We-Flow Part 4: Reversing Financial Unsafety and Background Unhappiness

Persistent Well-Being Explained

This article is the fourth of a 6-part series on the practice of We-Flow.

In We-Flow, Part 1: How to Work with More Joy and Effectiveness, I share my first experience at a 2-day We-Flow Immersion in late September (5 months ago) and the surprising outcome of that weekend. I attended a second immersion in early November, in which the impact amplified in a way I could hardly believe. I tell that story in We-Flow, Part 2: Moving Towards Effortless Manifestation.

I was already feeling a bit disoriented at that point, having the thought, “this is too good to be true”. From that place I wrote the third article We-Flow, Part 3: What is the Stewardship Course, in an attempt to understand and contextualize what was happening to me.

Then I joined the Stewardship Course (SC), which is the highest-level We-Flow training. I attended the first weekend of the SC course a month ago in Amsterdam. It was a small cohort of students plus 2 leaders, all attending in person (We-Flow has both live and virtual events). I came from Berlin. One student came from the US.

This and the follow-up We-Flow, Part 5: Expansion vs. Integration, are my most comprehensive We-Flow articles yet. I am writing them partly for myself , to help me understand the deep changes that are occurring to me in such a relatively short time. I am trying to answer the question: how is it possible, in such a short time, to see my life bootstrapped to the level of success and happiness I am currently experiencing (granted, this is still “oscillating” as explained below). Am I dreaming? Could this just be what I call “bipolar ideation”? I can’t exclude that possibility, but my positive results are tangible and continuing.

Heads-up here that I don’t receive compensation for this article, and I am not saying that the same thing will happen to you, or that We-Flow was the cause of this transformation. It could be that after 10 years of deep developmental work I was just “ready to pop”. It is also a fact that concurrently with my We-Flow experience I discovered a practice-goal called Persistent Well-Being (PWB), and I was able, finally (after 20 years of trying) to execute a daily somatic embodiment practice and start meditating. That alone would have been worth the price of admission, especially given that PWB training is now free through the app. To note here that PWB is separate from We-Flow, yet fully compatible. More about this below.

The Question I Couldn’t Answer: Why Was I Unhappy?

For roughly a decade, I have been one of the more committed practitioners in the global Authentic Relating (AR) and Circling community — as a student, author, and eventually as a facilitator who began to build a modest livelihood around it. Over that time I touched genuine depth. I met my wife Sophie through the movement and our relationship, although sometimes turbulent, is the best thing that has ever happened to me. My network, my writing, my capacity for presence, my ability to hold a room — all of these grew in ways I am genuinely proud of.

And yet, for most of those years, I was also chronically anxious, financially precarious, and very lonely. Not miserable: there were real peaks of joy, connection, and transformation. I traveled the world and wrote a lot, and many of my relationships (the thing for which I live) were deep and nurturing. But underneath all of that, sat a background hum of instability and discontent that my decade of inner work had not resolved. And a panic-fueled kind of drivenness that caused me sometimes to make costly mistakes and engage in addictive behavior.

That is the question this article is built around: How is it possible to spend years in dedicated inner work and still be unhappy?

And equally importantly: what does We-Flow offer (if anything) that actually addresses this?

I want to be careful here of not sounding like a new, starry-eyed convert 🙂. I am as much an “AR and Circling evangelist” as I ever was, especially given the relative affordability of these practices, this being in line with what I call “the democratization of transformation”, another goal of mine. I am also still very much in the unknown about the miracle that seems to have occurred to me.

But I now, finally, have a working hypothesis of how this happened. It turns on a distinction that I think is one of the most important and least-discussed in the whole field of personal development. The distinction is called “Expansion vs. Integration”.

Background Unhappiness and Financial Unsafety

Let me define some terms before going further.

By “background unhappiness,” I mean the chronic low-grade dissatisfaction that persists even in people who have done extensive inner work. It takes various forms, in my case drivenness and addictive behavior. For others it is more like a low-level depression or compulsive worrying, like “living under a cloud”. Think of it as a background hum of incompletion, of unexpressed gifts, of a life that has not quite found its right form. Perhaps a sense that life is way too much work for insufficient pleasure:

“Don’t die with your music still in you” – Wayne Dyer.

This had become my mantra in those years. But although I had started singing (kind-of / sort-of), it hadn’t yet fundamentally changed me. For sure, it wasn’t making me much money.

By “financial unsafety,” I mean a constant worry even in the midst of a purpose-driven life. This is the writer who can’t pay the rent, the gifted healer or facilitator who can’t get any clients, the business owner who loves their job but can’t quite seem to get the cash flow right.

These two things are deeply related. In a conversation I had with Stéphane Segatori — Co-originator and steward of We-Flow — he described it this way: some people have genuine, even significant well-being, but the moment their financial safety is threatened, that well-being begins to oscillate. The inner resource is real, but it is not stable under pressure.

Other people may have financial safety, but at the cost of their well-being. Maybe they work in a corporate culture that does not align with them and requires sacrifices which feel out of integrity. Or maybe they are relatively fulfilled in their career and financially stable, but they have a nagging sense that something is missing. Common examples of this include desire for a relationship, an obsessive existential pre-occupation or distress of some kind, or a constant undefinable sense of dread. Maybe they don’t even know what the problem is, they just know that something is “off”.

These kinds of people are not unusual by the way, rather they are the norm. I was in the first category (of financial unsafety): I had found my purpose and I had found real connection, but my finances were challenged and caused oscillations in my mood. The worst, of course, is when you have both background unhappiness and financial unsafety together. This is a pretty miserable fate, but sadly (again) it is also very common.

So what do these people do? They take a transformational workshop, of course!

They become Authentic Relating enthusiasts, for instance. Some of you reading this, have had your experience of life profoundly altered by attending Circling events and workshops, or other transformational communities and events such as Burning Man. You have experienced “expansion” and had deep insights and meaningful connections. For a while it seemed (as in my case) that your life was working better. But sadly – or maybe tragically – this state did not persist.

Stéphane’s mapping of this is unusually clear: We-Flow works simultaneously on two axes. For those with well-being but financial instability, the practices help stabilize livelihood. For those with financial security but persistent background unhappiness, the practices deepen access to Persistent Well-Being. The goal — and this is what distinguishes We-Flow in my experience — is to create conditions where both axes reinforce each other, rather than pulling in opposite directions.

Why Authentic Relating and other Expansion Practices Don’t Generally Create Financial Safety

Authentic Relating and related practices often fail to generate income or lasting stability for their practitioners — even the most dedicated ones. This is related to the previous distinction, Expansion vs. Integration.

Expansion is what happens when you go to a good workshop, a retreat, or a circling weekend. Your horizons open. You touch depths of connection, presence, and creative possibility that you did not know were available. New needs arise — new desires, new visions of what life could be. This is real growth. But it is also, in a certain sense, a kind of destabilization.

Because expansion creates a liminal phase: a transitional space between the old self and the new. The old structures of motivation, identity, and livelihood no longer fit — but the new ones have not yet been built. This liminal phase can be disorienting and, if it is not held well, genuinely costly.

In Layman Pascal’s landmark article, The MetaModern Business Bureau (MMBB), the author identifies at least six mechanisms through which expansion-oriented practices can actually harm livelihood, rather than support it. I’ll summarize them here:

First, the attention depletion problem. Expansion creates new desires and new topologies of interest. If financial life has not been stabilized before this expansion, the energy that was previously going towards livelihood gets redirected towards the new. Work becomes less interesting. Focus diffuses.

Second, magical thinking. Many relational and spiritual practices rightly train practitioners in comfort with not-knowing and trust in emergence. But this wisdom can slide into a subtle passivity — an expectation that life will deliver without requiring concrete action. The “trust the unknown” teaching needs to be held alongside, not instead of, practical initiative.

Third, trauma activation. Deep relational practices can and do surface old material. This is generally a good thing — but it also creates a genuine need for post-processing support that is rarely built into the training structure. People sometimes leave a weekend of profound Circling holding more than they walked in with, and with no clear container for what to do next.

Fourth, negative social field dynamics. Community-based practices create rich, sometimes intense social environments that become their own source of drama, distraction, and sometimes conflict. The community that was meant to support growth can become another front requiring energy and attention. In extreme cases, sucking attention away like a vortex.

Fifth, and perhaps most structurally interesting: the gap between expansion and what Ken Wilber called “Showing Up.“ Wilber said that Showing Up practices — the embodied, practical integration of inner growth into real-world behavior — are a hundred times more powerful and necessary than waking up, cleaning up, or growing up alone. And yet, the field of integral and developmental work has produced remarkably little codified practice in this domain, until now.

Sixth and related to the above (this is the real killer): the daily-life implementation gap. Many AR and circling programs – let alone the more popular transformational programs like Tony Robbins and Landmark Worldwide, mentioned in my parallel article Authentic Relating, A Map of the Territory – many of these programs consider daily-life integration, and financial stability in particular, to be outside the scope of their offering. Maybe they will give you some ideas of what to do, and the fantasy that you can actually do it on your own; but then you don’t do it. Alternatively, they keep you on a kind of addictive treadmill where you need support from the program. And then, you are on the hook to spend more thousands of your scarce dollars. You don’t yet have sufficient well-being energy to create the financial resources and purpose-driven life that will, in turn, generate more well-being. Your life has not yet bootstrapped itself.

And from there you fall into the trap which countless people, me included, have fallen into: you know what to do, more or less. But you don’t do it. And then you (me!) enter into a guilt and shame spiral, and maybe never get out of it.

This is the problem that We-Flow addresses. I will say more about that in the Part 5 article.

For now, however, let me tell how my discovery of Persistent Well-Being (PWB) initiated a real personal revolution. PWB was created outside of We-Flow, but it has been fully integrated. PWB is “baked-in” or integral to the We-Flow structure and curriculum.

A Personal Example: My Daily Somatic / Embodiment Practice and How PWB Has Helped

I will give a personal example here.

As noted above, I learned about PWB through We-Flow and started applying it immediately (through the free app, The Finders, which is wonderful).

I have a long history with Sivananda Yoga. I have been to perhaps 20 weekend retreats in as many years, always leaving energized and inspired. I used to say that there is no malady, physical or mental, that can withstand 4 hours a day of yoga in combination with a simple vegetarian diet. It was even effective with my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which no other modality or treatment could touch. Aside from retreats, there is a very powerful, 30 minute morning practice consisting of two breathing exercises and 4 rounds of Sun Salutations which, whenever I practice, changes my day.

You would think that I would do it every day, religiously, would you not? Well, I haven’t. Never, consistently.

Until now.

What finally changed my attitude was my discovery of The Finders app and reading about PWB. There is a good article about that (a bit technical) Enlightenment and the Psychology of Self-Transcendence: Pathways to Fundamental Well-Being and Prosocial Behavior. Skip forward to section 5 to read about the most reliable and predictable mechanisms to have Self-Transcendent Experiences (STE’s). It is through PWB practices.

I was so inspired by all this, and the prospect of learning how to meditate (I have been trying unsuccessfully for 20 years, which includes four different 10-day retreats), that I overcame my resistance to a daily somatic embodiment practice. I have been doing something like that every day now for two weeks. I discovered a local Osho Dynamic Meditation place, which also does the job, and is better for me than a sitting meditation.

PWB practice is also not that complicated, I learned. At core, it has to do with training the brain to be happy and with finding what’s called your “meditation fit”. Nor is it necessarily time-consuming. A half-hour a day of meditation or any kind of somatic practice, plus a few exercises you can do from bed before sleeping and immediately after waking, are extremely powerful.

It turns out that I am still not very good at meditation. I am learning how that works. But I am pretty good at having happy thoughts. At some level (I am realizing now) I am actually exceptional at having happy thoughts. Who knew what a little bit of practice could accomplish?

All this has been a game-changer for me. And although it coincided with my engagement with We-Flow, it is a separate track. PWB and We-Flow feed off each other, they are very complementary. For instance, I have added a We-Flow practice called “Golden Diamond” to my bedtime ritual, and it has been very powerful.

Another way of saying this, is that PWB made me aware of a fundamental blind spot I was carrying: this is the common Western idea that happiness comes from meeting your needs. It turns out that the Buddha was right about this: it doesn’t work. At least not by itself.

In its simplest form, I would put it this way: money doesn’t make you happy, everybody knows this. Nor does being happy make you money, necessarily. However, if you work both, and particularly within an intelligent framework like We-Flow, the sky is the limit.

Continue reading We-Flow, Part 5

We-Flow, Part 5: Expansion vs. Integration [currently in production, I will update the link later]. This article starts to explain how We-Flow solves the “integration gap” and why it is different from almost all other trainings in this respect.