Creating from the source.
Giving, receiving, letting it circulate —
like living water that regenerates as it passes.
In-depth reflections on today's world — through the lens of the living. What circulates, what stagnates, what is ready to transform.
Living governance · Systemic reading · Transmission
Here, I write what forty years between finance and the living have taught me — and I offer individual systemic readings to name what repeats itself without you having chosen it, and set it back in motion.
We all build a mental map of reality. It's what orients us — or what leads us astray, when it's outdated and we forget to update it.
We are, to a large extent, a sum of habits and conditionings accumulated over time — many of which run on autopilot, never questioned.
Mine had become obsolete. Life forced me to refocus on the essential — and to redraw it from what truly moves me.
Here is my new map of the territory.
The blue Grandala is its symbol: not a destination, but a direction that lets life circulate rather than blocking it. Everyone has their own archetype, their own inspiring symbol — sometimes even unconsciously. Mine is this one. → Why the Grandala?
A compass. Not a plan. A direction carrying new meaning, new energy and enthusiasm — and clarity about what I no longer wish to feed in my life.
Giving, receiving, letting it circulate. Without extracting, without dominating, without betraying yourself — or giving up your essence out of fear of truly being seen.
Some elements may resonate for you too. It circulates freely — simply mention its author.
A starting point, not a method. I continue these explorations in Flourish & Corinne on Substack.
Forty years crossing systems — from the inside. International finance, pioneering entrepreneurship in the living world, then governance. Each stage refined the same capacity: reading patterns, naming blind spots, telling apart what accumulates from what circulates.
"True strength is not doing everything alone.
It lies in sincere connection and reciprocal support."
These aren't advice articles. They are reflections rooted in experience — on what our systems do to us, and on what the living shows us.
Reading an article about corruption in large corporations, I stumbled by chance on a name: Philippe Jaffré. CEO of Elf Aquitaine, dead of cancer at 62. It wasn't his career that stopped me. It was the age.
I found myself slipping onto ground that was draining my energy — without having chosen it, without noticing right away. The day I saw it, something was set free. Not the situation. My way of inhabiting it.
I had already succeeded, in the way the world counts success. Seventeen years in international finance, including Citigroup. Then seventeen years building Sequoia. On paper, everything was there. And yet.
For a long time I wanted concrete proof of certain things from the past that I felt without being able to put into words. It led me on a quest for external truth, since 2024.
For a long time, I believed my sufferings were only mine. Then I looked more closely at my family history. Dramas. Losses. Secrets. Deaths. Invisible loyalties, passed on unnamed, like ghosts.
There are symbols we don't choose. They choose us. In 2024, I was called toward a building. Incomprehensible at the time. It was a work by my great-grandfather on my father's side — a family, a lineage I knew almost nothing about.
People often reach out to me this way. A well-written message. Flattery about my career. Nostalgia for shared moments — even when there's been no contact for ages. Then the real request arrives. A piece of information. A contact. A diagnosis. No offer of reciprocity. No real commitment.
Every cart has a square wheel that slows our spontaneous momentum. That wheel isn't the same for everyone. That's exactly why we are mirrors for one another — and why mutual support has a value that autonomy alone never reaches.
We were raised to believe success is autonomy. Managing on your own. Depending on no one. Except that's not what nature shows. 'Every man for himself' isn't a law of nature — it's a story we were told.
Some of my exhaustion wasn't mine. It came from further back. What I learned by following the thread — about dispossession, invisible pacts, and what it costs to honor them without having chosen them.
It slipped into all my ways of functioning. It took me a long time to see it. The superwoman model was, for my generation, a conquest. But what no one said is that this model rests on an illusion: that carrying everything alone is strength.
Alice Walton could have stayed in retail. She chose to found a school of preventive and integrative medicine. What strikes me isn't the amount invested. It's the gesture. True capital isn't what you accumulate — it's what you pass on in a form that regenerates.
These reflections circulate freely.
This space shares, by starting small and concretely, what art and nature can teach us about what it means to be alive, today.
A book, a film, a debate — read or watched on your own, then shared together.
You're at a turning point — sale, succession, inheritance, transition — and you sense that what's stuck isn't in the contract, nor in the number in the account. It's older than you. A memory that isn't only yours.
That's where I come in.
I read both human systems and financial systems. Forty years between banking, business, the living world, holistic health, horses and other cultures have taught me to see where money, lineages and wounds intertwine — across four axes: body, heart, mind and spirit. Often without our knowing it.
A systemic reading means naming what repeats itself in order to set it back in motion.
Tell me in a few words what brings you here and what you're going through right now.