Welcome to the

Metta Tropical Fellowship

Cultivating Wisdom for a Time Between Worlds

What is this moment in history asking of your life?

A ten-month initiatory journey for a generation called to take responsibility
for who we must become at a time of planetary crisis.

February — December 2027 Begin Application →

The Fellowship

A new kind of transformative journey for a time of planetary crisis

The Metta Tropical Fellowship is a ten-month journey, rooted in Brazil, emerging from the understanding that we are living through the unraveling of a world whose promises are reaching their limits, in which many of our attempts to respond to our challenges continue to reproduce the very logics of separation, extraction, and optimization that brought us here. The crises of our time cannot be met through better ideas, strategies, or solutions alone. They ask for a deeper transformation in how we perceive reality, relate to ourselves and one another, encounter the living world and the sacred, and participate in life.

Rather than a traditional leadership program, the Fellowship is a living process of formation weaving together spiritual training, relational practice, complexity theory, systems change, civilizational inquiry, and land-based wisdom—bringing into relationship ways of knowing, practices, and lineages rooted across the Global South and Global North that rarely meet within the same educational space.

We are calling together Brazilian young adults aged 18–29 who feel the pain of the world in their bones and long to offer their lives meaningfully in response—post-activist leaders, artists, educators, organizers, change-makers, thinkers, and spiritual practitioners, willing to undergo the kind of transformation needed to wisely navigate and respond to these collapsing times.

At its heart, the Fellowship is an attempt to create the kinds of educational and communal spaces this moment demands: sanctuaries of transformation where we can live inside the questions that matter most for this time, and undergo the kind of shape-shift through which what we come to know begins to reshape how we live, what we value, how we relate, what we take responsibility for, and what we ultimately offer our lives to.

The Invitation

Suspending the sky means broadening our horizon—not a prospective horizon, but an existential one. It means enriching our subjectivities, which are precisely the material that the times we live in seek to consume.
— Ailton Krenak

In times between worlds—when the predominant structures and stories of a civilization begin to decay before new ones have been built—certain individuals find themselves living without a world. Neither fully belonging to the old nor yet inhabiting what comes next. They are living in the liminal space between collapse and emergence, between what is dying and what has not yet been born.

You may already know what this feels like.

To have lost faith in the underlying logic of the current system while still being deeply dependent on it. To feel that some of the paths you inherited can no longer hold the questions living inside you. To care deeply about the crises of our time while struggling to know how to respond without reproducing the same patterns.

There is something profoundly disorienting and overwhelming about this experience. But there may also be an invitation within it. When the old maps no longer lead where we need to go, and there is no instruction manual for crossing the threshold. It is the time for those living in this liminal space to learn how to cultivate the capacities our existing institutions rarely know how to develop, and experiment together with ways of living, relating, and responding from which radically different futures might emerge.

People gathering during a Metta Tropical experience

This is why we understand this moment as a potential civilizational rite of passage—one that asks us to question who we are becoming, what we aspire toward, which desires are shaping our lives, what we are willing to let go of and compost, and what may need to change if our lives are to serve the flourishing of all living beings.

Thresholds of this depth are difficult to cross alone, they need relationships strong enough to hold uncertainty. Practices that help us remain present when old identities and assumptions begin to loosen. Friends and mentors who can challenge and care for us. Places where grief and longing can be taken seriously, and where we can experiment with other possibilities of life aligned to what we know to be true.

The Metta Tropical Fellowship is our attempt to create such a place.

The Fellowship Overview

The Path

Over the ten months, we will move through five interconnected Streams of Transformation—The Sacred, Soul, Systems, Soil, and Society. You can see them as our "curriculum", but rather than engaging with them as subjects we need to master, we understand them as dimensions of life we are learning to perceive more deeply, relate with more skillfully, and be transformed by what they reveal to us.

The Path of Transformation

The Sacred

Remembering What Ultimately Matters

What is intrinsically valuable? What makes a life meaningful? What is worthy of our devotion? What is the true nature of the reality we participate in? Is this even knowable? How do we come to know it?

We begin here because every path of transformation is oriented by what we ultimately value. We approach the sacred not as a realm above or outside ordinary life, but as a depth dimension of life itself—one that becomes available through particular qualities of attention, perception, and participation that modernity has often taught us to close ourselves off from. Rather than prescribing a single metaphysical belief, we engage with multiple wisdom traditions and lineages that can help reawaken our capacity to encounter this dimension of life more wholeheartedly.

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To encounter the sacred is to experience the world as radically interdependent, intrinsically valuable, alive with meaning, and worthy of reverence. The Sacred is therefore not simply one stream among others. It is the orienting horizon within which the other streams acquire meaning and significance, continually returning us to the question of what our lives and transformation are ultimately in service of.

Some of the themes we will explore

01 ·The Nature of Reality & the Sacred

Exploring different ontological and metaphysical understandings of reality, existence, consciousness, and the sacred.

02 ·Interbeing & the Illusion of Separation

Exploring the movement from separateness toward a lived realization of interdependence and our belonging within the whole.

03 ·Disenchantment & the Recovery of the Sacred

Exploring how our ways of perceiving reality shape our relationships with life, and what it means to recover a more soulful and reverential way of seeing.

04 ·Intrinsic Value & the Eyes of Perception

Cultivating value perception while exploring how the Eyes of Mind, Heart, Spirit, and Value disclose different dimensions of reality.

05 ·Contemplative & Spiritual Practice

Exploring practices and capacities that deepen our sensitivity to, encounter with, and participation in the sacred.

06 ·Wisdom, Love & Meaning

Exploring how love opens us to deeper dimensions of reality, how wisdom guides our participation in life, and what makes a life truly meaningful.

Soul

Remembering Who We Are

What is my true nature? What does it mean to meet ourselves and one another more truthfully? How might we recover our capacity to sense the world with soul? How can relationships become a doorway into the sacred?

This stream explores the emotional, psychological, relational, embodied, and spiritual work of becoming more whole. We inquire into our true nature, encounter the conditioning and protective patterns that shape us, tend to our wounds, discern the desires moving through us, and open space for the fullness of our being to come alive.

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Grounded in the sacred, we turn toward the inner and relational dimensions of transformation, recognizing that who we become is inseparable from how we meet ourselves, relate to others, and participate in the world. Without this dimension of formation, our attempts to transform the world can unintentionally reproduce the very patterns of separation, projection, and domination we seek to change.

Some of the themes we will explore

01 ·True Nature & the Human Self

Exploring who we are beneath our conditioning, how our identities are constructed, and the relationship between our deeper nature and the many parts of ourselves.

02 ·Parts Work & Ego Development

Encountering the protective patterns, wounds, and inner conflicts that shape our lives, and cultivating the compassion needed to move toward greater wholeness.

03 ·Embodiment, Emotion & Desire

Deepening our capacity to inhabit our bodies, meet our emotional experience, and clarify the desires and unconscious forces shaping our choices.

04 ·Relational Depth & Intimacy

Exploring how attunement, loving-presence, authentic expression, and genuine contact with another can make relationships a ground for transformation.

05 ·Grief, Sorrow & Ritual

Exploring grief as a doorway into deeper relationship with life, alongside rituals and the processes through which we grow into mature adulthood.

06 ·Soul, Eros & Vocation

Exploring our deepest longings, our aliveness, what makes our lives unique, and how our gifts might find meaningful expression in service of the whole.

Systems

Remembering Where We Are

What does it mean to be in a time between worlds? What are the underlying causes of the metacrisis? How does change happen? How do systems learn and collapse? How deeply have the logics of modernity colonized our minds, desires, and imagination?

With a deeper sense of who we are, we turn toward the complexity of the systems we participate in. This stream cultivates the capacity to perceive patterns beneath events, trace the historical and structural roots of the metacrisis, and understand the cultural, political, technological, economic, and ecological forces shaping the world around us.

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We investigate how dominant worldviews, colonial histories, incentive structures, institutions, and economic systems have shaped not only society, but also our desires, identities, relationships, and imagination. We examine how the logics of the systems we inhabit—mechanistic, linear, transactional, and extractive—can become embedded within us, shaping how we perceive, relate, and act.

The more clearly we can perceive the patterns and dynamics generating our crises, within and outside ourselves, the greater our capacity to respond at the depth from which they are being produced.

Some of the themes we will explore

01 ·The Metacrisis & Our Civilizational Predicament

Investigating the roots of our crises, from rivalrous dynamics and systemic externalities to disenchantment and spiritual crisis.

02 ·Systems Thinking & Complexity

Exploring interdependence, feedback loops, emergence, nonlinear change, and the unintended consequences of our interventions.

03 ·Modernity & Colonialism

Examining modernity's historical roots, its assumptions about reality and progress, and the colonial logics shaping our institutions, desires, and imagination.

04 ·Economy, Incentives & Planetary Limits

Exploring how economic systems and institutional incentives drive extraction and growth on a finite planet.

05 ·Technology, AI & Energy

Investigating exponential technologies, AI risks, energy, and the growing consequences of humanity's technological power.

06 ·Collapse & Civilizational Transition

Exploring the consequences of systemic breakdown and what it might take to move toward a third attractor.

Soil

Remembering Our Place in the Web of Life

What does the more-than-human world know that we have forgotten? How might we organize life through reciprocity rather than ownership? What would it mean to encounter another world without colonizing it? What changes when a river becomes a relative?

Having explored the systems of the human world, we return to the larger living world to which we have always belonged. This stream tends our relationship with land, place, ancestry, and the more-than-human world. It explores what becomes possible when Earth is no longer encountered primarily as a resource, but as kin, teacher, community, and living participant in our becoming.

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This stream moves beyond abstraction and intellectual study, through encounters with Indigenous, Quilombola, and other territorial communities in Brazil and Latin America, we explore ways of life grounded in reciprocity, ancestry, autonomy, and belonging.

These encounters invite us to question our inherited assumptions about land, progress, and development—and open ourselves to ways of seeing, knowing, and living that might transform our relationship with the Earth.

Some of the themes we will explore

01 ·Ecological Belonging & More-Than-Human Kinship

Exploring our place within the web of life and what changes when we encounter other beings as kin rather than resources.

02 ·Territory, Ancestry & Memory

Exploring how land, ancestry, and collective memory shape identity, belonging, and ways of life.

03 ·Indigenous & Quilombola Ways of Knowing

Encountering diverse cosmologies, philosophies, and practices that offer different ways of understanding and relating to life.

04 ·Land, Dispossession & Autonomy

Investigating struggles over land and territory, and how communities sustain their ways of life in the face of dispossession.

05 ·Agroecology & Regeneration

Exploring practices of care, cultivation, and regeneration that nurture reciprocal relationships between human communities and the Earth.

06 ·Colonialism, Decolonization & Countercolonialism

Exploring how colonial logics shape our relationships with land, knowledge, and all aspects of life itself.

Society

Remembering How to Respond to This Moment

What does this moment ask of us—together? What is uniquely ours to offer? What is our responsibility at this time? How have people responded to moments of historical rupture? How do movements emerge, grow, and reshape society?

This stream brings us into direct contact with people, communities, movements, and initiatives at the living edge of cultural and societal renewal—those experimenting with how to organize their lives and work in response to the metacrisis. We encounter people and communities responding to historical rupture through organizing, peacebuilding, cultural renewal, and institution-building. Their experiences invite us to discern where our own gifts, responsibilities, and commitments might belong.

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Having explored what is sacred, deepened our relationship with ourselves and one another, investigated the systems shaping our world, and remembered our belonging within the living Earth, we ask:

How might we live in response?

This is where wisdom, power, and love learn to walk together toward the futures we long to bring into being.

Some of the themes we will explore

01 ·Historical Movements & Social Transformation

Exploring how people and movements have responded to historical crises, challenged existing systems, and contributed to societal change.

02 ·Community Organizing & Movement-Building

Understanding how communities mobilize, build collective power, sustain commitment, and organize for lasting change.

03 ·Power, Leadership & Responsibility

Exploring the ethical exercise of power, leadership as service to all life, and the responsibilities of living at a time of collapse.

04 ·Post-Capitalist Philanthropy & Resource Stewardship

Exploring how money, philanthropy, and other forms of wealth can be mobilized and stewarded in service of life-affirming futures.

05 ·Cultural Renewal & Institution-Building

Exploring how new narratives, practices, communities, and institutions have been embodying life-affirming alternatives.

06 ·Vocation, Commitment & Sacred Responsibility

Discerning how we are called to serve life at this moment, and what it would take to orient our lives more fully toward that calling.

The capacities most needed at this time are also existential and relational. These are not supplements to systems work. They may be conditions for systems work not to become another elegant technology of control.
— Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

The Pedagogy

Knowing something is not the same as being transformed by what we know.

The Five Streams describe the dimensions of life we will engage with. Our pedagogy asks a different question: How must we engage with them for what we come to know to actually transform how we live?

The Pedagogy of Transformation

Our civilization has developed extraordinary intellectual understanding of ecological breakdown, technological risk, systemic incentives, and the metacrisis, while continuing to organize our lives around many of the same desires, habits, relationships, and definitions of success that reproduce them.

Education in a time of metacrisis must therefore help bridge a deeper knowing–becoming–doing gap: allowing what we encounter to move beyond ideas we understand and begin reshaping how we perceive, relate, choose, work, consume, and participate in the world.

We call our approach Relational Ontological Pedagogy: an education that seeks to refine how we perceive reality, deepen how we participate in what we perceive, cultivate our capacity to sense and discern together, and allow what we encounter to reshape who we become and how we live.

Our pedagogy is grounded in four main movements:

Ontological

Refine Perception

What kind of world becomes visible through the way we learn to perceive?

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We seek to cultivate forms of perception, ways of looking at the world, that make us more sensitive to fundamental dimensions of reality which modernity has often dismissed: interdependence, intrinsic value, suffering, eros, meaning, sacredness, beauty, and the transcendental worth of a life.

Relational

Deepen Participation

How deeply can we enter into relationship with what we perceive?

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As our perception opens up, we practice entering into deeper relationship with what we encounter—not only through abstraction, but through the stories we inhabit, the feelings and sensations we experience, the intimacy of relationship, the symbols of our imagination, the intelligence of the collective field, and the depths of contemplative and transpersonal experience. Each opens a different way of relating to life itself.

Collective

Sense From the Whole

What becomes possible when knowing is no longer located only within the individual?

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As trust, attention, and relational coherence deepen, the locus from which we perceive can begin to widen. We practice sensing not only from ourselves or one another, but the larger collective field of relationships we are part of—learning to access forms of intelligence and wisdom that no individual may be able to perceive alone.

Transformational

Embody What We Know

How does what we perceive, relate with, and encounter become a way of life?

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Transformation deepens through active participation in the world—through work, experimentation, creation, organizing, service, and the responsibilities of everyday life. As we encounter the world's complexity, resistance, and consequences, we discover what has truly become embodied within us, and where our desires, relationships, habits and choices are still asking to change.

At the heart of our pedagogy lies an aspiration not simply to recognize interdependence, sacredness, love, and the intrinsic value of life, but to cultivate the practices, relationships, and conditions through which we become ever more capable of living from them—individually and together.

Go Deeper on Relational Ontological Pedagogy →

The Structure

The Streams name the dimensions of life we will engage; the Pedagogy shapes how we engage them; and the Structure provides the containers that sustain this work over time.

The Fellowship is held by an ecology of transformation: structures that hold the journey together, inviting participants into a shared rhythm of immersive experiences, sustained practice, collective inquiry, intimate relationships, mentorship, accompaniment, and spaces for integration. These aspects of our journey create the conditions of depth, care, support and accompaniment we consider essential for deep transformation to take place.

The Ecology of Transformation

01 — The Core Rhythm

Immersive RetreatsCollective InquiryCollective Practice

Immersive Retreats

Three week-long retreats anchor the beginning, middle, and completion of the Fellowship. They are our deepest moments of immersion and communal life, where the relational field we create allows us to dive deeper into practice, inquiry, relationship, ritual, and communal life, experimenting with ways of being that we may want to carry more fully into our lives.

Opening Retreat

Inviting the Sacred

Tending to the Soul of Our Community

Feb 7th–14th, 2026 · São Paulo

The first retreat is where we begin to come into more intimate relationships with ourselves, each other, and the sacred. Through contemplative and relational practices of presencing, attunement, deep listening, relationality, emergent dialogue, awareness, story sharing and authentic communication, we begin cultivating the relational soil from which the rest of the Fellowship can grow.

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Alongside these practices, we will enter shared rituals and ceremonies that mark our crossing into the journey together, helping us step into a deeper field of transformation and become more sensitive to the sacred. Over time, we hope to experience the community not simply as a collection of individuals, but as a living collective body—learning to move as one river, to care for the whole we are becoming together, and to belong to something larger than ourselves.

This is where the soul and culture of our community begin to take shape.

Midpoint Retreat

Feeling the Metacrisis

Relating to the Systems & Territories We Are Embedded In

July 11th–18th, 2027 · TBD

Here we turn more directly toward the complexity of the systems and histories we participate in, the colonial habits of being still embedded in our civilization, the possibility of systemic breakdown, the underlying causes of the metacrisis, and the ways of perceiving, understanding and organizing life that have brought us here.

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We practice developing our capacity for collective sensemaking, staying present with complexity without collapsing into abstraction or simplistic solutions, and becoming more capable of sensing patterns, tensions, aliveness and emergent possibilities together rather than only as isolated individuals.

We are in conversation with Indigenous and Quilombola communities with whom we already have relationships, exploring the possibility of holding this retreat within their territory. This is not yet confirmed, but it is an intention we are tending with care. At minimum, we will spend meaningful time learning with these communities by encountering ways of seeing, being, and relating to life that may unsettle some of what our dominant culture has taught us to take for granted.

Closing Retreat

Serving the Whole

Contributing to the Emergence of Life-Enhancing Futures

Dec 12th–19, 2027 · São Paulo

The final retreat creates space to metabolize and integrate the journey. Transformation does not happen only through what we experience, but through the time and attention we give to understanding what those experiences have revealed, what has actually changed, and what we are now being asked to carry forward.

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This is a space to discern what has become precious enough that we want to reorganize our lives around it.

What has changed in us? What remains unresolved? What do we now know to be true that asks something of the way we live? What support will we need to remain faithful to it? What is asking to emerge through each of us—and through this community?

We close through reflection, celebration, personal commitments, and forms of vow that help us carry what has been touched into our own lives. The intention is not to leave the Fellowship with a perfect plan, but to sense into what we want to protect, deepen, practice, and offer our lives in service of.

The retreat is also a threshold into what this community might become beyond the Fellowship. Our aspiration is not simply to run cohorts and send people on their way, but to cultivate a long-term developmental community capable of continuing to offer relationship, practice, mentorship, experiences, care, and shared responsibility across the years. We hope the Fellowship becomes the beginning of a much longer journey.

Attendance at all three retreats is required for participation.

Collective Inquiry

Our regular online gatherings sustain the intellectual and collective inquiry of the Fellowship. We encounter new ideas, practices, ontologies, maps, frameworks and wisdom while continuing to deepen what has been opened through the retreats.

Community Inquiry

Tuesday · 19h to 21h · Online

Facilitated by our core team, these sessions introduce new ideas, questions, frameworks, and inquiries, while also deepening the ones that are already alive within the Fellowship. At times, we will study the work of an upcoming guest beforehand so that our encounter with them can begin from a deeper place.

Wisdom Dialogues

Thursday · 19h to 21h · Online

During these sessions, we welcome local and global thinkers, artists, organizers, leaders, contemplatives, elders, practitioners, and wisdom holders whose lives and work are lived responses to this moment of metacrisis.

Collective Practice

During the fellowship, we will enter a rhythm of weekly practice, where we will be engaging with contemplative, relational, and developmental practices that can begin reshaping how we perceive and relate with life.

Collective Practice

Bi-weekly Wednesdays · 19h30–21h

Every six to eight weeks, we therefore enter a sustained practice cycle around specific contemplative, meditative, and relational practices that deepen our capacity to be with and hold space for ourselves and others with greater intimacy, attention, presence, attunement, love, and compassion amid complexity.

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One of the things that differentiate our work is that we understand ourselves as practitioners: people interested not only in ideas, but in becoming increasingly capable of living from what we come to know matters most.

In this, we draw inspiration from wisdom traditions and spiritual lineages that have long understood that worldview alone is insufficient for transformation. A way of seeing the world must be accompanied by practices through which that way of seeing can gradually become a way of being.

Our practice ecology draws inspiration from lineages and approaches including Transformational Connection, Authentic Relating, Insight Dialogue, Internal Family Systems, Aletheia Unfoldment, Compassion Cultivation Training, Insight Meditation, Zen Buddhism, Soulmaking Dharma, Plum Village, and Vipassana.

02 — The Relational Web

Dharma FamilyMentorshipTherapy & Coaching

This journey can be overwhelming, challenging and touch a lot of delicate places within ourselves that will need tending, care and attunement. Instead of relying on a single facilitator and staff to carry everything, the Fellowship creates multiple layers of accompaniment:

Dharma Family

Depth grows in small circles of trust.

Intimate groups of three to four participants and a mentor walk together across the full Fellowship. They become a consistent place for reflection, truth, mutual care, accountability, and the kind of precise form of love and care that can best take place in smaller containers.

Mentorship

Some thresholds cannot be crossed alone.

Throughout the journey, we help participants form relationships with practitioners, teachers, leaders, elders, and others whose experience may speak directly to the questions they are living at this moment.

How it works+

We do not automatically assign every participant to a predetermined mentor. We believe meaningful mentorship grows through resonance, trust, and genuine relationships built over time.

Instead, we will incentivize participants to be constantly looking for possible mentors in their life, and will also create opportunities for them to meet the wider constellation of people connected to our community. As particular questions, fields of interest, or life decisions emerge for each participant we can help with specific connections from which deeper mentorship relationships may grow.

Therapy & Coaching

Tend what the journey stirs.

Deep spaces of transformation can bring us into contact with psychological patterns, wounds, desires, questions, and decisions that deserve more individual attention than the Fellowship community itself can, or should, provide.

How it works+

Participants may therefore choose to receive individual therapeutic or coaching accompaniment throughout the journey.

We aim to connect participants with therapists familiar with approaches such as Internal Family Systems and with coaches who understand the existential and systemic questions at the heart of this Fellowship.

Therapy can offer a dedicated space for tending psychological and emotional material that arises. Coaching can support sensing deeply into current desires and longings, responsibility, choices, relationships, and how one's inner transformation meets the realities of everyday life.

These spaces complement the Fellowship while remaining distinct from the educational and communal container itself. The Fellowship team does not receive the content of therapeutic or coaching sessions unless a participant chooses to share it.

We are particularly drawn to Internal Family Systems because it offers a compassionate way of meeting inner complexity rather than fighting it. Learning to recognize our different parts without being governed by them can allow us to cultivate a quality of wholeness and inner spaciousness needed to meet complexity outside ourselves as well.

03 — The Integration Week

Tending the FieldResourcing Together

At the end of every six week cycle, we interrupt the regular rhythm of the Fellowship and create space to pause, metabolize, listen, repair, and integrate.

We will hold two specific spaces during integration week:

Tending the Field

Inspired by the Plum Village practice of Beginning Anew, we create a recurring space to tend the health of our relationships before distance, hurt, or aversion harden.

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We nurture a space to practice appreciation, honest communication, acknowledgement of regrets and hurts, accountability, forgiveness, and repair. We learn to become more sensitive to how our individual actions affect the collective body, and that trust and intimacy do not grow by avoiding rupture, but by developing the capacity to meet rupture with truth, care, and responsibility.

The intention is not a community without conflict, but one increasingly interested and capable of caring for what happens between us.

Resourcing Together

This space is for us to better understand how to distribute resources within our community by engaging with a simple and important question: What does each of us actually need in order to feel sufficiently resourced to live well and offer what we are here to offer?

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We are inviting the community not to treat resources as an entirely private problem each person must solve alone. We want to explore what becomes possible when a community begins to notice what it has in abundance, what it needs, and what might be able to circulate between us.

Resources may take the form of money, but also time, knowledge, introductions, opportunities, skills, places to stay, work, food, attention, access, friendship, and practical support. The aim is not to erase personal responsibility or create dependency, but to loosen the fantasy of complete self-sufficiency and experiment with interdependence as something material and lived, not merely something we believe.

We hope to experiment with forms of mutual support that make our lives less isolated, less precarious, and less dependent on having every need mediated through the market economy, while also strengthening our capacity to share resources, carry risk together, and support one another in living more fully in alignment with what matters.

04 — Emergent Spaces

Philosophical DinnersEmergent Immersions

Even though this Fellowship has been carefully designed, not everything can be planned in advance. As the questions, relationships, challenges, and desires of the cohort become clearer, we leave room to create additional spaces in response to what is genuinely alive in the cohort.

Philosophical Dinners

Three to four times during the Fellowship, we plan to gather in São Paulo for intimate dinners with thinkers, elders, artists, organizers, practitioners, and friends of our community.

How it works+

These evenings are not a presentation or panel. They are organized around a meaningful question the cohort has been wrestling with, and worth spending a night with. We will have an evening of food, conversations and relationships with specific guests who care deeply about the state of our world, have been thinking deeply about what needs to be done, and are attempting to live in response.

Emergent Immersions

Across the eight months, additional weekend immersions may emerge around questions, practices, or capacities the cohort wants to explore more fully, but that haven't necessarily been part of the “core curriculum” of the Fellowship.

How it works+

These are not predetermined workshops delivered to the cohort. They emerge from the cohort itself, by sensing into the needs and desires most alive within the group.

Participants will help out with this process by discerning what feels most needed, identifying someone or something we genuinely want to learn with, making invitations, helping organize the experience, and where necessary finding the resources required to bring it into being.

This might take the form of a weekend where we invite an expert on Nonviolent Communication, Warm Data, Theory U, Musica do Circulo, restorative practices, or relational work. It could also become a time for serving a specific community in need, travelling together to an important gathering or event, or something none of us can yet anticipate.

Part of the learning here is not only participating in what is offered, but becoming capable of bringing into being what the community senses it needs.

True transformation does not come from grand, heroic gestures, but from small ruptures, moments of vulnerability, and the spaces where we can lose ourselves together to find something new.
— Báyò Akómoláfé

Who We Must Become

Reclaiming Leadership as a Sacred Responsibility Towards the Flourishing of All Life.

The Fellowship's structure, path, and pedagogy exist in service of a deeper question grounding our journey: Who must we become to respond to this moment with wisdom, maturity, and responsibility?

We believe this question matters deeply in a culture where the dominant images of human possibility are often too narrow for the challenges we face. Part of our work is therefore to recover and cultivate richer orientations toward who we might become.

For us this becoming involves four main shifts in our most fundamental relationships with all life—with ourselves, one another, the world, and the sacred. Each shift is supported by capacities that help these deeper ways of relating become lived realities.

Self

From Fragmentation → Towards Wholeness

Remembering who we are beneath our conditioning, while learning to meet the many parts of ourselves with presence, compassion, and love—becoming less governed by fear, wounds, and protective patterns, and more able to live from a deeper ground of wholeness.

Explore capacities →

Self

Capacities we cultivate

Self-Awareness · Presence · Self-Inquiry · Self-Compassion · Emotional Maturity · Attunement · Embodied Awareness

Other

From Separation → Towards Interbeing

Reawakening to our entanglement with other beings, human and more-than-human, encountering them not as objects or resources, but as lives of intrinsic worth—and cultivating relationships grounded in intimacy, reciprocity, and genuine care for each others flourishing.

Explore capacities →

Other

Capacities we cultivate

Attunement · Compassion · Intimacy · Loving Speech · Deep Listening · Perspective Taking · Revealing Experience · Co-sensing · Feeling-Saying

World

From Observation → Towards Participation

Remembering that we are participants, not spectators, in a living and interdependent world, embedded within social, ecological, historical, and economic systems, where the ways we live ripple far beyond ourselves and carry consequences for the larger web of life.

Explore capacities →

World

Capacities we cultivate

Systems Thinking · Complexity Literacy · Historical Consciousness · Ecological Awareness · Sensemaking · Critical Thinking · Intellectual Humility

The Sacred

From Disenchantment → Towards Reverence

Recovering our sense of belonging within a mysterious cosmos, experiencing life as intrinsically valuable, meaningful and sacred, while recognizing ourselves as unique expressions of that same mystery. And allowing our relationship to the sacred to expand love, devotion, and responsibility toward the whole.

Explore capacities →

The Sacred

Capacities we cultivate

Contemplative Depth · Value Perception · Meaning-making · Ethical Discernment · Devotion · Truthfulness · Beauty

These shifts point to the deeper horizon of our journey toward the types of relationships, capacities and maturation we believe this moment is asking us to deepen if we want to help steward civilization towards life-enhancing futures.

Who This Is For

For a generation ready to take responsibility for embodying the world it longs to bring into being

We are calling together post-activist leaders—artists, educators, organizers, thinkers, change-makers, technologists and spiritual practitioners—who feel the depth of our historical moment in their bodies, and who are called to undergo the kind of transformation that can better prepare us to navigate and respond to these times.

Our first Fellowship is looking for Brazilian young adults between 18 and 29 who are questioning the limitations of conventional approaches to systems change, leadership, and education; who long to contribute to the emergence of new systems, cultures and life-enhancing futures; and who recognize that any meaningful response to this moment must begin with a radical shift in the ways we perceive, relate and participate in the world.

This Fellowship is for those who:

Feel the pain and beauty of the world deeply and are called to care more deeply for it.
Sense that inherited definitions of success, progress, and impact no longer fully answer the questions your life is asking.
Have grown skeptical of the underlying assumptions that shape many of our responses to the crises we face.
Want to understand the deeper roots of the metacrisis and how to respond appropriately to it.
Feel called to offer their lives and unique gifts in service of life-affirming futures.
Sense that spiritual transformation, systemic understanding, and collective action are inseparable.
Long for a community where deep questions of meaning, value, vocation, and existence can be held seriously.
Are willing to examine how their own desires, habits, identities, and ways of life may be contributing to the patterns we hope to transform.
Long for a community that welcomes who they are, nurtures their becoming, and supports them in transforming how they live.

You might recognize yourself as:

The artist trying to help us imagine another world

You know that cultural transformation requires new stories, images, symbols, and possibilities through which people can imagine another way of being. You want your art to respond to the crises of our time by helping reforest the social imaginary with beauty, sacredness, soulfulness, love, and wisdom, but you can't seem to find spaces that can nourish your own soul and spirit in this way, allowing you to feel this time of rupture more deeply and create from the insight that comes from such place.

The community-builder cultivating islands of sanity

You have felt firsthand the power of genuine community and believe that rebuilding our capacity to live, care, and act together is essential to whatever comes next. Perhaps you are convening gatherings, hosting circles, creating places of belonging, or experimenting with more relational ways of living. You want to learn how to create sanctuaries of transition, but have been encountering your own limitations to hold space for the intimacy, conflict, difference, and complexity that emerges in communal space at a time between worlds.

The educator who has lost faith in our educational system

You care deeply about learning, formation, and human development, yet increasingly feel that much of education is preparing people for a world that is disappearing while reproducing many of the assumptions that helped create our crises. You find yourself asking what education should become in a time of ecological breakdown, technological acceleration, political fragmentation, and civilizational transition. You are searching for people willing to question education at its foundations and experiment seriously with what might need to emerge next.

The researcher following questions that do not fit inside one discipline

You are trying to understand the deeper roots of our predicament through systems thinking, ecology, philosophy, political economy, psychology, technology, history, spirituality, or questions that refuse to fit inside any of them. You are looking for a community where intellectual rigor can remain in relationship with lived experience, ethical responsibility, and multiple ways of knowing, and where research in a time of planetary crisis can become genuinely transdisciplinary.

The entrepreneur trying to build institutions that serve life

You have the impulse to build new projects, initiatives, organizations, communities, or institutions that make something different possible. But you are increasingly unwilling to reproduce the logics of extraction, endless growth, competition, and optimization simply because they are considered normal. You want to understand what it might mean to build and steward institutions whose relationships, structures, and use of resources genuinely serve the flourishing of life and become stuck with the complexity of doing so.

The activist questioning how transformation actually happens

You care deeply about justice and may have spent years organizing, campaigning, advocating, or resisting systems of harm. At the same time, you have begun to notice how easily movements for change can reproduce polarization, burnout, dehumanization, and some of the very relational patterns they seek to transform. You want to explore ways of confronting injustice rooted in nonviolence, relational maturity, inner transformation, sacredness, and love, without losing the courage and power required for meaningful change.

The technologist wrestling with the power of what we are building

You are fascinated by technology and its potential to contribute to human and more-than-human flourishing, while increasingly unsettled by the speed, incentives, and concentration of power shaping its development. You are wrestling with questions that engineering alone cannot answer and searching for deeper ethical, philosophical, and spiritual ground from which to decide what should be built, what should not, and what forms of life our technologies are helping create.

The climate organizer carrying both urgency and grief

You have lived with ecological breakdown long enough that it lives in your body. You may carry grief, anger, fear, urgency, exhaustion, and a fierce love for the living world all at once. Perhaps you have spent years organizing around climate change and are now questioning whether the strategies and forms of organizing we have used are capable of producing the transformation the crisis demands. You are looking for others who can keep trying to understand how new forms of ecological activism and movement can emerge.

The university or master's student hungry for an education they cannot find

You may be studying at an excellent university, surrounded by brilliant professors and extraordinary opportunities, yet still feel that something essential is missing. You are learning how to analyze the world without necessarily learning how to live within it, how to know yourself, cultivate meaningful relationships, navigate uncertainty, or discern what this moment is asking of your life. You hunger for an education that engages mind, body, heart, imagination, spirit, and relationship, and helps you understand what ought we do in this time of planetary crisis.

The social change-maker who has begun to question the social-impact world itself

You entered this work because you wanted to contribute to meaningful change. But over time, you have begun to see the limitations of approaches that address symptoms without questioning the deeper foundations of the systems producing them. You may have noticed the same logics of growth, scale, competition, extraction, and control appearing even inside spaces committed to social impact. You still want to serve transformation, but from a deeper understanding of reality, the world, yourself, and the ways our attempts to help can sometimes reproduce what we hope to change.

Or perhaps none of these descriptions quite fit. You may be in a moment of discovering more deeply who you are, what matters to you, and how you might meaningfully participate in this moment. What is important to us is not your identity, title or what you have already accomplished, but the sincerity of your inquiry, your commitment to individual and collective transformation, the call you feel to this Fellowship, and your genuine desire to be part of and contribute to this community.

Still Unsure?

Schedule a discernment call.

If something here resonates, but you're unsure whether the Fellowship is the right place for you—or whether this is the right moment in your life—we would love to explore that with you.

We offer these conversations as a space to meet you beyond an application: to listen to the questions you are living, what is challenging you, what is seeking to emerge, and what draws you toward this journey.

This is not a selection process interview. It is a space for mutual discernment, offered with care and without pressure, to help you sense whether applying to the Fellowship feels aligned with your life right now.

Whether or not you eventually join, we would love to meet you.

Schedule a conversation →Write to us →

The Cost — Offered as a Gift

A post-capitalist approach to money

In the Story of Separation, giving does not come naturally. If I'm separate from you, then more for me is less for you. In the story of Interbeing, life is a gift. We did not earn the sun, the water, our breath, or the beating of our hearts. Life is a gift.

— Charles Eisenstein

We believe the practices, relationships, wisdom, and forms of community needed to navigate a time of metacrisis should not become privileges available only to those who can afford them. At a moment when so much is at stake, helping those who feel called to serve life wholeheartedly become more capable of doing so feels like a sacred responsibility we must share.

This conviction is also personal. Many of us holding this work have spent decades seeking transformational, educational, and developmental spaces that deeply shaped our lives, yet access to them was often limited by cost. Coming from the Global South, opportunities created in the Global North could become prohibitively expensive. At times we found scholarships, made significant sacrifices to participate, or simply could not access experiences we deeply longed for.

We want to practice something different.

For this reason, the Fellowship is offered as a gift, so that financial capacity does not determine who has access to the forms of formation we believe are increasingly important for this time.

What does “offered as a gift” mean for us?+

A gift, for us, is not simply a financial agreement. It is an experiment in loosening the logics of separation, transaction, and scarcity so deeply embedded in us by modernity, and remembering ourselves as interdependent beings, part of the same living movement of giving and receiving.

Rather than reinforcing the familiar approach to education as consumers, asking:

How much does this cost? What will I get in return? Is this investment worth it? How will this expand my network? Will this make me a more interesting or accomplished person?

We want to make room for another kind of inquiry:

What is this moment of my life asking of me? Can this fellowship support me on this path? Am I ready to offer myself wholeheartedly to this journey? Does something in this invitation speak to a truth I have been longing to live? Is this a community I long to belong to, and help bring into being?

If something in you comes alive in response to that question, we invite you to listen to it.

What Does This Gift Include?

Offering the Fellowship as a gift does not mean it has no material costs. Retreat spaces, food, facilitation, therapy, teachers, travel support, and the labor of holding this community all require real resources. Some are themselves gifted; others are carried by supporters, practitioners, and friends who believe this work matters and want to make it possible for others. Their generosity allows the central discernment to remain about readiness, resonance, and your current moment rather than your financial situation.

This Fellowship gift includes:

All online sessions and facilitation
All in-person retreat experiences
Accommodation and food during retreats
Coaching/therapy and developmental support
All resources and materials for sessions

Participants are only responsible for transportation to and from the in-person retreats.

Collective Resource Fund+

Beyond making the Fellowship accessible, we are also experimenting with new ways of relating to resources as a community. Our hope is to create a Collective Resource Fund—a shared pool of resources that can support participants throughout the journey based on real needs and opportunities.

These resources could support: transportation to retreats, complementary developmental experiences, seed funding for projects and initiatives, temporary financial support that help cover basic needs of participants.

The distribution of these resources will happen through a transparent collective process involving participants and the team, inspired by practices of collective resource sharing and gift economies. This is all part of our practice to learn how resources can flow with greater trust, transparency, and care toward where they are most needed.

We are currently fundraising for this Collective Resource Fund and hope to have resources available throughout the Fellowship journey.

Practical Commitment

What Saying Yes to the Fellowship Asks of You

We are offering this Fellowship as a gift, and inviting each fellow to meet that gift with a meaningful commitment of their own — through their time, attention, energy, presence, and dedication. This is a demanding journey, and we invite those who feel genuinely able to give themselves to it fully at this moment in their lives.

Program Length

10 months

Format

Hybrid

Residential and online

Participants

Location

São Paulo, Brazil

Language

Portuguese

Immersive Retreats

Three week-long gatherings anchoring the journey

Opening Retreat

Inviting the Sacred

Tending to the Soul of Our Community

February 7–14, 2027

São Paulo

Midpoint Retreat

Feeling the Metacrisis

Relating to the Systems & Territories We Are Embedded In

July 4–11, 2027

Location to be confirmed

Closing Retreat

Serving the Whole

Contributing to the Emergence of Life-Enhancing Futures

December 12–19, 2027

Location to be confirmed

Full participation in all three retreats is required.

Weekly Rhythm

Regular online spaces for inquiry, practice and guest interactions

Community Inquiry

Tuesdays · 19h–21h · Online

Collective Practice

Bi-weekly Wednesdays · 19h30–21h · Online

Wisdom Dialogues

Thursdays · 19h–21h · Online

Attendance required in all regular online spaces.

Relational Support

Spaces for more individual accompaniment within the Fellowship.

Dharma Families

Once a month

Therapy and/or Coaching

Twice a month

Mentorship

Via resonance and emergence

Emergent Spaces

Additional experiences that arise in response to the cohort's inquiries, desires and needs.

Philosophical Dinners

In-person · São Paulo

2–4 gatherings throughout the Fellowship

Emergent Immersions

In-person or online

2–3 possible weekend experiences

These spaces are responsive to the interests and needs of the community and may not all be required for participation.

Time Commitment

Three week-long retreats

In person · Full participation required

8–12 hours per week

During regular online periods

Two dedicated rest weeks

No scheduled programming

Schedule Overview

The Fellowship Schedule

February – December 2027

OnlineIn-person

The LaunchOnline

Opening Ceremony Call

February 3, 2027

18h45–21h30

Opening RetreatIn-person

Inviting the Sacred

Tending to the Soul of Our Community

February 7–14, 2027

São Paulo, Brazil

Stream 1 · Eight-Week CycleOnline

The Sacred

Remembering What Ultimately Matters

February 15 – April 11, 2027

Every WeekTue · Collective Inquiry (19h–21h)Wed · Practice (19h30–21h)Thu · Wisdom Dialogues (19h–21h)

Stream 2 · Eight-Week CycleOnline

Soul

Remembering Who We Are

April 12 – June 6, 2027

Every WeekTue · Collective Inquiry (19h–21h)Wed · Practice (19h30–21h)Thu · Wisdom Dialogues (19h–21h)

Rest Week

Off Week

June 7–13, 2027

Stream 3 · Eight-Week Cycle · Weeks 1–3Online

Systems

Remembering Where We Are

June 14 – July 4, 2027

Every WeekTue · Collective Inquiry (19h–21h)Wed · Practice (19h30–21h)Thu · Wisdom Dialogues (19h–21h)

Midpoint RetreatIn-person

Feeling the Metacrisis

Relating to the Systems & Territories We Are Embedded In

July 4–11, 2027

Location to be confirmed

Stream 3 · Eight-Week Cycle · Weeks 4–8Online

Systems

Remembering Where We Are

July 12 – August 15, 2027

Every WeekTue · Collective Inquiry (19h–21h)Wed · Practice (19h30–21h)Thu · Wisdom Dialogues (19h–21h)

Stream 4 · Eight-Week CycleOnline

Soil

Remembering Our Place in the Web of Life

August 16 – October 10, 2027

Every WeekTue · Collective Inquiry (19h–21h)Wed · Practice (19h30–21h)Thu · Wisdom Dialogues (19h–21h)

Rest Week

Off Week

October 11–17, 2027

Stream 5 · Eight-Week CycleOnline

Society

Remembering How to Respond to This Moment

October 18 – December 12, 2027

Every WeekTue · Collective Inquiry (19h–21h)Wed · Practice (19h30–21h)Thu · Wisdom Dialogues (19h–21h)

Closing RetreatIn-person

Serving the Whole

Contributing to the Emergence of Life-Enhancing Futures

December 12–19, 2027

Location to be confirmed

A Note on Emergence

The Fellowship follows an intentional rhythm, but its structure is not rigid. As our founding cohort, we will remain attentive to the community’s evolving needs, allowing certain inquiries, practices, and encounters to emerge along the way.

Dharma Families and individual coaching or therapy will be arranged around participants’ availability, while Philosophical Dinners and possible Emergent Immersions will be scheduled in conversation with the community.

We want the structure to be strong enough to hold us, and alive enough to respond to what emerges as we walk this journey together.

The Application Process

An Invitation Into Discernment

We do not see the application process simply as a way for us to select participants. We see it as an invitation into a mutual process of discernment, an opportunity for both of us to explore whether this is the right moment, the right community, and the right commitment for the next chapter of your life.

We are less interested in impressive accomplishments or positions you have held. We are looking for truth, honesty, and sincerity. We want to understand the path that has brought you here, interested in this Fellowship: the questions you have been wrestling with, the experiences that have shaped you, the moment of life you find yourself in, the inquiries that live in your body, and the deeper longings that may be seeking space to be met more fully.

Our hope is that, whatever the outcome, this process already offers you something meaningful.

The Discernment Process

The process itself is an invitation into some of the questions at the heart of our work: How am I experiencing this time between worlds? What is my life longing for? What is being asked of me? Who must we become to meet this moment? What kind of community do I need to hold me at this time?

Online Application

Oct 15 – Nov 30, 2026

We invite you to share more about your story, your questions, your inquiries, your relationship with this moment, and what is calling you toward this fellowship.

Individual Conversations

Rolling Basis

Selected applicants will be invited to an individual conversation with our team. This is a space to get to know you more fully, understand your current moment, longings and challenges, explore resonances with our work, and clarify questions and expectations about the Fellowship.

Community Engagement

Nov 20 – Dec 20, 2026

Over the course of a month, we will offer optional weekly online gatherings (90 minutes each) where you can connect with our community and fellow applicants, experience our ways of learning, practicing, and relating, and get a glimpse of the Fellowship before making a deeper commitment.

Final Invitations & Commitment

By Dec 30, 2026

Those invited to the founding cohort of the Metta Tropical Fellowship will have 2–3 weeks to confirm their participation.

Feeling called to apply? We encourage you to join our Fellowship WhatsApp group and subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed about the application process, upcoming gatherings, information sessions, and ask questions along the way.

Fellowship Updates

Stay informed about applications, gatherings, and information sessions.

Join the Fellowship WhatsApp Group

Our Wider Community

Stay informed about all of Metta Tropical Collective's work, offerings and inquires.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Ready to apply?

Please leave your name and email below, and we’ll send you the complete application right away. You’ll get a PDF with all the questions, so you can read and reflect before you start, and the link to the form when you’re ready to submit.

Why This Exists, Now

A generation is inheriting a world in transition and a responsibility it was never taught how to carry.

Beneath the visible crises of our time—ecological breakdown, social fragmentation, institutional instability, technological risk, meaning crisis—lies a deeper predicament often described as the metacrisis: a dysfunction in the underlying ways of perceiving, relating to, and understanding reality that modern civilization has been built upon.

As this predicament deepens, moving towards life-enhancing forms of civilization is not a given. It will require profound changes not only in our systems and institutions, but in how we understand ourselves, reality and relate to all life.

The Challenge Is:

Civilizational

This moment is historically distinct due to the unprecedented power humanity now holds to shape—and potentially destabilize—the conditions of life itself. Our technological power has grown much faster than the wisdom and maturity required to orient them. This ethical discernment and relational maturity requires decades, if not generations to cultivate to the levels we need at this moment.

Developmental

This period of civilizational breakdown can be understood as a potential rite of passage for humanity—a threshold that could invite us into greater wisdom and maturity. But rupture does not guarantee transformation. Without the practices, communities, elders, and developmental containers capable of holding such a passage, crisis can just as easily deepen fear, fragmentation, tribalism, and attachment to ways of life that are part of the problem.

Generational

A generation of young people feel the weight of this moment and long to participate meaningfully in what comes next, yet few institutions are helping them make consequential life choices—how to live, what to value, what to learn, where to work, and what to devote themselves to—in relation to the depth of the transition underway, while preparing them to carry the responsibilities this civilizational moment is placing before them.

None of this is the work of the young alone.

Older generations carry hard-won wisdom from lives spent within and outside the systems we have inherited. Younger generations bring their own wisdom, questions, and sensitivity to what no longer holds, alongside a longing to help bring different futures into being. We place young people at the center of this Fellowship not because the responsibility is theirs to carry alone, but because they will live most fully with the consequences of the choices being made today.

The work of this moment is therefore intergenerational. We need spaces where generations can find one another again—to learn from what has been lived, discern what must be carried forward and what must be left behind, and begin taking responsibility for the future together.

Intergenerational gathering at Metta Tropical

The Fellowship exists to help restore the intergenerational fabric through which the wisdom, courage, and capacities this moment demands can be cultivated and carried forward. We hope that, by coming together in intimate and trustworthy relationships across generations, we can become more capable of wisely stewarding our passage through this civilizational threshold.

The Team

We are here because we need this work, too.

As long as you, or someone who learned from you, are teaching and passing on our knowledge, I will be alive even if buried. But if you stop teaching what I taught you, I will be buried even if I am alive. My life is in your hands. You are now responsible for my living. This is what it means to relate to ancestry, my dear. Ancestry is not death; ancestry is alive, present, right now. Ancestry is a journey.

— Nego Bispo

Dear friend,

Most of us holding this journey have spent years wrestling with the challenges of living at a time between worlds. We have been shaped by the experience of questioning the ways of life we have inherited, longing for what has yet to emerge, and searching for how to offer our lives more meaningfully to this moment.

For us, the metacrisis is something we feel before we can make sense of it. It's the unsettling texture of everyday life, the disbelief at how strange things have become, the sense that the ground beneath our familiar ways of life has become unreliable, and the deeper knowing that something more truthful, meaningful, and beautiful is possible.

Our paths have taken us through different traditions, communities, ideas, and transformative experiences in search of guidance, wisdom, and islands of sanity amid the disorientation of our times. Along the way, we have found not only companions who share the depth of these questions, but also teachers, elders, and thinkers whose wisdom, practices, and ways of living have helped us make sense of this moment, deepen our own journeys, and sustain our commitment to more life-affirming futures.

We are not holding this Fellowship because we have figured out how to navigate the transition ahead. Quite the opposite. We are holding it because we, too, are trying to discern how to live and respond to this moment, and because we have been profoundly shaped by the people, practices, frameworks and wisdom we have encountered along the way.

The Fellowship is our attempt to bring these gifts into relationship. To gather those who recognize something of this longing, connect them with the teachers, elders, and companions who have nourished our own journeys, and create a community where we can continue learning, practicing, and becoming more capable of meeting this moment together.

With love,
The Metta Tropical Team

Core Team

Hover over a portrait to read their story

Mars is an educator, facilitator, mentor, Buddhist practitioner, community organizer, aspiring philosopher, and student of spiritual friendship. He has been dedicating his life to exploring how education might be radically reimagined to support the civilizational transition we are living through. His work begins from the recognition that today’s crises express a deeper crisis of perception, meaning, sensemaking, and value. At the core of his practice and research is an inquiry into how the sacred and the wisdom of spiritual traditions might be re-legitimized within the heart of education as essential sources of meaning, depth, ethical responsibility, discernment, and wisdom for a time of systemic breakdown.

Marcelo was a founding member of the Latin American Leadership Academy, where he contributed to the formation of thousands of young leaders across the region and personally mentored hundreds of them. His path has since taken him through spiritual and transformational communities exploring the intersections of spiritual practice, systems change, and responses to the metacrisis. Among the experiences that have most shaped him are periods of training in Buddhist monasteries, participation in metamodern communities, time at Schumacher College, and experiments with communities organized around spiritual innovation, relational practice, decolonial thought, and metacrisis awareness. Through these experiences, it has become increasingly clear to him that part of his vocation is to support the emergence of a post-secular, wisdom-centered approach to leadership and education rooted in the Global South. He is now exploring what kinds of educational architectures might hold human transformation across decades and generations, and help accompany us through the civilizational rite of passage we are being called into.

Metta Tropical Collective is his first sustained experiment in this direction. In a more intimate place in his heart, lives the inquiry of what would it mean to build a modern Bodhisattva training in Brazil, capable of supporting young people, adults, and elders to meet civilizational breakdown with wisdom, relational maturity, courage, and responsibility toward the flourishing of all life. He often thinks of this as a 300-year project towards the emergence of wisdom-centered cultures and educational systems that future generations might one day inherit.

Marcelo Peterlini

Educator, Mentor, Spiritual Seeker, Facilitator, Vision Holder, Community Weaver

hey! pleased to meet you. i'm Cássius, i'm a student of the world's wisdom traditions, a self-directed researcher and educator/metadesigner in training.

after a near-death experience (NDE) and a deep disillusionment while working with technology and social impact in Silicon Valley, both at 19 years old, i started questioning and radically changing my worldview and the way i live my life.

in the last 8 years, as a response to the various profound inquiries that arose from that - even bigger questions about purpose, the nature of reality, the possibilities of life and existence on Earth - i dove into researching what other ways of being, existing, and living are possible as humans and as a society, and started to dedicate much of my time to interdisciplinary research, practices, and experiences that helped me reach a guiding question:

"how can we create systems that affirm life - i.e. that support the flourishing of all beings, and that allow us to play life collaboratively, coordinating towards wiser, more sacred and regenerative futures?"

these investigations culminated in a "digital garden", a website where i have cultivated reflections over these years and compiled the main references that informed, guided, and supported me throughout this process of reflection, transformation, and maturation.

since then, i have been researching initiatives, communities, and experiments especially at the intersections of consciousness/spirituality, technology, art, design, learning, complexity, regeneration, anthropology, decoloniality and games, which seek to respond to the metacrisis and the various systemic crises we face, as gestures towards wiser, more compassionate and regenerative futures.

i continue to research, experiment with and contribute to different initiatives, mainly through what i call the L1F3 game - a continuous r&d project that investigates and prototypes: "how can we transform real life into an actual modular, interoperable, distributed, open-source, online-and-offline collaborative self-transformation & regenerative civilization-building game?"

these investigations and others are, in some level, available in my digital garden, at: c4ss1usgarden.vercel.app.

the Metta Tropical Collective is for me, a home, a sanctuary, an embryo of a lineage that seeks to place the sacred at the center while recognizing and honoring our tropical spirit - and from this intersection, bringing many of these systemic and social investigations from the personal to the collective spheres.

it is a way we have found to organize ourselves by recognizing that if we want to truly move towards these futures, we need to go radically beyond our bubbles, learn from each other, find common ground between our perspectives, support each other through our processes of engagement, development and transformation in devoted and accountable ways, and establish new forms of relationships of transparadigmatic trust, collaboration and coordination that our century so desperately needs.

welcome and thank you for being here. 🙏🏽❤️‍🔥🌱

Cássius Carvalho

Researcher, Metadesigner, Curator, Systems Mapper, Knowledge Gardener

Before joining Imaginable Futures, Nathalie co-founded CO.LETIVO, a teacher residency program in Brazil aimed at bringing equity and excellence to teacher training in the country. Nathalie was also a partner at SOMOS Educação, where she managed Colégio Anglo 21, the company’s leading primary and secondary school in São Paulo. She also worked in the company’s M&A and school operations teams. During her time in education, Nathalie conducted a deep inquiry into what drives extraordinary learning experiences, connecting research findings from Learning Science to school practices worldwide. As part of this journey, she visited over 40 schools across seven countries and mapped effective learning conditions, curriculum design choices, instructional strategies, and support systems beyond the classroom. Nathalie began her career in investment banking before moving into education in search of meaning and social impact.

Nathalie Zogbi

Devoted Mother, Passionate Caretaker, Strategic Thought Partner, Resource Steward

Karen is an educator and advisory Chief Technology Officer with global experience researching and working at the intersection of education and technology, in both for-profit and non-profit organizations. Today, her work focuses on understanding how to make wise, life-conscious decisions around technology — and especially how to bring this inquiry into educational and governmental spaces. She has led initiatives such as a digital school for COVID-displaced elementary students in Colombia, digital literacy training and higher education counseling in South Africa, and the development of adaptive learning tools used by millions of students on Quizlet. Karen is currently the CTO of VélezReyes+, a Latin American philanthropic platform working through education and leadership transformation, and a professor of society and technology at Insper, in Brazil.

Karen Sun

Guest Teacher, Book Lover, Mentor, Doula, Kitchen Heart Chef, Tech Advisor

Guest Teachers Who Walk With Us

These are some of the teachers and elders who have walked with us, or still do, as guest teachers, deepening the core inquiries of our collective. We continue to cultivate relationships with each of them, learning, transforming, and supporting one another over time. Many of them shaped last year’s retreat, and we hope to welcome them back for this year’s Fellowship.

This year’s circle of guest teachers is still forming, and we’ll keep adding them here as they confirm.

FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the time commitment?

The Fellowship requires approximately 8–10 hours per week during online periods, alongside three week-long, in-person retreats over the ten months. The online journey unfolds in cycles of approximately 12–14 weeks of weekly gatherings, each followed by a week of rest to allow space for integration and renewal.

Is the Fellowship conducted in Portuguese?

Yes. The Fellowship is primarily conducted in Portuguese and rooted in the Brazilian context. Some guest teachers may speak English or Spanish, with translation provided.

What is the cost of the Fellowship?

The Fellowship is offered as a gift, with no program fee. This includes online sessions, retreats, accommodation and meals during retreats, and the individual therapeutic and coaching support offered throughout the program. Participants are only responsible for their transportation to and from the in-person retreats.

Can I participate if I don't live in São Paulo?

Yes. The weekly sessions take place online, so you can participate from elsewhere in Brazil or abroad. Full time attendance in all three in-person retreats are required for all participants. We may also organize additional in-person gatherings (philosophical dinners and weekend immersions) throughout the Fellowship, which we highly recommend participation but they won't be required.

Do I need to attend all three retreats?

Yes. The retreats are central to the Fellowship's developmental journey and to building the relationships that will hold our community. We ask applicants to confirm that they can attend all three before committing to the program. If you foresee a conflict or have particular circumstances you would like to discuss, please reach out before applying.

Can I participate while working or studying full-time?

The Fellowship is designed to take place alongside participants' existing lives, but it does require a substantial commitment of time, energy, and attention. We encourage you to consider your current responsibilities and whether you can realistically make space for the weekly gatherings, personal practice, and three retreats. If you're unsure, we would be happy to explore this with you in a discernment conversation.

How are fellows selected?

Our intention is to bring together a group of people who resonate deeply with the Fellowship's inquiries, recognize in this invitation something they have been longing for, and feel ready to participate wholeheartedly in this journey.

We are less interested in what you have accomplished than in the path that has brought you here: the questions you have been living with, the experiences that have shaped you, and what is drawing you toward this work. Because this is our first cohort, we are especially attentive to bringing together a group of people who can genuinely enrich each other's journey. We also want to take time to genuinely meet the applicants and explore the resonance between your aspirations, the inquiries at the heart of the Fellowship, and the community we hope to cultivate together.

Ultimately, we are looking for people who will not only benefit from this community, but feel the call to help bring it into being.

Can I apply if I am outside the 18–29 age range?

Yes. Our first Fellowship is primarily designed for Brazilian young adults aged 18–29, but we are open to considering a small number of applicants outside this range whose aspirations and circumstances resonate deeply with our mission. We cannot guarantee admission outside the intended age range, but we encourage you to reach out if you feel strongly drawn to this work. We are also cultivating a wider intergenerational community, with other possibilities of engagement with us.

What happens after the Fellowship?

We see the Fellowship not as an isolated ten-month experience, but as a doorway into a longer-term community of practice, learning, inquiry and shared responsibility. Our aspiration is for fellows to remain part of the growing Metta Tropical Collective community, where we will intentionally offer multiple online and in-person opportunities to continue practicing, developing, gathering, and collaborating beyond the formal program.

What if I don't see myself as a leader?

We totally understand. We recognize that the word leadership carries considerable baggage, often associated with status, authority, achievement, or influence over others. Part of our work is to reclaim a different understanding of leadership as a sacred responsibility toward the flourishing of all life: a way of relating to ourselves, one another, and the world with love, wisdom, courage, and a willingness to care for something larger than ourselves.

We sometimes use the term post-activism to gesture toward this orientation. This is not a rejection of activism, but as an invitation to question the very ways of perceiving, thinking, relating, and organizing life from which our attempts to change the world tend to arise.

Ultimately, we are interested in those who feel the pain of the world deeply, and long to offer their lives in service of all life. You do not need to call yourself a leader or post-activist, but If you recognize something of that longing in your own heart, this invitation is for you.

Do I need previous experience with spirituality, systems thinking, the metacrisis, or relational practices?

Not necessarily. We do not expect applicants to be experts or experienced practitioners in all these fields. Fellows will arrive with different backgrounds, depths of experience, and ways of engaging with the questions at the heart of our work.

At the same time, we are looking for people who recognize something of their own journey in these inquiries and long to explore them more deeply, in the company of others who share that commitment. What matters more is your genuine desire and curiosity to step fully into these dimensions of life, and the recognition that this is the type of space your soul is most hungry for at this moment in life.

Is the Fellowship affiliated with a particular religion or spiritual tradition?

No. The Fellowship is not directly affiliated with any religious or spiritual institution, although those of us holding this work have been profoundly shaped and supported by spiritual and wisdom traditions along our paths.

Buddhism has been a particularly important influence, alongside other contemplative traditions, philosophical inquiries, and contemporary approaches to human development and relational practice. We carry deep gratitude for these lineages and seek to honor the ways they have shaped our understanding of reality, our practices, and how we aspire to live. So, in some way the Fellowship is inevitably shaped by them.

We believe the roots of the metacrisis are deeply spiritual. Beneath the breakdown of our systems lie deeper questions about how we understand existence, what we recognize as intrinsically valuable, what gives our lives meaning, and how we relate to one another, the living world, and the sacred. Spiritual and religious traditions have spent centuries engaging with these questions, developing profound bodies of wisdom and practice around them. We believe responding meaningfully to this moment requires us to bring these dimensions of life back into the heart of our collective inquiry.

To be part of the Fellowship you do not need to identify as religious or spiritual, or subscribe to any particular worldview. What we ask is a sincere willingness to engage with these dimensions of life through inquiry, practice, and dialogue.

We also recognize that spirituality and religion can be delicate territory. Many people carry experiences of harm, exclusion, or disillusionment from religious and spiritual spaces, and we do not take this lightly. Our intention is neither to shy away from these questions nor to impose any specific path, but to create conditions in which we can engage with them with openness, discernment, humility, and care, knowing the importance they have for our time.

I'm interested, but I'm unsure whether this is the right moment for me. Can we talk?

Absolutely. We know that committing to a journey like this can involve significant questions about your life, responsibilities, and aspirations.

We offer discernment conversations as a space to meet you, listen to what is alive for you, and explore together whether the Fellowship feels aligned with your current moment. These conversations are not selection interviews, and there is no pressure to apply afterward.

Whether or not you eventually join the Fellowship, we would love to meet you.

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Ok, why is this called Metta Tropical Fellowship?

We're glad you asked. Metta Tropical is more than a name for us. It is an invocation of the spirit with which we hope to meet the metacrisis, what we hold sacred, and the possibilities of life we long to bring into being.

At its heart, Metta comes from the Pali language, which means a kind of boundless and self-giving love towards all living beings. For us, Metta is the orientation that allows us to face the metacrisis with the kind of wisdom that prevents us from collapsing into despair, simplistic solutions or domination. And It holds three main energies:

Loving-kindness (Metta)

A fierce, boundless and all embracing love towards the liberation and flourishing of all life. It evokes the heart of the Bodhisattva in a time of societal collapse.

Meta-awareness

The capacity to step back, to sense into the deeper patterns shaping our world, systems and crises. Meta as within (interiority), meta as between (relationality), and meta as beyond (different ways of seeing and being).

Metamorphosis

The recognition that these times are demanding us to be transformed, to have our Ego be shape-shifted, to become mature and wise adults in order to fully embody our soul's work.

Tropical

Tropical is a certain kind of invocation. It calls in the warmth, the pulse, the wild intelligence of life. The eros, aliveness and creative force that lives in Brazil and across the Global South.

It's also a call to not be stuck in abstraction, but to return to the body, the land, the rhythm, and the relationships. Tropical honors the wisdom that has long lived in this territory—indigenous, quilombola, Afro-diasporic, and marginalized communities—which despite being ignored, silenced and erased, has endured, holding so many keys for how to live through collapse.

It reminds us that what has survived erasure must hold something essential. And that any honest reckoning with collapse must humbly find its way back to it.

Explore the Spirit of Our Work →

Metta Tropical Fellowship

What is this moment in history asking of your life?

If something in you comes alive in response to this journey, we invite you to listen to it.

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