- #AcreditoEmJornadas
- Posts
- WHAT WORD IS GUIDING YOUR JOURNEY?
WHAT WORD IS GUIDING YOUR JOURNEY?
Global Oracle of Words Project | Awakening and connecting protagonists
Paula Costa
12 de junho de 2025
[PT NOTE BEFORE ENGLISH REPORT] Please, use o tradutor do navegador para ler este conteúdo traduzido; vou gostar de ouvir as suas impressões sobre essa experiência!
We, Amánda Efthimiou and Paula Costa, are mentors and researchers of regenerative economies, working at the intersection of language, presence, and transformation through awakened integration and protagonism. Our collaboration began in Tangier and continues to grow through the Global Oracle of Words project.
We are currently guided by the words "AMA" and "CORAGEM”, beautifully illustrated below by Karen Suehiro:
 AMA by Karen Suehiro |  CORAGEM by Karen Suehiro |
“AMA” in Brazilian Portuguese most commonly means “the act of loving”. Here, “AMA” can be understood as an acronym integrating the words “love”, “magic” and “alchemy” (LMA).
“CORAGEM” translade to “Courage” in English, comes from the Latin word “cor”, meaning “heart”. Courage is the ability to listen to your heart in order to act in alignment and integrity with one’s truth. It’s not the absence of fear, but the willingness to be present and move forward despite it.
FROM THESE WORDS, WE ARE CO-CREATING THE GLOBAL ORACLE OF WORDS
The Global Oracle of Words is a regenerative research project. Our goal is to awaken and connect the voices of protagonists — individuals and communities shaping their own narratives.
This project was first seeded during last year's House of Beautiful Business gathering in Tangier. This year, we returned for the PolyOpportunity to take the next step: activating the project through direct engagement.
We invited participants into the Oracle Lab, guiding them through reflective experiences, conversations, and tactile practices designed to help them uncover the word currently guiding their journey. These encounters brought the project to life, deepening the original intention and rooting it in lived, diverse experience.
A COMMUNITY BEGINS WITH PROTAGONISTS
In Portuguese, the word “protagonismo” means more than just being a main character. It reflects the choice to take authorship of one’s own life and to step into presence, responsibility, and action. And we believe that communities emerge from protagonists around the world contributing courageously to the things they care about.
From our experience, one of the core intentions uniting the House of Beautiful Business community is the desire to integrate the personal and the professional.
When we bring our full selves, our dreams, skills, and contradictions into our work, we activate this deeper sense of protagonismo. This kind of presence is essential for building regenerative ecosystems. Without it, community becomes conformity. With it, we create cultures of belonging rooted in truth.
THE COURAGE TO RETURN
House of Beautiful Business gatherings happen in different parts of the world each year. This year, the core meeting returned to Tangier, offering the chance to go deeper with the local community.
Returning to the same place, when novelty often seems more desirable, was a courageous act. But that is exactly what regenerative work asks of us: not chasing novelty, but returning with depth and fresh eyes.
What else might we create, discover, or reimagine in what we already have in our relationships, at home, in the places we work, and within the larger ecosystem?
SPACES THAT INVITE DEPTH
This idea of returning resonated in the way we connected: through long tables, intimate food gatherings, and dialogues that welcomed discomfort. Alongside these, there were music performances, collective readings, co-created art, and spontaneous storytelling circles.
These moments reminded us that regeneration starts with relational depth. Real intimacy requires slowing down, showing up, and staying curious.
EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
Beyond food, sensory practices like movement, creativity, and ritual opening & closing sessions were core to the weekend.
The embodied experiences served as platforms for not only dialogue but also deep and truly regenerative connections with ourselves and others.
It was powerful to witness people awakening their own regenerative protagonism through creative workshops and artistic experiences offered by members of our global community.
FOCUS
This year, the more structured sessions took place in the iconic Cinémathèque de Tanger. The dark room and spotlight allowed for a kind of focused presence we don’t often get. Topics like spirituality — still taboo in many work and policy spaces — were held with seriousness and care.
THE POWER OF WORDS
On the final day, the audience was invited on stage. As decentralization is a central pillar of regenerative economies, the audience arrived not as performers but as participants in meaning-making. Each person offered a word to guide their next chapter.
And just minutes before this concluding moment, in a spontaneous gesture, we drew a single card from our “Oráculo das Palavras” deck that we had been using with people throughout the weekend. We chose one card among thirty-six to represent the collective energy of the group. The word? Coragem. Courage.
 Paula Costa and Amánda Efthimiou |
To hear over a hundred people softly speaking this word in Brazilian Portuguese, many for the first time, was a moment of linguistic and emotional alignment. Words, when shared with intention, open something within us — individually and collectively — that invites connection, clarity, and courage.
Insights to deepen your protagonism within the spaces you care about:
We are shaped by what we consume, and what consumes us. Nourishment is multidimensional.
There is beauty in structure and resilience in flow; we need both.
Words evolve. They can - and should - be redefined.
Belonging begins with vulnerability. Intimacy grows through authenticity.
Resilience helps us move through the discomfort of building real connection in systems not designed for it. Evolution requires rupture, and rupture isn’t painless.
Honoring and sharing your culture and story is an act of regeneration.
Deep, co-created dialogue sustains collaboration that is long-term, diverse, and rooted in mutual care.
New languages and models of connection emerge in trans-rational spaces. Silence is one of those languages that facilitates all the others.
Asking, receiving, and serving reconnect us to the alchemical nature of creation.
Spirituality becomes tangible when we integrate both the agency to lead and the humility to be part of something greater. Yes, spirituality is officially on the table!
We are the emotional, nervous, and spiritual systems of AI. Technology reflects what we integrate and then makes visible our collective (integrated) intelligences.
Reprogramming physical and digital architectures can accelerate relationship-centered communities.
Rituals are to time what homes are to space: they hold, reveal, and protect what matters.
Leadership and creativity aren’t about fixing something as in forms of control; they’re facilitating our protagonism with care and empathy.
True learning begins when we embrace agency — not as authority over others, but as authorship of self.
Last words from some of the voices of the House that inspired us:
Bayo Akomolafe, transhumanist philosopher:
“We’re not as put together as we think we are. Stay with the trouble. Systems learn from cracks… We need a different kind of politics, not premised on individual or identity, that knows how to pay attention to those places where systems are churning or breaking open.”
Anna Harutyunyan, AI researcher, Google DeepMind:
“We are the nervous system of AI. But what state is our nervous system in? Intelligence flows through us. Earth-based and ancestral wisdoms never left — they’ve been waiting at the margins. The work is not engineering, it’s midwifery.”
Laura Peña Zanatta, Rituals researcher:
“Rituals are to time what homes are to space. Through repetition, we stabilize. Even brushing teeth is a ritual. When we don’t tend to endings, we carry ghosts. If we can’t feel our pain, we can’t feel the world’s pain. That’s when we mistake fixing for caring.”
Tim Leberecht, Co-Founder The House of Beautiful Business:
“Presence is a physical phenomenon. To be truly open and alert, your mind and body must occupy the same space. To be present is to exist in the here and now, to 'live in the moment’, as the adage goes. Research has shown that live performances can synchronize the pulses of people in the audience, so that hundreds of hearts literally beat together. Other studies have shown that audiences tend to breathe in unison when they’re moved by what they're watching or listening to; they even experience goosebumps and shivers at the same time. We all know what it’s like to sense an entire room hold their breath at the same climactic moment, the thrill of exhaling in a great communal huff. There’s something spiritual in these occurrences, as though each life is touched differently by the same all-powerful hand.
Bruno Giussani, International Curator of TED:
“Great things don’t come out of ease; they come out of friction. Live events require that you get there; for some people that means traveling a great distance and, perhaps, saving up to afford the trip. Then there is the friction and discomfort of sitting in a room with strangers, possibly in a place you don’t know, where you don’t speak the local language. All these are powerful factors in putting you into a position of openness and acceptance. (…) presence allows for something else: serendipity.”
João Sevilhano, Writer & Linguist:
“In English, we pay attention. In French, we make it. In German, we gift it. In Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, we lend it, as though attention is something that can be used and then duly returned. In Finnish, attention is gathered or added, like a spice that seasons perception. It’s a broad linguistic trend that begs a couple of questions: Are we using this resource efficiently? Are we paying attention to what we should be? (…) The poet J.D. McCatchy wrote: “Love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”. We need to draw on that love, rediscovering the joy of sustained attention (…) We need to find pleasure in the process of deep focus and contemplation.”
WHAT WORD IS GUIDING YOUR JOURNEY RIGHT NOW?
Synchronicitei by Tomas Van Cleynenbreugel
Before we say goodbye — and in the spirit of serendipity, as Bruno Giussani reminded us — we’d love to share one of the first words from the Global Oracle of Words, a living project we’re co-creating. The word and question was written by Tomas Van Cleynenbreugel, from Mechelen (Belgium):
SYNCHRONICITEIT
How do you combine heaven and earth in the lived experience?
Language
Dutch
Translation
Synchronicity
