Three Lessons in Humility
A diaper change, a dying dream, and a cup of spilled tea.
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.
Be Part of This
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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