The Shunya Fellowship · Pilot Cohort · Winter 2026
Three months of formation, a two-month pod and a month
of immersion in India, then nine months of peer support
as you build a project of your own.
Most of the world trains you to be the clock.
This fellowship forms you to be the beam.
A small, carefully gathered cohort of seasoned practitioners
A weekly module for head, hands and heart, and a 90-minute Sunday call with the cohort, facilitators and guests. 10+ hours/week.
Over a month of exciting local circles and retreats, customize a plan that works best for you. Flights, lodging and meals are covered.
As you build the project, and the project builds you, the cohort friendship and peer support deepens through monthly check-in calls.
To apply, share your deep dive and we'll follow up to set a time to talk.
That's the outline. The rest of the page is about why.
Our economy privatizes benefit and socializes cost, and AI, left to that logic, will run it faster. This fellowship forms people who move the opposite way: contributors who regenerate the commons of the collective heart, the way a mother does, a teacher does, a forest does.
The full storyThe dominant logic of our economy runs one way: capture the gains for yourself, and let the costs (ecological, social, attentional) drift out onto everyone else. Privatize benefit, socialize cost. Every extractive system on earth is a variation on that theme.
This fellowship is built on the opposite movement: to show up as a contributor. To regenerate the commons of the collective heart without seeking to capture the gains. That inversion cannot be engineered by policy or prompt. It requires an actual growth in compassion: a heart spacious enough to give freely, without needing to be seen giving.
In 1656, the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens hung two pendulum clocks from a wooden beam laid across two chairs. Within half an hour, the pendulums synchronized. He disturbed them; they found each other again. The coupling ran through the beam, which did not tick, did not keep time, did not draw the eye. It merely absorbed vibrations too subtle to see, and let two things find a shared rhythm they could never have found alone.
Most training makes you a better clock: sharper answers, louder ticking. We are looking for people who want to become the beam for their families, their teams, their neighborhoods, their fields. The beam does its quiet job, and the whole room comes into rhythm. That is the service this fellowship prepares you for.
The journey works on three nested levels at once: inner conditions, laddership, and AI fluency. That is, the person, the relationships, and the systems we're all now inside of. A fellow who carries only the tools is a consultant; a fellow who carries all three is a ladder.
The three foldsEach fold has its own craft, and each is a way of finding value in space.
"The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener."
This is the fulcrum on which the fellowship rests: the intrinsic motivation to serve, joined to your own inner transformation. We start there, with practices of stillness, gratitude, and equanimity that grow the compassion this inversion runs on.
The space here: the pause between stimulus and response, where all our freedom lives.
If leadership leads with transaction, laddership leads with relationship.
Instead of trying to fix or teach others, this is the art of holding space for others' goodness to flourish naturally. You'll practice the craft of tending conditions rather than engineering outcomes: drawing out latent gifts, letting them circulate in a trust ecology, designing for emergence.
The space here: a circle is held by the space in between its members.
Not AI for productivity — AI for human wisdom and kinship.
Hands-on competency with frontier AI (building, prompting, orchestrating), pointed somewhere most courses never look: systems that deepen inner work, laddership, and the alleviation of suffering. Technology as infrastructure that recedes, so human coherence can deepen. You'll learn what to build with AI, and just as carefully, what not to.
The space here: the best technology is structurally essential and experientially absent.
Shunya means emptiness, zero: the empty center everything else organizes around. The fellowship trains the reflex our schools never reward: not to fill the space, but to hold it, so that something larger can emerge.
On emptinessMusic is the space between the notes. A wheel turns on the emptiness at its hub. The cosmos is almost entirely space; so, at the atomic level, are our bodies. And yet we spend our lives identifying with the non-space (the notes, the nodes, the stuff) and wondering why the music doesn't come.
Holding space looks small from the outside. A held silence in a meeting. An unclaimed credit. A question left open a beat longer than comfort allows. Small emptinesses, out of which very large things grow.
We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. — Lao Tzu
The fellowship itself is three months: a two-month pod starting October 2026 (10+ hours a week, alongside your own project work), then a month of in-person immersion in India, with lodging, food and travel within India covered (and airfare where a fellow needs it). What follows is nine months of peer support as you build a social-permaculture project of your own. Co-created in the spirit of the gift: no fees, sustained by those who came before, paid forward by those who come after.
The full arcA weekly curriculum with your cohort: 10+ hours a week, wherever you live, in addition to the work on your own project that continues alongside. Each week brings an online module engaging head, hands and heart, and closes with a 90-minute Sunday call with fellows, facilitators, and the occasional guest. The first month leans toward AI fluency, hands-on, and the second toward social permaculture: Me, We, Us in practice, in circles with kindred travelers from around the world. The pilot pod gathers in Winter 2026.
A month embedded, in person, in one of our communities, living labs where these practices have been running for years, sometimes decades. Field wisdom of this kind isn't taught; it's caught. The immersion is a core part of the fellowship, and our investment in you: travel (flights to and from India included), lodging and food are covered, and what it asks is your time. We highly recommend the core week when the whole cohort is together, and welcome as much of the surrounding month as you can join; we work out the window with you. The winter immersion, and what it holds for a fellow →
Then you build your social permaculture project, in your local community, virtually, or globally. The formal fellowship completes with the three months; what continues for nine more is peer support. You won't build alone: the cohort keeps walking with you at a lighter rhythm, with a monthly call where fellows learn from and support each other, and Shunya Labs offers common tooling so no one reinvents the infrastructure. Some projects flourish and some fold, and we've found both have a lot to teach.
The dates, the Sunday call times, the December month day by day, and the practical questions are all on the year ahead →
Like everything in our ecosystem, the fellowship is co-created in the spirit of the gift: no fees, sustained by the generosity of those who came before, and paid forward by those who come after. What we ask instead is sincerity: show up fully, and let the journey rearrange you a little.
This is a deliberately senior fellowship: a small, curated cohort of people with real depth: years spent building, serving, or holding something that mattered. We would rather journey with five fellows ripe to contribute meaningfully than twenty-five who are merely curious.
What we look forWe look for five threads, in some combination. This isn't a checklist to satisfy in full. Most fellows will be strong in two or three and still learning the rest, and that mix is the point of a cohort.
A living practice, not a credential: meditation, prayer, contemplation, yoga, or a tradition of your own that shapes how you move through the world.
Leading with relationships, not transactions. An instinct to gather, to hold a circle, to let trust do the slow work that no framework can do faster.
A real curiosity about what these new tools are for: a pull toward learning where AI might serve human flourishing, and just as importantly, where it shouldn't.
Volunteering as a way of being, not an occasional act. A history of showing up where nobody is keeping score.
A project, existing or imagined, that you'd carry through the nine months after the pod. This is a project-oriented fellowship, so an intention here matters a lot to us. Bringing social permaculture to an existing project, or joining one of ServiceSpace's, both count.
What we look for is not a title but a track record of practice: sustained evidence that you've already held space for others somewhere, whether a community, a company, a classroom, a movement or a bedside, and a wish to do it with more skill and more depth. Mastery in at least one of the three folds, and the humility to be a beginner in the others. Curiosity about AI without being captured by it. Comfort with emergence, which is to say, with not knowing exactly where this leads.
We also look for commitment. This is a plunge, not a course to sample: the three formation months ask for presence, 10+ hours a week on top of your own project, and the nine months of peer support that follow ask for steady building. If you're at a stage where you can give yourself to something radical this year, that readiness is itself part of what we select for.
One more note: this is our first cohort. Through ServiceSpace and its kindred communities, we've been holding this kind of work (inner growth, outer service, and technology in between) for more than two decades; this is the first time we're holding it as a fellowship. So whoever joins will be shaping it with us, for the many who might come after.
If you read the inversion above and felt something in you say finally, that recognition matters more to us than any single thread above. When in doubt, write in.
Duration and commitment, skills and seniority, money, and what happens after you write in.
The detailsThis is a fellowship for experienced practitioners, not a training program for those starting out. It operates at the intersection of three forces: inner work, a deep desire to be the change; laddership, building human communities rooted in collective transformation; and AI fluency, using AI to build systems that foster inner work, laddership, and the alleviation of suffering.
We ask for demonstrated experience and depth in at least one of the three, and we'll help you grow in the others.
The fellowship itself is three months: the two-month pod (October–November 2026), which asks 10+ hours a week in addition to your own project work, and a month of in-person immersion in India in December (one core week we highly recommend for everyone, and as much of the surrounding month as you can), with lodging, food and travel within India covered, and airfare where a fellow needs it. After that, the cohort stays with you as peer support for nine months, January to September 2027, while you build your project; its exact rhythm we'll shape together at the end of the formation months, once we know what's landing.
How much of that project year you give is yours to shape. Many fellows will give it the better part of their time; if you're adept and inspired and can create significant ripples with, say, 50% of your time, that works too. At the end of the arc, the peer support may continue with mutual consent, or it completes. Either way, we think of it as a plunge more than a program: a year to create something new for a world that could use it.
The arc of three months of formation and nine of peer-supported building is designed to be complete in itself, with its own formation, service and learning. Beyond it, we've watched three possibilities emerge.
Root. You stay with the work: from being held by Shunya, you grow into being held by the field itself, a seasoned ladder that others rise on.
Branch. Depending on its nature, your project may be suited to branch into an independent not-for-profit, with you as its founder.
Seed. You return to your career track, carrying what grew here into new soil. Call it a gap year, of the kind a wheel turns on.
None of these is owed, and none is prescribed. The invitation in front of you is whole in itself: three months given fully, and a project built in good company. In our experience, that tends to shape whatever comes after.
The fellowship is offered as a gift: the two-month online pod, and the month in India with stays, meals and travel within India covered, plus an economy flight if you need one.
When we first shared the fellowship, we were exploring a small honorarium for fellows who might need extra support during the building months. This first cohort is bootstrapped, though, so we won't be able to offer financial support directly. Separately, our fiscal sponsor, The Pollination Project, will offer fellows a way to apply for a one-time microgrant of $1,000–2,000 toward their project, reviewed through its own process. It's modest, and not everyone who applies will receive one, but if it would be meaningful for your work, you're welcome to apply. We'll share the details in the new year. Future cohorts may look different, depending on what emerges.
Most of what this fellowship offers isn't money: the time of many volunteers, a small circle walking together, and homes that open to you in India. If going without financial support makes taking part infeasible for you right now, we honor that completely, and we'd love to welcome you in a future cohort.
We've kept the path short on purpose, because a cohort this small comes together through relationship, not paperwork. There are three steps, and we read and reply personally at each one.
The deep dive. One written form, and a short video if you like, about you and your work, your project, and the practicalities of the year. It's fuller than a first note on purpose; we'd rather meet you in your own words. The deep dive →
A conversation. We write back within two weeks to set up one call, about 75 minutes, with two or three of us. It's less an interview than a chance for both sides to sense the fit and ask each other honest questions. It's also where we talk through your window for December, so it helps to read the year ahead before we talk.
A mutual yes. After the conversation we write back, usually within two weeks. If it feels like a fit on both sides, both sides confirm.
Each cohort is a small, intentional circle of around ten people from different countries, fields and stages of life. What they share is a curiosity about their own transformation and a wish to serve something larger than themselves.
There's a shared path of readings, practices and calls, but much of the learning happens between fellows: honest conversations, questions held together, reflection. We never quite know what a cohort will become. That's part of what keeps it alive.
Less experts giving answers, more experienced companions walking alongside you, asking good questions, and helping you hear your own wisdom more clearly. It comes in layers: the fellows themselves, guides who bring relevant experience, and regular one-on-one and group calls to reflect, ask and be supported along the way.
The fellowship grows out of ServiceSpace, a field shaped over 25 years by thousands of volunteers exploring what becomes possible through service. As a fellow you can draw on it: its stories and people, projects like DailyGood, KindSpring, Karma Kitchen and Awakin Circles, and a network across many fields and countries that continues well beyond the fellowship.
And the flow goes both ways. Your questions, experiments and learnings become part of that field too, for those who come after you.
Sure. If you feel an intuition, just share this page with them.
The fellowship's architecture has its own page, written for backers, host fields, and the structurally curious. It covers the three parties who hold it, the move from direct to indirect reciprocity, what each receives, and how it sits beside kindred efforts: The deeper design →
It's more a conversation than a competition. There is one form. It's a fuller one on purpose, because we'd rather meet you in your own words than in a checklist. Take your time with it; we read every one personally, and write back to set up a call. If you're in doubt about whether you "qualify," write anyway.
Write to usRather say hello first, before the fuller form? A short note through our contact page is welcome too.