WHAT IS FULLNESS?

I remember standing by the Pacific Ocean one afternoon. I had just delivered one of my first energy work sessions in LA and walked over to the beach in Venice right afterward to ground. My body was still buzzing from having shared in such intimate space - space where people could let down their guard. Where they could cry, and laugh and feel held by something far greater than what they had known. 

As I touched the water with my toes and let my feet sink into the sand, I too could feel myself held. A knowing fell through my body like a sheet landing gently on a summer clothesline and I let myself go into the vast ocean before me. “You’ve got me. We’ve all got each other.” I whispered to myself. “Nothing to do. No one to be.” 

For me, fullness is a state of being. Of contentment, of ecstatic aliveness, or feeling fully. 

At least that’s how I understand it. But my understanding is only one perspective. Which is why I’ve started a journey and exploration to understand how others understand fullness.

From chefs to entrepreneurs, philanthropists to teachers, I’m curious about how it is that people find satisfaction. What does it feel like? How did they realize it? 

I believe that everyone has a key to the secret of living a fulfilling life and that there are as many keys as there are doors of experience. Fullness for one person might be the care of their mom’s cooking. For another, fullness might mean justice for the underserved. Our experiences of fullness are as varied as our backgrounds, histories and lineages. 

For a while now I’ve been hosting virtual dinners with The Feast as a way of bringing people together around this idea of fullness and fulfillment. At each dinner, I’ve been asking people “What does fulfillment look and feel like?” The answers to this have been as beautifully diverse as the people answering them but each of the answers shares a similar quality. A warm feeling. A content feeling. 
Here’s what some people said fulfillment is… 

• Having more people feel seen, valued heard

• Being me, while doing things that I couldn’t imagine I’d be able to do given what I know now

• Being of service to the greater good

• Having great conversations about the future

• A nourished inner and outer ecosystem in all of its glorious complexity, messiness and elegant simplicity

• A caravan of light

There were so many more moments and notions, each one welling up a huge bubble, a feeling, of fullness. In those moments, coming into connection with what fullness means for others, I found some of my own. It didn’t mean eating more. I didn’t need to stuff myself to the brim with extremes. It was an often gentle, sometimes funny, but always warm experience. One where I could let my guard down and just be me, resting and fully relaxed in the contentment of those around me. Nothing to fix, nothing to hold, no need to worry. A sheer sense of belonging to others who were with their own fulfillment. 

This is how we are meant to be, especially in community. You’ve got you. And I’ve got me. And together, we can revel in the joyous expression of fullness together. The experiences we have shared may have very well been the fruits of learnings, life and suffering, and who knows where will go from here, but for now, we have this moment and each other. 

This, to me, is fullness. The embrace of the completeness of life, together. 

Experience Design for Meaning Making

Photo of installation by The Windmill Factory

Throughout the ages, we have co-created, as community, spaces for connection. For making meaning together and for helping each other understand each other and our place in the world. But we have lost, left, or actively destroyed many of the spaces, rituals, and the cultures that stewarded them.

Many of these practices were previously held within spiritual traditions. From indigenous wisdom practices, to Greek trance + gnostic traditions, Taoism and even Christianity (while by no means perfect) were often the central hub for community and ritualized interaction in pursuit of connection and communion with each other and with something greater than ourselves.

But as a dear friend, monk, and Harvard economist, Soryu Forall of The Monastic Academy suggests, religion is just a set of ideological beliefs. In which case, capitalism may have replaced what once was a more decentralized process as the religion of our times. 

In this religion, fulfillment (over understanding) of our individual wants and desires is paramount. These days, every marketer knows to connect what someone wants with a product. But this tactic was founded by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, to connect our implicit human desires - for power, belonging, purpose - to products as a way of keeping them under control. With a whole technological and cultural system built on this foundation, we find ourselves incentivized to keep our attention toward the products that we’re promised will fulfill us over the connections that actually would.

“Money follows the contours of the mind”, a protege of Soryu once said to me, and these days, the contours of the mind follows what distracts us. 

The trance that was used to bring about states of collective oneness and bliss is used to keep us glued to flickering screens that pitch us products between the mesmerizing cuts. The music and song that once connected us with the human spirit are relegated to “content” seeking monetization by any means necessary. The theater and art that once threw people into revelrous states of rapture and healing has been used for escape and be entertained. 

We have lost the sanctity of these great arts, and it’s not without its impacts. 

The entire world was already experiencing a loneliness epidemic even before COVID and rising rates of mental illness have been spurred on by the uncertainty and isolation of the pandemic. The reality of the global climate crisis is creating psychological dissonance, grief and existential dread. Amidst all of this, people are increasingly looking to understand themselves and their role in the world. From the rise of the personality tests to the fact that 70% of workers define their sense of purpose through their work, our culture is seeking meaning - and in a constant state of question it with 52% of the US population considering a career change in 2021.

But our human hunger for connection runs deep, and with it, hope for the return of these kinds of spaces that fill some of our most deeply held needs.  

Ida Benedetto is a renown experience designer and healer who came out with a profound piece of research called “Patterns of Transformation: Designing Sex, Death, and Survival in the 21st Century.” In it, she describes learnings from researching several spaces that are known for their capacity for transformation and suggests that, “in previous eras, social gatherings and ritual experiences were the domain of religious institutions, cultural organizations, or the state. Now, they increasingly fall within the realm of design as it expands to address challenges of human emotion and connection… Experience design offers a possible solution to our fundamental human craving for connection and meaning in the face of increased isolation and diminishing social cooperation.” 

How can experiences fill this gap? The Sacred Design Lab is one example of a group championing intentional design for transformation. A venture that emerged out of a collaboration with The Harvard Divinity School, their first major work was entitled “How We Gather.”  In it, they describe case-studies of various ways people are finding meaning (and it wasn’t your typical Sunday School). Instead, they cited classes like Soul Cycle, or Dinner Parties like The Feast as the new spaces where people were filling an age-old need. Now they are being hired by everyone from major corporations to churches themselves to design spaces of greater belonging and connection. 

Creativity is the answer and it’s everywhere.

I am a staunch believer that experience designers, artists and creators of all kinds are often closest to the places of inspiration where our human spirit and meaning reside. They pull from the ether new possibilities, express the internal, and create moments of wonder and connection to what is true in our individual and collective experience.  

Public art projects like Subway Therapy and The Strangers Project are offering every-day people a space for voicing their experience, offering cathartic sharing and connection through seeing our shared humanity across a wide range of total strangers. Death Over Dinner is creating ritualized space and community for a challenging and taboo conversation in the US. The Jejune Institute created a city-wide immersive game that created so much meaning that the lines between reality and fiction began to blur. 

These are just a few of the breakthrough experiences that have taken people out of their day-to day and offered them a new and more inspired way to look at the world; to find meaning and connection with each other and something greater.

The opportunity is to create as many spaces as there are kinds of people. Because, luckily, everyone is creative. We don’t require fancy studios and labs to design these spaces of connection. They can come from a mother who wants to do something special for her family. They can come from young people wanting to make something better and beautiful for their community. 

And now there are more and more tools empowering the every-day person to design such spaces. Matthew Chavez, the artist from Subway Therapy has started training young people to create their own art activations that create spaces of listening. There are a growing number of books like The Power of Ritual by Casper ter Kuile and The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker that help people create their own experiences. And there are more tools than ever, from card games like this one by Esther Perel to DIY resources from a growing number of practitioners.

What is required is the intention to create something meaningful for someone else - an orientation toward expression as gift or service. What is required is connecting with an intention that motivates beyond the directives of just money. And what is required is the intent to bring the breath of inspiration we all share to others. 

Deep within each of us is a DNA that remembers how to be together. How to share stories and create meaning together. How to celebrate joys and heal grief together. How to sing each other’s names into belonging. If we can reconnect with the part of us that knows what it is to create these kinds of spaces with and for each other, we can find our way back to what we have lost in new and profound ways. We can meet each other’s hungers for our most basic human desires more fully together than we could ever do alone. 

*For those interested in this thread of conversation, I’ve started a conversation series titled “Transformation by Design”. You can check out the first episode with Author Judah Pollack that covers many of these topics here. 

Feel Everything

I want you to feel everything 

Every morsel of the divine 

Swallowed whole 

A muse from 

Songbird’s swollen throats 

Exposed 

Wafting in the wind of a thousand 

Throes 

An ounce of life is worth a world of gold

That’s why you came 

Became 

A soul

Don’t run away 

Half foot 

In or out 

All but sold 

Come stand firm

In you choice

Head on 

As you continue to choose 

This.

Here. 

Now.

Is a good one 

So make good on this one 

Jump in the ride of your design 

After all

or before it

You promised yourself a surprise 

No clichés 

They bore you 

You rathered the twists and turns 

The sacral churns, yearns and 

Burning hopes and dreams 

That connect you with the place 

From which you came 

What fun is a ride if all is steady

Known and found 

The risk is the thrill worth taking

What makes the life rise 

Is the threat of its eternal demise 

So you threw them in 

The unknowns 

Small and large 

Mattering and meaning it all 

Mattering and meeting it all 

With the knowing that this ride could be over at any time 

So that you would stay on

And let go 

Letting those unknowns 

Fall into the cracks and crevices of your soul 

Till there was nothing to do 

But be filled by the glorious bigness of existence 

Now is your moment 

To shine 

And squeeze the sweetness from 

The light 

Of this temporal tome of life 

Till dripping 

This body feels itself in and out 

to the tip of every nerve and every cell 

Of your God beloved form 

Leave no stone unturned 

In the search for your aliveness 

The way back home is through the valley 

Of the shadows you left behind 

Gather them up, those tender sheep 

And let the light in 

To find them lying 

Await, Awake 

At the door of your unraveling 

Left open 

For the wind to blow you whole

Systems of abundance & Fullness

The world is in a state of transition. But what are we transitioning to? 

For me and The Feast, everything is interconnected and everything goes back to a relationship with the land. 

You see, monocrop and mono-culture go hand in hand. Individualized, compartmentalized ways of seeing the world has stripped our land and our guts of culture - physical and social. Big ag leaves the land depleted of nutrients and eating its output kills our digestive biome. This leaves us more prone to depression, anxiety and other issues. Is it any wonder our culture reflects rising mental health issues and isolation? 

The micro is the macro. The state of our planet is the state of our gut is the state of our greater social order: And we are starving.

Starved for connection, starved for agency and meaning, starved for a community that sees us for who we are as enough - the foundation that makes us capable of anything and everything. 

We must re-weave ourselves into a collective fabric, and relationship is the thread. 

Through systems of trust and mutual support, we can find our way back a way of connection. Because community is not a commodity, but connection will become the new currency in the days to come. Because as social structures continue to shift, it connection that enables resilience and response.

The question is what kind of system do we want to build? One that leverages connection for flourishing? Or one that attempts to use it as a means to an end or minimize it as a nice to have. 

I suggest that connection and community, must be valued at the center of new ways of living, working. 

What does that look like? 

Imagine, a world where you know who you are and friends supporting you on the life-long journey toward coming home to yourself. That you have people to turn to to make sense of the world and your place in it. To share your deepest vulnerabilities and your greatest celebrations. 

Imagine that you are able to share your gifts in a way that flows as fluidly as a river stream - undammed, unafraid, unencumbered by forces external or internal. By arguments or issues of money or systems. Imagine that you have a community to help you channel the force of this powerful current that is you - toward flourishing, toward beauty, toward that which truly fulfills you. 

Imagine a place where we see the gift in every conflict as an opportunity to grow. Where we do that growing in community to realize our fullest expression. Day by day, growing, bearing fruit, sharing our gifts with each other, and starting over again - each time with new lessons, new experiences, and new things to celebrate. 

Imagine a place where our investment in each other means greater security ; socially, ecologically, financially. Where we are not divorced from the system, but independent of it. 

We have what we need so we can fully serve. 

We create an example of what’s possible; for how to live, how to work, and how to play, expand, and creating in relationship with this incredible planet. And we extend our learnings as an offering to the world in a time of transition. 

At The Feast, we are transitioning to a state of fullness. One that is replete with social, cultural, and economic richness and abundance. Yes, we are creating systems of abundance. 

So come, Feast with me. I would love to connect with you about this vision and how we’re bringing it to life to learn and co-create a more beautiful and connected future with you.