Beyond Scale

One of the things I thought about a long time ago, when I started practicing dharma, was: does it scale?

I didn’t realize then how much my mind had been colonized by what has become the default question for nearly everything in today’s society—businesses, nonprofits, wellness regimes, spiritual pursuits, technology products, financial gambits. Does it scale? might be an appropriate question for software, but it’s probably the wrong approach to the human heart and its potential for transformation.

There are things whose value increases with scale, and others whose value diminishes—or even becomes inaccessible—when embiggening is the objective. Healing and growth fall in the second category. They don’t take root because someone reaches ten thousand followers or millions of users. They often unfold through one heart opening up to another, perhaps as a first step in opening to oneself. The ripple effects of such connections can be profound, even life-changing, whether or not they can ever be quantified.

For example, if a single individual interrupts multigenerational trauma and heals from its cumulative effects, imagine what might flow from that—even if they never have children. Think about all the uncountable ways a life is connected: friendships, workplaces, neighborhoods, even everyday transactions. How many conflicts never arise? How much fear never gets projected? How many people experience, even fleetingly, a greater sense of safety in their own nervous system simply by coming into contact with someone who embodies that groundedness. 

The point isn’t to become some kind of saintly figure. It’s that people transformed at the heart level create different worlds around themselves by virtue of their authentic being.

We live in an era of self-improvement and nonstop promotion of wellness that’s only an app away. Whether it’s squeezing every last drop of productivity out of therapy—for the client or the provider—or the countless meditation and somatic experiencing apps, AI chatbots, and pressures to compete, the assumption is that transformation is primarily a problem of optimization, distribution, and efficiency.

Many of the tools are genuinely useful. App-based guided meditations can help people soothe their overtaxed nervous systems while helping to establish routine. A YouTube yoga nidra body scan at bedtime can be deeply restorative. Even an AI conversation might help somebody organize thoughts that are difficult to express.

The missing ingredient in deeper transformation is the heart connection. Technology can help facilitate such encounters—Zoom is a bigger part of my life now than during the pandemic—but caring presence that allows someone to discover their own capacity for healing is something uniquely human, and cannot be replicated by technology.

That kind of transformation can occur when an individual is welcomed and witnessed beyond judgment—not trying to fix, optimize, or alter them; not selling them anything; not rushing; not evaluating every claim. Just basic presence. Accepting what’s there from a place of loving acceptance. Perhaps modeling what real groundedness and security feel like through genuine caring and friendship.

That can’t be reduced to a stream of information. Technology can broaden access to provisional tools for self-soothing and interoception, but love beyond judgment is not governed by the metrics we apply to products, platforms, or markets. No venture capitalist can fund it. No system of measurement can capture or contain it. Yet everything depends on it, including society itself.

So the question is not so much does it scale? but what emerges organically when we’re awakened to our own loving heart?

Its unfolding may be exponential and its influence beyond measure. Capacities for connection become more clearly available and unobstructed. Like everything else, such transformations occur relationally, spread relationally, and their fruit is known relationally. There’s no way to isolate any single factor.

None of this can be accounted for in a ledger or uploaded as training data. But it can be accessed in any moment. And it often spreads through the most ordinary and simple human encounters. I know this because I’ve experienced it, and I’ve delighted in others’ experience of it.

And so, I’m no longer concerned about whether anything scales. The reality of transformation is more than sufficient. In fact, it’s literally everything.