The Relateful Co

Our vision is a world where inner peace and deep interconnection are the norm, and our mission is to increase love and truth in how humans relate.

At The Relateful Company, we believe that empathic relating and more awake, mature leadership are keys to a more peaceful and interconnected world. We see the transformative power of presence and the irony of non-goal orientations leading to quicker and healthier development, happier people, and stronger communities.

We believe authenticity is something each individual must cultivate from the inside out, so while following unifying principles, every person’s version of being real is going to look wildly different, and will change throughout their lives and in different contexts. We embrace the timeless truths about “waking up” from our world’s wisdom traditions, while also believing that we’re best served by also “cleaning up”—doing our shadow work, seeing what we’ve hidden from ourselves, taking self-responsibility, facing our fears and the places of inconsistency and unconsciousness with courage and openness.

We’re informed by adult developmental psychology and integral theory, seeing how people can “grow up” into broader, more mature ways of making sense of the world, moving from impulsive to socialized to autonomous, to eventually interdependent orientations—with the visceral realization that we’re both causes and effects of relationships. We embrace an incredibly wide range of human experience, from the mundane to the sublime, from the immensely painful to the ecstatically transcendent.

We believe this all gets put to the test by embodying relateful insights in our day to day lives. And we see whole classes of new kinds of problems facing our species today (AI, ecology, the effects of  globalization like massive refugee resettlements, bioethics) calling for new kinds of leadership to navigate through them. 

We’re answering this call through training the kinds of leadership that we see leading to ever better futures, working with organizations, facilitating public sessions for anyone, providing individual support, developing cultural knowledge and insights into interconnectivity, and innovating on the edge of what it means to be human together. We believe it’s possible to move into greater love and wholeness from a place of gratitude, admiration, wonder, and already-wholeness. 

We invite you to join us, and we understand that this is a practice for anyone, but not for everyone!

Existential Risk

Relating with the world's current state

As a species, we’re grappling with several seemingly contradictory perspectives:

• We are facing enormously complex and dangerous existential problems like unaligned AI superintelligence, nuclear warfare, ecological devastation, and drastic polarization.
• Yet, conditions for a larger portion of humans are better than ever before and continue to improve (as highlighted by Hans Rosling's Factfulness, and numerous global trends).
• Our attempts to improve the world are often projections, a way to evade confronting our personal uncertainties and inner demons.
• The constructs we use to frame things are enactive, decisive, and therefore carry ethical implications. (eg: Seeing change as a revolution rather than crisis).
• From a mystical perspective, all is one/nondual/God, and thus, nothing can truly be threatened and nothing needs to be done. This means there is no reason to not do things either (all illusions being equally illusory), so we do what we’re called to do.

The Relateful Company's perspective and purpose

The Relateful Company sees none of these views as contradictory. We frame all these perspectives as supporting each other—eg: Facing existential risks is part of some people’s psycho-spiritual journey; reclaiming projections, onto global issues, of personal struggles and uncertainties about life's purpose can ironically lead to healthier change.

From the vantage point of nonduality, we don’t believe that what we’re doing is any more or less valuable than a garbage man, UN Secretary-General, or whatever it is that you do. In the grand scheme of the cosmos and in the great mystery of being self-aware creatures, we do not know what anything is for, but we know that ignoring intuitive guidance tends to lead to more suffering.

Thus the world, being nondual and interconnected (the "absolute" perspective) is a play, and it’s more fun and meaningful to play all out. Life conditions continue to factfully improve through self-organizing systems, particularly evolution (the "relative" perspective), so the world doesn't need any particular us to do anything for it. But those systems move towards greater good when people and organizations work whole-heartedly in their unique calling, continually transcending and including what’s come before, and relinquishing everything in the way of that. So we’re here in alignment with our unique contribution to the freshness of evolution, and surrendering the rest. This principle of "relatefulness"—witnessing and being present with love as it animates us—allows for more direct, potent action where needed.

What this looks like in practice

This is all very philosophical. What this looks like is the Relateful Company working directly with some of the world’s top AI alignment researchers and organizations through 1-1 sessions, bespoke workshops, and long term leadership training. 

We also do live research, looking directly at the question of human values, civilizational alignment, how collectives self-organize, and what are the best practices of groups working together to ask questions that challenge our fundamental assumptions about reality and/or threaten everything we hold dear.

As but one recent example, in 2023 we convened a year long “Math and Metaphysics Symposia” for a select group of lauded researchers, with relatefulness as a core methodology for investigation. Within the first few days this resulted in some breakthrough new math, which is already being applied in AI Alignment puzzles. Part of what made this possible was the relateful attitude of balance, holding the event as serious and playful—nothing needs to be done, but by the same logic no calling needs to be avoided. The organizing team acknowledges the need for “legible output” but allows that to be secondary to the process of discovery, which includes whiteboards and lectures alongside time and space to be “stuck”. It includes a more holistic embrace of meaning-making, like toddlers and nursing mothers, dreams, literature, and movies.

Promoting better relating and mature leadership

Our evolutionary contribution-as-play emerges from this perspective, and so far has led us to focus on better relating and mature leadership. 

We believe these traits can help individuals face their projections, bridge divides, and navigate the complexities of our increasingly interdependent and uncertain world. These existential “threats” have no clear answer and call for a more complex, fluid, and multi-perspectival type of leadership that embraces a wide and polarized set of perspectives –in a context of not knowing who or what to trust (“fake news”), while knowing that everything affects everything else. This is the exact kind of leadership The Relateful Company, Level Up ⬆, the Coaching Course and Flow Course, train.

Plus, as you’ll surely recognize, we waste a ton of energy and attention on personal grievances. Some of us know that deep empathy is a vital antidote to societal fragmentation, isolation, and superficiality, yet we struggle in our own triggers in activations. We don’t know how to bring empathy without abandoning ourselves, leading to resentment and further separations.

We suffer at the hands of unacknowledged interpersonal dynamics, unaware of how to navigate psychologically fraught communications, and therefore we often ignore the deeper underlying issues that keep us from being honest, compassionate, and getting stuff done. We have many of the resources and capacities to solve our biggest problems but like children in parallel play, we haven’t grown up enough to actually play together.

Embracing humility

However, in our endeavor, we are cautious not to inflate our self-importance or lose sight of the broader perspective. 

So we do our best to see our role as 'gardeners', nurturing the future by creating conditions conducive to growth and harmony, but mindful of the sacredness and inherent wisdom of nature. We hold the whole thing lightly and assume there’s much more to the mystery of living (and dying) than we humans will probably ever know. Zooming out, we’re a whole-part in an unfathomably vast and intricate web of billions of years of evolution and entropy, in a universe made up of 95% mystery (“dark matter and dark energy”). And that’s just what we know that we don’t know!

Recognizing our apocalyptic projections

Our times seem crazy, yet in almost every era there were people who believed their times to be the end of days. Maybe they would have been right if they didn’t act, but these perspectives often reveal more about our inner struggles than the state of the world itself. Projecting our own sense of brokenness onto the world, or an inflated sense of importance of our historical time and place, is even easier when society and technology seem to be changing faster than ever before.

We believe that addressing these projections, fostering self-understanding, and promoting deeper, empathetic connections will not only contribute to personal well-being, but make for a more compassionate, sustainable world. We project our power right alongside our fears, and sometimes they interpenetrate. Our deepest fear, as Marianne Williamson suggested, is not our inadequacy but our power. This insight encourages us to show up and embrace our potential, using it not to dominate or control, but to cultivate understanding, connection, and sustainable change, ever conscious of the unending mystery and interconnectedness of existence.

Our Culture

Inside the organization:

Over the past decade our working culture has been inspired by the practice of relatefulness, by the power of love and truth, and by innovative organizational literature like Reinventing Organizations, and An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization. The result is an extremely self-organizing culture that is constantly growing, changing, evolving, and leaning in. As an organization, we’re straddling and synthesizing ever wider polarities; from autonomy and communion, visionary and concrete, structure and chaos, emptiness and manifestation, human and divine (wave and ocean), emotional being-with and strategic getting-things-done, micro and macro, theoretical and practical, humorous and serious, sacred and profane, reality as being and as becoming, One and many.

We don’t always live up to our ideals, but we learn quickly, fail with grace, apologize often, and love challenging and supporting each other. It’s hard to understand how revolutionary the way we do things are without experiencing it for yourself. Check out Fabiola Romero, Annabeth Novitzki, and Dara Harmon sharing their experience of the relateful culture. If this sounds amazing to you, please note that we open applications for Level Up ⬆ Certified Relateful Facilitators once every 6-12 months. Make sure you’re signed up for our email to stay informed. 

World Class Team

Reading through the bios, you might miss how incredible this team is. They are wildly capable of connecting, in the moment, in some of the most challenging experiences humans can have—good and bad! All have done extensive training before we hire them, and then must go through a three month “Facilitator in Training” program, leading under supervision before they lead sessions on their own.

Plus, some facilitators lead relatefulness or are full time healing professionals: Therapists, coaches, and embodiment practitioners. Others are venture capitalists, machine intelligence researchers, executives, lawyers, accountants, professors, and professional musicians moonlighting as relateful practitioners. Many have Phds and run their own businesses.

Community / Ecosystem

Online

When I started experimenting with the technology to connect online as early as 2013, I had no idea how deep and interconnected a global community could be in each others lives.

We’ve had multiple people meet business partners on RelatefulAnywhere. We’ve had people go on multi-country road trips staying only with friends they met on the platform. We’ve had many couples fall in love, a few get married, and at least one have children after meeting on the platform! 

There’s a real spirit of generosity and participation; Level Up, the Coaching Course, and the Flow Training all demand a lot of practice and need volunteers, so there’s an abundance of free Focus, Coaching, and Flow sessions for those of you willing to be guinea pigs. Facilitators tend to post in the Facebook group with a day, time and link. We encourage people learning new practices from our courses to seek out practice partners. Someone inevitably shows up!

The culture isn’t necessarily all “integrally informed”, but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a “teal culture”, with a lot of self-organization (love organization!), ability to hold paradox and a wide variety of perspectives, to discern between better and worse without falling into illusions of observer independence or ignoring the objective world, and to honor and include contextuality and interconnection. This may rub some people the wrong way who want to stay in one particular value set, who do not believe in boundaries, or can’t appreciate the performative contradiction of attempting to include everyone, but we do our best to truly transclude the whole (integral) spectrum of adult development—including the incredible gifts of Green! For an example of how this can possibly coincide together, you might enjoy this article/massive chart on Circling and Integral that I wrote a few years back, before we evolved the practice into Relatefulness.

Of course there are challenges, and not everyone will find their ‘tribe’ here. We like to say this is a practice for anyone, and not for everyone. Relateful Flow for instance, is one of our more intense practices, it can deeply challenge relational expectations, and consequently for some can simply be too overwhelming at times, and for some not be the right practice for their needs and personality type at all. No judgement if this is the case, I feel deep respect for anyone who knows or discovers what they want and need. Relatefulness can also be particularly unsuitable for those looking for things we do not offer, such as trauma therapy. These needs will be better served elsewhere. Our Terms of Service help set expectations and clarify what some of these mismatches might be.

In Person-Austin

Everything said above (including people getting married and making babies!) is true of the various in-person communities as well. Here in Austin, TX (where the company started) we have the largest and most active in-person community. We host open sessions 4-5 days a week and regular special events like GiveFest. Come and visit us here and get a taste of what it’s like; that's an invite! One warning though: You might end up falling in love and staying! 

Los Angeles

There are vibrant and growing communities in Los Angeles (hosted by Kedar, Lisa Lapan, JJ, Mitch, and Evan)

Berkeley

(at the Alembic, hosted by Brian Raszap Skorbiansky, Josefine Röding, and Josh Kelly)

Latin America - Para hispanohablantes

Special shout out to our burgeoning Spanish speaking communities. Having led Spanish-only events in Mexico City, Cusco, Lima, Bogota & online over the past six years, launching our first spanish language facilitator training in 2023 was a dream come true. Click here to find out more.

All Over

There are a bunch of other thriving communities, such as MAPLE, Relateful Tuscon, groups in North Carolina, Ontario, London, and beyond. If you’d like to start a local practice group, we recommend certifying through Level Up ⬆, and then getting in touch. If you plan to start a group before you’ve certified, we ask that you let people know your certification status.

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