Breathwork Workshop for VC firm Data Tech Fund — Ericeira, Portugal

In April, I spent a morning with the team at Data Tech Fund — a VC firm whose people are spread across the world and come together once a year for their annual offsite. They'd been in cognitively demanding work for a few days. Vision, strategy, big-picture thinking. By the time I arrived, what they needed was the opposite of that: less thinking, more body. What we did in this annual offsite breathwork workshop This was a purely experiential, somatic breathwork session. No slides. Just an hour of slowing down and exploring what a healthy, functional breathing pattern actually feels like, and why it matters for everything from brain function to recovery to sleep. The concept I most wanted them to walk away with was interoception—your brain's ability to sense what's happening inside your body. Heart rate, breath, muscle tension, gut activity. It's a skill that's massively undervalued, especially by highly cognitive, analytical people. And it's increasingly backed by research as one of the most important capacities you can train for self-regulation, decision-making, and emotional resilience. We spent more than an hour with our eyes closed, just feeling into the breath, the nervous system, and the sensory systems. One person was genuinely surprised it had...