What a couple dozen people in Morocco taught us about awe (and why we've been thinking about it wrong)

You’ve just had an extraordinary experience at a gathering. Maybe it was a powerful workshop, a profound conversation, a moment in a truly wild place. As you leave, there’s an almost automatic expectation: How will I integrate this? What learnings will I take back? How will this shift the way I talk to my colleagues, approach my work, and live my daily life?

This expectation runs so deep that we’ve built our work around it. For years, we’ve been supporting communities in awe-based changemaking, advocating for the connection between awe and impact, and designing scaffolding that helps people move from profound moments to meaningful engagement with the world’s challenges. We believed (and still think) that awe can be a powerful catalyst for positive change.

But there’s a difference between “awe to action” and “awe in action.” Two little letters that mean a lot.

“Awe to action” implies a linear pathway: take the profound moment, extract insights, convert them into behaviors, measure the impact. It’s transactional. Awe becomes a tool for producing change.

“Awe in action” recognizes something different: awe already at work, present in the unfolding, resistant to being instrumentalized. It’s about witnessing transformation as it happens, not forcing it toward predetermined outcomes.

This insight emerged powerfully through our collaboration with House of Beautiful Business. Together, we turned their “Between the Two of Us” gathering in Tangier, Morocco, into a research partnership, tracking how a randomized group of participants processed profound experiences before, during, and months after the event.

Consider this: You’re swimming in the ocean and encounter a sea turtle. The experience stops time. Suddenly, life feels different. You’ve never thought about the creatures in the ocean this way before. It feels alive, interconnected, vast beyond your previous understanding of life on this planet.

But it’s also a total mixed bag. The experience surfaces fears about the future of species, including our own. It makes you feel uncertain, small, even scared in the face of this planet’s complexity and fragility.

You return to your job the next day and might instinctively research ways to weave this newfound awareness into your daily routine, to integrate these insights into actionable steps. That response isn’t wrong, and it might even lead to important changes.

But something else has happened that resists such integration: there’s now another version of you that exists. A version whose mindset doesn’t quite fit with the person sitting at your desk, attending your meetings, and living your previous assumptions. And maybe that misfit, that dissonance, is precisely the point.

When psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt first mapped the terrain of awe in their landmark 2003 research, they identified two core components that distinguish awe from other emotions:

Perceived Vastness – encountering something much larger in scale, complexity, or magnitude than ourselves.

Need for Accommodation – the recognition that this vast stimulus cannot be squeezed into our existing mental models. It requires us to literally restructure our cognitive frameworks to make room for new understanding.

This second component is crucial. Awe, by its very nature, breaks our current containers of meaning. It doesn't just add to what we know; it challenges the very architecture of how we know.

Integrating an experience is of a different flavor to accommodating an experience. The distinction shapes how we approach transformational experiences and, ultimately, whether we honor or diminish their power.

Integration implies synthesis, coherence, unity. It suggests taking something new and weaving it into existing structures until it becomes part of a cohesive whole. Integration asks: “How will you make this fit?”

Accommodation, by contrast, honors plurality and contradiction. It acknowledges that what just occurred may not fit within current structures. An ‘aha’ moment can serve as a new architect creating an ecosystem of new understanding, not to override what was previously there, but to create a new level of apartment blocks in the building of your mind. Accommodation asks: “What kind of room do you need now?”

Let’s get technical for a moment. Using an adapted version of the Awe Experience Scale, we conducted focus group interviews at three key stages: one month before, one week after, and 5-6 months after the gathering. What emerged challenged our assumptions about how transformation works.

Four main pathways to awe appeared consistently: moral beauty (witnessing acts of genuine kindness and courage), nature (proximity to the ocean and orange trees), collective effervescence (shared moments of heightened energy), and art and music (experiences that bridge the seen and felt).

But participants didn’t experience clean, integrated insights. Instead, they held contradictory experiences simultaneously: feeling both hopeful about transformation and deeply concerned about systemic challenges; experiencing profound connection while also confronting isolation; gaining clarity on purpose while feeling more uncertain about action.

Our most important finding centered on how the space to metabolize awe is often lost in the over-programming of events and gatherings. Through our observations in Tangier, we documented where the most profound shifts actually happened: not during structured sessions, but in the liminal spaces.

Conversations under orange trees. Silent moments watching sunsets over the Mediterranean. Spontaneous collage-making where participants could “find a childlike wonder state” rather than staying trapped in intellectual processing.

The accommodation process recognizes that transformation doesn’t always look like productivity gains or immediate behavior change. Sometimes it looks like learning to live with beautiful contradictions. Sometimes it looks like developing the capacity to hold uncertainty. Sometimes the most profound shift is simply becoming someone who can see what they previously couldn’t see… even if they don’t yet know what to do with that new view.

In a culture obsessed with optimization and immediate application, accommodation offers a different wisdom: some of the most profound changes happen not when we integrate experiences, but when we let them rearrange the very rooms of our being.

The question isn’t “How will you use this awe?” but “How are you learning to live in the room awe has opened?”

Our new report, created in partnership with House of Beautiful Business, documents not just the immediate impacts of awe experiences, but the longer arc of how people learn to accommodate new ways of seeing and being in the world. It explores what accomodating for ‘new rooms’ might look like, spaces where transformation can unfold at its own pace, without pressure to immediately produce measurable outcomes.

With kindness and curiosity,

Laura

Download the guide

This report is available, for free, thanks to our partners and friends at House of Beautiful Business (who are also entirely responsible for making the report look as beautiful as it does!) and Faraway Projects.

Thank you to the invaluable contributions of Eeshta Malhotra and Elaine Kasket, as well as the honesty and willingness of our focus group participants who shared their experiences so generously. Thank you!