Learning to Receive: Humility, Burning Man, and the Spaces Between Us with Lorenz Sell – Walk Talk Listen (Episode 222)

2025-12-17

In this episode of Walk Talk Listen, Maurice Bloem is joined by Lorenz Sell, co-founder of Sutra, for a reflective conversation about humility, receiving, and what it means to create spaces—both digital and human—where genuine connection can emerge. Lorenz shares how experiences such as Burning Man became unexpected teachers in his life, challenging deeply ingrained habits of control, self-sufficiency, and productivity. In those liminal spaces, where usual social scripts fall away, he began to notice how difficult it can ...

In this episode of Walk Talk Listen, Maurice Bloem is joined by Lorenz Sell, co-founder of Sutra, for a reflective conversation about humility, receiving, and what it means to create spaces—both digital and human—where genuine connection can emerge.

Lorenz shares how experiences such as Burning Man became unexpected teachers in his life, challenging deeply ingrained habits of control, self-sufficiency, and productivity. In those liminal spaces, where usual social scripts fall away, he began to notice how difficult it can be—not to give, but to receive. Receiving attention, support, care, and presence requires a different posture: one rooted in humility.

The conversation weaves together Lorenz’s background in technology and engineering with his growing attention to inner development and relational practice. Rather than seeing technology as neutral or inevitable, he reflects on how digital environments quietly shape our behavior, our pace, and our ability to listen to one another. Designing spaces, he suggests, is always also designing relationships.

Throughout the episode, humility is not framed as self-effacement, but as openness: a willingness to be changed by others and by experience. Receiving becomes an active practice—one that makes mutuality possible and allows communities of learning to form over time.

This conversation is an invitation to slow down, to notice where we resist receiving, and to consider how the spaces we create—online and offline—can support deeper presence, trust, and shared becoming. And it also reminded me that receiving is not something we do once we understand—it’s something we practice by listening a little longer.

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