The School That Runs Through My Blood
What my grandfather dreamed, my father built, and I will bring to life.
Before my grandfather passed, he dreamt of building a school.
He was a Chinese doctor. He read pulses, prescribed herbs, served the community in San Francisco Chinatown, helped many women conceive when Western medicine had no answers—a godfather to children who might never have been born. And somewhere in him lived a vision of something larger—a place where what he knew could be transmitted, where the healing could multiply beyond what one man could hold.
He never built it.
My father carried the thread forward. He took over the family’s Chinese herb store—now the oldest in California—and then went further. He organized teachers, created a four-year program, a satellite school of a Chinese medicine university in China. He shepherded a cohort of dozens of adults through and conferred degrees. He brought something into form that his father had only dreamed—one cohort, and then it was complete.
And then there was me.
The Lineage in My Bones
I didn’t know I was continuing anything.
Eight years ago, I co-founded Co Leadership. We created perhaps the best leadership training out there for engineers, working with household Silicon Valley names.
We charged companies $60,000 for a two-day workshop—not because I had the most management experience, but because I could do something rare:
I could take a hundred disparate insights—from psychology, from systems thinking, from productivity, from coaching, from project management, from organizational dynamics—and weave them into one coherent map.
I could make the complex land in the body. What had felt murky and political suddenly had structure. I was teaching engineers APIs for relationships—clean interfaces for the messiest parts of working with other humans.
In truth, we were Trojan horsing intimacy skills. Intimacy wasn’t what people asked for directly, but it was both clearly needed and also the most direct path. The fastest way for engineers to become effective leaders was to learn to be more intimate with what they and their teammates truly wanted.
It turns out I was building a school. I just didn’t call it that.
And then I left. I told myself the container wasn’t big enough to hold everything I wanted to teach. In my own spiritual journey, I would attend expansive tantra festivals and come home lit up with insight about life, desire, sexuality, the full spectrum of what it means to be human—and then try to squeeze it all into the tiny box of how people communicated what they wanted for the team.
That was the story I carried for years—until last week.
The Truth in the Body
Lily’s fingers press hard into my back. My body braces against the pain, the intensity, the intrusion.
This is the Grinberg Method—bodywork that reads the story your tissue tells and works directly with our relationship to pain and fear. The practice is learning to soften and receive intensity without bracing. Lily calls it agreeing with the fear rather than fighting it.
I was telling her about Co·Awaken, about how it feels different from everything I’ve done before.
And then she named something in that piercing way of hers, her fingers pressing through my body armor even as her words cut through my story:
You didn’t leave your last company because the container wasn’t big enough. You left because you had rules around how you were allowed to show up.
I felt my body brace against her hands. I felt my mind brace against her words.
Through our session, I could see it—those rules encoded in the rigidity of my own body. The bracing was visible, tangible. Still here, still running me, even in this new thing I was building.
She didn’t tell me what to do with this. She just named it—while I practiced softening into what I didn’t want to feel.
I let in the whole truth of what I hadn’t been willing to see: a part of me had left the company because I had decided how much of myself I was allowed to bring.
I can’t change the past. But what I finally saw was the invitation: to include my full self in the work I’m doing now, including my engineer. The precision, the systems thinking, the capacity to build coherent maps—that’s life force I will need. No part left out.
The Knowing in My Soul
Days later, sitting in tea ceremony, it arrived—a knowing about Co·Awaken.
I am building a school.
A modern-day school of awakened relating through the path of partnership—the next generation of the Hendricks Institute or the Gottman Institute. Something that can hold rigor and depth, sexuality and spirituality, attachment and desire. Something that can reach people wherever they are without diluting the transmission.
The knowing landed with a perfection I could feel in my bones. I’ve spent the years since leaving tech on a quest to clarify my soul’s purpose—searching, experimenting, following threads that sometimes led somewhere and sometimes dissolved. And in that moment, I could feel my grandfather and father in it, the healers and teachers who came before, their dreams moving through my blood like warmth spreading through the body after the first sip of tea.
Everything I’d been living—the past few months, the past few years—had been training me for exactly this.
And I could finally see what I am:
I am a weaver. Someone who can take disparate threads—the mechanics of projection, attachment work with desire, the art of reparenting, the architecture of rupture, sexuality as transformational system and sacred container—and make them into one coherent tapestry. That’s why people in my engineering days paid $60,000 for two days. Not because I was the expert in any single domain, but because I could hold all the domains at once and show people where they connect.
I am not a therapist. I am not an attachment expert. I am not a tantra teacher. And I don’t need to be. Weaving is my superpower. This is what my grandfather dreamed of. This is what my father built toward. This is what runs through my blood.
What I really want is to help people create intimate relationships where they can have it all—deep safety and wild passion, feeling deeply seen and met and turned on. Relationships that are fully alive.
The most direct path to that is to relate to partnership as a spiritual path, as a path of mutual soul liberation.
I have been immersed in the deep end of the spiritual community for a long time. I have sat in circles. I have drunk the medicines. I have been held by practitioners and healers who speak a language that most people never encounter. And I love that world. It has given me my path to freedom.
But Co·Awaken is also for the people I used to work with. The engineers and builders who would never set foot in a tantra festival but who are starving for something real in their relationships. It’s for the man who knows something is missing in his marriage but doesn’t know how to name it. It’s for the mother who wants to feel more alive with her partner but is terrified of her own desire. It’s for the couple who has read all the books and still can’t seem to bridge the gap between them.
I can feel the shape of it even though I cannot yet see the details. Life force will be built into its very foundation.
This is a big ambition. I know that. And I will need a lot of help—collaborators, teachers, community, resources I can’t yet name. I’m not pretending I can do this alone. But I am ready to stand as the steward of this dream, to hold it with everything I have, and to ask for help from that place of fullness rather than lack.
The Orientation in the Not-Knowing
The orientation required to build this school is part of the teaching itself.
I can feel how it asks me to fully own my gifts—and to hold total humility that I have no idea how to build this thing. Both, at the same time. Not as contradiction but as integration of paradox.
It requires utter surrender and total commitment. It requires me to operate outside the rules that have governed my life—the same rules I saw encoded in my body on Lily’s table, the same rules that made me leave my tech leadership company behind.
It requires reaching like my daughter reaches for life—going for it while remaining in complete openness.
I can feel how if I adopt the stance of trying to figure it out, I won’t get there. That stance is fundamentally contractive—a bracing against not-knowing, a grasping for control. This school wants to be built from a different place: from receiving, from listening, from welcoming what life is trying to show me. From creating out of beauty rather than fear.
This is not something I can figure out. This is something I must become.
Before my grandfather passed, he dreamed of building a school. He never built it. But the dream didn’t die.
It moved through my father. It moved through me. It’s moving still.
I have finally found a dream big enough to devote my life’s work to. The thing I am willing to live for. The thing I am willing to die for. My soul’s work, finally clear.
The school that runs through my blood is ready to be born.
And the orientation I am learning—fully owning, completely surrendering, dissolving the rules, letting it come—this is how I say yes.
Beautiful ✨