I came to relational practice by a somewhat unusual route: fifteen years in enterprise software.
My early career was spent building business intelligence systems, managing products, and writing more documentation and emails than any person probably should. It was not the obvious doorway into deep human connection. But it taught me something I still value deeply: how organizations actually work. How money, management, delivery, decision-making, and people all fit together — or fail to.
When I discovered circling and authentic relating, and later the community around the Integral Center in Boulder, something clicked. I did not have the words for it yet, but I recognized a quality of presence and connection I had previously only associated with high-level sports, transformative leadership work, meditation retreats, nature, or rare moments of flow.
I began offering workshops there in 2016. One of my early practices was called Gifting Mind, built around a simple discovery: what looks like disagreement between people is often just different personality types experiencing the world differently. When those differences are explored together, individual truth can become shared truth. That principle — intersubjective exploration and shared validation — became foundational to everything I have built since.
Over time, I also began to see a gap.
Beyond Deep Connection
Deep connection is powerful, but by itself it is not enough. I saw extraordinary practitioners have profound peak experiences and then return to lives that still did not work: financially strained, relationally unstable, or unable to translate what they had touched into the realities of Monday morning. I lived some of this myself.
Many of the practices we loved were excellent at expansion. They opened horizons, created powerful states, and revealed new possibilities. But very little existed for integration — the slower, less glamorous process of weaving an expanded self into livelihood, relationships, conflict, responsibility, and daily action.
I came to see this as one of the central design failures of the personal development world. Closing that gap became my work.
We-Flow emerged from that inquiry. And I want to be precise about the word “emerged.” I did not invent it. We did not invent it. It came out spontaneously during our first year of R&D experimentation, followed by nearly a decade of continuous application; in what was & became the We-Space Lab in Amsterdam. We are a collective of experienced practitioners that kept returning to one question:
How can we learn from everything we have already lived, so we can be better together right now?
We deconstructed the practices we knew — circling, authentic relating, integral theory, even Zen state training — and rebuilt from their shared essence something practical, useful, and alive. What emerged was less a technique than a living culture: intentional flow, explicit relational agreements, and a form of mutual support we call backup.
Backup means standing next to someone, attuned and available, while they access their own inner autonomy. It is not rescuing, fixing, coaching, or taking over. It is a way of being with another person that helps them become more themselves.
One of the discoveries that still moves me is that giving backup nourishes the giver as much as the receiver.
Stabilizing States
This practice has changed me in ways I did not expect. My lay Zen training taught me states. We-Flow taught me how to stabilize those states inside relationships, work, conflict, and responsibility. I have learned that entrepreneurship can be a genuine contemplative path. There does not need to be a contradiction between deep presence and getting things done. In the right conditions, they strengthen each other.
I have learned to meet each person in their specificity, not by fitting them into a method, but by creating the conditions in which their own intelligence can unfold naturally, in real time. And after years of carrying this work, sometimes with more self-sacrifice than was wise, I have learned to enjoy receiving support as much as I genuinely enjoy giving it.
Today, I lead We-Flow immersions and the Stewardship Course for the public, and most of my time I work with organizations that want their culture and business processes to become one coherent reality rather than two separate worlds.
My conviction, tested over many years and in many lives, including my own, is simple:
Effectiveness and joy are not opposites. In the right container, they multiply each other.
