Forests, Burnout & Regeneration – Tommi Ullgrén on Chaga, Community & What We Choose to Value

🌲 We sat in a forest that may soon be gone.This episode takes place in the forest behind Mycelium Hub Sweden — a place of stillness, retreat, and community.Like many forests across Sweden, it now faces the threat of clear-cutting. That reality shaped the conversation we had with our guest, Tommi Ullgrén— not as theory, but as lived experience.Tommi is a Finnish conscious entrepreneur, startup mentor, forest guardian and sauna enthusiast. He left behind the tech world and a life of burnout to become a professional mentor and to return his ancestral land in Eastern Finland for summertime. There, he began cultivating chaga, practicing regenerative forestry, and co-creating a new model for how local communities can steward their forests for sustainable income — not through extraction and clearcutting, but through care and cooperation with nature.This conversation explores grief, economics, regeneration, and the possibility of a deeper relationship with land — one rooted in time, trust, and mycelial thinking.In this episode:- 🍄 How chaga cultivation can rival industrial forestry- 🌳 Community-owned forest trusts and sustainable land governance- 💔 The emotional toll of watching forests fall — and how to respond- 🔥 Saunas, stillness, and rewilding the nervous system- 🌐 Forests as living networks — and decentralisation as a way of lifeThis isn’t just about trees. It’s about what we choose to value — and how we learn to stay, tend, and protect what matters.💻 Learn more about Tommi:- Personal story as a startup mentor: https://www.cocoonprogram.com/Mentors/tommi-ullgren- ATRA Innovations: http://www.atrainno.com/- LinkedIn (write a personal note while connecting): https://www.linkedin.com/in/ullgren/- Chaga cultivation partner KÄÄPÄ Forest in Finland: https://kaapaforest.fi/🌱 Mycelium Hub: https://www.myceliumhub.org