The Intentional Society Podcast: Liminal Stories

Carol Xu spent the first thirty years of her life on a clear trajectory: top schools, a PhD at Berkeley, a future in academia studying the sociology of organizations. Then, somewhere inside a dissertation she couldn't finish, something broke.

What followed was years of anxiety, meditation, and a slow dismantling of the identity she'd built her whole life around. She left academia. She stopped pretending the two halves of her life, the professional and the contemplative, weren't in conflict. And in that emptying, something new began to take shape.

In this conversation, Carol talks about what it feels like to follow intuition when the rational mind can't justify it, what she learned about depression that changed how she understood her own mind, and why she thinks the way most of us relate to money and livelihood is quietly draining the life out of our communities. We also get into the projects she's building now - experiments in what it looks like to do heart-centered work without burning out or going broke.

A conversation about the cost of the path you were handed and what becomes possible when you finally set it down.

Carol's projects:

• Relational Dojo - a community for intentional, relational practices such as Bohm Dialogue or T-group. All practices are free of charge to people across the globe. 
• Coherence Weaving - facilitating diverse stakeholders in a system (team, org, community, network, or ecosystem) to amplify collective coherence, purpose, and wise action. We also help organizations build their coherence weaving capacities through workshops and retreats.
• Reclaim Work  - reimagining and reclaiming what human work can be in the face of AI and  extractive economic models.
• Living Systems Research Initiative - non-profit project integrating different schools of thought (permaculture, warm data, ecological studies, indigenous wisdom) on living systems and directly applying the insights to designing and developing social systems. 
• Attuning To Aliveness - in person gatherings at Berkeley, California practicing attuning to aliveness as individuals and collectives. We integrate different ways of knowing and modalities into a monthly series. 

Jason Sears spent twenty years working in nonprofits before realizing he was treating symptoms rather than causes. The cause, as he saw it: we've lost the infrastructure that used to hold communities together — the regular gatherings, the shared rituals, the simple fact of knowing your neighbors.

So he founded VillageCo, left his salary behind, and started building something new: a civic club model designed for an era of disconnection. Along the way he discovered Open Space Technology, learned to run an organization on consent rather than authority, and found out what happens when you slow everything down on purpose.

This conversation covers the full arc — from a Boys and Girls Club mentor who told him the building could burn down and it wouldn't matter, to why he now thinks relationships might be the most reliable source of security any of us have.