There’s a choice at the root of every health decision: fear, or love
Jun 9, 2026 · 5 min read
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Our week-long event series at New York Tech Week 2026 began with a healthy lunch and conversation between our CEO, Jennifer (Azar) Burnham-Grubbs, and Melanie Griffith—Head of Brand Experience & Master Instructor at SoulCycle.
This conversation was all about how we make decisions as humans. Is it rooted in fear or rooted in love?
Melanie has lived that question. In 2009 she became SoulCycle’s very first rider to turn instructor, leaving a career in law for something that didn’t have a name yet. About a year later she was diagnosed with a chronic form of lymphoma and had to be watched—scan by scan—for a year before treatment.
What she learned there became the spine of the whole conversation.
“I’m always going to coach somebody to see the continuum of choice. Every decision is rooted in one of two places—fear, or love." - Melanie Griffith
Fear is human. It floods you with stress chemicals, narrows what you can see, and makes worse things more likely. Melanie’s answer wasn’t to fight it. It was to pause—let it settle—and then take one small step from that quieter place.
Pick up the weight. Put it down. Take the walk. Book the scan. The trajectory changes by tiny degrees.
That’s the same thing that wakes Azar up in the morning.
For 20 years she’s been in the health insurance industry and seen how it has become sickness insurance. And underneath that, she said, something closer to financial death insurance—a system that runs on fear and asks you to deplete your budget guarding against it.
ionava is built on the other side of that line.
Not a fear-based model. A love-and-life one.
Your ionava Wallet is flexible funding for the things that actually keep you well—the class, the clean food, the therapy, the early screening. Your ionava Vault is reserved cash for the rare, serious moments—the 'Big What-Ifs'—so fear doesn’t get to run your finances.
That’s why we always say ionava is not insurance. We are building a completely different model from a new foundation. One where people can have ownership of their health money, and transparency for how they spend it.
Melanie put it plainly: you don’t get to opt out of taking care of yourself.
We’d add one line to that—you shouldn’t have to choose between staying well and staying prepared.
Curious where you’d land?
Get your Health Score—and see what a love-based model looks like for you.
