Intro
Alex Carabi, a coach, therapist and facilitator of family constellations, talks through how he left business consulting, what constellation work showed him about inherited family dynamics, and how he coaches leaders to stop trying to make things run smoothly. William Oliver brings his own history with psychedelics, Eastern philosophy and the Seva Foundation board to it.
Guest: Alex Carabi, coach, therapist, author of On Relationality, and facilitator of constellations; runs a small farm and retreat center in northern Sweden
Host: William Oliver
Published: 28 August 2026 on The Art of Quality
Episode page | 1 hr 4 min
Key Takeaways
Take yourself far less seriously and life far more seriously
"it's helpful to take oneself way less seriously. And simultaneously to take life way more seriously" — Carabi
The labels a personality test hands you are useful until you attach to them
Humor is not a tool, it is a solvent for whatever has gone rigid
"humor and lightness is somewhat of a lubricant" — Carabi
Stuckness from trauma looks the same either way: frozenness, rigidity, no movement
Comfort for its own sake is the thing to be suspicious of
"we're not here to be comfortable" — a teacher of Carabi's, quoted by him
Most opinions are preferences with evidence marshalled behind them, per the host
A "needs inventory" is usually a list of how other people have to behave for you to be okay
Development is a move from ego to soul, with ego meaning the separate self, not the selfish one
What gets excluded is what keeps a person or a culture stuck
The Sami in Sweden; a grandfather Carabi never met who was a medic in the Philippines
Carabi left consulting because his body would not let him stay
"my body didn't relent and I eventually heard the call"
A constellation with two strangers holding unread slips of paper produced an alcoholic father and his abused son
Prayer differs from Western meditation by being relational rather than solitary
"it cannot be overstated the importance of that shift" — Carabi
The stance is not to object to what is happening
"Whatever I'm experiencing is for my development" — Carabi
A leader's job is not smooth running
"You're a leader to help evolution happen" — Carabi
The integrated leader is the most surrendered one, not the one who decides
Carabi tracks the pride that comes with being annoyed, and measures himself by how fast he gets back to a smile
Where the Humor Comes From
Oliver opens by asking where Carabi's streak of laughter comes from, given how intense the work he does is. Carabi's first answer is a joke: he says he does not laugh that much with other people, and "I think it's all about you."
The real answer is a pair of opposite moves. "it's helpful to take oneself way less seriously. And simultaneously to take life way more seriously"
What gets taken less seriously is pride, identification, preference — "anything that smacks of ego and the limited defense mechanism constrained consciousness"
He is explicit that this is not about pushing your own intuitions and desires down
Personality tests and similar exercises produce labels that describe us, and Carabi says they can be helpful for some things — the problem starts when you latch onto them.
What is left when the labels go is far less than people assume. "letting go of much of that as possible and simply being the flow, being who one is in that moment without any grasping for any labels or things to compensate for"
The counterweight to the lightness is a sense of scale: "the profoundity of the experience of life and what a treasure, what a gift it is"
The question Carabi says drives him is "what is this," said three ways. The first is curiosity about life itself; the second is aimed at what is hard, difficult and tragic; the third is "an intonation of wow like what is this?"
Serious Is a Funny Word
Oliver's own story about the word. He sat on Ram Dass's Seva Foundation board alongside a room of very accomplished people, and one of the board members was a clown called Wavy Gravy who owned a pair of clown glasses. Anyone who used the word serious in a board meeting had to put on "the serious glasses."
Carabi answers with an old Latin expression he glosses as "Play seriously" — a phrase he says has all sorts of facets and can be helpful or unhelpful.
Humor's function in developmental work is mechanical, not decorative. "humor and lightness is somewhat of a lubricant. It helps things to move"
Stuckness, whether from trauma or other forms of fragmentation, is characterized by a lack of movement — frozenness and rigidity
Carabi points to Iain McGilchrist's work: "the left hemisphere of our brains tend to fix things into place", and humor disrupts that mode of attention
He is careful that the laughter is not a technique. It is what feels like an appropriate response in the moment, and it can let someone see their own gravity in a different light.
Oliver offers a mechanism for it: "There's a thesis that laughter is a reward mechanism for a shift in perspective." He says he has experienced Carabi's laughter in quote unquote serious situations and found it subversive as well as welcome — "It feels like a way to get closer to the edge of what is real."
Comfort, and Staying This Side of the Edge
Carabi relays what a teacher once told him: "we're not here to be comfortable." Oliver's response is to bargain for five minutes a day.
The distinction Carabi draws is between inner ease and comfort-seeking. Space, nourishment, pleasure and feeling at ease in oneself are all wonderful things in his account.
What he objects to is "the comfort of staying this side of the edge, the comfort of holding oneself back" — and the comfort of not doing what Martin Buber described as going out with one's whole being.
He declines to make it a moral point. That kind of comfort can be understood, he says; it is just "probably not a path to be sought" in terms of fulfillment and joy.
Preferences Disguised as Opinions
Oliver's confession is that most of what he calls opinions are preferences in costume. He describes his own "very diligent efforts to marshall all manner of evidence around my preferences", and says a good joke sees straight through that.
He wonders aloud what would happen if people walked into rooms and announced their preferences instead of their opinions
Carabi's reply is that any way of seeing through the illusions is worth having, and he offers a daily practice: notice every preference across a day — what you want to eat, do and say — and ask where each one is coming from.
The test is whether a want is a deep expression of intuition, or a compensation mechanism leaned on so long it now feels like a need
The word "need" gets the sharpest treatment in the episode. Expressing your needs in relationship is, as Carabi puts it, quite trendy and all the rage.
Oliver plays the coach asking for it — "Give me your inventory" — and Carabi lands the line: it is "actually code for inventory of how I quote unquote need you to be for me to be okay."
Extended outward, that becomes how I need the president of the United States to be for me to feel okay. If a person is genuinely okay with themselves, Carabi says, how anyone else is "doesn't cause a ripple in the pond of one's attention", which leaves a clean choice: continue this, change this, leave this, or admit you don't know yet.
From Ego to Soul
Carabi frames the whole developmental arc as "this movement from you might summarize it as moving from ego to soul." He takes the phrase from Chris Bache's book LSD and the Mind of the Universe, which he calls a fantastic read on human development and spiritual unfolding whatever your stance on psychedelic substances.
Ego here does not mean the selfish part of a person. For Carabi it is the separate sense of self that learned to make its way through the world and built an identity out of it — "This separate sense of self who lives in this isolated skin encapsulated experience."
Soul is the deeper, more timeless part underneath those separative notions, and getting in touch with it is what he calls the mystic path.
Oliver's counter-history is a decade of trying to destroy his ego. He liked the message of Ryan Holiday's Ego Is the Enemy, and between that, extensive psychedelic experimentation and a falling in love with Eastern philosophy, he spent years trying to crush and banish the ego — which led to what he describes as ridiculous behavioral patterns and more than enough comedy.
He asks whether the ego might instead have a legitimate role: rendering it transparent to deeper forces rather than expunging it, including it in the experience without being lost in it.
Why Exclusion Keeps Things Stuck
Carabi answers with the constellations idea of inclusion, which he says is not unique to constellations — any healing or developmental work touches something like it.
Difficulty comes from excluding. A person going through something they do not want to feel can dissociate into the mind, suppress, go numb, or otherwise separate from the experience.
The exclusion also happens at the scale of a culture. Carabi lives in Sweden and grew up there from the age of 12, and points to how far the Sami have been pushed into the hinterland over the last couple of hundred years, physically and metaphorically. "I don't remember a single lesson in school around the history of the Sami people and their experience"
His personal example is a grandfather he never met. The man died of a stroke before Carabi was born; Carabi knew he had various entrepreneurial experiences and that he was a medic in the Philippines in the Second World War, and it stayed a factoid until somewhere between the ages of 25 and 30, when "a two-dimensional fact became a three-dimensional experience."
Exclusion is not a defect. "Excluding keeps things fixed and at a distance, which is fine. We need to do that. That's a very necessary mechanism for survival." Children take on a great deal of overwhelm and exclude most of it; developmental work later builds the capacity to feel it.
On whether the ego is permanent, Carabi will not concede it. "I see a future where a human being can be alive without ego. It's not a metaphysical necessity to experience life." In today's day and age, he adds, you would struggle without it.
Leaving Consulting Because His Body Would Not Relent
Asked what experiences showed him a deeper way of living was possible, Carabi opens with two disclaimers — the list is very long, and the journey is not complete.
He spent his formative years of adulthood in business consulting and left through what he calls forced self inquiry. "my body and emotions told me I needed to cast my place in life in a different light"
It took heartache, body ache and mind ache before he reached the conclusion that "I was called to something different in life"
The hard part was identity, not logistics. The question he could not get past was who he would be if he was not working as X, in that place, at that salary, and what that meant for his sense of worth.
"I'm very grateful that my body didn't relent and I eventually heard the call" — and he moved into one-on-one developmental work as a coach and therapist.
What Actually Happens in a Constellation
Constellations were developed, or as Carabi says discovered, by Bert Hellinger, a German man who worked across family systems therapy and psychodrama and spent time with the Zulu in Africa. The method surfaces hidden, unspoken dynamics in a system — usually a family, but also an organization, a partnership or a cultural dynamic.
Carabi's first exposure was in a gazebo in Marin County, at a constellation convened by a facilitator and teacher he names as Carl Bukhite.
A client wanted to explore a dynamic in their life; about 20 people sat in a circle knowing nothing about the client or the question
The facilitator wrote roles on slips of paper, two volunteers pocketed them without reading them, and the constellation began
What the two representatives did, not knowing what they represented: one walked around in a stupor claiming to feel hung over and exhausted, as though he had been partying all night; the other curled up in a ball in a corner, hiding from him. The client then revealed the situation — "an alcoholic father and his abused son."
This is the moment Carabi's interest in philosophy stopped being theoretical. "holy moly, we have access to all of this information all of the time and yet we don't know it cognitively"
The dynamics the work surfaces are inherited. Carabi calls it something very dear but very tragic that "children tend to do is to try and take on their parents' pain for them" — no dear mother, I see how much pain you are in, I'll take that for you.
"we inherit and take on these legacy burdens", and the work is to identify them and slowly dissolve them
He now facilitates constellations himself.
Teachers, and Clearing Out the Cobwebs
The teachers Carabi names are Thomas Hübl, Patrick Connor and Leslie Temple-Thurston.
What he says they share is a refusal to separate psychological repair from spiritual practice. Uncovering and dissolving inner fragmentation and defense mechanisms is, in his account, crucial to the spiritual path, and doing one without the other is challenging at best and problematic at worst.
The metaphor is plumbing. Clearing out the cobwebs of self-protection means "the more space there is to tune into" intuition or higher intelligence — "the clearer the pipe is, you could say, to just let love, intelligence, intuition flow."
Carabi's framing of where thought comes from inverts the usual one: "We think we create information in our brains. But it's much more that we're receiving and tuning in."
Prayer, Asking, and a Different Kind of Intelligence
Oliver sets up the question by naming what our culture counts as intelligence: propositional knowledge, the capacity to manipulate and articulate propositions, and the capacity to "weaponize language."
Carabi's way in is a phrase he attributes only to some important book somewhere — "ask and you shall receive" — and says taking it literally has been transformative in his own practice.
His diagnosis of Western meditation is that it is a solitary affair. People come to it for stress relief, for focus and productivity, or to experience life at a deeper level, and it is usually presented as working toward a state of no thinking — either way it is you alone with your thoughts.
The religious traditions talk about prayer instead, and prayer is relational. Supplication, thanksgiving, even meditative prayer all place you with your experience in the context of something far greater. "Now that might seem like a small shift, but it's it cannot be overstated the importance of that shift."
He immediately qualifies the spatial language. Western languages are built on a subject-object distinction, so receiving sounds like something arriving from outside — but the tuning in happens inside. He cites the Dao De Jing: "I look inside myself and see."
The second move is "asking to be shown what I need to be shown", which he concedes will sound to some people like complete mumbo jumbo nonsense.
Oliver pushes back, comically and then not. "You mean I don't have to do all that work? All these decades I've put into thinking so hard." Carabi agrees it is genuinely difficult, because it means surrendering an identity built on fixing things, moving them forward and being the source of your own experience.
What gets revealed does not arrive as an answer popping into your head. It might show up as a challenging emotion or sensation that was not there before, and be revealed in time.
Carabi's evidence is the constellation room: "the people who need to be there are there. And what happens in a constellation is what needs to happen in a constellation." He extends it to the internet dropping out on a Zoom constellation exactly when someone does not want to hear something — "What needs to happen is always happening."
Not Objecting to Your Experience
The final component Carabi offers is a stance toward life. "Whatever is happening in this moment is how it should be."
It does not mean agreeing, and it does not mean wanting the suffering in yourself or around you, and it does not mean avoiding the pain of the world
"It simply means not objecting to one's experience of life"
The stronger version is that what happens is for you. "Whatever I'm experiencing is for my development. Every moment, every challenge, it's not an error or a fault that I need to push away or fix."
Living this way, he says, means you are not separate, not on your own, and not fighting against what you come across.
Asked what that state is like, Carabi picks "Way more neutral, which is, could say, one of the more boring words in our vocabulary" — and Oliver takes the opening: come hang out with Alex and become more neutral and laugh about your neutrality.
Oliver connects it to the Zen-master parable retold in the film Charlie Wilson's War — the boy breaks his leg, the master says we'll see if this is good or bad, then the army shows up — and says he hears a wait-and-see quality in Carabi's position, a resisting of the temptation to collapse reality into good or bad, disaster or bounty.
Oliver also resists the word neutral as a description of Carabi's actual presence, and lands on defining neutrality as the capacity to work with what is here without collapsing into I'm for this or I'm against this — not as being less decisive.
Triggers on a Farm in Northern Sweden
Carabi refuses the enlightened-guru framing outright. "I make no claims for everlasting joy. That could be just because I'm not there yet." He says he lives, like everyone, with triggers left, right and center.
Alongside the coaching, therapy and facilitation he runs a small farm and retreat center in northern Sweden, and has a three-year-old son, a partner, neighbors and family — which he calls a very meaningful life and an occasionally very triggering one, where you get drawn out of presence and react far out of proportion.
The examples are deliberately unglamorous. He was emptying urine tanks the other day because the toilets were smelling; a couple of weeks earlier a guest called and the water was not working because the wells had dried up; and a three-year-old is a never-ending way of throwing wrenches into the day's plans.
The point is not to stop fixing things. Of course you try to fix the water, he says. What dissolves is the resistance, the objection and the pressure that mounts in the body and mind — and then "it becomes way more fun, way more interesting and way less of a necessity to have to push against them."
"Fascinating" Instead of a Problem
Carabi recounts a talk by Jim Snabe, who he says was CEO of SAP for a while, about people arriving in his office with a complaint or a problem.
The shift came when Snabe stopped colluding with the notion of problem and "he instead met the other person with the response" with a single word: "Fascinating."
The practical version for leaders is a change in what a team is for. Carabi coaches leaders out of seeing employees as the people who should make things run smoothly and into seeing them as a constant source of evolution and stimulation.
"it's very easy for people in leadership positions to want others to be different than they are" — the alternative is meeting people where they are, with the leader's job being "to help people to grow, help people to evolve and in that process to help myself evolve."
Set up that way, a complaint arriving at your door can be met with "wonder and fascination", which Carabi notes is more colorful than neutrality — and which, like neutrality, contains no repulsion to the situation.
Oliver names this as the shared interest at the center of their friendship, and says dropping the idea that leadership is about making things run smoothly looks to him like the drive of an unintegrated ego structure.
What Changes for a Leader Who Does the Work
Carabi's example is a client who was afraid at work and stopped managing his life around avoiding it. Instead of steering clear of situations that scared him, the client started actually feeling the emotions and sensations of fear.
Two weeks later the payoff showed up somewhere else entirely. The client's son had severe nightmares and would come to him at night, and the father's old response had been to tell him there was nothing to worry about and he did not need to be scared.
Carabi's read is that those apparently loving words dismiss and reject the child's fear
What the client said instead: "Oh, wow. I see that you're really scared. Come here. I got you. It's okay. I got you. It's okay to be scared."
"they have a way of spreading to other parts of life through osmosis" — Carabi's claim is that a practice applied in one domain does not stay there.
The second change he sees is a stronger sense of mission alongside a much smaller sense of self-importance.
The definition of leadership he ends on inverts the usual one. "a leader in my mind is not the one who decides. The leader at least an integrated leader who's living from soul is the most surrendered one."
The surrendered leader is the one listening most deeply and asking what do you want done with us, show me the way for all of us
Ego, identity and status drain away, while the sense of why this organization exists and why they are leading it gets stronger — not as a defined answer, but as a felt direction
The call is explicitly temporary: "I might not be here forever. It's not about being here forever, but I'm called to this now. And as long as I'm called to this, I'm devoted to it."
The Dao De Jing on the Source of Power
Carabi reads aloud from John Heider's adaptation of a page of the Dao De Jing, on the source of power.
The passage argues that natural events are potent because they act in accordance with how things work, and it points the reader at the light in the sky, the gravity of earth, the emptiness of space, the fullness of life and the behavior of saints.
The inversion in the middle is what makes it land: imagine those processes as neurotic and self-centered — a lazy sky flickers, gravity varies from moment to moment, space is agitated, the saints are worthless models, and "Nothing works."
The conclusion Carabi reads out: "Potency comes from knowing what is happening and acting accordingly. Paradoxically, freedom comes from obedience to the natural order."
"Since all creation is a whole, separateness is an illusion. Like it or not, we are team players. Power comes through cooperation, independence through service and greater self through selflessness."
Oliver's response is a comparison. He says the potency in that passage is far more interesting than the potency most leaders and most people in the business world swim in, which he calls much shallower and "neurotic actually."
Obedience, Adventure and the Fear of What Is Left
Carabi picks out freedom and obedience as one of the paradoxes the passage is filled with, and says how tightly the two are linked.
Giving yourself to life does not create the adventure, it stops you fighting it. From a fragmented, egoic place, he says, "you try and control your way out of the adventure or through the adventure, my way or the highway."
Obedience here is not to arbitrary rules and laws but "obedient to what wants to flow through oneself." He does not promise it gets easier — every time you step up in your evolution you confront what needs confronting — but "It's a lot more fun."
Oliver asks what obedience is subversive to, and answers himself: the personality structure, the story of who I am and what I am good at and what I like, all of which he says is born out of a mistrust of life. He credits the untangling he has directly experienced in constellations work with Carabi as essential to loosening it.
The fear he names is what will be left at the end of the path. "the idea of deadwood burning is great. Like, that sounds beautiful, and maybe it's an ego story that there'll be nothing left."
Carabi's answer is a line he heard once: "the ego is allergic to anything smelling of the soul." Oliver: "It's holding on for dear life." Carabi: "And it comes up with all sorts of wonderful reasons why."
The Pride of Being Annoyed
The mechanism Carabi says he most enjoys tracking in himself is the pride that comes with anger. "when I'm angry or annoyed, like I really want to hold on to it because it somehow gives me a sense of strength and almost this twisted sense of pride" — give up the annoyance and he would somehow be less, or weaker.
He borrows Jim Dethmer and colleagues' term for the triggered state: below the line.
What below the line looks like from inside: "we're stressed we're in the drama triangle of victim hero villain. Our body feels tight and constrained. Our focus is very narrow. We see threat everywhere."
Seeing the state for what it is, rather than as the whole truth, is what loosens the grip. Carabi's own test is physical and unmistakable: "If I can narrow the gap between trigger and returning to a loving smile, I know I'm doing something right."
The ambition is measured in seconds. Shaving off a couple of seconds or minutes is enough to say the trend is right, and Oliver adopts it on the spot as a worthy ambition — closing the gap between the trigger and the awareness of the cosmic joke and absurdity of life as a human being.
Carabi's last word is "it's nice to find the wiggle room. No, just keep on wiggling."
Carabi's bottom line is that development is a matter of excluding less and objecting less — to your own history, to the people in front of you, and to whatever the day hands you — and that a leader who does that stops trying to run things smoothly and starts listening for what the system is asking of them.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
SAP (Jim Snabe, who Carabi says was CEO for a while, stopped colluding with the word problem and started answering complaints with "Fascinating")
Seva Foundation (Ram Dass's foundation, whose board kept a pair of clown glasses that anyone using the word serious had to put on)
Zoom (Carabi's example of intelligence at play: the connection drops out exactly when someone does not want to hear something)
Carabi's farm and retreat center in northern Sweden (Where the urine tanks, the dried-up wells and the three-year-old supply the triggers he says the practice is actually for)
Books & Resources Mentioned
On Relationality – Alex Carabi (Oliver introduces it as a beautiful book, and Carabi as its author)
LSD and the Mind of the Universe – Chris Bache (Where Carabi found the phrase "moving from ego to soul"; he calls it a fantastic read on human development whatever your stance on psychedelics)
Ego Is the Enemy – Ryan Holiday (Oliver's own years of trying to crush and banish the ego, which he now reads as a mistake)
Dao De Jing, in John Heider's adaptation (Carabi reads the page on the source of power aloud: "Power comes through cooperation, independence through service and greater self through selflessness")
The work of Iain McGilchrist (Carabi's source for the left hemisphere fixing things into place, which humor disrupts)
Jim Dethmer and colleagues' "below the line" (The vocabulary Carabi uses for the triggered state: drama triangle, tight body, narrow focus, threat everywhere)
Charlie Wilson's War (Oliver invokes the Zen-master "we'll see" parable from the film as the wait-and-see quality he hears in Carabi)
Bert Hellinger's constellations (The modality Carabi practices, developed by a German man who worked across family systems therapy and psychodrama)
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