Meet Ari
Ari Nazem
Apprentice to John & Nicole Churchill | Medicine Dharma Facilitator-in-Training | MetaShamanic Practitioner
Since childhood, Ari has been guided by a central inquiry: how might we relate to ourselves, each other, and the world in regenerative ways that support the thriving and evolution of all beings over all time? In other words, how might we live well? Raised in Silicon Valley yet educated through extensive world travel—visiting more than a hundred countries by the age of fifteen—he grew up with an intuitive sense of the vastness of our planetary inheritance and the fragility of its current moment.
His first answers took the form of technology and leadership. By the age of twenty, he had founded four startups—two that thrived, two that didn’t—and served three years as Class President at Stanford. There, he dove into philosophy through the Structured Liberal Education program, design thinking in close collaboration with professors at the d.school, and a doctoral-level study of Kashmir Shaivism and Vajrayana Buddhism. By the end of his four-year journey, he dropped out, recognizing that our global challenges could not be resolved by repairing broken systems alone. The deeper work lay in evolving our faulty maps of reality—the hidden generator functions—that give rise to those systems in the first place.
In response, he set out to create the Ancestor System, a framework born from years of interdisciplinary inquiry into the nature of reality. To shape it, Ari undertook a shamanic apprenticeship with the spirit of the medicine mushroom, immersed himself in intensive contemplative practice, engaged in psychodynamic healing to clean up his perspective, and pursued wide-ranging intellectual study. The resulting map weaves together our evolutionary history, psychological developmental potentials, and a novel archetypal type system—offering a way to understand how the human body-mind has evolved through time, where we are now, and how new cultural possibilities might emerge. He prototyped and refined this story-as-operating-system by iteratively using it to guide a men’s group of around ten peers on a multi-year initiatory journey, with Burning Man as the yearly rite of passage.
Today, Ari apprentices with Dr. John & Nicole Churchill, studies in the Banyan cohort, supports the sangha as a member of the operations team and also as a facilitator-in-training for Medicine Dharma. Interweaving with his work at PD, he sustains an apprenticeship with the notorious trickster-sage Layman Pascal in evolving shamanic psychotechnologies for the Metamodern age. Ari’s life is dedicated to the emergence of a planetary wisdom civilization, and he hopes to raise his future children in a prototype community gesturing towards it. He lives in Boulder, Colorado with his lady Gabi and their ever-growing menagerie of animals.