Initiated Episode 1: The Framework

After some deliberation (and finally admitting to myself just what is actually possible in my life right now), Initiated has been shifted from a video-based offering into a multi-episode series of podcasts on this channel. The complex process of putting such a large project out has just felt utterly overwhelming, but this way feels the very opposite: sweet, accessible, and really exciting. May these tools be helpful and supportive on your path, and I hope this is an easy way to access them.

And so this is the journey: Every week for the foreseeable future I will be releasing a solo audio track offering the principles, practices, and philosophies of Spiritual Initiation as understood through the syncretic lenses of Shamanism, Buddhism, and modern Psychology. Along with the primary track each week you’ll also see a bonus experiential track featuring some beautiful ambient music from Belltower Audio (also known as my partner, Brent) and a practice aligned with each week’s subject to really support your experience. These practices have nourished and aligned me on my own path, and I offer them with the hope and intention that they will do the same for you.

Life is beckoning all of us onto this initiatory path in anticipation and support of the next phase of our species’ experience. We are being transformed by life (as life has the habit of doing), calling us into alignment with our surroundings and into the potential for a truly interdependent and respectful human civilization. We can all see that we cannot continue to live as we are on this planet without destroying both ourselves and our environment, but how do we change? Why do we continue to relate to ourselves and each other in such damaging ways even as we seem to ‘see’ our behaviours and the patterns of our history? What is our true nature, and how do we express that more fully and beautifully? And how do we reclaim the soul self, and then build a world that protects the soul of every individual?

These are the questions we’ll be exploring in the next many weeks, along with many, many others. I believe that the crisis and chaos of this time is asking us to ponder these questions and live our way into their answers, and I’m excited to do it here together.

In this first episode we’re going to explore the principles of the initiation concept and process, what the ultimate ‘goal’ of the entire experience is, and take a deep dive into the importance of reflective, conscious belief formation as the ‘framework’ for this work. I offer here, with humility, several perspectives that I feel are fundamental to a powerful, awake relationship with life, and which have been distorted in the last few hundred years (and beyond) within the collective modern human consciousness. We once had access to ways of understanding our place in the world that encouraged connection, belonging, and faith, yet these have been skewed into ones that perpetuate suffering, separation, and instability. If we see the “problem” as something outside of ourselves we will be exhausted by attempting to change or fix it, but if we look within and towards the beliefs that form our world, massive change can and does happen.

Please note that I offer these perspectives not as a form of ‘commandments’ that you have to align with, but as an opportunity to reflect and investigate your own beliefs, and to ask what the consequences of those beliefs are.

With love and peace and the aspiration to grace for all of us.