From Degenerative to Regenerative Cycles

Breaking degenerative systems does not happen by dismantling structures alone. This is what revolutions do: we kill a king and elect other leaders. After a while, things take the same turn. Because the system exists in the eyes — and the nervous systems — of those who build it. If the people who create new systems have not addressed the degenerative patterns within themselves, they will reproduce what they already know, the way they have learned to make themselves safe.

The world leaders, the managers, the teachers, the operators across every sector: most are functioning under the pressure of scarcity and existential threat, playing the negative-sum game -“If I don’t, someone else will.” - and building systems in the image of that fear.

Evolving to regenerative leadership

Elevating individuals to pedestals is a transfer of expectations that leads to the appropriation of responsibilities that do not belong to only one person. At present we expect only individual leaders to take decisions that affect billions. We did not come here all at once, but by recreating the same patterns for a couple of millennia. Not only
does this model expect leaders to perform and to take public praise or blame, it detaches us completely from our own decision-making and authority.

Regeneration of the self is the breaking of the degenerative cycle.

This means creating conditions in which individuals can regulate their nervous systems and find enough safety to act from who they are, rather than react to constant perceived threat.

The regenerative economy is evolving and not primarily through literature, which is already rich, but at the individual level, where people become able to reclaim their own agency and participation in economic life and decision-making. We already know that what we are missing is not more frameworks. It is the embodied practice of living them.

The three spaces I describe here - a Women’s Circle, The Enclave, and the Mycelial Network - are not a sequence, they are my embodied experience in the regenerative journey. They are a movement of spirals and cycles, dancing with each other and operating at different scales: personal integrity expanding into relational practice, relational practice into economic model, economic model into systemic influence

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Women’s Circle – Reclamations of Self-Care and Collective Wellness

The Architecture of Belonging Without Common Ground

We gather once a month. What keeps us together is not shared interests, professional opportunities, or calculated gain. We are so different, in age, background, profession, life experience, social and economic status. Our contexts are genuinely diverse. The challenges each of us faces can seem distant from one another. And yet we are tightly knit.

Connection does not have to be built on common interests, standing, or lifestyle. In fact, organizing belonging around those things draws borders by default - between those who share them and those who don’t. This is what we are conditioned to believe community requires.

What draws us together is the recognition of something deeper: a connection that goes beyond the school we attended, the neighborhood we live in, the jobs we hold. It is the shared question: How do we thrive while living in adverse circumstances of constant threat, trauma, and uncertainty?

The Extraction I Was Running on Myself

The transformational element of that question lies in its intimacy. I know this because for a long time I designed models and ecosystems offering alternatives to the extraction mindset. And they worked only while I was in the picture — pushing, pulling, carrying.

I was using the extraction model against my own self, processing it inside me to create regeneration for others.

This is easy to see as unsustainable. And when such attempts fail, they reinforce extractive models, making them appear necessary — because nothing else works.

What I had missed was the intimate nature of the thriving question, which I found in the women’s circle: the shift from searching for validation outside to taking care of oneself. Incredibly simple to understand, and incredibly hard to do as a woman. Because women have been carrying the caretaking role for millennia, for the reward of becoming accepted - and were never paid for this work. This made us identify with it as our essence rather than an activity. But attributing intrinsic value to an activity that is geared to create benefit for others, decenters the sense of self, places authority outside of the self and creates dependence on outside sources, leaders and institutions. This sounds very familiar because it is deeply documented (pls cfr the reference listing at the end of this piece).

Safety Is the Clarity Within

My experiences, the connections I make, what I intuitively know in the circle, none of this is isolated, pathologized, ridiculed, dismissed, or seen as a threat. Our human experiences are not filtered through the rational scientific lens that recognizes humanity only in one dimension — the cognitive, which the system measures, optimizes, and rewards for efficiency.

This is what makes the circle safe. Not rules. Not contracts or NDAs. Safety here is the right to be yourself and speak your own truth without being judged.

I can remember who I am beyond my nervous system. I know what triggers me. I can trace which experience of pain or trauma that comes from.

I can re-ground and act from a place that holds all of my emotions at once, one that recognizes projected fear, distinguishes threat from difference, and returns to the throughline of personal truth.

Safety is not a place, not an institution, not a law. Safety is the clarity within oneself when the nervous system is regulated. It is a constant practice of self-awareness combined with relationality. It cannot be outsourced. It is a principle that needs to be embedded in how we create and operate at whatever scale.

Wellness Practices as Regenerative Leadership

Sometimes we cook together. Dance in circles and spirals. Go hiking. We listen, talk, laugh and feel the happiness of others in us. We embrace each other, helping grief to move. There are always those of us who know how to bring relief to our bodies through the use of natural oils and massage, and we re-learn from each other how to care for ourselves.

We recognize, nourish and benefit from each other’s authority and knowledge. There is no rule governing the way we do it. It is all in the simplicity of natural breathing: receiving and releasing back.

The host is the closest to a leading position and she constantly reminds us she does not want us to depend on her or transfer to her expectations to care for us. Each bring her own responsibility and gives back what is not theirs. Hosting is rotational. Everyone feels the authority and responsibility to hold space.

This is where trust thrives: in the awareness that each of us can keep herself safe and build relationships that expand creativity beyond safe circles.

The regenerative quality of this circle extends into the public and business sphere. The question has always been a focus of mine as a connector and ecosystem builder: how do you remain yourself also in your professional life? This is why I have always been drawn to entrepreneurship, because entrepreneurs potentially have the ability to shape their innovations according to their own authority.

The Enclave is where I take that question into economic practice.

The Enclave – Building From Our Own Authority

Integrity as a Design Principle

This is the space that , and I are building for people who design business models from the integrity of their own authority. Each of us brings our own specificity. The common denominator is our individual experience of integration — the practice of making the inside and the outside coherent.

At The Enclave, I transform what I have come to understand as my sovereign operating system - the way I work that is independent from inherited cultures, learned beliefs, and current socio-economic logic - into actionable models.

This meant stopping the practice of designing offers around what the market said it wanted, and starting instead from what I know to be true about how organizations change. I do not translate my work at Impact Hub only into numbers. I use my favourite metrics: invitations to weddings and other meaningful life events; unprompted referrals; “Gaia, can you check how this looks to you?” from team members. Supported entrepreneurs. Relationships that lasted.

The Enclave is where patience and urgency coexist in economic terms. Where the only thing that is comfortable is knowing that we are not too much or too little and we do not have to translate ourselves.

Language as Extraction, Language as Design

Language itself is a site of extraction. The concepts and frameworks we use to build, measure, and communicate have largely been designed to serve extraction, not people — and they operate without our awareness.

At The Enclave, we take that rupture as an opportunity. We identify the language that keeps our thinking aligned with the system’s own logic, and we choose differently.

In collaboration with , founder of , we decoded the McKinsey Health Institute / World Economic Forum article “The Human Advantage: Stronger Brains in the Age of AI.” We examined its epistemological architecture: whose knowledge counts, who benefits, who is rendered invisible, and what conceptual violence is done when Western capitalist rationality is applied universally to human minds and communities.

We are reclaiming language as our symbol of meaning — one that serves our wellbeing rather than the system’s logic. This is becoming more aware of the power of epistemologies, the agenda of those who make them, and know that we can choose as we shall what to do with it. It is the basis for regenerative creativity. Meaning and operating system, as one act.

Redefining “More with Less” Metrics

It is not a coincidence that women entrepreneurs - especially focused on women-health - are increasingly reclaiming regenerative funding models by redesigning finance as a collective, trust-based practice rather than an exclusive system—shifting the narrative from scarcity and gatekeeping to access, care, and long-term value. Instead of complex venture structures, these initiatives often use community-led funds, accessible ticket sizes, and participatory decision-making to channel “patient capital” into women-led projects. Examples include: SheEO (active in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom); iFundWomen in the United States; The 51 in Canada.

Together, these models demonstrate how women are not only reimagining finance, but actively building regenerative ecosystems that redistribute power, align with real-life cycles, and make investing a shared, human-centered act.

These regenerative funding models demonstrate something important: “more” is no
longer measured by dominance, speed, or outsized returns for a few, but by breadth of benefit — more livelihoods supported, more resilience built, more value circulating locally. “Less” is not scarcity or compromise. It is a deliberate reduction of extraction: less pressure for hyper-growth, less financial gatekeeping, less misalignment between capital and real human need.

In this model, abundance is not accumulated. It is distributed, regenerated, and sustained.

Helping Builders Own Their Own Leadership

We center business modelling in the quality of work that expresses the integrity of the builder. We keep people focused on their own definition of success and their voice. “Building the best company” in this context may mean many different things. Often, it is not about scale alone, but about coherence: who is involved, how they work together, and what they create.

From these sovereign definitions, new indicators emerge: team well-being and retention, quality and longevity of products, depth of stakeholder relationships, alignment between mission and operations, and the capacity to generate shared value without depletion. Some of these can be measured. Others must be felt. Together, they articulate a form of growth where “more” is richer, not bigger, and “less” is lighter, not weaker.

Finding Those Who Benefit from What You Build – Is Like When Your Self-Care Turns Into Collective Wellbeing

Business is increasingly alienated from people’s and the planet’s priorities — and it is alienating people from themselves and their communities.

Finding your audience is expanding the benefit of self-care onto others. It is taking the practices of mutual care from women’s circles into economic relations — reinventing how we exchange value and create revenue.

The ICP — the Ideal Customer Profile — targets only those able to pay, rooted in the assumption that success is only possible through hockey stick growth. Everyone knows how this works. Everyone feels exploited by it. And most of us still treats it as a given.

We move from attracting audiences to sharing experiences with people who may truly benefit, by communicating honestly what we mean. Projecting value creation onto market assumptions is not trust-building. It is manipulation with the intention of creating the perception of need. To sell more, beat the competition, meet the projected ROI, constantly feeding the beast.

The mindset of wellness in business is not being naïve; it is knowing that this is what it used to be, a real core service to community. We have been doing this for a very long time, and then forgot.

The Mycelial Network – Working in a Regenerative Ecosystem

Building Density – Outside of the Comfort Zone

Connecting, building connectivity and regenerative ecosystems is in my DNA. It gives me immense pleasure. This does not mean that working in a network is always comfortable. It is not meant to be, because it is about expansion and growth always brings effort. Integration works like a muscle. Muscle-building burns.

Connecting to this network feels like great curiosity, stretching, jumping into the unknown. I feel the excitement of finding out who works on what and how we can collaborate. Yet, even me expecting collaboration opportunities all the time may be projecting and then lead to disappointment.

So, I intentionally notice the questions it may raise alongside the judgement. Sometimes I may feel foggy from the overload. I notice the reflex to contract, to protect what I hold as my truth, as if by default it were under threat just because not everyone frames theirs the same way.

Then I remember: I am not my beliefs. I can receive and give back in a wider, diverse network of networks. I can go beyond the stories and expand connectivity.

, who cofounded and invited me into this initiative, put it well: “Reach across your silo. Call the person in the adjacent field. Every new thread moves the needle. We aren’t just connecting - we’re changing the state of the system.”

Where Contradictions Cross-Pollinate

The conversations here are even more open because there is no agenda. We exchange with genuine curiosity and intention to learn from each other engaged in – amongst other - helping leaders make better decisions through neuroscience; co-designing repurposed civic spaces; incubating clean deep tech through hybrid models; self-organization and human agentic power.

I found climate operators here who became involved in the events I am co-organizing during SF Climate Week. It is not about feeling good about what I do. It is about taking the common thread from conversations and unfolding new questions, adopting new lenses to look at the same thing. A network of diverse clusters expands the capacity to live inside complexity before you even understand it.

One conversation from this network stayed with me. I was asked how it felt to hear “Ruthless Humanity” as the name for a new Substack on high-stakes leadership. It unleashed an avalanche of associations.

It brought me back to an investor I worked closely with for years - amicable dinners, time with each other’s families. When I had to renegotiate terms for a second round, he said: “Let me hug you now — you will hate me after we finish this discussion.”

I still think he is a great person. And also a ruthless operator. Both are true.

Coexistence is always complex and indispensable. The Mycelial Network holds both what is and what is in the making. So, here The Women’s Circle and The Enclave are part of a larger ecosystem. The contradiction is not a problem to solve. It is the condition of systemic change.

For the End

This is a reflective map. The Women’s Circle taught me that safety is internal regulation made relational and that this is the precondition for any authority worth building on. The Enclave is a co-creation where sovereign operating systems produce different economics: different metrics, different language, different definitions of growth. The Mycelial Network is a trusted ecosystem to build the density of regulated, intentional connections for what is not yet.

Three spaces. One movement. A replicable architecture: inner regeneration → relational practice → economic model → systemic influence.

I design from my embodied experience. Not because it is exceptional, but because it is honest and because the only systems that regenerate are the ones built by people who have already started to.

How do you thrive in or complex times? How do you build? What do leadership and regenerative economy mean to you?

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A Note on the Research Behind This

What I describe in the Women’s Circle section is not new or revolutionary. There is extensive anthropological evidence that women throughout history and across cultures held healing knowledge, and that modern economic relations systematically suppressed women’s self and collective care practices, specifically to transfer authority over health from home and community to institutions.

The reason this awareness becomes transformational is not when it is labelled or argued. It is when it is truly felt in the body and in relationships, rather than dismissed as esoteric or unscientific.

NB: This text was written by me and then edited with the help of Claude that took out redundancies and helped with grammatical structures

References & Further Reading

On unregulated nervous systems and degenerative leadership outcomes

Porges, S.W. (2009). The polyvagal theory: New insights into adaptive reactions of the autonomic nervous system. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, 76(Suppl 2), S86–S90. doi:10.3949/ccjm.76.s2.17 — Establishes the neurophysiological basis for how threat-state autonomic activation (sympathetic/dorsal vagal) dismantles the social engagement system, impairing prosocial perception and collaborative behavior.

Harms, P.D., Credé, M., Tynan, M., Leon, M., & Jeung, W. (2017). Leadership and stress: A meta-analytic review. The Leadership Quarterly, 28(1), 178–194. — Meta-analysis of 418 empirical samples (N = 123,511) confirming that leader stress is associated with reduced transformational leadership and increased abusive supervision; stressed leaders drain cognitive and emotional resources and are more likely to act destructively toward followers.

On The imposition of the care-taking role; extraction of authority of the self and community for the benefit of system’s institutions:

The historical wound Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch is the essential starting point. Federici traces how women’s healing power - their authority over reproduction, plant medicine, and community health - was systematically dismantled during the transition to capitalism. The witch hunts weren’t superstition; they were policy.

The structural trap Arlie Hochschild gave us the language in The Managed Heart (University of California Press, 1983). Emotional labor - the work of managing feeling, smoothing over conflict, anticipating others’ needs - falls disproportionately on women, and it was never a natural tendency. It was an economic survival mechanism baked into centuries of gendered exclusion.

The reclamation Audre Lorde’s A Burst of Light is where self-care finds its radical roots. Written while she was living with cancer and doing frontline feminist work, Lorde reframed caring for yourself not as indulgence but as survival - and modeled this through healing circles, community publishing, and shared witness.

The scholarship is a thorough academic genealogy of the term across Black feminist, Indigenous, queer, and disability frameworks.

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia.

Hochschild, A.R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press.

Lorde, A. (1988). A Burst of Light and Other Essays. Ixia Press.

Nash, J., & Rosenbaum, J. (2022). “Self-Care.” Feminist Anthropology, 3(2). Wiley/American Anthropological Association.

Kim, J.B., & Schalk, S. (2021). “Reclaiming the Radical Politics of Self-Care: A Crip-of-Color Critique.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 120(2), 325–342. Duke University Press.

Nicol, D.J., & Yee, J.A. (2017). “’Reclaiming Our Time’: Women of Color Faculty and Radical Self-Care in the Academy.” Feminist Teacher, 27(2–3), 133–156.

Medical Anthropology of Care Mol, A. (2008). The Logic of Care. Routledge.

Gendered Burnout & Social Reproduction English, R., et al. (2023). “My Mum is on Strike! Social Reproduction and the Emotional Labor of Mothering Work in Neoliberal Britain.” Gender, Work & Organization. Wiley.

On women practices of self-care and community care across cultures and history:

What the anthropological record shows, across all these cases, is a consistent structure:

• Women heal themselves in circle, not in isolation

• Self-care and community care were the same act - tending to oneself was understood as tending to the collective

• These practices carried ecological knowledge, emotional intelligence, bodily autonomy, and social cohesion simultaneously

• They were systematically dismantled by colonialism, capitalist medicalization, and patriarchal religion, not because they didn’t work, but because they represented an independent form of female power

• The revitalization of traditional medicine is a form of resilience. Reclaiming the role of healer - often passed down through matrilineal or community-based knowledge - is an act of resurgence. Traditional medicine strengthens not only individuals but also collective identities, grounding the community in a worldview where care is reciprocal and healing is relational

The Original Wound: When Women’s Healing Was Taken

Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman as Healer provides the deep historical arc, arguing that women were the original holders of healing knowledge in virtually every culture, and tracing exactly when and how that authority was transferred to male-dominated institutions.

Achterberg, J. (1990). Woman as Healer. Shambhala Publications.

Africa: Ubuntu, Xhosa Healers & the Zār Circles

University of Johannesburg, Department of Nursing. (2020). “Women as Healers and Indigenous Knowledge Systems.” In The Walk Without Limbs: Searching for Indigenous Health Knowledge in a Rural South Africa. NCBI Bookshelf. — Ethnographic study of elite older Xhosa women as community health knowledge holders.

Van Norren, D. (2022). “African Ubuntu and Sustainable Development Goals.” Third World Quarterly

The Zār Cult — Women’s Healing Circles in North & East Africa Boddy, J. (1989). Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan. University of Wisconsin Press

Boddy, J. (1988). “Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan: The Cultural Therapeutics of Possession and Trance.” American Ethnologist, 15(1).

Lewis, I.M., Al-Safi, A., & Hurreiz, S. (Eds.). (1991). Women’s Medicine: The Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond. Edinburgh University Press.

Messing, S.D. (1958). “Group Therapy and Social Status in the Zar Cult of Ethiopia.” American Anthropologist, 60(6)

Indigenous North America: Circles, Moon Lodges & Midwifery

McNeil, D.A., et al. (2024). “Indigenous Maternal and Infant Outcomes and Women’s Experiences of Midwifery Care.” Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care. Wiley.

Buchwald, D., et al. (2004). “Introducing Healing Circles and Talking Circles into Primary Care.” BMC Family Practice.

O’Driscoll, T., et al. — “Traditional First Nations Birthing Practices: Interviews With Elders in Northwestern Ontario.”

Mesoamerica & African Birth Traditions

Powers, L. (2024). “Reclaiming Traditional and Indigenous Postpartum Care Practices as an Act of Remembering and Revolution.” Journal of Midwifery Studies.

University of Johannesburg (2020). “African Indigenous Beliefs and Practices During Pregnancy, Birth and After Birth.” In Working with Indigenous Knowledge. NCBI Bookshelf.

The Caretaker Trap: Emotional Labor

Hochschild, A.R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press.

English, R., et al. (2023). “My Mum is on Strike! Social Reproduction and the Emotional Labor of Mothering Work in Neoliberal Britain.” Gender, Work & Organization. Wiley.

The Reclamation: Self-Care as Collective Survival

Nash, J., & Rosenbaum, J. (2022). “Self-Care.” Feminist Anthropology, 3(2). Wiley/American Anthropological Association.

Kim, J.B., & Schalk, S. (2021). “Reclaiming the Radical Politics of Self-Care: A Crip-of-Color Critique.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 120(2). Duke University Press.

Women’s Circles - Contemporary Ethnographic Research

Longman, C. (2018). “Women’s Circles and the Rise of the New Feminine: Reclaiming Sisterhood, Spirituality, and Wellbeing.” Religions, 9(1). MDPI.

The instructor said: “Care about the integrity of the movement — not the form.”

I was in barre class. My muscles were shaking. And something clicked, not in my head, but somewhere lower, somewhere more visceral.

As I leaned into the depth of that movement, releasing resistance rather than bracing against it, I felt muscles I did not know I had. The length, the depth, the heat. The very particular kind of pain that is also expansion. And as I held it - asking myself how long I could stay there - everything made sense. The message came from my bones.

This happens to me often when I am in my body - running, dancing, writing, breathing. The things my mind spins around inconclusively, circling without landing, find their place when I move. Something releases and a “aha” just comes in with the intensity of water and like a vision coming out of nowhere.

It is like an orgasm, I wrote, unfiltered, as it came to me.

And I just discovered Doris Lessing had been there first. In The Golden Notebook, she writes: “For women like me, integrity isn’t chastity, it isn’t fidelity, it isn’t any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm.”

Just brilliant. And completely aligned with what the barre instructor was pointing at: integrity is not about form. Not about the moral social code. Not about compliance with norms, however well-intentioned. Not about doing things because you have to, out of fear or protection, out of respect for rules that may or may not reflect your actual life.

That is being a good citizen. It may (or may not) overlap with integrity, in any case it is not the same thing.

What Integrity Actually Is

Integrity, at its root, is about sustaining life. It comes to me as the experience of wholeness, of all my “parts” present and at work at the same time. And the body knows this before the mind does. The mind is more likely to comply, to keep us safe, to defer to external pressure. The body moves toward what sustains it.

We have known this forever. It has been documented, philosophized, and rendered a science. And yet, when it becomes scientific, something happens: I can totally understand it, but outside of me, outside of what I actually feel. It becomes a framework - so appealing to my mind - but detached from a felt sense. Unless there is an attached call to action that urges me to take a stand on the basis of the theory or scientific finding. Then my mind goes wild and my body overheats. Signals of stress. Reactive nervous system.

We say “You Do You” as if it were obvious what that means, as if the knowing were already there, clean and accessible. For me, it is buried under decades of “dos and don’ts,” incentives and punishments, etiquettes and judgements. I am still discovering what “To Do Me” actually is.

And even when I find the moment when glimpses of my inner integrity come out, it is not only personal. For me, it feels deeply relational. It connects into an ecosystem of other people, other forms of life. My individual wholeness is part of something much larger. And I get it, this is why integrity gets confused with the moral code: the construct that at its best, was trying to capture exactly this - the life-sustaining principle that connects us. But somewhere along the way, the codified version diverged from the living one. The rules started to serve the system rather than the life inside it. And that is the disconnect.

The Disconnect - and Why It Matters Now

Here is what I keep coming back to, personally and professionally: we have somehow accepted, as a given, that people carry their integrity in their private lives and set it aside in professional and public settings.

I have done this, so many times and for long stretches. And it is not a personal failure, rather a structural one. It is what happens when the institutions, norms, and business models we operate inside were built to sustain systems, not to sustain the people within them.

We know how this split looks. We read all about it in well-documented accounts discussing the myriad manifestations of this gap across sectors, industries, and geographies - accelerated in our AI-agentic times. Besides the the so many, and the most followed popular authors and thought leaders, many emerge and talk about our experiences of disconnection, and this means it is more than real and people everywhere are waking up to feeling it. Just to mention a couple of substacks/profiles worthwhile exploring on related issues: The Staring Point by Anna Brentan is about the personal, systemic and collective transition we go through; Ego, Eco, SEVA by Linda Mc Donad Glenn explores human progress at the intersection of technology, politics, movements; Deeply Human by The Center for Humane Technology is about preserving what makes us deeply humane in the age of AI; The Enclave By Olja Aleksic, Lauren Zavlunov and me is to help founders in executing businesses making money in a way that feels also good.

We, our family, friends, neighbors, fellow entrepreneurs really struggle in between who we are when we are most ourselves and who we perform at work. The distance between what founders say they are building and what actually gets built under pressure is becoming an abyss.

And mainly: keeping integration in our private safe net, away from social judgement and professional exposure, actually disrupts the very safety for which we are wired: the safety that lives in inter-relationships with other people.

These relationships live inside of us. I know this, I sense this in my muscles, bones, tissue. When I experience tension, stiffness, warmth, shiver, openness, tenderness, relaxation in parts of my body, I also see faces, people in my life and how I am connected to them, what clogs those relationships for example.

How can we build, grow, and expand healthy businesses on the basis of an overall accepted mistrust and disconnectedness that threatens back our individual integrity, safety, and ability to sustain ourselves?

Toward a Relational Economic Compass - Business as a Body

Let me make this concrete. Because I think the reason this conversation keeps cycling without landing is that we treat it as a personal development question when it is actually a structural and architectural one.

A business is not separate from the body of the person who builds it. It is its projection and extension. And when I look at how businesses are actually architected - how information moves, how decisions get made, how trust is distributed or withheld, how parts of the organization are nourished or starved of attention and resources - what I see is a nervous system: scaled and encoded into culture, process, org chart, and product.

This is not a metaphor. Or rather, it is a metaphor that is also literally true. A business in chronic contraction, one operating from scarcity, defensive posture, and hierarchical control, mirrors exactly what a body under threat looks like: resources pulled inward, focus narrowed to vital functions, everything peripheral undernourished. Efficient in the short term. Degenerative over time. Unable to expand because expansion requires trust, and trust requires the felt experience of safety, in the body, and in the relationships between bodies.

The wellness conversation has noticed part of this: founders burn out, the nervous system can be regulated and breath gives the rhythm of the expansion and contraction. That is real and important. And it does not stop at the individual.

What I am pointing at is one layer deeper: the nervous system does not just affect how you run the business. It becomes the business. The architecture of how your organization communicates, responds to uncertainty, integrates its parts, and relates to its ecosystem - that is the nervous system of the organism you are building.

And here is where integrity returns as an operational principle rather than a moral one. When all the parts of a body are trusted and enabled to carry the movement - when nothing is braced against or suppressed - expansion is the result. That is what the barre instructor was describing. That is also what a business looks like when integration is the design principle rather than an afterthought or something that becomes a requirement to avoid vexation, taxes.

Integrity is relational. It is a constant effort that expands our capacities within ourselves and with others. It makes each of us and each organization more adaptable in relation to our ecosystem. Integration is not a wellness practice bolted onto a business. It is the foundation on which a business that can actually sustain life is built.

What I have is a direction, and a growing conviction that this integration work - the weaving back together of the inner and outer, the personal and the structural - is at this time both of priority importance and yet the least addressed frontier in how we think about entrepreneurship, organizations, and ecosystems.

I keep returning to foundational principles:

Authenticity: not as a brand attribute, but as the practice of acting from the inside out rather than performing to external expectations. Building businesses and collaborations rooted in what actually sustains life, rather than what optimizes the mechanism. When the structure of a business reflects the actual values of its builders,not as stated values, but as lived ones, something in how it relates to the world shifts.

Wholeness: bringing all of oneself, including the parts that don’t fit neatly into job descriptions or pitch decks. The parts that feel in the body, not only think in the head. Organizations that make room for this are different in quality, not just in culture. They are structurally capable of integrating more of reality, because more of what is true can actually surface.

Interconnection: understanding that our individual integrity is always already embedded in an ecosystem. That what I feel is partly what the ecosystem is feeling. That the boundary between self and collective, between the founder and the organization, between the organization and its community, is more porous than our institutions acknowledge. And that designing for this porosity rather than against it, is what allows a business to actually grow rather than merely scale.

Business as a Body: trust in authenticity, interconnectedness and in the reason to be in every part of what makes a whole enables one to feel the pain in the points of fracture and to see where it comes from. All these are signals and they become so much easier to address once they are accepted as such, as a way for founders, teams, departments to remove obstructions so that all parts can work in integration with each other towards what they are meant to do.

This is what I am calling the Relational Economic Compass, a way of navigating the space between the vertical (the inner dimension, the individual genius, the body’s knowing) and the horizontal (the relational, the collective, the world beyond social norms and legacy business models). Not a framework to follow, but a direction to feel for.

This piece is part of an ongoing exploration at the intersection of embodied intelligence, entrepreneurship, and what it means to build from the inside out.

The conceptual framework, core arguments, synthesis, reflections presented here are my own intellectual property. This article was developed through dialogue with AI that provided structural clarity. I believe transparency about this collaborative process strengthens rather than diminishes the work’s value

An Invitation

If you are building organizations, communities, or collaborations that take this tension seriously - between the inner compass and the outer world, between personal integrity and collective thriving, between the body and the business - I would love to be in conversation with you.

Reach out

About Me

Based in Berkeley, I work with European Bridge Organizations and European companies entering the Bay Area ecosystem. I design and implement US market entry strategies, I am a mentor and Head of Cleantech Program at Innovit. I collaborate with Olja Aleksic and Lauren Zavlunov at The Enclave bringing multidimensional intelligence and leadership for founders who are on the business integrity journey.

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As international companies arrive in the San Francisco Bay Area, they enter an ecosystem shaped by forces far deeper than quarterly earnings and pitch decks. Three historical foundations converge here with unusual intensity: Defense, Psychedelics, and the Human Potential Movement. Together, they have created a technological culture that is simultaneously visionary and vertically obsessed, brilliant at optimization yet structurally blind to what makes us most human.

What follows is an architectural analysis with personal thoughts and reflections - not a moral judgment - of how these foundations have shaped the Bay Area’s current trajectory. This is an invitation to see the structures, understand the incentives, and decide for yourself what role relationality might play in reclaiming human sovereignty in an age of artificial intelligence.

The Three Foundations: How the Bay Area Was Built

The modern Bay Area tech ecosystem rests on three pillars, each contributing a distinct type of infrastructure to what we now call Silicon Valley. Historians like Fred Turner (From Counterculture to Cyberculture) and John Markoff (What the Dormouse Said) have documented this convergence extensively:

Ministry of Defense (The Hard Infrastructure): Post-World War II, massive federal investment from the Department of Defense and NASA flowed into Stanford and early semiconductor firms. This created the material foundation: transistors, microwave technology, and the early internet (ARPANET). The Defense pillar provided the tools of power - systems designed for control, precision, and dominance.

Psychedelics (The Cognitive Spark): The Bay Area became the epicenter of the 1960s psychedelic revolution. Figures like Steve Jobs credited LSD as pivotal to their creative breakthroughs. This foundation introduced boundary-dissolution, the belief that reality is malleable, and that perception itself could be reprogrammed. Today, this manifests in a multi-million dollar psychedelic renaissance, with UCSF and UC Berkeley leading research into treating PTSD and depression, often with Defense Department funding.

Human Potential Movement (The Ego-Drive as Cultural Software): Pioneered by institutions like the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, the Human Potential Movement focused on self-actualization, mindfulness, and the conviction that humans possess untapped mental capacities. This created the cultural software: the obsession with disruption, optimization, and the quantified self. The movement’s core belief - that the ultimate frontier is inward mastery - became encoded in the region’s approach to innovation.

The Convergence: Building a Cognitive Tower to the Heavens

These three foundations are no longer separate. Recently, they have merged into what some call “Neuro-Sovereignty” or “Optimized Performance”, a feedback loop manifest in sectors like neurotechnology, bio-digital health, affective computing, and cognitive security. Here are some examples (based on real work and my interpretation of the context and deriving associations) of how the convergence can operate:

The Defense-Psychedelic Bridge: DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Defense’s primary agency for research and development of emerging, cutting-edge technologies aimed at ensuring national security) is actively funding psychedelic-assisted therapy trials to treat PTSD in active-duty personnel. What was once counterculture medicine is now a tool for maintaining military readiness. The boundary between ‘healing’ and ‘performance enhancement’ has collapsed.

The Human-Tech Interface: The HPM Human Potential Movement’s goal of ‘higher consciousness’ has been rebranded as neuro-optimization. Companies like Neuralink and Paradromics pursue brain-computer interfaces that promise to expand cognitive capacity, fulfilling the HPM dream of infinite human potential through military-grade hardware.

The Datafication of Spirit: Wellness culture now uses Defense-grade sensors (wearables, biometrics) combined with psychedelic-inspired ‘insights’ to create data-driven paths to enlightenment. The goal is measurable transcendence, self-actualization as KPI.

This convergence has birthed specific tech sectors: neurotechnology pursuing cognitive enhancement; bio-digital health treating aging as a ‘bug to be fixed’; affective AI that quantifies emotion; and cognitive security defending against psychological manipulation.

Each sector reflects the same architecture: inward mastery and upward expansion.

The God Complex: Omniscience of the Self, Omnipotence of the Machine

When you combine obsession with the self (inward) and creation of an unbeatable cognitive machine (upward), you create a two-dimensional movement that can resemble a modern Tower of Babel. We are building a cognitive tower to reach the heavens (AGI), fueled by internal visions (psychedelics), funded by tools of war (Defense).

This manifests as a specific psychological structure:

The Inward God - Omniscience of the Self Coded in Technology: The HPM taught that ‘the universe is within.’ In a technocratic context, this became radical self-optimization through biometrics, emotional regulation via AI, and the quantified self. The individual becomes the ultimate arbiter of reality - like a God who needs no community because they have achieved internal data-perfection.

The Upward God - Omnipotence of the Machine: Defense infrastructure provides the means to build a ‘Higher Intelligence.’ By pursuing AGI that can solve climate change, mortality, and scarcity, the Bay Area is building a Deity in a Box - surrendering agency to a machine they believe will grant them God-like power.

The irony of Sovereignty is structural: the more individuals pursue sovereignty through AI augmentation, the more dependent they become. If I need AI to regulate my mood, enhance memory, or draft thoughts, I am not sovereign - I am augmented but tethered.

We have shifted from self-actualization to system-actualization, where the human is one node in a computational loop.

Hallucination as Intentional Reframing

When AI ‘hallucinates,’ the standard response is to call it a bug. But through the lens of psychedelic counterculture, hallucination is a feature, a breakdown of standard patterns to reveal new possibilities.

AI hallucination may be intentionally encoded for computational imagination.

If an AI hallucinates a new protein structure or architectural design, and we use Defense-funded robotics to build it, have we turned a ‘delusion’ into material reality?

This aligns with the manifestation culture of the 1970s: the industry is not trying to make AI accurate to the world as it is - they are using AI to hallucinate a world as they want it to be, then deploying massive capital to force reality to match the model. Hallucination, in this framework, may not be delusional, but rather an intentional push toward a preferred future.

The Missing Dimension: Relationality as the Grounding Compass

If Defense provided infrastructure, Psychedelics the cognitive spark, and Human Potential the ego-drive in the upward spiral growth at speed, somewhere along the way the relational intelligence - that so much shaped the activism and grit in the community-building of the Bay Area - was left behind. Maybe because as a grounding experience it (only) appears to hinder speed, if we look at it from the scientific optics.

Relationality, the immune system and human evolutionary engine, was maybe sidelined because it cannot be quantified in productivity metrics.

In technocracies relationality is conceived as a ‘soft skill,’ subordinate to hard skills measured by efficiency and output. Intelligence is defined as throughput: how fast you process information, rather than resonance; how deeply you connect with others. The result is a hierarchy of intelligence that only recognizes what can be measured, optimized, and transacted.

Relationality is valued only as a medium toward hard transactions. ‘Networking’ is the transactional ghost of a relationship - a latency period before an API call. This strips connection of its transformative power, reducing human bonds to efficiency protocols.

But relational intelligence is how humans are connected to one another and to the world. It is how we can actually expand our capabilities and adaptability. It is how we reclaim sovereignty, evolve, and realize visions we ourselves authored. When we relate deeply, we encounter friction: perspectives, emotions, and biological cues AI can simulate but does not feel as a human body does.

This friction is what sparks true adaptability. Evolution does not happen in isolation; it happens through symbiosis and social complexity.

The Extremes of Manifesting Hallucinations in a Vertical

Consider two approaches to turning vision into reality below. I took them to their extremes and simplified them as in practice there are many in-between versions. The purpose of this is to show that when technocracies do not recognize the value of the relational and this becomes only functional to the achievement of sought after vertical results (as opposed to a foundational pillar) we are all at a loss.

The Technocratic Path: I have a vision → I prompt an AI → I raise VC capital → I use digital platforms to create demand and bring the technology pushing the vision to the world. The ‘hallucination’ is encoded, marketed as inevitable and thus realised by a Sovereign Individual with a Defense-grade budget.

The Relational Path: I have a vision → I share it with a community → We negotiate, refine together → We manifest a shared reality. The ‘hallucination’ is democratized, grounded in collective wisdom, and lived into existence through interdependence.

Extended to extremes, in the first path, sovereignty means isolation, self-reliance through computational power. In the second, sovereignty means agency within community.

The Human Potential Movement turned inward (obsession with the self) and then upward (the superhuman machine) and overlooked the around-ward (grounded relationships with the other). The Bay Area created a framework of vertical intelligence brilliant at calculating and scaling efficiency. It seems like relational intelligence (horizontal connectivity) is left out and detached, present in a parallel realm of communities that are increasingly more closed, as safety-nets. As our relational intelligence atrophy, so does our true sovereignty. We replace human inter-dependency with and addictive dependency from AI agentic systems that are available/accessible 24/7; always have an answer; do not “judge” unless specifically asked to; offer ready-made solutions right away; take out the discomfort of confronting other human beings with whom we may not share the same opinions/values; save us “brain and emotional muscles” and time...

The Ethics Gap and Where the Conversation Is Happening

For reference, these issues are being addressed in emerging fields of Critical Techno-culture Studies, though often in academic or niche intellectual circles:

The Sovereignty Deception: Jaron Lanier argues we are becoming ‘be-pebbled’ by our tools—enhanced but chained. Evgeny Morozov critiques ‘Solutionism,’ the belief that every human problem has a technological fix, which often erodes the very autonomy it promises.

Hallucination as Intent: AI theorist Andrej Karpathy describes LLMs as ‘dream machines,’ while philosopher Yuk Hui examines how different cultures ‘program’ reality through technology, revealing that what we build reflects what we value and what we ignore.

The Ethics Gap: The Center for Humane Technology (Tristan Harris and team) focuses on how we are optimizing for ‘intelligence’ while losing ‘wisdom.’ Various AI alignment researchers worry that we are building systems optimized for computational power without corresponding ethical frameworks.

As I see it, the convergence of Defense (power), Psychedelics (boundary-dissolution), and HPM (self-obsession) creates a unique ethical vacuum. Neither Defense (mission-focused) nor HPM/Psychedelics (inner journey) inherently take much into consideration communal or democratic ethics. When you combine ego-dissolution (psychedelics) with world-shaping power (Defense tech), you often produce leaders who believe they operate on a higher evolutionary plane than the ‘un-augmented’ public. This creates techno-feudalism, where ethics are replaced by ‘alignment’, making sure AI obeys the creator, not necessarily the law or public good.

Practical Implications for International Companies Entering the Bay Area

For international companies - particularly those from European contexts with stronger social safety nets and collective values - understanding this architecture is not theoretical. It has immediate implications on how you design the market entry.

The relationality that you bring is an advantage. It may often be an unconscious bias, encoded in your practices. Recognize the relational value in your company - how your product or service creates deeper human connection, trust, or community resilience. Design metrics that describe and demonstrate the types of value-added relationality creates.These may not fit standard KPIs, but they represent competitive advantages in markets increasingly fatigued by “efficiency optimization”. In sectors like cleantech, where systemic change requires broad coalitions, relationality is not a nice-to-have; it is infrastructure.

Adapt for Optimization with Precision and Context. You most likely cannot compete with the speed and efficiency that is embedded in operational systems in the Bay Area. It is not about catching up with a baseline that incrementally grows by the hour (exactly because optimized and automated for efficiency). It is about being selective and precise about where you want to fit in the system. Bringing complementarity and value-added. Matching multi-intelligence

Navigate the ‘Networking’ vs. Relationship Distinction. To build genuine partnerships, invest time in understanding your collaborators’ underlying values and visions - not just their quarterly targets. What problem are they trying to solve for humanity, not just their market? How are individuals, communities, ecosystems affected? What are the underlying assumptions guiding these thoughts?

Offer the Missing Dimension. If your company brings expertise in stakeholder engagement, cooperative models, or long-term community building, frame these not as ‘soft’ competencies but as evolutionary intelligence - the adaptive capacity that vertical optimization cannot replicate.

Practice becoming aware of underlying assumptions. You have your own from your culture and ecosystem and the Bay Area founders, investors etc have their own. And Silicon Valley has not only the historical architectural foundations for, but also the systemic metrics demonstrating its dominance - in 2025 alone, it was the center of AI investment, capturing approximately 60% ($126 billion) of global AI funding. So, the God Complex is cognitively acceptable. It is the psychological output of a system built on inward mastery and upward transcendence. Practice discernment: when is this confidence visionary, and when is it a refusal to encounter the friction of ‘the other’?

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Horizontal for Evolvement - What the Orchestrator Brings back as Foundational

The intersectionality of defense infrastructure, psychedelic exploration, and the pursuit of human potential have produced genuine breakthroughs, excellence and once unimaginable expansion. They made possible what was thought of as impossible. They scaled positivism in the realization of opportunities through self-improvement and work. The Bay Area is a unique frontier, built on curiosity, grit and on the beautiful recognition of the significance and incredible value of its diversity and resources. And it keeps pushing forward, setting higher standards that make evolution a constant.

But the architecture of the tech ecosystem has a blind spot: it has built vertically -inward and upward - without a corresponding horizontal dimension. So, we have created distance. We less often ‘speak the same language’ because we have eroded the relational foundations that allow us to understand one another.

If we are building a Tower of Babel in 2026, the solution is not to stop building. It is to build with more human intelligence. It is to remember that towers require foundations and bridges. Relationality is both. It is the immune system that prevents systemic fragility, the evolutionary engine that allows adaptation, and the ethical compass that prevents God complexes from becoming unchecked power.

In a culture optimizing for omniscience of the self and omnipotence of the machine, the most radical intentional act may be to insist that true intelligence lives in the space between us.

Acknowledgments and Transparency

This analysis builds on extensive historical documentation by Fred Turner (From Counterculture to Cyberculture), John Markoff (What the Dormouse Said), and others who have traced the Bay Area’s unique convergence. The critiques presented here intersect with ongoing work in Critical Technoculture Studies, including Jaron Lanier’s warnings about tool dependency, Evgeny Morozov’s critique of technological solutionism, Andrej Karpathy’s insights on LLMs as ‘dream machines,’ Yuk Hui’s work on how cultures program reality through technology, and the Center for Humane Technology’s efforts to restore wisdom to technological development.

While the conceptual framework, synthesis, and analysis presented here are my own intellectual property, this article was developed through iterative dialogue with AI. The core arguments - the sovereignty deception, hallucination as intentional reframing, and relationality as the missing foundation - emerged from my own reflection, with AI providing historical references, and structural clarity. I believe transparency about this collaborative process strengthens rather than diminishes the work’s value.

About Me

Based in Berkeley, I work with European Bridge Organizations and European companies entering the Bay Area ecosystem. I design and implement US market entry strategies, I am a mentor and Head of Cleantech Program at Innovit.

I have developed a culture fluency curriculum to help international entrepreneurs navigate the region’s unique psychological, cultural, and infrastructural architecture. This article reflects years of architecting, building ecosystems, weaving connections, supporting business development cross-border and the conviction that today in our AI agentic era, the most valuable bridge between Europe and Silicon Valley may be a restoration of relational intelligence as a legitimate form of power.

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