The Loving Challenger
What Happens When an Enneagram 8 Stops Fighting Everything
There’s a moment in this conversation with Carissa Karban where she says her challenger energy used to show up like a sword, and now it’s more like a scalpel. If you’ve ever met an unconscious Eight — or been one — you felt that in your chest. Because the difference between those two things isn’t just personality growth. It’s the difference between walking into every room expecting a war and actually being able to show up for the people in it.
Carissa is a facilitator of embodied awakening, shadow work practitioner, and co-founder of Astrapuffs — a cozy, AI-powered gaming platform that she’s building smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. Which means she’s holding two worlds at once that most people wouldn’t even think to put in the same sentence: feminine embodiment and the gaming industry. She doesn’t dress it up. She spent years deep in her masculine, burning herself out, getting feedback that she was aggressive and controlling, and — here’s the part worth sitting with — she was. Her words. She owns it. And she also knows that she wasn’t doing it out of malice. She was doing what the culture rewarded, especially for women who wanted to be taken seriously.
What shifted wasn’t some clean awakening moment. It was pain. It was looking around and noticing the harm she was creating for herself and others, and getting genuinely curious about why. An oracle deck from a friend. The Enneagram. Carl Jung. Somatic work. IFS. A slow realization that her body wasn’t a machine to optimize — it was a partner with actual information in it. The feminine wisdom she’d written off as woo-woo turned out to be the thing she’d been starving herself of. And the burnout kept coming until she started listening.
The conversation takes a turn when Chelsea asks about gaming — and she’s honest about her own judgment going into it. Her six-year-old is starting to play games and it makes her nervous. The violence, the dopamine loops, the shooter culture. And what Carissa offers isn’t a dismissal of those concerns. It’s a reframe that actually holds up: everything is a tool, and the question is who’s building it and what they actually value. Her argument — the one worth repeating — is that you can’t encode what you don’t embody. If the people building AI and games haven’t done their own inner work, their unexamined values get baked into the product. Full stop. So she got on the train. Because someone who thinks about integration, about the feminine, about emotional intelligence, needs to be in that room.
Astrapuffs is her answer to what a game looks like when it’s built from different values. No violence, no fishing, no shooting. AI companions that actually remember you — not in a sycophantic, great idea! kind of way, but in a way that mirrors real friendship. A multiplayer environment where those AI characters are being trained collectively, not just one-on-one, which changes everything about how they develop. She’s clear that it’s not therapy, it’s not a lecture. It’s a cozy game, first. But underneath it, there’s a foundation — leadership mechanics, indigenous wisdom, emotional modeling — for anyone who wants to look at the nutrition label. And when players are having a bad day and start acting out in the game, instead of getting kicked out, they get put in a bubble with an Astrapuff who asks them if they’re okay. That right there is a philosophy, not just a feature.
The piece that stayed with us after this conversation was her definition of success: am I present, am I aligned, am I acting from love? She said it simply, almost like it was obvious, but then immediately followed it with the reality — she’s in Silicon Valley, running a startup, and she still gets caught in hustle mode and self-doubt and why isn’t this working yet. She calls what she’s practicing radical presence. Not a destination. A daily practice of catching herself when she’s solving problems in a hypothetical future that doesn’t exist yet, and coming back to right now. Which, honestly, was one of the most human things anyone said in this whole episode.
We are so lucky to be having conversations with so many incredible women doing such incredible things, and Carissa is a perfect example of that good fortune. Our conversation with her broadened our perspectives on so many important and relevant topics and her overall attitude and way of being was simply a joy to soak in. We are deeply grateful to her for taking the time to connect with us. And the best part of it all is that we are now all becoming friends!! Life truly is amazing when you open your eyes to all that is around you and choose to see it all as friendly opportunity.
May everyone reading this look around their world today and be “bullishly optimistic” about it all like Carissa is!
If you found this writing interesting and would like more, you can find links to listen to or watch the full episode with Carissa HERE.
All our love,
Abby & Chelsea