What Comes After Flourishing?
Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
Welcome to the July edition of Future Intelligence: Field Notes—a research-informed newsletter exploring how we thrive in body, mind, and the choices that shape who we become.
For the last few months this space has asked: What does it really mean to flourish?
Not just to succeed—but to feel deeply without numbing. To know with the body, not just the mind. To remember the parts of ourselves we silenced to survive.
We’ve explored purpose, the mind-body connection, microbiome health, trauma, awe, and the intelligence that lives beneath cognition.
But the truth is:
Flourishing is no longer the edge.
The edge is this question:
How far can we take this human thing?
Not just how do we heal… but, what does it mean to expand?
To repattern our nervous system. To train coherence. To build an inner world that doesn’t just survive uncertainty—but generates clarity in the midst of it.
Welcome to the next era.
The Overview Effect
In 1987, philosopher Frank White coined the term “The Overview Effect” to describe what happens when astronauts see Earth from orbit.
They witness the planet without borders. No politics. No separateness. Just one shimmering, breathing ecosystem. And it breaks something open inside them.
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell said it this way:
“You develop an instant global consciousness… an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.”
The nervous system expands. The small self dissolves. From that vantage point, you don’t just see differently—you become different.
But you don’t need to go to space to experience that shift.
That feeling of transcendence? That same sense of awe?
It’s not a metaphor.
It’s capacity—encoded in your biology, waiting to be turned back on.
Our bodies were built to enter higher clarity under pressure. To become fluent in sensation, subtlety, and signal. To recalibrate in real-time—not just survive change, but create it.
Signal Over Strategy
Let’s get specific.
When the brain and heart enter a state of physiological coherence, the autonomic nervous system stabilizes, and the body begins to entrain to more efficient, high-frequency patterns of communication. This synchronization enhances signal clarity between the heart, brain, and other organ systems—improving cognitive function, emotional regulation, and adaptive capacity.
High Heart Rate Variability (HRV) states reduce emotional reactivity and open access to intuition.
A recalibrated vagus nerve can shift your perception of time, increase relational empathy, and improve decision-making.
Your biology becomes a living altar of what’s possible. It’s how awe moves through you. It’s how clarity emerges in crisis. It’s how you become the kind of leader who doesn’t just solve problems—you alter paradigms.
Because at the highest levels of performance, leadership, and intuition—strategy is not the bottleneck.
Signal capacity is.
The Intelligence We Abandoned
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself—biologically, structurally, functionally.
It means new thoughts, new actions, new feelings literally reshape your brain. It means healing isn’t just emotional. It’s anatomical.
But neuroplasticity isn’t just a feature of the brain. It’s also how your nervous system recalibrates.
And the nervous system governs far more than stress—it governs perception, memory, immunity, relationships, emotional range and reactivity, impulse control, and your very sense of time and truth.
Let’s look at the data:
A Harvard study using fMRI showed that just 8 weeks of daily mindfulness meditation produced measurable increases in gray matter density in the prefrontal cortex (attention, executive function) and temporo-parietal junction (perspective-taking, empathy). It also decreased density in the amygdala (stress and threat response).
In a controlled study, soldiers who trained in heart rate variability biofeedback and breathing coherence techniques recovered 3x faster from stress and showed significant improvements in performance accuracy under duress—including in marksmanship and decision-making tasks.
Compassion practices increase DHEA (an anti-aging hormone) and lower cortisol.
Just 15 minutes of awe each day—from ritual, music, or nature—reduces IL-6, a biomarker for depression and chronic illness.
Neuroscience confirms what mystics have known for centuries:
In the Yoga Sutras: “Through practice and detachment, the mind can be rewired."
In Sufi poetry: “You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?”
In Gnostic texts, the body is described not as flesh to escape—but as an instrument of revelation.
Every breath, every act of noticing, every moment of awe becomes circuitry.
The brain is malleable, responsive, alive.
What You Were Actually Built For
Phil Jackson—11-time NBA champion coach—knew this.
He didn’t just train athletes for physical precision. He trained them for inner stillness.
He studied Native American traditions. Integrated Zen philosophy.
He had his players sit in silence. Breathe. Watch their thoughts. Because he knew: under pressure, the nervous system is the real game.
He taught Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant how to trust the space between action and reaction. How to source clarity—not from adrenaline, but from coherence.
He even knew how to work with Dennis Rodman—not by forcing him to fit a mold, but by recognizing his archetype and honoring him as a heyoka in Lakota Sioux tradition: the sacred contrarian, the mirror, the wild one who disrupts to awaken. Jackson understood Rodman’s spirit needed freedom and reverence—not control. And in honoring that, he unlocked one of the most unpredictable yet powerful players in the game.
His teams didn’t just play harder. They played in flow. They moved like a single organism—not from control, but from inner spaciousness.
Because when the nervous system is regulated, pattern recognition sharpens. Timing becomes intuitive. Decisions become instantaneous. Leadership becomes felt, not forced.
The Capacity You Forgot
When high achievers override the body's warning signs in service of outcomes, they confuse pressure with purpose. Adrenaline with aliveness.
Here’s the paradox: High achievers are praised for our tenacity and will—but punished by our own biology.
The body—bless it—eventually refuses to cooperate.
For some, that refusal looks like brain fog or chronic pain.
For others, it’s an autoimmune flare.
For many, it’s the slow erosion of clarity, joy, or sex drive—a dullness they can’t name.
But… neuroplasticity offers another way. A braver one.
Not through collapse. Not through hustle. But through repatterning.
From adrenaline → to clarity.
From perfectionism → to precision.
From performance → to presence.
And no, it’s not easy.
But, your biology was built for range:
To track danger in the dark and write poetry at sunrise.
To sit in silence and hear what hasn’t been spoken.
To alter your perception of time with breath.
But you can’t access any of it if your nervous system is fried. Because chronic stress doesn’t just exhaust you. It flattens your access to everything extraordinary.
Stress shuts down the prefrontal cortex—your seat of reason, foresight, empathy, and creative genius.
It dysregulates the vagus nerve—your body’s main communication highway for calm, clarity, digestion, and intuition. It shrinks your time horizon—so you start making short-term decisions that betray long-term truth.
But, when the nervous system is balanced, you don’t just feel better. You access capacities that most people call “superhuman”:
Interoception: Your body’s felt sense of internal states— improves emotional regulation and reduces cortisol.
Neuroception: Your body’s unconscious scanning for safety and threat—helps you unconsciously track safety faster than thought.
HRV: Your body’s signal of resilience—predicts peak performance.
Awe states: A vastness that softens the self—reduces inflammation and enhances meaning-making.
Presence: Mindfulness lowers CRP—C-Reactive protein, an indicator of inflammation in the body, reverses cortisol dysregulation, and slows cognitive decline.
Empathy and coherence boost DHEA, reduce IL-6, and synchronize brainwave and heart rhythm patterns between people—creating shared regulation and changing what becomes possible between humans.
You’re not just building new habits. You’re breaking neural loyalty to identities that once kept you safe.
This is nervous system recalibration.
And it’s trainable.