When Grace Meets the Machine
Part 1: Trust, Intelligence & the Feminine Wound
When Grace Meets the Machine is a two-part essay series, adapted from a talk I gave at the New Female Leaders Festival on June 20th. Part personal essay. Part philosophical invitation - I hope it will help you rethink your relationship with intelligence, ambition, and AI.
Part 1 explores the wound we all carry: how we unlearn trust, perform intelligence, and “lose ourselves” in the process.
Part 2 moves forward: into a reimagined future where feminine intelligence partners with AI, not to control or to succeed, but to amplify what matters most.
When Grace Meets the Machine
Part 1: Trust, Intelligence & the Feminine Wound
Today is my father’s birthday. This brings back memories like this one:
I was a small girl, holding what looked like a very big bike. Next to me, my dad. He ran beside me once, maybe twice. But then he let go, because he knew I'd be alright. And I rode.
Later in life, I realized that moments like these taught me to trust, and I thank my dad dearly for letting me dare and take risks.
But what I didn’t see then, was that the very same world that cheered my risk-taking as a child, would later ask me to package it as achievement. To turn play into proof. Curiosity into currency. Intelligence into identity.
In school, I learned quickly that intelligence had a form - and it wasn’t feeling, it wasn’t play. Biology, mathematics, physics, we learn it through abstraction. Especially in scientific education, abstraction is how we are being taught about the world. Not lived experience, that is unscientific. Not embodied wisdom, but externalized logic and precision are the apex of understanding.
I was good at all of it. But in my desire to fulfill the expectations of the world I forgot how to listen to the deeper questions that my soul whispered. Why am I learning this? What future could this shape? What life it could serve? What does this really mean?
Maybe you recognize this. This version of intelligence that we get taught by the world and in school... it is smart. But it is not wise. It turned me into someone high-achieving. My intelligence was my weapon. And as world rewarded it, I supercharged it.
During my twenties I had a tech startup. Me and my co-founder the only women in a building of 40 startups. We moved fast. We optimized. And from the outside it looked like we succeeded. But my body was failing. My soul became thin. And so it felt like failure.
Our mission started ethical, but lost its heartbeat in the scaling. I ignored my feminine intelligence: my rhythms, my intuition, my inner voice that kept asking: Is this what you came here for?
Eventually, I needed to let go of that company before it would burn me. That loss of identity was a true grieving process. "I think therefore I am," said Descartes. And yes, intelligence and outer success had become the measure of my self-worth, and so a large part of me died then. I forcefully went inward. I traveled around the world while I unraveled. And of course, I moved to Ibiza, because that is what you do as a spiritual seeker…
Being there, all the conditioning rose up. Mistaking inaction for weakness, I thought losing drive meant losing direction and definitely losing love and respect. But underneath all that something ancient was happening. Something alchemical. I was being re-membered.
This process of letting go of the demands of the tech world, for constant innovation, output, scale, speed, precision, progress, and financial success, was revealing both deep questions and deep pain.
The pain that had kept me from truly trusting in life and myself. The pain of forgetting how I was stepping on that bike as a kid, trusting that something would simply carry me. Not just my dad's trust in my abilities, but life's intelligence, something deeper, something I then did not yet have words for.
I underwent a healing process, and bounced towards the other end of the spectrum before I could return to the middle: from a masculine high-achiever I became an emotive mystic. People around me thought I had lost it. My parents were confronted with their own beliefs around safety in money and success, while I set out to find my own way.
By the way: even this healing was forceful. I ambitiously went to shamans, healers, and psychotherapists. I sat in ceremonies and endured the back pain of numerous 10-day Vipassana retreats.
And in that time I also learned about purpose, and that it doesn't come through force.
That purpose is not “to have a smart business idea and turn it into a unicorn company”, or even “to have a moonshot solution to one of humanity's biggest problems.” Purpose is something you don't have a say in. Something that is emerging from a deeper place.
Purpose arrives when you least ask for it. The only job you have, is to connect the dots and effectively midwife it into existence through your knowledge of the ways of the world. To give it hands and feet, relieve it from the abstract into tangible impact.
That purpose only became clear when I stopped trying to fix myself. I realized: even healing isn’t something we achieve. Life does the healing when we stop pushing and start trusting.
That’s when grace arrived. And with it, a clear direction: I was here to help shape the movement that puts AI in service of life.
Next week: When Grace meets the machine, and why feminine intelligence must lead our technological future.
