Corporate brain, woo-woo heart

I spent years thinking corporate structure and intuition belonged in different rooms. I’m not so sure anymore.

I spent two months in Mexico living in a tipi on the beach. There was one normal-looking wall in the whole eco-lodge, and I took all of my work calls sitting against it desperately hoping the executives on the other end couldn’t tell I was sandy and barefoot.

I was consulting remotely for biotech and pharma companies at the time when I was invited out to Chacahua to teach breathwork and yoga.

For anyone that isn’t familiar with Chacahua, it’s a tiny Afro-Mexican fishing village in Oaxaca with a population of less than 500 people. The community is so close-knit that there’s an expat who moved there years ago from Italy that built a pizza oven by hand on the beach and makes pizza for everyone on Friday nights.

There’s electricity, but no cell service (even with a local Mexican SIM card). The power can go out for days at a time. I used to pray my laptop and backup battery had enough charge to get me through my work, but somehow it always came back on just in time.

One of my clients would ask how things were in NYC.

“Yeah, it’s great. I love this city.”

I was trying very hard to keep the tipi out of the professional picture.

My extremely professional and legitimate remote office setup. Bedroom included.

I think that sums up a lot of how I spent my twenties. I had a very clear idea of how I was expected to show up to be respected in the corporate world and I nailed the perfect professional version of myself: biotech and pharma consultant, HR, operations, organizational and process design.

I was good at what I did and it felt good to be successful. I built full R&D functions from scratch. I visited one of my clients up in Boston when they only had 2 VC founders and the first technical hire, we unpacked boxes in their new lab space. I made every single hire across the company and in 4 years they made it from pre-discovery through FDA approval with 100% employee retention.

But there was also the life I was quietly building outside of work. I wasn’t looking for a new hobby or trying to keep up with wellness trends. I was working 12–14 hour days, drinking far more than I should have been, and waking up with this growing sense of unease, dread, anxiety, and hopelessness. Breathwork, yoga, and contrast therapy were the only things I had found that gave me a small pocket of relief.

My 6-8 before my 9-5

At the time, drawing a very deep line between these two people was the only thing that made sense to me. To be fair, could you imagine me bringing up energy healing in a conversation about vaccine efficacy during a global pandemic? These two versions of myself never needed to be in the same room.

Around that time though, I also started working with Bathhouse and fell in love with the concept of Aufguss. I was fascinated by the intentionality behind the music, the essential oils, the heat, the towel waving, and the cold. How all of those things could be brought together to create an experience that felt like more than just the sum of its parts individually.

I didn’t really have language for what I was interested in yet, I just knew I wanted to understand more about how and why that experience was so visceral and deeply felt. Especially why it seemed so effortless for some sauna masters to deliver the experience, but awkward and lacking the magic for others.

Then I went to a temazcal in Mexico.

I had agreed to join without really knowing what to expect. Huitzi and his family come from the Zapotec tribe, and they explained each step of the ceremony. Helping us understand the culture and meaning behind what we were being invited into as we moved through it.

The temazcal. At the time, I just knew the experience moved me. It took me a while to understand why.

When we entered the hut, we were crouched close together with the heated volcanic stones right in front of us. Huitzi poured water infused with medicinal herbs over the rocks, and the steam filled the hut almost immediately. Once the ceremony began, the entry was covered and it was pitch black. The drumming was loud. The tribal stories were visceral. At one point he passed around honey for us to rub on our bodies, and orange slices to eat.

Somewhere between the darkness, the heat, and the sound, I lost track of the space and time around me. We spent 2 hours in the temazcal, but I wouldn’t have known if it was 20 minutes or 6 hours.

When we finished, we went into the garden and lay face down in the dirt and grass. I can still remember how that felt.

What stayed with me wasn’t only the intensity of the heat. It was how much had gone into the experience before we ever entered the temazal, and how much care there was in what happened afterward. We weren’t just being taken through a sweat session. We were being invited into something that had deep meaning to the people sharing it with us.

I think that was the first time I really understood how much more there could be behind an experience that leads to the kind of transformation that really changes people.

I was talking about my newfound obsession with Aufguss and contrast therapy to a woman from Toronto while I was there. She said she knew someone building something similar who was getting ready to land in NYC. When I got back, she introduced me to Robbie Bent. We sat through one of Othership’s pre-launch nights in Flatiron, and he told me about the path that had led him there and what they were trying to build. I knew immediately that he understood the kind of experience I was still trying to put words to.

That’s been one of my favorite synchronicities in my career. I wasn’t out there trying to network or leverage anything, just genuinely excited to talk about how deeply these contrast therapy experiences could be felt. Robbie quickly became someone I really looked up to professionally, especially as I watched what he and the Othership team are building.

Shortly after returning from Mexico, I left the biotech/pharma side of my consulting work and joined Bathhouse full-time. We were going through a period of rapid growth, and I was excited by the challenge of building an HR function that could sustain that.

June 2025 we hosted the first U.S. National Aufguss competition at Bathhouse. Safe to say the obsession stuck.

In theory, I thought the jump was a clean integration of my corporate growth-strategy consulting brain and my woo-woo heart that wanted to create these transformative and visceral experiences.

There was a second layer of integration I didn’t expect though. The more time I spent around wellness businesses, the more I started hearing some version of the same concern:

“We don’t want to become too corporate.”

“We don’t want a ton of bloated layers of process and policy.”

“We don’t want HR coming in and changing the culture.”

“We don’t want to lose the magic.”

And the funny thing is, I understood exactly what they meant. I didn’t want that for them either. I had spent years unknowingly chasing the feeling these founders were trying to protect. The thing that makes one sauna round feel completely different from another. The thing that made me lie face-down in the dirt after a temazcal and still remember exactly how the ground felt years later. I knew that something could be operationally sound and still feel completely lifeless.

But the more I looked back at the experiences that have stayed with me the most, the harder it became to ignore something else: none of them were actually unstructured.

The temazcal certainly wasn’t. So many tiny decisions had been made before I ever stepped inside that hut. We knew enough about what we were entering to feel comfortable participating in something that wasn’t ours. The cultural education didn’t feel like an orientation we had to sit through before the “real” experience; it made the experience richer. The herbs had been planted intentionally by Huitzi and his family, and we were invited to help gather them before the ceremony. The sequence, symbolism, and meaning were understood. There was enough preparation to make joining strangers feel natural, and enough care afterward to give everyone space to come back to themselves in their own way.

It wasn’t powerful because nobody had designed it. It was powerful because so much had been designed with care that the structure almost disappeared into the experience.

That changed the question for me, and led me to look at internal People and Ops structure the same way.

I don’t think the problem is structure. I think the problem is structure that has no relationship to the experience the business is trying to protect.

Wellness businesses don’t need to borrow layers of corporate machinery just because they’re growing. But growth does eventually ask a business to become more explicit about how it works. Things that once lived naturally between a founder and five people have to somehow survive fifty people, another manager, another location, more guests, more decisions, and more distance from the person who originally knew how everything was supposed to feel.

If you refuse to build structure because you’re afraid of losing the magic, structure doesn’t simply disappear. The structure will build itself. In workarounds, in unwritten rules, in a founder who has a hard time taking vacation, in the team member who answers everyone’s questions because they’ve been around the longest and “just get it.” In all of the tiny intricacies, exceptions, and ways of working that need to be verbally taught, observed, and relearned every time someone new joins.

And if the magic can only be recreated when the founder, the original team, or the one person who just gets it is in the room, I’m not sure you’ve actually protected it.

I think there is a version of growth where the point of infrastructure isn’t to make the business feel more corporate. It’s to understand what the business is actually trying to protect, and then make it strong enough to preserve those things without requiring the same handful of people to personally hold everything together forever.

That’s the space I’ve become obsessed with. It’s also the question sitting underneath a lot of my work with Groundwork: how do you give a business enough structure to hold itself without squeezing out the strange, human, hard-to-measure things that made people feel the experience and care about it in the first place?

I have a lot to say about where I think that balance lives. This is just the story behind how I started looking for it.

Somewhere between an empty biotech lab, a tipi on a beach, a two-hour sweat ceremony in Oaxaca, and a sauna in New York City, the two versions of myself I had worked so hard to keep in separate rooms finally started talking to each other. Turns out they were trying to solve the same problem all along.