The Energetics of Moving Capital
By Shen Tong
Notes from a circle at the Sheen Center, Transformative Wealth NYC, Climate Week 2026, where I held the field for the room to meditate on, and contemplate, money as a form of energy we steward
Coming down from the stage
On September 24 and 25, during Climate Week, I was invited to speak at the Transformative Wealth gathering in New York: two closed-door days for family offices, foundations, impact investors and philanthropists. My session was called The Energetics of Moving Capital.
Before I said anything about money, I asked for two things.
First, I asked everyone to come forward and gather at the front.
Second, I asked the backstage crew to carry my chair down from the stage and set it on the floor. I sat at the same height as everyone else. We became an energetic circle, all at the same physical level.
That small move did most of the work. A stage says: knowledge flows one way, from up here to down there. A circle says: we are a field, and whatever moves here moves through all of us. For a talk about how energy flows, the shape of the room had to tell the truth first.
I felt the room settle. Then we began, not with ideas but with breath.
Arriving in the body
I invited everyone to feel their feet, let the chair hold them, and bring to mind one decision about money they were carrying that season: a commitment, a grant, a transfer to the next generation.
Then, simply: notice the body as you hold it. Is there tightening, in the chest, the jaw, the belly? Or openness, warmth, ease?
That sensation is information. Your spreadsheet can't see it. But your capital will carry it.
Where I speak from
I was trained in two materialisms: dialectical materialism growing up in China, then Western scientific materialism at Harvard. I studied in two PhD programs. I backed deep-science companies as a general partner at SOSV and IndieBio. By every measure that room uses, I was a credentialed rationalist.
You know PhD as Doctor of Philosophy. It also stands for Permanent Head Damage. The room laughed loudly. So I've had two “head injuries.”
What brought me back from them was not more theory. It was embodied practice: sitting, breathing, attention, and direct experiences my training had no category for. Before "I think, therefore I am," there is simply: I am.
The numbers point the same way. Our bodies are met by around a trillion bits of raw information every second. The nervous system compresses that to about eleven million. Only ten to sixty bits reach the part of us that thinks in words. (I wrote more about this in Let the Being Gnosis the Knowing.) Almost everything we know, we know below thought.
I keep what those PhD trainings gave me. I use them to say, from inside the system it certifies: rigor is not the same as reality.
Two founders, one mirror
What tuned me in so sharply to the energetics of money was a court case this year. Two founders of two of the most valuable companies on Earth faced each other, and years of their private emails became public.
In the early emails, the intention reads as genuine: build something for the public good. Then you watch the current change. Scale needs capital. Capital brings its incentives. Mission language gives way to control, to valuation, to who wins.
I didn't see villains. I saw myself, in my own journey from public movement building, into business, and then into impact investing. And I saw many of the founders I've backed over a decade at TheFutureCo, people whose wish to change the world was real, but whose good intention entered a river running the other way.
Most people in that circle had already made their money. That's why family offices exist. But the energetics don't end at the exit. How money was made (a contemplation for another day), accumulated or extracted still lives in it. And now they, we, are the ones who decide which way the river runs.
Stuck qi, and ease and grace
In Chinese medicine, illness is where qi stops moving. Not too much, not too little: stuck.
I've come to see concentrated wealth the same way. A great fortune is human and planetary energy gathered in one place: labor, land, attention, ingenuity, sometimes extraction. It didn't vanish when it became a number. It still holds its charge. And when it sits still, it does to a family what stuck energy does to a body. It tightens. It breeds fear of loss. It separates generations. It turns stewards into guards.
Stuck capital is dis-ease. Moving capital is ease and grace.
Not moved from guilt; guilt is another contraction. Moved from sufficiency. As Lewis Hyde wrote, a gift must keep moving or it stops being a gift. Capital is the same. Its health is in its circulation.
And this moment is an unusual opening. As AI and robotics take on more of the work of survival, the outside world may ask less of our attention. We are free, perhaps for the first time, to turn inward, and to move capital from our being and inner knowing, not only from the rational investment thesis.
The line I asked people to take home: money carries the state it was moved from. Fear builds walls. Ego buys visibility. Sufficiency, a nervous system actually at rest, can wait, listen, and go where it's needed rather than where it's seen.
Three currents: from, through, toward
From. Where the money came from, and the state of the person moving it. I now do diligence in two languages: the model, the team and the terms, and the body. Does it contract or open? We spent centuries calibrating our instruments and forgot that we are the instrument.
Through. The relationships it moves in, and not only with our money managers. Anonymous channels strip out care going in and feedback coming back. That's why our work is bioregional: a watershed, a coastline, a forest, with the people who will be there in fifty years, in two hundred. We listen to the land, to its sacred places, and to its peoples: the First Nations, those who came after, those arriving now.
Toward. The timeline it moves into. Most capital moves toward next quarter. Bhutan measures Gross National Happiness and keeps its forests under constitutional protection. Closer to where we sat, the Haudenosaunee, the Six Nations confederacy whose homelands span much of what is now New York State, teach that we should make decisions with the seventh generation in mind: people we will never meet. And the island beneath the Sheen Center is Lenapehoking, homeland of the Lenape. Family offices are among the few forms of capital free to choose that horizon. No one forces an exit in seven years. That freedom is a gift, and a responsibility.
Three practices for Monday
Three breaths before you sign. Notice whether you're contracted or open. If contracted, don't override it. Ask what it knows.
Ask what the money wants to become, given where it came from. Moving it well can be healing for the money, the family, and the land it came from.
Relationship before the wire. A visit to the land and the people. A meal before the term sheet.
That week the world was talking about climate: temperatures, targets, trillions. All of it matters. But the climate inside the people who move money matters too. A frightened system can't fund a regenerative world. As within, so without.
Following one dollar
We closed where we began, in the body. I asked everyone to imagine one dollar leaving their hands, and follow it: into whose hands, what place, ten years, fifty, seven generations. Who is alive because of how that dollar moved? What do they know about you?
Then: what state would you want to be in when it leaves your hands, so everything downstream carries that quality?
May what moves through us move freely. May it serve the living, and those not yet born.
After
Quite a few people came to talk with me afterwards. Among their words: “It’s meaningful work.” “I cried right at the opening meditation.” “It’s so good, finally.”
I felt the room's resonance, and I trust it began with the chair on the floor. A field is opening: the good karma of moving capital.
I came holding a mystery, not answers. I still do. But I know this much: stuck energy wants to move.
One Earth. One Humanity. The future is calling. The question is whether our capital is calm enough to hear it.