The Intersection

Building Co·Awaken at the crossroads of spirituality, business, and engineering.

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, Scott Britton 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.