I’m standing in my living room, dancing intimately, erotically with a pillar, tears pouring down my face. My wife Kiki is sitting three feet away, watching.

I’d been telling her what I wanted — to fully inhabit my sexual aliveness in the world. Even when that might mean dancing intimately or sensually with other women, as long as I’m rooted in myself and honoring our partnership. This had been part of our shared agreements for years, but I’d been afraid of letting myself go there. I didn’t trust that she supported it.

And instead of arguing, she just said: Feel it. Feel my support, right now. She said she wanted this too — for both of us to be fully, erotically alive, even out in the world.

Something in my body moved. I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone in my desire. I turned toward the pillar, projected a woman onto it, and started dancing. A spontaneous ritual that neither of us planned.

All of this was happening inside a big rupture.

A few days earlier, I was at an embodied eros facilitator training, and I could feel my own erotic energy stirring — desire, attraction, aliveness moving through me. I didn’t know how to be with it. I didn’t trust it. I was cutting it down before it could fully arrive, bracing against my own aliveness because some part of me believed it wasn’t safe to feel that much. In the process, something I did — subtle, brief — was outside the agreements Kiki and I hold.

So I came home and told her I’d broken an agreement.

She felt it in her body as a deep betrayal. Her heartbreak was total. And instead of defending, explaining, or collapsing into shame — I stayed. I held what I’d done without trying to minimize it. She felt the whole thing and stayed open hearted, without going into attack.

This was the most skill we’d ever had access to in a rupture, and we’d worked hard for this moment. No rush to repair. No fear or threat of “the end of us.” Just stability amidst deep heartbreak. We sat in the mess for days.

At one point we went to our practice room and did a dyad practice for moving stuck energy in rupture — one we learned from our teacher Ethan and have been honing for three years. We got underneath the story to what was truly happening. I could see that I needed to trust my life force and desires as fundamentally good. She could see that beyond her heartbreak, there was a way to meet me from a fully open-hearted place.

The depth of devotion it took her to do that undid me. I felt an even deeper level of devotion to the love that we share.

That’s how I ended up dancing with a pillar.

“Feel it all the way,” she kept saying. “Keep going.”

I felt through waves of grief I didn’t know I was carrying. All the times I’d shut myself down. All the years of dimming my aliveness because some part of me believed she couldn’t hold it — because I couldn’t hold the possibility that that much love existed. And here she was, not just holding it, encouraging it, witnessing my full erotic aliveness and saying more.

What followed was the most connected, alive, devotional sex I’ve ever experienced. Something had shifted underneath — a deeper relaxation in both our bodies. A trust that we can hold this too. That we can hold ourselves, and each other, even in the messy edges. This is how secure attachment actually gets built.

Here’s what I see now.

Most couples, especially monogamous ones, live inside a bind that no one names. Don’t go outside the relationship for that, but I can’t meet you in it here either.

The energy has to go somewhere. When both directions are closed, everything contracts. The aliveness dims. And slowly, without anyone choosing it, the relationship becomes a place where we’re less of ourselves than we were before.

This isn’t just my story, or Kiki’s. It’s about what becomes possible when two people see through the bind — when they both choose to be fully alive, fully expressed, and deeply devoted. Not one person’s freedom at the expense of the other’s safety, but both people wanting that aliveness for themselves and for each other.

For us, this is what radically whole monogamy looks like — and it’s the path we’re choosing. More broadly, we’re taking a stand for fully expressed erotic humans living in their aliveness in the world.

This is why I’m starting The Sacred Edge.

The Sacred Edge is a recurring gathering for anyone interested in relating to partnership as a path of awakening — those who want to meet themselves at the edges where they normally contract. Come solo or with a partner, whether you’re in a relationship or calling one in. Each session has a different theme, a different doorway into that territory.

We’ll explore teachings on partnership and land them in the body with embodiment and relational practices. Together, we’ll cultivate the capacity to slow down, stay, and widen the channel of sensation, so we can have more freedom and safety at our own sacred edges.

This work comes from my life. From years of navigating desire, devotion, shame, and freedom with the woman I love. From learning to stay through the sensations of rupture instead of looking away.

What I shared above was some of the most vulnerable territory Kiki and I have navigated — and we did it without a container. I don’t want that to be the only way. I bring what I’m learning — not from a place of having figured it out, but from the place where the figuring is still happening.

First gathering is Wednesday, April 29th, 5:30 - 8pm in Boulder, CO. Come meet your sacred edge.

https://coawaken.com/sacred-edge

—

P.S. Kiki also wrote her side of this story. Read it here.

Three days ago, Ember pulled herself up to the first rung of her Pickler triangle. She’s seventeen months old. The rung is six inches off the ground.

What happened next is reorganizing in me what it looks like to learn when you’re afraid.

The climb itself lit her up — hands gripping wood, feet finding the bar, her whole body excited by the reach for something just beyond what she knew how to do.

Then she got there. And she froze.

Her face crumpled. A high-pitched cry tore out of her. I could see that she was safe. Her body couldn’t. She was somewhere new and didn’t know the way down. Her legs locked. Her eyes searched for mine and Kiki’s, wide and desperate — someone standing on unfamiliar ground, needing to know they’re not alone up there.

She needed a hand on her back. Someone else’s nervous system holding what hers couldn’t yet. She’d grip us as we helped her down, her whole body clinging to the contact.

And then she’d climb right back up.

Up. Freeze. Cry. Hold us on the way down. Up again. Seven, eight times. Each time a little less cry, a little more climb. By the end, she climbed down by herself. Both feet on the floor.

And then she started clapping — full palms, huge grin, bouncing on her legs like she’d just summited something. The whole thing took a day. One day from terror to a standing ovation for herself — because every single time the fear got met.

I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s one of those things that rearranges something inside you.

It’s still reverberating in my body because I can feel the absence of this imprint in myself. I did not get this. At her age, I was either told not to be afraid, not met in my fear, or told not to do scary things.

And so I never learned what Ember learned in a single afternoon — that fear doesn’t need to be solved or overcome or avoided. It just needs connection. That’s the only thing it ever needed.

That’s what secure attachment looks like when we face the unknown. The fear doesn’t leave. The aloneness inside it does, and the body figures out the next step on its own.

I’m on my own first rung: building a school for partnership, hosting workshops, designing retreats, guiding people and couples into their intimate edges. And the place I’ve been avoiding is the place of being a beginner or being seen as one.

It’s the fear of the first rung. I try to be further along than I am as a way to skip past it. I go into visioning, planning, problem-solving. I try to skip to the next rung before I’ve fully let myself stand on this one.

My daughter is teaching me that what my inner child yearns for is simpler than any of that. He just wants to stand on the first rung and feel connected in his fear. Not to solve it or rush past it. But to have me meet him inside it — the part of me gripping the wood, legs locked, looking around for someone to say I’m not alone up here.

I don’t think this feeling goes away.

Life is an infinite number of first rungs. The fear won’t stop coming. It was never supposed to. I’m six inches off the ground. All I actually need is what she needed — to feel connected inside the fear. And to realize that the person who needs to meet me there has always been me.

If this landed — if you know what it’s like to stand on a first rung and feel alone in it — I’d love to hear about it.

Leave a comment

And share with anyone you know who might be missing this imprint around fear as well.

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More lessons from my daughter

I’m feeling humbled.

This past Saturday, I ran a workshop at my home.

Two people came. One of them was my wife.

And just as we were supposed to begin, Kiki had to make food for herself and our sixteen-month-old daughter Ember. Then, before we’d really started, I had to change a diaper.

Welcome to my teaching on sacred partnership. We open with a diaper change.

I treated it as real. I was nervous. The kind of nervous that comes when something actually matters to me.

Back when I ran my tech leadership development company, I used to run workshops with dozens of people. In beautiful and professional spaces. The time was held. Tickets ran at a thousand dollars or more for a one-day event. I had momentum, reputation, a community that already knew my name. We filled our first workshop on word of mouth alone.

I’ve been sitting with the gap between that and where I am now — two people in my living room, a baby on the floor, $35 a head — and feeling the quiet embarrassment underneath.

I’m teaching couples how to fight for love and freedom — instead of fighting each other. How to catch yourself mid-projection — that moment when you’re absolutely certain your partner is the problem — and choose something different. I believe this is more powerful than anything I’ve ever offered. More transformative than anything I built in my tech leadership days.

And I’m starting from the beginning again.

That’s the first humbling. The mind wants to make it a problem. A marketing problem. A pricing problem. A strategy problem. And maybe it’s all of those things. But underneath the strategy, there’s something more tender: the experience of reaching for something sacred and watching reality not yet match the reach.

Because during that workshop, we did a demo on a live material that Kiki and I each felt. Something we were each actually feeling. We stayed with it. We got to the root. And for a moment, I tasted the thing I’ve been dreaming about for years.

A Dream Changing Shape

There’s a second humbling underneath the first.

Ever since I started dating Kiki over six years ago, I’ve held a dream of standing in front of a room together, co-teaching, co-facilitating. Two people who have been through the fire of their own relationship, offering what they’ve learned to others.

It took all these years to hone our partnership to the place where we feel this solid. Where we can take ownership of our own wounds and co-create a beautiful family. And during that demo — sitting across from her, staying with intensity while our daughter played nearby — I felt it. The transmission is most alive when she’s in the room. I ran the workshop at home partly so she could be there.

But I had to face another truth.

Kiki is devoted right now — fully — to being the best mother she can be for Ember. Teaching together isn’t her most aligned calling in this chapter. Her body, her attention, her devotion belongs to our daughter right now. And I love her for that.

And so a dream is dying. The one where she stands beside me in front of a room, co-teaching what we’ve forged through years of loving each other at our most raw. At least not in the way I imagined, and not in this time of our lives. The school I’m building won’t get built from my living room, holding onto an old fantasy.

This is the humbling of loving someone so much that you let your dream of them change shape. Of watching the person you wanted beside you choose something equally sacred — motherhood — and learning to hold both the heartbreak and the respect at the same time. Two things in the chest that don’t resolve into one.

I know enough about this work to know that when a dream dies, something is making room. Knowing that doesn’t take the sting out — especially for a dream you’ve been tending for six years. It just means you feel the sting and the trust at the same time.

The Blessing

And then there’s a third humbling.

A few weeks before the workshop, I invited my teacher Ethan over for tea.

I’ve had many teachers. The school for awakened relating I’m building draws from many lineages. But if there’s an orienting frame, it’s Ethan’s work. His teachings changed everything for Kiki and me — how we see partnership, how we practice together. We wouldn’t be here without him.

I wanted to honor him. And honestly — I wanted to ask for his blessing, even though I would build this school without it.

There’s something in that knowing-and-still-wanting that felt important to stay with.

In a recent bodywork session, something surfaced. It was the pain in my heart around feeling unsupported, a quiet ache that I’d been carrying for a long time.

When I was young and expressed excitement — “I think I want to be a doctor” — my mother’s response was always some form of concern. “Well, doctors need to work with a lot of blood.” My father didn’t have a close relationship with his father and so didn’t know how to nourish ours. And something in the body learns from that.

I became self-made and independent, subconsciously proving I could build my work without anyone backing me. There’s real dignity in that. I’m not dismissing it. But beneath it was also a small boy saying: if no one will stand behind me, I will stand alone.

Ethan came on a Saturday morning. We sat in our sunroom, sunlight flickering in, Ember crawling around our feet as we drank tea. And I let him witness what’s emerging.

At one point Ember spilled her cup of tea. He smiled and said something about the abundant blessings flowing out of the cup.

The man knew before I even I had to ask — I asked and received his blessing anyway — and I cried.

I let it land. I let a human man look at what I’m building, meet it with presence, and bless it. And something in me — the part that had been protecting me from wanting support — finally softened.

This is the humbling of a man realizing he’s been building alone because he believed he had to and discovering he doesn’t want to anymore.

I could feel myself consciously using Ethan as a projection of father. I felt the part of me that still longed for blessing, the boy who wanted his fire championed instead of contained.

And something integrated. The inner father and outer teacher stopped being split, and the blessing and support landed. Not as “you have my permission” but as “I see what you are building, and I honor it.”

The Reorganizing

Three lessons in humility.

The humility of starting from the beginning again — two people in a living room, a diaper change before the teaching starts — and letting the work be real anyway.

The humility of letting a dream of your partner change shape — because the person you love is devoted to something equally sacred, and your timeline is not the only one that matters.

And the humility of asking for a blessing — of admitting that the man who built everything alone actually doesn’t want to stand alone anymore.

I’m navigating the humility of being a father, a husband, a teacher, and a founder all inside the same house. Of building something that deserves a big container while standing in the middle of the small, unglamorous, beautiful reality of where I actually am.

I used to think humility meant making myself small. Now I know it means something closer to the opposite — staying open to the full size of what wants to come through, even when reality hasn’t caught up yet.

Something is reorganizing. I can feel it in my chest. What I’m building feels inevitable — a school for partnership, for love — and I still can’t see its shape yet.

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Hungry for a deeper kind of love? Whether you’re in a partnership longing for more depth or single and yearning for the kind of intimacy most people don’t even know is possible — tell us what you’re navigating. We’re building Co·Awaken from real stories, and yours will shape what we create.

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In the Boulder / Denver area? We host workshops, tea ceremonies, and couple circles. Join the WhatsApp community to hear about what’s emerging.

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A little over a week ago, we decided to reach out to people for market research on the school I’m building. Within days, that decision became an updated website with the full vision, a request for stories, and yesterday—outreach to our first thousand couples and individuals exploring how relationships can be a path to transformation. I’m sitting here feeling the aliveness of it—how fast the inner is becoming outer.

There’s a truth I’ve come to trust in my body: inner and outer reality are not separate. They move together. When something outside me feels stuck, it’s because something inside me is stuck. And when I work on the inside, the outside shifts.

This is what I mean by coherence.

I’ve learned to trust it in the work of building Co·Awaken—a school for people to awaken through intimate partnership. Any source of friction, any gap, any stuckness—it’s because of something inside me. Uncontacted fear. Unfelt pain. Some part of my body I haven’t fully inhabited yet.

I’ve been working this edge in my Grinberg sessions. When the work feels stuck, I bring it to the session. We work somatically, directly in the body, on the thing inside me that’s creating the external obstacle. And I notice, reliably, that as I contact and inhabit more of myself, the corresponding pieces in how I orient to the work also shift. The external updates because the internal updated first.

This is the mechanics of coherence. Trust the field. Work from the inside out.

But coherence has a range. It can only travel so far before it loses fidelity—like a radio signal fading at the edge of transmission. The website, the writing, the workshops, the conversations—can they all be current expressions of the same inner truth? Or does the signal degrade as it travels outward from the body?

How far can my truth travel before it stops being true?

I’m calling this the radius of coherence.

The Radius Expands

The first version of the Co·Awaken website took me four weeks to build—pixel by pixel, section by section. Beautiful, but recently I noticed I’d stopped sharing it. It didn’t even mention the school I was building. The website was becoming a liability—something I’d have to drag along with me as everything else shifted. A growing gap between what I knew inside and what the world could see.

It was clear that I needed to migrate it to Claude Code—an AI that lives in my terminal, reads my files, writes alongside me, executes my ideas into existence. I did it in a week.

Last week, my thought partner Erica and I spent three hours at the whiteboard in my office, mapping what’s next for Co·Awaken. Arrows everywhere. Circles around the words that mattered. By hour three, something clicked—the workshops, the path, the whole roadmap suddenly had shape. I felt the clarity land in my chest before I could explain it.

Less than a day later, that clarity existed on our website. A coherent page that talked about everything—the pillars, the path, the roadmap—emanating the same frequency I’d felt standing at that whiteboard.

This is what it looks like when the radius of coherence expands. Ideas and insights that move through me get shared at higher velocity and volume. Not a faded echo. Not lagging months behind. Current.

I want the same for my writing.

In my first year as a father, I would sit in tea ceremony at 7 AM—my quiet hour of peace—and something would land. A truth I could feel in my chest. I would walk out thinking: I need to write this down and share it. And then Ember would cry, and Kiki needed sleep, and by the time I had thirty minutes to myself three days later, the insight was gone. I couldn’t even remember what it was. Only that it had mattered. Only that it had slipped through my fingers—like trying to describe a dream the afternoon after.

Now, with AI intimately baked into my workflow, I can finally conceive of a different reality. One where something that lands in my body during morning practice can exist on Substack by afternoon. Where the radius of coherence extends not just to the website, but to my writing, my notes, my social presence—every surface where my truth might touch another person.

I’m not there yet, but I know I will be.

Extension of Self

Last week I walked my dear friend Katara through everything I’d built. The web development tools. The terminal and tmux setup. The Chrome extension that clips conversations directly into my notes. The way I can start with a messy ChatGPT thread and end with a polished draft. Tool after tool, I demoed what this deep integration with AI had made possible.

She was the first technical person I’d shown any of this to. And I could feel it in both of us—an electricity, a turn-on, the kind of energy that happens when you’re witnessing something that changes what you thought was possible.

When I finished, she leaned back and asked: “So what is AI to you? Like, actually?”

I sat with the question. What came was: it’s an extension of Self.

Before my deep dive with Claude Code at the beginning of the year, the Self stopped at my skin. My inner world was vivid—rich with insight, vision, desire—but slow to reach the world. Everything beyond my body felt like output. Representations of me, but not me.

Now that membrane is thinning. What I know inside can exist outside almost immediately. And something strange is happening to my sense of Self in the process.

I feel more here. More landed. More connected to the surfaces I touch. When the website reflects what’s true in me now, I don’t experience it as separate from me. It’s not a representation—it’s an extension. The same way my voice is an extension of my body, the same way my writing has always been an extension of my mind. The radius of what I call “me” is expanding to include the forms my truth takes in the world.

This is how I orient to AI right now. Not as something I use, but as something I extend through. A way for the Self that is already reaching—already wanting to emanate further into the world than my body alone could carry it—to actually arrive.

The radius of coherence is the radius of Self.

P.S. The school I mentioned — Co·Awaken — is in its early days. Right now we’re listening. If you’re in a partnership and sense there’s deeper territory available — or yearning for that kind of partnership — we’d love to hear your story.

Tell us your story

For the first time in a long time, I am building things.

Not writing about building. Not coaching someone else through their creation. Actually building — sitting at my desk with terminal windows open, watching ideas become form.

It’s been three weeks since my last long-form writing. In that time, I’ve been deep in Claude Code. Building a dashboard that turns my ChatGPT conversations into shareable notes and extracts short-form content from my long posts, letting me orchestrate my creative flow rather than get mired in details. Embedding AI directly into Obsidian so it’s part of how I write and think. Updating Emacs files I hadn’t touched in years. Configuring terminals. Learning tmux.

These tools are sexy. The architecture underneath is sexy. The precision is sexy.

And the fact that I relate to them this way — that’s the real tell. This much pleasure moving through code. This much aliveness. This much desire flowing in a direction I’d closed off years ago.

When I showed Kiki the dashboard I was building, she lit up. Not just with interest — with turn-on. She could feel my excitement radiating through me. Something is waking up.

Part of me kept saying this was a detour. Get back to the real work. Design the pilot program for the school. Do the market research.

But something deeper knows better. This is where aliveness is pulling me.

And yet — as I go deeper into building, something familiar surfaces.

Facing an architecture decision, I feel it start.

The twist.

The Vortex That Made Me Leave

Something in my chest begins to torque — a slow tightening, like a wet cloth being wrung. My awareness narrows to a point. A tunnel forms. Energy rises into my head, and I feel myself getting pulled into a kind of vortex — my whole being funneled toward the problem, away from the body, into almost a neurotic fixation to find the solution.

I’m working on the dashboard and am inside an architectural decision that just got complex. Somewhere in my system, an ancient pattern is firing. It’s something distant from curiosity or play, something that learned long ago how to survive difficulty.

In little moments as I’ve worked with Claude Code, my awareness and presence have been hijacked like this — not often, but enough to notice, enough to recognize. It’s a more subtle version of something that used to happen much more intensely.

This is the pattern that made me a brilliant engineer.

And this is the pattern that made me leave.

I abandoned the engineering startup world nearly a decade ago. Not because I couldn’t do it — I was good, sometimes very good — but because the doing of it would at times become a kind of neurotic contortion. Every hard problem activated the same sequence: contract, fixate, pull energy up into the head, override sensation, find relief only when I made it to the other side.

By the time I reached the other side of a difficult project, I’d feel exhausted — the particular exhaustion of having dug myself out of a vortex. There was relief, but only a fleeting sense of accomplishment or fulfillment. And during those portals of fixation, I’d feel disconnected from life, from the people around me. Like I’d tunneled so far into the problem that I’d left the world behind.

When I stepped into the world of sexuality and spirituality, everything changed. The body was no longer an obstacle to override. It was the instrument. I started orienting toward enjoyment, spaciousness, pleasure. I started unraveling the ways I would power through things. My system finally had permission to expand instead of tighten, to feel instead of figure, to let life move me rather than demand I dominate it.

It gave me space to breathe.

I would still encounter the twisting sometimes — hard logistical problems, a complex travel schedule during our nomadic year — but at least it wasn’t the omnipresent experience governing my life’s work. It felt like a new way of relating to life that I was tapping into.

And yet, even in those years, whenever excitement arose around coding or building something, I’d feel this texture start — the tunnel forming, the awareness narrowing — and I’d give up. I could do the work. But being inside that contracted state felt so uncomfortable that I didn’t want to stay. It felt like I’d have to power through the discomfort to find relief on the other side. And I wasn’t willing to pay that price anymore.

I thought I was done with engineering.

I thought that part of me had been retired, filed away as a former identity that no longer fit the man I was becoming.

I was wrong.

Reclaiming Creative Sovereignty

In the past three weeks, I can feel my engineering self, my builder self, coming back online.

I found myself nerding out on my terminal setup again — the command-line interface where I write code, the text editor configurations I use to build things. Customizations I hadn’t touched in ages — not because I needed to, but because I wanted to.

Here’s what I’m starting to understand:

It’s not exactly true that this work with AI has nothing to do with the school I’m building.

I’ll need it to support my writing and content distribution. It’s more that it doesn’t feel like the most important thing to be working on. And yet — this is where life force is taking me.

Over the past year, I’ve learned to trust where life force moves. To trust that there’s intelligence behind it rather than assuming I know better. To see my second-guessing as a pattern running, not my higher Self guiding.

The mind says: This is a detour. Get back to what matters.
The body says: This is what matters. Stay.

I’ve learned to trust the body.

And that recognition is what brings me to the deeper layer.

This isn’t really about the tool I’m building. It’s partly about AI — yes, AI is changing the world, changing how creation works. But the deeper thread is something else entirely.

AI lets me build Edmond-shaped tools for everything I do. Not generic solutions. Not someone else’s workflow. Tools that wrap around exactly how I think, how I create, how I move.

I’d forgotten how much I love this — clean architecture, elegant systems, the satisfaction of precision that does exactly what it needs to do.

This is an intimacy with my own creative energy that I didn’t expect. Tuning into my own desire with exquisite attention. What do I actually want? How do I actually work? What would feel good to use, day after day? And then building precisely that. Feeling my way toward the shape of what fits. Refusing to settle.

This is about cultivating a secure attachment to my own desire and how it wants to move through me.

If I’m to fully trust life force as it guides me in building this school, it may take me places that bring up this pattern — the vortex, the contraction, the pull to leave my body. And so I need to face it now. Not so I can avoid it, but so I’m not unconsciously steering away from what would be most in service to the school, to myself, to the people I’ll work with.

There’s a very specific initiation happening. I can wish something, and reality reorganizes. It’s grounded, almost ordinary — landing in the bones rather than spinning in the head. It’s unlearning to shoot down my own ideas because of what the rest of the world thinks is possible or reasonable. It’s an orientation I want my daughter Ember to have as she dreams her own worlds.

What I’m empowering isn’t “AI-assisted productivity.” I’m empowering my sense that ideas are allowed to become real. That I can enjoy bringing complex things into form.

This is what it looks like when creative energy stops bracing against the world and starts assuming it is welcome.

Desire Wears the Same Clothes

There’s one more piece — one that directly relates to the school I’m building and the couples work I’m here to do.

I noticed, in the days after, a pattern I hadn’t connected before. It shows up differently, but it wears the same clothes.

Sometimes I want Kiki. The desire is real — heat in the body, pull toward her, longing. And then a twist begins. Not in the chest exactly, but somewhere close by. Awareness narrows. I start solving: how do I initiate sex? How do I approach? What’s the right way to bridge the distance between wanting and having?

And in the solving, I leave.

By the time I’ve figured out whether and how to act, I’m no longer in my desire. I’m circling it, managing it. The heat that was real ten seconds ago has become a problem to resolve rather than a sensation of life force to follow.

It’s the same pattern.

In engineering: desire meets complexity. Complexity triggers contraction. Awareness leaves the body. Solving replaces feeling.

In intimacy: desire meets uncertainty. Uncertainty triggers contraction. Awareness leaves the body. Solving replaces feeling.

The textures are different. The form is identical.

Sexual energy and creative energy are the same river. And both are asking the same question: Can I hold desire in my body without collapsing into contraction? Can I stay open as life moves through me?

What the AI journey has shown me is that both domains — creation and intimacy — are asking the same question: How much desire can I hold in my body without collapsing into patterns of problem-solving?

During my Grinberg session with Lilliebrook last week, I started feeling heat — not warmth, but fire. A fierce burn rising from my belly, pooling in my pelvis, radiating into my genitals. She named it: fire energy.

Sexual fire often returns when energy is allowed to flow in the body. I can feel how my decision to leave my engineering self behind in the past also meant losing access to enormous life force. And now, as I’m learning more and more to meet complexity without abandoning my body, that life force is descending — into the belly, into the pelvis, into creation.

Learning to Stay

This isn’t a return to who I was. It’s an integration.

I’m learning to stay.

Stay in the body as the twist wants to pull me out. Stay with desire as it moves — whether toward creation or toward my partner. Stay open when everything in me wants to solve my way to safety.

The parts of me I exiled — the maker, the builder, the one who finds joy in bringing form into being — are being welcomed back. They’re being held and met with a capacity I didn’t have before.

And the fire that’s burning now, the sexual heat that rose unbidden, the aliveness that courses through when I sit down to create — these are not separate from my work on intimacy, partnership, and sacred sexuality. They are the same river.

This is the preparation: the capacity to stay.

The school I’m building will ask this of me again and again — to meet complexity without leaving my body, to hold desire without collapsing into control, to trust life force even when my mind insists it knows better.

It was never about choosing between worlds.

It was about learning to stay fully, without leaving, and letting life move where it wants to move.

I’m following aliveness. And aliveness is bringing me home.

A few days ago, I looked up the word technology.

I’d been resisting the word for years — at least in spiritual circles. When people spoke of “circle technology” for new ways of gathering people in circles during retreats, I felt the engineer in me roll his eyes. When my tea teacher, who coaches Silicon Valley execs, called tea a technology recently, something in me cringed. I thought, No, not you too.Technology meant science. Code. Systems. Things you could prove.

But the word kept returning. In a tea ceremony last week, I felt electricity move through my body when I held my awareness on two words: spiritual technology. My heart was beating fast. I didn’t know why it mattered. I just knew it did.

So I looked it up.

The root is Greek:

• technē (τέχνη) = art, craft, skill, a way of making

• logos (λόγος) = word, account, principle, reasoned explanation

Technology then was any systematic way of bringing something into being. Rhetoric was once a technology. So was blacksmithing. So was medicine. The word only narrowed during the Industrial Revolution, when we decided that only things related to science and industry deserved the name.

And in that narrowing, we forgot something essential.

The Recognition

I remember the first time I completely dissolved in a plant medicine. Somewhere in that dissolving, a thought arose: This is very advanced alien technology.

Something extremely mystical and important was happening — and present-day science had no way of explaining or proving it. Yet it was undeniably real. Undeniably working on me in ways I couldn’t explain.

There are systems for transformation that have been refined over thousands of years. Plant medicines. Breathwork. Tantric practice. Chinese medicine. They work — not because we can prove them in randomized controlled trials, but because lineages have tested them on countless human bodies and passed down what reliably opens, heals, and awakens.

Over Christmas, I talked with my dad about his work. He runs the oldest Chinese herb store in California. He helped create the San Francisco campus for the top Chinese medicine university in China — a four-year program that conferred bachelor’s degrees to nearly fifty adult students.

Chinese herbs have thousands of years of clinical history. In China, Chinese medicine is woven into the mainstream medical system — hospitals, universities, clinical training. Most of it wouldn’t fit the FDA drug-approval pathway in the United States as it exists today. Not because it doesn’t work — because it doesn’t fit certain modern-day, Western beliefs about what medicine has to be. It doesn’t fit the boxes.

And I realized: I’ve been holding a similar kind of judgment toward what I’ve learned on the spiritual path.

Underneath was a belief I didn’t even know I was carrying: If it’s not proven by science, it’s not really technology. It’s woo. It’s alternative. It’s belief.

The other day, I listened to a friend share about a relational rupture with his partner — something he couldn’t find his way through. And I could see the mechanics. The physics of the situation. The way through.

I shared what I saw, but not with my full spine.

Even though some part of me knew how rupture works, I softened it. I hedged. I spoke from somewhere smaller than my actual knowing.

If I were in an engineering context, describing how a system worked, I wouldn’t apologize. I wouldn’t shrink to avoid seeming arrogant. I wouldn’t say “this is just my experience.”

I would say: this is how it works — while remaining open to revision if reality proves otherwise.

I’ve lived inside the mechanics of desire, attachment, projection, rupture and repair — intimately, painfully, devotionally — for seven years. My authority doesn’t come from theory. It comes from repeated contact with laws of relational reality.

And my humility in shrinking that knowing doesn’t serve anyone.

This phrase — spiritual technology — is an invitation. To fully claim what I’ve learned. To share with the same spine I would bring to any domain where I’ve earned my knowing. To stop treating the relational and the sacred as somehow less rigorous, less mappable, less real.

There’s a fidelity to how things actually work. And I’m ready to speak from the recognition.

The Claim

What I’m claiming is radical:

There are reliable, lawful, repeatable dynamics by which human beings come into contact with truth, love, attachment, power, and awakening — and they are embedded in partnership and sex.

Awakening has mechanics — alive mechanics.

Just like breath has mechanics. Just like attachment has mechanics. Just like desire has mechanics. Just like rupture and repair have mechanics.

Most spiritual spaces say: This works… sometimes… if you’re open… if the energy is right.

Spiritual technology says: When we put human nervous systems into certain configurations, truth appears.

Life itself is already a perfectly functioning spiritual technology — and partnership and sex are among its most precise interfaces.

I’ve been sitting with Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle lately — the what, the how, the why. His thesis is that the most inspiring leaders and movements start from the inside out: they lead with why they do what they do, not what they do.

At the end of last year, I realized the school was the what. Co·Awaken is emerging to be a school of awakened relating through the path of partnership.

But what is the why?

The Golden Circle helped me see something I hadn’t fully articulated about Co·Awaken:

We believe partnership and sex are high-leverage spiritual technology — the most embedded and direct path to awakening, woven into our daily lives. When partnership transforms, everything transforms: our homes, our families, our work, our communities.

I know this because I lived it.

For seventeen years, I circled around sex in shame and silence. When that chapter ended, I didn’t just want intimacy — I wanted to understand it. Not just as a concept but as a lived experience.

And through years of practice, rupture, healing, and devotion with my partner , I now live something I couldn’t have imagined.

Deep love of life. Deep love of each other. Deep secure attachment — not just to one another, but to reality itself, to desire itself. A sense of awakening together. A sense that anything is possible.

We just created our vision boards for 2026. And there’s a knowing — not hope, knowing — that what we envision will become true. A deep trust that we’ve cultivated through years of showing up for what’s hard.

Not because I figured it out. Because I let myself be transformed.

If a man like me — with generations of conditioning and seventeen years of shutdown — can create a life this beautiful and nourishing and alive, then so can anyone.

The Form

For the past four and a half years, I’ve been writing this newsletter under the name Intimate Reflections. Some part of me always knew it was a temporary container — a cocoon where I could discover what wanted to emerge.

What emerged was Co·Awaken.

And now the cocoon has done its work.

Starting today, this publication carries the name — Co·Awaken — of what it’s becoming. A school that runs in my lineage, a thing I’m in devotion to, a thing I want to last beyond me.

This year, I’m building a pilot program — a four-to-seven day immersive container for couples. Partnership and sexuality and attachment woven together. The practices that transformed my own life, distilled into something others can live.

There’s much I don’t yet know. But I do know the essence:

Technology, at its root, is the craft of bringing something into form.

I am bringing a school into form.

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If you’ve been reading along, thank you. The experiment continues — now with a name that matches what it’s becoming.

If you’re new here, welcome. You’re witnessing a school being built in real time.

There’s a moment from this year I keep returning to.

I’m sitting before a medicine journey. My body is doing what it often does before something big—heart beating fast, chest tight, breath shallow, a low hum of activation running through my nervous system.

I’m really nervous.

And for most of my life, my relationship to this sensation has been the same: hunker down, brace against it, wait for it to pass.

Somewhere deep in my patterning, I had learned that discomfort was something to survive. That the right response to intensity was to harden, contract, and endure—wait for the nervousness to end, wait for the uncertainty to resolve, wait for life to become more comfortable so I could finally relax.

But sitting there, in that moment before the journey, something different happened.

I saw it.

I saw the pattern clearly—not just intellectually, but in my body. I was bracing. I was waiting. I was enduring. I was treating my own aliveness as a threat.

I even saw how all the ways I knew to ground myself were fundamentally just strategies that pushed away the sensations of nervousness.

And then came the insight that would reshape the rest of my year:

If I keep this relationship with nervousness, I will stop doing the things that matter.

Because here’s the truth I couldn’t escape: the bigger I play, the more I step into the unknown, the more I follow the call of my soul—the more this sensation will be present. Nervousness isn’t a sign that something is wrong. It’s a sign that I’m at my edge. It’s the feeling of growth.

And if my relationship is to ground or to brace and wait for it to pass, then I will subconsciously avoid the very things I’m here to do.

So I tried something different.

I breathed into it. Not to make it go away. Not to transform it into something else. But to actually relax into it—to let the sensation be what it is without pushing any of it away.

And something shifted.

The sensation was still there. But it wasn’t a threat anymore. It was just energy. It was life force moving through me.

I realized, in that moment, that not just nervousness but every sensation I had ever resisted as something to avoid or survive could actually be aliveness. With enough openness and surrender, every sensation could be pleasure. Every sensation could actually be the orgasmic pulse of existence moving through my body.

The only thing that made it suffering was my resistance to it.

This wasn’t a concept. It was felt. My body softened. My chest opened. The breath moved differently.

And I understood: This is what it means to open myself to life.

—

This is what 2025 was about.

Something fundamental shifted in how I relate to reality itself. Not one breakthrough, but a slow accumulation of moments where I chose to soften instead of brace—until softening became the new default.

There’s a spaciousness in my body now that wasn’t there before. A sense of possibility that doesn’t depend on circumstances. An excitement about what’s unfolding that comes from trust rather than hope.

I don’t know how else to say it: I broke into a new way of being alive.

This was the year I deepened into secure attachment with life—and stabilized unconditional trust as the ground I stand on.

There’s a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where he stands at the edge of a massive chasm. The only way across is a leap of faith—stepping into what looks like empty air, trusting that the bridge will appear beneath his foot.

That’s what this year asked of me, again and again.

For most of my life, I froze at that edge. I could see where I wanted to go. I could feel the pull. But I couldn’t take the step—not without proof, not without certainty, not without knowing the bridge was already there, not without someone else holding me in it.

What changed wasn’t that I became braver. What changed was that I started to meticulously track the places in my awareness where I wasn’t feeling trust. As my awareness sharpened, trust stopped being something I tried to believe and became something I could feel—a specific vibration in my body that I can now recognize when it’s present and sense the absence of when it’s not.

Now I can catch the moments when I’m out of alignment with trust in real-time. I can feel the gap—the unfelt emotion sitting between me and that ground—and instead of pushing through or overriding it, I can turn toward it. I can feel what needs to be felt to come back.

Nowhere was this clearer than stepping into my sacred purpose. I ran my first couples workshops. I wrote about sex publicly for the first time. Each one felt like stepping into empty air.

And each time, the bridge appeared. I was met, held, and supported in ways my mind couldn’t have orchestrated.

This is what trust actually feels like when it becomes ground: you stop needing to see the whole path before you take the first step. You stop requiring certainty before you act. You start living as if life wants to meet you.

Because it does.

This was the year I broke through a core pattern of enduring life.

There’s a book I’ve come to regard as a bible for healing and being human: The 5 Personality Patterns. It describes five core ways we learn to protect ourselves as children—each brilliant for survival, each costly for living fully. I’ve probably read the book five or six times.

The one that has run my life most deeply up until this year is what the book calls the enduring pattern. You might recognize it: when something feels like too much, instead of fighting or fleeing, you hunker down. You clench against the discomfort. You wait for the hard thing to end. You endure.

It’s the kid who learns that the safest response to overwhelm is to go still and quiet and just... get through it. The adult version looks like tolerating situations that don’t work, resisting your own desires because wanting leads to disappointment, and bracing against life’s intensity rather than letting it move through you.

It’s a survival strategy. And like all survival strategies, it worked—at some point, in some context, it kept me safe. But it also kept me from fully engaging with life. You can’t reach for something while you’re braced against it.

2025 was the year I broke through it. The pattern no longer runs the show.

In my plant medicine journeys this year, I healed a core abandonment wound that left me feeling helpless and waiting indefinitely to be saved. And in so doing, I melted a deep and ancient freeze in my nervous system that kept me from fully reaching for life. I feel reunited with Life itself in ways that are still rippling.

What remains is different work—the rules I absorbed about how to be, what’s allowed, what’s too much. But that’s next year’s territory. This year, the enduring broke.

This was the year I came out with my sacred purpose.

For years, I’ve been searching for this. Circling it. Sensing something was there but not being able to name it or claim it. I’d catch glimpses in conversations, in the way people responded when I spoke about partnership or projections or sex as a spiritual path. But I couldn’t land it. I couldn’t say: this is what I’m here for.

This year, it finally clicked into place.

There’s still much I don’t know, and yet there is also a knowing that has settled into my body. I’m here to guide couples across thresholds of truth—to help them see that their partnership is a portal for awakening, that ruptures are doorways to secure attachment, that their sex can be a transformative path to meeting what’s real.

The clarity didn't arrive all at once. It accumulated—each step I took revealing the next, each leap building trust that there was more to step into.

I wrote about sex publicly—multiple times. I wrote about not just the models and the abstractions, but the lived texture of my own partnership, my own body, my own edges.

I shared my story about losing my virginity at 35. The one I’d shared privately and written about in private circles but never owned publicly. The shame I’d carried for decades about what happened and who I was. I pressed publish and felt my heart pound and trusted that I would be held.

I ran my first three couples workshops at my home. I transmitted what I’ve learned about projections, about the truth that partnership can be a portal for awakening, and embodied practices for working through them.

I reclaimed Co·Awaken—a container I’d created last year but never used—and gave it new life and direction. It’s now the vessel for everything I’m here to offer the world. And I can feel it taking shape, becoming real.

The leap was scary. It was trembling and uncertain and required everything I had. But I leaned into trusting that when I move from truth and beauty, I will be held.

And I was.

This was the year I broke through the problem-solving frame and learned to create from beauty.

For most of my life, my creative energy was organized around solving problems. I would identify a problem—in my life, in my work, in sex, in the world—and creation was the way to make it right.

This year, something different emerged.

The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz helped me see that problem-solving and creation are fundamentally different systems. Without problems as the orienting frame, I’m feeling access to so much more possibility.

For the first time in three attempts, I completed The Artist’s Way—twelve weeks of morning pages and artist dates and cracking open the places where creativity had calcified. Through that process and ’s Prismara container, I discovered what it feels like to create from vision instead of from problems. It’s connected me with a way to move from what’s true and what’s beautiful and what’s real—not from a place of needing to do something to be okay.

There’s a reunion happening with life force, with creative energy, with sexual energy. They’re not separate—they never were. And when I’m creating from that place, it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like making love to reality.

I have my first embodied glimpses now of what it means to create my life as art, with no problem in mind. Not to solve my life but to create it—from beauty, from devotion, from desire. And I can feel how as I build Co·Awaken, even the website was created from beauty as an organizing principle.

This was the year Kiki and I became true co-creators—first as parents, now in our offerings.

Ember is fourteen months old now. And what I can say is this: and I have become an excellent team.

We’re more attuned to our own nervous systems and to each other’s. We know when we’re parenting from authentic desire and presence and when we’re doing it from obligation. And in owning our true limits, we’ve been able to get the nanny support we actually needed to be a thriving family.

I feel us becoming leaders as conscious parents in our community. Friends tell us they look up to how we’re doing this—that watching us paves the way for something new in their imagination of what parenting could be. With secure attachment as our north star, it’s clear what is and isn’t in alignment, which makes it easy to feel deep trust in our shared philosophy.

Kiki and I have wanted to co-create offerings together since the beginning of relationship. It’s clear that parenting together is co-creation. It always was. The way we navigate travel, support each other’s needs, know when we’re hitting our limits and ask for help before we break—this is the prototype. This is us learning to build something together without our patterns hijacking the process.

A friend in a mastermind two years ago told us something hard to hear: we needed to come into our own sovereignty before we could truly co-create offerings. She was right.

This December, we crossed a major milestone and started serving tea in our home as a paid offering to our community. It felt like a natural next step—just presence, just service, just the sacred field we’ve been cultivating together. All the patterns still show up. But instead of collapsing into them, I feel us meeting them. Owning what’s ours. Not without friction, but without the old confusion about whose stuff is whose.

The ground we built through parenting is now holding something new. And I’m excited to see what wants to emerge.

This was the year I began meeting the fear stored in my body.

Through the Grinberg Method, I discovered something I didn’t know was possible: direct contact with fear itself.

Not processing fear through story. Not understanding where it came from. Not even releasing it. Just meeting it—in the body, as sensation, without flinching.

Fear lives in places I didn’t know had memory. In the subtle bracing of my right calf. In the holding pattern in my shoulders and hips. In a tightness low in my pelvis that I’d mistaken for how bodies simply are.

And when I meet it directly—without making it mean anything, without needing it to change—something shifts. The fear doesn’t disappear. It integrates. What was locked as tension becomes available as energy.

I’m just beginning. But there’s something so exciting about knowing this territory exists—knowing that layer by layer, I can meet what’s been frozen for decades and let it move again. The excitement about what becomes possible here is one of the most alive sensations in my body right now.

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If 2024 was the year I hit escape velocity—breaking free of the gravitational pull of my trauma—then 2025 was the year I landed somewhere new.

Not on solid ground in the old sense. Not certainty. Not safety manufactured through control.

But ground made of trust.

Trust that I can soften instead of brace. Trust that desire is safe to follow. Trust that when I step into the unknown, the bridge will appear—maybe not in the form I expected, but it will appear.

I feel the vibrant tingles on the edge of my skin now, living on the threshold of uncertainty and mystery. I’m not waiting anymore for life to become comfortable enough to finally relax into.

I’m already here. Already held. Already home.

This was the year trust became ground.

Before my grandfather passed, he dreamt of building a school.

He was a Chinese doctor. He read pulses, prescribed herbs, served the community in San Francisco Chinatown, helped many women conceive when Western medicine had no answers—a godfather to children who might never have been born. And somewhere in him lived a vision of something larger—a place where what he knew could be transmitted, where the healing could multiply beyond what one man could hold.

He never built it.

My father carried the thread forward. He took over the family’s Chinese herb store—now the oldest in California—and then went further. He organized teachers, created a four-year program, a satellite school of a Chinese medicine university in China. He shepherded a cohort of dozens of adults through and conferred degrees. He brought something into form that his father had only dreamed—one cohort, and then it was complete.

And then there was me.

The Lineage in My Bones

I didn’t know I was continuing anything.

Eight years ago, I co-founded Co Leadership. We created perhaps the best leadership training out there for engineers, working with household Silicon Valley names.

We charged companies $60,000 for a two-day workshop—not because I had the most management experience, but because I could do something rare:

I could take a hundred disparate insights—from psychology, from systems thinking, from productivity, from coaching, from project management, from organizational dynamics—and weave them into one coherent map.

I could make the complex land in the body. What had felt murky and political suddenly had structure. I was teaching engineers APIs for relationships—clean interfaces for the messiest parts of working with other humans.

In truth, we were Trojan horsing intimacy skills. Intimacy wasn’t what people asked for directly, but it was both clearly needed and also the most direct path. The fastest way for engineers to become effective leaders was to learn to be more intimate with what they and their teammates truly wanted.

It turns out I was building a school. I just didn’t call it that.

And then I left. I told myself the container wasn’t big enough to hold everything I wanted to teach. In my own spiritual journey, I would attend expansive tantra festivals and come home lit up with insight about life, desire, sexuality, the full spectrum of what it means to be human—and then try to squeeze it all into the tiny box of how people communicated what they wanted for the team.

That was the story I carried for years—until last week.

The Truth in the Body

Lily’s fingers press hard into my back. My body braces against the pain, the intensity, the intrusion.

This is the Grinberg Method—bodywork that reads the story your tissue tells and works directly with our relationship to pain and fear. The practice is learning to soften and receive intensity without bracing. Lily calls it agreeing with the fear rather than fighting it.

I was telling her about Co·Awaken, about how it feels different from everything I’ve done before.

And then she named something in that piercing way of hers, her fingers pressing through my body armor even as her words cut through my story:

You didn’t leave your last company because the container wasn’t big enough. You left because you had rules around how you were allowed to show up.

I felt my body brace against her hands. I felt my mind brace against her words.

Through our session, I could see it—those rules encoded in the rigidity of my own body. The bracing was visible, tangible. Still here, still running me, even in this new thing I was building.

She didn’t tell me what to do with this. She just named it—while I practiced softening into what I didn’t want to feel.

I let in the whole truth of what I hadn’t been willing to see: a part of me had left the company because I had decided how much of myself I was allowed to bring.

I can’t change the past. But what I finally saw was the invitation: to include my full self in the work I’m doing now, including my engineer. The precision, the systems thinking, the capacity to build coherent maps—that’s life force I will need. No part left out.

The Knowing in My Soul

Days later, sitting in tea ceremony, it arrived—a knowing about Co·Awaken.

I am building a school.

A modern-day school of awakened relating through the path of partnership—the next generation of the Hendricks Institute or the Gottman Institute. Something that can hold rigor and depth, sexuality and spirituality, attachment and desire. Something that can reach people wherever they are without diluting the transmission.

The knowing landed with a perfection I could feel in my bones. I’ve spent the years since leaving tech on a quest to clarify my soul’s purpose—searching, experimenting, following threads that sometimes led somewhere and sometimes dissolved. And in that moment, I could feel my grandfather and father in it, the healers and teachers who came before, their dreams moving through my blood like warmth spreading through the body after the first sip of tea.

Everything I’d been living—the past few months, the past few years—had been training me for exactly this.

And I could finally see what I am:

I am a weaver. Someone who can take disparate threads—the mechanics of projection, attachment work with desire, the art of reparenting, the architecture of rupture, sexuality as transformational system and sacred container—and make them into one coherent tapestry. That’s why people in my engineering days paid $60,000 for two days. Not because I was the expert in any single domain, but because I could hold all the domains at once and show people where they connect.

I am not a therapist. I am not an attachment expert. I am not a tantra teacher. And I don’t need to be. Weaving is my superpower. This is what my grandfather dreamed of. This is what my father built toward. This is what runs through my blood.

What I really want is to help people create intimate relationships where they can have it all—deep safety and wild passion, feeling deeply seen and met and turned on. Relationships that are fully alive.

The most direct path to that is to relate to partnership as a spiritual path, as a path of mutual soul liberation.

I have been immersed in the deep end of the spiritual community for a long time. I have sat in circles. I have drunk the medicines. I have been held by practitioners and healers who speak a language that most people never encounter. And I love that world. It has given me my path to freedom.

But Co·Awaken is also for the people I used to work with. The engineers and builders who would never set foot in a tantra festival but who are starving for something real in their relationships. It’s for the man who knows something is missing in his marriage but doesn’t know how to name it. It’s for the mother who wants to feel more alive with her partner but is terrified of her own desire. It’s for the couple who has read all the books and still can’t seem to bridge the gap between them.

I can feel the shape of it even though I cannot yet see the details. Life force will be built into its very foundation.

This is a big ambition. I know that. And I will need a lot of help—collaborators, teachers, community, resources I can’t yet name. I’m not pretending I can do this alone. But I am ready to stand as the steward of this dream, to hold it with everything I have, and to ask for help from that place of fullness rather than lack.

The Orientation in the Not-Knowing

The orientation required to build this school is part of the teaching itself.

I can feel how it asks me to fully own my gifts—and to hold total humility that I have no idea how to build this thing. Both, at the same time. Not as contradiction but as integration of paradox.

It requires utter surrender and total commitment. It requires me to operate outside the rules that have governed my life—the same rules I saw encoded in my body on Lily’s table, the same rules that made me leave my tech leadership company behind.

It requires reaching like my daughter reaches for life—going for it while remaining in complete openness.

I can feel how if I adopt the stance of trying to figure it out, I won’t get there. That stance is fundamentally contractive—a bracing against not-knowing, a grasping for control. This school wants to be built from a different place: from receiving, from listening, from welcoming what life is trying to show me. From creating out of beauty rather than fear.

This is not something I can figure out. This is something I must become.

Before my grandfather passed, he dreamed of building a school. He never built it. But the dream didn’t die.

It moved through my father. It moved through me. It’s moving still.

I have finally found a dream big enough to devote my life’s work to. The thing I am willing to live for. The thing I am willing to die for. My soul’s work, finally clear.

The school that runs through my blood is ready to be born.

And the orientation I am learning—fully owning, completely surrendering, dissolving the rules, letting it come—this is how I say yes.

I want to try something radical.

I’m building a body of work called Co·Awaken — and a company to carry it. And I want to build it in public. Not the kind of building in public where I just share wins and milestones — but the kind where I also share the not-knowing, the mystery, and the messy middle where the thing hasn’t taken shape yet.

Yesterday morning, I didn’t know what the next step was.

I felt myself reaching for the habitual moves — just write something, iterate on the website, or promote something. They were the familiar motions of productivity, but this time I caught myself. Doing the same habitual movements would just get me the same results, and the results I’ve been creating weren’t what I’m wanting.

So in tea ceremony this morning, I sat with the discomfort of not knowing. And in being with the heaviness in my chest, something surfaced: an intersection. Three things that want to meet — spirituality, business, and engineering.

I don’t fully know what it means yet. But I feel the aliveness, and I want to follow it. And I want to let you watch.

Here’s where I am:

I’m staring at the screen, at three million words of transcripts (about 30 novels’ worth) I’ve imported into an AI tool called NotebookLM — 70+ hours with my relationship coach Ethan Henson, 50+ hours with Mina Lee, hundreds of conversations about awakening, sexuality, partnership, creativity, secure attachment, and more with ChatGPT. They’re an in-depth capture of my deepest personal and relational breakthroughs from the past five years.

Three million words. And the question: What wants to emerge — and can I be the vessel for it?

What I know now is that whatever emerges will live at the intersection of these three things.

I. Spirituality

For the past few years, I’ve been deeply walking the spiritual path. Plant medicine has played a major role — alongside sacred partnership, sexuality, fatherhood, and years of retreats and trainings. They’ve all brought me into deeper love and acceptance of myself, and deeper trust and secure attachment with life.

I wouldn’t change any of those choices, and yet, one of the challenges this path presented is that the creative engine I had always relied on — the one that could push through resistance, use willpower to overcome doubt, force creation when creation didn’t want to come — started to die.

The medicine was doing its work — not just healing old wounds, but rewiring something fundamental in how I operate.

I lost the ability to power through. I lost the ability to use willpower to do things I thought I should do but didn’t actually want to do. I lost the ability to build from anywhere other than truth.

Every step of my spiritual evolution removed my capacity for self-betrayal. Every crutch. Every bypass. Every way I had learned to override my body’s wisdom — it was all being dissolved, piece by piece, until there was nothing left to push with.

In his book Conscious Accomplishment, uses the term inner purgatory to describe this inevitable part of the spiritual path:

Inner purgatory is the intermediate state between focusing on your inner work and feeling invigorated to take creative action in the world. When you’re in inner purgatory, you desire to accomplish things from an updated perspective, but find it inexplicably difficult. You may struggle with a lack of motivation, inspiration, or energy for external goals, despite knowing that you want more for your life than doing inner work all the time.

That was exactly it.

For the past four years — ever since I burnt out building my last company — I’ve been living in this inner purgatory. I would sit down to build something new. I would feel the pull toward creation. And then I would try to force it — the way I had always forced it — and I would fail.

There were so many times I’d push myself deeper into a depressive pit I didn’t know how to get out of. The forcing didn’t work and made things worse. And yet, I couldn’t stop because I didn’t know any other way.

What I kept resisting for the past four years — and what I’m only beginning to fully embrace — is that the dissolution of that old creative engine was preparing for a new way of creating.

Because when you lose the ability to build from force, you are left with only one option: to build from coherence.

When you can no longer override your body’s no, you discover what your body’s yes actually feels like.

The spiritual path gave me a real-time compass — an internal instrument calibrated to truth.

Now I can only create from a place that feels in deep coherence with my soul. I can only build in ways that feel sustainable and energizing. I can only make things that expand me, grow me, let me meet parts of myself I haven’t met yet.

II. Business

But a compass alone isn’t enough, and I know I’m here to build something. I’ve built before. I know I can build again.

Eight years ago, I co-founded a company called Co Leadership. We trained engineers, managers, and leaders at tech companies you’ve heard of — the ones with the strongest engineering brands in Silicon Valley. People raved about the trainings. We created frameworks for connection in a world that was focused on effectiveness and results.

We called it Building Alignment. But what we were really doing was teaching intimacy to people who had been trained and conditioned to think in logic and precision.

The magic was real.

I remember a closing circle at one of our trainings. An engineer — someone who had spent years working alongside colleagues without ever really knowing them — looked around the room and said, in something like awe:

“I didn’t know there could be an API for relationships.”

That phrase stuck in me — because it captured exactly what we had built. We’d distilled beautiful and simple frameworks — ways of structuring conversation so that intimacy could emerge, reliably, in five minutes, when years of proximity had failed — that broke through ceilings of effectiveness for teams.

We did live demos where my co-founder and I would clear the stories we held about each other — the projections, the fears, the things unsaid — right in front of a room of strangers. We let them watch us touch the places that held us back from deeper connection.

And something would shift in the room. The energy would be palpable.

Co Leadership was proof — proof that I could take a mysterious black box like human connection and create a container that made it widely accessible in high-stakes environments where billions of dollars flowed.

If it worked for engineers learning to connect with their co-workers, what might be possible in a domain that feels infinitely richer and more complex: intimate partnership and sexuality?

The question is: how do you build a framework for something this vast?

III. Engineering

I’ve always thought in systems.

The world reveals itself to me in patterns, in structures, in the logic beneath the surface of things. When I look at something complex, I instinctively start mapping it. What are the abstractions? How do they interact? Where are the leverage points?

That’s how I built growth teams at tech startups. It’s how I wrote a bestselling book on engineering effectiveness that generated half a million in revenue. It’s how Co Leadership became successful.

I knew how to see systems, and I knew how to make them work.

The engineer in me never left, but he’s gone quiet the past few years when it came to my creative work. And now he’s finally coming back online.

This week, I’ve been tinkering.

I wrote tools with Claude Code to parse through years of transcripts. I imported everything into NotebookLM — every conversation with spiritual teachers that have guided me in relationship and business and creativity, every late-night dialogue about awakening, partnership, and sex that I’ve had with ChatGPT.

Three million words of my own transformation, now available to explore and model with the help of AI.

When I sit with it all, I feel infinite potential and a draw to tinker. I feel the excitement of not knowing what might emerge. And underneath it, fear and overwhelm — the question of whether I can be the vessel for what wants to come through.

It feels bigger than me. And yet unmistakably mine.

IV. The Intersection

Co·Awaken lives where these three paths meet.

Spirituality gave me the compass — a calibration to truth, an inability to build from anywhere other than coherence.

Business gave me the proof — the lived experience of creating something that worked, that can truly impact the world.

Engineering gave me the eyes — the ability to see systems and patterns, and the tools to build with.

I know that what I’m uniquely bringing to this intersection is that I’ve thoroughly lived it. Deep attachment wounding — and learning to rewire it. Sexual re-imprinting — letting my body discover a new relationship to desire. Long-term partnership as an awakening path. Fatherhood. And through all of it, a devotion to truth that refuses to let go of me.

I’m not a tantra teacher or a therapist. But I am a systems engineer of desire, life force, and contact with reality. And Co·Awaken is where I’m bringing that — to the domain of intimate partnership and sexuality. To build frameworks for awakening through the places we’re most hungry, most afraid, most alive.

I don’t know what Co·Awaken will become. I don’t have a roadmap. I don’t have the old engine that could power through the unknown.

All I have is the compass, the proof, and the eyes. And the question: Can I be the man to let this move through me?

I know the answer is yes. I’m just not sure who I have to become to be that man.

But I’m devoted to finding out.

Three million words. An intersection where spirituality, business, and engineering meet. And the willingness, finally, to build in public and in the mystery.

Today I’m sharing the first shape of a project I’ve been working on — a website for Co·Awaken. It’s a simple beginning, the earliest seed of a transmission I’m here to bring through.

Before I go further into what it is, I want to name something true: this partnership and this family are where the real work happens. Opening to ever-deepening intimacy, becoming a father, staying in relationship through all the beauty and all the mess — these are the places where life has broken me open and remade me again and again.

In many ways, what I’m sharing today is three things at once: a seed, a transmission, and a beginning. And I wanted to share it while it’s still imperfect, still early, still forming.

Co·Awaken is the place where I’ll be exploring how intimacy and relationship wake us up to who we really are — and to the beauty that becomes possible when we live from that truth. This past year, I’ve shared early teachings, run small workshops, and held tea ceremonies in our home in Boulder. I can feel the work wanting to grow toward retreats and deeper containers.

This website is the first form to hold what wants to emerge: coawaken.com.

I. A Seed — Imperfect Beginnings, Disappointment, and Devotion

This week in tea, my teacher Mina offered a pointer: when we avoid disappointment, we also suppress the feeling that comes right before it. So I let myself feel disappointment — and alongside it, I sensed a tenderness in my belly and pelvis.

It was a kind of innocence — the innocence of wanting to really go for life.

It reminded me of my 13-month-old daughter Ember learning to walk these past couple weeks — how she throws her whole being into it, falls and cries, and then tries again without hesitation. No armor. Just devotion to the movement of life.

Disappointment has never been easy for me. As a child, my mom’s disappointment came paired with distance and punishment, not love. So I learned to avoid it.

And this past month, I could feel the deeper disappointment I’ve been skirting for a long time: the mismatch between the inner destiny I’ve sensed for years and the current outer shape of my life when it comes to my work.

That gap has meant that for few years, nothing I dreamt up ever seemed to match what I created in practice. The avoided disappointment became a dense loop in my body that kept me from moving. And yet, when I finally let myself feel it — really feel it — I could sense the devotion underneath.

I felt the yearning to fully go for life — and to go for it before I have everything sorted out.

This website emerges from that truth. It’s small and beautifully whole in its imperfection and incompleteness.

I’ve never embraced the movement of building in public before, and for the first time, I’m choosing to build in public — to let myself be seen in the not-knowing, to begin before I feel polished, to trust that what’s true now doesn’t need to be more than it is.

And as I built the site, something surprising happened.

For years, creating websites felt embarrassingly challenging despite by background as an engineer. Nothing ever quite matched my sense of beauty. The tools felt clunky. My expectations of what I wanted stripped the joy out of creating. My energy and motivation would collapse before I could finish.

But this time something shifted.

I created from joy — letting beauty lead, letting my engineering mind tinker playfully, letting my aesthetic sense shape each choice. I found a web design tool called Framer that felt fluid. Collaborating with Claude around typography, color, design and architectural choices felt like dancing intimately in a creative field rather than forcing an outcome.

I found myself building something I actually loved — and it reorganized something in me.

I realized that Co·Awaken won’t just be about the content I share. It will also be about how I create:

From devotion.
From beauty.
From truth.
From enjoyment rather than obligation.
From the willingness to be seen while still becoming.

II. The Transmission: What Co·Awaken Is Meant to Hold

Co·Awaken is a transmission.

It’s the stream of awakening that has reshaped me through partnership, intimacy, sexuality, fatherhood, the most intense plant medicines on the planet, and every doorway life has used to break me open and remake me again and again.

The website I’m sharing today is simply a first texture of that transmission — something life is asking me to place into the world even though I don’t yet know what it will become.

And it begins with what has transformed me most:

• The way my partnership with has been the fiercest, clearest mirror of my evolution.

• The way awakening happens through the body — through relationship — through the places that soften us and the places that challenge us.

• The way every rupture, trigger, and moment of pain has actually been love, orchestrating my liberation.

It’s my attempt to share the architecture of awakening as it moves through partnership — the path of becoming more available to love, more honest with truth, and more devoted to beauty, even while I’m still learning how to hold it.

There’s a mystery to this moment that feels like an echo of the days leading up to Ember’s birth — driving to the hospital knowing everything was about to change, while having no way of imagining what fatherhood would feel like on the other side.

A faint version of that event-horizon quality is here.

I can’t see the full future of this work.
I can only feel my devotion to putting my life’s energy toward it — and to being intimate with its unfolding.

III. A Beginning — Revealed Exactly As It Is

So with all of that, here is the first visible shape of this transmission — a love letter to my partnership and to the life that has been working me:

coawaken.com

A seed, a transmission, a beginning — revealed exactly as it is.
A beginning, nothing more — and nothing less.
I’m grateful, proud, and humbled to finally be stepping in.

I’m fully embracing my dharma and stepping into the arena of couples work.

Somewhere around my third date with Kiki, I told her that I wanted us to teach intimacy workshops together. That was six years ago. That’s how long some part of me has known this to be my calling—and how long it’s taken to initiate myself into it.

My own partnership has been the richest source of expansion in my life, and I know I’m here to guide couples into deeper contact with themselves and each other. To breathe space into the places where fear and love intertwine. To shepherd the transformation that becomes possible when rupture is met as sacred—not avoided, fixed, or managed.

And now, I’m finally stepping into it.

At the end of October, I carved out space in our home for a private 2½-day retreat—an intimate, high-touch experience for one couple ready to walk through a portal together. A sacred container where everything and every part gets to be seen and met with love, where the partnership itself becomes a vessel for awakening.

I haven’t found the right couple yet—and I might not. And that feels important to name. Because this isn’t about having it all figured out. It’s about saying yes before the form appears. It’s about entering the arena and letting the work find its shape through contact with reality.

Alongside that, I led a public workshop at my home in Boulder—called The Sacred Art of Rupture—where I shared the very transmission that has changed everything in my own relationship. It’s not about tools or communication scripts. It’s about staying in the fire when every part of your body wants to escape. And it’s about letting rupture become the sacred intelligence that shows you exactly where love wants to go next.

Because that’s what Kiki and I lived through. Not just once, but over and over again. For years, rupture felt like threat — something to manage, fix, survive — until it didn’t. Until it became the very force that deepened our safety, that anchored our truth, that made our love more real.

And that’s what I want to share with others. Not from a place of mastery, but from lived devotion. From the part of me that keeps learning how to stay open when I don’t yet know what’s next.

These past weeks, I’ve been actively reaching out to couples—friends, peers, people I admire for the retreat. I haven’t yet received a yes. But something deeper has arrived: a quiet knowing that I’m in the right place, doing the right thing, in the right time. I can feel myself staying open and in devotion to what I’m here to create—without attachment to outcome.

There’s something sobering and exhilarating about it. There’s no more hiding. And also, nothing to prove.

I’m just making deeper and deeper contact with reality—with the truth of what I’ve lived and with the dharma that’s always been here, waiting for me to claim it.

I’m remembering that the only way to create is to keep moving to the art table.

Last month, I attended a powerful medicine retreat oriented around how we relate to the creator inside ourselves. In between the journeys, there was an art table—covered in paint brushes, markers, and colored pencils—for us to explore whatever wanted to come through.

I remember sitting a few feet away, leaning back in a chair. I wasn’t tired exactly—but there was a kind of inertia. I didn’t yet know what I wanted to create, and so I lingered and waited.

Eventually, I got up. I walked to the table and sat down.

The first piece I made, I didn’t like it. The second one… same. But somewhere in that second piece, there was a small element that sparked something—a line, a gesture, a feeling. I followed it. And that became a third piece—one that I actually enjoyed. One that felt like mine.

And I realized: this is the whole thing.

The thing that’s been holding me back has been waiting until I’m clear. It’s hovering in the not-knowing, hoping for direction before I move.

But the clarity I’m waiting for doesn’t come first. It comes through the doing. It’s in the act of creating that I discover the art I actually want to make—not before.

That’s what I’ve been integrating since the retreat—the invitation to move before I’m clear: to walk to the table, to touch the paper, to begin. Not to figure it out from afar—but to be in motion, to let the work itself reveal me to myself.

And that’s the posture I’m bringing now to my couples work. I don’t have all the answers. I don’t yet know exactly what shape this work will take over time. But I know that I need to be in contact. I need to be talking to couples, gathering them, serving them, sitting in the relational field I want to serve—not someday, but now.

Because it’s only by being in the field that I’ll discover the offering. It’s only by showing up that I’ll see what’s needed. It’s only by creating that I’ll know what I’m here to create.

And so the practice is simple: move toward the art table. And just trust that the act of doing is the path.

I’m seeing life more and more as a labyrinth my soul has built for me.

If you had told me this a few years ago, I would have found it absurd. But these days, it feels like the only frame that makes sense.

When I really slow down and feel into it, I can sense it: life isn’t happening to me—it’s happening for me. Every moment, every twist, every obstacle is being placed with precision—not to block me but to guide me.

The soul doesn’t build a labyrinth to test us. It builds a labyrinth to awaken us. And the so-called “obstacles” are not things to be fixed or bypassed. They’re the point. They’re not the detour—they’re the design.

Because what the obstacle brings up in me—the contraction, the grief, the fear, the desire—is exactly the place where love wants to go next. That’s the part of me my soul is trying to reach.

The more I orient to life this way, the more everything softens. I stop trying to get out of the moment. I stop seeing friction as a failure or something to fix. Instead, I meet it. I let it work me. I begin to trust that my soul is in collaboration with life—not in conflict with it.

And in that orientation, I can feel the larger intelligence moving. I can feel how precisely this moment was built. I can feel how even the uncomfortable parts are sacred.

When I remember this, I stop trying to make life better. I start to feel life as it is. And that subtle shift—from avoidance to embrace—is what brings me back into alignment with the path my soul is actually walking.

Because love doesn’t flow around the obstacle. It flows through it.

And that’s the whole point.

I’m orienting my life around the posture of the Reach.

Last week, I wrote about Ember’s open-handed reaching—the way she extends her whole body toward what she wants without shame, without collapse. I’ve felt it living in me as a kind of imprint, a posture for how I want to meet life.

These past weeks, as I’ve stepped more fully into couples work, I’ve had many moments of contraction—personally inviting couples for the retreat, reaching out to collaborators, imagining how it will all flow, wondering how people will respond. I could feel the habitual pattern in me wanting to hunker down until it was over.

But this time, I didn’t.

Instead, I sat with the impulse to go into the pattern and let myself feel the sensations until they revealed themselves as pure aliveness.

On days I felt nervous, I noticed the tingling in my skin—almost as if Life were barraging me. I let it all be here, and I stayed. I kept my hand metaphorically outstretched—the way Ember does—open, upright, surrendered, willing to feel.

On days I felt avoidant, I met the part of me that wanted to curl up and give up on the idea entirely—and felt through the fear of failure. Other days, I could sense the contraction that comes when I try to figure out my way into safety—and instead, I rested in the not-knowing.

Every time I remembered the posture of the Reach, something in me softened. The contraction became less something to overcome and more a current of life force wanting to move through me.

And I realized: this is the practice.

It’s not about getting to the destination. Yes, I want to host the retreat, to serve couples, to see this work come alive—but that’s just the North Star. The real journey is learning to stay open through the process. To trust and rest in the not-knowing. To meet the sensations that arise without needing to fix them.

Because when I live from the posture of the Reach, I’m no longer creating to get somewhere. I’m creating to be here.

And maybe that’s the deeper purpose that’s revealing itself through all of this—to stay open to life, to let the soul’s reach become the shape of my days. To keep extending toward what I love, hand outstretched, heart open, no matter what comes.

Each of these threads—stepping into the arena, moving to the art table, walking the soul’s labyrinth, and remembering the posture of the Reach—feels like one teaching told four ways. They all point to the same movement: contact with reality.

Whether it’s a couple in rupture, a blank canvas, a twist in the labyrinth, or the nervous quickening of a new threshold—life keeps inviting me closer. And the more I let myself be moved by those invitations, the more I see that the path of service and the path of awakening are not two paths. They’re the same one.

Here’s to staying open.
To creating from presence.
To reaching, again and again.

There’s a gesture you’ve been making lately.

One arm outstretched.
Hand open.
Fingers splayed.

Reaching toward the thing you want—
a toy, a dog, the light in the hallway,
my face.

And you’ll just stay there—
not grasping,
not demanding,
just fully reaching.

Your whole body held in this exquisite posture of open wanting.

No shame.
No second-guessing.
No collapse.
Just a kind of upright, surrendered vulnerability.

I’ve started calling it The Reach.

And it’s become the imprint I want to build my life around.

Because what I see in you is something so pure.
The moment your desire arises, you let your whole body orient toward it.
You don’t guard your heart.
You don’t pretend not to care.
You don’t collapse when it doesn’t come right away.
You just stay open.

Sometimes there’s frustration.
Sometimes there are tears.
But even then—your hand stays out.
And Life meets you there.

I see it in how and I instinctively respond.
We notice the direction of your longing.
We come closer.
We help you get what you’re reaching for—
not just the object, but the contact. The recognition. The feeling of being met.

And I realize:
That’s how I want to live.

This past month, as I’ve stepped deeper into the unknown of fully embracing my dharma—
to teach, to lead, to serve couples in the most intimate arenas of love—
I’ve felt moments of contraction.

The nervousness of reaching out and being fully seen.
The instinct to hunker down.

And instead, I practice feeling it all—
the tingling in my chest, the tightening in my belly—
and opening to the sensation as aliveness.

There are moments of disappointment too,
where something doesn’t land the way I’d hoped,
and I feel the pull to curl up, to collapse into safety.

And every time, I come back to you.
To that image of your arm, outstretched.
Your reach that stays open, no matter what.

And I realize—this is the work.
To stay in The Reach.
To not collapse around fear.
To not armor against disappointment.
To feel it all—the uncertainty, the ache, the trembling in my spine—
and still let my spine be tall, heart and body stay open toward what I love.
To stay in the reach—
even when I don’t yet know how life will meet me.

You’ve taught me that this is what reaching actually is.
It’s a posture.
An orientation of the soul.

It’s not about getting the thing.
It’s about staying open to Life in every moment.
It’s about letting Life know—I’m here.
I’m wanting.
I’m available.

And then trusting what comes.

You’re only turning one,
and already, you’ve become one of my greatest teachers.

You remind me every day how much beauty there is in simply wanting.
How sacred it is to not hide that want.
How brave it is to let your body say yes.

You’re teaching me about boundaries, about play, about delight and agency, about presence.
But more than anything, you’re teaching me about how to live.

You’re showing me what it means to meet Life with arms open.
To say yes to my longing.
To let love and uncertainty coexist.
To reach—fully, vulnerably, beautifully—toward what I want.

And to trust that life, in some mysterious way, will meet me there.

Happy birthday, Ember.

I see your reach.
And I feel mine awakening too.

When I sat down for tea ceremony this morning, I was dancing at the edges of my limit. Ember had woken in the middle of the night. I was tired. I could feel myself with less patience than usual when I fed her breakfast — a subtle bracing against life, a resistance to fully letting the moment in.

In my back, it felt like veins of tension in my shoulders. In my stomach, like a tight ball. My breath was shallow.

And I saw: the experience of being “at my limit” is really just a story. A story that arises whenever I am not present to the sensorial experience in my body.

As I sat in tea, I breathed into the veins, into the ball in my belly. I wrapped all the tightness in tender, loving awareness. And as I did, the story dissolved. The wall I had braced against opened into a doorway.

That’s the most beautiful gift fatherhood keeps giving me: the realization that what feels like “too much” is never a fixed boundary, but always an invitation to grow my capacity to be with what is.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted to be fully in this chapter, to orient toward being a 50–50 parent as much as possible. Kiki says it’s generally more like 45–55, and that feels true. I’m not the primary caregiver, but I am close. Close enough that fatherhood is not something I dip into. It is my daily life, woven into the rhythm of naps, feedings, cuddles, middle-of-the-night wakings, laughter, and tears.

The choice not to work for this initial chapter of parenthood has meant that all of it is in my body, not a side role I drop into after “real life.” Fatherhood is the path itself. And choosing this way has created a no-exit experience: I can’t outsource presence or hand off my capacity to meet what’s real to my partner. I am met with every part of myself, every limit and every edge, and I have no choice but to be with it.

That is the gift. That is the path. And the capacity I’m growing here is already shaping the work I long to bring into the world.

We just came back from our first family camping trip, four days in a campervan, two of them with another family who is growing into close friends, part of our village.

Nearly every morning since Ember’s birth, Kiki and I have sat in tea together. But this was the first time we carried the practice into nature—to drink tea with mountains holding us, the trees steady around us, the ground rising to meet us. To feel the life force of the earth moving through my body, as though nature itself were another parent holding all three of us.

And in the middle of ceremony, a hummingbird visited three times, each time hovering close by Ember’s feet as if to bless her. The magic of it lingered in me. To witness Ember being imprinted not just by us, but by the earth itself — mountains, trees, wild creatures — felt like a divine connection.

This is part of what heals me most in fatherhood: to give Ember what I didn’t receive. My father was away on a business trip when I was born. My mother worked 364 days a year in our family store. Love was there, but presence was scarce. Cuddles, touch, afternoons of being held — those weren’t the imprints of my childhood.

On this trip, sitting in nature, it struck me how much presence, play, and contact Ember is wrapped in each day. How, in particular, her body is being imprinted with the knowing that masculine presence is here — reliable and devoted.

Ember’s nervous system is being shaped by something different than what I had. Two present parents. A growing village of attachment figures. A field of safety that teaches her she belongs here. And in teaching her that, I am teaching myself. My own inner child is learning, through her, that secure attachment to life itself is possible.

Last night, Ember woke screaming in the campervan. It was the middle of the night. Kiki hadn’t slept well for days. I could feel exhaustion in myself too. Still, I sat up, pressed Ember to my chest, and held her as she felt through her emotion.

And in that moment, in a van in the middle of the forest, the thought rose in me: What an epic adventure this is.

It wasn’t an idea. It was a pulse through my whole body. Awe that this, exactly this — tired, raw, tender — belongs to the adventure. Awe that nothing needs to be excluded. That every cry, every ache, every joy is part of it.

This morning in tea, when I breathed into the tight ball in my belly, that memory returned. And it brought me to tears: tears of gratitude that this is the capacity I’ve cultivated as a father. That in the middle of the night, holding my daughter’s screams against my chest, the thought that arose in me was "what an epic adventure this is."

And it’s not just fatherhood. It’s life. Every rupture with Kiki. Every edge of resistance. Every limit that dissolves into sensation. Every cry that melts into tenderness. Every silence that opens into awe. All of it can be held as part of life’s epic adventure, as life’s gift to me.

And how beautiful to see that choosing to experience life as an epic adventure is itself devotion. The greatest devotion I can offer to life is to meet it this way: fully, gratefully, and awake to its beauty.

Ten months in, I know this truth in my body: every moment of this life — messy, beautiful, exhausting, sacred — is part of the adventure.

Here’s to Ember’s ten months. And here’s to living it all as the epic adventure it truly is.

When I first fell in love with Kiki, it felt like stepping into a fairy tale.

We had only been dating for a month and a half when we flew to Fiji for my birthday. I was giddy, glowing, wide open. I couldn’t stop beaming to people about her, about us, about the magic we were creating. It didn’t feel like something I had to protect or hold close. It felt like something I wanted the world to feel.

People told me: “Enjoy the honeymoon phase while it lasts.” They said it like a warning, like passion was supposed to fade.

I didn’t believe them then. And I still don’t believe them now.

Because what I’ve come to see is this: Back then, I thought fairy tales were just about that part—the glow, the newness, the effortless passion.

But I was wrong.

Fairy tales don’t end when things get hard. Fairy tales begin when the dragons appear.

They’re made of thresholds, of dark forests, of moments when everything seems lost, and we continue on the quest for love anyway. That’s what makes them epic—not the absence of hardship, but the devotion to beauty through it.

And that’s what we’ve built.

The other morning, we had a rupture. We were both exhausted. Our nine-month-old daughter Ember is still learning to sleep through the night. I was feeling irritated, tired of feeling tired. I wanted us to both feel energized again.

And instead of getting stuck in the frustration at each other, Kiki invited me downstairs for our dyad practice. We sat across from each other on the mat in our practice room.

I moved the anger. I let the heartbreak come through. And in her meeting me, I could finally touch the deeper ache—the part of me that missed her, that missed us feeling well-rested and lit up. I softened. I apologized. I bowed. She received me.

We’ve become masterful at repairing. At not just moving on, but meeting the rupture so fully that it becomes a doorway to a deeper level of love. And a couple hours later, we went on a beautiful date.

Even this home we live in—this sanctuary of love that we both feel deep appreciation for every day, only became possible because we were willing to meet the dragons.

A little over a year ago, I had just returned from a 4-day conscious kink retreat, where I worked through my relationship with money and power. There was one moment where I saw with total clarity: “I get to set boundaries around how my money is spent in our family.” Not from control, but from energetic integrity. From honoring the part of me that had diluted my power to stay safe.

I also touched a deeper part of myself—the part that loves to provide, that wants to be well-used in devotion, and that finds pleasure, power, and turn-on in being a conscious provider. I came back ready to own the archetype I had long been afraid to claim: the sacred sugar daddy in me. The one who wants to be generous and who feels sexier, freer, and more alive when his power isn’t bound up in guilt or people-pleasing, but flowing through clean, clear giving.

Bringing that clarity and turn-on back into the relationship—that’s where it got terrifying. It stirred everything. It forced us to confront ways we'd collapsed money with power and love. It touched her fear of being left and homeless. It touched my fear that claiming what was mine would make me lose love.

There were ruptures, projections, old wounds brought to the surface, moments when the foundation of our relationship shook.

But we stayed. We stayed through the fire. We kept choosing. We cleaned up the distortions wrapped up around money. We came into integrity. And I was able to buy our family a home as a clean expression of devotion and love.

After that, money became a place where life force energy could flow freely between us—a way for the masculine to provide and the feminine to surrender. My generosity could move as devotion without obligation. Her receiving could come as appreciation without guilt. And the flow itself began to feel hot, alive, and sexy, like love moving through the current between us.

For a long time, I kept the sacredness of our love inside a small bubble, not letting myself fully beam about how wonderful it was. Some part of me believed I had to resolve everything I perceived as a problem first, before I could share more. That until it was all worked out, I couldn’t fully claim how good it really was. As if the fairytale didn’t count until it was spotless. As if I had to earn the right to beam.

But the truth is—this love isn’t here to be hidden. It’s here to be shared.

Because part of receiving the beauty is letting it ripple. This love is not a secret to protect. It’s a transmission. And I know it’s part of my dharma to speak it.

I’m a romantic at heart. I still love dating my wife—especially now, five and a half years in, in the sacred chaos of parenting, in the quiet moments after the fire. Just that other day, we dressed up for a date—Kiki in a stunning turquoise dress, me in a handwoven boho shirt. It was the one day we had a nanny, and we chose to spend it nuzzling on the couch of a Japanese restaurant in downtown Boulder.

And what still surprises me sometimes—is that I feel more attraction to her now than ever before. More turn-on. More devotion. Even more love for the woman who is the mother of my child.

Because passion and love don’t die with time, as long as we continue to meet what’s true. It deepens. It ripens.

So I’m letting myself beam again. Not with naïve innocence, but with a radiance that’s been forged through fire. And this time, I’m unapologetic about it. Because beaming—letting the beauty of this love be seen—isn’t just something that happens to me. It’s a sacred practice: a way of honoring the life we’ve created, the love we’ve devoted ourselves to, and the world I believe is possible.

This is the fairy tale I believe in.

And it keeps getting better.

I’m exploring what life becomes when it’s no longer a problem to solve.

I just finished reading a book that shifted something foundational in me—The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz, a former musician who created a company systematizing learnings about the creative process. His book put systems-oriented language to a quiet tension I’ve felt for years but never fully understood.

The core insight is this: most of us have been trained to relate to creativity through the lens of problem-solving. If something feels off—sex, parenting, business—we ask what’s wrong, what needs to be fixed, what’s in the way. Then we brainstorm. We try to solve for it.

But problem-solving and creation are fundamentally different systems. Problem-solving is reactive. It’s about removing what we don’t want. Creation is generative. It’s about bringing something into existence that doesn’t yet exist. One is about elimination. The other, emergence. And no amount of problem-solving or brainstorming could have enabled great artists like Beethoven or Mozart to create their masterpieces.

When we collapse the two—when we try to create from the energy of problem-solving—it doesn’t work. At least not in a sustainable way.

With problem-solving, the intensity of the problem dictates our motivation. But as we begin to address the issue, the intensity goes down—and so does the motivation. The system is inherently oscillatory.

That was a revelation. It explained the invisible loop I’ve lived inside so many times. Feeling inspired… then stuck. Getting clarity… then dropping off. Pouring energy into something, only to lose steam the moment the “problem” feels resolved. Even my last newsletter framed my exploration of service as what was in the way—a classic problem-solving frame.

And it wasn’t just creativity. I saw it in my relationship to sex. A little over a month ago, on Father’s Day, Kiki reflected that I’d been relating to sex as a problem to solve—and that the impact was that it made her want it less. I could feel the truth in that.

So much of my recent writing—beautiful as it’s been—was still rooted in metabolizing tension, in working through a problem that wanted to be resolved . It wasn’t coming from the clean current of desire.

And because sex is a mirror, I saw the larger pattern: I’ve been relating to life itself as a problem to solve. And once I decided to stop doing that, I could feel the floatiness of the past month—the disorientation of no longer having a “problem” as a North Star to orient around. I’ve gotten so good at problem solving and created so much beauty in my life from it, and it’s become clear that it’s time for a new way of being.

The book offers an alternative: create a clear, compelling vision for what you want. Come into deep contact with your actual present reality. And then let the natural tension between those two states become the path of least resistance for your creative energy.

That structural tension between vision and reality is what creates a truly sustainable system—one that doesn’t oscillate, one that consistently progresses.

And right now, I’m feeling genuinely excited to begin living from that frame—not just in my work, but in every part of life.

I’m dreaming into the masterpiece I want my life to be.

If I’m no longer orienting to life as a problem to solve, then what do I want to create?

That’s the question I’ve been living into—and it’s been waking something in me. Not just a new way of thinking, but a new feeling of possibility in my body, an aliveness, a spark.

I’ve started building what I’m calling a soul vision board (I’m using the canvas feature in Obsidian)—a place to dream into every area of my life as if it were a blank canvas. Not through the lens of problem solving, but of creating something beautiful. A life that feels like art. A masterpiece that only I could make.

When I’ve done similar exercises before, I realized there would be a subtle problem-solving energy, a slight pressure to figure my life out. And this time there just feels like infinite spaciousness. And the qualitative shift is soft but unmistakable.

I’m dreaming into partnership and sex, into fatherhood, into epic adventures and awe-filled moments in nature, into deep brotherhood, into living as the embodied divine masculine, into a life of passionate creativity.

And what I’m noticing is: this is a muscle I haven’t worked very much. I’m great at solving problems. I can see what’s not working and name what needs to shift. But visual dreaming—creating images in my awareness of the life I want to create—is something I’m only starting to touch.

So I’ve been practicing. And it’s bringing me to life.

I ordered a stack of beautiful coffee table books filled with wonders of the natural world—epic hikes, remote landscapes, glacial peaks, sacred ruins. Not because I’m actively planning a trip, but because I want to inspire new possibilities. To surround myself with images that awaken the part of me that remembers: I’m allowed to want this. I’m allowed to dream this big.

One dream that landed especially deep was this: investing in brotherhood and friendships that deepen over decades. It wasn’t something I would have named at first. But as I wrote it down, I could feel it in my body—the beauty of sitting under the stars in my seventies, surrounded by men and families I’ve grown with and loved for a lifetime, looking around and saying, What a life we’ve lived.

I want that. I want to live in a way that makes that future inevitable and creates the world that aligns with that dream.

There’s a new kind of fuel rising from this process, a new sense of zest and joy. And what I’m starting to see is that it’s not problem-solving or efforting that will carry me into deeper service—it’s this. This intimacy with what I truly want. This devotion to beauty. This orientation toward life not as a problem to solve, but something to paint with the full palette of my soul.

And that feels like thriving.

I’m tuning into the energy of fully showing up to meet life.

I recently had a challenging conversation with a friend—one that carried rupture, unspoken tension, unfinished truth. I was tired going into it. Ember is waking up throughout the night, and I hadn’t slept well for two nights in a row. And yet, I showed up. I sat in the fire. I listened. I took in his words and let them land.

But the next morning, as I reflected during tea, I could feel something subtle in my posture. I’d received the conversation in a soft, open way—but I hadn’t fully met it. My spine was a little sunken. My energy leaned slightly back. I hadn’t brought the full clarity and aliveness of my being. I hadn’t touched the exact place in him—in us—that the rupture had revealed.

And the truth is: I can.

With everything I’ve trained for—the medicine journeys, the years of inner work—I have the capacity to meet those moments not just with softness and receptivity, but with presence that penetrates. The kind that names the deeper layer, that speaks to the hurt beneath the anger, that reveals the truth behind the words.

And that requires a choice. A choice to bring an upright spine. A choice to lean into life, even when I’m tired. A choice to show up not just as someone who holds space—but as someone who shapes it.

Ever since Ember was born, I’ve shown up for tea every morning. It’s been my anchor. But now, I’m realizing that showing up is no longer just about consistency—it’s about how I show up. What would it mean to show up to tea with a fully upright posture, as a daily embodiment of how I want to meet life?

I just completed a three-day “Awaken Your Dom” training around embodying dominance. And one of the teachings that landed most was this: being a Dom is about your capacity to shape reality. It’s about being willing to fully take responsibility for what wants to be created.

They described the Dom energy as a combination of containment and penetration. And I could feel how much of my life has been devoted to the first. I know how to hold. I know how to listen. I know how to be with what is.

But now, something more is being asked of me: a fuller willingness to lean in, a penetrating of reality. It’s a transmission that says: this is what I’m here for. This is what I want to create. Not just for me—but for Ember, for my family, for the world I want to help shape.

This isn’t about force. It’s about truth. It’s about presence with a spine. The kind of presence that wakes people up—not by pushing, but by being so undeniably here that the world can’t help but shift around it.

And so the question I’m living into now is this: What does it mean to meet life with an upright spine?

Not just to show up for life. But to shape the world I want to live in.

I’m cherishing the golden stretch of morning with my daughter.

Most mornings lately, Ember wakes up between 6 and 7. And for that first hour or two before our tea ceremonies, it’s just me and her—making her breakfast, feeding her bites of yogurt and fruit, and playing, while Kiki catches up on sleep.

There’s a kind of quiet magic in that window. The world is still soft. And I get to be fully with her—her expressions, her sounds, her small hands reaching for the next thing she wants to try. Some mornings when I haven’t slept well, presence is challenging. Other days, it’s pure magic.

This past week has felt like a kind of explosion. She finally learned to crawl forward. We set up a Montessori Pikler triangle in our living room, and within days, she went from wobbly hesitation to confidently standing on her own. I could feel the shift in her body—more grounded, more capable, more here.

And it’s not just the milestones. It’s the moments in between—when she tries something and can’t quite do it, when she falls and starts to cry, when she looks at me, disoriented, unsure.

In those quiet morning hours, I get to be the one who says, It’s okay to be afraid. I get to show her, in every gesture, that she’s not alone. And in doing that for her, something is softening in me too.

Because there’s a younger part of me that never got that kind of holding. A part that was overly protected rather than allowed to explore. A part that was told something was wrong whenever I got hurt. A part that didn’t feel love when I was afraid I can’t.

And now, each morning, I get to rewrite that pattern—by simply being there, holding her through the fear, and loving her in the trying.

These days feel fuller and longer. Not in a draining way—but in a way that stretches time with meaning. When I get to be with Ember and dream into what I want to create, something deep in me settles. It feels like the shape of a perfect day. I’m living on purpose.

And I’m soaking it in, for however long it lasts.

A friend asked me recently how I deal with being tired as a new father.

Ember is nine months old today, and we’re in a chapter where she wakes every couple hours through the night—maybe teething, maybe just practicing how to sit up at 2AM, as if our bed were her dojo.

I told her there are two kinds of tired.

There’s the physical tired—the simple fact of less sleep, the body asking for rest it won’t get. That’s just mathematics.

But there’s another tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep. It’s the exhaustion that comes from resistance to what is, from the part of me that judges reality as inconvenient.

That part has had to die. And it has been dying, over and over, in the crucible of fatherhood.

This is the gift at the heart of fatherhood: all the spiritual deaths.

Every time I’ve resisted what’s actually happening—because Ember is fussing while I want to journal, because she’s done eating when I have other plans—I feel it immediately in my body. I feel a contraction, a turning away. The luxury of avoiding this tension for hours or days is gone.

With a baby, there’s a persistent on-ness I cannot escape. The only way through is to feel it.

I’ve broken down from overwhelm. I’ve felt through the heartbreak of not having energy for creative work after another sleepless night.

I’ve recently dissolved the illusion that I’m “too tired to be present.” That story is just an escape hatch—from the sadness, the helplessness, the quiet ache of not showing up the way I want to. But there’s infinite power available in presence, always.

The other morning, Ember woke up early, sunlight barely streaming through our bedroom window. I could have slept more—my body wanted it. But something had shifted. Where before there would have been grogginess, resistance, the desperate hope that if I ignored her she might let me rest—this time there was just alertness.

I felt the simple choice to meet what is. My baby was awake. Rather than resist reality, I could get up and play with her while Kiki slept some more.

So I did. I slipped out of bed and into presence. We played peek-a-boo with my robe. I made sounds that sent her into fits of giggles. I fashioned her a new breakfast. And in that early morning light, before Mamma woke, I discovered a capacity for presence I’d never known. Not despite the tiredness, but through it. The resistance had died, and what remained was just this: my daughter, awake and alive, teaching me how to be the same.

What remains after each death is a deeper contact with reality than I’ve ever known. I’m experiencing a presence and relationship to life itself that I couldn’t access before Ember arrived. I’m living a truer life—forged in the moment-to-moment requirement to meet what’s actually here.

Time itself feels fuller and more dilated—because fewer and fewer parts of me need to be elsewhere.

Our friends often say that Ember is one of the most awake and aware babies they’ve ever seen.

I know a big part of that is the way we parent her. We practice aware parenting—a way of being with her that honors her emotional truth. Once her needs are met, if she cries, we don’t shush or bounce or distract her. We hold her. We witness her. We let her feel what she needs to feel.

And almost every time, she moves through it completely. Her body softens. Her breath deepens. She returns to presence—clear and radiant.

It’s not always convenient. But she’s teaching us how to stop resisting feelings just because they’re loud or inconvenient—how to trust that when emotion is fully met, it dissolves into clarity and presence.

Even now, when I notice I’m not listening to her—or to life—I feel it instantly. I feel the drain on my body of subtly pushing against reality.

And I see it for what it is: another part of me needing to be held the same way. Another part of me ready to die into something truer.

This is how the fire of fatherhood shapes you. In fractured nights and surrendered plans. In choosing presence over the story of exhaustion. In dying to every idea of how things should be and meeting the fierce, relentless grace of what is.

Nine months in, and I know with bone-deep certainty: Ember is teaching me how to live a truer and truer life. The same fluff I’m learning to cut through as a father—the stories, the resistance, the convenient escapes—I’m cutting through everywhere. In relationships. In my creative work. In how I move through the world.

I’m not working in the traditional sense right now. That’s been a conscious choice—and a deep privilege. I’ve oriented this season of life around fatherhood, around writing, around listening for what wants to move through me. Not as a pause from purpose—but as a deeper entry into it.

I’m honing my sword of transmission. When I support friends or offer reflections to people in my life now, there’s a deeper listening available—a more powerful and subtle attunement to the truth and energetics underneath what’s being said. I’m surprised by this capacity. I didn’t have access to it before.

This is Ember’s gift to me. She’s showing me that the way through is always the same: feel what’s here, meet what is, let the resistance die. And from that death, something truer is born.

The way I create, express, and move through the world will never be the same. Fatherhood has carved me open—and what’s been revealed is presence.

This is the greatest gift of fatherhood: The resistance dies. And in its place, presence is born. What remains is life itself.

I’m sitting with the question: What’s in the way of giving myself fully in service to life?

In my last men’s group, a brother shared how he’d been riding this steady wave of creative flow—lit up, alive, pouring his energy into the world. As I listened, I felt something stir in me—a yearning in my heart that whispered, I want that. Not just the output or momentum, but the feeling of deep alignment and purpose, the sense of being in service to something greater than myself, and the experience of being moved by life.

That desire hasn’t left. It’s been burning quietly in the background—in my morning tea ceremonies, in the in-between moments—asking me to pay attention. And lately, I’ve been sitting in the inquiry: What’s in the way of giving myself fully in service to life?

The question has echoed through tea ceremonies, summer barbecues, a baby blessing in our backyard. It moved through me as I watched my mom hold Ember during her visit last month with a kind of joy I rarely see elsewhere on her face—a grandmother’s delight that felt like love made visible.

With our nanny on vacation last week, I had more time with Ember and less space and energy for work—and I could feel different parts of me surface.

One part said, “I’m afraid I can’t do it.” There was a tremble in that young voice—a fear that I’d step into something sacred and then freeze. That I’d be asked to carry more than I can hold. Another part didn’t even want to enter the conversation. He was warm, content, curled into the sweetness of fatherhood and home. He loved the simplicity of family life and didn’t want to awaken, not really. He just wanted to stay in what was already beautiful.

And yet, beneath both of these parts, something else is waking up. It feels like reverence and devotion. Like a sacred kind of pressure that lives low in my belly and high in my chest—a pulsing reminder, every time I look at Kiki and Ember’s faces, that life has given me so much. And that some part of me longs to surrender to full-bodied service to something greater. Not out of obligation or ambition, but from the truth that this life is not mine to withhold, that the gifts I’ve received were never meant to stop with me.

I don’t yet know what shape it will take. I’m still sitting in the question. But I feel the soul fire in me that is kneeling before Life and saying: use me. And I’m listening.

I’m meeting parts of myself I’ve never had to meet—through fatherhood.

Over the weekend, Kiki booked a hotel room in Boulder—her first night away from Ember since she was born. Twenty-four hours to rest, to be alone, to sleep. It was something we both knew she needed.

I felt confident and steady taking care of Ember on my own. Everything went fine—she squealed with delight over her morning apple slice and oatmeal, stealing the show as usual with every bite like it was a private movie just for me. And still, something subtle played out beneath the surface—almost too quiet to catch at first. When I defrosted the breast milk, I had a passing thought: I just need to make it until Kiki gets back. When Ember skipped her nap, another whisper: It’s okay, it’s just for one day.

In the moment, I didn’t fully register it. But the next day, something landed.

Kiki has been holding the full field of awareness around Ember’s care—and I’ve been co-holding most of it, but not all. Maybe 90%. And this was the moment life asked me to feel the stretch, to catch the subtle places where I still brace against experience rather than being present with it.

And that stretch—that’s my favorite part of this spiritual journey of fatherhood.

Because what I’m really being asked to do is expand my capacity. To become more aware, more present, and more willing to feel all of it—not just the moments of sweetness, but the subtle sensations underneath. Fatherhood is revealing the edges of my own consciousness, and inviting me to stay.

And the beauty is: I love this chapter of fatherhood.

We’re spending quality time with Ember every day—starting each morning with a tea ceremony as a family, singing with the ukulele, planning meals with her in mind, watching her eyes widen at new textures and tastes. There’s more play, more presence, and more love than I knew my body could hold.

And somehow, alongside all the joy, there’s this deeper current—the slow expansion of my awareness into corners of myself I’ve never touched before. And that? That’s the true gift. That’s what fatherhood is offering me, in this season.

Not just the miracle of raising a child—but the sacredness of becoming the man who can hold everything that’s arising.

I’m reclaiming sex as a sacred practice of truth—and masculine leadership.

I’ve started scheduling tantra dates with Kiki—once a week, on the calendar, when we have childcare coverage. We’ve had two so far.

For a long time, I resisted scheduling sex. I thought it would make things feel mechanical or forced. But in this season of life—especially as parents—putting it on the calendar is one of the most loving things we can do. Not because it guarantees a particular outcome, but because it creates the spaciousness and the conditions for something sacred to emerge.

I used to wait for a window to open—a break in the day when the baby was asleep, a sliver of quiet—and try to slide intimacy into it. But intimacy doesn’t want to be squeezed. It wants to be chosen. It wants to breathe. And if we don’t intentionally make space for intimacy, it just falls by the wayside.

These tantra dates are becoming the natural extension of our sex containers—but with an even deeper sense of ceremony. The essence of tantra for me has always been to return home to ourselves, and these dates are precisely that — a ritual space to return to what is most real between us, a practice to meet each other in truth. Whether what arises is tension, grief, beauty, fatigue, turn-on, or something else entirely, we meet it with presence, breath, and reverence.

It’s also become the place where I practice masculine leadership—and expanding my awareness through sensation. When I set the space with intention, when I root into my own experience, when I choose to stay, I become the one who can hold all of me—and in turn, all of her.

In the past, I struggled to hold this kind of space on my own. Some part of me kept looking to Kiki for a signal that it was safe. I didn’t yet know how to hold the container of my own vulnerability, fear, or desire—so I tried to outsource that safety to her. I kept waiting for her buy-in. But what I’m seeing now is that this very dynamic kept me from being able to lead—not just in our relationship but in life.

It kept me from being the one who could truly hold the space for life to unfold.

I’m re-orienting toward the gap between desire and reality—as the place where something in me is waiting to be met.

There’s a pattern I’ve been tracking lately in my creative process. It begins with desire—an impulse to write, to express, to bring something into form. But instead of clarity, I find a kind of quiet stall. The energy just isn’t there. My thoughts don’t cohere. The idea doesn’t fully take shape.

In the past, I’d default to one of two strategies. Sometimes I’d push—trying to make something happen, trying to will the creative current forward. Other times I’d pivot, deciding the moment wasn’t right and turning toward something else: a walk, a river dip, a jaunt through town. Both strategies have served me. But lately, I’ve started to see them not just as responses, but as ways I’ve been skimming over a deeper layer of experience. I’m starting to wonder if what I’ve been calling “low energy” or “lack of flow” is actually an invitation to meet something in myself I’ve been avoiding.

Most conventional approaches frame this kind of stall as a problem to solve—some version of procrastination, resistance, or misalignment. But what feels more true is that there’s a part of me—often a very young part—that doesn’t yet feel safe to come forward. And when I orient toward the goal, toward the thing I’m supposed to be producing, I bypass that part entirely. Even turning toward something else can become a subtle bypass, if I don’t take the time to pause and feel what’s actually here.

A moment from last month made this unmistakably clear. I had committed to leading a Dharma talk for couples on Sex, Partnership, and Projections in our home—an experience that was part storytelling, part workshop, part ritual to teach some of my recent transmissions. And yet, in the days leading up to it, I could feel the young part of me that would freeze.

I didn’t push through it. I stayed with it. I breathed with it. I let it exist. I invited friends to the talk who could hold that part with loving presence. And in that meeting, the energy I’ve been wanting kept showing up. Not as a result of effort, but as a natural unfolding once the part of me holding the freeze felt seen. The talk came through with ease—not because I got unblocked, but because I felt whole.

That moment changed how I relate to the space between desire and action. I see it as a part of me surfacing to be felt. I’m hypothesizing that with this new frame, I’ll find that the creative energy I was seeking was never gone—it was simply waiting for me to slow down enough to meet myself.

I’m exploring a deeper integration of masculine and feminine in my creative life.

There was a time when I forced myself to show up every day at the desk. No matter how I felt, I would sit down to write—same place, same time, same pressure to produce. It was masculine discipline in its rawest form. And while something did get created, it often felt dry. The writing came from will, not from truth. I was holding the container, but I wasn’t meeting anything real inside it.

Then, as part of going through The Artist’s Way this spring, I let go of the structure entirely. I stopped trying to force the current. I let my feminine lead. I waited for inspiration, wrote when I felt called, trusted the flow. That felt like freedom—for a while. But recently, something in me has gone quiet. I hadn’t published anything in a month. I was waiting for the muse—but I wasn’t showing up for her. And with our beloved nanny transitioning to a professorship, it was easy to let the extra uninspired hours fold into fatherhood.

What I’m exploring now is something new—a third way.

A glimpse of it showed up during a recent tantra date with Kiki. A part of me didn’t want to show up. I felt tired, disconnected from turn-on. But something in me knew—if I entered the space, if I breathed into the discomfort, if I met her and myself with honesty—I would touch something real. And I did. We did.

That’s the shift I’m curious to bring into my creative practice now.

Not showing up with an attachment to produce something. Not waiting until I feel ready. But coming to my creative altar as I would to a lover—with breath, with reverence, with deep listening.

What happens if I treat my creative practice like a tantra date with my inner Creator? Where I let myself settle into deep ritual space to meet some part of myself. Where I allow and don’t force. Where, in the same way I might let go of attachment to sex, I let go of attachment to producing. Where I choose contact over avoidance—but without self-bullying or willful override.

What happens if I expand the field of what I’m creating, and let creation take new forms? Not just writing, but arranging a room, designing a moment, planning a surprise, building an altar of beauty in everyday life.

What happens if creation isn’t something I do—but something I meet? A field I enter when I stop grasping and start feeling.

I’m still in the exploration. But something is slowly revealing itself. A rhythm that doesn’t collapse into discipline or dissolve into flow. A rhythm that lets me show up as my Creator in every moment.

We had carved out the time.

The baby was asleep. The lights were low. Tantric music was playing. We had lit candles. We’d even built an altar. Everything was in place.

After weeks of exhaustion and parenting, we were finally naked together—the kind of intimacy we’d been missing in the blur of new parenthood. We moved slowly, sensually, skin to skin. It was one of those rare moments that brought back memories of the sexual magic from the early days in our relationship.

We hadn’t made love in a while, and this felt like a step toward that—toward penetration, toward union. Before we got there, however, something shifted.

There was a moment of collapse—subtle, but real. The kind of moment where something vulnerable arises, and there isn’t quite enough energy to meet it. It was late. We were tired. And so, gently, we let it go.

Even so, I could feel the beauty of the night—the love, the tantra, the courage in both of us to even show up. There was something sacred in it—a sweetness in the way we touched, a tenderness in the space we had created.

But the next morning, something else was there too: a quiet, heavy discouragement had crept in.

At first, I thought it was just about sex—or even about her. I thought it was about how she hadn’t stayed with me through the collapse.

But when I was honest with myself, the truth was that I hadn’t stayed. I hadn’t honored that I still wanted to be in it. Even though it was late, even though it was tender. Some part of me had stepped out, when my heart wanted to stay. And I could feel the weight of that in my body.

It was more than disappointment though. There was an ache in it—something older. Like a familiar fog had rolled in again. A sense of: We’ve come so far… and we’re still here?

We had made time. We had created space. And still, sex didn’t happen. And the part of me that had been holding so much—hope, desire, effort—just felt worn down.

The whole experience felt stuck. I kept turning it over—was it about her? About the night? About the pattern? But none of those quite landed.

Because beneath all that, something else was surfacing. A long-running storyline I’d been swimming in for years. I couldn’t name it yet—but I could feel it pressing up through the discouragement, asking to be seen.

And in that moment, a tiny crack appeared in the projection. Maybe this wasn’t just about sex. Maybe it wasn’t about her. Maybe it wasn’t even about the night.

Maybe what I was feeling wasn’t the result of what happened—but of how I was seeing.

Projections—The Lens We Don’t Know We’re Looking Through

A projection is when we collapse an unseen inner lens—an internal belief, fear, or longing—onto an outer circumstance. And then we mistake what we’re looking at as the source of our experience.

It’s like we’re all swimming in the water of our own consciousness—made up of our past experiences, unmet needs, wounds, and hopes. But like fish, we can’t always see the water we’re in. We just see through it. Instead, that water becomes the lens through which we view the world. And whatever that internal water is—scarcity, fear, shame, hope, longing—gets silently cast outward, like a film projected onto a movie screen.

Suddenly, it’s not just I feel abandoned. It’s you are abandoning me.
It’s not just I feel unmet. It’s you never meet me.
I’m not just feeling lack. I’m seeing lack in your behavior.
I’m not just afraid. I’m convinced you’re making me unsafe.

The projection becomes so convincing we can’t see it’s one possible story—we believe it’s reality. In this way, life itself becomes a projection screen.

And the places we project most intensely? Sex and partnership.

Each one alone carries charge. Sex touches shame, desire, power, approval, intimacy. Partnership touches attachment, identity, longing, safety, love.

And when they merge—when we believe our partner should meet this need, through sex—it becomes the most powerful kind of illusion. The stakes feel existential. The nervous system gets hooked. Our sense of wholeness feels like it lives in someone else’s hands.

That’s the cost of projection. It lights up our body with urgency, scarcity, and reactivity. We flail. We withdraw. We blame. We rupture. And we keep trying to fix something out there, that’s actually happening in here.

But the upside is this: Projections always leave clues.

The ache, the charge, and the reactivity are visible surfaces of something deeper—a way our nervous system is relating not just to a person or an event, but to Life itself. And if we’re willing to feel into them—not just act from them—they can show us the inner lens we’ve been unconsciously swimming in.

If we follow the charge—not to act it out, but to be with it—we start to see. When we give ourselves the capacity to ask, “How is this experience a projection of how I’m relating to Life itself?”—we begin to see how an entire worldview can collapse into a single interaction.

And when the projection cracks—when we realize this isn’t about them—we reclaim our power.

Because the thing we thought was about our partner, or the sex we’re not having, or the unmet need in this moment—is actually a mirror for how we’ve learned to relate to desire, to love, to the mystery of being alive.

And that’s the path to freedom.

Sex and partnership then become not just mirrors—but initiations. Because they’re the projections that carry the most energy, they hold the potential for the deepest rupture—and the deepest liberation.

When we see clearly, the real opportunity arrives: To heal the wound not just in sex, but in Life. To reshape how we meet intimacy—not just with a partner but with reality itself.

The Kind of Discouragement That Reveals the Pattern

That morning, I didn’t yet know what the projection was. But the discouragement was familiar. I could feel how this loop had shown up before—times when sex wasn’t happening and when I just felt tired, stuck, and alone in wanting more.

When I zoomed out, I saw the same pattern echoing in how I was relating to the sex container program I’m creating for couples. I’m wildly excited about it. I know it’s aligned. And still, I’ve felt overwhelmed, discouraged, almost frozen. Like I don’t have the energy to do the thing I know I’m here to do. Like I need someone to come rescue me from a situation I didn’t have the capacity to meet.

And then it hit me: This wasn’t about sex—or the program. It was about the projection I was carrying.

That feeling of helplessness—of waiting for someone to come—became a portal. It brought me straight back to a childhood memory that surfaced during a recent plant medicine journey: I was four years old, standing alone at the front of my family’s Chinese herb store.

My mom was the only adult running the place, and every day during lunch, she’d step away upstairs to make food. She would lock the doors, and my job was to stand watch. If a customer came, I was supposed to tell her.

So I stood there—tiny body pressed up against the glass—staring out, alone, frozen.

I didn’t want to be there. I was anxious and afraid. I didn’t know what I was doing. I barely spoke English. But I also felt like I couldn’t leave. This was my post, my job, something important I had to hold. I couldn’t walk away to get help, couldn’t ask for connection, couldn’t move.

So I just waited. And waited. And waited—for someone, anyone, to come save me.

But no one came. Even when my mom came back, she couldn’t see how disregulated I was.

That part of me never stopped waiting.

And now, decades later, I could feel myself projecting that same helpless waiting—onto sex, onto partnership, onto life.

The projection wasn’t just showing up in moments of collapse. This undercurrent had been running quietly beneath so many moments—where I subtly hoped things would change, where I wanted to run away from what life was giving me, where I looked to be rescued without even knowing it.

This experience connected the dots. The way through isn’t waiting. It’s turning toward the little boy who is—and holding him.

Because that’s who had been here all along—still waiting, still watching the door, still hoping someone would come save him. That little boy needed to be seen and held, met by something larger than himself.

And that was the echo I’d been living inside. I’d been swimming in the invisible storyline:

Life won’t come for me. I’m on my own. I’m alone in my collapse.

Not just in partnership. Not just in sex. But in existence itself.

That’s what had collapsed in me the morning after our intimacy. Not because the night wasn’t beautiful—it was. But when the energy shifted and it didn’t feel like my desire could be met, something in me still believed: And here it is again. I’m on my own.

Even if we had made love that night, it wouldn’t have touched that place. At best, it would’ve been a temporary balm—an illusion of resolution. At worst, it would’ve deepened the illusion that Kiki’s body could rescue me from a wound that began long before her.

Because here’s the truth:

When we make our partners responsible for wounds that live in our relationship to Life, they will inevitably fail. Not because they don’t love us. But because no one else can repair a rupture that happened between us and Life itself. Only when we can see the full rupture, do we create the possibility for enrolling our partners to meet us in what’s truly here.

And so the discouragement became a gift. Because for the first time, I could see through the projection and the healing that actually wanted to happen. Not to override the frozen feeling. Not to “make it through.” Not to make Kiki respond differently. But to re-pattern the experience with that little boy.

To show him I wouldn’t abandon him, too.

I stayed. I held him. I whispered: I see you. You’re not alone. I’ve got you now.

And something began to shift.

The frozen waiting softened. His body—my body—began to feel a little safer. A little more here. No one had come for him back then. But this time, I did. I didn’t leave.

The Moment I Chose to Meet Life

And then, just a few days later—something opened.

The nanny was here. The house was quiet. Sunlight poured through the windows. We had set up the room. Music floated through the space. And for the first time in what felt like forever, there was breath—spaciousness. A pocket of time not ruled by exhaustion or needs or rushing.

We danced—bodies present, alive, attuned. We moved with the kind of touch that’s not about getting anywhere, the kind that says: I’m here. I feel you.

And then we made love.

Our bodies had missed each other, deeply. There was reverence in it—pleasure, tenderness, a sense of return. It reminded me of our early days—those moments that felt orchestrated by Life itself. Like something sacred was moving through us, loving us through each other, meeting desires we didn’t even know we had.

But this time, something else was here too, something new.

We held each other through moments that—just days ago—we might have collapsed in. We stayed through places that used to unseat us. We breathed through uncertainty, through tenderness, through the edge of old patterns. And in that staying, there was such devotion and love.

Because even as I felt the beauty of our connection, I could feel what had changed.

This didn’t just happen. I had created this moment.

I had initiated sex. I had stayed with my desire and reached for intimacy. I had felt the freeze when it arose, and instead of collapsing, I breathed with it. I didn’t override it. I didn’t disappear. I stayed with the part of me that once froze in terror. The little boy who waited at the door. I whispered again: You don’t have to wait anymore. I’m here.

From that place, I no longer needed to wait for life—or for Kiki—to rescue me. By seeing that I was projecting the little boy’s story onto the moment—and by holding him—I became the source of what I most longed for. That’s what allowed union to meet me—not from waiting, but from choosing to meet Life.

That’s what moved through our lovemaking. A power that went deeper than arousal, deeper than connection. A truth that was anchoring in my body: I am no longer helpless inside this pattern. I can create the world I long for.

This wasn’t just a beautiful moment between lovers. It was a reclamation—a closing of the gap between longing and reality. A pulse of empowerment that moved from my pelvis to chest to throat—until every cell in me knew: this will ripple.

Not just in sex.
In life.
In how I create.
In how I move toward what I love.
In how I hold myself when the old fears arise.

Because this time, I didn’t collapse. I didn’t spiral into helplessness. I didn’t wait to be rescued. I moved. I stayed. I held the boy who once froze—and chose to meet Life, exactly where he couldn’t.

And that’s the power of projection. Left unseen, it keeps us circling the same loop—assigning meaning to the outside world because of something unresolved within. But once revealed, it becomes a portal.

This wasn’t about sex. Or Kiki. Or even partnership.

It was about how I’d learned to relate to Life. And in choosing not to wait—in choosing to stay, to feel, to move—I reclaimed something I didn’t know I’d given away: my own power to meet the moment. My own capacity to create the world I long for.

Because I am the one I’ve been waiting for.

I’d head straight to the LEGO aisle and find the space station monorail set—the one I was quietly obsessed with.

Motorized and futuristic, the little train ran on a 9V battery, gliding around a looping track—clicking between imagined galaxies. I’d just stand there, staring. Tracing the shapes of the track with my eyes. Imagining how epic it would be in my room.

It was the most expensive set in the store—$179. A number I never spoke aloud, but never forgot either. It was etched in me like a boundary I wasn’t allowed to cross.

And I never once told my parents I wanted it.

Not because I didn’t want it, but because even then, I had already learned: my excitement wasn’t fully welcome.

Yes, finances were tight—I could feel the unspoken pressure of that. And maybe that was part of it. But more than that, I had learned there wasn’t space for the wanting itself.

It wasn’t that anyone told me I couldn’t want it. It’s that no one met me in my wanting—then or elsewhere. There was no encouragement. No reflection of, “That’s amazing—tell me more!” No sense that the brightness in my chest was something inherently worth celebrating.

So I learned to tuck excitement away—quietly, tightly, without ceremony. It became something I held in—like a breath beneath the surface, silent and alone.

It didn’t just happen with toys. I remember sharing early dreams of who I might become—a doctor, an architect. Not from a place of achievement, but from wonder. From the joy of imagining myself in the world. And the responses would come: “Doctors deal with a lot of blood.” “Architects have a hard time finding clients.” Subtle nods toward practicality and realism. Doses of adult reality that seemed to say: don’t get too lit up.

No one meant harm, but the effect was the same. The energy of “that’s hard” or “that’s not realistic” quietly closed the door on my excitement before it could fully open.

So I stopped knocking. I learned to dream quietly. To want things privately. To keep the electric pulse of excitement folded inside me, where it was safe from disappointment or dismissal.

The Imprint I Never Got

This week, I learned from my friend that one of the essential ingredients of secure attachment is encouragement—the kind that says not just “you’re safe,” but “I see you, and I love watching you light up.” A child needs to feel not only protected and soothed, but mirrored in their joy. Supported in their curiosity. Met in their wonder.

It’s such a simple thing—and I didn’t get it.

Not around the LEGO set. Not around the things that lit me up. Not around the early dreams that started to form in me.

So I internalized something: that my excitement wasn’t something to bring into connection. It was something to retreat into—something to feel privately, to hold alone.

Over the past month, I found myself wandering into toy stores again—not with Ember, not as a dad. Just me.

I didn’t even think about it at first. I was just drawn to them.

I’d linger in front of model kits—wooden catapults, metal Star Wars X-wings, intricate mechanical machines that stirred something ancient and joyful in my chest. I’d study the details. I’d imagine how fun it’d be. I’d feel that same childhood buzz, rising quietly in my body.

And mixed in with the enjoyment was always the quiet knowing that I likely wouldn’t be buying anything, with thoughts like:

“It’s not worth the money.”
“You’ll only enjoy it for a little while.”
“You don’t need more junk in the house.”

I walked out empty-handed—from three different stores.

It wasn’t until this week that I finally caught what was happening. The shutdown was so reflexive, I thought it was just practicality. I thought I was being sensible, thoughtful, mature.

But I was still doing what I did as a kid. Still holding excitement quietly in my hands, then setting it down before anyone else could see it. Still cutting it off before it had a chance to breathe.

And then something even deeper landed: I had mistaken that voice of practicality for me.

I thought the shutdown was me—my discernment, my essence, my natural restraint.

But it wasn’t.

It was an inherited pattern—an old, protective script. The internalized dismissal was a way of bracing against disappointment by never reaching in the first place.

What I thought was “me being realistic” was actually me dimming my life force before it got too bright.

I hadn’t seen it until now, but my excitement is my essence. That upward-moving, chest-opening, eye-widening spark—that’s me. That’s the pulse of who I am, of what wants to move through me.

And the thoughts that shut it down?

They were never mine to begin with.

The Dream I’ve Been Scared and Excited to Share

The ache I felt wasn’t just about the toys.

It was about the part of me that still doesn’t quite know how to be in connection while feeling excited. That still tenses up around the idea of sharing something that lights me up before it’s useful or certain or complete. That still sometimes wants to retreat to his office to open up new toys at home, rather than being seen in my excitement. That still doesn’t fully trust I’ll be met.

And that pattern isn’t just showing up in toy stores. It’s showing up in how I relate to a dream I’ve been quietly holding.

As my Sex, Systems, and Sacred Union series has been unfolding, a vision has been forming, one of guiding couples to embark on their own sacred sex container—a practice that for my wife and me, has irrevocably shifted how we show up in partnership, in the most beautiful way. I feel a yearning to create a field of reverence and rawness. A place where sexual intimacy becomes a site of devotion and transformation. A temple, really.

It’s a big dream. And it lights something up in me. Like, really lights something up.

Because it checks all the boxes for what I believe makes transformation real. It’s emergent, not performative. It meets couples exactly where they are. It works with what’s actually alive, what’s tender, what’s stuck. It expands capacity, deepens intimacy, and sends love to the places that haven’t had it before. It’s the closest thing I know to a sacred medicine journey without actual medicine. And because it lives inside relationship, everything it touches ripples directly into the family, the home, the ecosystem of daily life.

A journey like this doesn’t just increase sex. It changes how we relate to life itself. It’s the closest thing I’ve discovered that integrates everything I’ve experienced in personal growth into a coherent offering that aligns with my soul’s purpose. And it feels like something I could pour my whole heart into—something sacred, something real, something that wants to change lives.

And still—right alongside all that excitement—I sometimes feel stuck. Not because the dream is in the wrong direction, but because the act of sharing my excitement around it still feels so vulnerable.

For most of my life, I’ve protected the things I was most excited about. Especially when they were still in seed form. I didn’t want the bubble to burst. I’d feel a clenching in my stomach and not share if I wasn’t certain my excitement would be received. I didn’t want to risk the tender magic of a dream being met with confusion, silence, practicality.

But I’m starting to see that the pathway to healing isn’t to guard my excitement. It’s to let myself be seen inside of it.

It’s in training my system, over and over, that the world can actually meet me in the places that light me up. That I don’t have to dim what I love. That I am safe—not just in my fear or pain—but in my excitement.

That’s what shifts the imprint.
That’s what rewires the pattern.

Trusting That I’ll Be Met in My Excitement

Rewiring the pattern doesn’t always require something huge. Sometimes it looks like giving that joy a small but meaningful yes.

Like buying myself a LEGO vintage typewriter—beautiful, unnecessary, and more expensive than I would’ve ever let myself justify before.

Not the space station monorail—that’s a collector’s item now. But this one—soft mint green, with movable keys—felt like something meant for wonder. Something fun. Something the kid inside me really loves but thought was too expensive.

And this time, I didn’t shut it down. I didn’t justify it. I didn’t make myself earn it. I let myself want it. I let myself have it.

I showed that little boy a different world. One where excitement doesn’t have to be dismissed. One where joy doesn’t need justification. One where delight gets to take up space.

And it felt like something inside me finally got to exhale.

Because I wasn’t just buying a toy. I was practicing something.

I was practicing honoring my excitement amidst the voices that said I shouldn’t. I was honoring my own essence.

And that practice continued later that week, when I asked my men’s group, “Can you be excited with me?”

I asked them for an imprint of something I never got as a kid. Not just encouragement, but companionship in the things that lit me up. Not just protection, but presence.

And I let myself stay in the joy and aliveness of sharing my dream of guiding couples in their own sex container—without downshifting, without hedging, without turning the volume down. I asked them to just be with me in it, to set aside all practicalities or feedback. To just feel the spark of it with me, as something I was genuinely excited about.

It was the longest I’ve ever let myself stay in my excitement while being witnessed and reflected back. There was laughter. There were tears. There was that unmistakable feeling of being met—not in my pain, but in my passion.

And, surprisingly, I received a reflection that I was magnetic in my excitement—and I felt it, in a way that I haven’t felt before. I got to feel what it’s like to stand at the edge of a new pattern. To risk letting my excitement be fully felt, with someone. To invite intimacy, not just certainty.

It felt amazing—and I know I’ll need more of it. Because this is what I missed as a kid.

And now, I’m giving that to myself—moment by moment. I’m intentionally creating experiences to give my nervous system new evidence that it’s safe to be lit up. That my excitement is sacred. That it belongs.

Because the truth is: excitement is vulnerable. To feel it is to be alive without a guarantee. To stand at the edge of something that matters to you—before it’s validated, before it’s reciprocated, before it’s “ready.” And still say yes. Still stay open.

That’s the moment I’m in. Learning how to feel excitement without needing to contain it. Learning how to stay connected while I’m lit up. Learning to trust that the Universe and Life welcomes and loves my excitement.

This is the practice now—to let myself be seen, not just in my clarity or confidence, but in the ignition itself. In the moment where something beautiful begins to flicker, and I don’t yet know what it will become.

To ask: Can you be excited with me?

And to trust, more and more, that the answer will be yes.

During our recent 7-day sex container, there was an evening where I felt utterly spent.

I’d had a long day caring for our daughter Ember, and by evening, all I wanted was to collapse—alone—in my office, to disappear into the cave of no contact. My body wanted to shut down. My nervous system was maxed out. Everything in me wanted to retreat from intimacy, from connection, from the container.

The sex container is a sacred commitment we make—sometimes for 7 days, sometimes for 30—to meet each other daily in the field of sexual intimacy. Not to force, but to come as we are. And on that night, the place where I found myself in was collapse.

Kiki looked at me and asked gently, “What if you just collapsed into the sex container?”

Even though that had been the whole point of the practice, my collapsed mind hadn’t considered it. And in truth, part of me was resisting it. It still felt safer to collapse away from connection.

But something in me knew to say yes.

I slid to the floor at her feet, the weight of the entire day and the ache of this moment of parenthood pouring through me. I cried. Not because I wanted to be seen. Not because I was trying to make anything happen. But because that’s where I was—exhausted, heartbare, with nothing left to give.

And she stayed with me. She witnessed me and welcomed me. She didn’t try to fix it or guide us toward something else. She just stayed.

And from that place of raw collapse, I found my way into deep connection—with the truth of where I was, and with her. And from there, we found our way into beautiful, tender, and intimate lovemaking.

It was a sacred moment, one that rewired something deep in me.

Where the Sex Container Began

The sex container in our relationship was born from rupture.

Before this practice ever felt sacred or stabilizing, it was born in a storm—in a chapter of our relationship where sex had become a tender and triggering space between us.

I'd feel desire—and somewhere in the movement toward intimacy, something would kink: an attachment wound, an unmet need, a protective strategy. Sometimes subtle, sometimes explosive.

We’d lose each other, push each other away, or simply not know how to stay in connection. We didn’t yet have the tools to move through the emotional weather between desire and union.

And over time, a quiet fear began to build in me—especially as we were preparing to become parents. It was a fear of being helpless with my own desire. A fear that without a structure to meet what arose, we might slowly drift into a sexless partnership—this time not because of shame, but because we hadn’t learned how to stay.

What if I ended up in a sexless marriage, again?

My mind spiraled into fear. I had lived through that once before—a 17-year relationship where sex didn’t exist. And I wasn’t willing to go back to a life where I abandoned my desire again. I couldn’t return to a life where desire got tucked away, quietly set aside to keep the peace. I couldn’t go numb again—not in this chapter, not in this love.

So I proposed a sex container—not as a method or technique, but as a lifeline. A prayer to the universe.

A way to return to the magic I knew lived between us. To the kind of intimacy that had once felt like something out of a fairy tale—where I couldn’t believe how deeply we met, how wildly alive our sex felt, how safe and seen and turned on I was just being in her presence.

A way to train our systems to stay in connection even when things got hard—rather than making each other wrong, or pushing each other away when the intensity rose.

A way to practice letting desire lead to intimacy, not rupture—to learn how to stay even when one of us froze, or shut down, or didn’t know how to meet the other.

So I could trust that even in the chaos of parenting, even in the intensity of life—we could still find our way back to each other.

We started with a 30-day container. Recently we did a 7-day one. Sometimes we’ll explicitly do one for one night. Over time, it became less a thing we "did" and more a way we practiced being.

A sex container, for us, is a shared commitment to enter a field of nakedness, sexual intimacy, and emotional truth—every day of the container. Whether it’s one night or thirty, we agree to show up fully, just as we are.

It’s not about having sex each day. But it is about showing up with the desire to meet in sexual intimacy—whether or not that intimacy leads to penetration. It’s a devotional space where everything that arises is part of the practice—a structure for staying in connection through it all.

Grief is welcome. Numbness is welcome. Longing, anger, mismatch, shutdown, wild turn-on—all of it belongs.

If I’m shut down, that’s the practice. If Kiki is frozen, that’s the intimacy. If one of us is longing while the other is numb, we meet in that truth and let it teach us.

There’s no set time frame. Some containers last an hour or more; others are shorter. But we stay until there’s a real sense of completion—not from avoidance, not from discomfort, but because something true has been met.

Everything That Arises Is Sacred

Over time, we’ve learned that the true power of the sex container isn’t about sex at all.

It’s about learning to stay.

We’ve had containers that felt like magic—where our sex felt ecstatic, easeful, deeply connected. Where we touched realms of intimacy, pleasure, and sacred union we’d never known before. Where the space itself felt ritual, even shamanic—as if we were being moved by something far greater than ourselves.

Some of the deepest magic wasn’t in the turn-on or the flow.

It was in the moments when a part of us we thought wasn’t lovable got met—fully, gently, and without agenda. When a place inside that had long carried shame or felt unworthy of love became the very place being welcomed with tenderness, attention, and orgasmic pleasure. When that part didn’t just get tolerated, but got to receive beauty—and was made love to there.

We've also had containers where everything felt messy and misaligned—where we fought, froze, or didn’t want to be there. And looking back, so much of the early messiness came from not accepting what was actually here. We were still resisting the truth of the moment—trying to shift it, rather than stay with it.

But over time, we stopped fighting the moment. We learned to trust that nothing arising is wrong. And as that trust has grown, the containers have felt cleaner. More easeful. More alive. More magical.

Because what we’ve learned—again and again—is this:

Everything that arises is sacred.

Through repetition, our bodies have come to know this deeper truth. Anything less than that awareness only leads to rupture and suffering.

My nervous system has learned that I don’t need to be any different than I am to be met in intimacy. That love doesn’t require a different state. That I don’t need to fix, hide, or perform.

That I can collapse and still be loved.

This is the deepest teaching of the container: That nothing is in the way. That every emotion, every sensation, every rupture is part of the path.

It’s a spiritual practice of being with what is—together.

The container didn’t just hold us—it transformed us. It revealed our patterns and invited us to meet it all until our bodies remembered love.

And over time, the practice has rewired my nervous system. My body is learning that shame, collapse, fear, shutdown, turn-on—all of it—belongs inside connection.

Life as the Ultimate Sex Container

The day after our most recent 7-day container, I felt something subtle but hard.

Inside the container, it had become easy to reach, to initiate, to trust I would be met. The shared commitment created a field of safety, permission, devotion. But now, on the other side of it, reaching felt more vulnerable. The trust that I’d be met felt less certain. The ache of desire—without the container’s holding—felt exposed.

I named it to Kiki. And she said, almost in passing, "What if life is the sex container?"

Something in me stilled—as the deeper truth dawned on me.

The first truth was this: Even when we’re not in an explicit sex container, the field still exists between us. The commitment doesn’t vanish. The container doesn’t disappear. We are still in it—for the duration of this life.

And so I could rest in that, in the knowing that I could still be met. The safety didn’t come from a defined time frame, but from the fabric of our bond.

The second truth was even deeper: That the ultimate lover here isn’t Kiki. It’s Life itself—Life, as in the Divine. God. The Universe. Source. The sacred intelligence moving through all things.

All the times I’ve made love with Kiki—tender, wild, devotional—I’ve been making love to Life, through her. And Life has been making love to me.

There was a morning on our recent trip to Kauai where I woke with collapse in my chest. We hadn’t had sex in a couple weeks—some of it logistical as new parents, some of it emotional. I didn’t know how to close the gap.

And I could feel how sex was mirroring life. I’d been working on my last piece of writing for days and still didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t know how to bring it to completion. I didn’t know how to close that gap either.

There was an ache in my body. A quiet despair. A thought that something was missing, and if only I could fix it—by having sex, or finishing my piece, or planning some grand adventure—then I’d feel okay.

And then I remembered.

None of those were the answer. They were all escapes from what was already here.

Life is the sex container, where everything that arises is sacred. What was needed was to be with the collapse—to feel it, to let it ache, to be with the deep yearning for union in sex, in creativity, in life.

This collapse was arising in consciousness so I could meet it—so I could heal my relationship with it. It would keep returning until I learned how to be with it fully. Not to fix it. Not to push past it. But to let it be here, in love. So I might as well begin now.

I sobbed—for the yearning, for the heartbreak of the moment. And in that sobbing, I could feel the truth: even in collapse, even in my sense of being alone, I was being loved by Life. Held by the Divine. Touched in the deepest places.

The training ground of the sex container had prepared me for this. To remember that I don’t need an explicit container to find my way back to connection. That I don’t need a structure to remember the sacred.

I am in the container. Always.

And whatever arises—this ache, this sadness, this longing—is not a problem to solve.

It is sacred. It is part of the lovemaking.

And the remembering keeps happening.

A few days later, after a red-eye flight and several low-sleep nights with my daughter, I felt exhausted. A deep desire to create—and the felt reality of exhaustion making that almost impossible.

I started to check out—unable to respond to Kiki, unable to be present to my daughter bouncing in front of me, me starting to make the motions toward doomscrolling social media.

And then, I felt a small flicker in my chest. A memory in the body—a quiet flame remembering itself. A faint knowing: This is the moment. A new option had appeared on the menu of my consciousness—one that hadn’t been there before. I didn’t have to check out—like I had so many times before when collapse hit.

I could collapse toward Life, instead of away from it.

“I could use a little loving,“ I said in my frozen, collapsed state.

Kiki came over and wrapped her legs around me, yab-yum style. I cried into her shoulder. With each sob, I could feel myself meeting Life—just as I had in the sex container. Meeting the heartbreak. Meeting the exhaustion. Meeting what was here.

Fifteen minutes later, I was back. Still tired—but present. Open to the beauty of it all—in touch with myself, with her, with my daughter, with the moment.

This moment. This breath. This ache.

All those nights of staying in connection with Kiki in our sex containers—through shutdown, joy, friction, laughter—were preparing me for this.

So I could recognize: this, too, is union. With the Divine, with Life, with God, with the universe. This, too, is lovemaking. This, too, is sacred.

Not once it shifts. Now.

That’s the ultimate gift of the sex container: an embodied training ground for how to make love with Life itself, in every moment. One that leaves imprints in the body so that I can find my way back.

A transmission that not only can I collapse into intimacy with another—I can collapse into the arms of Life.

And I can be made love to there, too.

P.S. I’m exploring offering a live, guided experience for a small group of couples, co-led with my wife, Kiki. This will be a private practice between you and your partner, supported by a shared field of guidance and devotion. The format is still unfolding, but if you and your partner feel called to explore this path together—to deepen your intimacy, to meet what arises with sacred devotion—I’d love to hear from you. You can reply to this or reach out directly.

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