Expression of interest

June 2026: The Neurobiology of Connection & the Autonomic and Social Cartography of Genius

Transformational Retreat June 8-June 12, 2026

Near Siena, Tuscany, Italy

In this 5-day depth transformational retreat, we will host a space for exploring the neurobiology of connection and the AUTONOMIC & social cartography of evoking genius.

Gabriel will teach the neurobiology of connection, scaffolded on The Neurobiology of Connection and its associated Foundation Model of Autonomics. Based on 30 years of research, crowd-sourced with more than 15,000 participants in 50 countries, co-created with input from more than 100 advisors in 25 disciplines of wellbeing across 24 cultures (many of them Indigenous), including a dozen of the world’s leading experts in connection and wellbeing, the Foundation Model unites the cutting-edges of autonomic physiology, neurochemistry, and ancestral lifeways into a living map of embodied autonomic states. Fluency in this map teaches humans how to locate themselves in the foundation layer of physiology that governs visceral state, sense of self, emotions, cognitions, the way we perceive the world around us, and the behavioral repertoires available to us. It teaches us how to transform from living in defensive states (fight, flight, appease, freeze, shutdown), which are necessarily pathogenic, into connection states that are salugenic (e.g., health-creating.)

Part of our co-inquiry will be based on the five doorways to enduring wellbeing articulated in the book: Safety to connection to interoception to intuition to relatedness.

The other element of this retreat is an exploration of the social cartography of genius. The Florentine Renaissance saw a very unusual, yet replicable collision of forces that led to the explosion of collective genius, and re-wrote the history of the modern world.

During a period of less than one hundred years, a centered strangely around what seems to be a single bookseller, under the patronage of the Medicis, there was an explosion of trans-disciplinary learning that transformed the humanities, art, architecture, medicine, and physics, the likes of which have not been replicated since.

Join Gabriel in the Tuscan countryside for a deep-dive into The Neurobiology of Connection and an inquiry into the social architecture of genius.

At a practical level we are asking the question- what is the algorithm for inducing the kind of accelerated trans-disciplinary explosion of innovation that happened during the Florentine Renaissance?

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This training will host a small number of people from around the world who wish to come into circle to deep-dive into these themes. If you would care to join us, please detail below the nature of your interest.

If we are interested in having you join us, we will follow up with an interview.

Expression of interest