Deaccumulation Lab
with Miki Kashtan
with Miki Kashtan
Deaccumulation Lab
Experiments in Deaccumulation to Restore Flow and Trust in Life
Coaching and Support Calls with Miki Kashtan
Are you deeply aware of individual and collective patterns of consumption and accumulation and the threat they pose to our interdependent web of life on Earth?
Are you longing for support and practices to exit these patterns?
Are you ready to experiment with restoring trust in life and flow alongside others?
If so, the Deaccumulation Lab may be a powerful next step for you.
We experiment together because we have a deep conviction that it’s entirely possible to realign humanity with life and to restore and expand the ancient practices of using only what we need. By using no more and no less than what we need, we support all life on Earth to thrive within interdependent flows.
We maintain this conviction despite living in unprecedented levels of scarcity, separation, and powerlessness; despite seeing around us a spiraling degradation of our planetary life support systems and our human systems; and despite being deeply embedded within the pervasive presence of the accumulation and exchange paradigm.
Weaving this vision into being will take some of us modeling what is possible for humans. Our part of it looks like individuals and communities dedicated to transforming the deep-seated habits of our current systems into the life-aligned pathways of our livable future. And it will take us functioning in deep trust, intimacy, loving truth-speaking, and mutual care.
The purpose of the Deaccumulation Lab is to deepen our collective understanding about how to restore trust in life through experimenting with practices for deaccumulation within community.
We are doing this because we believe that realigning humanity with life invites us to rethink our deepest habits of how we relate to financial resources, so we can restore the flow of life that cares for all that lives.
The lab is designed around individual coaching. Miki offers coaching to folks who have committed to being part of this experimentation and meet the following criteria:
They self-identify as having more financial resources than they need.
They are willing to be coached.
They are willing to be witnessed by others who register for the lab.
This means that all learning is likely to be live, emergent, and dialogical.
For more information on why we are focusing on deaccumulation, especially in relation to financial resources, see the end of this page along with links for further learning.
We invite you to sign up as an active witness, with the understanding you will be joining in order to observe and energetically support a small group of people fully committed to receive coaching by Miki as they experiment with money deaccumulation practices. Based on experiences with other labs and knowing that our liberation is connected to one another, we are confident that this will support learning and integration for you.
Given the level of commitment and vulnerability that those being coached have accepted, we request all others joining to commit to showing up as regularly as possible.
At the end of each trimester, we intend to evaluate and adjust the experimentation based on what we learn. This includes opening up, again, the possibility of new people joining the core group that is in the primary experiment.
One session per month during four months
Each session runs for 2.5 hours
Basic structure:
Coming together to review purpose and connect (about 20 mins)
Focused coaching by Miki with one or two people from the group (about an hour or more),
Break and small group practice and mutual support (30 mins),
Q&A (until the two and half hour mark)
We are all coming into this without knowing how to make deaccumulation possible and entirely voluntary at the scale necessary for life to continue. This is an experiment and we are coming into it with humility, questions, and faith, not with much experience and knowledge.
Some questions are for those of us holding the lab and anyone else who longs to learn how to support others in the sacred work of deaccumulation:
People with access to financial resources are often judged and othered in many circles. What do we need to reach an embodied understanding of the immense inner and outer constraints that people with some access to resources face, which only grows the more access to resources anyone has?
How do we transform any judgments we have so we can sustain sufficient deep compassion for everyone in order to be of active service?
How do we grapple with the immense gap between current reality and vision sufficiently to be able to support creativity in relation to deaccumulation pathways?
How do we support everyone – those with access to wealth and those who struggle to get their most basic needs met – to restore the ancient practices of sharing resources such that everyone’s needs are met? What can support all of us to develop the perspective taking towards everyone that Ramadan aims to instill through fasting and remembering the experience of hunger?
Some questions are for those of us who are coming because we want to learn how to shift our own relationship to the resources we have and for those of us who want to offer support:
Many of us carry shame in relation to how much access to resources we have – both when we do and when we don’t have access. What forms of ongoing and tailored support can move us towards and through discomfort on the way to fuller freedom?
How do we learn enough to be able to lean on the systemic lens for understanding the impacts on each of us regardless of how much access to resources we have?
How do we find life-trusting discernment about next steps towards our vision even when we struggle to actually trust in life?
How does deepening the practice of generosity support shifting from scarcity to flow?
What can support us in connecting with and mourning our experiences of loss of trust in life, in each other, and in ourselves, as a doorway to transforming patterns of accumulation
What support structures are needed to begin and stay the course with a journey that very few take and for which there are almost no models?
What can we learn about our own next steps from witnessing one another’s challenges and celebrating each other’s baby steps to increase collective capacity to attend to needs
How do we find a deep and authentic sense of enoughness when everything around us calls for more and more?
How does connecting with vision support us in grounding in our longing for realigning with life?
How do we work out what to do with resources that we release to make a meaningful impact when everyone else and the systems around us continue to function in accumulation and exchange?
Each of us is born with a biological trust that others will orient to us and care for our needs simply because we are alive and have needs. When our needs are cared for sufficiently, we find, over time, our own natural desire to contribute to others, with no conditions and no expectations, and to keep receiving, unconditionally. This is what it means for humans to be what Genevieve Vaughan calls “a mothering species.”
Several thousand years ago, in some parts of the world, our collective trust in life was disrupted, initially through immense and sudden physical challenges, and, over time, through invasions and the establishment of states, markets, slavery, money, and debt. This meant deep loss of trust – in life, in each other, and ultimately in ourselves, leading us from flow to scarcity, from togetherness to separation, and from choice to powerlessness. Within the resulting patriarchal societies, we lost our capacity to collaborate in order to share resources based on needs and replaced it with accumulation, exchange, control, and deep mistrust. Along the way, we also lost our capacity to know what we need and to only use what’s available to care for that. This is part of why, within globalized capitalist societies, accumulation knows no endpoint and so many of us are always sensing a need for “more” – well beyond what we actually need to live and thrive within communities of care. More and more of us know that accumulation removes resources from circulation and leaves less for others, which simultaneously creates artificial surplus and manufactured scarcity.
We are putting together the Deaccumulation Lab because we believe that realigning humanity with life invites us to rethink our deepest habits of how we relate to resources, so we can restore the flow of life that cares for all that lives.
This lab is offered fully as a gift and everyone is welcome to join without any expectation of giving us money. Simultaneously, we invite everyone who registers for any NGL event to consider offering us a financial gift in support of the sustainability needs of those who gift their energy and skills to steward all that happens within NGL.
This is part of our overall gift economy approach emerging from our deep commitment to restoring flow for all - we want the gifts within this course to flow to where they are needed and we want to have gifts flowing towards us, often not from the same people, so that we can continue to experiment within NGL and offer what we offer to others.
With all this, we are asking you to consider if giving a gift to support our sustainability makes sense for you. If yes, to support you to discern an amount to give, we invite you to think of an amount that is at the intersection of your willingness and your capacity to give – the maximum you can give without overstretching or resentment.
There is no expectation or requirement that anyone give any specific amount, including choosing to join without giving any financial gift
Sessions at 19.00 - 21.30 CET
May 24th, 2025 (local time)
June 21st, 2025 (local time)
July 5th, 2025 (local time)
August 2nd, 2025 (local time)
Here are additional articles, videos, and resources you may find supportive in your journey to learn more about this work.
Here are some learning packets relevant to resource flow:
Here are some blog posts (in reverse date of publication, easier to retrieve this way)
From Exchange to Gifting Part One: Why We Need to Find Our Way out of Scarcity
From Exchange to Gifting Part Two: Beyond the Exchange/Gift Binary
From Exchange to Gifting Part Three: Reintegrating into Flow One Experiment at a Time
Apart and Together: Addressing Needs beyond Market Economies
Matching Resources to Needs: Learning to Receive through Participating in “Money Piles”
The Impossible Will Take a Little While – Experiments in Gift Economy (Part I)
The Impossible Will Take a Little While – Experiments in Gift Economy (Part II)
Here are a couple of articles:
From Ability to Willingness: Freeing Socialism from Its Patriarchal Roots [very similar to the previous one, which was edited from this one for a different purpose]
Here are some recordings:
For a few years, Miki was holding monthly calls on the topic of Questioning Money and those recordings (audio only) are still available.
The Case for a Gift Economy was a podcast (audio only) interview Miki had with Eric Torenberger in April 2019.
Miki was interviewed as part of The Work that Reconnects Webinar Series on the topic of the Maternal Gift Economy took place in January 2024.
Living a Gift Economy within an Exchange World, a live talk in Tamera in 2022, including slides which can be found here.
And finally, Wisdom Tales from the Future is a synopsis for a film about how people address common human challenges in a future world that sees to the needs of the entire web of life based on the stories in Miki’s book Reweaving Our Human Fabric, which contains twelve such stories.