, a patch that is full of mint and strawberries right now. My whole being feels cooled and soothed and nourished by this patch, even when I just think about it. I sat in that patch on Saturday and weeded to make more space for the good medicine to grow.

  • I remember that there is so much good life growing, and I remember that I must take out the compost in order to tend to the living.

I love this world.

I am committed to our healing.

We have our work cut out for us.

PS, one of the things I’m excited to share is that in April Seth and I will be teaching at The Thread Interfaith Seminary on the Practice of Sacred Relationship. For three consecutive Wednesday evenings, we will be going deep on the topics of Sacred Relationships in Marriage, with the Living World, and with Sexual Energy, respectively. You can learn more and register here.

This has been a personal breakthrough in the last two weeks:

I was raised in a community which, to many, seemed like a Matriarchy. A woman founded it and was the center of everyone’s lives. The organization was mostly run by women, and the spiritual teaching at its core was about the Divine Mother. I myself have called it a matriarchy in the past, and for that I must now apologize.

Nearly four years into an extensive collective healing process I’ve been engaged in at every level — personally and professionally — the breakthrough came in a dialogue I was co-facilitating last week. The confidentiality agreements of this space allow me to share themes but not details, so I will keep it simple: the community was never a matriarchy. To the untrained eye it looked like one, but structurally it was always modeled as a patriarchy.

The simplest expression of the distinction, articulated well by many before me (and I do apologize for not having good attribution for it), is this:

• Patriarchy is a pyramid designed to protect the power of whoever is at the top, at the expense of whoever is at the bottom. Lots of people can be at the bottom, but especially and always children will be found there.

• Matriarchy is a circle, with children at the center. Children have the attention, care, and protection of everyone within it. Mothers are supported. Power is distributed among all who are trusted within the community.

And I realized that the work being done by the administration of this community at this time, right now, work that I am so grateful to be involved in, is the work of rectifying this. Changing the structures and bylaws and codes of conduct within the organization so that it can be governed not out of protection and fear and domination, but out of a diverse body of people who love the community and want it to flourish for everyones’ sake, for the blessings that we have to be passed on to future generations. Everyone will benefit from these changes, including the people in the organization resisting it with all the vitriol they have.

This is important: men benefit just as much as everyone else in a Matriarchal culture. Men also suffer deeply under Patriarchy, violently disconnected from their own feeling, their own capacity to care. And women can perpetuate the harms of Patriarchal dynamics just as readily as anyone else. These are models of how we organize ourselves as a species, not descriptions of individuals.

This insight shook me awake to the nature of the work I have always been doing in every dimension of my personal and professional life. Whether it’s called Organizational Consulting, Regenerative Counseling, Permaculture, Interspiritual Ministry, Systems Change Development, or making dinner, making a person, making a community garden, choosing to rest when I need it — my entire fucking life is committed to embodying the changes we need for the world we deserve.

And my life is profoundly blessed because of this commitment. There is a lot we all have to learn to lead the necessary transitions together, but I do believe that there are actually billions of us ready to do our part.

I’m so tired of people being miserable and guilty due to the idea that we created this mess. We didn’t. Every person alive today was born on a train already careening toward disaster. Some of us have made the best of it with what we had. Many have sleepwalked. A few have tried to smash and grab everything in a bid to save themselves. It won’t work.

There is no saving anyone without saving all of us.

This is what mothers, when we are present enough to reality, know most deeply: all of life came into existence because of a mother. Every form of life is so intensely precious there are no words — just the ache of tearing your body apart for the sake of another. This bleeding, aching truth has nowhere to land in the cold architecture of Patriarchy. It looks and feels like chaos there. But it’s not chaos. It is the organizing principle of reality.

Life and death are so completely, intimately combined, and this is a time of many deaths in every sense of the word, and it is also a time of immensely potent life force rising.

It’s time for the Matriarchy to make the Patriarchy obsolete. Time for men to come home to their wholeness and their true responsibilities. Time for women to step into our most sacred power. Time for all of us to learn from those who exist beyond the gender binary the radical idea that we do too.

A life-affirming, antifragile, syntropic, regenerative, truly beautiful world is possible. We can transition to it far more thoroughly in our lifetimes than most of us can imagine. Those of us who have been working on this — across many titles and many sectors, for decades — are finding one another with increasing frequency and resonance.

We are coordinating with one another at the pace of our joy, and our joy is immense. Our love is tremendous. Our commitment is alive in our whole bodies.

No less than the soul of the world is at stake.

Today I’m writing this with a tender heart, a bleeding body, and the desire to put down the screen and spend the rest of this day with my child. These are the words I have. This is the signal I want to send.

Happy International Women’s Day.

You may have read this title and assumed this might be an anti-science, anti-intellectual essay. Not so.1 I believe Science is a vital, essential religion of our time, and I also believe, like all religions, we must be wary of the dogmatism that can arise from the priesthood, and remain curious and open to the renegades and mystics of the tradition who challenge the edges and welcome the sacred and the beautiful in to their leadership within the tradition.

This paper was written in seven years ago, 2019 at the end of my first year of Interspiritual Seminary when we were assigned the task of researching and writing an essay about a religious tradition we hadn’t studied yet. For context on where I am coming from— I was raised on an Interfaith Ashram, had studied religious anthropology in college, and was curious to explore territory with this assignment I hadn’t fully gone into before. I present it to you now as it was written then, with a few formatting adjustments for emphasis and ease of reading.

As always, doing this project parallel with was deeply enjoyable. His essay for this assignment was about agnosticism2 as a religion, and if you’re interested in reading that, please say so in the comments, I’d be happy to encourage him to share it.

This essay came to mind a few weeks ago when I served as a mentor to some brilliant Fellows of the Design Science Studio, of which I am an alum. A core theme of our small group mentor session was how many of them are transitioning from more rigid scientific careers to more creative/intuitive paths. That is what prompted my sharing and therefore revisiting this essay. I absolutely loved the time I spent with those Design Scientists rEvolutionaries who chose to spend time with me, and look forward to the next round of mentor sessions I’m doing this afternoon.

I also am reflecting on another full circle student-to-teacher moment as Seth and I prepare to co-teach a series of classes on The Practice of Sacred Relationship: Marriage, Earth, and Sexual Energy in Spiritual Leadership in April at a new Interfaith Seminary. We’ll be sharing about that more soon.

In his 1935 book The World as I See It, Albert Einstein wrote, “The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and oldest mainspring of scientific research.”3

There is tremendous richness in this quote which I am not able to dive into in the scope of this paper, but I hope that what I have written here will be a starting point for deeper exploration of the human creation and quest for meaning that we call Science. The arc of its inception and transformation through time has been driven by the human impulse for making sense of the mystery of reality, and just like every religion, aspects of it have become calcified, dogmatic, and inextricably tied in with unhealthy power dynamics.

Just like every religion, despite the rigid power structures which seek to limit the empowerment of individuals who long for creative involvement with the quest for meaning, there continue to emerge mystical voices who keep the tradition alive.

One of the foundations from which I have harvested my conclusions is Clifford Geertz’ working definition of religion4. Geertz suggests that a religion is something which:

1. Establishes powerful “moods and motivations” in people

2. Formulates a “general order of existence”

3. Makes these conceptions appear as fact

4. Makes these moods and motivations seem “uniquely realistic”

By this analysis, we can see that science by any examination fits the bill. An example of the efficacy of the religion of Science can be found by suggesting to an adherent that Science is, indeed, a religion. This simple experiment yields consistent results of logical outrage and defense of science as something that is far more factual than ‘other’ ‘religions’ (point 3), uniquely representative of reality (point 4), that it is not magical or fantastical but describes the general order of existence (point 2), and that it is this commitment to order, logic, rationality, and truth which motivates them (point 1). I have observed that strict adherents to this religion generally feel both intellectually and morally superior to what they perceive as adherents of other, more primitive worldviews. This is an example of the dogmatic rigidity that we can find in all religions, and it is important to note that it is not a universal attitude. As in every study, there are sure to be outliers.

ORIGINS

I believe that Science is as old as any religion, but I concede that adherents to all religions tend to claim that their tradition is as old as time itself. What we now call science has been called by many names including alchemy, natural philosophy, raja yoga, etc. and throughout the ages, it has held authority in many cultures, with different schools of thought and practice given different degrees of importance depending on the inclinations and goals of the people and the power holders of that time and place.

Consistently, Science emerges from a quest for human understanding and it seems that Science has been with us for as long as humanity has sought meaning, order, and understanding of the world in which we live.

Science is shaped by pursuits as diverse and vast as human imagination, and emerges from human understanding and application of cause and effect. From the earliest Neolithic hominids who found that they could carry embers in Birch Polypore mushrooms to extend their chance of survival, to the ancient Polynesian astronomers who navigated the vast unknown universe by the stars, the quest for survival, expansion, understanding, and meaning in the vast unknown has been the starting point of all human creations. This quest, this longing for understanding and participating in the Cosmos is, as Einstein has said, the origin of all scientific research.

BELIEF

Just as in every religion, belief in the religion of Science varies widely depending on the lineage of the practitioner. The most dominant belief in the dominant western scientific culture up until the 20th century (though certainly still widespread today) is that the cosmos is understandable, and that if we break it down enough to its constituent parts, we will be able to understand everything. This is known as the reductive school of thought within the religion, which is increasingly coming into question as the emergent living system and quantum field schools of thought becomes more mainstream.

These latter sects maintain that the universe is enormously mysterious, and will continue to surprise us, but that it can be best understood less as an object under examination, and more as a living system of relationships intertwined through the fabric of space and time.

SCRIPTURE

The scriptures of Science also depend largely on the lineage of the practitioner. From Pythagoras to Hippocrates, the early prophets of the so-called “western“ branches of this tradition laid a rich scriptural foundation on which countless scholar-practitioners have built new meaning.

Perhaps the most hallowed doctrine is that of Newton’s Laws of Motion.5 This text ushered in a new paradigm of scientific and cosmic understanding, anchoring consistent laws as reliable ways to expect reality to operate which has proved foundational for all subsequent scientific investigation.

Another core text to Science is Darwin’s The Origin of Species,6 which ushered in a paradigm shift for all of humanity to have deeper and wider context to understand how we came to be. This was disruptive to not only other schools within the religion of Science, but all religious belief in general; Darwin’s work led to the Victorian Crisis of Faith, which is arguably the time of greatest planetary conversion to the religion of Science.

One of Science’s unique characteristics is that it is understood to be a living tradition, with not only interpretation of these core texts being explored and published constantly, but with the clergy of Science—+ it’s doctors and researchers alike, continuously seeking to contribute meaningfully to the Canon of scripture.

INITIATION

How do these many people seeking to contribute to Science’s scripture through their own Magnum Opus’ become empowered to contribute so grandly to such an exalted tradition? The religion of Science has many initiation rituals, from the most widespread initiation of the Scientific Method, and the most hallowed initiation into terminal degrees of authority (MD, PhD, etc.).

School children are often initiated early on in their lives through the religious practice of the Scientific Method. Scientific Method initiation in schools generally begins with a few week’s study of the stages of the scientific method, the specific details and languaging of which differs slightly based on the geography of the school and lineage of the teacher. When the foundational education is sufficiently laid, the initiation begins, with school children around the world conducting their own scientific experiments, to be presented to and judged by teachers and priests of Science at annual Science Fairs. Success in this arena garners a student great confidence from their elders, and is a strong indication of likely success in the only world that matters to the Scientific Institution: the world of the living.7

This initiation is a widespread microcosmic taste of the same process repeated on grand scales for Doctorate degrees which are the process of initiation for the clergy of the religion of Science, who either minister to people directly as physicians (as priests might), or retreat to research fellowships much as monks and nuns might, nourishing the tradition from the background.

FURTHER STUDY

The scope of this assignment is simple8 and allows only for a cursory examination of this religion. In further work, I would like to explore the differences between the dogmatic branches of this religion and its mystical branches, looking at the renegade prophets of which have, after death, become canonized as saints of the religion.9 Most of all, I look forward to sharing with the world what I am constantly studying about the recent and living teachers, prophets, and poets of the tradition who are bringing this religion into an integral, evolutionary future.

Yesterday, shared a story2 and an idea from a Tibetan political leader that will be viewed by millions. It will be viewed by millions because Heather Cox Richardson is a living embodiment of what the story she shared is pointing us toward: doing what only you can do in this moment of collective transformation.

She recounted a conversation between Kate Barr, a progressive congressional candidate in North Carolina running transparently as a Republican, and Lobsang Sangay, president of the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan government in exile. Barr3 had spoken at an event before Sangay and apparently told a dick joke in her speech, and then when he spoke after her about the serious issues facing Tibetans at home and in exile, she felt mortified. But he came up to her and expressed that he deeply appreciated her and saw their work as the same work, which she dismissed apologetically in her fear of having offended him.

Then he said something that seems to have lit a spark in her, and many:

Everyone in the world has one torch to pick up. You carry your torch as far as you can for as long as you can. And hope others are carrying their torches alongside you.

Heather Cox Richardson expanded on this,

…You can't carry somebody else's torch, but you have an obligation to pick up your torch, whether it's to run for office or whether it's to help out at the schools or whether it's to feed people or whether it's to fight back against the concentration camps or whether it's to write letters, I hope.

Each one of us has some kind of a torch to carry, and nobody but us can carry that particular torch. And it's our job to pick that torch up and carry it as long as we can.

And I love that idea.

Whatever your skill is, offer it to the world, and it'll find a home. And in this moment, there's going to be so many places that we need so many people.

Now is the time to make sure that you are carrying a torch.

Part of that, for me going forward, and I'm trying to start doing this more, is thinking about what I really want on the other side of this. Because there is going to be another side, whether it's tomorrow or in 50 years.

What kind of a world do we want to have?

And putting your mind to work trying to figure that out. Where your lane is, where you think you can contribute, that is going to be really important when that moment comes, because then we're absolutely going to have all hands on deck. But that part of it is going to be fun. So give a little bit of thought about, you know, what matters to you? What do you want your community to look like? What do you want your government to look like?

This is the moment we're in where we are getting to start to define that. And part of carrying a torch for the United States is trying to figure out what we want of it.

The image of many torches in the darkness, offered by a Tibetan political leader in exile, feels like a powerful way to begin this auspicious Year of the Fire Horse. Fire as responsibility. Fire as continuity. Fire as light carried forward through uncertainty and darkness.

That imagery will stay with me. So will the clarity I feel about the distinct torches being held in that story: Lobsang Sangay stewarding a the government of a people in exile. Heather Cox Richardson documenting history in real time. Kate Barr stepping into a bold new strategy of leadership.

Three torches. Three very different expressions of responsibility.

I am grateful to say that I feel clear about the torch I am holding.

It took years to understand it.

My mother’s definition of humility is, “to know your place and take it.” And the reality is that one’s place may be sweeping the floor in one moment, speaking on a stage the next, and then feeding people the next moment. Our roles and places in the web of life are evolving, adaptive, never just one thing.

But when we are clear in our center about who we truly are, we can know in a given moment what torch is ours to carry.

As vivid and timely as the torch imagery is, it is not usually how I speak about this in my own work.

I tend to frame it in greener terms.

I speak about ecosystem services.

Because in the dark, every torch looks similar. A small light against a vast night.

But in the living richness of an ecosystem, every contribution is wildly distinct.

A bee offers something different than a river.
A river offers something different than a forest.
A forest offers something different than soil microbes.

And yet each is essential to one another and to the Whole to which we all belong.

When I write of ecology, I am not turning to metaphor. I am turning to reality.

Ecology is the organizational structure of reality on this planet. The dominant narrative of humanity had us forget this for a time, but with the support of our indigenous relatives, the insights of systems theory, and our own embodied wisdom, we are remembering.

There is no place on this planet where ecosystem ends and something else begins. There are only gradients of relationship — soil to root, root to tree, tree to atmosphere, atmosphere to ocean, ocean to human, human to human, human to microbial cloud, microbial cloud to soil. Cells operate as ecosystems. Forests operate as ecosystems. Cities and cultures do too.

We are not outside of life.

We are expressions of life.

In every living system, each participant provides services, functions that sustain the larger web. Pollination. Nutrient cycling. Stabilization. Shelter. Aeration. Decomposition. None of these roles are interchangeable. None are incidental. Each exists in relationship to the Whole.

Life continues because everyone does their part.

High concentrations of diverse organisms offering unique ecosystem services simply by existing authentically to their unique capabilities is precisely how regeneration happens at every scale.

This is how forests regenerate after fire. This is how space dust turns into new solar systems. After mass extinctions, life has never ended; it reorganized into all of the beauty we now get to celebrate and love on the Earth, right now. We are the living legacy of that regeneration!

Collapse is not foreign to living systems, and it is never a final ending.
It is essential to how we evolve.

Strauss and Howe used the word regeneracy to describe the moment in a crisis cycle when a fragmented society wakes up from the spell of disempowerment and reclaims collective agency. When despair gives way to a vitalizing shared purpose. When we stop assuming someone else will fix things and begin rolling up our sleeves and finding our place in the work of our time.

We are living inside such a moment now.

The crises we face — ecological, institutional, economic, cultural — are not isolated failures. They are signs that the extractive paradigm has reached its limit. The shift underway is not primarily political or technological, it is ontological.

It is ecological.

We are being called home into a living-systems reality.

And in living systems, any chance of surviving, and certainly of thriving, requires us to find our unique contribution and give and receive from others in a dynamic web of mutual support.

Your torch, in this framing, is your ecosystem service.

It is the specific function your life is capable of offering within the larger web.

My teacher Pamela Mang at the Regenesis Institute says that “potential is always completely unique and absolutely limitless.”

The work of a Regenerative Practitioner in this lineage is about realizing the unique potential of a system at hand. Most of my peers at Regenesis do this at the scale of place: land and community projects. I do this work too, but it turns out that my unique and limitless potential comes most alive in work of helping my fellow humans remember our place in the family of life.

Everyone’s service is unique:

Some people metabolize complexity and translate it into clarity.
Some stabilize nervous systems.
Some build institutions.
Some grow food.
Some protect habitat.
Some document truth.
Some raise children who feel safe enough to think clearly.
Some design new economic models.
Some repair broken relationships.

Many of us will do some combination of all of these things, and more in our lifetime. What an honor.

In an extractive paradigm, we are trained to measure value through visibility, scale, or accumulation. Only the biggest scales seem to matter here.

In a living-systems paradigm, value is measured through contribution to stability, reciprocity, and renewal. Every scale matters. Every scale holds a pattern that ripples in and out to every other scale. Therefore, the work we do on ourselves is work for the collective, and it also is necessary preparation for holding new patterns as we do our bigger world in the world.

The question is not, How big is your torch?
The question is, What pattern can you bring that will nourish and strengthen the Whole?

Regeneration at scale requires stabilization at the level of the individual.

You cannot participate clearly in regeneracy if your nervous system is perpetually destabilized.4 You cannot shape the future if you are frozen in despair or trapped in reaction. You cannot provide your ecosystem service if you are unclear about who you truly are.

Regenerative Embodiment is the practice of aligning your body, perception, habits, and labor with the regenerative intelligence of living systems.

It is:

• Stabilizing your nervous system so you can think clearly.

• Clarifying your function so you can act deliberately.

• Training your attention away from spectacle and toward contribution.

• Rooting your work in place and relationship.

• Repatterning extraction within yourself so you are not unconsciously replicating what you say you oppose.

Regenerative Embodiment is the practice of stabilizing and expanding your experience of reality so that you can perceive your place in the web of life more clearly in the midst of chaos and transformation. It is an ongoing process of clarifying the function your life reliably provides within the larger web.

Regenerative Embodiment calls each of us to repattern where separation, neglect, and extraction live within ourselves so we are not unconsciously reproducing the very systems we critique.

Regeneracy, historically, is the moment when a society reclaims its agency.

Regeneration, biologically, is how life reorganizes after death or disruption.

Regenerative Embodiment is how each of us can participate in this emergence.

And here, I return to the Tibetan lineage from which this essay began.

In Tibetan Buddhism, there are many teachings about what it means to have a Precious Human Life.5

Not every human life is considered a Precious Human Life. There are humans that are born into conditions without freedom, agency, or access to wisdom. It’s important to note here that these lives are considered no less precious in value, but the framing of a Precious Human Life is about what you can do with your life, how you can enact and live from a place of genuine wisdom.

The ability to discern, to reflect, to choose, to alleviate suffering, to cultivate wisdom, to act intentionally within interdependence. These are skills we can cultivate with our Precious Human Lives.

To be born human is statistically rare.

To be a human, alive during a civilizational turning point is rarer still.

Even more rare is to be a human, alive during a civilizational turning point, with enough spaciousness and safety in your day to be able to sit and read and think deeply about who you are here to be, who you choose to be, at this time.

None of us can carry every torch. None of us can hold up the whole ecosystem.

But when we each find, and serve, our unique gifts, the ecosystem regenerates.

This is happening at many scales, in many places, all around the world.

Will you find your place, and take it?

If you want a place to start, the Reality Reorientation Experiment is a supportive process designed to help you reconnect, right where you are, with your own embodied wisdom through the wisdom of the Living World. It’s completely free right now, and I invite you to begin this New Year by grounding into yourself in this way.

If you’re seeking clarity about your unique ecosystem services, what you can uniquely offer in these times, or reconnecting with your Authentic Self in a time of transition, I would be honored to support you with Regenerative Wayfinding. For a limited time I’m experimenting with offering this at a 50% discount to expand the field of who I am able to work with.

And if this message resonates, help it travel. Share it. Quote it. I am open to showing up to conversations, podcasts, or communities where it can serve. Living systems grow through relationship. I want to see this year light up the unique and limitless potential of every single person we share this world with, that we all can find our unique ecosystem services and contribute in our own way, in our own place, to the regeneracy that is so deeply needed planet-wide.

Thank you for being a part of this emergence.

And there are many of us who sense that it can be something deeper, and we long to access something that is rarely taught or spoken about, but which we know, with a longing deep in our bellies, is possible.

We sense deeply that sex can be a source of greater pleasure and greater personal power than we’ve yet to experience, and that inevitably (and justifiably) scares us. Because, well, look at *gesturing broadly* all of this.

The ultra powerful, who rise to power because we live in a culture which incentivizes the development of narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies have (to all of our surprise, I know) gotten it twisted. Sex is a source of life force, but life force does not get transferred through extraction, it circulates, infinitely regeneratively, where there is love.

For those feeling frozen or uncertain of what the fuck to do in the midst of all of this, wrote a great piece on Wednesday, with a lot of useful guidance for what any of us, especially men, can do on multiple dimensions: internally, interpersonally, institutionally, and intergenerationally.
You can read that piece here.

The waves will keep on coming.

We need to do all that we can to be human in these crises, to feel deeply, to love courageously, to imagine what real justice could look like, to imagine what a life-affirming future would require, and to go ahead and build it.

This is the work of Regeneracy, and there is no limit to the diverse and beautiful ways we all can contribute to it.

Whoever we are, whatever our talents, wherever we live, there is something meaningful we can do, and we can generally do it best if we are resourced and embodied.

And one of the best tools we have available to us, truly, is sex.

Profoundly loving, deeply patient sex.

This can be with your beloved, with someone you trust, or with yourself, alone.

There are many ways to do this. But I want you to know that making time for loving, slow, patient, care-fueled sex is not a distraction from the dumpster fire that is raging in the wider world.

Sex is a powerful tool to reclaim our life-force, to come home to our bodies and our authentic selves, to feel deeply, to imagine open-heartedly, and to find an infinite well of love for the world.

I think it’s a bit funny that this is my first essay after updating my Substack name to include the Rev. part, publicly owning the fact that I am indeed an Ordained Interspiritual Minister. That makes it even more important to me to talk about sex. Because far too many of us are living with a massive amount of religious trauma that fractured our relationship with sex from safety, from sanctity, and from virtue. Repairing that rupture is a special passion of mine.

I am here to tell you, with my whole heart, that sex is sacred, sex is healing, sex is playful, sex is and can and should be resourcing the Regeneracy in all of our lives.

I had a whole section here about the systemic problems that what I’m writing about here can address, but I chose to take it out because most of us are all too aware. I want reading this to nourish your nervous system so let’s step away from problem and into potential.

Regeneration Requires Embodiment

Regeneration is not only about land, food systems, or economics. It is also about bodies. About nervous systems. About how we relate to pleasure, pain, and one another. After a decade of collaboration and cross-pollination throughout many different sectors of the regenerative movement, I am more convinced than ever that we must turn the regenerative lens to the body and our relationships for the integrity of this paradigm shift to truly root into the ground of reality.

In my work, I’ve begun naming what I do with my clients and my educational processes as Regenerative Embodiment; the integration of the somatic, the spiritual, the sexual, and the systemic dimensions of our lives. We weave it all together, and the insight and wisdom and healing that flows from my clients and students helps me to see the potential we all hold, every single day.

The premise is simple:

We cannot regenerate a world while remaining shut down from sensation.
We cannot regenerate a world while dissociated from our life force.
We cannot regenerate a world while disconnected from love.

Sexuality is not peripheral to this. It is central.

Loving, Patient Sex

When I say “sex” here, I am not talking about what is modeled for us in mainstream culture. I am not talking about speed, intensity, performance, conquest, or release as an endpoint. I am talking about sex that is loving and patient enough to allow the body to feel safe again.

This kind of sex may unfold slowly, over months or years. It may involve long periods of simply being present with sensation, without pushing toward outcome. It may look quiet, gentle, even ordinary from the outside. And it can be profoundly healing.

This is true whether you are partnered or not.

For those who are partnered, this means prioritizing time to be together in a way that is neither rushed nor utilitarian. Creating a ceremonial space where you can slow down and be present with each other’s bodies, hearts, hopes, and longings. Talking about the world. Talking about what feels unbearable. Talking about what could be possible. Talk about the world your hearts long to create, and find a way to co-create that.

For those who are not partnered, this practice is no less available. It doesn’t even need to resemble what you might normally think of as masturbation. In our work, we reframe it as somatic self-pleasure: learning how to meet your own body with patience, attention, and care. Awakening sensation slowly and safely. Allowing trust to rebuild in the nervous system. We add to this embodied visualization meditations that give framing and supportive ground for your own wisdom and visions for the future to grow.

There is a baseline understanding of sexual anatomy from a nervous system perspective that makes a huge difference in how you approach pleasure with yourself and others. Techniques that are developed from that place have the power to bring about tremendous personal sexual healing.

So much potential is in the simplest principles: how to slow down, how to stay present, how to feel more through all of your senses, how to move your life force energy through you with awareness, intention, and reclaimed personal power.

Rather than sex as escapism or distraction, what if we experienced it as nourishment for the deep and necessary work required in this world right now?

We cannot effectively regenerate a collapsing culture while remaining braced in our most intimate spaces.

If sex is rushed, dissociated, performative, pressured, or numb, it reinforces the same extraction logic that is running the planet and our society into rapid decay, and exhausting each of us in our daily lives. Extraction requires the body to override its own pace and wisdom. It starves us of sensation. No wonder those at the highest levels of power have to turn to the worst depravity to feel something.

When we are already living inside systems that extract our time, our attention, our labor, and our energy, the last place we can afford to be disconnected is in our own bodies.

Loving, patient sex is not indulgent, it is nourishment for the integrity of the world to come.

Everything I am talking about here is essentially about applying the core principles of somatic healing directly to your sex life.

• Slow down to the pace of your nervous system.

• Track sensation without forcing outcome.

• Notice where you’re bracing and soften into it.

• Establish safety before asking your own body or another’s to open.

• Stay present with pleasure without rushing to climax.

These are somatic healing skills, applied where they are most needed, in the part of our bodies, and the part of our lives that carries the most ambient, collective, ancestral, and present-life trauma: our sex lives.

I believe firmly that each of us can become our own sexual somatic healer, whether alone or partnered.

We each can developing the capacity to meet our bodies with patience, curiosity, and skill, instead of pressure or performance.

This is why we created the EDGE.

If you feel disconnected from your desire, in a rut or stuck in patterns that don’t serve your full potential for pleasure, connection, and intimacy, we made this for you. If you have difficulty with arousal, or know that there is something deeper and more sacred that is possible for you in your sexuality, we made this for you.

If you sense that you are holding the pain of the world in your body, and you want to work with your sexuality to resource your life to heal, transmute, and regenerate the world, we definitely made this for you, be sure you make it to phase six, you will love it.

Inside the EDGE, we teach you how to integrate somatic healing principles into your sexuality in a practical, grounded way. Theory and practice. Meditations and techniques. Sexual anatomy from a nervous system perspective. Exercises that help you to heal the past and create better futures, while you’re moving with orgasmic awareness. It’s a framework that brings the somatic, the relational, the spiritual, and the sexual together, all with ample space for your own wisdom, discernment, and deep listening to your nervous system’s needs baked in.

We created it to empower you to become your own sexual somatic healer.

And what you practice deeply with yourself, you can bring powerfully to any partners you may have, present or future.

It’s not a cohort, and it’s not time bound. It’s a course designed for the privacy and pacing of your most honest, intimate needs. That said, the art being shared in our Connect + Share space, and the conversations we are having in our Office Hours are incredible. This work attracts some remarkably wise people, and we are honored to be cultivating a pocket universe of collective wisdom around this work.

We know that when sensation returns, imagination flourishes. Pleasure and the erotic are essential for resourcing us for the present and creating better futures. When eros moves through us, something powerful shifts in how we move through the world.

Our sex lives should never be a site of extraction, they should always be a well of our life force infinitely regenerating.

The Beta phase of the EDGE is ending on Valentines Day. Until then, it’s still 44% off, and we are excited to welcome you in!

I have one more essay I am working on (Star Trek is for Lovers over at ) before I sign off for a day of art and love for Valentines Day tomorrow, and you are welcome to go get nerdy with me there.

If anything in this essay resonated, please know how welcome you are over at EMUNAH and at the EDGE.

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” — David Graeber1

If you don’t want to read this whole essay, please just read this next paragraph. Screenshot it, share it, make this idea your own:

Regeneracy2 is the moment in a crisis cycle when the tide starts to turn because ordinary people stop waiting, start building, and begin cohering into shared purpose. Historically we haven’t seen it clearly until after the crisis is over (and when we’re in the crisis it seems like it will never end), so naming it now is a powerful advantage that our ancestors did not have. If you’re doing the work of revillaging, building mutual aid, practicing democracy, creating alternative systems of care, protecting the vulnerable, growing food, caring for land, telling the truth, stabilizing a nervous systems, repairing relationships, or making art that helps people stay human, all of that is Regeneracy. If you aren’t doing any of these things, start now, wherever you are, whoever you are, with whatever you have. Find others. We are everywhere.

For a menu of options to help you take your next steps, head to the end of this essay.

Take this idea. Experiment with it. See the pattern emerging all around the world. Find your place within it. It can’t be owned or made proprietary because it’s a property of living systems. And the more people who find their place within the Regeneracy and take it, the faster we move from isolated efforts to history-shifting coherence, resonance, and ultimately the possibility of a greater harmony among humanity and within the Living World than any of us have had any reason to believe might be possible.3

I am drawing from a few primary interpretive frameworks in my analysis. If you are interested to know more about where this analysis is coming from, please see the following footnotes for more context on the original authors of these frameworks: Strauss & Howe’s Generational Cycle (The Fourth Turning)4; Barbara Risman’s Gender as a Social Structure5; Graves, Beck, and Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics6; and Ken Wilbur’s Integral Theory7. If you would like to hear more of my own take on these interconnected frameworks, please let me know in the comments and I will gladly write more detailed explorations of them.

If history teaches us anything about what we are living through, it’s that the Regeneracy phase of the Crisis brings about surprising results, results that cannot be predicted because they are emergent properties of a critical mass of people responding and cooperating uniquely for the benefit of all.

This is the first time, in all of history’s massive, world shaking crises, that we have had the benefit of seeing the pattern clearly. In seeing the pattern clearly, we can find our place within it.

Call for collaboration: I have some clear visions and briefs for posters that can be made for physical and digital distribution of the ideas contained in this essay but I do not have the skills to do them justice. If you have graphic design skills and are open to collaboration on this, please reach out.

I don’t have a budget to resource this kind of creative collaboration right now, but if anyone reading this would like to contribute, you can Venmo me at: GangaDevi or Cashapp me at $GangaDeviBraun with the note “For the Regeneracy” and it will go toward resourcing collaborations to get this idea out there. You can of course also explore the courses and services I have on my website to be in a mutual exchange that will help you deepen into the inner dimensions of this work.

Nearly seven years ago, I was speaking on a panel at the United Nations in Bangkok. It was the second day of a week-long gathering convened by the Global Peace Initiative of Women on the Inner Dimensions of Climate Change. The room was full of young ecologists, organizers, policy thinkers, and cultural workers from around the world, people who had already committed their lives to responding to planetary crisis.

During one of the panels, a delegate from Germany spoke about his work as resistance, which is of course a common framing when we’re talking about the work of disrupting and redirecting the inertia of the dominant world order that has caused so many of the ongoing and interconnected crises we are facing.

It gave rise to an ongoing conversation for the rest of the week, one that I had already been having in my own life for years, about the language we use to frame the work of our time. There were many different insightful opinions that week from delegates from every continent about whether resistance feels like an accurate description of the work that many of us have dedicated our lives to.

I am curious to hear, what does the word resistance evoke in your body?

For me, it brings up a tension in my belly, a heaviness on my shoulders, and a clenching in my pelvis. Note how it feels for you. Please feel welcome to share in the comments below, I am genuinely curious.

The language we use to rally around ideas and possibilities matters so much. It shapes whether the people who are less likely to initially see themselves in the movements that are arising stay on the sidelines or jump in to be involved. As I see amazing work, organizing, and training emerging, like Minneapolis based Singing Resistance (instagram here, toolkit here), I do ask myself:

Is resistance the most accurate or most effective, life-giving frame for the work?8

Resistance, by its nature, keeps the thing being resisted at the center of the story. Sometimes this is warranted to expose injustices and rally energy to slow or stop abuses. But having a range of vocabulary to describe our collective efforts is vital.

Regeneracy, by contrast, centers the life that wants to emerge. It asks a different set of questions. Not only how do we stop what is harmful? but what systems, relationships, and ways of living are we actively building so that harmful structures lose their grip and relevance altogether?

I believe that that is what most people operating from the frame of resistance often mean, but I think we can cohere around clearer and stronger language, and in that language, we can welcome a much wider swath of the population that feels uneasy with the language of resistance or revolution, but who are eager to be a part of making meaningful change. These people have skills, passions, resources, relationships to offer, and by creating clear on-roads for them, and together developing pathways to futures that are more life-affirming for all of us, we will get there more effectively together.

Especially in places that are relatively stable right now, we have an opportunity and responsibility to do the work that those actively and necessarily resisting systemic state violence cannot afford to do.

I want to be clear, I am not here to shit on people using the term resistance. I have no interest really in arguing about this, our energy is too precious. We’re on the same page. However, I do very much want to spread the framing of Regeneracy as far and wide as possible because we have a powerful opportunity to coordinate together in a way that has never been done before, and the language and framing we use matters very, very much.

If you’ve read my work before, you will know that I talk about regeneration often. I teach and speak publicly about regeneration, I am a trained and certified regenerative practitioner, and I support my 1:1 clients with Regenerative Embodiment, including many incredible regenerative leaders, and including many people who have no idea where to start with regeneration, but know they need to begin by being more present to the wisdom of the body and the wisdom of the earth to show them the way.

But the framing of Regeneracy doesn’t actually come from any of that work. I didn’t even know until a few months ago that this is a term that historians Strauss & Howe used to describe the consistent pattern that gets us out of the worst crises American culture has seen, again and again.

If you are new to the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, here’s a super quick overview of the basic pattern, though please know there is a lot more depth explored in their books (see footnote 4):

In Strauss and Howe’s account, the Crisis phase intensifies until the existing social and economic order can no longer sustain itself. Institutions lose legitimacy. Norms break down. The gap between the story we’ve been telling about who we are and the reality of how power actually operates becomes impossible to ignore.

This is where we are, especially if we are willing to face the indefensible realities both of what is happening in concentration camps here in the United States, and what has been going on for decades among the global elite as we are seeing in ever more gruesome accounts from the Epstein files. We are all waking up to the reality that pretty much every crisis we are facing has been manufactured by the Epstein Class to keep themselves in power, and to extract as much money and energy from all of us as they can. Even the way they are releasing the files should be widely considered to be psychological warfare, and we must not go numb or hopeless, we must help each other stay connected to our humanity and our knowledge that it doesn’t have to be this way.

We must allow ourselves to feel the depth of outrage that these revelations call for so deeply that we shape a new world together from that collective energy.

The Crisis only ever ends when things are revealed to be so bad that any attempt to renegotiate for normalcy becomes entirely untenable, and public will becomes strong enough and organized enough that massive change cascades throughout every dimension of society until the entire order is dramatically changed.

Historically, this is the phase when the worst behavior of the collapsing systems tends to surface. This is where we are.

We are in the stretch of the Crisis where it’s getting harder and harder to stick our heads in the sand, and any idea of the status quo being maintained is viscerally sickening to anyone paying attention.

And it is precisely at this point that the window for regeneracy opens.

Regeneracy doesn’t emerge from everyone suddenly agreeing on ideology, but because the reality of our situation clarifies our priorities and we begin to coordinate from that clarity.

As public will begins to cohere around specific shared messaging, strategies, and coordination effort, eventually someone, or some constellation of people and institutions, will earn the mandate to carry a dramatic restructuring forward.

This mandate can be used in very different ways. It could very well be used to consolidate power upward through fear and exclusion if we continue to be misdirected as we have been for the last ten years. Or it can be used to reorganize society toward greater care, participation, and resilience, dramatically restructuring our laws and norms and standards of how we take care of one another, who is protected, and who gets to benefit from the wealth of this world.

Which direction it takes is not predetermined.

We are still a few years out from that climax moment of the Crisis.

The outcome depends on what we will have practiced, imagined, and built before that culminating moment arrives.

What Regeneracy Looks Like Right Now

Regeneracy cannot be something we wait for, keeping ourselves safe and quiet until the crisis passes.

We must participate in it in every way we can, as ourselves, where we are, with what we have to offer. It will be different for everyone.

Participation means building the internal, relational, and collective capacity to face reality without collapsing, and to act from that groundedness when any opportunity to contribute to a more caring, coordinated, loving world appears.

Each of the following dimensions are, of course, deeply interconnected with one another. Choose a starting place and grow from there:

1. INTERNAL: Capacity to Stay Present with Reality

We are living through a widespread confrontation with unbearable truths and a growing need for inner capacity to hold them without collapsing, dissociating, or outsourcing responsibility.

Embodying regeneration from the inside out allows us to access a deep well of life force energy to bring to every dimension of our lives. This internal cultivation is magnetic, and it resonates with others, calling forward new friends and collaborators who also seek to live from a place that is grounded, loving, and life-affirming. That pattern integrity ripples outward to every other domain.

Regenerative capacities to cultivate:

• Reconnection with Your Body and the Earth
  This is primary. Reweave the relationship between your nervous system and the Living World every day. Find your rhythms and rituals and allies in the Living World exactly where you are right now.

• Trauma Resolution Skills
  Learn how trauma responses live in patterns in your own body, and how to metabolize them, individually and collectively. This will open up greater responsiveness, mental clarity, pleasure, physical strength, and restfulness.

• Awareness of Psychological Warfare
  Understand that fear, outrage, despair, and distraction are actively weaponized through media, government, and social platforms. Learn how to take in the horrors of our time both without numbing/looking away and without being consumed by them. Develop a dynamic system of discernment, and know when and how to come back to your center when you feel destabilized.

• Rest
  This one can be hard to cultivate, justify, or fully embrace until you see the bigger picture of how chronic burnout and extraction fuel the systems we are seeking to transform. has been leading this conversation for a very long time, explore and support her work to go deeper.

• Connect with the Erotic as a Source of Power9
  Your erotic energy is your life force. Reclaim it. Whether through somatic sexual healing, or writing poetry, or dancing, or enjoying a ripe piece of fruit, or receiving the wisdom and guidance of our Black Womanist ancestors (see footnote), know that this life force exists within you as a source of power that will guide you to your greatest contributions to the Whole.

• Find your Teachers in the Living World
  For me this includes the oak trees surrounding my house, the cacao I drink every morning (and the incredible women who make it), the wind I feel on my skin when I get still enough to feel, the yarrow and mugwort growing in my garden, the light of the sun on the water, the moon, the gopher tortoises I share my home with and who share their homes with thousands of others, and I could go on and on. Find yours.

2. INTERPERSONAL: Trust, Repair, and Care

We all have a longing to experience real belonging. There has never been more discussion of how to revillage our lives and neighborhoods. People are doing it and sharing what they’re learning about how to care for and show up for one another more and more, even and especially in the midst of all of this fragmentation, polarization, and manufactured division.

Regenerative capacities to cultivate:

• Talk to People with Love
  Whether it’s the people you share a home with, your neighbors, your colleagues, service workers, or total strangers, practice communicating with a little bit more love and care every single day.

• Practice Depolarizing
  Learn how to communicate across difference without collapsing into false binaries or moral superiority.

• Repair as a Skill
  Practice acknowledging harm, making amends, and restoring trust in relationships, families, friendships, movements, and communities when rupture or harm inevitably arises.

• Unlearning Patterns of Domination and Harm
  In all of our interactions, and all of our relationships, old patterns we didn’t consciously choose can come up. Practice being lovingly aware of how you are impacting others, care for others’ sense of safety, comfort, and pleasure, learn to advocate for your own, and be willing to acknowledge when you have fallen into inherited patterns of harm. Return to repair when hurt inevitably shows up.

• Practicing Coherence Locally
  Small groups learning how to think, feel, and act together without central command are popping up everywhere. We can learn from one another. We can grow stronger together.

• Revillage Your Neighborhood
  Get to know your neighbors, and get to know their needs, visions, and realities. Share what you are going through. Find ways to help each other. Show up for one another a little bit more all the time. Get creative. is full of useful guidance and support in this arena.

3. INSTITUTIONAL: Reimagining Collective Life

The current collapse of trust in existing institutions is an opening that can usher in an unprecedented openness to redesign our institutions. We are facing constitutional crises and glaringly obvious gaps in our justice system, the system of checks and balances, and our ability to protect and provide for the most vulnerable among us, especially children.

We must reimagine what institutions can look like when the thriving of all children is centered and we must increase our participation in our current institutions with such a strong surge that we increasingly take the reins of power away from the abusers and hold our representatives at every level of government accountable.

Regenerative capacities to cultivate:

• Political Participation at Every Scale
  From hyperlocal to federal: contacting representatives, showing up, shaping agendas daily, not just during elections.

• Policy Imagination
  Learn how policy actually works and imagine radically more effective ways institutions could be structured based on your lived expertise. Share these ideas with others, and actively experiment with different ways they could become real and implemented.

• Civic Courage
  Know that it is not too late to run for something10, support a campaign for a candidate or policy you believe in, or step into leadership where you are. Follow and to find your place.

• Institutional Experimentation
  Cooperatives, commons, mutual aid networks, participatory governance, new economic models. Learn about them, experiment with them, see what’s possible! Check out the work of for regular reporting on what is happening in this arena and how to collaborate!

• Distributed Leadership
  Learn how to cultivate collective wisdom and distributed leadership. Models like circling, Sociocracy, Open Space Technology and Restorative Justice all hold keys to help us move beyond savior figures and toward systems that can actually serve the people.

• Understand and Begin Living into a Matriarchal Model
  So much of what I included in this all of these sections is what matriarchy looks like in action. Decondition yourself from any false equivalancy that tells you that matriarchy is just patriarchal dominance with women put on top. It is a complete transformation of the model of how we can organize ourselves, and men benefit from Matriarchy just as much as anyone.

4. INTERGENERATIONAL: Weaving Past and Future

We are intensely fragmented from the vitally important intergenerational relationships that hold within them the greatest potential for healing, wisdom, and effective longterm change making.

Unless you are in a stage of life where you are actively taking care of a child or an elder, how much time do you actually spend in their company? Meanwhile, those who are in that stage of life, are doing so in intense isolation and impossible pressures on our time, money, and energy.

By transitioning to a more intergenerationally integrated way of life beyond just the family unit, everyone will benefit, fewer people will fall through the cracks, and we will ensure that the future is actually better for our descendents.

Regenerative capacities to cultivate:

• Cultivate Relationships Across Generations
  Elders, children, and everyone in between connecting together beyond just biological family units.

• Truthful Storytelling
  Speaking honestly about what is happening in ways that do not terrorize or infantilize. Listening to stories of past times to help deepen understanding. Recording the realities of this time for future generations to understand.

• Future-Oriented Ethics
  Making choices today based on what would create a better life, and better world for future generations. Expanding this beyond thinking just of future human generations, considering the futures of all species that call this world home.

• Continuity of Care
  Being sure you are passing on skills, land stewardship, knowledge, and wisdom to future generations, not just legacies of trauma and deficit.

• Good Ancestor Practice
  Asking yourself what it would mean now, to become a good ancestor. Turning to your own ancestors for guidance and connection. Casting back and casting forward to inform your embodied wisdom and empowered agency right now.

One year ago this week, I wrote my first viral essay on Substack, “Villaging, not Homesteading: We’re Not Doing This Alone”.11 I published it around noon just as I was logging into my RegenIntel class where my brilliant friend was teaching a foundational course on Regenerative Principles. I spent the class listening, yes, engaging, yes, and also gardening, making little pots of tulsi and lemon balm for my neighbors to be able to garden for their mental health, enjoying a beautiful Florida February day in the cool air and sunshine.

It was the early days of this administration, and I wish I could say that I had no idea that any of the horrific things we are experiencing today would be happening. Like many, I saw the writing on the wall signaling the immense cruelty, economic hardship, and institutional collapse we were headed toward.

What I didn’t anticipate was that a year later nearly 20,000 people would have read my words, and that so many of those people would have reached out with examples of what they are doing, or what they are longing to be able to do in their own lives. The neighborhood scale revillaging work is one of many scales through which the Regeneracy is unfolding.

Every scale nourishes the others. Nothing is too small, and no vision is too bold.

Start where you are.

Updates from the ΛCΛDEMY:

In light of all of reality shifting all around us, we are in a phase of adjusting pricing for some of our offerings. Some of these changes have been a long time coming, some are experimental, all are in service to the integrity of our work. We want to be sure you know about it all so you can make informed choices while our offerings are at their lowest prices:

• In writing this essay, I’ve decided to place an experimental 50% discount on my Regenerative Wayfinding package for 1:1 exploration of your unique potential to contribute to the regeneracy. I will transparently say that I am not sure how long I will offer this discount, but I am eager to not just serve those who have been swimming in these waters for years, but also those who are just beginning to dive in. If that’s you, let’s go deep together.

• Our writing ritual workshop, BE the LOVE which we launched last week is now just $36. It’s a vitalizing and deeply supportive process for any love relationship in your life, whether it exists already or is something you are calling in. A healthy, supportive, and resourced love life is essential for the deep work of our times.

• Our six phase self-paced course the EDGE is our deep dive into the world of somatic sexual healing, teaching you to become your own best practitioner, rooted in a vision for a healed world. the EDGE has been offered for its first few months at a 44% discounted Beta rate which will be ending on Valentines Day.

  • You can purchase both the EDGE and BE the LOVE bundled together for just the current price of the EDGE here, also through Valentines Day.

• We genuinely hope you are finding love, connection, and meaningful contribution in these times, whatever that looks like for you.

It was incredibly fun to discuss the behind the scenes of our business through a framework that can actually meet the depth of consideration of interdependence that we bring to all of our work.

Enjoy!

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Today is a Holy Day.

The moon is ripe and full in Leo, and that is not all.

Today is Imbolc, a sacred cross-quarter day to my Gaelic ancestors, the midpoint between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. It is not about what is blooming, but what is stirring beneath the surface of the Earth, the movement and preparation in the magic dark that will bring the fruit of the year to come.

And tonight at Sundown we welcome Tu B’Shvat, which I think is my favorite of all of the Jewish Holy Days. It is the New Year of the Trees! Just like Imbolc, it is signified by the stirring of life and creation beneath the surface. It marks the moment that the sap in the trees of the Earth and the Tree of Life begins to reverse course, and move from the roots back toward the branches. In the Holy Land, this is the time of year when the earliest buds on the almond trees begin to emerge, delicate and white and extraordinarily beautiful.

Both traditions, rising from the connection of two different peoples in two different lands thousands of years ago point to the same message from the Living World today:

There is more life flowing than what our eyes can see.

Love is the Ground

When the light of the morning sun pours through the quickly moving leaves of the trees outside my window, it reminds me of my fourth trimester, my many months postpartum that began just between the Fall Equinox and Winter Solstice. This is the first year I’ve noticed that the quality of light is the same now as it is in October, an observation that brings a massive swelling of gratitude and sensory memory.

If you have ever had a season of life in which you were rapidly transformed by love, you will know that the music that was with you during that time will always bring you back to that experience. For me, the album that was my constant companion during that season was Love is the Ground by Rena Branson named for the beautiful words that flow from her song Ahava Raba:

I offer this music, and this blessing, on this Holy Day.

Within these traditions (one I come from, and one I have loved myself into) the subtext is the same:

Soil.
Ground.
Roots.
The conditions that make life possible.

Nothing grows without ground.
But not all ground is nourishing.

Some soil holds water, warmth, and life.
Some soil is compacted, depleted, or eroded, and life can have a hard time flourishing from it.

This is true in ecosystems, and it is also true in our lives.

Love is the ground from which the rest of our life grows.

Love truly is the relational soil from which everything else grows.

We see this clearly when our lives are so new and fragile; babies who are provided all of the technical needs of life but not loved can fail to thrive. But I believe this is true at any stage of life.

If we want stability and expansion in our lives, healthy, dynamic, living love is a vital condition for flourishing.

When I talk about love, I truly mean it in an expansive sense. Romantic, familial, spiritual, communal, embodied love, all of these determine whether life feels generative or exhausting, rooted or constantly washed away. They shape what we have the capacity to tend, to offer, and to serve.

As Seth wrote this morning, love is a skill. Like soil, it must be cultivated. It must be given structure, it must be fed, it must be alive.1

If love is the ground, then the question becomes simple:

What kind of ground are you living on?

Where is your love life nourishing you; giving you strength, clarity, and capacity?

Where is it depleting you; quietly eroding your energy, your confidence, your future?

These essential questions lay the groundwork for the rest of our lives.
This is why we created BE the LOVE.

It’s an Embodied Writing Ritual you can do tonight with the power of the Full Moon and these overlapping Holy Days to shed light on all that you need to clarify and take responsibility for in order to have the love you long for in your life.

BE the LOVE has been developed over years of work 1:1 with clients and friends who have had incredible results. Marriages have been begun and strengthened, old patterns composted, new futures seeded from this work.

And though it was developed initially to support deep health and clarity for romantic love relationships, we realized while creating it that it can be equally powerful for the love between parent and child, chosen family, friendship, community, and the relationship you’re in with your own body. Any kind of love relationship would benefit from this beautiful process we welcome you into.

BE the LOVE is self-paced and repeatable. It isn’t a replay of a live workshop. It’s a guided experience you can move through step by step, with short videos, structured writing phases, and opening and closing meditations to help your body stay present as insight emerges.

If you’re feeling the call to tend the ground tonight, you’re warmly invited.

BE the LOVE

Note: BE the LOVE is entering our catalogue of courses and mini-courses that will generally always be available, however for a limited time between now and Valentines Day we are offering it bundled with our course the EDGE which is an incredibly powerful resource for sexual somatic healing. If you have been considering the EDGE, we encourage you to jump in now while you can save $108 total on both.

We’ll be talking about this, and much more tomorrow when we go live at 2pm Eastern Time. We hope you’ll join us!

Yesterday, Venus and Mercury conjoined in Aquarius,1 giving a beautiful boost to our inter-networked communication and coordination efforts, fueled by love. And I believe that our democratic systems are getting a meaningful boost from the powerful outpouring and organizing rooted in love that is moving, powerfully and decentralized, through the body of our nation right now.

Around the world you can find the wisdom that there are two primary drivers of choice in this world:

Love or Fear

Love can turn into many things, like care, creativity, patience, and also urgent action when needed. Righteous anger in the face of harm. Protection. Sacrifice for others. Nourishing others. Showing up for the sanctity of life.

Fear can turn into many things as well. Violence, avoidance, complicity, dehumanizing others for one’s own sense of safety and security. It can look like hate, in fact we can think that hate is the primary driver of someone’s choices, but peeling back the layers, we can always find fear.

Back in November of 2016, my Restorative Justice mentor Dr. Mara Schiff had been planning a Nonviolent Communication retreat with Dr. Mikhail Lyubansky for months. It just so happened that the weekend it was scheduled for was the weekend directly following the election. I remember feeling disoriented going into this weekend, overwhelmed with the pain and disappointment I felt. I could only imagine that so many of this country’s voting electorate would have voted for Trump because they hated people of color, immigrants, and women so much that they were willing to go for the most vile among us.

I carried this overwhelming need to make sense of the moment into the weekend, and somewhere in the second day, as we were deepening into the NVC principle that we all have needs, that all true needs are valid and universal, and that where we get messed up is in being more attached to the strategy we believe will best fulfill that need than being willing to creatively explore other strategies that might in fact work better for more people.

This of course is easiest to understand, apply, and experiment with in our most intimate relationships. In our marriages, with our parents and children, with friends. But I couldn’t shake the need in my mind to understand the 62 million people2 who voted for…what exactly? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. But as we deepened into our understanding of universal needs and the mismatched strategies we attach to them, it clicked.

A sense of safety and security is certainly a universal need.

This is a need that far too many people have been denied for far too long. And the general strategy of the system we live within is that those who are afforded a sense of safety and security are actually doing so at the expense of others. That is not a winning strategy. That is not the way things need to be.

And for so many who sought their own security in whiteness, in maleness, and in domination over others,3 eight years of the Obama presidency followed by the elevation of a woman to the highest office in the land was too much. The violence by which White Male Dominant America held on to power for so long is so alive in the bodies and imaginations of those who seek refuge there, that they cannot imagine that they would be safe if some of that domination loosened. If we gave other ways of trying things a chance.4

So they turn to fear. They choose from fear. They act from fear. Fear shows up as bigotry, as pompousness, as stupid facebook posts, as an unwillingness to admit that maybe you were wrong.

But at the bottom of it is fear. Fear that you won’t be safe, fear that when “they” gain power, they’ll do to you what has been done to “them”.

But the reality is, there is no “them.” There is only us. All of us. Completely tied together. More and more people are showing up that way, waking up to the reality of our interdependence, refusing the lie of separation, living from love.

And everywhere I look, I am astonished by the love on display in the face of overwhelmingly cruel state violence. And from where I am sitting, it seems that love is winning the long game.

Every day, I see videos of people (many of whom have never shown up to a protest before) showing up with love in whatever way they can. Some are directly addressing ICE agents in their neighborhoods to protect their neighbors. Some are camping out outside of detention centers to care for those who are being released, phoneless and shoeless, into the biting cold. They supply coats, socks, shoes, burner phones, nourishment, a ride, and whatever they can provide to these victims of Stephen Miller’s horrific quotas for ICE arrests.

Hundreds gather in song, to sing their resistance, to sing their love. For those singing together, I’d bet good money that this is not the full extent of their actions, but a deep and powerful soul nourishment that fuels greater connection, coordination, and ideas of how to help from a place of greater love.

I don’t want to be misleading in saying that love is winning as if there is not a very long road ahead of us to make that so.

The fear-driven electorate has enabled the cruel billionaire class to enact an agenda of ethnic cleansing and systematic stripping away of our rights and freedoms within this country. Countering this will take a broader coalition than ever, more deeply committed to democracy in action than ever. We will need to initiate profound changes to the way we do government, the way we care for one another in this country, for generations to come. The potentials of this genuinely excite me, and the urgency and importance of this is just as big as the biggest horrors we are perpetrating as a country, which we must tell the truth about.

When Love is Absent, Cruelty Creeps In

The systematic cruelty happening within the United States’ concentration camps (yes, that is literally, by definition what the detention centers are) is just beginning to be grasped by the public, and I am sure it will be years before we face the extent of it.

The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas where children are screaming to be released, is holding thousands of children under extremely inhumane conditions, and precisely 0% of the prisoners there are criminals.

On Wednesday, lawmakers visited Liam Ramos, whose cruel arrest has captured the heart of this country, and as a mother of a young child, I feel extremely alarmed to see the listlessness in his sleeping body in his father’s arms. He is defaulting to the freeze response, a trauma response common in children, especially when there literally is no where to flee to. I understand that his mother is pregnant and millions of miles away. My heart aches for them, and for the thousands and thousands of other families whose names we don’t know, but who are suffering just as harshly.

I have thought, every day this week, about how Anne Frank was killed not by a bullet, nor by a gas chamber, but by an illness she contracted in similar conditions to those found at Dilley and the other concentration camps being constructed and expanded around the country. I take a deep breath and I commit more deeply to the kind of person I know I must be during these times.

We have a lot of work to do to save the soul of this country, of our communities, of the world from these horrors. We must do all that we can to save the lives of these children and keep these families intact.

This is the work of love.

And again, I am seeing love, pouring out, everywhere I look.

I am seeing love in neighbors bringing groceries to their neighbors.

I am seeing love in those who are house-bound keeping an eye out the window and pressing the alarm on their car when they see ICE on their block, initiating the cascade of care that protects people every day.

I am seeing love in people who never usually speak out about politics finding the courage to do so, now. That is amazing to me.

I am seeing love in the clear eyed messages from legal experts informing ICE agents that they are being lied to, that they are being used as pawns. That they will likely not have immunity for the crimes they are committing. That the statute of limitations for murder is never.

I am seeing love in the 300+ likes on a comment I left on one such post requesting that the information be reformatted into a zine style design that I can print dozens of to leave around town, hoping to protect people where I live from being recruited by ICE and having to face the long term moral and legal consequences that would come with such a choice.

I am seeing love in the pressure created by so many phone calls from constituents that eight republican senators yesterday (including, shockingly, my own) voted the DHS spending portion of the current budget bill to be carved out, allowing funding to flow to education, health, transportation, and more, with a big two week question mark on funding for DHS. If we keep the pressure up, there’s a chance DHS could shut down for a time, without the rest of the government shutting down. This is a very big deal and evidence that participating in democracy still works.5

I see love in people participating in democracy in so many ways. Legislatively, yes, and in educating one another, and in caring for one another. It is so beautiful.

I see love everywhere.

The Work of Regeneration is the Work of Democracy

Carol Sanford, whose life was devoted to Regenerative Paradigm transition, and who recently transitioned herself from elder to ancestor, wrote extensively about how the work of regeneration is the work of democracy:

So much of her work can be boiled down to enabling more capacity from within each of us to think, choose, and act in ways that strengthen the Living Systems we belong to.” and participate in.

The beauty of this is that we can practice this at so many different scales throughout our lives, and when we become clearer and stronger in one dimension, we can then translate that to more effective application in other dimensions of our lives.

I am blessed beyond belief to have clients and students around the world who are doing incredible work in the world, whether in their local communities or on the world stage. And the work I do with them often focuses on the dimensions of their lives closest to home:

Their relationship with themselves, their loved ones, and the living world around them.

Those of us who keenly feel the pain of the world, and feel a deep obligation to help where we can, need to be nourished by love if we are to enact love in the world.

This week, I taught Regenerative Design to the visionary cohort at the Design Science Studio. We had a really rich and beautiful two and a half hours together going deep on the principles of Regeneration in Living Systems to inform how they approach the design of their incredible projects.

The way I teach always weaves a lot of lived, embodied inquiry throughout, and this was no different. I asked them some key questions along the way to help inform how Regenerative Design can effectively take root in their life’s work.

What came up however was, overwhelmingly, in the dimension of their personal life. Grief and love and loss and longing. We tend to compartmentalize this dimension of our life away from our professional work, our civic work, our work in “the world“. But our lives are the substrate from which everything else grows, and nothing nourishes or drains that foundation more than our love life.

Living with the pain of heartbreak, frustration, loss, or disappointment. Wondering if you will ever have the deep experience of truly mutual partnership that you long for, these feelings can be present whether you are partnered or solo. These feelings can take up a tremendous amount of psychic space. This destabilizes our internal locus of control, our sense of embodied agency.

Contrast this with a grounded clarity about who you are, the unique and beautiful qualities you offer in relationship, what you long for (and how you can be self-responsible for that), all of this creates the confidence and magnetism that can shape the healthiest relationships of your life, nourishing your body, mind, and spirit to do what you uniquely are here to do in the world.

This is what I want for everyone.

And this is what we’ve created in a new resource we released to our community yesterday, BE the LOVE.6 It’s a powerful process we’ve guided many of our 1:1 clients through that has profoundly changed their lives forever, and we are excited to now be able to deliver it in a way that anyone can experience from a deeply embodied, grounded place even if you’re brand new to our work.

Choosing love over fear is a practice.

It takes courage to stay present when despair would be easier. To speak when silence feels safer. To act when the outcome isn’t guaranteed. Fear asks us to shrink, to hand our agency over to outrage, exhaustion, or hopelessness.

Love requires that we remain available to one another, to responsibility, to the shaping of our shared world.

But courage is not an individual achievement. It’s contagious.

Every time one of us chooses consciously to show up, to speak clearly, to act with care, it makes that choice more visible and more possible for others. The more people who do this, the easier it becomes to do. This is how norms shift.

The Overton Window is shifting in realtime. Speaking up becomes less risky as our numbers swell. The window to speak up is now, and if we do so effectively, if we keep on going, we will only get stronger.

The fifth stage of fascism7 holds two pathways: radicalization or entropy of power. They are crashing out. We are gaining traction. We can win this.

Every time we choose agency over despair, relationship over isolation, love over fear, we are shaping the world in realtime.

My hope is that anyone who reads this feels a little more courage in your body. A little more trust in your capacity to choose. A little more connection to what is possible, not just in the world, but in your own life, right where you are.

This is how change happens. Not all at once. But together, with love.

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:

Cells
Soil
Bodies
Families
Communities
Organizations
Cultures
Gardens
Forests
Superorganisms
Fungal networks
Bioregions
This whole incredible planet we call home
Galaxies
Cosmos

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):

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.

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.1 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.2

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?