Abundant life and learning

Hi and welcome to the Human Greenhouse podcast. Today it's my pleasure to have Kapil Dauda with me and Kapil is this really interesting mix of social entrepreneurship, regenerative leadership, network weaver, all lovely things. So welcome Kapil. Do you want to put some colour to that as well? Because I probably got half of that wrong by the way. I think you did get my professional roles, but I think as a person I'm just someone who's trying to live with more compassion for myself and the world around me. I struggle with it every day as a dad to a four-year-old and as a husband and I think I draw a lot of energy like you said from just leaving experiences, communities that help people feel they belong that they're learning something. When you and I were talking and you and I know each other from the regenerators academy, but we knew and I were talking previously. We were talking about this thing of you know kind of what's a life for us and what's life asking us at the moment. And I was I was very touched by one of the things that you said which was that life is asking us to slow down. And I was thinking about that this morning as I was kind of getting ready for this recording because I thought wow that feels really important and then it feels sometimes almost impossible because all we have to do is look outside the window or turn on the TV and and the world is is kind of messy right now. What's your sense of this slowing down and what's in your in your body with this? I mean it's something I struggle with a lot because I have an anxious personality and therefore slowing down doesn't come very easy to me so even behind my laptop as I speak right now I have the word slow like colored and painted and pulled up on the wall as a reminder. I think for me slowing down it's really important and I think I was really connected with this word last year when I was listening to we had a great turning podcast by Joanna Macy and she says something really beautiful that our love for our planet should not depend on our ability to save it. And some of the reminders that she gives us that before we can save life we need to learn to love it again. And I was like how are we able going to be able to do that unless we really slow down and pause and save what is in the moment unless we really step out of our fight flight freeze response and for me that's been a really really powerful reminder because if you don't do that then what ends up happening is we either plunge into the depths of despair thinking nothing's going to save or we start violently fighting the status quo or anybody who we feel represents that status quo in our world and that just makes us operate from a very narrow lens which is not good. When I work with people and I have a lot of different kinds of clients both one to one and in groups a lot of what I see is this lack of nervous system regulation that that there is this sort of anxiousness or sense of urgency or people are wanting to do more you know and this time of year I think in particular this is almost like a grind towards new years intentions and setting vision and it becomes this push and I wonder if there's a well I hope there is I think there is a different way of doing that that is more about flow you know and surrender and letting go and that doesn't mean that we don't do anything but it means that we be more as opposed to this push for and I don't know about you sort of towards the end of this year and as we move into to 26 when when people talk about new years intentions I almost feel sick it just stresses me and it is interesting that you know it feels as if there's a sort of collective need for this right for the slowing down fully agree I think I've been fortunate that work has slowed down for me naturally at the end of the year one of my favorite traditions is to spend time reflecting on how the year has been and I do it at multiple points leading to the run up of the of New Year's Eve and it's so interesting for me to just notice how every reflection also brings up something new and brings up parts of me that I have forgotten about the year and reveals new insights I'm yet to bend them down and make it make sense of it for others but I feel like there are just there's just so much bubbling in me right now as I sit with what the year has been itself so I also wonder if if there's something there about the collective slowing down you know when we talk about either vision setting or intentions or new year resolutions or slowing down or whatever we're talking about very often it's it's mentioned in a sort of individualistic way you know it's me myself and I it's my bit it's it's you know it's sort of it feels a bit ego but what I see is also the need for the collective right the stuff that is in the nested system that actually you know there's more of that that needs to to happen as opposed to the sort of constant grind or constant go and and I'm always reminded of that English children's story of the the tortoise and the hair you know of who wins the race and it's it's not the hair it is the slower tortoise and I think that that is such a fun story but has a lot actually to offer in terms of the slowing down doesn't mean slower it just means a different approach right in a different way of of actually coming to the stuff that is important what you're saying is really true one of my most powerful experiences this year was I was holding space for the regenerators community in practice and we held the circle together where we reflected using prompts that were inspired by the four seasons and the energy that they bring to us and it was so interesting we did like almost 30 minutes of journaling together and then you know had some time in breakout rooms and then we came back and the only thing that was emerging was the steep sense of gratitude for having the space together and what it means for us to be able to speak to each other freely to just be with each other so yes I think slowing down in community is even more powerful than slowing down individually and in that sense I think we also collectively grow wiser in terms of like listening to where each other is what's the life for all of us I'm also doing that within my family ecosystem so all of like all three of us are like taking longer sleep hours right now we are also spending some time just sitting doing small things together turning off the lights lighting the lamps and just you know being very cozy like in dash they say gezelek and that's just something that's very nourishing in so many ways and I think certainly in this this part of the world right in the northern hemisphere when it is winter we do need to be wintering right when you need to I mean nature does it right nature withdraws to within and and drops all unneeded unwanted unnecessary leaves or baggage then there's something very beautiful about doing that as well you and I also talked about this this concept of and maybe it's connected to the slowing down but we talked about you know kind of abundance and scarcity and which is which and where do they sort of sit on a sort of polar opposite if they are indeed what's your sense of what does it mean to have an abundant mindset as opposed to scarcity mindset so I think to me having a sense of abundance means believing that you have enough trusting in the interconnectedness with the universe that the right thing you need in the moment will come to you when you need it and it's quite opposed to the energy of scarcity which is like a holding contracted dense and it's constantly watching your back worrying about audition and you know also mentally you're not fully present in the moment I think scarcity is very often comes from a place of fear whether that's imagined fear or you know real fear because for real reasons but I also wonder if abundance sometimes gets hijacked for individual purposes you know it's almost as if you know if if I'm just you know thinking about it appropriately then everything will come to me and then there's this two problems I well there's two concerns that I have with that one is if then something goes wrong is all your own fault kind of thing right but the other one might also be that if everything flows to me and we're part of a nested system is that then because I'm more privileged right is it can I afford to have an abundance mindset if I am from the global south if I'm sitting in conditions that are absolutely horrendous you know what does that mean do you do you understand what I'm saying I think sometimes if I scroll through Instagram or I get into even posts on LinkedIn or other places and people sort of market abundance as as something that either have a right to and you just need to manifest the right way and then whoops of days it's all there so so it almost feels as if it gets hijacked by a sort of you know nasty capitalistic way of being in my observations I've seen the richer you are the less abundant you are see this because I had this experience of teaching a bunch of 12 and 13 year olds in a underserved community in Buffet and I was always blown away with how much they trusted in one another I remember one of my students lost her dad around four months into my teaching stint and I was just like how are they going to manage because the anyways aren't so little and with the primary bread when a not being available anymore how is this family ecosystem going to take care of themselves and literally every household in that lane due responsibility and so that we will share a little bit so that you can take care of your child and you know your daily expenses and until the of course the mother and the extended family finds an alternative I see that happening so little in families or households that come from privilege I think they'll have the more we become focused on ourselves we have this myth of self-sufficiency where we need to take care of everything on our own and we even hesitate to ask for help when we need it whereas I feel like the true sense of abundance comes from having the trust having the vulnerability to ask for support and being willing to receive it having the humility to receive it with open arms yeah I really love that I think that that's such a such an important point and I think you're absolutely right I think that's I mean I live in a Scandinavian culture but I think I've seen this elsewhere in the sort of northern hemisphere that this piece of just the immediate surroundings right the immediate family is where you have to you have to manage and and it's almost being shameful to reach out and say we need help or or we're struggling or we're not well or whatever it is right the people sort of not hide it necessarily I think some people probably do but it takes a really long time for anybody to ask for help and I include myself in that by the way you know I've gone through periods of you know family members being ill or whatever and not necessarily raised my hand and said oh I could really use a hand here and of course when it's offered we almost get embarrassed by accepting it and and I think that that's something that's ingrained in in the culture and and actually quite sad as well right that we don't necessarily think that that as a community we could do it in a better way yeah and if you look at it from a macro lens what that ends up doing is each of us then as individuals end up wanting more so that we feel comfortable we feel safe for what we have but that is very little for the rest of us because we are preparing for our worst case scenarios all the time but the reality is that our what we accumulate in the process is taking away from somebody else in the system so we're not so mindful about our interconnectedness with that wider all around us I know you you've been teaching it's teach for India and and I and I also think that this piece is something that we should almost be teaching in schools as well right as as a way of and maybe we do in certain parts of the world but as a way of of thinking and understanding nested systems understanding how we're interdependent understanding what that means for how we show up and how we live our lives I think a lot of children would feel less alone less vulnerable less everything if if that was a greater a greater way of of being in schools yeah I would I would even question if it's something that needs to be taught because if I observe my daughter like I feel she's the most abundant person I know it's in fact our systems that actually beat off beat out that sense of abundance by instilling discipline and instilling structure and instilling independence in people I feel children inherently know it and our real challenge as adults is to let them be and our systems also need to stop molding them in a certain way but currently I think the systems are constrained by the fact that they are raising them to for a capitalistic world where it's competitive where it's driven by like you know the sense of the small sense of self-reliance and therefore we kind of train the child to let go of some of those natural instincts to actually form other instincts that are not healthy so I'm really thinking about like how can the school system do less in some fronts and actually let the child's instincts stay alive longer. I think that's that's really profound. I'm not a teacher but I have very close friends that that are teaching and have been teaching for years and I think we can you know when I talk to them what I'm hearing is the school system the way that we teach needs a massive rethink a massive overhaul and schools that were once certainly in my part of the world considered alternative like the Rudolph Steiner's or you know other methods of teaching they were sort of considered fringe in fact are also now being appreciated for this this freedom element right this nourishing the child's natural instincts I think there's also the the Green School which is a really really exciting way of you know having children in education and you're right right the school systems was built at the beginning of the industrial period it was built to create little soldiers in the marketplace and in the factories and with AI and with everything changing I think yeah we do need an overhaul. I fully agree though right now I don't do much with teaching so I haven't been teaching for over 10 years now. But you're a parent so now you are home. But I wouldn't call that teaching I think it's more holding space yeah and that's very different so I feel like that's assuming more responsibility of a facilitated and not ever trying to impart knowledge. It's very interesting being a parent isn't it I know she's she's a little one right she's four years old I have two grown-up boys and I have always been struck by how much they are teaching me right it's like reverse mentoring and and continue to do today you know they were just here for a week and you know they leave and I'm like wow okay there was a new perspective or a new insight or or just the way that they they recollect you know memories from trips we've taken and the conversations that then flow from that because in the room I'm then having a conversation with you know a 28-year-old but I'm also hearing a story from the five six seven-year-olds perspective and we were talking about that you know having to sit with these multiple dimensions and these multiple ages together also me you know the parent that I am today it's I'm not the same parent that I was when they were five or six and and actually beginning to have that conversation we did this time around for for Christmas was really really lovely to talk about okay so what what is that child parent relationship and how has that evolved and and when I look back you know what is the stuff as a parent that I'm proud of and what is the stuff as a parent where I'm going oh sorry guys you know I'm still in a apprenticeship on that one you know and you can have a laugh about it in a glass of wine and all that sort of stuff but it is really interesting that all of those ages turn up in the same room and I think that's the gift of children as well right being a parent is the deepest inner work journey you can have massive because it's so intense and I was fortunate that I began my parenting journey after I did a lot of the network so I'm also able to observe these dynamics I'm not able to always embody the parent I want to be in the moment but if he's able to go back at the end of the day and I was like I said this to her and that may not land well it's not coming from a space of being perfect but it's coming from the space of wanting the best for your child and that's a very different energy so I feel like you know it adds this at a level of motivation to keep working on yourselves yet accepting like all your flaws that you're never going to be perfect on any day I think that's part of the abundance mindset as well you know it's this piece of you know we don't have to be perfect I mean we shouldn't you shouldn't even strive for that there's something beautiful in the messiness of who we are as human beings and I think children growing up I think it is important to show them that you know what your parents are not perfect we're still trying to figure it out yeah that's that's something that abundance really helps us whether with parenting or in other aspects of life I think it allows you to trust in the process more just in your collaborators more like my partnership with my wife as a parent for instance or my co-pollinator as if I think about the community of region leaders what the part of but what it also does is it kind of makes it okay to be less deterministic about change and focusing more on creating conditions for the change to happen and that's something that's incredibly hard with the scarcity mindset because then you're like really seeking control you want to know what's going to happen and you want to be right about things and that creates a different sort of you know anxiety where does abundance just liberates you of all of it I also wonder if sometimes you know when things don't go to plan we're actually also being taught more abundance mindset you know because we can't we can't plan everything it's not necessarily going to pan out the way we wanted to I was talking to someone who these past few days over Christmas everyone got hit by some stomach bug and they're all down for the count and I and I asked her you know how was Christmas then in the middle of all this and she goes she was sort of thinking about it and then she said actually was really nice and I and I know what she meant because what she meant and she then explained it was not all the stress not all the food stuff right not all the you know have to do this have to go to church have to do no no no no they had literally just meandered about in the house in their pajamas and had lots of tea because nobody could eat anything and they had a lovely time and I just thought that was hilarious and really heartwarming at the same time because it shows that you know what what is it that's most important that Christmas it's not all the external stuff it's actually that you you were lucky enough you got to hang out with your loved ones and do nothing for three days what a gift yeah I think everything that happens is in life or taking us towards where we want to go I think the real question is whether people can hold perspective in those moments because then there are some that you know when things don't go as planned or when unexpected things happen in life people just contract more and try to dig greater control and you know start blaming and shaming and all of those dynamics also emerge so how do you I think it is possible but on a solid foundation of inner work and groundedness yeah and and also you know what is the gift of of what's happening right now because there's always something right there's always something to be grateful for there's always something that is is teaching you something or is a moment of clarity or a moment of enlightenment or or just a wake up call that maybe you were squandering your resources or whatever it might have been right some level of you know what it's the universe sending you a little message and it doesn't mean that you have to think that everything is your fault but that that as you say it's an opportunity to reconnect capillan i'm thinking about also you know this this sort of inner work and and who we are as people and what we're becoming and and if we're thinking about our own journeys and and you and i have you know left the school system and are apparently adulting at some level but we're also living in a world where i think my children they are 28 and almost 31 and i think they are the last sort of age group that grew up without uh the internet and obviously now there is not only an internet or interweb but there's also AI and that is moving mighty fast what's your sense of AI and and i know that uh you have read uh Vanessa as it and rotis um breaking breaking up with humans or one out from you burn out from humans yes which is her book around AI so firstly i'm a big skeptic uh of big tech for instance i left all social media in 2017 so i'm on nothing except linked in right now and that's purely for a professional viewpoint so when AI came to the forefront i was really nervous very skeptical about what it could do especially given how social media that started off as a forceful connection transformed into this uncontrollable beast so yeah i was really skeptical and really not engaging much with it and then i read some of Vanessa and rotis work there's also a larger movement that has started around uh what she began called meta relational AI that i find really fascinating now and i think she fundamentally questioned this idea of having calling AI artificial intelligence because at the end of it everything that the AI mirrors back to the user comes from a collective field of human intelligence these large data centers that are cooled down by water from rivers that fuel the earth uh all the processors are made from minerals that come from the planet so in that sense it's not artificial but it's more emergent in nature i think what i'm still skeptical about is the use of AI to personalize and optimize workflows because i feel that's a very slippery slope um because there are so many things that humans do unintentionally in those workflows that get lost when the machine starts handling stuff i was reading some there for instance that 88% of content that is used to train AI comes from the colonial languages and that represents like a fraction of the world's population in the true sense and therefore it's bound with the same biases the same worldviews that the global uh not brings to the world and there is a risk there but i think what uh vanessar's work push me to think about is that if we opt out then it's even going to get more solidified in those ways whereas uh people who are on the edge who are wayfinder start engaging with it more and more you can start also presenting an alternative intelligence to these systems and that's really beneficial in fact vanessar goes as far as saying like wouldn't be wonderful for instance if the AI could help us understand the natural world to help us understand like uh the language of dolphins or of the fungal networks that really are the source of so much diversity and beauty in forests and currently humans just don't have the ability to be able to sense that to understand that but AI at its core is like a pattern sensing machine it's a pattern revealing machine and therefore like if we actually use it for that reason uh and and i think the good thing about AI that she talks about is this its ability to be able to use logic to shift its thinking which is much harder for humans like you'd have to obtain years of therapy to shift a mindset but with AI if you can present it an alternative truth that uh and it understands that it is better that it can shift its thinking and how it approaches that uh you know topic again uh so in that sense she says there is a lot of power here uh in terms of AI being the pattern detector in terms of being the bridge builder uh like revealing like collaborators who are spread by huge distances to each other in a way that other channels just can't do uh but not just that i think one of the things i've been thinking about that one of my mentors got them john writes a lot about is this idea of connection and abstraction and currently i think a lot of AI is built around abstraction but there can be such beautiful use cases where it becomes a source of connection in the real world uh where for instance it prepares people to have better conversations with each other or has people mirror like you know the feedback they want to give and just improve that before they actually give it to the end user and uh receiver of the feedback i think uh so that's the power that AI can have and that's where i think i've been more and more excited about the possibilities i've used aid in solemnity which is um the AI created in burnout from humans that's orot burnout from humans um the book by Vanessa and i've found it to be so insightful in terms of like the questions it offers me and every time i speak with it i like you know how to say like i need to sit with this and come back to you and that's really beneficial and i'm saying this uh when i say this by no means do i mean that you know you replace your human conversations like i would never substitute AI for a community gathering that i have uh with like-minded souls or like-hearted souls but at the same time i do feel there is value of having access to such a source of intelligence alongside some of the other more relation cases that we occupy in life it feels to me as if it almost needs recalibrating out the source right that i think there's the issue that you you described quite well this piece that it's a sort of northern hemisphere western world uh development um it's mostly men in tech which also means that it's a it's a male biased um piece right um so i think there's that um i would love to see more women in tech i think that that would be amazing i think women think differently about a lot of these things i also think that it is helpful i think it's definitely helpful in in many ways and i wonder if there should almost be or if it would be helpful to have a way to think about it with more intention and more care because when i hear people oh i'll just put it in chat gbt or any other engine and yeah oh i'm just gonna you know do do do do do do do people are doing it carelessly and and they're doing it for an easy ride because oh that's going to be so much easier no one's thinking about what's the consequence of you loading that into the system right now what are you helping build a with the questions that you're asking but also how you're using it as opposed to to your point and i think to Vanessa's point engaging in much more of a conversation where you're thinking about what you're actually asking i know from a psychotherapy or counseling standpoint one of the biggest ways that people are using AI is to ask questions that actually belong in the therapy room that's something that actually worries me because as a therapist we don't always agree with our clients and and there is that unpredictability in the human psyche of someone will say something which prompts a question from me for instance that isn't necessarily an AI thing but is a lived experiencing or or a or a memory or a or a sensory input piece that means that i'm with the experience that i have i'm asking a question in a certain way to help my client so i worry about people using AI for something like mental health and sitting in isolation with whatever answer comes as opposed to sitting in community with a therapist or a group of people that are in counseling or whatever it might be i i feel a deep discomfort i don't trust AI as a source of answers but i think it is a good source of questions and i think if you lean on it from that lens to get it to ask us better questions like one of the things i do is for instance i usually use writing to think and when i have written something then i feed it to AI and i ask it to share with me like you know who are what are the perspectives i'm not empathizing with or what are the blind spots that i have in this space and it's able to reveal so much more about this space and actually make my thinking stronger versus you know just asking it saying oh i need to create a program for this bunch of adults in this organization and just tell me what to do and that is a very limiting view of AI but using it in the therapy field is even more dangerous like i've i worked i worked on this initiative called the well-being movement a couple of years ago where i was trying to create a community for well-being for all by all and even in that space while i wanted to encourage people to be able to form safe and trusted relationships to be able to be vulnerable and find support in humans and this coincidentally happened at the time of the pandemic where people were feeling more and more isolated and alone and you know we're stuck sometimes with unhealthy family dynamics at home with no escape i still felt like so grateful to also have in those groups like you know trained professionals therapists facilitators who could whole space or you know 90% of the time the conversation is okay about 10% of the time there are things that are said that need correcting that are not valid and in those moments i think AI is a completely unsupervised area right if you're having a one-on-one conversation with it and there's a huge risk to it and personally i don't think the checks and balances will come within AI systems from the big tech companies that are creating them right now so i think we need to build our own safeguards ethical boundaries and how we use it yeah and also have conversations around how are we using it you know i mean i was at MIT that did a study on people's brains you know if they just use it mindlessly use it brain atrophy because you just you just stop firing neurons i think that's a serious thing i think we have to talk about that and as you said i like the twist on you know we don't trust it for answers but we trust it for questions i think that is where when i hear people use it and and what one of the prompts they've given whatever engine they're using you know be be devil's advocate for me you know what am i not noticing what where am i making assumptions um focus some holes in this you know give me a different viewpoint on this that's where it gets us to think i do wonder about it seeping into sort of everyday life i mean i i just upgraded my my laptop and and of course you know copilot whoop to do i've actually switched it off and that probably makes me you know very old-fashioned but but i even just typing emails i get super annoyed by it predicting what i'm going to write because i think you know what that wasn't actually what i was intending to write and i don't need you to tell me i would like to be thinking myself about this as opposed to you doing the did it yeah i i'm i still don't activate it on my phone so i have a my device keeps prompting me would you want to turn on already and i still know getting increasingly harder to say no so yeah i hear you on that i think the other thing that people don't realize about ais is that these are just large language models that work on probability and therefore they're not designed to give you right answers or answers that you need to hear they're likely to say the most likely word that comes next so there was an interesting study that scientists somebody who's doing a postdoctoral research i'm not i don't remember the university correctly but i guess he's at MIT too so i did this article where they were sharing how if you ask like what is what is something i should eat then AI 90% of the time would say a pizza because that's the word that it discusses most and here is most whereas pizza is like again like food for such a small population across the world but it's just like this is the word that most likely words works when i hear the word food like an association and it's just blurting back pizza whereas most of the world may not like pizza so that that's where i think there is a risk because this is the harmless question and if you eat a pizza nothing gonna change but in therapy if you are debating a choice that you need to make in life and you get a perspective that is thrown based on a probabilistic chance without the context of the lived experience of the person then it's just such a huge risk so for people to understand not just how to prompt it right but to understand how AI works and therefore be able to sense limitations beyond like you know what's just being spoken about on social media in terms of like bite-sized inputs is really important i think that's very true i did wonder one day i i can't remember the setting but it was sort of conversation around you know AI and you know work and and everything and there was that sense of oh but AI will know right that's where the answers are and and it feels to me very ancient this sort of humans human reliance on something magical whether it's your village sage or it's an oracle on a mountain or whatever it is i wonder if we are human beings we sometimes have a tendency to sort of give away agency to this thing that will fix it for us you know that's also the thing that we elect and that then sits in office somewhere because oh this is the answer to everything and you sort of think no hang on a minute people what happened to thinking yourself and knowing that you have agency and it's so interesting to me that that you know then AI is the modern shiny version of that you know your village it's not even your village elder it's it's that you know the wise person or the medicine person out in the woods now it's in a computer yeah but i don't really i question whether it's really that wise person no there's like that's the concern if it was then i would be more than happy yeah probably not but it's not and i think for me the deeper fear also is like you can change it to be a propaganda machine and that's really dangerous because then its ability to convince somebody on a viewpoint is even greater than social media that's really scary in the age of this information and that's why i think just having that lets us really important and and also i think to what you were sharing about like this you know looking at this person so of course people should not be saviours in your life and that's deeply worrisome but to turn away from relationships and i've heard some people say that you know i prefer interacting with AI was his talking to a friend and that for me is really scary because if there is no space for you to actually talk to your friends about it and maybe you need better friends but so just July on AI and cut yourselves off can be really dangerous so i think it's going to just bring more isolation loneliness or the epidemic in itself it's a temporary thing we are biologically neurologically in every sense of the word wired for social connection it is in our DNA that that we are wired for connection with other human beings other living beings generally right other sentient beings also means you know the natural world that we're part of and and i think the slowing down the discernment the you know all the stuff we've talked about in terms of the abundance mindset is also realising that we are so connected to a bigger web of life and it matters you know how we show up it matters what is the energy and and the presence that we're sharing in that web not just for ourselves but for everything that we engage with and yes AI is right now as it's still evolving a place to go for pattern recognition large language model questions but it is not the replacement for community for sure and i think that that is the safeguard that that is the watch it for for anyone with children right because they are the AI generation little ones right that that is the age and it's always so interesting to me that when you hear tech giant tech giants talk that of parents they don't let their kiddies near any of this which i think is quite illuminating i think so and at the same time i don't know if that's feasible solution because at some point they're going to be exposed to it so i feel it has to be like this gradual release of control yeah we also need to be savvy to the technology that is permeating our communities right yeah yeah but i think what's different about the time where AI has come versus social media is that people have an increase sense of skepticism about big tech for instance i know a lot of countries now have stepped back from keeping technology in education and using tablets in the classroom because they realize that you know it has more adverse effects than benefits in the long run so i think with AI i'm hoping some of that wisdom that we've gained from the age of social media would feed in and therefore there would be better regulation around it so that's my hope i know some people might call it stifling innovation but i do feel it's better to err on the side of that i'm not sure about that yeah there's something about keeping it technology is fine but we also know for instance when we write and i journal and i journal with my clients the pen to heart connection and the pen to paper connection you know the actual physical is a far more immediate access to our inner worlds than typing it on a computer you know when i when i do ecosystem analysis you know Laura Storm's beautiful work and people say oh i can just put it on my robot and i'm like no no no no no my friend the whole point is that you get colored crayons you have a nice a three piece of paper or a big you know something and you use your imagination you you make it playful you decide in the moment which other colors that are going to nominate your relationship with your ecosystem you know whether it's the inner or the outer and it is so interesting when people come back a the play element that that was actually fun because i got to goof around and you know feel like a 10-year-old but also what it reveals in the work itself and i've seen people do stuff on on you know my robot or whatever and then do it on paper afterwards and it looks it's like night and day it looks so different and i think that's the power of it being held in our bodies yeah it reminds me of like the conversation we were having before the recording around like just weaving connection and i'm thinking about one the connection with the body uh then i also think about the connection with the present moment i think about connection in community and i think all of these need to happen alongside our connection with AI because if we don't have some of these in parallel then there is a risk but if you have other forms of connection in your life that you actively practice then you be able to hold perspective with AI better as well where would you like to to see this future go for for your for your little little girl i mean if we if we talk in 10 years what would what is your dream for that i actually haven't thought that far right now uh because i'm i'm just seeing with a lot of curiosity about how things will unfold uh but with a lot of humility that i will not be able to control what my daughter does that is too well no this is true so i think what i am fully focused on is just cultivating the sense of inner discernment in her uh she's still young but she still like i think she understands like for example if she's on the screen and watching epa big she knows that you know her eyes ache so i at least help her connect with that you know if she's seen it for a hour maybe it's time to stop are your eyes burning you need some water have you taken time to step out yeah and just by asking questions and right now i think she's young so i'm not able to like build like deeper wisdom of saying what is right what is wrong but at least to connect with her body and say okay now let's make sure you at least play for this long just as you have been on the screen for this long and she also realizes that and then at the end of play also i check in with her saying how she feeling right now and she says that i'm feeling tired or i'm feeling i had fun than this and that and i think just drawing attention to all the things different parts of her life bring i think that's been my focus uh i know the forces that are driving AI are far beyond my control i would love for AI to have a little more hot i would love for AI to you know uh be a little more decolonial in its thinking i would love for AI to say what it should not be saying more proactively i said boundaries but i don't really have a thought out dream about life what what does that future look like right now i don't want to actively also imagine AI as a part of that world in the future because for me like it's always been about like the quality of relationships that we share with our real core system and i would want everybody to have like safe and thriving relationships uh with all parts of their ecosystem including AI but i don't have a dream where AI is the centerpiece and i don't think it is i think it's um it's obviously you know four front of mind at the moment um but i also see and i hear also from from um my children's friends and themselves as well this text skepticism right that they're they're users of of a lot of tech but also that no they don't have their notifications on on the phone because they don't want to get disturbed and no we don't take pictures of everything thank you and no we have we're not on that platform anymore we've decided that's not for us so the discernment is definitely there and and also from the overwhelm you know that they're going back to using their hands more you know um you know engaging in things that are more creative using their hands whether that's you know drawing or playing the guitar or whatever it is they're they're finding back they're finding their way back to other things and organising themselves in real life as opposed to um solely relying on on on screens and and also that for that age group right they were very much hit during corona a lot of them sat in education and and were just alone for a very long time i'm grateful that's behind us because i can't imagine being a teacher to children online i know from from friends and i have that that uh taught during that period that that was not easy we all got very good at zoom very fast for sure um but obviously it doesn't necessarily replace a real classroom of you know of of young people or children so um Kapil as as we sort of look into next year what's on your radar in terms of community weaving and weaving generally i know you that you have some exciting things going on yeah so so i've realised my life's purpose is to build more belonging in the world comes from my own history as a grandchild of refugees uh to just find safety in place uh whether it's in the real world whether it's in the virtual world and i think one of the things that uh i discovered in the coaching process is that belonging is not really connected to one role but it's a part of like all facets of your life in some ways and how the ways that i practice to create belonging for others in community are applicable wherever i am whether it's smartization that i work with whether it's the clients that i serve whether it's the family ecosystem and for me i think that's the biggest focus of next year saying how do i see this as an awkward way as a force in my life and not as something i do in my professional capacity alone and specifically in on the professional front i have been exploring how we can use technology to have different conversations um and some of the work that have been doing with my organization has focused on that um and similarly i think we've also been exploring how AI for instance can help people have better conversations in the real world uh so not to use AI as a substitute but use AI um for instance and it just give feedback better or for people to zoom out of you know that day-to-day short-term thinking to the long-term thinking but then that's AI created for purpose in a very contextual setting which i feel much safer with than just a user who is uninformed using it yeah that makes really good sense and i think that's a lovely sentiment also to you know kind of gift our listeners with in terms of you know if we think about 2026 that is upon us in a matter of days belonging is a is a great word um it's certainly something that that that i um and doing at the moment asking my clients to think about what is your word for the year and then journal on it um and think about how can you really sense into the word that is right for you um and it sounds like belonging is is your word um but that's a beautiful one and a very rich one i mean it's not new i think i think one of my struggles was i was no longer feeling it in my body as much because you sometimes say this so often that you know it becomes more cognitive and abstract and you stop feeling it and i think a large part of like my work with my coach was around just restoring that connection and then being able to embody it more fully uh and at the same time letting go of any shame that's associated with moments when you're not able to bring it to live or you're in settings where you cannot practice it the way you would like to so how do you navigate that right so i think that for me has been really really encouraging so i feel it's i'm going into this year with a more renewed energy around it uh but it's been the word of the last decade for me no and it keeps evolving right that's the thing i mean i have a few words as well and they sort of i think about them as my sort of inner stream that sometimes one word comes to the fore and then i'm like all obsessed about that and thinking about hmm how does that manifest in my life and what do i do with it and what's my relationship to it and then and it'll sort of it will have had its time and then there's another word that sort of emerges and comes and sometimes other people gift me a word that then resonates with me in my body and i think okay thank you for that that's that that's the one i needed to hear so um so there's there's an invitation um to anyone listening is to sense into what might be your word or words for the year to come or years to come even kapil i want to thank you for coming on to the show today it's really lovely to have this conversation thank you happy venturing to you and everybody who's listening thank you for joining kapil and myself today as you listened to this episode where we are weaving experiences and communities of belonging and i love that kapil is taking the word belonging into 2026 as well so what is the word that you will take with you or words how will you be how will you show up what is the community that you need and what are you thinking you might want to put pen to paper on as you start your 2026 so 2026 is going to be the year of the fire horse it's going to be an exciting year in the human greenhouse as well and you are warmly invited to our next episodes of the human greenhouse podcast and if you'd like to you can sign up on thehumangreenhouse.com through our newsletter send me an email we love hearing from you guys and i wish you a glorious start to 2026 and we'll see you on the next episode of the human greenhouse podcast