We will begin our story with Naomi as a child, in a social environment that was really hurting — physically, emotionally, relationally.
And as Naomi looked for the reason behind her suffering, and the suffering of the people she loved, she came into awareness of the converging series of catastrophic risks to the current world order, known as the Polycrisis.
Now being that she was seven, she didn’t have a name for what was happening, she just developed a felt sense of it. It was palpable everywhere she went, and without any peers to talk to about it, she found herself spiraling into a crisis of meaning.
It was terrifying. And, it transformed her. When she was 9, she dedicated her life to figuring out how to address what was happening.
As the intervening years until adulthood went by, Naomi inherited relational, intergenerational and ancestral trauma from her diseased social environment. No matter where she went, she found that the people around her needed her to absorb their emotional, romantic, and sexual needs. She learned to keep her thoughts to herself, and to not challenge the people around her.
Over time, Naomi’s self-expression muscles atrophied. She lost contact with her ability to express her own perspective, and indeed, almost everything about herself. Inside, her self-knowledge remained tethered to the core understanding that the human system desperately needed to change, and that we, the humans, needed to be that change.
By the time Naomi was 22, though she had created a successful business to fund this calling, she was in nearly constant sympathetic nervous system activation, living to avoid anxiety attacks, and collapsing under the weight of her trauma. Enter, Matthew.
Matthew also came up in a deeply diseased social environment, with a single, disabled mother, living in abject poverty. His family would go weeks without food. Childhood play with other boys was restricted to fight club. Gangs infested his house. To handle his personal meaning crisis, Matthew dedicated himself to two things: First, to finding the love of his life. Second, to escaping the deep, dark poverty that seemed designed to keep him in bondage.
Though he encountered a lot of danger, and accumulated a lot of trauma along the way, Matthew fought with all his might to transcend his circumstances and achieve the American dream.
It was brutally difficult, but he did it: An executive-track job at a major financial software company, a wife, a house in the suburbs, and the car of his childhood dreams. And he still crushed it at basketball.
And yet, despite his achievements, Matthew found himself lost and deeply unfulfilled. What’s more, his marriage was failing, and his trauma was getting much worse, keeping him in constant misery and threatening his life.
By the time Matthew and Naomi met, we were both traumatized and hurting, caught in snarls of our own coping mechanisms.
While we don’t ascribe to labels, they do a good job of painting a picture. Some labels that described us at the time include: anxiety disorder, manic depression, complex post traumatic stress disorder, autism spectrum disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, anorexia nervosa, hypertonia, arthritis, and chronic migraines.
The beginning of our relationship was a beautiful and complex dance that we will expand upon in upcoming videos. For now, the important thing to know is that we made a pact: To create and maintain mutual relational safety.
Now, as anyone who’s engaged in relationships knows, this is easier said than done. We had contrasting boundaries, needs, traumas, and coping mechanisms. Not to mention, we were a generation’s worth of cultural context apart. We had so many reasons not to sustain coming together.
Here’s what made it possible for us: We spent the first year we knew each other exploring and establishing shared values.
Once we’d co-created a stock of relational trust, every time a dissonance occurred, we acknowledged it and worked through it. We kept at it until we reached a shared perspective — even if that shared perspective was a codified understanding that we saw things differently, and we needed to decide together whether to come back to it.
When contrasting needs came up, we referenced our shared values. Both of us committed, and recommitted during every dissonance resolution, to releasing the parts of our individuated selves that weren’t in resonance with our highest values.
We held each other in integrity to this process, and over time, we noticed something: the more that we rerouted how we perceived, interpreted, and behaved according to our shared values, the more energy we regained.
We no longer needed to hype ourselves up to get through our workouts. We no longer needed to listen to stimulating music to get through our days. We no longer needed to participate in commerce for pleasure. Rather than running on the fossil fuels of anticipation and stress, we were now running on the clean energy of connection, contentment, stability, and satisfaction.
Incrementally, we came into the awareness that we were no longer individuals, but an interdependent energy system. That when one of us took a tumble, both of us hurt. But when we iterated together towards a shared vision, we were able to go further, faster, than when we worked alone.
What’s more, as we took on more and more shared life practices based on our shared values, our healing accelerated. Our shared physical practices, nutritional practices, and sleep practices healed our anorexia, hypertonia, and arthritis. By incrementally processing through all the distances in our relational field, both with each other an in other relationships, we integrated our anxiety, depression, mania, cPTSD, paranoid schizophrenia, and more.
Over the course of our eight years together, something amazing happened: We reached absolute dissonance zero. Nothing left in the queue to process; nothing lingering in our subconscious; a distinct yet shared perspective on everything; no separation left between us. Reunion.
As reunion became our daily nervous system experience, we noticed something else. For the first time in our lives, we had an energetic surplus. Our relationship and all our shared health practices actually returned more energy than they took.
We took that energetic surplus, and did what we’d always intended to do: create the Experience of We.
Because, we can’t help but wonder, if embracing deep connection and interdependence had such a healing impact for us, and caused us to consume so much less energy, what could this way of being mean for families and communities? And if more people practiced it, what could it mean for Mama Earth?
On our healing journey, every time we asked ourselves why our traumas had happened, why anyone’s traumas had happened, we found the incoherent, entropic world systems.
Every time we asked ourselves why those world systems came to be that way, we found an underlying collective crisis of meaning. And every time we asked ourselves why the crisis of meaning was happening, we discovered a foundational relational pathology with a seemingly infinite number of forms.
We believe that addressing the quality and coherence of our relationships, with ourselves, each other, and the greater Community of Earth, is essential for addressing the systemic imbalances in the world that perpetuate suffering.
When we met, Naomi told Matthew that she had a calling, a plan, and a boundary: We have to devote ourselves to healing the world — and we have to begin with healing ourselves.
Matthew left his marriage, his job, and his life behind to be with Naomi on this quest. And together, we transformed.
Now, we want to share that transformation with the world.