Last March, I Interviewed Nipun for Our magazine, Dumbo Feather -- and I Left So Energized by Our chat! It Left a Deep Impression and We Locally Got Active in Trying to Create an Awakin Circle in Melbourne, we've Published Anot

massage parlour, you’re comparing apples and oranges because the real reward for this is actually something that happens way more upstream.

NC: Love that.

NM: Like an Awakin Circle. You can’t pay back at an Awakin Circle, you just have to pay forward.

NC: I was thinking before actually how crazy we’ve got with gift giving. With my siblings or whatever, how we kind of have an agreement between us on the monetary value of the gift we spend for one another. And if I spend less on him than he did on me, then that’s suggesting something about our relationship and cause for fire. Like isn’t that insane? And limiting as well to all the potential that we could be getting out of the connection.

NM: Totally. Yet everyone can understand the value of small acts of kindness. When these acts get connected, you get something like a Karma Kitchen. Bunch of UC Berkeley researchers tried to study it and they came up with a seminal paper titled, “Paying more when paying for others.” That actually if the context is right, people will actually contribute more because we are wired to give. And there’s a lot of neuroscience now behind it. Eventually, it becomes clear that we’re all quite tangibly connected to everything, and we have the potential to from a dial-up connection to a 5G connection! Of course, if we are to actually do justice to all that flow of energy and data, traditional structures and leadership models won’t suffice. In place of leaders, what we will need are ladders. Ladders allow emergence to rise up. They don’t merely plan and execute, but instead search and amplify. The use of coercive force to control or dominate a situation now feels like an act of desperation. Because a ladder knows the intricate nuances of how everyone is related to each other, he or she just creates a small little nudge and that nudge creates a cascading ripple effect. Everyone wants to be the tipping point, to be extra-ordinary, and to be in the lime light, but ladders know the power of the ordinary 37th snowflake in an avalanche. Such ladders, I feel, will allow our culture to give birth to a whole new realm of possibilities – where your gift won’t be valued by a price tag, but by something far more priceless.

NC: So are you training people to become ladders?

NM: Yeah, lots of people were coming to us with that need, and to be honest, we didn’t realize we even had that expertise, but it’s turning out to be quite impactful. We host various Laddership Circles, which are six-week peer learning journeys. It’s got a “hands” component of personal practices we do in our material lives. It’s got a head component of looking at different kinds of case studies and reflecting on a potential story. And of course, the heart component of learning in a community, from each other. All that has led to many profound inner transformations and very different project designs.

A woman in Los Angeles shifted her yoga studio from “transaction to trust”, an art director in Philippines allowed act of kindness as a form of payment for her theatre shows, a doctor in Texas took the gutsy step of going beyond price tags in the field of medical insurance. That’s something. A Church minister started teaching courses with “priceless pricing”, principals of various schools took the course and initiated compassion ideas with their students. Just this month, we’re completing a circle with senior teachers of an international meditation movement. We’ve had a Noble Peace Laureate take the course, and even a former billionaire, alongside so many everyday heroes. Learning how to operate with flow and relationship, instead of accumulation and transaction, is not common in our paradigm today, and there’s a real hunger for it. Of course, on our end, we really don’t know what will happen in a particular Laddership Circle – no “10 steps to becoming a great ladder”. Because it's emergence. So we can’t honestly promise anything, but the sincerity draws people, and the inner transformations through the process have been surprising and humbling.

NC: It’s interesting ’cause I’m always thinking about how to be a better leader. I’m always asking that question and looking for conferences or workshops that will address it. But now I’m thinking maybe that’s not the pursuit.

NM: There’s no recipe. It’s a metaphorical shift from manufacturing to gardening. In manufacturing you can say, “Here’s the recipe, I’m going to apply it N times, and scale.” Cookie cutter approach, right? But when you’re a gardener, you know that there are all these other inputs. You can’t control the sun. You can’t control the rain. But you can control so many other factors. So you are in concert with all of these factors. You are just supporting the emergence. You cannot look at a sapling and say, “I need a Tomato by Tuesday.” That’s manufacturing, which is predicated on control and knowing the recipes. Our business schools today are set up precisely to leaders who can take over manufacturing plants. That’s good, and certainly has its place in the world. But everything can’t be manufacturing. Compassion, for example, cannot be manufactured. It has to grow. Now, there are people who try to apply the manufacturing mindset to compassion too. Scientists are trying to break compassion down into its component parts, and say, “Hey, Nathan is compassionate when his brain releases oxytocin and serotonin. So let’s just give him a compassion pill.” And we are not doing ourselves any favors, if all we have is the hammer of manufacturing. Then, everything looks like a nail. If we a smarter, we’ll learn how to couple manufacturing with gardening.

NC: I was going to ask about hope and are you hopeful for what we can create beyond the systems we live, but I don’t even think that’s the question either. It’s like, all of this is happening. You’re doing it, you’re a ladder creating the ripples. And this almost feels inevitable what will emerge from new ways of interacting. Although there’s still some fear in me I guess given the forces we’re up against.

NM: Isn’t it love that gives us hope?

We’re all born with nine months of an unconditional gift from our mothers. We know generosity. We have received generosity in a way that we can never even pay back.

And if we’re just tuned in, we know that all we can do is pay forward. Once we start to tap into that, our biochemistry supports it, our social connections support it, nature supports it -- and we’re in greater harmony. It feels lighter. If you look at the other route of control and of domination, where is that getting us? We have a shockingly unequal society, we feel isolated, are disconnected from each other and the systems that we’re embedded in. There are no real solutions for things like inequality. We are not able to address climate change. We don’t even know how to have deeper conversations about artificial intelligence. With each solution we create, it seems like we’re creating five new problems. I’m not being fatalistic. There has certainly been progress on many metrics, but we can do better. We can do better if we learn how to garden, if we combine Leadership 101 with Laddership 101. Yes, the sensational draws our attention, but if we deepen our awareness, the ordinary is every bit extraordinary. In that sense, the ServiceSpace journey has been about creating a field that honors the sacred in the subtle. When we do that, kindness is no longer a cute add-on to a tedious, mechanistic world – it’s actually a revolutionary impulse to bloom into our oneness.