Welcoming Beauty

Lessons on allowing creation to move through me.

I used to think that creation was something I had to force—that if I wanted to build something meaningful, I had to mine the past, gather my lessons, and shape them into something lasting. I thought impact required effort, that wisdom had to be extracted and structured.

But lately, something has been shifting. The weight of effort has given way to something lighter, more fluid.

Last week, I took a Welcoming Beauty tea meditation class with my teacher Mina, and something profound opened in me. Sitting in tea, the warm ceramic cradled in my palms and steam rising in our sun room, I felt it—this subtle but powerful realization that the simple act of welcoming beauty isn't just receiving beauty. It's creating it. In the moment that I allow myself to be impacted by beauty, I am creating the experience of beauty in my consciousness, not by doing, but by allowing.

In that moment, I felt what it means to embody tantric practice in the sacredness of everyday moments. Much of tantric practice centers around the divine union of the masculine and feminine—those complementary energies we all contain regardless of gender. And while many of the tantric trainings I’ve been to have been sexual in nature, tea showed me that the sense of union also happens in the mundane.

The feminine in us is beauty, is the fullness, is the unnameable flow of what simply is. And in the moment of welcoming beauty, the masculine in us sees and names beauty, gives it a container, allows it to be witnessed. The two meet together in divine union, where reception and creation aren’t separate but one continuous, simultaneous act in the present moment.

What I'm discovering is that true welcoming of beauty goes beyond what many meditation teachers describe. It isn't just enjoying what's pleasant or trying to be "more present" with what's already here. That approach can still create resistance. If there's an impulse to escape, a pull to be somewhere else, then forcing presence becomes a fight against reality.

In the tantric union of welcoming and creating, we hold everything that arises—including the discomfort, including the impulse to leave—as beautiful. When we embrace even the part of us that wants to run, that's when the masculine and feminine energies truly unite, and we can be fully with what's here, without struggle.

And in that moment of effortless presence, a question landed around my recent inquiries around creativity: What if everything I create could come from this? From the simple act of letting beauty move through me?

For so long, I thought I needed to do something with what I had learned—to refine it, structure it, offer it in a way that lasted. So much of the conventional wisdom around building transformational businesses centers around packaging up the lessons that have brought you to where you are. But when I create from the past, from an old version of myself, there’s a staleness to it. It doesn’t breathe and pulsate with aliveness. And creation that doesn’t breathe cannot expand. It can’t grow with me.

Instead, I am learning to create from the now—from the beauty that is here, in this moment, already alive, already moving. I’m shifting from a question of “What did I learn back then?” to “How is the truth expressing itself in me right now?” and “How does a lesson live in me today?”

And this, I am realizing, is not just about creation. It is about entering into intimacy with beauty itself in the felt sense experience of what’s here now. When I am truly in intimacy with beauty, I am with it, I am in it, I am moved by it, in real-time. And when I meet beauty in this way, I am not just receiving it—I am co-creating with it, in a dance between presence and expression.

I felt this the other night, as Kiki and I prepared to host a dinner around what it means to build a village with loved ones in Boulder to raise children together. I turned to Kiki and said, “I am 100% by your side in this gathering tomorrow. I am your king.” In that moment, I pledged my strength, protection, and full presence to her vision.

Something moved between us—not just because of the words, but because I was fully there with the beauty of what was unfolding. Because I wasn't just expressing devotion, I was embodying the love we stand for. I was dancing with the beauty that was emerging before me, not trying to control it, but fully meeting it. And it brought her to tears.

And that's the shift. The transformation from force to presence, from effort to allowing.

This is no longer about building an empire—though that’s a side effect that a part of me still ambitiously hopes for. It’s about opening as a channel for something so much bigger than me, something that cannot be contained but will shape the world nonetheless.

I just started The Artist’s Way, a practice of coming into deeper connection with the Creator within me. And already, I can feel how this journey is not about controlling creation, but about trusting it. Trusting the emergence of beauty as it moves through me. Trusting that I don’t need to structure and contain it for it to have meaning. Trusting that the most powerful creation isn’t one I manage—it’s one I allow.

So now, I am in an experiment: Can I allow so much beauty to move through me that I can’t help but express that beauty through creation? Can I create from a place of receiving, of trust, of surrender—rather than from effort and control?

Because when I allow beauty to fill me so completely that it must move through me, when I express that beauty in whatever form wants to arise—what is created is something alive. It may not take the shape of some structure I’m holding, but it will ripple outward, shaping the world in ways I cannot predict.

And maybe that is the most lasting creation of all.