It’s been over four months since my last post.
In that time something fundamental has changed: Co-Awaken has become a real school.
We’ve led five Sacred Edges. I’d originally imagined it as a workshop about partnership. But like most things in Co-Awaken, it’s been reshaped through contact with the world into something different that feels deeply true: a recurring embodied and relational ritual for meeting ourselves, again and again, in a room full of other people.
A man who keeps coming back wrote: “The Sacred Edge workshop is my favorite relating workshop in the Boulder area — such a beautiful, safe container for real transformation.” In Boulder, that’s like being someone’s favorite coffee shop in Seattle. There are a LOT of us.
Four months ago, I was still building Co-Awaken mostly on my own, with the support of my business doula Erica Shapiro. Now, we are a team of four — not just a team, but friends and family who weave into my daughter Ember’s life, each one an attachment figure she knows and trusts to hold her.
In this moment, we’re halfway through the 4-week True Contact cohort that Kiki Candace Sauve and I are teaching on secure attachment. And I don’t just mean secure attachment with each other, but with life itself — an unconditional trust that no matter what life gives us, we are held. We are finally teaching the dyad practice that we’ve been honing for the past five years — a simple form rooted in a deep science of attachment repair.
And people are breaking through. Touching shame, anger, power. One woman pressed her feet into the floor and pushed with sound, stuck anger moving out of her body and into another nervous system that could finally receive it. Another is meeting all the places where she pops out — the conviction that life can’t meet her, whether it’s with her partner or in the fear that she’s taking too much space. Places they haven’t been able to reach with years and years of therapy, energetic work, even medicine journeys.
The more we teach this and the more we watch people open up, the more I know in my soul: the dyad practice we’re teaching is both a sacred medicine and a transmissible technology meant to truly change the world, one attachment system at a time.
This weekend, we’ll be teaching a 2-day intensive on building secure attachment through the dyad practice with three families in our home. Newborns will be nursing through the workshop, and our daughter will be moving through the space of our living room. We’ll be working with our inner children and our children at the same time — the little ones in the room mirroring the little ones within us.
It feels like I’m sitting at the intersection of medicine and technology, building a school that runs in my blood.
Three Generations of Medicine
The blood part — I mean that literally.
My grandfather opened a Chinese herb store in San Francisco Chinatown more than fifty years ago. My dad took it on. It’s still there, now the oldest Chinese herb store in California.
I can still feel the chaos of Chinatown around it: aunts and uncles behind the counter pulling herbs from a wall of little wooden drawers, weighing bark and root on hand scales, folding each order into paper packets. The smell of bitterness everywhere. Bitter like the teas I grew up drinking, and somehow so natural.
People in Chinatown know my family. My grandfather was a doctor. Women who had trouble conceiving would come to him, and he’d read their pulse and guide their bodies back into balance. And they would get pregnant. He became godfather to so many of their children.
He read what a body was carrying and guided it back into balance. We’re doing the same work with different instruments: guiding people back into their bodies, to feel the attachment wounds that have been waiting there all along.
Even the technology echoes him.
Two weekends ago, I built the school an internal dashboard, keeping tabs on the whole field so we can keep contact, so no one gets missed or dropped. It’s a level of automation that still feels surreal to me: building in a weekend what once would have taken me and a whole team a month in Silicon Valley.
I named the dashboard I built Pulse. I realize only as I’m writing this that reading the pulse was part of how my grandfather knew what a body needed; reading the pulse of the field will be how we will know what the school needs. Same job.
That one store has fed an extended family for three generations. Medicine has been the family business. Now I’m making my own medicine. Not just for my own family, but for a team that includes my chosen family as well.
The other day during tea, Kiki thanked me with tears in her eyes: I get to be a mother first, and I still get to facilitate. She’s such a masterful facilitator — she knows how to read the room and meet what’s there.
It touched this place in me: like my dad and grandfather, I’m not just creating a school. I’m creating a place where our family gets to work.
A New Way of Life
Secure attachment has become a way of life for us at the school — a cultivation of unconditional trust in life itself, that it can hold us in anything.
The dyad practice we’re teaching has become the daily form of that. In the middle of a business meeting, when a wobble moves through, the team pauses on the agenda to meet it. Two of us face each other and reach — my fingers closing around her wrist, hers around mine. One of us pulls the other into what is actually there: the ache that never got met when we were young. The other stays present, and meets it. That’s the whole practice.
Two forearms, held. That’s the technology.
It’s a radical way of building a business — surrendering attachment to the agenda, letting two grown adults hold on while the meeting waits. I don’t know anyone else building a company this way.
I feel the part of me that sometimes just wants to keep driving forward. We have content to prepare! Things to figure out! Yet every time we slow down and touch the old wound in the body, we come into a deeper devotion: this is the attachment-first way of life we want to share, and the way we want to build the company.
Because the deepest technology we’re building isn’t the software I write for the school. It’s the form of a practice that puts the building of secure attachment at the center of everything.
My intention for these cohorts is not for people to leave feeling that we’re amazing coaches and facilitators. I think we are. But I don’t want us to be the reason for their transformation.
I want them to feel that this technology is a part of them now. That they are creating the transformation for themselves, weaving it into their day-to-day, a new way of relating to reality. The calling I feel is for the magic to live in the form itself, so it works even when we’re not in the room.
I’ve been to fusion dance workshops where you leave feeling like the teacher is an amazing dancer. And I’ve left workshops feeling: wow, I’m pretty good at this. I can do this.
The teacher might still be amazing. But that second feeling is what I want for our students. The one thing I want them walking away with, felt in their bodies: I can do this. I am the creator of my own reality.
My dad brought his father’s dream into reality: he built an actual, accredited school in San Francisco, where several dozen students earned bachelor’s degrees in Chinese medicine. I remember sitting in the audience at a graduation, watching my dad on stage as he talked about what the school meant to him. He was crying. I’ve seen my dad cry maybe three times in my life.
And the other day, grief moved through me: that school ended when he ran out of energy to operate it. He never fully differentiated himself from it. It required him to operate.
Underneath the grief was a yearning: to build something that can exist outside of me. So that when Kiki steps away for a season of motherhood, or when I’m gone — the school still lives on. The practice still lives on. The technology still lives on.
The medicine still lives on.
This publication has a new name: Co-Awaken: The Living Edge — my personal stories from the living edge of creating the school. The school itself now has its own newsletter: transmissions and teachings on secure attachment as a way of life, how to cultivate secure attachment with life itself.