We should have not created artificial intelligence.

At least that’s the thought that runs through my mind when I get tackled by some new distressing news about what feels like an unstoppable and rapidly-evolving technology. I was taken aback recently after learning about Amazon and Anthropic’s attempt to buy antique books to scan and destroy them—all for the purpose of AI training.

I was already concerned about the technology’s impact on the environment and on our psychological, cognitive and emotional development. As a community-centered scholar and practitioner, I spend a significant amount of time researching trends in education, business and technology that will eventually shape the conditions within which my people are embedded in.

I typically hold the paradox of AI’s potential to help us and the role it could possibly play as an existential threat to humanity. I still encourage people to understand and use the technology as best they can. However, I have been left restless with a number of questions about the ways this technology is changing us. I called on a small number of colleagues—many of whom are neuroscientists, mystics, futurists, philosophers, artists and poets—to help me make sense of what happens to us when technological advancement warps our sense of self.

In partnership with the Garrison Institute, I am excited to share that we are hosting a virtual conference titled Artificial Intelligence and Our Spiritual Imagination to reflect together on this. We will be in great company to think through what kinds of wisdom will be needed to contend with the promise and challenges that come with AI development.

Visit Conference Site

More importantly, most of the mainstream AI discourse focuses on productivity and the commercial value of this technology. I want to invite us into a more expansive conversation tied to our deepest spiritual yearnings to make meaning of our world in constant flux. A different way to think about this is—what happens to the texture of the dialogue around AI when we approach it in spiritual terms.

I am not sure what the result of this conversation will be, but my intuition tells me it will be soul-nourishing!

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

Grief is loyal to the bone. It never leaves. I just finished running an emotional marathon of sorts. The month of June was pregnant with feelings. In a span of three weeks, my heart felt a holy trinity—Father’s Day, my son’s birthday and the anniversary of the my father’s passing. Jose Agustin Acosta was his full name.

It has been two years since my dad transitioned. This second year was harder than the first. I can’t pinpoint why. I’m just still in shock that he’s gone. He was the smartest person I ever met. His grace, his humor, his perceptiveness, his discipline and his joy are still resonating with me. He was the byproduct of so much love.

My grandparents seemed to want to go out with a bang when they gave birth to their 11th child in 1956. My father was the last to be born and the first to be immersed in the loving hands of nine sisters. I can feel this love still—through them, through him…through me.

I’ve been wanting to write about my dad for a while. The experience remains confusing. Like an unwelcomed guest, brain cancer made itself comfortable in dad’s head and in our lives. All of a sudden, we were holding an already broken promise—a fifteen-month prognosis. Dad was always a trickster though. He lived 14 months longer than expected—gently modeling how to be terminally ill with dignity.

I am not sure what was more jolting and sad. Maybe it was the way he slowly withered away, losing his ability to walk and then talk. Maybe it was the short time he had to be with my son Sydney. It probably was the two craniotomies. The scars left behind made it hard to hide that something was wrong.

Glioblastoma Multiforme. Stage 4. The diagnosis felt more like a swift sentence from a cruel judge. Dad was 66 years-young when this predicament arrived. His sisters, many of them in their late 80’s and 90’s, would outlive the boy they once spoiled.

We were in an out of the hospital for the good part of two years. My nervous system had to acclimate to the tumult. I’m just grateful that he had great care. His partner was caring. My sister was right there as well. I still recall sitting next to him during hospitalizations telling stories and jokes.

There is so much more I want to write about. This is all that comes out for now. Maybe nothing more will ever come to be written about this. To the grief that comes and goes, yet never leaves, you are welcome here. I send energy to all of you holding a loss.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

The pandemic had turned my vision of an epic in-person graduation party into an impossibility.

“Congratulations to the 2020 Graduates!”

Digital confetti exploded on my screen.

I asked myself, “Is this it?” I studied, researched and worked for five years to culminate the experience in this way. If it were just underwhelming, that would have been fine. But, there was a dark cloud forming that spring. I was banking on getting an academic job that would allow me to flex the two letters next to my name. Dr. Acosta sounded chic. However, there were no job in a barren job market.

I could see myself freaking out thinking about student debt, the job market, the relevance of my work in the field, and all things survival. I looked at my dissertation research and decided to try to build a consulting business around it. I had already spent over a decade working and consulting in leadership and youth development. It was time double-down, grind and do the proverbial “hustle.”

But I had never led or built a business before. I was all alone. Turning intellectual property into a viable business felt like medieval alchemy. I could teach, research, analyze, write, give talks and facilitate powerful conversations. But, as my dear brother Bayo Akomolafe would say, “I had no business bone in my body.”

I went ahead and took all that brain power and acumen for learning and started to attend conferences, workshops and anything that would teach me how to manage a business. The marketing, strategizing, positioning, and contracting was all too dizzying. Like many academics, I felt more comfortable behind a book or Power Point presentation.

All that learning helped, but it was when I started doing 1-on-1 coaching that things started to exponentially shift. I worked with a variety of coaches across the last five years to help with business planning, executive leadership, product development and just sheer confidence building. All of those conversations allowed me to get direct feedback and lean into areas of my growth that I was too afraid to touch.

The interesting thing here is that I was a coach myself. I’ve coached and mentored hundreds of people, mainly in context of leadership and academic development. Here I was as a disciple of sorts—surrendered at the feet of other coaches.

I am at this powerful place now where I’ve received enough coaching and have coached others through major transitions. Over the last eight months alone, I’ve coached over 60 Fellows from the Acosta Institute. I’ve been noticing how expensive and inaccessible high-quality coaching can be for our community. This is why I am creating a little space in my calendar to provide coaching for those who need it right now on a limited basis.

If you need some support and are working on a project, purpose-driven business or are going through a career transition, I’m here. I’ll be creating windows of time to accept one-on-one clients. The video below gives a little insight into my approach to coaching.

My vision is to gradually create more time and infrastructure to support the community in this way. For now, the on-demand program is the best way for me to honor my paced work schedule and meet the needs of the community. Send energy my way as I grow this for us.

On-Demand Coaching Program

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

I’ve been slowing down to catch up to myself.

I’ve also been trying to understand the impact of my work and my team in the field. There is a blinding effect that takes hold of me when I am doing something that I love and that is positively supporting the broader community.

As I come up for air, you need to know about the story of the moment I received close to a $1 million dollars to expand healing-centered education from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. This came about from a stroke of luck, timely scholarship and unapologetic readiness.

I spent five years researching the emergence of the healing-centered paradigm in education. This plunged me into an inquiry full of somatic practices, mindfulness, restorative justice, emotional intelligence and trauma studies. The Acosta Institute was founded on this foundational scholarship. As I slowly built it, I was also working with the Garrison Institute. It was like playing ping pong.

I simply wanted to build something useful from my scholarship that met the temper of the times and the needs of the community. More importantly, I wanted to create a sandbox where my colleagues and I could play, tinker and evolve the work.

^{Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Bayo Akomolafe and I at the Garrison Institute preparing for a summit.}

A representative from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation heard about our work through social media. We were on a row hosting healing-centered education summits and were make waves online. When I spoke to the rep, she asked me for my vision and where I wanted to take the work. With five years of research under my belt and the hunger to grow the work, I gave the best pitch that I’ve ever delivered. She asked if I could submit a proposal to the Foundation with a three-year horizon. I sent it in a week later.

The Foundation would later commit $975,000 to healing-centered education programming through the Acosta Institute, fiscally sponsored by the Garrison Institute. I grew the team, hired more faculty, brought on more speakers, and expanded infrastructure. It was a labor of love.

I want to invite you to take a moment to glance at the report documenting our impact on the community through this sacred work. I could not have done this alone. The landing page below captures three years of “moving at the speed of trust.”

Read Full Impact Report

As you’ll see, we were able to create a sanctuary and communal space to practice hope. In a moment of polycrisis and global tumult, we need spaces like this like never before. When my son, Sydney, reads this several decades from now, I hope he feels into the fact that daddy and his peers did the best they could to contribute to making the world a better place.

I invite you to share this piece or the link to the report with your networks. I want to make sure more people learn about this precious work.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

Imagine being handed the keys to a 100 year-old 77,000 square foot monastery.

Over the years, I’ve hosted hundreds of people at the Garrison Institute. This time, the gathering felt different, pact with a unique intention. Over 60 individuals from the Acosta Institute Fellowship came together for a three-day retreat filled with rest, collaboration, nature and rejuvenation.

Fellows from three separate cohorts gathered as a way to honor months of learning together about healing-centered education, business and technology. Throughout the retreat, what became clear is that the Fellowship has become a sanctuary and a relational container where people can be known beyond their titles, witnessed in their becoming, and supported as they bring healing-centered work into the world.

Over the course of our time together, Fellows engaged in somatic grounding, healing circles, fellow-led sessions, conversations about artificial intelligence, healing-centered business, storytelling, dancing, silence, and deep dialogue. The language that emerged from the retreat was rich and alive: fellows spoke of belonging, being held, finding community, having their cups filled, becoming more visible, and remembering who they are. One of the most powerful threads was the experience of moving from virtual squares on Zoom into embodied relationship at the monastery.

After months of connecting online, Fellows were able to feel the depth of the community in the flesh — through hugs, shared meals, tears, laughter, and the quiet recognition that something sacred had been built.

In a time marked by fragmentation, acceleration, and uncertainty, the Fellowship offers a community rooted in care, slow work, restorative practices, innovation, and emergence. As we continue to grow this community, we are reminded that healing-centered leadership is not only about what we build in the world, but how we gather, how we witness, and how we help one another remember the gifts we are here to offer.

The team and I are in the process of reviewing applications for our next cohort of Fellows. The application portal closes on June 15th. If you know of anyone who might be interested in this experience, feel free to share this with them. If you or anyone in your network is in the position to fund this work, we are open to receiving philanthropic support that is tax-deductible. You can sponsor a Fellow or an entire cohort. Feel free to reach out about this as well.

I also ask for your prayers. I am grateful to be able to do this work. I am in a great space right now after months of paced work. I’m looking forward to seeing how this program grows and to building out more resources within the Institute. As Gwendolyn Brooks once said, “We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

I’ve been fairly quiet. It started after a silent meditation retreat in the deserts of California at the end of last year—hosted by Rocio Navarro. I decided to close out 2025 with a commitment to slowing down. I carried this intention into the first two quarters of 2026.

There was a deep fatigue that had settled in my bones after a decade of moving at mock-speed. I frenetically finished my doctorate program amidst the pandemic, then dove straight into building the Acosta Institute, my precious son was born, my dear father died, and life was deliciously unforgiving.

“Overwhelming” feels like the wrong word to describe the feeling of life swelling around me. At an unconscious level, I had the nervous system of a porcupine puffer fish. At a conscious level, the work I was doing in the community kept me engaged, immune to, and at times unaware of compounding effects of grief and exhaustion.

Instead of continuing the flow of work in the field at the familiar clip, I decided to take a moment to recalibrate. I set a simple intention—2026 was a year of embodiment and pacing myself. I was coming out of a 3-year run with fundraising over $2 million for our work and standing up the consulting arm of the business. The team had grown as well. Four more titans and elders in my family passed away. We lost over $100,000 in contracts.

I still decided to set all kinds of boundaries around client work, email usage, time on calls, and took a month and a half away from all social media platforms. It took every ounce of me to protect my time and energy. Pulling away from large parts of my digital life required an off-ramp. It took three weeks to actually fully unplug.

Some people would call this a digital detox. I considered it an “emptying.” I needed to create space to catch up to my grief. I needed time to sense into the growing contradiction between the vision for my work and the way I was actually executing it. Somewhere at the bottom of my mission statement there was a reference to “slow work” and “healing-centered” approaches to education, business and technology. But carrying out such a mission in this political moment required a particular kind of intensity, in order to meet community needs and financial sustainability.

I decelerated.

I even decided to cut back on travel for work. I missed the ’s Forum in Athens. I said “NO” to other tempting invitations. I befriended the spirit of FOMO (fear of missing out).

I just craved for an un-frazzled nervous system. I wanted to test the notion that the world can wait. Did it?

I welcomed tears of sorrow and created the most spacious calendar in the history of my ancestry. This kind of rest and pace may have healed generations that have long passed and some to come.

As the world kept roiling. I became empty.

This whole process felt like a digital, at times, spiritual disembowelment—at best a purification.

I went so deep that I have been struggling to come back fully. My eyes are more sensitive to screens. I don’t know how to act online. My attention has a sharpness and density to it. Now, I don’t know what to do with this attention beyond staying…EMPTY.

This writing is an attempt to, as they say, “get back on the horse.” It is the first of a few pieces that I am slowly composing. I am shifting and dialing all the levers and energetic buttons to come back FULLY.

No moving at lightspeed.

No hyperdrive moment with work.

Just godspeed.

What feels true is that I have changed. Send energy my way as I make use of this transformation.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

Whether you are a long-time practitioner of meditation or have struggled to quiet the mind for just a moment, it is crucial to understand the paradox in finding stillness. I started to meditate over two decades ago while in college. Then, I could only sit in silence for two minutes.

I couldn’t bare the darkness inside. I didn’t have the nerve to stare at the void within. It felt all too intimate. However, something told me there was medicine in the practice. It took me another ten years to “truly” be able to sit. Every couple of years, I’d go to a silent or mindfulness retreat to see if I could deepen my practice with the support of other people and expert guidance.

I remember sitting in zazen at Blue Cliff Monastery with the monks there. Not a word was uttered for three days. At moments, all you could hear was me repositioning and ruffling my feathers—knees clicking from numbness. It was not sexy. I did not look cool nor serene. In this style of practice, there was serious work required just to physically orient toward paying attention to the present moment. Why should finding silence and being quiet be so hard? An older version of me would have quit.

I’m not sure when it happened. It felt as though after an immense amount of practice, I made it to the other side. I became able to “drop in” with more ease. It wasn’t an arrival or enlightenment though. All that effort to center my mind-body and be with internal landscape didn’t quiet life.

As opposed to my attention being pulled by every thought and sensation while in practice, I could now sit relatively undisturbed in the face of the cacophony of sounds and myriad of thoughts swirling in my mind. Quieting the mind was a myth. Shutting out the noise from the outside only amplified and made room for the clamor inside.

I discovered worlds—an ocean in the now. It became a little clearer why some teachers would suggest that the present was infinite. It was pregnant with possibilities.

To be honest, I was dismayed at the fact the grass wasn’t greener on the other side, and that I wouldn’t arrive at a state of awakening beyond suffering. Nevertheless, I received a gift. With my eyes open, I could hold both the voracious and mundane world. With my eyes closed, I could bare witness to the exploding, expanding, and dynamic life within.

It all felt like an ocean.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

I’m kind of terrified of artificial intelligence. However, not necessarily so much in terms of the potential existential threat that it might pose to our species or the ways that its development further deteriorates our environment.

I am more concerned about how its emergence often brings out our deepest fear of being irrelevant and our even deeper distrust for one another. It is not fear of AI that is overwhelming. It is the fear of AI in the hands of people who have the capacity to intentionally act against our interests and well-being that is most concerning.

In light of my concerns around AI, I’ve invited the community to join me in co-hosting a conference about it. Over the last two years, we have taught over 2,000 people how to use basic Ai tools and develop a more nuanced perspective on the matter.

This Sunday, February 8th, a small number of those people will present on how they use and think about artificial intelligence. It will be free and open to the public.

I am so proud and excited! I invite you to join us!

Free Conference RSVP

Free Conference RSVP

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

I can relate to most people who are struggling to find an anchor or a relatively solid orientation towards a world in flux. At a large scale, there is so much happening across the board. Even in our personal lives, it seems like another pipe bursts right after fixing a leak in the roof—metaphorically speaking.

For me, out of all the feelings and sensations that come up, grief has come to stay. I’ve had to treat it as a frequent traveler to my home and heart. Over the last five years, I’ve lost an elder in my family each year. My fecund maternal grandmother, Cristina Caceres. My august father Jose Agustin Acosta. My rambunctious and industrious uncles Aristides and Miguelito. My hip-swinging great aunt La Nena.

Have you ever felt space and time bend in the flash of a moment?

Last December, a few days before Christmas, my sister Ivelisse called me. Her voice was faint and cracked. She spoke but it was as though the words fainted on their way to my ears. She said it once and hung up. The pain of staying on the phone was too heavy. My dear Tia Angela was dyingx.

I was walking to my car. The cold streets, the zipping pedestrians and zooming cars seemed to collapse in my field of vision. I got dizzy. It felt like being sucked in by a Black hole. I went straight to the hospital to say goodbye. She passed away that evening.

If our culture wasn’t so death-averse, these last few years might have been smoother. The compound personal grief has broken me open and unable to hide or tuck away death and dying. After my father died from terminal brain cancer, I surrendered to grief. I had to.

While my personal life unfolded, the world felt like it was declining in a way. I watched from afar the polarizing politics, pervasive violence at home and abroad, alongside other crises. I was also grieving a kind of collective loss.

Now, when grief comes to visit—always unannounced—tears may swell and my heart definitely sinks. But instead of doing the old shuffle to find a distraction or push the feelings away, I set a table for it.

I have never felt so alive surrounded by so much death.

Even the overwhelming barrage of information and misinformation that I am bombarded with takes on a different texture when juxtaposed to my grief. I trust my grief. It is truth. It is my compass and anchor.

There is so much more I want to share here. The last thing that I’ll say is that on the other side of grief is a sober and grounded kind of joy. It feels like soft gratitude. I imagine it like terry cloth.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

In the fog of war, soldiers trench and trek witnessing the unspeakable. At times, enemy combatants deploy heinous strategies and tactics to pulverize any promise of victory.

We have heard tall and short tales of people recovering from serving in the front lines. Many a spouses have been jerked awake by a partner gripping their neck in the middle of the night, replaying hand-to-hand combat in the battled field. Post-traumatic stress disorder is all too real. We have extensive research and language to discuss it.

Studies on PTSD and the afterlife of military service have also provided us with a unique term that is appropriate to apply now to the American psyche—moral injury. One thing is to experience the sporadic spasms and flinches of tweaked nerves from the jolt of imaginary bullets, but it is something else to feel the gnawing—at times unending—spiritual torture from witnessing violence beyond ethical comprehension.

The Moral Injury Projects defines the term as follows:

“Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.”

While soldiers all too often return from war with incurable existential angst—byproducts of being overexposed to mayhem—we all are now subject to this as well. As our 24-hour news cycle and social media feeds flood and load our nervous systems with an array of images and videos from different conflict zones, there is a part of us that gets cornered and sequestered.

My experience witnessing what is happening in the Minnesota in the face of lethal and heavy-handed I.C.E. agents has led me to think about the notion of collective moral injury.

What happens when a whole nation is engulfed in either supporting, witnessing or directly experiencing the blunt force of law enforcement on its own citizens?

What happens to us when we, from a distance, see the spirits of Renee Good and Alex Pretti leave their bodies?

What happens to us when we see pervasive footage of feral federal officers snatch documented and undocumented citizens from their homes, schools, and places of worship?

On the one hand, we experience a multi-layered disorientation and, of course, a form of moral injury. We feel powerless with a transgressed moral compass from our inability to do something palpable about it. All of this can make us more apathetic, nihilistic—spiraling us into despair.

On the other hand, there is a part of moral injury that pertains to the perpetrators and their supporters. Whether it is publicly acknowledged or not, you cannot snatch bodies, break bones, and divide families without parts of your own spirit being snatched, broken and divided. There is a cumulative and compounding toll of this enforcement. I write this directly to I.C.E agents for I know somewhere in their hearts lies a soul bearing witness to their actions.

So what does this all mean? What do we do with this kind of metaphysical injury of sorts?

The reality is that there have been many communities that have had similar experiences. To name one, think of Indigenous communities who were removed from their land. We must think about the cultural, psychological and emotional effort to preserve a semblance of hope, dignity and humanity in the face of a society that aimed to “kill the Indian, save the man.” What did Indigenous people do to persevere? They got in circle. They nurtured community. They danced. They sang. They resisted. They rested. They dreamt. They preserved their languages and much more. There is so much more I want to share about this.

In times like this, community is a form of medicine. I’ll be holding space around this issue tomorrow, Wednesday, February 4th at 5pm ET. If you are looking for a space to make meaning and connect, join us.

RSVP to Community Grounding

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

This is a short conversation between him and I that provides the gist of his new book Team Intelligence, where he explores how leaders can unlock collective genius by designing the conditions for teams to think, learn, and perform together.

If you’d like to explore these ideas live, join us on January 21st at 12:00 PM ET for a webinar with Jon hosted by the Garrison Institute, where we’ll dive into the book, unpack real-world applications, and reflect together on what it means to cultivate team intelligence in these complex times.

Free RSVP

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

There is a knowing that comes from deep inside of us. It is sometimes hard to talk about because we either take it for granted or misuse it. We build and sustain cultures, civilizations, and ecosystems. Albeit imperfect, we do all of this together.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the emergence of artificial intelligence is shaping how we perceive and related to our own intelligence. I’ve also been intrigued about the limits of AI tools and workflows as they often isolate us more in front of our screens, leaving us prompting alone.

As impressive as some of these AI systems are, they come with major costs to our environment, our cognition and our sense of reality. However, like many other exponential technologies that have come before, artificial intelligence is applying evolutionary pressure on our species as whole. We are just in the early stages.

Aside from the tumultuous and polarized geopolitical moment we are undergoing that sometimes feels like a rite of passage or a walk through a mad house, something feels off about this AI thing. It’s not just the concentration of power in those building it. It’s not just the limited guardrails in place to deter major privacy and existential risks. It’s not just the disempowering fact that we cannot hit a stop button towards building superintelligence. For me, a major issue is incapacity to enable and allow communities to come to terms with AI on their own terms.

There might be some magic that can happen when we come together to think through all of the issues connected to this consequential technology and also play with it, set our own guardrails and conjure our own visions for how it serves us and future generations. There is a magic in what happens when we cultivate collective consciousness, a concentrated intergenerational generative social field so dense it changes systems and worlds.

I’m embarking on a journey of hosting what were are calling Collective Intelligence Labs to provide such a space. It is free to the community. We will talk, tinker and touch what happens we prompt together. I invite you join us next week for our first session on January 13th at 12pm ET.

RSVP for Lab

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send a Voice Message to Dr. Acosta

In 2001, the political scientist Robert Putnam wrote a piercing book, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.” Putnam argued that American social capital—the networks, norms, and trust that enabled communities to function—had dramatically declined since the mid-20th century. He identified the how this erosion affected civic life, democracy and overall well-being.

I have this gnawing feeling that we are “bowling alone” again, but this time it’s prompting. Everywhere you look there seems to be some kind of loneliness epidemic and mental health crisis that sharply contradicts the promise of technology to connect us and bring us closer through social media and online community.

The rise of ChatGPT psychosis and the growing use of AI chatbots as therapists and intimate partners should give us hints of where were are now and where we are headed. It feels as though we are prompting for intimacy and connection. Amidst a politically polarized nation and fragmented communities, more and more of us are turning to algorithms for the love, community and work.

The AI revolution has certainly consumed many corners of the business world. Governments as well are in global arms race. The push for efficiency, productivity and optimization has pushed many of us into all kinds of imposed and chosen up-skilling education. “Adapt or be left behind,” some say. This overwhelming rush has also left us “prompting alone” as we learn to use large language models and other AI systems to accomplish work tasks. We were already chronically online with the amount of time we spent on screens.

What does the future hold for us if we continue to become over-reliant on digital social networks and interfacing with artificial intelligence for our livelihood and intimacy?

Photo by Ezra Jeffrey-Comeau on Unsplash

I am unclear what the answer to all of this is, but I am certain of two things. We have to set the screens aside for a bit and connect with each other. We have have to find more communal ways to work with artificial intelligence.

To combat the loneliness and isolation many of us feel, we have to figure out how to participate in intentional communities that can reinvigorate our relationship to each other, to culture, and to life itself. This can be done online, if necessary.

In terms of work, I see many colleagues who spend their days playing hopscotch between their emails and ChatGPT—ending their days without one interaction with an actual human. If the rate of technological acceleration continues, AI will consume more of our time and box us in further in front of our screens. This is where I invite us to think about ways we might be able to start “prompting together.” In what ways could AI use become less isolating?

I am not sure how this looks like yet, but there is a whole movement of “vibe coding” that sometime integrate a community component. The classic coding hackathons might have something to teach us about how we come together to leverage technology.

Photo by Jonas Denil on Unsplash

We need an all out revival and reinvigoration of our approach to our own development amidst all this technological change. It might serve us to return to Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” book for insights. He closes his text suggesting that we can revive our social and community connections by building new civic institutions, encouraging workplace democracy, experiment with community-based problem solving, educate people more about civic responsibility, and ensure that technology is used as a tool to connect.

What questions come to mind for you as you consider this?

How are you making sense of all of this?

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

What does it mean to be in living inquiry?

I’ve read more books than I can count. I’ve been exposed to all kinds of methodologies, especially during my doctoral education. Quantitative inquiry. Qualitative inquiry. Appreciative inquiry. Structured inquiry. Inquiry-as-Stance. All of these thinking and research paradigms onto themselves.

But this only made me top-heavy. A kind of book-smart that often fumbled with common sense. This kind of way of being with the world may enable some of us to process information efficiently and make insightful analyzes, but does it enable us to cultivate a deep embodied wisdom?

Ever since I left the university system, I’ve been in recovery from the drunken stupor that comes with too much peer-reviewed knowledge. It felt like a process of decolonization and un-domestication—a return to my body.

The work I do in public through the Garrison Institute, Acosta Institute and the consulting I do for clients is all an excuse—a front to disguise a very personal journey. Fundamentally, I love to learn. But I have suffered from an acute sense of denial and disconnection from my body. I think it’s a byproduct of growing up in poverty and disassociation becoming the key survival skill.

This is why I’ve used my public work to bring me closer to myself and to the topics that make my soul tremble, turn and dance ecstatically. While exploring healing-centered education is the core of the inquiry that I’ve been in, it really is more of a soft foundation from which to perch and see. From capacity-building, play, and slow work to collective flourishing, technology and business, I’ve been in a dynamic inquiry—touching the fields and topics that have called me.

One habit and practice that has emerged from this living inquiry is hosting large virtual and in-person conferences. Each conference theme is both my team and I’s attempt to meet the needs of the community and signal the direction of our inquiry. Last year, we explored Capacity-Building in Times of Change for our International Healing-Centered Education Conference.

This year, the theme is Discernment & Fortitude in Times of Disruption. As much as this title is fitting for this moment that we are all going through, it really is another stepping stone for me to continue my living inquiry. I crave to learn more about discernment and fortitude myself. If you could only see what I’ve seen and feel what I have felt in this body of the last few years, you would understand this urge to know grace. Here, I am unapologetically selfish. The theme hits close to home.

At the same time, I know and my team knows that this topics is exactly what we need to be exploring together. It is a true convergence of my needs and the needs of the community. It also captures the profound sense of joy, pleasure and play that is involved in this work. Although the times are hard and the work is tough, my spirit is smiling at the promise of this endeavor.

Explore the Conference

This will be the last large virtual event that we host. I figured we should close 2025 out with a bang, especially since the year has felt like a kick to the chest.

Maybe this is our way to kick back?

I invite you to join us if the topic resonates with you. Beyond this, I would love to ask you the following questions:

What does your living inquiry look like and feel like?

Does it feel like your in living inquiry permeates all domains of your life? Or only some?

What insights are you craving for?

What experiments can you set for yourself to expand this inquiry?

How can this kind of inquiry deepen your own embodied wisdom?

Just some questions for you to ponder.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

Let me tell you a story.

I was in my second year of my doctorate program in 2016. I was serving as a Board Member for the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. My mentor Mirabai Bush and legendary meditation teacher took me under wings. She invited me to join the Board and gave me direct insight into the history of mindfulness in the U.S.A. That transmission was precious.

She had been one of the pioneers who traveled East during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s to find an alternative way to live. She returned transformed. Her forthcoming memoir is a juicy text. Many people like her became the trailblazers who shaped American mindfulness over the last fifty years.

Caveat—this history is coming from my subjective experience. There is so much more that will be missing here.

It was a slow yet watershed moment. In 1992, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn was interviewed on the Oprah Show for the first time and exposed millions of Americans to mindfulness. His groundbreaking work on mindfulness-based stress-reduction is still one the most powerful modalities in the cannon.

By the 2000’s and early 2010’s, mindfulness was everywhere. There were so many forms of practice—transcendental, zen, Vipassana and many others. Even, the military and Navy SEALs caught on and were teaching the practice to help soldiers focus and increase their effectiveness on the battlefield. Hundreds of thousands of American public schools were integrating mindfulness programs throughout the country. It was a movement.

There was an awkward tension with all of this momentum though. With the evolution of social media and the diffusion of personal cameras via cellphones, our society experienced a wave public deaths at the hands of law enforcement. From Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin to Sandra Bland and George Floyd, our hearts were broken open by the continuing legacy of bias and racism. The Black Lives Matter movement captured the rage of the moment to demand accountability.

At the same time, over two decade of activism and scholarship in the field of social justice educated a whole swath of American society about an array of terms that made the tentacles of systemic oppression more visible when it came to issues of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. This was pre-Woke era.

Here lies the rub. I was on the Board of CMIND steering that conference planning committee with Dr. Linda Slakey. I was the youngest person in the group. Planning for this conference revealed the internal and external tensions of the mindfulness and contemplative moment so vividly.

The classic expression was “mindfulness beyond the cushion,” which signaled the importance of taking all that accumulated wellness and peace garnered through practice to act upon the world in a transformative way. There was a limit to practice if all it could do for us was reduce stress. The field began to see me more scholars and practitioners make this connection and integrate mindfulness with discussions about social justice. That conference we helped to put together at CMIND had a telling title—Radicalizing Contemplative Education: Compassion, Intersectionality and Justice in Challenging

You could feel the grumbling and sometimes thunderous clamor across discussions about the limits of mindfulness and the importance of action. See the text below. They were all published around the same time—early to mid 2010’s. They all represent the temper of the times—mindfulness and contemplative practices had to grow up to transform the systems that were causing so much suffering.

By now, you get the point. The field experienced an inflection point then. Extraordinary work came out of this tectonic shift. But what happened after?

A whole book is needed to explain this. I’ll just say that the field is experiencing another major moment right now as I write this. With all of the crises before us—climate change, political polarization, teen depression, geo-political wars, economic inequality, gender inequity and more—the promise of mindfulness seems to have fallen short.

It seems as though those who have stood to benefit most have been the corporations and entrepreneurially-savvy changemakers who leveraged the wellness industry’s boom to line their pockets. No shade being thrown here. It is what it is. We are living in a capitalist political economy. I myself have gotten paid to teach mindfulness. I didn’t reject the check.

However, I am committed to leaning into the cracks and tensions within the field. Here I am again working on a conference at the Garrison Institute that aims to touch the sore spots in this work. This weekend—Nov 7th to 9th— we will be hosting Contemplative Wisdom, Transformative Action, a virtual conference with luminaries in the field. Working with Fellows from GI, we hope to ask tough questions, facilitate restorative practices and make sense of where the field is at this moment. Below are some of the sessions from the program. We invite you to join us.

Learn more about the Conference

All in all, I am grateful to be in a position to mentor the next generation of scholars and changemakers in this field. The conference is co-hosted with GI Fellows under my guidance. I also grateful to have the trust of many of the scholars who are speaking. They are donating their time for us to raise funds for the Garrison Institute Fellowship Program.

May this work continue to blossom.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

What calls you?

Is there a faint or clear whisper from a future you that pokes and prods?

Is there a magnetic pull towards a path you’ve yet to walk on?

I’ve come to understand that life is waltzing with surrender.

I remember when none of this was here. No Institute, no clients, no career momentum, no speaking, no consulting nor the ways my personal life has broken open with grief and change.

All there was was me clutching for dear life for what felt safe, familiar and tamed. I can’t name the exact moment(s) that led to building the fierceness to meet life on different terms, but surrendering was a fundamental part of it.

What is the pedagogy of surrender?

Is there an art and science to it?

I wonder what FMRI machines looking into the neurochemistry of our brains would reveal of our moments of letting go and moving with complete abandon of our greatest fears.

We recently welcome a second cohort of Acosta Institute Fellows and this sent me spiraling and reflecting.

Why are people gravitating towards our vision? I refuse to take this for granted.

This reminded me of the early days during my doctorate. There was this unshakeable, almost gnawing, pull towards unchartered territory for myself and my field.

Figuratively, my knees buckled. It is as though I’ve been on my knees, surrendered to some larger calling ever since.

It was as though it would take more effort to resist than to fall.

I am just so curious about what needs to happen in our lives to fall over, to collapse into change.

I’m imagining this like a dance. At moments you lead grasping surrender’s hand while griping her waist—thinking your in control. Then she sets the pace and you lose any sense of direction.

Trusting her direction is all there is. Enjoy the dance.

If you are going through a transition or have something that constantly calls for your soul’s attention, I send you love.

And maybe some advice after a couple decades of dancing myself….

Close your eyes. Breathe. Pray. Dare. Act. Reflect. Repeat

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Message

Photo by Tima Bogun on Unsplash

I wrote this in my head four years ago. It has taken me long to work it out of me.

I remember feeling the encroaching isolation that came with being at home during the early days of the global pandemic. My son would soon be born. Shelter-in-place felt like cabin fever city-wide.

That first year was odd because it felt like we were waiting to catch COVID, especially if you hadn’t already. One by one, members of my family and community became bed-ridden by the virus. Some transitioned.

The times were heavy. I spent the bulk of my energy holding the anticipation and anxiety of becoming a father with the stress of upholding habits/protocols to keep COVID out of our house, out of our bodies.

Hybrid work was in full swing. Life-on-Zoom was a thing. I was in front of screens for most of my days. Online, I noticed the enormous attention many people were putting into leveraging the internet for entrepreneurship and economic mobility. Going viral was strategy.

The idea of being seen by millions could result in financial reward, a new life. There was a collective urge for and towards virality—both in consumption of content and destination. I found the reality of a virus physically spreading across the globe and the deep desires of folks to go viral online as a curious phenomenon.

This random thought sparked a whole inquiry for me about the state of our digital lives. We were packed liked sardines online. Our work, love and live becoming more and more digital.

Here are some of the questions that I started asking myself:

What happens to us online when we are in isolation offline?

What happens when the the pressure to survive in a capitalist economy meets our desires to be seen, valued and resourced?

What does the urge and interest to go viral reveal about the state of our society and the structure of the human condition?

How does work from home blur the lines between work and life?

Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash

I’ve been holding these questions as I think hard about what is means run a consulting business that does in-person and online research and teaching. To promote the work, I have to play the game of sharing it online. This feels a little icky sometimes. I don’t enjoy it. I see a weird threshold and awkward fine line that gets crossed while doing this.

As we share about our work online, it feels as though we are exposing ourselves out in the digital-open. As I share about my work, I am also putting myself on the line. It’s not just the business that gets exposed to the elements, but my whole self.

Things get more confusing for me. At this point of the evolution of the internet and social media, it is as if we are all walking and talking brands. The growth of influencer and founder-led marketing has opened up a whole new world. Your life can be your brand, your personality is your business.

This personal branding discourse has been unfolding for some time now. I have an allergic reaction to it. I’ve seen so many close colleagues who do this loss a grip on what is public and what is private. I can’t imagine managing this, let alone going viral.

Nevertheless, the rat race is more virtual now than ever before. The unspoken motto should be “share or die.” There is a potent tension here. While people are being laid off and hiring slows down, more of us have to pound the pavement and fend for ourselves. The only way to survive is to get our message out and do it voraciously. The very conditions before us force us to bend the knee, quietly desiring the possibility of going viral.

Photo from Unsplash

I am still holding all of this. There is so much more to share. I hope to return to this inquiry in future pieces. Thank you for reading and listening to me.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

Adulting was already hard enough. Now, we need to learn how to navigate a world with growing complexity and crises. As much as I love the idea that our crises can become our greatest opportunities, it is hard to think optimistically with a broken heart.

I tried. I even embarked on an extraordinary partnership called the PolyOpportunity with the House of Beautiful Business, which turned the polycrisis on its head. It was an incredible global initiative to reframe this moment of interlocking wicked problems.

I noticed that all this effort was less about holding on to hope and positivity, rather about building the capacity to hold more and be more. This is why my team and I have been transfixed by the concept capacity-building. We focused our international conference last year on this. We then produced seventeen episodes for a Capacity-Building Show. We’re in the process of publishing to two books about it.

Capacity-Building Show

Throughout our work with clients, fellows and the community, we’ve developed some unique ways to increase people’s capacity to be with all that is emerging now. From Drisana’s ability to walk people through holding paradox to Maria’s sensitivity when it comes to inviting us back into our bodies, we’re excited to continue to support folks. I also developed a unique exercise called the Matrix of Needs that allows you to deeply reflect on your current met and unmet needs across several dimensions.

We are launching out Capacity-Building Certificate program tomorrow, October 7th. We are providing this first session free to the public. Free free to join us.

Complimentary Capacity-Building Session

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

I still don’t fully understand quantum physics. The idea that a whole other set of rules apply at the atomic level befuddles me. I do desire a quantum leap though. I crave a warp-speed shift to a time in the future when we figure out, at least, how to live in equilibrium with nature.

Is this too much to ask?

I have been a ferocious reader for some time now. All of my work comes out of an incessant reading of the world, as Paolo Freire would say. My early obsession with education led to my focus on building a business. My focus on business and attuning to history led to me to paying close attention to technology. Recently, this thrust has landed in the middle of conversations with and about the future.

I say “conversations with the future” on purpose. As much as we talk about the future as though it a this temporally distant stranger, it is here now with us too. This is why I’ve gravitated towards futurists and future foresight scholars over the last year. I am fascinated by how people, not necessarily predict, but create conditions to understand the emerging future. I’m also curious of the ways indigenous people relate to time in a way that collapses past-present-future, creating an embodied future foresight praxis! Read that again.

Image by Paper Monday

Art has been a key medium for me to sometimes play with ideas that I am learning about or working with. As I prepared for our Healing-Centered Futures Summit, I commissioned another art piece that would explore what my great-great-great grandson might look like. I was formally crafting the summit agenda and doing the serious work of weaving together an experience that would explore healing-centered futures in the context of education, business and technology.

Click Play:

What Samar Younes produced left me speechless? I am still processing. Through her methodology called Quantum Craft, collaborating with artificial intelligence Samar created a ritual to produce the portrait of my descendant. I don’t have the worlds to truly articulate what she did. Below is a excerpt of voice message she sent me to describe the piece.

From Samar Younes

As far as the portrait is concerned, I created it through what I call material digital entanglement. It is a kind of Quantum Craft, which is one of my methods. In this approach, computational collaboration (such as generative AI) isn’t generating the aesthetic surface; instead, it’s sensing cultural patterns. In this specific case, I was working through what I call Neuroaesthetic Intelligence.

You’ll notice the material is copper. The threading isn’t decorative; I chose copper because it conducts electrically, energetically, and culturally. Across civilizations for thousands of years, copper has been used as a healing technology—it’s both ancestral and, at the same time, a very future-oriented material. You can see it manifesting throughout the parts of what you’re wearing in the portrait.

I was working with copper not only for its conductive properties, but also metaphorically. I wanted to reference the healing practice you’ve embodied and championed—through your education and contemplative work. The material intelligence mirrors your cultural work. This textile structure, with its layering, references an ancestral adorntment system—it’s never “just fashion.” I call this identity technology.

It’s also a kind of protection protocol or ceremonial interface, where I’m excavating your future ancestor portrait. The question I was asking myself, based on what I’ve read about you and what you’ve shared with me, was: What would a first-generation Dominican American healer would be wearing in the future when moving between worlds? What kind of intelligence holds that kaleidoscopic selfhood without forcing you to choose one culture or territory?

This connects to the Silk Road Logic I often speak about when applying identity—how you carry the Dominican Republic’s earth memory, the African diaspora’s resilience, the skills you gained navigating American institutions, and contemplative wisdom tradition simultaneously. This portrait tries to hold that complexity without synthesis, because my aim in much of my work is to create more complexity in a world where monoculture reigns supreme.

I also wanted to evoke a sense of warrior energy. Healing work, for me, is a kind of warfare against systems designed for extraction, so there’s a ceremonial quality here—transformation as a type of virtual technology. My company, Samaritual, exists to prototype the future with identity, technology, and cultural memory—all collaborating, not competing, reflecting onto one another.

I wanted you to read this in her voice. Please join me in applauding her work and vision. In these times of turbulence, this is the kind of visionaries we need to think outside of the box. I can’t wait to hear her speak at our summit.

This Friday, October 3rd, we will kick-off our two-day summit. Our team at the Acosta Institute will gather a range of futurists, educators and business leaders to explore unique ways to think about our collective future.

Healing-Centered Futures Summit

I invite you to join us. This is sacred work to me. It is a true honor to be able to play in public like this.

Our paid subscribers will receive a complimentary ticket to the summit.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message

I imagined what the great-great-great granddaughter of my colleague Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz might look like.

Yolanda has been committed to healing and transforming her communities for over two-decades as a researcher and tenured professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. I worked with artist and futurist, Samar Younes, who created a ritual with information on Yolanda’s work and collaborated with artificial intelligence to produce the compelling image above. I use the image in a presentation titled Superintelligence for What? Artificial Intelligence in a Post-Truth World. I’ll presenting this work again this weekend. Leaning on Samar, I commissioned other similar images for our Healing-Centered Futures Summit Oct. 3rd-4th—a gathering to explore healing-centered education, business and technology.

This summer, I went down the rabbit hole studying future foresight and felt compelled to explore what would healing-centered future foresight methods look like. Samar’s work my mind with the ways she leverages AI to create countercultural understandings of emerging technologies.

Samar describes her practice as a hybrid, transdisciplinary atelier where ancestral wisdom, computational possibility, and cultural memory collide—not to simply use tools, but to “hack the systems that shape creativity” via her Quantum Craft™ methodology. She positions AI not as a neutral instrument but as a cultural collaborator, seeking to dismantle reductive binaries and circumvent algorithmic biases by embedding ethno-aesthetic, speculative, and radical imagination protocols. Her work functions as both cognitive provocation and cultural ritual, expanding “environments into vessels for memory and speculation” and inviting audiences to co-create futures where multiple intelligences, identities, and temporalities merge.

Photo by Paper Monday

I invited Samar to be a speaker for our Summit as well. She and over a dozen other incredible scholars, artists and technologists will be sharing their visions and methods for thinking through this moment of accelerated technological change from more healing-centered perspectives. The playful and simple idea of imagining Yolanda’s descendants through art has opened a new inquiry for me around how we envision the future and how we relate to the present in order to bring about a future worth living into.

In a moment when there is so much to be concerned about, it is key that we come together to practice a sense of hope or a different kind of communal future foresight. I invite you to join us this weekend. Below are the main talks and presentations.

Healing-Centered Futures Summit Presentations

• Superintelligence for What? — Dr. Angel Acosta

• Quantum Methodological Leaps & Transcultural Universes — Samar Younes

• Cultural Geography & Our Collective Liberation — Musa Murchison

• Symbiotic Creativity & the Post-Industrial Economy — Vincent Hunt

• Community Adaptation & Resilience in the Face of Exponential Technologies — Rose Genele

• Building Liberatory Technologies — Dr. Sará King & Kierstin Gray

• Sensuous Knowledge in Times of Enclosure — Minna Salami & Angel Acosta

• Healing-Centered Education in Times of Overwhelm — Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Arlené Casimir & Dr. Justis Lopez

• Business as Ceremony — Clarinda Tivoli

• Fortitude and Discernment in Times of Change — Maria Tan & Drisana McDaniel

Healing-Centered Futures Summit

I am beyond grateful to do this work. To assemble such a cast of luminaries is a true gift.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts or questions. I listen to every message.

Our paid subscribers will receive a complimentary ticket to the summit.

Send Dr. Acosta a Voice Message