The Shunya Fellowship · Pilot Cohort · Winter 2026
A two-month pod, a possible month of immersion,
and a project of your own — a formation in three folds:
personal, interpersonal, and systemic.
Most of the world trains you to be the clock.
This fellowship forms you to be the beam.
A small, deeply curated cohort of seasoned practitioners
The whole calling, in five breaths — and the practical notes. Open what calls to you.
Our economy privatizes benefit and socializes cost — and AI, left to that logic, will simply run it faster. This fellowship forms people who move the opposite way: contributors who regenerate the commons of the collective heart, the way a mother does, a teacher does, a forest does.
The full storyThe dominant logic of our economy runs one way: capture the gains for yourself, and let the costs — ecological, social, attentional — drift out onto everyone else. Privatize benefit, socialize cost. Every extractive system on earth is a variation on that theme.
This fellowship is built on the opposite movement: to show up as a contributor. To regenerate the commons of the collective heart without seeking to capture the gains. That inversion cannot be engineered by policy or prompt. It requires an actual growth in compassion: a heart spacious enough to give freely, without needing to be seen giving.
In 1656, the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens hung two pendulum clocks from a wooden beam laid across two chairs. Within half an hour, the pendulums synchronized. He disturbed them; they found each other again. The coupling ran through the beam — which did not tick, did not keep time, did not draw the eye. It merely absorbed vibrations too subtle to see, and let two things find a shared rhythm they could never have found alone.
Most training makes you a better clock: sharper answers, louder ticking. We are looking for people who want to become the beam — for their families, their teams, their neighborhoods, their fields. The beam does its quiet job, and the whole room comes into rhythm. That is the service this fellowship prepares you for.
The journey works on three nested levels at once — inner conditions, laddership, and AI fluency: the person, the relationships, and the systems we're all now inside of. A fellow who carries only the tools is a consultant; a fellow who carries all three is a ladder.
The three foldsEach fold has its own craft, and each is a way of finding value in space.
"The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener."
This is the fulcrum on which the fellowship rests: the intrinsic motivation to serve, joined to your own inner transformation. We start there — practices of stillness, gratitude, and equanimity that grow the compassion this inversion actually runs on.
The space here: the pause between stimulus and response, where all our freedom lives.
If leadership leads with transaction, laddership leads with relationship.
Instead of trying to fix or teach others, this is the art of holding space for others' goodness to flourish naturally. You'll practice the craft of tending conditions rather than engineering outcomes: drawing out latent gifts, letting them circulate in a trust ecology, designing for emergence.
The space here: a circle is held by the space in between its members.
Not AI for productivity — AI for human wisdom and kinship.
Hands-on competency with frontier AI — building, prompting, orchestrating — pointed somewhere most courses never look: systems that deepen inner work, laddership, and the alleviation of suffering. Technology as infrastructure that recedes, so human coherence can deepen. You'll learn what to build with AI, and just as carefully, what not to.
The space here: the best technology is structurally essential and experientially absent.
Shunya means emptiness, zero — the empty center everything else organizes around. The fellowship trains the reflex our schools never reward: not to fill the space, but to hold it, so that something larger can emerge.
On emptinessMusic is the space between the notes. A wheel turns on the emptiness at its hub. The cosmos is almost entirely space; so, at the atomic level, are our bodies. And yet we spend our lives identifying with the non-space — the notes, the nodes, the stuff — and wondering why the music doesn't come.
Holding space looks small from the outside. A held silence in a meeting. An unclaimed credit. A question left open a beat longer than comfort allows. Small emptinesses, out of which very large things grow.
We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. — Lao Tzu
A two-month pod starting October 2026 (about 10 hours a week), a month of in-person immersion by mutual invitation, then a nine-month social-permaculture project of your own. Co-created in the spirit of the gift — no fees, sustained by those who came before, paid forward by those who come after.
The full arcA weekly curriculum with your cohort — about 10 hours a week, wherever you live. The first month builds AI fluency, hands-on. The second turns to social permaculture: Me, We, Us in practice, in circles with kindred travelers from around the world. The pilot pod gathers in Winter 2026.
A month embedded, in person, in one of our communities — living labs where these practices have been running for years, sometimes decades. Field wisdom of this kind isn't taught; it's caught. Immersion is extended where the resonance is mutual — a possibility we explore together, not a default.
Then you build your social permaculture project — in your local community, virtually, or globally. You won't build alone: a community of kindred fellows walks with you, and Shunya Labs offers common tooling so no one reinvents the infrastructure. Some projects flourish; some fold. Both teach — and both count.
Like everything in our ecosystem, the fellowship is co-created in the spirit of the gift — no fees, sustained by the generosity of those who came before, and paid forward by those who come after. What we ask instead is sincerity: show up fully, and let the journey rearrange you a little.
This is a deliberately senior fellowship: a small, curated cohort of people with real depth — years spent building, serving, or holding something that mattered. We would rather journey with five fellows ripe to contribute meaningfully than twenty-five who are merely curious.
What we look forWhat we look for is not a title but a track record of practice: sustained evidence that you've already held space for others somewhere — a community, a company, a classroom, a movement, a bedside — and a wish to do it with more skill and more depth. Mastery in at least one of the three folds, and the humility to be a beginner in the others. Curiosity about AI without being captured by it. Comfort with emergence, which is to say, with not knowing exactly where this leads.
And we look for genuine commitment. This is broadly a one-year, full-time plunge, not a course to sample: the formation months ask real presence, and the project months ask real building. If you're at a stage where you can give a year to something radical — that readiness is itself part of what we select for.
If you read the inversion above and felt something in you say finally — this is probably for you.
Duration and commitment, skills and seniority, honorarium, and what happens after you write in — the practical notes, stated without mystique.
The detailsThis is a fellowship for experienced practitioners, not a training program for those starting out. It operates at the intersection of three crucial forces — inner work: a deep desire to be the change; laddership: building human communities rooted in collective transformation; and AI fluency: using AI to build systems that foster inner work, laddership, and the alleviation of suffering.
We ask for demonstrated experience and depth in at least one of the three, and we'll help you grow in the others.
Broadly, it's a one-year, full-time commitment. During the Oct–Dec formation there is some flexibility to continue your existing engagements; beyond that, we'd expect deeper focus on your project. That said, if you're really adept and inspired, and can create significant ripples with, say, even 50% of your time, we're open on a case-by-case basis.
At the end of the year, the fellowship may be extended by a year with mutual consent — or it completes. Either way, what we know is this: it's a plunge to create something radical for an increasingly challenged world.
The year is designed to be complete in itself — a real formation, real service, real learning. Beyond it, we've watched three possibilities emerge.
Root. You stay with the work: from being held by Shunya, you grow into being held by the field itself — a seasoned ladder that others rise on.
Branch. Depending on its nature, your project may be suited to branch into an independent not-for-profit, with you as its founder.
Seed. You return to your career track, carrying what grew here into new soil. Call it a gap year — except this gap is the kind a wheel turns on.
None of these is owed, and none is prescribed. The invitation in front of you is one year, whole in itself — and a year given fully has a way of quietly re-tuning everything that comes after.
Right now, the fellowship is in its bootstrap season — it runs on the same gift logic it hopes to seed. Many fellows join self-funded, carried by their own means or their own fields. And as financial capital is offered to us for this vision, we hope to pass it through as modest monthly honoraria for sustenance. In our design, money is one stream in a much wider pie of value — the deeper aspiration is a fellowship increasingly held by its field.
Either way, don't let this decide for you. If you would need an honorarium to say yes, please tell us in your note — it helps us match arriving capital to arriving callings, and takes nothing away from your raised hand.
We are grateful for your interest. Once you write in, our team will read your note personally and be in touch within two weeks to set up a conversation.
Sure — if you feel an intuition, just share this page with them.
The fellowship's architecture — the three parties who hold it, the move from direct to indirect reciprocity, what each receives, and how it sits beside kindred efforts — lives on its own page, written for backers, host fields, and the structurally curious: The deeper design →
This isn't a competition; it's a conversation. Share a few notes below, and we'll write back to set up a time to talk. If you're in doubt about whether you "qualify" — write anyway.
Thank you for raising a hand. We'll write back soon to set up a conversation — an unhurried one, in both directions.