The themes varied—my “Hero’s Journey to Wholeness” framework, the “Midlife Shift” for men (more coming soon), the “Sacred Pause” retreat for religious and spiritual leaders from across traditions, and a really fun one about living with greater presence and alignment called “Awakening Wisdom”—but they all contained a through line:

Each workshop was filled with people longing to experience personal transformation and participate in collective renewal.

The Two Things

I’ll say it again… These hundreds of workshop participants were dedicated to TWO THINGS:

1. They wanted to grow up. To shed their limiting operating patterns, embrace their authentic identity, and step into the fullness of who they really are.

   AND…

2. They carried a deep desire—a burden, almost—to make their mark in this tumultuous moment. Not “success” as the world often thinks about it. But contribution. Service. Being a healing presence.

The reason I emphasize this commitment to TWO THINGS is because this is not the norm. While religious communities historically held these two pursuits together (and, at their best, still do), we live in a moment where personal growth and social transformation are often divorced.

There’s a whole world focused on the individual, whether it’s about wholeness or wellbeing or optimization or influence.

Then there’s a whole world focused on the collective, whether it’s about social good or community building, policy or politics.

And, as Rudyard Kipling put it, never the twain shall meet.

But as I’m witnessing in these workshops and seeing in other places, fresh expressions of communities committed to both personal transformation and collective renewal are emerging.

I’m interested in this for a couple reasons.

First, I’ve spent significant time in both of these “spaces.”

As a founder of multiple social impact organizations, I know what it feels like to be so focused on the collective—cultivating community, serving those in need, working for justice—that I neglected my inner life, and crashed and burned as a result.

I’ve seen this same dynamic play itself out in the lives of countless leaders I’ve accompanied through my speaking, coaching, and writing. I’ve also encountered plenty of people who either feel guilty about or actively reject inner work because of, according to them, the magnitude and urgency of the collective needs.

On the other side of things, authoring a book classified as “self-help” and teaching meditation over the past seven years has brought me more into the wellness space. It is almost exclusively defined as personal wellness. This is a vast terrain and includes some really beneficial stuff, but it also can be marked by chasing after spiritual highs, spiritual bypassing, spiritual materialism, and other things that lead to ego inflation rather than ego integration.

Given my commitments to collective healing, I’ve had a hard time figuring out how I fit even into the best parts of this space. (And, yes, that’s probably why my attempts at bringing meditation into corporate settings were short-lived and I ended up teaching in prisons instead!).

Second, I’m paying attention to where I see people committed to both personal transformation and collective renewal because I’m launching an online network (with eventual in-person elements) committed to the TWO THINGS. Not just personal growth. Not just social healing. But both.

In fact, I wonder if part of why my discernment process has taken so long is because in some way I internalized the separation of these spaces I’ve experienced externally—and pressured myself to be about ONE THING. But, the truth is I’ve never been about one thing. Over the past 20+ years, whether as a pastor, nonprofit leader, meditation teacher, hospice chaplain, or coach, both spirituality/inner life and social healing/impact have been central to my calling—along with community/belonging. Which is why starting an online community committed to accelerating personal transformation and collective renewal makes total sense!

I’m eager to have a space to express all aspects of my inner and outer journey, and to do so along with other… mystic-catalysts.

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Way of the Mystic-Catalyst

Lately, I’ve been playing around with using the term “mystic-catalyst” to describe those committed to embodying inner transformation as outer impact. I don’t necessarily mean outer impact at some large scale, though that will no doubt happen if an increasing number of people pursue their own evolution alongside a desire for fostering the collective good. I mean people who are not just into personal transformation for the sake of their personal happiness and getting everything they want.

Mystic-catalysts, as I see it, are people who are committed to three things:

The Sound of the Genuine

In his 1980 commencement speech at Spelman College, mystic, theologian, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman said:

“The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams, your ambitions, so that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you, because that is the only true guide that you will ever have, and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing.”

Thurman, who mentored Martin Luther King Jr. and also preached at the famous 1962 “Good Friday Experiment” at Boston University where half of a group of seminary students were given psilocybin and the other half a placebo, was the quintessential mystic-catalyst. In the above quote, he is highlighting the most critical task of anyone seeking social change:

It starts within.

To be a mystic-catalyst means living a guided life—prioritizing connection with and living in alignment with Something More. This, he says, is the “sound of the genuine.” The Quakers call it the “still, small voice.” Many traditions say “God.” Some streams of Christianity say it’s the “Holy Spirit.” It is “the great” or “the vastness” of the Tao Te Ching. Many like to say “Nature” or “Universe.” In the 12-step world, it’s a Higher Power. Ultimately, as Joseph Campbell once said in his famous PBS interview with Bill Moyers, it is, “Unnameable. It is transcendent of all names.”

Mystic-catalysts are investigators of the inner realm. Correspondingly, they commit to solitude practices—meditation and prayer, reflection, nature immersion, or any other habits of the heart. They understand that spiritual practice is not about selfishly withdrawing from the world. Instead, this inner work energizes and equips them for their work in the world. As theologian Karl Barth put it, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”

The Ultimate Boon

When I teach on the Hero’s Journey in workshops, there is always at least one person who raises their hand and takes issues with the individual nature of the Hero’s Journey. Instead, they say, the journey should be about serving the community.

I have a problem with it to, but not for the same reason.

My issue is that they are responding to a sloppy understanding of the Hero’s Journey—the term coined by Joseph Campbell for a recurring pattern in myths and sacred texts that carries wisdom for our lives today. Because any articulation of the Hero’s Journey that fails to state that it is ultimately about the good of the community is not actually the Hero’s Journey.

As Campbell writes in Myths to Live By, “The ultimate air of the quest if one is to return, must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.”

There it is. Clearly stated.

The mystic-catalyst is one who has embarked on the extraordinary quest, leaving behind the familiar, navigating the unknown, and claiming “The Ultimate Boon.” This boon is a blessing, a gift. It is healing power or powerful wisdom that they carry back to the ordinary world.

That some benefit for others would result from your journey to become more whole is not some add-on to the quest. It is the quest.

As I write in The Way Home:

“If the quest doesn't lead you into serving the human family and planet, then you still haven't retrieved your heart. You've settled for something else. You've refused to surrender. Because the common destination for anyone who has traveled this path is a life that radiates out ward in tangible love to others—loved ones and rejected ones, neighbors and strangers, friends and enemies. The quest doesn't lead you to escape the world, but rather brings us all the way back home and immerses us fully in its complexities and challenges.”

Critical Yeast

One of the many gifts from my work at was connecting with John Paul Lederach, a global expert in conflict resolution and mediation who is the American Professor of International Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame. He was a mentor to our “social healing” team as we convened leaders from across disciplines, cultures, generations, and religions.

He introduced me to the phrase critical yeast, which he defines as “small groups of people in unlikely combinations, in a new quality of relationship.”

The idea of critical yeast stands in contrast to the common assumption about how change happens in the world. We like the big stories. Marches and protests and large-scale activity—the critical mass.

But what Lederach has observed across decades of work in places of intense conflict is that the critical mass is always preceded by critical yeast. Deep, trusting relationships that work slowly, but serve as a powerful catalyst for collective renewal. And they don’t just lead to a moment of change, but to the kind of change that endures beyond the initial excitement and energy.

Mystic-catalysts join together to create critical yeast. They don’t stay entrenched in spheres of similarity. They actively build bridges across difference, and do so with courage, empathy, and creativity.

The result?

Anthropologist and author Margaret Mead captures it well:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

The Sound of the Genuine.
The Ultimate Boon.
Critical Yeast.

These are the three commitments of the mystic-catalyst. And they describe the kind of people I’m looking for as I launch my community—in invite-only pilot form this September through December before opening it up more broadly in January 2027.

If this describes you or anyone you know, I’d love to hear from you.

Sort of.

My friend Dave and I were sitting at the La Coruña train station in northwest Spain. Or maybe it was the bus station in Santiago de Compostela.

I’m not sure…

But I know where we were headed: back across the country to the Mediterranean port city of Dénia, our semester-abroad home base.

And I know how we got to that station. We had spent the previous few days backpacking around the coastal fishing town of Finesterre—named by the Roman’s who considered it the “end of the earth”—and the week before that on the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage trail that leads to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where, according to legend, a hermit named Pelayo found the bones of St. James in the 9th century.

It was early morning. Commuters rushed past us. We sat on the ground with our packs propped against the wall, disheveled from our adventures, and relieved to be off of our blistered feet. We were eager to get back to our temporary Spanish hometown, but we had a long trip ahead of us. And we were broke. At least, I was.

Despite our minimal expenses on the Camino—the albergues where we spent the night were cheap and we mostly stuck to baguettes and canned tuna (sometimes with olives and cheese) for our meals—I had gone over budget (maybe I overdid it on café con leche?). Dave had already lent me some money, but I wasn’t going to borrow any more. Plus he didn’t want to withdraw any more cash and deal with the transaction and conversion fees.

That’s why, sitting in the crowded bus/train station that morning, we decided that we were going to have to stretch the coins in our pockets to cover food for our trip home. We each pulled out our respective euros—in near mint condition since the switch from the peseta had happened only a few months earlier—and began counting.

Suddenly, we were interrupted. A tall person in a trench coat zoomed past, dropped a paper bag on the ground next to us, and vanished down the escalator. Dave and I were confused. Cautiously, I grabbed the crumpled bag and began to unfold it.

My jaw dropped when I saw what was in the bag. I looked up at Dave and slowly pulled out two cans of tuna—the exact thing we had been eating for our entire pilgrimage! We exchanged a startled expression that asked, What in the world is going on?

Sure, maybe we looked homeless and hungry. But that still didn’t explain how a stranger:
(1) was walking around with a bag containing our dietary staple and
(2) decided to donate it to us
(3) at the precise moment we were figuring out our meal plan…

We were stunned.

Of course, we still needed bread. So after we calmed down, I took another look at the coins in my pocket—a couple euro dollars along with some quarters—and told Dave I had enough to get a pair of baguettes. I left my pack with him and found a panaderia nearby. I did the math, ordered two sandwich-sized baguettes, and handed over all of the coins in my pocket. The baker handed me two fresh baguettes and some change in the form of what I assumed were a couple of five and ten cent coins. I didn’t look at them. I promptly placed them in my pocket.

When I returned to Dave, I set the bagged baguettes down next to the bag of tuna cans, grateful we now had a meal for the long ride across Spain. Then I pulled the coins out of my pocket to give to Dave so he would have all of our remaining change, in case we had enough for another snack. But when I looked, I saw that I was holding a couple euro dollars along with some quarters—the exact amount I had handed to the baker at the panaderia!

Seeing the puzzled look on my face, Dave asked what happened. I explained that I had spent all of my coins on the bread, but came back with the bread and all of my coins. I didn’t understand…
Did the baker give me incorrect change?
Was the baker still confused by the recent switch from the peseta to the euro?
Did the baker intend to give us bread for free?

Just like the tuna incident moments earlier, it didn’t make any sense.
But it didn’t need to.
Our analysis quickly quieted and was replaced with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude.

We had just received exactly what we needed—arriving as an echo of two-thousand-year-old story of divine provision: our very own miracle of the loaves and fishes.

A Course in Miracles

The provision of the loaves and fishes at the train-or-bus-station was certainly a surprise. But in many ways we had been primed for it. Because it wasn’t the first time we received from others on our trip.

The last two beds in the hostel.
An invitation to the house of a local we met in the town square for dinner (followed by a couple shots of aguardiente that put some hair on my chest).
Free pints at the pub, courtesy of Moritz, the German pilgrim celebrating his birthday—“In my country, we treat others on our birthday,” he insisted.

The entire Camino experience was a course in mini-miracles.

In fact, this is the nature of a pilgrimage. A pilgrim may plan their path, but walking it requires relinquishing control and relying on the hospitality of others. For food an drink. For lodging. For safety from the elements and nourishing conversation.

To be a pilgrim is embrace a constant receptive posture.

This is why a decade ago, following a season of intense burnout, I approached the my sabbatical as a pilgrimage. After many years of leading, guiding, facilitating, initiating, gathering, and convening, it was time for me to be a guest, not the host. I embarked on a cross-country roadtrip with my family. Away from the familiarity and comforts of home, we relied on the people and places we visited. I could feel the practice of receiving liberating me from my addiction to achievement, perfection, and people-pleasing.

This is also why pilgrimage is such a powerful metaphor for the spiritual journey, drawing us out of the energy of striving and accomplishing and into the way of grace.

Get Help

Journey. Quest. Adventure. Odyssey.

These are a few of my favorite words to describe the process of spiritual transformation.

But none of these quite capture what pilgrimage does: the essential aspect of receptivity.

In my book, The Way Home: Discovering the Hero’s Journey to Wholeness at Midlife, I distill the wisdom of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey into a ten-step process (see image below) across three phases:
Leaving the Familiar.
Falling into the Unknown.
Rising to Wholeness.

Embracing the idea of pilgrimage brings us firmly into the territory of the second step: Get Help.

Across ancient and modern stories, we see how help always arrives to support the protagonist.

Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, assists Odysseus by, among other things, giving him a disguise and unbeatable strength so he can defeat the suitors and regain his throne.

Aaron helps his brother Moses, who “speaks with faltering lips,” by delivering God’s “Let my people go!” message to Pharaoh.

Obi-Wan Kenobi gives Luke Skywalker the lightsaber and becomes his Jedi Master. And then Han Solo and Chewbacca and Yoda show up too.

For Frodo, help comes from Gandalf and Sam, Merry and Pippin, and eventually the entire Fellowship of the Ring.

Campbell calls this stage Supernatural Aid or Meeting the Mentor. The idea is the same. A wise guide shows up, supporting the hero with advice, en-courage-ment, protection, or a bit of magic.

While this arrival of assistance is most notable early in the journey, when the hero has answered yes to the call to adventure and is crossing the threshold from the familiar into the unknown—when you’ve left behind the operating patterns that no longer serve you or stepped away from the secure job to open up to what’s next or moved across the country to pursue your dream—the truth is that Getting Help marks the entire terrain of the quest. The Leaving, the Falling, and the Rising.

W.H. Murray captures this in The Scottish Himalayan Expedition: “The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too… A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in ones’s favor all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no [one] would have believed would have come [their] way.”

Provision and support—loaves and fishes—just when you need it. Again and again and again.

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Activating and Accessing Assistance

Help is always there, waiting in the wings. But there are two crucial things we must do to activate and access this abundant support of the universe.

First, as Murray says in the above quote, you must commit yourself.

The problem, however, is that we are extremely creative in the ways we refuse the call to adventure―the invitation or, when it comes more urgently, the sounding of an alarm that urges you to exit the outdated version of your life: minimization, modification, administration, addiction, distraction, and destruction.1

So if you are looking around and don’t feel the support of the universe, it’s probably a sign that there is some way in which you are still resisting the call. There is something you are clinging to, internally or externally. Often we are waiting for some kind of guarantee that everything is going to turn out okay. But that’s not how it works. What’s required is the leap of faith―surrendering, turning yourself over to grace. No risk, no reward.

The first three steps of Alcoholic Anonymous’ Twelve Steps capture this posture:
Admitting powerlessness
Believing that a greater Power can assist
Turning our will and our lives over to the divine.

Committing yourself―saying yes to the call to adventure―is about relinquishing control.

Second, in order to access the help we need for the journey of transformation you also have to embrace the posture of receptivity.

Yes, even in our stubbornness, assistance can come our way. The heroes of old weren’t always open and yet help arrived.

But if we want to receive the fullness of support that is available to us, we have to walk in the way of the pilgrim and embrace a constant receptive posture.

How easily we revert back to controlling and grasping and striving to make everything happen on our own. Even after a powerful, clarifying epiphany. Even after gaining the courage to take that first step from the familiar into the unknown.

Of course, this happens. But the key is to a) be aware of when we relapse so that b) we can reset more quickly to the way of receptivity. When we do this we enter into the flow of the life we’re meant to live. Yes, it still involves decisions, action, and facing challenges. But functioning from this place of alignment is marked by ease, joy, and the awe that comes from being on the receiving end of abundant divine help.

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Resetting to Receptivity

As I describe in The Way Home, I answered a call to adventure over a decade ago:

One rainy fall morning I was charging up a hill near the end of a jog. Any other day I would dash around the corner and sprint the last ten blocks to my house. But this day was different. When I reached the top of the hill, my legs burning and music blasting in my ears, a string of words from within suddenly interrupted me.

“If you don’t have your heart, you have nothing,” the inner voice said.

I walked home dazed and confused. I knew something was shifting within me. Somehow I found the courage to commit myself and go all-in. What followed was a five-year inner journey―dark night of the soul included―that fundamentally rewired (reawakened) who I am and how I show up in the world.

Incredible assistance came my way during those years. And the years that followed. But looking back now, I can see that my receptivity started to close down.

I needed a reset.

It came at the beginning of 2025.

I was teaching my first workshop at Modern Elder Academy with founder Chip Conley. He was leading the group through a powerful exercise of identifying and releasing critical self-limiting beliefs.

As guest faculty, I was just supposed to observe. But as I witnessed each workshop participant bravely stepping up, publicly acknowledging a limiting belief, and casting it into the fire—and then claiming its opposite for their life, I was inspired…

And I realized, there was something I needed to say. Something I needed to release.

I felt inner resistance. Fear. Shame. Doubt. DON’T SAY THAT OUT LOUD.

But the truest part of me beneath that resistance—my true voice—prevailed.

I stepped in front of the group:

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived with a sense of abundance when it comes to love, friendship, meaningful work, energy, creativity, and having just enough and just the right time… But at some point, I came to believe a lie that I will always have to STRUGGLE to get paid for living my purpose, for the contribution I’m called to make in the world.”

I took the slip of paper I had written my limiting belief on, tossed it into the fire, and declared to the kind faces in front of me:

“Today I embrace abundance in every conceivable way.”

In Awe of Guidance

There was definitely a limiting belief around money that I was facing that day, and since then so much has shifted. But in the eighteen months that followed, it has become clear to me that the burning ritual enacted something much bigger.

It reset my posture to one of constant receptivity.

As it turns out there was so much more help waiting for me. I just needed to stay open (and stay patient!).

Now as I look back at the past year and a half, I am in absolute awe of all of the support and guidance I’ve received…

There was Chip and his generous invitation to lead a workshop with him at MEA.
Which led to a recurring teaching role as Faculty In Residence.
Which led to meeting hundreds of incredible heart-centered humans who have trusted me to be their coach or learned meditation from me or had me on their podcasts…

And led to meeting “K”, who offered to be my business mentor and who has shared his wisdom with me and invested in me financially.
Which led to participating in a high-level entrepreneurship program that altered my view of the impact I’m called to make.
Which led to attending a conference where I met someone who encouraged my growing exploration of consciousness capabilities and engagement with spiritual gifts.
Which led to listen to listening to a podcast featuring a woman who I felt prompted to connect with who ended up becoming a significant guide for me as I step more fully into my soul purpose.

And led to opportunities to lead other workshops too—the Omega Institute, YPO groups, and other private workshops.
Which led to a far-reaching social media post that connect me to a woman who is an expert guide for keynote speakers and who is now supporting me as I step into this area.
Which will lead to…

Do you see it, my fellow pilgrims?

It’s loaves and fishes all the way down.

Remembrance & Gratitude

As I share these reflections, it occurs to me that beyond committing and staying receptive, there may be one more important aspect to activating and accessing assistance.

In one biblical story, the prophet and judge Samuel, following victory in battle,2 sets up a stone and names it Ebenezer, meaning “stone of help,” as a way of remembering the support of the divine up to this point and also in anticipation of the help that is to come.

Remembering is not just about the past. It’s also about the future.

Remembering helps us see that we’ve been on a guided pilgrimage and emboldens us to continue traveling on this kind of path.
With gratitude for the support we have received.
With expectation for the miracles that are yet to come.

Community Coming Soon…

This September I’m launching something I’ve been dreaming of for a while. Something that my coaching clients, workshop participants, and other people I’ve been connecting with have been asking for.

It’s an online network for like-hearted leaders on the journey of spiritual awakening. Leaders who are cultivating presence and pursuing the fullest expression of their soul purpose. It’s for those who are… Seeking. Growing. Integrating. Together with others. So they can experience aliveness and be agents of healing and service in the world.

I’ll be sharing more soon, but if you want to indicate your interest and let me know what you’re looking for, and get the latest updates, please join the fifty others who have completed this brief survey.

“To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.”

– From The Alchemist

“I can see that book on the shelves at those stores in the airport,“ my brother Dan texted on the family thread.

“Me too,“ added my sister-in-law Callie before others added encouraging messages.

It was April 2023. I had just unveiled the final cover my publisher had chosen for my first book, The Way Home: Discovering the Hero’s Journey to Wholeness at Midlife, which was scheduled to be released ten months later.

I was excited, grateful. But my main thought in response to the string of texts was, I know. And not as in I hope or I believe, but as if it was already a foregone conclusion. As if I could see the future in the making. As if it was my destiny.

In this future, the folks at Macmillan’s St. Martin’s publishing group would keep giving it bestseller kind of attention (which my publisher and editor Joel told me with a chuckle it was already getting – a big deal for any author, much more a first-time author with almost no platform). In this future, they would passionately and aggressively get the book out into the world. They would champion it and put it on the airport store shelves. In this future, the book would end up on the New York Times bestseller list, which would open doors for all kinds of podcast appearances and speaking opportunities.

But here’s the thing: on the day those kind text messages came through from my family celebrating my book cover and the places the book would go, if you looked at my life, I had absolutely no good reason to think that this future was possible:
I had lost my job a year earlier.
The meditation and corporate mindfulness business I had started was limping along.
And I was making near minimum wage plus tips managing one of the taproom locations of my brother’s brewery.

So even though I didn’t wonder IF this future was possible, I definitely had my questions about HOW it was possible – common questions for anyone who feels destiny calling:

How will it happen?

What, if anything, do I need to do to “manifest” this future?

What is the next right thing for me to do?

Answering the Call

Before the instinctual knowing I experienced that day in response to my family’s text messages, I had already sensed a version of this future for over a year. Since before the book manuscript, which I had quietly worked on in the early mornings for fifteen months, was finished. Before a friend introduced me, at just the right time, to a literary agent who liked my project. Before the twenty or thirty rejections that preceded a deal with the best publisher of all the ones we engaged. I knew what was going to happen.

In fact, I can’t quite explain it, but I knew about this future nearly a decade earlier in 2016 after I stepped away from the church I had started in Seattle in my late twenties. I felt a calling to be a kind of pastor beyond the church, to be a spiritual director or advisor for proven, high-impact leaders – people who, like me, had achieved some things but lost their hearts along the way.

Looking back now, I can see two things. First, there was some unhealthy ambition in the mix. Second, this knowing about my future, nevertheless, flowed from a deeper place. It was a soul-level calling. And both the five-year “hero’s journey” I lived – a crucible that burned away the toxic ambition and purified my motives through a process of leaving the familiar, falling into the unknown, and rising to wholeness – and writing this book about said journey were an important part of answering the call.

Embarking on a grueling inner journey and the significant task of writing a book, however, would not be the only ways that I would say Yes to the call. In many ways, these responses made sense. They fit the script. Because doing my inner work and reflecting on the experience would no doubt further equip me to support others on their own journeys of transformation. But, as it turns out, following your calling is not always a linear path and often involves saying Yes to things that don’t fully make sense in the moment.

For me, one of those unexpected things was taking job at a brewpub.

On the surface, it didn’t even look like a professional detour. It looked like a dead end.

But it didn’t take long for me to realize it was exactly where I needed to be. Because there were some important lessons I still needed to learn.

The Next Right Thing

A couple months before the my-book-in-airport-stores text thread, my brother Dan called to tell me that the previous taproom manager, in his early twenties, had given his two-week notice.

“The NBA playoffs start in two weeks. I really need someone,” he said. “Would you be interested in managing the downtown taproom?”

I had been picking up a few shifts here and there to cover some grocery costs and, mostly, to enjoy the energetic pre-game environment for Milwaukee Bucks basketball games played in the arena across the plaza. But I hadn’t seriously worked in a restaurant in over two decades.

I thought about the job for a day or two.

On one hand, there were plenty of reasons to say no. While I knew how to manage people, I didn’t know anything about running a restaurant. It also paid far below my earning potential – certainly I could find a better paying job if I spent a little time searching (ZipRecruiter or something?). The job also would require time away from my family on some evenings and weekends.

On the other hand, there were many reasons to say yes. For one thing, it got me away from my computer – emails and zoom calls as I grew my meditation practice and prepared for my book’s release – and onto my feet and into real life interaction with all kinds of interesting people. For another, It was a unique opportunity to support my brother and be a part of his world. Additionally, the extra money would be helpful, taking a little pressure off of my wife Cherie, who was basically the sole provider for our family through her therapy practice, and come without locking me into a 9-5 job. I could continue to develop my business and have control over my own schedule – except for when I’d have to suddenly fill in on a Saturday morning because someone called in “sick” (It’s called a hangover, buddy!). As a bonus, I would be able to dust off my college Spanish major to coordinate (and joke around) with the kitchen staff.

Ultimately, despite some internal resistance, I sensed it was the next right thing.

I told Dan, I’m in.

An Academy for My Evolution

Indeed there were plenty of good reasons to say Yes. Not a single one of them, however, outlined a clear path from pouring beers and bussing tables and managing twentysomething-year-old servers and bartenders to my anticipated future as an author, teacher, and spiritual coach.

Still something within me knew that my experience working in the taproom was going to be another critical phase of my journey. And it was exactly that.

It looked like a brewery taproom. It smelled like a brewery taproom. It sounded like a brewery taproom. But it was really an academy for my evolution. Just as sacred and transformative, if not more so, then my decade as a pastor and years of meditation practice and teaching, my soul encounters in nature and psychedelic explorations.

These were my main courses of study:

Testing the Ego

I had finished writing book that recounted my journey of shedding the limiting identities of achiever, perfectionist, and people-pleaser in order to get my heart back. Truly, I felt free from the grip of these domineering, malformed expressions of my ego. Across five years of my life, I had experienced a deep shift from an egocentric way of being to a soul-centric way of moving through the world. But now, as my book was undergoing final edits, my stint at the brewery was putting all of this to the test.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes, “His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity.”

Such a poetic quote! I resonated with it so much that I had included it in the closing chapter of my book.

But now I was making near-minimum wage and tips at 42 years-old while watching my friends ascend their respective career ladders.
Now I was picking up dirty dishes for people who didn’t even notice me.
Now I was welcoming people I hadn’t seen since high school and seating them at their table – while a voice in the back of my mind quietly reminded me that I was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by my classmates.

At this moment in my life, the stakes were really real now.
Would I really let my personal ambitions be totally dissolved?
How willingly would I relax into whatever may come to pass?
Would I really allow myself to become an anonymity?

I did not get a 100% on this course. There were times where my ego was rattled, regretting its surrendered-to-soul state and pining for the days where soul was suppressed under its powers.

But this taproom course made two dynamics clear to me:

First, I really had experienced a dramatic transformation on my “hero’s journey to wholeness.” My identity and sense of self-worth no longer depended on external forces like they used to. I was living from the inside-out, which meant that I was in the moment, delighting in serving others (except people who were really rude to my staff), and having so much fun! At a soul level, I knew I was exactly where I needed to be.

Second, my awareness had expanded. In the moments where some part of me was uncomfortable or afraid, I could spot it quickly, and meet it with kindness and grace before it spun out of control into something like negative self-talk or bitterness or resentment.

Practicing the Presence of God

Many years ago I read The Practice of the Presence of God, a collection of the teachings of Brother Lawrence, a 17th-century Carmelite friar. “The presence of God is the concentration of the soul’s attention on God, remembering that [God] is always present,” Brother Lawrence writes, capturing the main theme of the book – dwelling in, maintaining an awareness of, abiding in the divine presence at all times.

I loved the idea. In practice, however, I found it more difficult. Especially since Brother Lawrence wasn’t just talking about practicing the presence of God on a beautiful lake shore, on stunning mountain overlook, or during a state of deep contemplation. He accessed this bliss while washing the dishes amidst the “noise and clatter” of the monastery kitchen, and during any other type of ordinary labor.

“The times of activity are not at all different from the hours of prayer, for I possess God as peacefully in the commotion of my kitchen, where often people are asking me for different things at the same time, as I do when kneeling in front of the Blessed Sacrament.” –Brother Lawrence

Now I had a chance to really give it a try.

For almost nearly five years leading up to my time at the taproom, I had been practicing a transcending style of meditation twice a day for twenty minutes. I noticed how the stillness I accessed in meditation was increasingly showing up in my daily life activities of parenting three kids, shuttling them to sports, running errands, and everything else.

The inner stillness, it turns out, was accessible at the brewery too. Whether I was behind the bar, on the line, running food, bussing tables, dealing with grumpy customers, or hustling around doing everything else, I regularly found myself in a flow state. Inner tranquility. The presence of God.

Yes, tapping into this state involved some level of intention. But I think my inner work and meditation practice had set me up for success in this course. Being fully present, which was marked by contentment, patience, joy, and gratitude, was mostly effortless.

I started to imagine that every other person in the service industry was experiencing this quality of presence. It was a fun thought. Look at all of these enlightened beings – how did I never notice?

Manifesting the Future

Manifestation is one of the most overused – and misunderstood – concepts in spiritual influencer, wellness, and New Age-y spaces (I’m not sure exactly what to call this, but you know what I’m talking about). Typically, it is described as using positive thoughts, affirmations, and visualizations to make one’s desired future a reality. And, almost always, it is about manifesting abundance – read: monetary and material wealth – and the online course you need to buy to make that happen. Rarely, do you hear conversations about manifesting world peace or ending hunger.

Admittedly, I’ve long had some resistance to the idea of manifestation. Yet I also have data, especially in the past eighteen months, that there is something important and powerful about the mindsets we carry and their capacity to limit us or open doors for us. And when I consider my time at the brewery, I think it was a major study in the area of manifestation, teaching me two primary lessons.

First, manifestation is primarily about receptivity. This means that it is not about achieving the ambitions of the Small Self, but aligning with the desires of the Big Self. Most often our agendas for our own lives are actually too small. When we are too focused on our own plans, we cut ourselves off from our higher purpose – both what this purpose looks like and how it may come to pass.

As I noted, for a long time, I had sensed a calling to serve leaders through coaching, teaching, and writing. Yes, it lit me up. It got me excited. But in my best moments, I understood this as something coming to me that I need to respond to rather than an idea I generated and needed to control. Particularly as I waited for my book to be born into the world and because my taproom gig stood in such sharp contrast to the future I felt, the experience expanded my receptivity instead of shrinking it. It reinforced the idea that the path to fulfilling “my” dreams required staying open, listening to the divine, and taking the next right step.

The second lesson about manifestation that the taproom gave me was that energy is everything. Get clear on what you are being called to, yes. But don’t strive and strain towards that goal. This kind of grasping, clinging energy actually creates resistance. Instead, be calm, be neutral. Why? Because this is what you are really after! When you desire something, it isn’t primarily about the thing itself; it is about the state of being that you imagine will come with it – a state of fulfillment, contentment, presence, calm. Embodying this energetic state here and now is then the best way to tune in and get aligned with your desired future.

When I arrived at the brewery I was a recovering striver. Any goal I set for myself was accompanied by anxiety. Saying Yes to the brewery, however, was a different approach. It was a way of relaxing into my desired future state rather than relapsing into my anxious past. Yes, with my book launch coming up I still went all in on the work needed to launch and promote a book. But it also slowed me down and taught me to accept everything as is, which, mysteriously, is the gateway to receiving opportunities and synchronicities as they come.

Closing Time

On a Thursday night, six months after I began, it was my final night as taproom manager. It was a busy, but smooth night. No major hiccups. Once the dinner rush was over and most guests had cleared out to get to the Stevie Nicks concert, I entered the walk-in fridge and tapped the first Oktoberfest keg of the season, before taking a seat at the bar to enjoy a “shifty” with the rest of the team.

I chatted with the young men behind the bar – Liam, a tall, proudly-Irish American guy earning some extra cash while beginning his career in banking; Patrick, a ponytailed graduate degree engineering student from Oregon; and Reed, studying finance and participating in the ROTC program.

I expressed how much I enjoyed getting to know them. “Well, that’s it for me,” I said, finishing my beer.

Liam grabbed my empty glass and wiped down the bar. “Let me give you a hug,” he said as he stepped out from behind the bar. Gladly embracing my “bar dad” status, I hugged him and the others before heading out the door and walking a few blocks to my car.

On my drive home I started reflecting on my experience, on the people I met and the lessons I learned. A surge of gratitude rushed through me. As I pulled the car over to text my brother and thank him for asking me to work at his brewery, the tears started flowing. I had been looking forward to my final day for over a month, but here I was full-on weeping. Excited for what was ahead, my book release and beyond. Sad that this chapter was over. Grateful for all that it had given me.

The Path of Service

At some point after my stint at the brewery, I realized that the entire time I had been traveling on an ancient spiritual path. The path of service. In yogic philosophy, it is known as karma yoga – the path of selfless service. This particular curriculum for our evolution is all about our actions and our interactions with our action.

Actions:
What is mine to do?
What is the next right step?
How can I be of service?

Interactions:
Am I giving selflessly without need for reward or acknowledgement?
Can I do what I’m called to here and now without feeling entitled to future benefits?How attached am I to particular outcomes?

The path of service and the questions it brings is critical for two reasons.

First, it ensures integration. In an era where so much emphasis is placed on chasing after enlightened insights and next spiritual high, the path of service is grounding. It invites us off the mountain top and into everyday life where embodied love is so desperately needed. It pulls us out of self-absorption and into the work of being the kind of selfless presence that can compassionately respond to the pain and suffering of others.

Second, it offers preparation. Wherever the path of service brings you matters in and of itself. But it also matters for what’s next. It lays the groundwork so that you can receive your destiny. It elevates the frequency of your being to the level of your epiphany.

Does your heart need opening? The path of service will open it.
Does your character need refining? The path of service will refine it.

For this reason, it is common that a mystical moment – the kind of transcendent experience that gives you insight about who you are and why you’re here – is often followed by a kind of divine curveball: the most mundane curriculum, such as navigating challenges at work, working on your marriage, parenting your children, dealing with finances, or maybe just dealing with dirty dishes.

This Is the Life Everlasting

As it turned out, that whole thing my family was texting about after seeing my book’s cover, the future I already knew was going to happen – the one with the book on airport store shelves and the New York Times bestseller list – well, it never happened. At least, not exactly like that.

The Way Home was released in February 2024. With a really cool cover. A local bookstore hosted a launch party and a bunch of twenty year-olds from the brewery were in attendance, cheering me on.

The book didn’t make any bestseller lists, but the people who read it said it was moving and impactful. Doors opened. Readers reached out for coaching. Podcast interviews came my way. Workshop invitations arrived. By the end of that year, I was able to step away from my job (the hospice work that followed my time in the taproom – a story for another time!) and fully into my calling, helping successful leaders shift from role to soul.

You could say that the spirit of the future I saw did come true.

But I’ll go even further: everything I knew would happen, happened.
The destination looked different, but the destiny was the same.
Because destiny isn’t as much about outer conditions as it is about an inner state.

On the day I received those celebratory texts from my loved ones, I knew the imagined future would come true… because I was already living it. Sure, I was working a low-paying job as a taproom manager, but I was already living my airport-bookstore-NYT-bestseller kind of life.

So, in the meantime, until the book with the cool cover came out, there was really only one thing I could do: take the next right step on my journey.

What this meant for me – what this means for anyone who approaches life as a spiritual journey – was not to anxiously hustle or grasp at the future, but to cultivate presence to that I would continue to act in alignment with my inner knowing.

In other words, I needed to show up fully for my life.

More specifically, I needed to show up for my shift at the taproom.

So that evening I poured beers, replaced kicked kegs, and cleared dirty dishes from the tables.
I refilled the ketchup machine and reloaded paper towel dispensers.
I apologized to a customer for his cold double cheeseburger, and issued a refund.
I told people restrooms are for customers only and that, no, our taproom is not an Uber waiting area.
Then I completed the closing ritual – sanitizing tables, mopping floors, completing the shift review. And at the end of the night, as I walked down the windy alley to toss the trash into the overflowing dumpster, a thought came to me:

This is the life everlasting.

Back home, before I went to bed, I pulled out my journal and spontaneously expanded on this thought:

I practice the presence of God in all things. I am simply present in each of these moments.

They pass in front of me with a blur-like quality. Not because I am mindlessly doing them, but because I am selflessly engaging – I am not caught up in other thoughts or desires, in what I should be doing or where I should be in life.

I merely am in the moment: I am.

This is the life everlasting.

This is the treasure of wholeness – it is also hereness, nowness.

So I have no need for a New York Times bestseller, even though I know it will be.
There’s nothing I will gain when that happens because…

I already have it all.

I was at a rundown, rustic retreat center along a storm-flooded river on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Peru. Along with a half-dozen other people, I was lying on my back inside a maloca, a large palm-constructed communal building. Just like the previous day, as the darkness of night descended, a thick jungle chorus arrived, followed by the rhythmic sounds of a hand drum and shaker. That’s when the shaman began to sing his Icaros, or ceremonial songs.

It was an ayahuasca ceremony, a ritual tradition of the indigenous people of South America’s Amazon basin that involves drinking a bitter, viscous tea made up primarily of the caapi vine and the chacruna shrub that facilitates altered states of consciousness. Ayahuasca, which has become more consumed and consumerized in recent years, is often referred to as a spiritual medicine with deep healing powers.

When my friend Chris had invited me to join him a few months earlier, I jumped at the chance. It was perfect timing. Not only had I been interested in participating in an ayahuasca retreat for a few years, but it was also my 41st birthday and I was eager to mark the occasion. Especially since my 40th had passed with little fanfare during the darkest days of the pandemic.

But why am I really here? I had asked myself this question a few days before this ceremony as I dangled in the hammock on the tiny porch of my stilted hillside hut. Unlike most people who come to ayahuasca, I wasn’t looking for healing or breakthrough or guidance. It’s not that I was resistant to any of these possibilities. But since I had emerged a year earlier from a soulful six-year healing journey (which I explore in my first book, The Way Home), I didn’t carry a fierce sense of need or expectation. I was mostly just curious and open to whatever “Mother Ayahuasca,” as the spirit of the medicine is often called, wanted to show me.

And show me something she did.

While my experience the previous day in the first ceremony was pleasant - a term rarely used to describe ayahuasca since it often involves purging into a bucket or sprinting to a toilet - it was not mind-blowing, as is often reported. It was not a dramatic, transcendent journey. So as I laid on my back in the maloca surrounded by the shaman’s song, I wondered if this second night would replicate that mild experience. But this was unlikely. Because moments earlier, with the hope of dialing up the intensity, like a bar patron requesting a double pour of whiskey, I had asked the shaman to fill my cup to the brim.

It didn’t take long for it to become clear that I was being brought on an entirely different adventure than the night before.

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Soon I became engulfed in a swirling, bending, twisting field of energy, bursting with light and color. Chaotic, yet choreographic. Dimensions endlessly birthing and swallowing one another. Space simultaneously shrinking and expanding. It moved at light speed; it was absolutely still. My particular self dissolved into this massive, unending presence. Yet there remained an awareness of “I” - the most elemental part of me - feeling complete peace, contentment, and joy.

And that “I” realized this:

This is where I belong.
This is where I come from.
This is who I am.

It was a remembering. An awakening. A reunion.

Back in my body, a million miles away in the maloca, I could feel cool tears streaming down my face. And then, from within this more-than-a-vision, a soothing voice spoke to me:

This is why it’s always been hard for you.

The more-than-a-vision blasted me into my past. I saw my burning desire to converse with the Unseen, my meandering vocational path, the feeling of being a stranger that had haunted me as far back as I could remember, and so much more. Every challenge was validated and affirmed. It had all been a part of my search, all part of me trying to get back home.

It became viscerally clear to me at that moment. The reason why it’s always been hard for me, why life is difficult, why being a human is such a challenge was because of this - True Self, Source, the Presence in and and through and behind everything. Because this Oneness is who and what I really am… But I forget it. Again and again.

***

After the ceremony, I returned to my jungle hut where I began to reflect on the remarkable journey I had undergone. Previous mystical experiences, unaided by a psychoactive brew, had given me powerful encounters with God or Reality, so this wasn’t the first time I was made aware of my fundamental belonging to the universe. It was, however, the most consuming contact with Oneness that I had ever experienced.

There would be another ceremony the next day (which would be potent in its own right), but as far as I was concerned, I had already received more than enough. Over the next few days, in a natural pool that Chris and I found during an upriver hike where we relaxed and traded ceremonial stories, in a Covid test waiting room while while my shaman stared at soccer highlights on his cell phone, on the sputtering three-wheeled mototaxi that struggled to carry Chris and me out of the valley from the retreat center to the airport, and back home around the Thanksgiving table with loved ones, the words I had received were stirring within me:

This is why it’s always been hard for you.

It was a comforting message for me in the maloca - whirling me around and hurling me through the different seasons of searching in my life, and blessing them. The sense of the sacred that was with me in the church pews on Sundays, at sweaty summer Bible camps, and later in passionate prayer groups in college. The hunger for wisdom that brought me to the quiet, dusty world religions aisle at the library in my teens and later to seminary for a Master of Divinity degree. The calling to community - to communion - that led me to start and grow a church dedicated to compassionate service. The longing for something more that led me to seek the Oneness in the stillness of meditation, the wildness of nature, and the vast horizon of psychedelic exploration.

But back in everyday life, as I unpacked the layers of meaning for myself, I also started to realize the inclusive, expansive nature of this message. It wasn’t just for me. It didn’t only have to do with the particular way I moved through the world or what my seeking looked like. The You of the message wasn’t just singular; it was plural.

The message was for all of us.

Life is hard…
Because all of us are contending with the Great Forgetting - amnesia about the Oneness that is who we really are.
Because all of us are seeking to reunite with our Source but have become entranced by the spell of Separateness.1
Because all of us are trying to trace the transcendent within us in order to become more fully alive here and now.

***

The thirteenth century Persian poet Rumi identified this very human predicament in the Masnavi. Written in Konya in what is now modern day Turkey, the Masnavi is regarded by many Muslims as the most important work of Islamic literature behind the Quran. Of all the possible places to begin this sprawling twenty-five-thousand-verse poem, Rumi chooses to start with the sadness and longing that result from our universal estrangement - the same beautiful revelation I experienced that night in the maloca:

Listen to the reed [flute] and the tale it tells,
how it sings of separation:
Ever since they cut me from the reed bed,
my wail has caused men and women to weep…
Whoever has been parted from [their] source
longs to return to that state of union.2

In these lines Rumi, a teacher of theology turned self-proclaimed Preacher of Love, captures a traumatic truth: we’ve all been pulled from our Source. Like a reed flute cut from the reed bed, we all sing a song of longing to go back.

We are, every one of us, trying to remember who we really are.

Not just those who think they are running towards Oneness through spiritual practice or metaphysical study, religious observance or quoting Rumi, psychedelic encounters with Mother Ayahuasca or Mother Teresa-like acts of service. But even those who appear to be resisting Oneness - either by chasing after something else, such as power and prestige, money and material possessions, novelty and pleasure, or a bigger buzz and higher high; or by hiding out in complacency and conformity, shrinking under fear and anxiety, or disappearing behind endless consumption and mind-numbing entertainment.

Whether our searching is marked by attraction or aversion, attention or avoidance, we are all singing the same song… We just might not realize it yet.

Addict and ascetic.
Misfit and mystic.
So-called sinner and supposed saint.
And everyone in between.

We all carry within us the ache of Separateness and its inevitable companion, the yearning for Oneness - to be fully alive!

And this is why it’s always been hard for you, for me, for everyone.

The film’s title refers to an anticipated global event - hypothetical at this moment - in which the existence of alien life and non-human intelligence visiting or living on Earth is revealed and confirmed by governmental authorities.1

The release of Disclosure Day marks the return to science fiction of director Steven Spielberg - known for classic movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. - after more than twenty years (a little less if we count 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).

I saw the movie on opening day with my son, but don’t worry, I won’t disclose any details beyond what the initial trailer reveals.

In one prominent, bone-chilling scene from the trailer, actress Emily Blunt’s Kansas City weather reporter character is on live TV, about to deliver the day’s forecast. But she freezes. She starts breathing heavily. She stutters. Something is happening to her that she’s trying to hold back.

Blunt starts speaking an alien language best described by the accompanying subtitles:

[muttering indistinctly, clicking tongue]

She is terrified.
People on the packed subway train watching the replay are disturbed too.
A group of nuns clutch their rosaries.

And what was my first reaction as I watched Blunt’s character utter this unintelligible language?

I thought: That’s what I do too.

A Season of Seeking

Just past midnight on November 24, 2002 after dropping off my fiancé-now-wife Cherie, I returned home and felt a strong urge to… pray. A bit of a strange way to end a night of drinks and dancing, perhaps, but I was in the midst of a season of intense spiritual seeking.

Earlier that year, during a semester abroad in Spain, I had a formative mystical experience. While sitting on a park bench in Sevilla, a quiet voice within me said,
I made you to be a leader.
But where are you leading people?
Lead people in my way.

Sure, the voice could have been the result of the unpleasant cocktail of chemicals that made up my hangover. Or maybe, in the wake of the previous night’s bottomless pitchers of Sangria I drank with my friends and the spliff I smoked with a couple of French girls that ended in vomiting off a balcony (and led to said hangover), it was a heavy dose of Christian guilt. But whatever it was, I heard it, I received it as the voice of Jesus, and it altered the course of my life.

This experience shifted the nature of my semester abroad experience, bringing a new spiritual depth (no, I didn’t give up the discotecas). It set up my post-college path of pursuing a Master of Divinity degree. Most significantly, this taste of the transcendent left me with a spiritual hunger that I carried with me into my senior year of college. I wasn’t satisfied with reading about God and studying theology, which I had in spades at the Christian liberal arts college I attended. I craved direct, unmediated experience of the divine - mystical experience. I wanted to encounter the Holy Spirit.

So when I got home that November night, I was thirsty. I was seeking. That’s why, instead of going directly to sleep, I sat up in my bed and began to pray.

I’m not sure exactly what I prayed, but it was probably combination of praise and thanksgiving followed by something like:
Are you here?
I’m open.
Show me you are real.

Almost immediately the air felt thick. I noticed a surge of warm energy filling my throat.
Is this the Holy Spirit? I wondered.
Am I being prompted to… speak in tongues?

Speaking in Tongues

Speaking in tongues - glossolalia in Greek - is a phenomenon that appears in the Bible most prominently on the day of Pentecost, which, as the story goes, is fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and ten days after his ascension into heaven. After Jesus’ ascension the disciples return to Jerusalem where they gather in an upper room, praying and waiting to receive the promised Holy Spirit as Jesus instructed them. According to the biblical book of Acts:

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

I grew up hearing this story, which plays a prominent role in the founding of the church. But, until a few weeks before that midnight moment, I had never heard anyone actually speak in tongues. Because while the Pentecostal and charismatic streams of Christianity prioritized speaking in tongues and other spiritual gifts (the Greek word charisma means “gift of grace”), such as healing, guidance, prophecy, and words of knowledge, mentioned by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians,2 the Reformed tradition in which I grew up largely ignored these phenomena. There were different reasons for this - an intellectualism dismissive of experience, fear of these spiritual capabilities being abused, or a “cessationist” perspective that held that these spiritual gifts were only available to Jesus’ early followers in order to jumpstart the fledgling church.

The implication for me? These spiritual gifts remained beyond the bounds of my faith, which was mostly centered around practices like prayer, reading Scripture, and acts of service.

But this all changed a few weeks earlier when, deep in my season of seeking at a weekly prayer gathering my friends and I had started, I witnessed someone speaking in tongues for the first time. Hearing a strange, unintelligible language spoken by my friend, I was mesmerized. It felt holy. It stirred something deep within me.

But I wasn’t just moved by it. Encountering this thing that I had only read about in Bible stories sparked a new desire: I want to be able to speak in tongues too.

In the following weeks, I studied what the Bible had to say about the phenomenon. I dove into theological books exploring various Christian perspectives on the matter. And when I sought guidance from a couple of mentors who came from a charismatic background, they encouraged me to take the most important step: Ask for it.

Which is exactly what I did.

That night, sitting on my bed in the upper room of my college house, I sensed the arrival of the moment I had been hoping for. My heart racing, my throat full, I dismissed any lingering doubts, I opened my mouth and started speaking.

A foreign phrase flowed forth. And then another. And another.

No force or strain was involved. My entire vocal apparatus effortlessly produced an arrangement of sounds I had never spoken, never heard, and didn’t understand.

As I listened to the language coming out of me, it sounded Middle Eastern. It sounded ancient. I detected the repetition of words and phrases. I noticed patterns. Rhythms. I realized I could start and stop at will, like turning the faucet on and off.

But more than any of these technical details, I sensed the nearness of a loving, powerful Presence.

After the Upper Room

According to the Christian tradition in which I was fully and exclusively immersed at the time, I was experiencing the presence of the Holy Spirit, one of the three persons of the Triune God, or Trinity, along with God the Father and Jesus Christ. My understanding was that the gift of speaking in tongues was uniquely available to Christians. It would take more than twenty years for me to discover, however, that this phenomenon exists in other contexts.

I emerged from my midnight upper room experience spiritually “on fire,” my faith more alive than ever. I had experienced God in a new way. It was thrilling.

In the weeks and months that followed, I told a few close friends about my experience. I practiced whenever I could. At some point, I even felt prompted to speak in tongues once or twice in our weekly prayer group. But mostly - because I was afraid of skeptics, worried about what people might think of me now that I did this weird thing, and carried denominationally-induced fear of misusing this gift - I considered it a private prayer language that nourished my soul.

After college, when I was pursuing my Master of Divinity degree, the topic of speaking in tongues occasionally came up in conversations with curious seminary classmates. I would tell them my story, explain the various theological perspectives, and then, if they were interested, encourage them to do exactly what my mentors told me: Ask for it. Invariably, on at least a half dozen occasions, a day or two later they would return to me wide-eyed, reporting that they had received the gift of speaking in tongues.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this dynamic, but it encouraged me to continue emphasizing and exploring speaking in tongues and other “extraordinary” gifts on my spiritual path. When I completed seminary and began discerning a calling to start a church, I envisioned a faith community that resembled the early church, which included “many wonders and signs” - the 1 Corinthians stuff, the charismatic stuff, the direct-unmediated-experience-of-the-divine stuff - as described in the book of Acts:

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common.

Within a few years of actually starting the church, however, my attention to speaking in tongues and other spiritual gifts faded into the background. The kind of charismatic spirituality I craved never materialized in our church. Because there were matters to tend to that felt more urgent - neighbors who needed a warm meal or a roof over their head, who wanted to get sober or escape sex work. Sermons needed to be written. Money to support all of this work needed to be raised. And I was a young pastor with a lot to learn about myself and how to lead an eclectic mix of humans with varied preferences, capabilities, theologies, and traumas.

Studying Glossolalia

This past March I was sharing the details of my speaking in tongues experience on a call with Dr. Siri Zemel, a researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. IONS conducts leading edge research in the areas of consciousness, inner experience, and psychic phenomena, including intuition, channeling, and energy healing.

I can’t remember when I first encountered IONS, but it came back on my radar in late 2025 while reading super-bestselling author Dan Brown’s (remember The Da Vinci Code?) most recent book, The Secret of Secrets. The narrative of this #1 New York Times bestseller, which merges theoretical quantum physics and mysticism, and is set against the backdrop of the resistance of the scientific materialist paradigm (consciousness as a product of the brain; matter is fundamental) to the growing field of noetic science (consciousness is fundamental), features the research of IONS.

My reacquaintance with IONS was right on time because Dr. Zemel, along with Dr. Helané Wahbeh, was conducting a first-of-its-kind study on glossolalia, the aforementioned Greek term for speaking in tongues that is also used in scientific research. Specifically, the IONS study was focused on non-religious glossolalia, or light language, as it is called in New Age settings - indecipherable speech, utterances, or sound patterns spoken during prayer, meditation, trance, or other altered states of consciousness. According to the IONS research announcement:

Many people have heard the term “speaking in tongues”—the scientific term is glossolalia—and this most often occurs in the charismatic Christian church environment during visits of the Holy Spirit. However, within the New Age movement, a similar phenomenon occurs outside of the religious setting and is typically referred to as light language (although it is also known as angelic language, the tongues of angels, or tonguespeak). There are numerous studies on speaking in tongues—including from psychological, neurological, biological, and linguist perspectives—but despite its rising visibility, non-religious glossolalia remains largely unexplored in the scientific literature.

In my interview with Dr. Zemel, the second phase of the two-part study which began with an in-depth survey, I talked about my religious background, the prayer group, my midnight upper room experience, the sharing of the gift in seminary, and the charismatic vision I had for the church I started. I talked about how I could speak in tongues anywhere, anytime. And about how even though I was in a Christian religious context when I first started, my experience had always been independent of a charismatic church setting.

I also told her about what my glossolalia experience looked like in the fifteen years that followed. How my engagement with the gift diminished, but always stayed with me. Even after I left the church - not just the church I started, but the church in general - because my spirituality had evolved beyond that container.

How the practice nourished me during a five year season of inner work and soul searching - experiences to which I made veiled references in my book The Way Home:

Next I am driving on a winding road between the canyon walls, spontaneously singing songs of hope.
…
I felt drawn into the great conversation that takes place in that canyon day after day between the stream and the rock walls, the birds and the trees. I banged the small hand drum I brought. I sang at the top of my lungs. I whispered. I spoke in rhyme.
…
After our final dinner together, we gathered for one last ceremony… When it was my turn… I sang and spoke and uttered indiscernible sounds. I moved my hands delicately through the air and communicated a story of dead things coming back to life.

As the research interview continued, I also shared reflections with Dr. Zemel about how my inner experience of speaking in tongues compared to other states of consciousness that I had been exploring, noting the similarities and differences with the transcending style of meditation I had fervently practiced for the previous six years, as well as describing an LSD experience I had in the Arizona desert in which, as energy surged through me, I had a distant thought: This energy is exactly what I communicate when I speak in tongues.

Finally, I told her about all that had transpired in the year leading up to our conversation. My interaction with the gift had been reignited. I had learned that there were people beyond the church who did the same thing and called it light language. To my surprise, I had even started using my light language with others, in my coaching and beyond - to clear energy blockages, enhance intuitive capabilities, and even facilitate healing.

And it all started with the Telepathy Tapes.

Let There Be Light Language

The Telepathy Tapes podcast, hosted by Ky Dickens, explores the extraordinary consciousness capabilities of non-speakers with autism, such as non-verbal telepathic communication, precognitive awareness, nonlocal consciousness, and access to transpersonal insights and knowledge. In other words, with autism as its entry point, the Telepathy Tapes investigates the same psychic phenomena that IONS researches.

Without the Telepathy Tapes, it’s unlikely that I would have ended up reflecting on my glossolalic journey on the research call with IONS. Because I wouldn’t have even known about the broader, beyond-Christianity world of light language. And I wouldn’t have reactivated the speaking in tongues gift I had quietly held for almost twenty-five years either.

Three things followed in the wake of encountering the Telepathy Tapes at the beginning of 2025.

First, the day I finished listening to season one of the Telepathy Tapes, a new consciousness capability came online for me (which I wrote about previously here). I began to engage in a receptive writing practice. I embraced it. I questioned it. I practiced it daily.

Second, this practice - the kind of direct, unmediated experience of the divine that I had been pursuing since that hungover mystical moment on the park bench in Sevilla - increased my interest in the consciousness phenomena that IONS researches and the Telepathy Tapes investigates. As summer ended, I started noticing channeling, mediumship, and energy healing all over the place. Previously, I was curious but skeptical about these phenomena, likely because of an impulse inherited from Christianity. At best, they were dismissed (That’s just New Age mumbo jumbo.3), and at worst, they were demeaned (That’s demonic stuff.).

But I could not ignore it any longer. My attention was being attracted to all of it:
I read about an online workshop exploring channeling in a daily email I subscribed to but rarely opened.
A copy of a book by psychic medium Laura Lynn Jackson practically fell off the dusty shelf at a local used bookstore.
While attending an entrepreneurship summit, I had a deep conversation with a woman who is an intuitive healer.
The concept of light language came into my field of awareness for the first time too (Strangely, I didn’t think much about it).4

Third - and most significantly - I started working with a coach who channels a council of wise guides in her work.5

I discovered her in a podcast that I had been listening to. In the conversation, she talked about how many years into a spiritual journey that had been triggered by a near death experience, she developed channeling capabilities. Intrigued, I reached out.

Her integrity, care, and wisdom were immediately apparent, so I began working with her as my coach to further develop my intuitive capabilities. Experiencing her channeling gift in our virtual sessions was transformative. It brought forth clarifying insights, wise guidance, and powerful love. Our work together opened the door to another season of profound inner expansion, accompanied by outer shifts in my life, work, and relationships. But the biggest thing was yet to come…

After a few sessions, I felt prompted to mention my background of speaking in tongues. Maybe it would be relevant to our work, I thought. But I had no idea how important it was… In response, she asked if I was comfortable sharing it. I paused, closed my eyes, and let the language flow.

A few minutes later, when I opened my eyes, she was staring back at me excitedly. “It’s stunning,” she said. She told me I was transmitting powerful energy and shared how speaking in tongues was not just important for my own healing and transformation, but it was also significant for how I would support others in my work.

And then she told me that this… light language… was my particular form of channeling.

At that moment, something clicked. I recalled that in my exploration of psychic phenomena, I had come across both the term and the practice of light language, but I had totally missed that it was something I already did. Something I had been doing for almost twenty-five years. Something I was equipped with that had played a powerful role in my spiritual development - and that could play a powerful role in my own life and the lives of others going forward, if I would only let it.

It was as if I had partitioned off this part of myself, unsure of how to integrate a gift I received in an exclusively Christian context into the more expansive world to which my spiritual journey had brought me.

But now, what was dormant had been reawakened:

I speak in light language.

The Tongues of Angels

Since this revelatory session with my coach, sharing my light language has become a regular aspect of our work together. But it hasn’t just stayed there. This spiritual gift has come back online in full force.

Of course, I have much to say about all of this…

What light language is.

That I actually speak light languages, featuring different sounds, cadences, and rhythms.

How, as I’ve been practicing, it has revealing its purpose to me - clearing, hearing, healing, and activating.

About starting to use light language in sessions with clients and on calls with other friends - and strangers.

I imagine that at some point in the near future (I think it’s inevitable), I’ll probably even share it here via recordings of light language meditations.

But for now, let me end with a word about where it comes from - who or what am I channeling?

This, in part, brings us full circle back to where I began this article.

Emerging from the coaching session that created the glossolalic bridge for me from speaking in tongues to light language, I began to study the phenomena more intensely (That’s how I came across the research IONS was conducting) and discovered that the source of glossolalia is of variously attributed origin.

For Christians, it is the Holy Spirit. In shamanic traditions, the speech flows into the material world from the spirit realm. According to neuroscience, anatomically speaking, the source is the limbic area of the brain.6

In New Age spaces, meanwhile, light language channeling can be angelic, ancestral, and - wait for it - alien in nature. Some light language speakers claim they speak Pleiadian, originating from a star cluster almost 500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Others speak Arcturian from the giant red star Arcturus, the fourth-brightest star in the night sky. There are the languages of Orion, Andromedan, and others too.

Learning all of this, I wondered if fully re-embracing this practice meant I had to believe all of the alien stuff too.7 As if speaking an unintelligible language wasn’t already weird enough! This added some additional hesitation in disclosing to anyone that I speak light language (Not to mention, publishing this article!).

A couple of months ago, hoping for some resolution, I brought up the matter in a session with another powerful channel that my coach had introduced me to.

“How do I know who I’m channeling in my light language?” I asked the older Englishman.8

He didn’t hesitate.

“By their fruits shall you know them,” he answered with his gentle, soothing voice, echoing the words of Jesus9 (apropos for someone who channels Christ Consciousness10).

Then he added, “You can feel the beauty of the fruit, and through experiencing that beauty you come to know who the being or the consciousness is.”

He went on to say that, at some point, a name (or names) may be revealed to me. Or maybe I’ll come up with my own for convenience. But I won’t need one. Because, ultimately, what’s most important is the fruit that it produces - Does it lead to joy and peace, kindness and goodness, connection and healing?

In sum, Does it lead to love?

This is the fundamental question. Not just for my own journey. It is the question that ought to guide all exploration and expression of these consciousness capabilities, whether we refer to them as spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues, prophecy, or visions; or call them psychic phenomena like light language, telepathic communication, precognitive awareness.

The preeminence of love is precisely what Paul the Apostle so beautifully articulated in a letter to a young spiritual community two thousand years ago as they were figuring out how to wield their spiritual powers - words that light my way forward as I continue on this journey that I’ve been on for a long, long time; a journey that I’m just beginning:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails.

It all started when I finished listening to season 1 of the Telepathy Tapes.

Or maybe it began in college, the summer after my freshman year in that rural Mayan village where I dedicated my life to serving the Eternal, or on that night my senior year when I returned from the bar, asked the Spirit for a sign, and a string of unintelligible words began to flow forth from within me.

I guess it also could have started when I went to divinity school or, after that, in my late twenties when, along an old state highway in Seattle lined with rundown motels, used car lots, and fast food joints, I answered a Call and gathered some friends to start a church dedicated to serving neighbors experiencing homelessness, addiction, mental illness, and sexual exploitation.

Maybe it was on that rainy morning run, burned out and lost, when a voice whispered within me, If you don’t have your heart, you have nothing. Or many years later in a remote desert canyon, fasting, alone, and weeping tears of gratitude as I walked through the years of my life in the presence of The One Who’s Always Been With Me. Or along a storm-flooded river in Peru on the edge of the Amazon during the ayahuasca ceremony where I received a clarifying vision for my life.

Or perhaps it started with a host of more ordinary experiences. A childhood marked by listening to sermons in the church pew on Sunday mornings, praying around the dinner table every night, and singing my heart out at a sweaty summer Bible camp. Ten thousand hours of fidgety prayers and mind-meandering meditations. The everyday schools of marriage and parenting. Quiet moments of sitting with the dying as a hospice chaplain or sharing meditation with the incarcerated.

I guess I’m not exactly sure of the starting point…

But what I can say is that on January 14, 2025, the day after finishing the Telepathy Tapes, something new… opened up. I sat down to write in my journal but ended up having Something write to me and through me.

Blessing me.
Teaching me.
And forecasting the next year of my life.

It was a Voice of love and light and liberation. And this Presence was patient too. Because no matter how many times I expressed my doubts—I must be making this up—kindness and wisdom continued to greet me.

In the days, weeks, and months that followed, anytime I sat down with my pen and journal, living water continued to flow forth from this mysterious wellspring within me. The themes were consistent:

Trust.
Stay on your path.
Be receptive.
Doors will open.
You will receive everything you need.

These messages nourished me. I needed them. Because for the previous three years, I had been traversing through the unknown. While I knew deep in my bones exactly what I was being called to, I couldn’t see how it was going to happen—and it was taking a lot longer than I thought.

Though I was anchored internally, I’m sure it appeared chaotic on the surface—job loss, my book release, a stint running a brewery taproom, hospice work, and bringing meditation into prisons. Maybe people thought I was lost.

It was a time of many twists and turns. It tested my perseverance. And, especially since we faced major financial instability, I often wondered…

Maybe I’m getting this all wrong.
Maybe I’m just irresponsible, reckless.
Or worse. Maybe I’m selfish—putting the stability and security of my family on the line to follow my calling.

So after the Telepathy Tapes, when the Voice started coming through, it was a gift. And it was right on time.

Was it automatic writing?
Two-way prayer?
Channeling?

Whatever you call it, it was guidance. And as I received new connections and insights, our needs were taken care of, and doors opened, it became increasingly clear it was accurate guidance. So I listened.

But recently I realized I haven’t been listening to everything that has come through me. In fact, there is one area where I’ve been resisting.

Here’s one of the messages I received:

Stop with the filter.
Be pure.
Let love speak through you.
You are a conduit of love and healing, remember.
Be that. In each moment.
Do not over-analyze.
Paint pictures for everyone to enjoy.
Leave doors open everywhere for people to find god.
This is your work.
Why hide food from the hungry?
Why keep the seer from being seen?
There are thirsty people.
Give them plenty to drink.

This exhortation to Stop with the filter has been a recurring theme.

But, honestly, I have been filtering. I haven’t been bringing forth the fullness of what’s within me. At least, not publicly. Not in my writing—that’s probably why I’ve been mostly avoiding Substack for the past year.

I’d like to think that I have a good reason for this. You see, even since before my first book The Way Home came out in February 2024, I’ve been working on my second book, with lots of starts and stops (My latest pause on the project has been almost a year and a half long!). In my mind, I wasn’t so much filtering as I was saving. While I’ve offered some glimpses of my journey, I’ve mostly stayed on the surface, intentionally choosing to keep to myself and save for later the juicy stories about the deeper stuff going on within me, including mystical wilderness experiences, meditation revelations, psychedelic exploration, and other inner insights. At some point, however, what may have started as saving devolved into filtering. Withholding.

Lately, the Stop with the filter message has been getting louder, accompanied by the guidance to Tell your story. My clear sense is that this is both for my own liberation and evolution—challenging the ways I might still be muting myself in order to be accepted and avoid rejection—as well as for the healing and growth of others who will resonate with what I share.

So here I am. Back on Substack. Consistently. Removing the veil and telling my story. My stories and whatever other wisdom wants to flow through me.

Thanks for being here.

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

I was in prison—six different prisons actually—to share the gift of meditation with incarcerated individuals as part of The With Prison Meditation Project, a non-profit initiative I started to help reduce anxiety and depression, heal trauma, and improve post-release success for incarcerated individuals.

It has been a meaningful and gratifying experience for me. I’ve learned a lot. And, based on the feedback I’ve received, it has been a transformational experience for the participants. I’m not surprised. Practicing this meditation technique has changed my life too.

(By the way, my Within Meditation Course is available for free HERE until the end of the month!)

But it is time for me to bring this work to a close. It isn’t finished, not by a long shot—incarcerated individuals are in need of mental health and wellbeing support—but this phase of my work is done (At least, formally. I will likely still volunteer to do a course or two each year).

You see, I’m in a season of pruning.

Pruning involves the removal of plant parts—even healthy parts—to improve structure, airflow, and light penetration so that the plant can grow.

For the past four years, I’ve been juggling many things. I’ve felt called to all of them, but as this year started, it became clear to me that in order to grow into the next phase of my work, in order for my contribution to be healthy, in order for my energy to expand, I need to remove some things. It’s time for subtraction.

Subtraction is one of the five practices of the Within Process, along with Reflection, Meditation, Rewilding, and Rites of Passage, that are foundational to the spiritual coaching I do with individuals and groups.

Subtraction is about making space for the soul to speak. It can involve removing things like social media consumption, binge-watching shows, lack of work boundaries, overindulged hobbies, too many social engagements, draining relationships, excessive consumerism, and food and drink consumption.

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But it can also entail subtracting “good” things. Things that in other seasons may be really helpful and meaningful. For me right now, that is the Within Prison Meditation Project.

As I teach a final course this month, I’m experiencing an assortment of feelings. Gratitude for this opportunity. Sadness that I can’t help more people. Relief that I can close down one of my many email accounts. Curiosity about what will come through as I open more space.

This comes with the territory of Subtraction.

I’m sharing this with you not only as an expression of gratitude for all the support I’ve received that made this work possible.

But also to invite you to consider if there is something you are being asked to subtract right now. Because if you’re feeling stunted in any area of your life right now. If you’re sensing a fuller expression of your identity and purpose wants to emerge, but you keep getting stuck. Then it’s probably because it’s time for some pruning.

As Joseph Campbell puts it, “We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.”

If there’s something you sense you need to subtract and you need a witness, drop it in the comments and let me know. You’re not alone!

Grace & Peace,

Ben

P.S. One of the reasons I’m subtracting is so I can better discern what I’m being asked to cultivate in terms of a spiritual/consciousness/wisdom community. I’d love to hear from you if you are interested in exploring this. Fill out this brief survey.

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I said I was launching my next Journey Within cohort—a 4-month guided journey, in community, to help proven leaders shed outgrown identities, navigate the unknown, and step into their soul purpose.

Sure, I was excited about it. Because I deeply care about this inner work, which includes spiritual practices, rites of passage, and everyday integration—it changed my life!

Not only that, but the first cohort experience last fall was powerful. Here’s what some participants said:

• “I’d highly recommend the cohort—it could alter the trajectory of your life.” —Christiana, Leadership Coach

• “The most even-keeled, open hearted and generous coach and team leader I’ve ever experienced.” —Bob Bates, Executive Coach

• “This was the rare course where I looked forward to the coursework… I have made the change I was hoping for.” —Katie, IT Executive

You see why I was excited to run it back?

Almost immediately after I announced it, however, something felt… off.

For one thing, interest only trickled in. And many inquirers said the timing wasn’t right for them. But as anyone who has run virtual programs or in person workshops can tell you, a lot of registrations come at the last minute, especially right now. So it wasn’t just this.

I was sensing something deeper: the timing wasn’t right for me!

Upon reflection, I realized that by launching this next cohort, I was interfering with what really wants to emerge.

Something that has been on my heart and mind for the last year1—and keeps coming up in my conversations.
Something that goes back more than twenty years in my life and work, but has been dormant for the past five years.
Something that is a piece of the Journey Within cohort, but not at the center…

It’s community.

I’ve been dreaming about starting an online community of like-hearted leaders. Leaders who are about all the things at the core of my 1:1 coaching and group coaching and courses—spiritual awakening, presence, and soul purpose. Leaders who are… Seeking. Growing. Integrating. Together with others. So they can experience aliveness and be agents of healing and service in the world.

Launching another cohort touches on community. But community isn’t at the center. A 4-month coaching container is different from what is being called for right now in these times. Different from what I’m being called to.

I’ve decided not to launch another cohort on April 9—wait, that’s today!—but I’m not bailing on the deep transformation I know I’m called to help facilitate.

I’m not ready to launch this community yet—many more insights are still coming through (about community as well as another aspect of my work I’m not quite ready to talk about). My dreams are still forming. I also have some more listening to do.

As part of this listening, I want to hear from you…

Are you interested in exploring this idea with me?

If so, please take 2 minutes to fill out [THIS SURVEY].

Grace & Peace,

Ben

P.S. Last week I decided to give my Within Meditation Course (regularly $97) for free for the entire month of April. If you’re looking for an easy, enjoyable, and powerful meditation technique, get the course here!

Our world is characterized by:

• Volatility - We are living in a time of constant, accelerating change.

• Uncertainty - We are moving through the unknown, filled with unpredictable issues and events.

• Complexity - Everything is interconnected. It’s difficult to discern the impact of a part on the whole.

• Ambiguity - Clarity of meaning and intent is hard to come by (As John Vervaeke says, “We are living in a tsunami of bullshit in a famine of wisdom.”).

The concept of VUCA was introduced by the U.S. Army War College in 1987 to describe the post-Cold War world. But we are living in VUCA times now more than ever. Political polarization and instability. Wealth disparity and economic uncertainty. Climate crisis. Fundamental changes to the nature of work. Rapid, dramatic shifts everywhere. And, of course, the rise of AI.

Leaders simply can’t rely on the same old strategies.
Nor is a new model or framework going to cut it.
AI isn’t the answer either.

I come across this again and again with the high-performers I work with—executives and entrepreneurs, international and non-profit leaders, former professional athletes and corporate coaches. They’ve gotten to the top of their game, but realized something essential is missing. They know that in order to meet this VUCA moment, to steward their influence for good, and to support the people they lead and serve, they don’t require a new way of doing, they need a whole new way of being.

It’s clear: what’s gotten us here cannot carry us forward.

In a world speeding up and spinning out, we need a different way in life and leadership. Grounded. Wise. Deeply alive.
We need to cultivate spiritual intelligence.

This is the key to navigating the future.

The good news is that this capacity is readily available.
It always has been.
It is within us.

When you cultivate your spiritual intelligence—an inner journey that requires practice, patience, and grace—you evolve into the kind of leader the world needs right now:

1. Finding Calm in the Chaos
Calm doesn’t mean disengaged or detached.
It means we are capable of staying grounded amid uncertainty because our internal state is not dependent on external circumstances. As a result, we don’t just deal with change; we ride the waves of change.
Bonus: calm is an exportable commodity. It naturally impacts others around us.

2. Moving from Reaction to Response
Spiritually intelligent leaders don’t run on autopilot. They are not prey to their fight or flight reactivity, which often triggers conflict and causes harm.
Instead, they meet the moment with the most generative response. They’re also highly adaptive.

3. Shifting from Performing to Presence
When we are in performing mode, wearing the masks that (we think) keep us safe and secure—achiever, controller, perfectionist, warrior—we have a limited repertoire of behaviors. We show up in irrelevant ways.
But shifting to presence sharpens our intuition, enhances our creativity, and enables us to truly see and support others.

4. Remembering the True Self
This is not an abstract or esoteric idea. Spiritual intelligence involves living an examined life by which you know who you really are. Not at a personality level, but at a soul level.
When your center of gravity shifts from ego to soul, you stop pursuing small, self-centered agendas and gain the clarity of purpose that enables you to serve the common good and live in harmony with nature.

Now here’s a little secret about all of this:
Spiritual intelligence isn’t just a formula for upleveling your leadership in chaotic times.
It is a journey within that is about fully embracing your humanity in a time when so many forces are trying to strip you of it.
Or, as I put it in my book, this is a spiritual path that helps you reclaim your heart.

Here’s what that leads to:

“When you get your heart back, your life becomes a song, inviting neighbors and strangers, young and old, to walk in the world in a new way, reclaiming a wider, wilder version of what it means to be human and belong to one another.”

This is what the world needs now…

If you’re feeling called to shed what you’ve outgrown so you can cross the threshold from performing to presence, my next Journey Within 4-month group cohort starts on April 9.

Learn More

A year ago I made a confession on social media:

I went on to describe how my approach is shaped by my background as a human being, husband (22 years!), father (3 teens!), spiritual teacher, entrepreneur, non-profit executive, community developer, pastor, hospice chaplain, meditation teacher, and—of course—karaoke singer.

It was all true.

But looking back I’m not sure I was being completely honest… with myself.

Because while it’s true that I have wrestled with how to present the kind of coaching I provide, my “confession” doesn’t highlight the real issue: my own hesitancy.

I know—and I knew then—exactly what I do.

It’s all there in my post. And it’s clear in my book, in my workshops, and to those who work with me. As Chip Conley, founder of Modern Elder Academy, put it, “Ben can translate any mystical message into a practical action plan.”

(There is it. And he actually said mystical! I love it.)

But I wasn’t ready to really own it.

Now I am.

I am a spiritual coach. I help people experience deep transformation by reconnecting with soul—the deepest, truest part of themselves. The presenting issue may be about career or relationships or some other transition, but it is always about accompanying people on the spiritual journey that revolutionizes their life and leadership.

So it’s time for me to be honest.

No more hedging. No more translating.

This isn’t just critical for me to own so I can fully express my calling.

It also matters for all those I’m here to serve. The proven leaders who are done performing but are ready for presence. Those who have achieved great things but long to live more authentically and express their soul purpose. It is my duty to put out the proper signal so they can find me through the noise, and I can support them on their spiritual journey.

And—now I’m being really honest—I believe it also matters for the world.

Because in these times of accelerating change, artificial intelligence isn’t going to cut it. We need authentic intelligence. Spiritual intelligence. To lead us forward with compassion and courage. Amid the rising anxiety, we need grounded leaders who live from the inside out. Who know how to hear and act on their inner wisdom. Who are unshakeable in the chaos.

I’m sorry I haven’t been totally transparent.

I guess I wasn’t ready yet.

It was my old performer “mask” at work, still working to secure approval and acceptance. Ensuring I didn’t sound too woo. Too earnest. Or too heretical for the religious background I outgrew.

But it won’t happen again. I’m here now. Fully.

I’m grateful for this realization. It’s the perfect moment.

As theologian Frederick Buechner says, your vocation is where “your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Right now, so many people are spiritually hungry. Many are finding their way back to the mystical path. A revolution of consciousness is underway.

And I’m ready to help. I’ve been preparing for this my whole life. Accompanying others on their spiritual journey is my deep gladness.

How about you?

In what way have you been hesitant about fully owning and naming your calling?

It’s time…

Embark on the Journey Within

If you’ve already been doing inner work, but something still hasn’t shifted at the level you know it needs to…
If you want to prepare for what’s ahead by growing your spiritual intelligence…
If you're navigating a significant transition, a deep identity question, or a calling you can't yet name…

I want to invite you to join me for my next Journey Within group coaching program. It starts April 9.

I’ve developed this four-month experience based on twenty years of guiding leaders on the spiritual journey to help you cross the threshold from performance to presence. What sets this program apart:

• Practices that go deep enough to produce lasting transformation

• Integration that makes the inner work real in your daily life and leadership

• Grace as the operating principle—not striving, not optimization

• Rites of passage to help you reclaim your soul purpose.

Learn More

If this resonates with you, check out the details and reach out to schedule a discovery call.

Grace & Peace,
Ben
benkattofficial.com

In my coaching, workshops, and networking, accomplished executives, successful entrepreneurs, and leadership coaches with thriving practices are all expressing the same exact thing: spiritual curiosity.

Wait, that’s not strong enough.

It’s spiritual hunger.

For some leaders, it’s because they’ve outgrown their religious background—they’re longing for more. For others, this spiritual hunger has been sparked by the emerging science around consciousness that is entering the mainstream through podcasts like Ky Dickens’ The Telepathy Tapes or books like Dan Brown’s bestseller The Secret of Secrets. Still others are arriving here because of an experience with psychedelics.

There are practical reasons that have brought people to this place, too. Evolving leaders who have been feasting on a steady diet of frameworks such as emotional intelligence, conscious leadership, Internal Family Systems, and Polyvagal Theory—and know their Enneagram number too—are realizing they’re still… hungry.

They’re longing for contact with something deeper.
They crave connection with what is really real.
(Perhaps even more so because of the rise of AI.)

In other words, so many leaders are awakening to the reality that their most important growth area—to help them serve their clients and colleagues, navigate change and complexity, and thrive in their work and life—is spiritual intelligence.

There are many ways to talk about this domain:
Expanding consciousness.
Accessing inner wisdom.
Cultivating intuition.
Exploring the mystical.

But they’re all describing the same thing—the journey from the head to the heart.

Yet as people are beginning or deepening this journey, so many are running into the same three problems.

First, there is the question of practices.
Spiritual growth requires spiritual practices. But with so many modalities on offer—meditation styles, breathwork, plant medicine ceremonies, intuitive readings—people are overwhelmed (“Where do I start?”).

Or, perhaps an even greater barrier to growth, they’re spirituality is scattered. They’re caught in a loop of endless experimentation (trying everything at the buffet) without devoting themselves to specific practices that will foster the inner growth they seek.

Meanwhile, others go all-in on particular practices (and they love to tell you all about it!), but the practices themselves become an obsession and, sadly, they mistake the tools for the transformation.

Second, there is the matter of integration.
People get a taste of the transcendent, but it doesn’t land in the real world. So they keep chasing after spiritual highs. They engage in spiritual bypassing, explaining everything away in spiritual terms without self-examination or accountability.

As Ken Wilber puts it, they may be waking up, but that doesn’t mean they’re growing up (psychological maturation), cleaning up (shadow work), or showing up (embodiment).

Third, there is the issue of approach.
As I alluded at the top, many people are exploring spirituality on the heels of success. This dynamic isn’t a surprise to ancient wisdom traditions, which are chock full of stories of accomplished, powerful, and wealthy individuals still seeking fulfillment.

But there is something that needs to be named: the temptation to employ the same approach in spirituality that one previously brought to their career. However, striving doesn’t work on the spiritual path. Instead, it calls for surrender, patience, unknowing. It calls for grace.

As someone who has spent over twenty years leading at the intersection of spirituality/inner life, community/belonging, and social healing/social impact, I am thrilled about this rise in spiritual hunger.

But I also know that if we really want to harness the transformative power of spiritual intelligence in our lives and relationships, our communities and workplaces, and our hurting, divided world, then it is going to take a lot more than listening to podcasts and reading books, taste-testing spiritual practices, and acquiring spiritual experiences.

It is going to require practice.
It is going to demand integration.
It is going to involve grace, too.

I know this all too well from the starts and stops on my own journey, as well as from the experiences of countless others I’ve had the privilege of supporting on the spiritual path, the consciousness quest, the way of wisdom—or as I like to call it, the journey within.

That’s why practice, integration, and grace are foundational aspects of all of my work, which I’ve developed from my own spiritual journey—my decade-plus as a pastor, five-year soul journey, six-year exploration and practice of eastern philosophy, and experience as a meditation teacher and hospice chaplain.

So if you’ve been trying to navigate life’s transitions—career, relationship, identity, faith, health, midlife, etc.—but feel like you keep getting stuck. It may be because you’re being called to go deeper… because you’re spiritually hungry.

If this is you…
Know that you’re not alone.
Remember practice, integration, and grace.
And please let me know if I can support you on your journey within!

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If you’ve been sensing something shifting in your life but aren’t sure what—or what your next step is—it’s a sign:

It’s time to go inward… so that you can move forward into your next chapter with clarity and courage.

Join me at Modern Elder Academy’s Rising Circle Ranch in Santa Fe, March 22-26.

Explore your unique path on an ancient universal journey.
Shed what’s keeping you stuck.
Cross the threshold into your authentic identity and purpose.

It was a phrase he used to describe the journey of going within, listening to your heart, and being true to the life you are called to live.

It is an inspiring idea. But it is easy to misunderstand.

Does it mean just doing what makes you happy?
What does it actually look like in your life?
Is it easy?

It turns out that before Follow your bliss, he said something different—something more powerful and instructive. Over breakfast one morning with a fellow academic Thomas Moore, before Campbell’s work entered the mainstream, he used another phrase:

Be faithful to your wyrd.

That’s Wyrd

Wyrd is a reference to an ancient image of a trio of sisters who spin the threads of fate, meaning “having the power to control destiny.” Wyrd eventually became weird. Its meaning evolved—first to “unearthly”; later it became “odd, strange.”

Given its multiple meanings, I think Be faithful to your wyrd is actually a clearer description for the journey of pursuing your soul’s purpose above all else.

• Because the way is odd—you make strange choices that don’t make sense to everyone else. You do strange things that make you stand out from society.

• Because the way is unearthly—you open yourself up to the mystical, to the sacred. You have to trust something more.

• Because the way is about the power to control your destiny. You don’t passively let life happen to you; you manifest the life your soul desires. You claim agency in the unfolding of your life. You make your myth.

As you know, Be faithful to your wyrd didn’t ultimately make the cut. It wasn’t catchy enough. But it does give us a better sense of what the journey of fulfilling your purpose entails—and the kind of person you need to become—an odd, mystical, and dare-I-say manifesting kind of human.

Walking the Wyrd Way

I’ve been living this way for a long time. But, I have to admit, I’ve only truly been getting comfortable with this way of being the past handful of years.

I declared it by sharing my story in my book, The Way Home: Discovering the Hero’s Journey to Wholeness at Midlife (which celebrated its second birthday last week)!

I doubled down on the wyrd path over the past half-decade, navigating so many professional twists and turns—hospice chaplain, bartender, prison meditation teacher, men’s eyewear model (talk about a strange combination!).

I continued the journey by going all-in on my soul coaching work and welcoming other incredible opportunities my way, such as my Faculty In Residence role at Modern Elder Academy, the world’s first midlife wisdom school, where I lead workshops regularly.

Here’s what I can tell you about this journey:

First, it’s not “normal” in our society.
So it can be lonely. It requires facing your fears. And being okay with being misunderstood (I bet you can hear your friends and colleagues, “You’re doing what!?”).

Second, it requires getting comfortable with the unknown.
Money. Timelines. Assistance. Outcomes.
This takes practice. It takes inner work. It always involves risk.

Third, this wyrd way is the way of life you are meant for.
It is more fulfilling than you can imagine—I’m not even talking about achieving bliss; I’m talking about following it, being faithful to it.

In fact, here’s a little secret: the finding is in the seeking. This changes everything. So when you step on this path, you are not waiting for some future experience on some future day, but claiming contentment, fulfillment, and aliveness here and now—in your work, your relationships, your entire life!

If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you sense a call to adventure, a sense that there is so much more that wants to come through you into the world. That there is a fuller, freer life you want to live.

I’m here to tell you keep going…

Follow your bliss.

Be faithful to your wyrd.

Or, an even simpler version I prefer:

Stay Weird!

Because the world needs more weird. To heal suffering. To evolve into our fullest potential. Weird is the way forward!

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New Year goals are great.
But sometimes they can get in the way of your growth process.
Whether or not you’re going to get into goal setting, there’s something even more important you need to do first.

The problem with New Year’s goal setting

There are a few reasons I encourage caution when it comes to setting goals for the new year.

First, it’s a timing issue.

The Gregorian calendar forces a shift that our bodies and minds are not yet ready for. Where I live in Wisconsin, December-January (and usually February too) is a single season. It is dark. Cold. It is a season that invites us to hibernate—to rest and recharge for all that will follow.

From my perspective and experience, to treat the changing calendar year as a time to look ahead and set goals interrupts this necessary wintering. It rushes things we’re not yet ready for. It interferes with our capacity to receive what we need to in order to be fully ready to step into what’s next.

Second, goal setting can contribute to action that is forced and misaligned.

Another reason I’m not big on goals at the turn of the year is because it adds unnecessary fuel to my doing identity. As a recovering striver, I still have a natural inclination to define myself by what I do. But relinquishing my grip on this I am what I do identity over the last decade (or it’s grip on me) has enabled me to get acquainted with my being—the vast stillness at my core. I’ve learned that when I am rooted in being, not only do I experience joy and peace that are steady and strong, but my doing is purified. My actions emerge from a place of alignment. And that means more flow, less effort.

Third, often your goals aren’t good enough.

Yes, goals can foster growth. But then can also interfere with your evolution. As this past year once again demonstrated, any goals I set often end up being far too small for the divine possibilities that reveal themselves in the twelve months that follow. So why bother? I’ve discovered that the best thing I can do as a new calendar year begins is to claim a posture of constant receptivity—curiosity, openness, and devotion to living in accordance with my highest self.

Looking back to look forward

While I tend to avoid looking ahead to the coming year with clearly defined goals, there is a practice that is essential for preparing me for the year ahead: reflection.
I don’t look forward. I look back.
Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say, I look back to look forward.

Here’s how I’m doing that this year…

In my coaching and workshops, there is a common question that comes up in response to my three phases of the journey within—the term I use for Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey:
Leaving the Familiar
Falling into the Unknown
Rising to Wholeness

The question people ask: Is it possible to be in multiple phases at once?

While I think there is a particular season of life, often in midlife, where we move through one phase at a time in the deepest levels of our interior world—beneath the surface shifts of career, relationships, health, finances, etc.—I think, yes, it is not just possible, but common, to experience some combination of Leaving, Falling, and Rising simultaneously, given the varying circumstances of our lives.

Evolution is not strictly linear.
We can be in a season of releasing and reclaiming.
Clarity and confusion.
Disorientation and direction.
Death and rebirth.

Not only have I seen this dynamic at play in the lives of others, but as I consider 2025, I can see clearly that I’ve been moving through these three phases in everything. Everywhere. All at once.

In what follows, I’m going to share some of my reflections on this past year through the lens of Leaving, Falling, and Rising, with the hopes that this might support your own reflection work—helping you look back so you can look forward.

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Leaving the Familiar

Leaving the Familiar involves recognizing and releasing what you have outgrown. At it’s deepest levels this is about shedding limiting operating patterns or ways of being that no longer serve you, but it also is expressed through endings in specific areas of your life: work, relationships, projects, hobbies, etc.

What I left behind:

HOSPICE
At the beginning of 2025, I sensed it was time to step away from my work as a hospice chaplain. My coaching work was growing, but more significantly my intuition detected that something else was coming my way. I didn’t know what, but I knew I needed to make space in my life in order to be ready to receive it.

I didn’t have to wait long.

After leading a workshop at Modern Elder Academy (MEA) in late January, I received an invitation to come back… multiple times. By July this turned into a part-time role as I became MEA’s first Faculty in Residence, teaching online workshops as well as monthly in-person workshops at their Santa Fe and Baja campuses.

I couldn’t have designed a better role for me. I didn’t see this coming. But I did sense something was shifting―and I paid attention. This experience was yet another confirmation of how important it is to pay attention to my inner knowing, even if I can’t clearly see what’s ahead.

SCARCITY
At some point, I came to believe a lie that I will always have to STRUGGLE to get paid for living my purpose, for the contribution I’m called to make in the world…

I confessed this limiting belief in front of a group at an MEA workshop at the beginning of the year. This wasn’t something I ever really talked about, besides with my wife.

Admitting my scarcity mindset―and releasing it―has had a powerful impact on my life and work this past year. Not only has it grown my gratitude for all that I have, but it has also enabled me to imagine new, abundant possibilities for my life and work, and the courage to more fully make my unique contribution to the world.

THE LONE RANGER MENTALITY
Over the past five years as I wrote my book, launched my meditation and coaching business, and started a non-profit bringing meditation into Wisconsin prisons, I got used to working alone. I bring tenacity to whatever I’m working on. I’m willing to put in the work and, in part, due to lack of resources (read also: scarcity mindset!), dedicated to learning new skills to get things done.

This independent, can-do attitude has come in handy. But when I’m not careful―and I wasn’t―this can devolve into a self-sufficiency that stifles my creativity and limits my impact.

In January (also at the MEA workshop) I met my new friend Kevin, a very successful entrepreneur and businessman. Through his kind and curious questions, he helped me see that my commitment to doing everything on my own was interfering with my personal and professional growth. He volunteered to become my business mentor, which led to me connect with a whole new network of like-hearted coaches and authors that are helping me take my coaching, teaching, and speaking to the next level.

Letting go of my lone ranger mentality has meant no more spinning my wheels, and more clarity and joy in what I’m here to do.

(Saving the unknown for last, let’s jump ahead to what has emerged, since I’ve already mentioned some of it)

Rising to Wholeness

Rising to Wholeness is the phase where you carry forward what you’ve discovered—as a gift to yourself, your community, and the world. It’s where you’ve reclaimed who you are and why you’re here, and courageously step into new beginnings. It involves acting on what you know.

What is rising:

MODERN ELDER ACADEMY
This was a big part of my year. Five workshops in two locations, and countless new relationships. I’m excited to be a part of growing this “midlife wisdom school” where I get to create meaningful, transformational experiences for people that explore themes I deeply care about—wholeness, wisdom, spirituality, transitions, purpose, and more!

JOURNEY WITHIN COACHING
After a few years focused on 1:1 coaching, I launched my first Journey Within group coaching cohort in October. This 16-week experience helps leaders shed limiting identities, get unstuck, and cross the threshold into greater authenticity, joy, and impact. Launching the group experience also involved creating three digital courses that I look forward to sharing more about in the coming months. (My next cohort starts on January 29).

HANGING OUT WITH HORSES
Before I heard that 2026 is the Year of the Horse, I was feeling the pull to horses. I went horseback riding multiple times in Santa Fe in 2025. I also participated in MEA’s Equine Assisted Learning experience, where I had a powerful encounter with a beautiful horse named Hef. I sense I have a lot to learn from the horse kingdom. More ahead in 2026!

LETTING MY LIGHT SHINE
In The Vision I’m Still Learning to Live, I wrote:
A coach recently reflected back to me that it’s as if I function like a set of Venetian blinds. I like to control the amount of light that gets through. I modulate the amount of love that I let flow through me.

In 2025 I learned that I’m just scratching the surface of the amount of light that I let shine though me. Enough of that! Equipped with some new practices and intentions, I started going all in on letting more light shine through me in all areas of my life. You’ll just have to take my word for it!:)

Falling into the Unknown

Falling into the Unknown is about traversing the terrain of uncertainty between the familiar and the fresh. It’s where the old maps that guided who you were and how you moved through the world—reliable and helpful for so long—no longer work. This phase involves wandering in order to find your way forward, befriending the darkness so you can see the light, and living the questions before the answers arrive.

What remains the unknown:

PARENTING SHIFTS
What an incredible year it was watching our three kids thrive! And also: having three teens in the house comes with new challenges. With our oldest graduating high school in June, we are in the midst of a new season of parenting—soaking up every moment while also paying attention to the new ways we are being called to support our children.

WRITING/CREATING
I started the year on Substack strong, and in June I renamed this space from STILL to WITHIN. My summer writing was steady, but when September arrived, I fell out of rhythm. That was mostly because I suddenly had multiple courses and workshops to develop and lead for MEA and my own coaching.

As 2025 ends:

• I’m not sure how much I’ll be writing here.

• I’m not sure whether or not I’ll get back into the second book I was working on until earlier this year.

• I wonder what, if anything, will happen with the TV show my friend and I have been working on for a couple years.

• I’m curious if I’ll start a podcast or YouTube show or some other creative endeavor.

…I’m just not sure. I think it is just too early to tell. Stay tuned!

THE WITHIN PRISON MEDITATION PROJECT
Over the past two years, I’ve taught a couple hundred people in six different prisons how to meditate. I treasure this experience. It’s a privilege. But with other areas of my work growing and calling for my attention—along with my low desire to do any fundraising to support this important work, I’m not sure exactly what this initiative will look like in 2026. I know I’ll teach a few courses, but I can’t say for sure beyond that.

THE MYSTICAL
2025 has been an incredible year. My family is in a really special season. I’ve been to some really cool places. I’ve met so many new inspiring people. I’ve accomplished some significant things. And yet… the greatest treasure of this past year is invisible—my relationship with the divine has deepened and expanded in beautiful, powerful ways. This is what grounds and guides me. It animates everything I do.

In terms of what is unknown about this dimension of my life—the dimension that includes every dimension—all I can say for now is that something is stirring deep within me. New insights. New gifts. I’m still listening, but I know that eventually, in some way, what is transpiring within me will be brought forward in my life and work.

Well, there you have it—some of my Leaving, Falling, and Rising from 2025.
I will continue to ruminate on these things, as they are no doubt the seeds for what will grow in me in 2026.

How about you?
What did you leave?
What remains in the unknown?
What is rising?

What makes you say that a wisdom revolution is taking place right now?

This was the final question asked by one of the participants as we wrapped up a five-day wisdom workshop at Modern Elder Academy (MEA) in Santa Fe last week.

Chip Conley, the former hotelier and Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb who founded MEA—“the world’s first midlife wisdom school”—in 2018, had just read an excerpt from an article about wisdom schools from teacher Cynthia Bourgeault’s Wisdom Waypoints:

From time immemorial, Wisdom Schools have emerged in times of global crisis or on the cusp of great leaps in human consciousness in order to help shepherd our planet through the transition. While there is academic teaching that goes on here, that is not the primary business of a Wisdom school; the primary business to help anchor human wholeness and to work with the core practices that sustain the transformation of consciousness.

After Chip offered a few additional comments, I responded too. The following reflections build on the thoughts I shared that day.

I’m seeing an increase in the pursuit of wisdom and growing curiosity about consciousness all over the place. Now a skeptic might just say it’s my algorithm, based on the articles I read, the books I buy, the podcasts I listen to, and the stuff that I write. Sure, in many ways I know and choose where to look for consciousness content.

But it’s more than that.

What I told the group was that the very fact that each of them chose to invest not an insignificant amount of money and travel from far and wide to attend a weeklong workshop exploring what wisdom is, its sources, and how we access it, grow it, and share it is proof enough for me that a wisdom revolution is taking place.

So many individuals are waking up right now. And it’s not just at these workshops. I see it in my coaching clients and meditation students—whether or not they even identify deepened “wisdom” or expanded “consciousness” as what they are looking for.

That’s because this awakening often initially presents itself as a feeling of being stuck, lost, or overwhelmed. But those who stay present to these states—instead of ignoring or minimizing them, distracting themselves with all sorts of things, or blaming some other individual or system soon realize that an alarm is sounding. A call to adventure is being issued, urging them to depart from limiting identities and expired ways of being, and inviting them to evolve, to seek wholeness. In other words, to grow in wisdom and expand their state of consciousness.

This wisdom revolution, however, is not just showing up at an individual level. It is visible at a broader, collective level too.

You can see it in the psychedelic renaissance arising over the last two decades, in which more people are seeking altered states of consciousness—and some smaller number exploring the benefits of accessing these states and how to do so responsibly.

You can see it in the popularity of the Telepathy Tapes podcast, a sleeper hit that has captivated millions of people with its exploration of the seemingly supernatural powers of non-speakers with autism.

And then there’s super-bestselling author Dan Brown’s (remember The Da Vinci Code?) latest book The Secret of Secrets, which is set against the backdrop of the resistance of the scientific materialist paradigm (consciousness as a product of the brain; matter is fundamental) to the growing field of noetic science (consciousness is fundamental), which explores “our inner worlds, our shared reality, and the interconnection between all things,” including psychic phenomena.

Up next is author Michael Pollan, who previously took conversations about ethical eating and psychedelics mainstream. His forthcoming book is A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.

Beyond the content that is being created and consumed on a massive scale, signs of the wisdom revolution are also visible in the new containers that are emerging.

My Substack friend Tom Morgan (Note-ed above) facilitates a sold-out virtual community of high-agency leaders dedicated to cultivating authenticity and exploring wisdom and consciousness called The Leading Edge. He has issued a call—and shared the details—for how others might create similar communities towards the development of what Tao Te Turquoise calls the “World Wise Web.”

Note: I’m very interested in developing such a container/community. Please let me know if you’re interested!

Tom is not alone. , who hesitantly describes himself as a “Mythodynamics Researcher,” writes about the importance and emergence of communities for cultivating consciousness. Andrew Dunn of the School of Wise Innovation is championing a vision for more “wisdom schools”—a lot more! MEA’s Chip Conley agrees and thinks wisdom schools are about to go mainstream. Meanwhile, Cynthia Bourgeault (mentioned at the top), who has been at this work for a long time, has been investigating the question of sustaining wisdom communities, particularly the issue of succession when the founder retires/departs/dies (start at the beginning and read in order).

This is all just the tip of the iceberg. There are no doubt countless other examples we could point to around the world.

So what does all of this mean?
How do we participate in this wisdom revolution?

I know the default response tends to be: We start reading tons of articles about wisdom and books about consciousness. We immerse ourselves in podcasts about these themes. We want to grow our knowledge. Maybe we even want to become experts on the subject matter.

This can be helpful.

But here’s the thing: we can’t just think our way into this revolution of wisdom and elevation of consciousness. Because this is about more than accumulating information. It is about undergoing transformation. And this requires a deeper response. Transformation requires practice—or, I should say, practices.

We could call them wisdom practices, but they go by many names:
Spiritual disciplines.
Mindfulness techniques.
Contemplative exercises.

Wisdom practices are rituals that grow your interior life and align you with Soul. These practices result in making you capable of moving through the world with increased and stabilized authenticity, empathy, equanimity, open-mindedness, and decisiveness—wisdom traits that we desperately need in these volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous times.

The invitation is simple. If all of this is stirring something in you….well, that’s probably a sign that you are joining this wisdom revolution. That this path is calling to you. Remember, you don’t have to know all of the information. Nor do you need to start a wisdom school (but who knows!?). You just need to stay open to your own evolution and commit yourself to transformative practices. And, remember, you’re not alone. Communities are forming, containers are emerging, and fellow wisdom seekers are everywhere, waiting to walk this path together.

A Personal Invitation

If you’re looking to answer the call to join the wisdom revolution, I invite you to explore The Journey Within, a 4-month group transformation experience designed for seekers ready to commit to their own evolution. Starting October 10.

This isn’t about quick fixes or surface-level adjustments. It’s about doing the deep work of reclaiming your heart, clarifying your purpose, and growing your interior life through practices that lead to lasting change. Over four months, you’ll walk the complete hero’s journey pattern—from leaving the familiar through navigating the unknown to rising into wholeness.

You’ll learn:

• How to access your inner wisdom and trust your inner knowing

• To navigate chaos and change with joy, creativity, and impact

• The foundational wisdom practices that sustain transformation

• How to lead from wholeness rather than striving or burning out

This coaching program grows out of my own decades-long journey as a meditator, coach, and community builder, as well as the insights I’ve explored in my book The Way Home and through my work at the Modern Elder Academy.

The wisdom revolution is already here. The only question is: will you answer the call?

If this resonates, I’d love to talk. Message me and we can schedule a brief conversation about whether The Journey Within is the right container for your transformation.

Enrollment closes Thursday, October 9.

I threw that limiting belief into the fire…

And everything changed.

Last January I was teaching my first workshop at Modern Elder Academy with founder Chip Conley. He was leading the group through a powerful exercise of identifying and releasing critical self-limiting beliefs.

As guest faculty, I was just supposed to observe. But as I witnessed each workshop participant bravely stepping up, publicly acknowledging a limiting belief, and casting it into the fire—and then claiming its opposite for their life, I was inspired…

And I realized, there was something I needed to say. Something I needed to release.

I felt inner resistance. Fear. Shame. Doubt. DON’T SAY THAT OUT LOUD.

(which, by the way, I’m feeling again as I write these words!)

But the truest part of me beneath that resistance—my true voice—prevailed.

I stepped in front of the group:

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived with a sense of abundance when it comes to love, friendship, meaningful work, energy, creativity, and having just enough and just the right time…

…

But at some point, I came to believe a lie that I will always have to STRUGGLE to get paid for living my purpose, for the contribution I’m called to make in the world.”

(There was a lot behind this—aversion to greed and fear of my proclivity for it, misconceptions about money and service, self-righteousness. At the same time—and this will come as no surprise to my coaching clients with whom I talk about the gifts our masks give us—I know that this limiting belief served a purpose—cultivating perseverance, integrity, and trust in the divine!)

Of course, I didn’t elaborate on all of this. I just took the slip of paper I had written my limiting belief on, tossed it into the fire, and declared to the kind faces in front of me:

“Today I embrace abundance in every conceivable way.”

What has unfolded since the moment of that ritual is hard to capture in words.

Internally, a dramatic shift has taken place. A sense of expansive freedom and higher power and infinite possibility.

And, externally, countless new opportunities and alliances have come my way—as if the divine was just waiting for me to let go of that lie.

To borrow from Joseph Campbell… Doors opened where there were no doors.

This past weekend I got to walk through one of those doors as I experienced my business coach Amber Vilhauer’s Elevate Entrepreneurship Summit. It was packed with inspiration, strategy, and… joy.

And, best of all, I found a host of new like-hearted friends and companions for the journey as I step into the next phase of giving my gift to the world―unshackled from any sense of scarcity.

LFG!

If you are looking to shed your limiting beliefs and step into your full power and potential, join me for the Journey Within, my first group coaching program starting this October. Embark on a quest to get your heart back and unlock your inner wisdom—so you can navigate chaos and change with joy, creativity, and impact!

Six years ago as I was camping alone in a remote canyon in southern Utah, I had a vision.

But I’m still learning to live it.

It’s a good thing the vision came to me. Because that’s what I was there for—the vision arrived near the end of four days of solitude that were part of a two week “vision quest,” a modern rendition of the rites of passage ceremonies that Indigenous cultures across time and place have used to mark the transition from childhood into adulthood and full participation in the community.

I was 39, so you could say I was a bit behind schedule for entering adulthood. But in my defense: I live in a society that has forgotten these ancient ways of marking key stages of our growth. Even more, we’ve made a collective agreement to settle for more stunted consciousness states instead of evolving and expanding. We prefer to cling to our egocentric ways rather than shifting to soulcentric ways of being. Anyways…

The term vision quest is derived from the Lakota word hanbleceya, which literally means “crying for a dream.” It involves suffering, undergoing a spiritual death, and crying out for a vision for one’s own life and for one’s people. I did experience a form of this out in that remote canyon though, admittedly, it couldn’t hold a candle to the kind of initiation experience that African shaman Malidoma Patrice Somé describes in his book Of Water and the Spirit.

Still, I was absolutely crying for a dream. Because in the years leading up to that lonely canyon moment, it had become increasingly clear that my way of moving through the world was unsustainable. And that there was more to who I was than I realized. I craved a glimpse of my destiny.

You can read all about this journey in my book The Way Home.

Fortunately, I received a vision. Sure, I didn’t expect it to involve Donald Trump. But that’s what the gods gave me. Beggars can’t be choosers.

You can read a fuller book excerpt of it here, but here’s what the vision showed me:

The message?
It is something so elemental, printed on the most basic greeting card and sung in the cheesiest pop song.
And yet something so magnificent and inexpressible, pointed to by the mystics in poetry, story, and song across the ages.
It is the Leaving, the Falling, the Rising.
It is the path, the journey, the destination.
It is the true treasure of the quest—the source of the sound of the genuine and the one and only human vocation. The message is love.
Love. Love. Love.
Life is all about love.
Immeasurable, unconditional love.
Love is our essence. It is where we come from. It is our destiny. Love is who I am and why I’m here.
Love is who you are and why you’re here.
Love is who we all are and why we’re all here.

Love is who I am and why I’m here.

This is the fundamental vision I received.
It’s also the vision that I’m still learning to live.

A series of experiences, encounters, and conversations this year has brought it to my attention that I’ve only been scratching the surface of expressing this vision in my life.

A coach recently reflected back to me that it’s as if I function like a set of Venetian blinds. I like to control the amount of light that gets through. I modulate the amount of love that I let flow through me.

His observation was spot on.

Why do I do that? I wondered.

There are lots of reasons. But as I’ve reflected on this I’ve realized that—and this feels like a odd thing to say—we live in a world where it is strange to love.

Yes, to love is our nature. It is our birthright. Yet we’ve forgotten. And at this moment, it often feels more common to withhold, to be against, to divide, to tear down. Or to be cynical about love.

So here I am as this creature that longs to be loved. But I’m worried that if I love too much, I will be, what—Obnoxious? Overbearing? Dismissed? Rejected?

Yes. In other words, there is still a part of me that is afraid that if I really reclaim my identity and purpose as Love that I will be… unloved.

As a result, I hold back. I allow only a fraction of what is within me to flow through me. In fact, I try to make love palatable—not “too much.” Practically, what this looks like is showing love in ways that make sense to people. In contexts where people will say “Yes, that is an acceptable place to show love” or “Yeah, they really need it there!”

With family and friends, of course. But also by starting a community center in Seattle to “serve the poor.” As a hospice chaplain, a meditation teacher in prisons, and as a coach and teacher.

Attempting to control my love output doesn’t just manifest in where or with whom I express love, it also impacts the levels that I let flow through me in those contexts. It might still feel like big love to those people and in those places—and I hope it does—but my inner dam operator knows there is a much vaster, boundless, ever-flowing stream where that comes from!

I’m aware that these reflections may not make sense to anyone. Or that this may be perceived in any number of ways, including, “Is this guy, like, bragging about how much he loves people?”

But I’m putting this out there to express my intention to fully live out the vision that I was given—to let love flow through me in even bigger, bolder ways. To open up the Venetian blinds and let the light come streaming in.

I’m also sharing this, I suppose, to remind you that despite what you’ve been told, it is not strange to love.

In fact, Love is who you are and why you’re here too.

Get Your Heart Back

Join me for the Journey Within, a 4-month quest to reclaim your heart and unlock your inner wisdom—so you can navigate chaos and change with joy, creativity, and impact.

It happened again.

A door opened…

Where there were no doors.

So I stepped through it.

Before my unplanned one month hiatus from this newsletter, I was doing a series of posts (links at the bottom) on navigating the space between jobs and the similar terrain of pursuing your creative purpose beyond a so-called traditional career path. My reflections came from investigating ancient myths as well as the journey I’ve been on for the past handful of years—especially since I lost my job in early 2022.

What I didn’t know when I began the series was that I was on the verge of yet another experience that would demonstrate the validity of all of the themes I was exploring.

In this post, I want to share what transpired and the incredible, even mystical, experience in the wild that affirmed my transition into this next expression of my calling—to encourage you on your journey of following your bliss and carrying forward your gift for the world.

The Backstory - A Call to Adventure

Last January I had the privilege of teaching a weeklong workshop at the Santa Fe campus of Modern Elder Academy, the world's first midlife wisdom school. I had been invited almost a year earlier after founder Chip Conley kindly read an advanced copy of my book The Way Home and was excited about all the parallel themes with the work of MEA and his new book, Learning to Love Midlife.

That week at MEA, with an incredible group of workshop participants, was such an impactful (and fun!) experience. As Chip experienced my teaching and facilitation―and realized how much my work overlapped with the three foundational pillars of the MEA curriculum (Navigating Transitions, Cultivating Purpose, Owning Wisdom)―it became clear to him that more collaboration was in order.

Initially, this meant an invitation to return as guest faculty and teach my Discovering the Hero’s Journey in Midlife workshop at MEA’s Baja campus this October. But that wasn’t it. In June, after continued conversation, the guest teaching gig turned into an ongoing role in supporting and shaping the important wisdom work of MEA, and on July 1 I joined hospitable, curious, and audacious MEA team as Faculty In Residence. In this role, I'll be leading and teaching workshops in person, facilitating online courses and masterclasses, and creating and designing offerings to help people in the second half of life to thrive, unlock their inner wisdom, grow through transitions, and express their purpose for the common good.

I could not have invented a role that was more aligned with who I am and what I’m about! I look forward to working with the team at Modern Elder Academy alongside my continued writing, coaching, and meditation work (in prisons and beyond).

The Confirmation - A Wild Encounter

It was supposed to be a quick hike.

But it turned into an epic quest—marking an outer transition and inner transformation years in the making—and an ordination for my next season of service.

In early July I was in Santa Fe, facilitating a Modern Elder Academy workshop led by Krista Tippett. After a delicious lunch, we had a 90ish minute break. I was thinking of getting in a nap. But my heart was calling me somewhere else… to the petroglyphs—400-800 year-old drawings, carved into rock faces.

Earlier that day, someone had whispered to me the secret knowledge of this set of petroglyphs, tucked away in a corner of the 2600-acre ranch. I was full. I was tired. But I was being pulled to go see these drawings NOW. So I listened.

A one-mile hike, ridge climb, and some light rock scrambling later, I arrived at a pile of boulders covered in dozens of petroglyphs. I wondered, How old are they? What do they mean? And, of course, I pulled out my phone and took a selfie with these ancient pictures.

Then, as I put my phone back in my pocket, my balance shifted and the rock beneath my feet wobbled.

That’s when I heard it: a loud RATTLE!

Instantly I jumped as high and far as I could (which is not saying very much). My heart racing, I turned around to identify where the unmistakable sound was coming from. And there it was: A RATTLESNAKE, UNDERNEATH THE ROCK I HAD JUST BEEN STANDING ON when taking my selfie, still shaking its tail.

What I felt next was not fear. It was awe.

This was not happenstance. It was destiny—a sacred encounter.

And just like in all of my previous encounters—owl and jaguar, hummingbird and cactus, and many more, I knew this rattlesnake carried a message for me.

As I made my way back, I researched the symbolic meaning of the rattlesnake in Southwest Native American cultures:

A powerful force of healing and transformation.
A sign of shedding and rebirth.
Deeply connected to the underworld—the spiritual realm.

All of it resonated with me.

Yes, it was a nod to the spiraling journey of transformation that I’ve been through. But even more, the rattlesnake represented and affirmed the work I had just stepped into with MEA and who I’m being called to come alongside as an anam cara—“soul friend” or spiritual guide—in this next season:

I’m here for the forces of nature—the high-performing leaders who’ve experienced incredible success… but now feel stuck, exhausted, lost.

I’m here to help them shed limiting identities, get their heart back, and unlock their inner wisdom so that they can navigate the chaos and change around them with joy, creativity, and impact.

We are living in a time of great transition. We are collectively being plunged into a call to adventure, and the unknown that follows it. But we can’t navigate these chaotic times with our old operating patterns. And leaders won’t be capable of leading through this societal transformation in the outer world unless they have tended to their own inner transformation. As I learned in my own midlife quest, if you don’t have your heart, you have nothing… and we have nothing. New ways of being will be required from each and every one of us—and this starts within.

***

One of the other symbolic identities of a rattlesnake I read about is rain-bringer. They often appear before storms and their rattle is associated with thunder. As I continued down the trail, a thick, dark storm cloud began to fill half the sky.
Lightning pierced the sky.
The thunder rolled.
I knew I was exactly where I need to be.

Join Me Online

Recent Posts on Career Transitions and the Creative Path

I Lost My Job. Now What?: Entering the unknown: where legends are born

Career Disruption & the Middle Way: What the Buddha’s journey reveals about charting a saner path between purpose and paycheck

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Career: From the pit to promotions: four timeless lessons for the wilderness between jobs

How to Roll the Dice on Your Career and Creativity: Replacing resumes with rituals on your professional path

Breaking Free, Finding Your Calling: Unearthing Clues to Your Vocation in Unlikely Places

You tell yourself rest is coming. After the project wraps. After the kids are older. After the next vacation. But the finish line keeps moving.

What if the rest your soul is craving isn’t waiting at the end of your to-do list?

What if it’s already here—hiding in plain sight, in small pauses, quiet moments, and the grace to stop striving?

This article, originally published in InHabit Magazine (June 4, 2025) explores where we can begin to find reenergizing rest in the midst of the madness of daily life.

The other morning I slid into a cracked-vinyl booth at our local greasy spoon for the monthly reunion with two lifelong friends. Tim beamed, still glowing from gallivanting with his family through Ireland, buddy-tripping to an English football match, and already golfing at levels on par with the PGA Tour—somehow, despite it only being spring in chilly Wisconsin. Meanwhile, I was fresh off an adults-only Belize birthday bash for my mom’s 70th, only a month after family spring break in Baja, with a Sedona meditation retreat on deck. Both of us were rested, energized, grateful.

Then there was Nate. Instead of getting his workout in, he had spent his morning barking at his boys because their stuff was scattered all over the house. So his wife kindly kicked him out of the house early. But this incident was just the tip of an iceberg of exhaustion. Beneath the surface? An understaffed team at work. His dad’s death six months ago. Struggles supporting his mom. “By the way,” he added, “It’s the year-anniversary of my brother-in-law’s death.” Nate was carrying a lot. No wonder he was feeling more scrambled than the eggs on his plate. Rest was a stranger.

“It’s the Nate Show today,” Tim declared. And so for the next hour, over breakfast and bottomless coffees, we all shared about family and work and life, but tried to pour out a little extra love for Nate.

The diner booth that day felt like a microcosm of life. Sometimes you’re refreshed like Tim or Ben. But sometimes you’re Nate, buried by demands with rest seemingly nowhere to be found. The eventual cost of the latter is no secret. The body keeps the score and you burn out. Your relationships pay the tax. And your identity shrivels into the smallest, distorted version of who you really are.

When life is overflowing with demands―single parenting, job loss, health issues, financial stress―rest feels elusive, inaccessible, impossible. But here’s what we need to remember: rest doesn’t require a lengthy retreat or hopping on a plane to eat, pray, love our way around the world. Rest can be encountered in everyday life. And it starts with resetting our relationship with rest.

Here are three ways to reset your relationship with rest:

1. Micro-dosing solitude

Solitude is intentional aloneness to reconnect with yourself and recharge for the activity of life. It is a potent, foundational rest practice. But it doesn’t just come in big gulps. Solitude also brings restoration in the smallest moments. Micro-dosing solitude is about ingesting little hits of stillness. Ninety seconds of slow breathing in your car in the school pickup line. Staring at the tree outside your window for three minutes between Zoom calls. One song, headphones in, eyes closed, heart open. Repeatedly taking tiny doses of rest leads to a big after-glow. No substances required!

2. Subtraction

You can’t squeeze rest into an already stuffed suitcase. We resist the opportunity to rest when we think it begins with addition. But rest starts with subtraction. Take an inventory of your life: Overflowing social calendar? Binge-scrolling “just to relax”? Hobbies that feel like second jobs? Overconsumption of food or alcohol? Release one thing. Marie-Kondo your commitments until what’s left actually sparks rest.

A tech-Sabbath is one of the most powerful subtraction practices: going screenless for a set amount of time, maybe even an entire 24 hours! The first hours feel like withdrawal, but by the end you remember what your own thoughts sound like.

3. Grace

If you are a card-carrying striver like me, the default mode is to attempt to achieve rest by creating a checklist, downloading a productivity app, or tracking your heart rate, sleep levels, and meditation minutes. Spoiler: you can’t white-knuckle your way to tranquility. Grace invites a different economy—one where you are already enough, already held, already loved. Downshift from performance to presence. Approach solitude like a child flopping into a loving parent’s lap. Practically, this might mean unfollowing the influencer whose “5 a.m. cold-plunge and journaling routine” makes you feel like a lazy sloth. Remember, rest isn’t a self-improvement project. It’s about loving and caring for yourself exactly as you are.

Whether you find yourself in a spacious season or in the pressure cooker like my friend, assess your relationship with rest. It might just be time for a reset, opening the way for you to access rest through micro-dosing, subtraction, and grace. Don’t wait! Because rest isn’t just the way through your overwhelm. It also sends ripples of peace into the overwhelmed world around you.

That’s because the decisive moves that help you figure out what’s next professionally often happen within, long before the hiring manager ever sees your name. I’m talking about the small daily disciplines that keep your judgment clear, rites of passage that burn off potential sabotage, and the practiced art of waiting until intuition (not anxiety!) says, Now.

Today’s mythic mirror comes from the bittersweet story of King Nala, found in ancient India’s epic Mahabharata. Let’s see what this ancient gambler-king has to say about your next chapter—whether that’s navigating your work transition or unleashing your next creative breakthrough.

This article continues my ongoing Substack exploration of how timeless myths illuminate modern career disruption—for more, check out I Lost My Job. Now What?, Career Disruption & the Middle Way, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Career.

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The Kings’ Gambit

Midway through the Mahabharata, the five Pandava brothers are trudging through forest exile—punishment for the eldest brother Yudhisthira’s catastrophic loss in a dice game that cost them their kingdom, their freedom, and even brief enslavement—when a visiting sage recounts the saga of King Nala to show the shattered heir that his gambling disaster doesn’t have to get the last word. A kingly comeback is possible.

The story of King Nala?
It’s a wild one:

King Nala, famed for virtue and horsemanship, stakes his kingdom on a dice game and loses it all. Wandering in the wilderness with his devoted wife, Damayanti, he becomes possessed by the spirit of discord, aka Kali. He spirals into self-sabotage, and even abandons his wife in despair. After a venomous snake bite transforms him into an unrecognizable dwarfish form, he gets a gig as a charioteer, perfects his lightning-fast riding and masters the mathematics of dice. Years later, purged of Kali’s influence, he is joyfully reunited with his loving wife, challenges his rival, and wins back his throne in a single toss of the dice. And King Nala rules wisely ever after.

What a whirlwind!

For the Pandavas, Nala is proof that you can blow up your life and still come back stronger. For us, he’s a case study in three powerful inner moves that can help us navigate the in-between space in our careers and creativity.

1. Protect your power with daily rituals.

Kali, the spirit of discord, stalked Nala for twelve years, looking for an entry with no success. Until the king slipped up. One night, after answering nature’s call, Nala rushed from relieving himself to his evening prayers without first washing his feet. Skipping this regular, required purity ritual flung the inner door open to Kali, who entered Nala and filled him with a feverish desire to fling the dice… leading to his ruin.

Does this mean that the key to your future involves washing your feet after using the bathroom? No.

Here’s what it means for you: When your role evaporates (or you’re itching to quit), your nervous system is already overloaded. One careless “crack”—late-night doom-scrolling, numbing with substances, food, drink, or impulse buys, or rage-texting someone in your life—can open the floodgates to chaos that drowns out your presence and purpose.

Instead of letting harmful habits accumulate, be intentional in this season about building practices and rhythms that nourish your soul:

• Micro-rituals. Begin each morning with a brief meditation or a page of stream-of-consciousness writing—anything that makes space for your soul to speak and grounds you before email noise hits or anxiety hijacks your day.

• Decision curfew. Make no major decisions—especially about work—after, say, 7 p.m. Stay rested (and hydrated too!) Exhaustion is Kali’s playground.

• Weekly reset. Schedule a short tech sabbath (an couple hours count) to stay out of the downward spiral of social media-induced feelings of insufficiency, discouragement, and negativity.

Slip ups happen. But the key is having healthy habits that keep you coming back to yourself.

For me, the crack for Kali-style disruption is an extra cocktail or mindless late-night eating. But I can always find myself again through twice a day meditation and a daily journaling practice. These have been absolutely critical for me during seasons of the unknown. I can’t imagine where I’d be without them.

For one of my coaching clients, the issue has been late afternoon media consumption that not only derails other job search activities, but also leave him feeling unproductive—and guilty about it. The rituals that keep him steady and help him reset to soul are morning movement followed by time with his kids before school.

So be vigilant against potential lapses. But also remember to be kind to yourself. Relapse happens. But a new beginning is always possible when we are intentional about our soulful rituals.

2. Release the past with a rite of passage.

Nala’s comeback to kingship wasn’t the result of networking. It happened because of a rite of passage. The snakebite (by the serpent Karkotaka) was a part of the rite, initiating the process the ultimately purged Kali. But after the venom finished its job, Nala still needed to do two things to be transformed back into his true form: take a bath and dress himself in magical garments.

This rite of passage solidified his transition from his cursed state to his “true form and beauty.”

A rite of passage is a type of ritual that marks a transition from one stage or situation to another. It serves as a visible expression of inner change, a physical manifestation of a spiritual shift.

And just as a rite was essential for Nala, it is powerful for you. After a layoff, the heaviest baggage isn’t the lost paycheck; it’s the invisible weight of shame, resentment, or perfectionism whispering, You blew it or You’re not good enough. If you build on top of that voice, your next move will inherit the same fault lines. Wherever you go, there you are.

But a rite of passage is a powerful tool to interrupt this narrative. Here are a few ways to think about your rite of passage:

• Name the saboteur. Is it the inner critic obsessing over “wasted years,” the anxious comparer, the martyr? Write its script verbatim. Exposure is the anti-venom.

• Design a rite. Maybe it’s a weekend solo retreat, a guided breath-work session, or a literal fire where you burn the resignation letter you never sent. Mark the transition in your body, not just on your calendar.

• Recruit witnesses. Ask two trusted friends to hear your story without fixing it. Speaking aloud weakens the spell faster than thinking in circles.

When I lost my job, I lit a fire. On a crisp day in early spring, I pilled up wood in my backyard solo stove and let the flames get high. Then I took the box of fancy business cards I had and one by one cast them into the fire. With each card, I either gave thanks for a gift the job gave me or called out a lie about what this loss meant for my identity or my future. I filmed some videos of the burning business cards and sent them to a few friends and former colleagues. The rite was a simple, but meaningful act.

Give it a try, and remember: When you clear the poison first, a fresh foundation will follow.

3. Nurture your intuition to perfect your timing.

The first time around, the game was stacked against Nala. Not only did Kali “[bewilder] his intelligence” so that Nala kept accepting heavier wagers, but he was also playing with loaded dice—they were possessed by a spirit the tipped every cast in favor of Nala’s cousin. The game was unwinnable.

Not so the second time. Nala waited to play again until he was free of the discernment-clouding presence of Kali. He also prepared himself in the in-between time by mastering the hidden mathematics of dice.

In other words, he didn’t rush back into the game, which would have meant reenacting the same tragedy. He waited until the winds changed.

Desperation loves speed, but wisdom loves timing. Cultivating intuition isn’t about waiting for a cosmic voice booming from clouds; it’s the quiet convergence of three signals:

1. Skill readiness. You’ve road-tested the new edge. The in-between time may invite you to pursue a new certification, develop a beta project, or add a portfolio piece that equips you to show up to what’s next prepared to perform under pressure.

2. Market opening. You catch the wind: a hiring spree in your niche, a technology shift that matches your new competency, or a key relationship warming up. At just the right time. You weren’t ready for this before because you weren’t this version of you yet. But now you are prepared to meet the moment.

3. Inner stillness. The anxious voice of sabotage becomes silent. The choice feels expansive, not frantic. Yes, you may feel afraid, but it’s the kind of fear that is clearly inviting you beyond your comfort zone and into your calling.

Practically, you can grow your intuitive perception for what’s next by:

• Keeping a log that tracks every time you come across something that your inner voice says Yes to.

• Practicing small experiments: pick up a freelance gig, attend a public webinar, read a book (or subscribe to a Substack!) that calls out to you. These inputs will help you sense where the wind within you and the outer wind are blowing.

• Moving decisively when the signals align. Hesitation at this point can cost as much as impatience earlier.

Nala’s time as exiled king was an incubation phase. So is yours! Let this be a season where you actively prepare yourself and patiently wait for the moment destiny swings back in your favor.

Resetting Your Inner Game

Daily boundaries keep your inner compass calibrated, deliberate rites flush the sabotage from your system, and disciplined patience puts intuition, not panic, in charge. King Nala’s game two dice victory wasn’t magic; it was the outward symbol of hard-won inner alignment.

Guard the crack.
Purge the poison.
Trust the timing.

Each of those moves happens within, long before the world crowns you king—or offers you a job.

Now that you’ve reset your inner game… your next throw awaits!

If you’re navigating your own career wilderness and want a seasoned companion on the trail, I help leaders and creatives design the inner scaffolding that turns setbacks into soul-level pivots. Learn more about coaching with me.

So if you lost your job recently, are thinking of leaving, have been in between work for a while, or walking a creative, self-employed path, you’ll want make sure to stick around. But this week, I’m pausing the series to explore one place to look for clues to your calling—it’s still very relevant to where you’re at, but since no ancient myths are involved, this post is technically not a part of the series.

Let me know what you think!

Your childhood holds clues to your calling.

But, as we grow up, these hints about who we are and why we are here get erased by the expectations of the world around us.

It’s an idea I first heard from activist and educator who says, “From the beginning, our lives lay down clues to selfhood and vocation, though the clues may be hard to decode.”

I haven’t always known what to do with this.

I don’t doubt that it’s true. In fact, I often share this idea with others.
I also don’t have a problem identifying my calling—though, admittedly, I probably think about my calling a lot more than most people.
My issue is just that I just haven’t been able to easily identify and decipher the clues in my past.

But that changed recently.

Last year, when I started teaching meditation in Wisconsin prisons, I found myself asking, How did I end up here?

I mean, I knew that it was the restorative justice work of Marquette University Law School’s Andrew Center that introduced me to the first prison I taught at, which opened the doors for me to teach in many more—now totaling six facilities.

And, sure, supporting incarcerated individuals parallels the community work I was engaged in as a pastor a decade ago when I co-founded Aurora Commons, a neighborhood living room and resource center in Seattle, where we accompanied neighbors who had experienced significant trauma and were dealing with addiction, mental illness, homelessness, and sexual exploitation.

I also remembered the time I visited an Ohio prison when I was in divinity school as part of a group led by Chuck Colson, President Nixon’s Special Counsel and “hatchet man,” who ended up serving seven months in an Alabama prison for his part in the Watergate scandal and went on to found Prison Fellowship.

But, I wondered, Where were the earlier clues—if there were any at all?

It turns out there were clues. And, lining up with Palmer’s statement that they may be hard to decode, they were on the fringe of my life. Subtle. Weird, even…

A couple weeks ago my daughter had a friend over. She texted me asking if we owned Shawshank Redemption on any of the too-many streaming platforms we subscribe to. They wanted to watch it.

Of course we own Shawshank Redemption, I told her. It’s the best movie of all time!

And that’s when it hit me. My love for this movie was a clue to my calling. A bizarre clue? Yes. But also a serious one!

And it wasn’t just Shawshank.

Suddenly, a whole bunch of prison movies and shows I’ve loved flooded my mind.

Tom Hanks’ mystical The Green Mile.

The Rock, featuring Nicolas Cage (my second Nicolas Cage reference in as many weeks—do I get special Substack points for that?), Sean Connery, and—let’s not forget—Ed Harris.

The show Prison Break, which Cherie and I binge watched early in our marriage when Blockbuster, before it was obliterated by Netflix, had its own DVD-by-mail service.

Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn’s Dead Man Walking, an amazing movie that has one of my favorite soundtracks of all time, particularly the song “Long Road” by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Long Road (Ben’s Version) - Circa 2010, featuring my mediocre guitar playing and my attempt at qawwali singing.

And then there was one of my favorite Unsolved Mysteries episodes of all time about the prisoners who escaped from Alcatraz.

Side note: It turns out that so much in my life can be traced back to something from Unsolved Mysteries.

My interest in movies and shows about prison—with a special place in my heart for the stories about people breaking out of prison—was right in front of me the whole time. I just never made anything of it. After all, it’s entertainment, right? So how could this possibly be a form of my soul speaking to me?

Well, it was. I just didn’t think to look there. I wasn’t paying attention.

When I investigate this clue, I can see now that it isn’t just pointing to my calling as it is being expressed through teaching meditation in prison. It’s saying something even bigger, broader.

Yes, I work with some people who are in prison, literally.

But even more of my work involves accompanying people who are in prison, figuratively.
In my coaching, I often journey with people who appear to have it all together on the surface.
But inside they feel alone. Trapped. Stuck.

They’re locked up in a prison.
By their success and achievements.
By old operating patterns that no longer serve them.
By past wounds that haven’t been tended to.

Yet, beyond these walls, they see glimpses of their fullest, freest life. Happiness. Connection. Purpose. Creative expression. But they’re not sure how to get out.

My age-old interest in escape-from-prison stories is indeed a quiet clue that central to my calling is the work of helping these people behind or beyond bars get free—to find peace, authenticity, and alignment—and to do so by empowering them to discover that they already hold the prison break plan within them.

I’ve been in the prison break business for a while now, so I guess you could wonder if discovering and decoding these clues from my childhood even matters. But I would say it absolutely does!

Because this insight emboldens me to keep going.
It gives me a powerful metaphor to animate my work.
It also invites me to widen my perspective so that I can notice other subtle and strange clues that not only shape my calling right now, but may also have something to say about future vehicles for my vocation about which I’m currently unaware.

So if you currently feel clueless about your calling. If you feel like you’ve lost the thread. Or are not sure about the next step. Remember to investigate your past. All of it. Not just the things you did or hobbies you had. But also the stories and characters that you’ve always been drawn to (even if Nicolas Cage is involved!). Because your soul has always been speaking to you, even—or perhaps, especially—from the fringes of your life.