GROWING UP +
HITTING ROCK BOTTOM

I grew up with one tricksy older sister in, let’s say, a conventional American nuclear family in a small back-woodsy Connecticut town. My mother described me as a “gentle, warm & generous child.” The family’s emotional vocabulary included sharp outbursts, no apologies, avoidances, and a well practiced under-the-rug technique. There was love and devotion as well. Parts of me closed, armored up, complied and quietly rebelled or longed to rebel.

When I hit school and then my teens, it came out. Inspired by the nihilistic film, I started a local ‘fight club’ for me and my friends in the backyard. With my experience now, it’s amazing to look back. So many signs of depression, self-hatred, and anger and so few adults around capable of even noticing. One of those saving graces, I learned how to modulate my aggression with some honorable values as I trained to black belt in Tae Kwon Do Moo Duk Kwan.

My early success as a filmmaker was an initiation into leadership. At 19, I wrote, produced and directed my first feature film ‘Moonshine: A real-life vampire story’ which premiered at the Sundance Film festival, making me the youngest feature filmmaker in the festival’s history. In the process, I began to scratch the surface of realizing how destructive my harsh inner critic was - and that it was somehow possible to rewire.

By 20, I was in a leadership role in my outer life, but my inner life, although tempered, was still largely unconscious. My achievements with the film were fueled and driven by a whip-lashing emptiness within myself. I found myself overworking on energy drinks and Adderall for weeks on end, sleeping very little, and heading towards a wall fast. Upon the completion of the film, I hit a three-day coma and a near-death experience that took me to rock bottom. It was what I would call an unconscious rite of passage. So many late teens / early twenties find themselves in a car accident or a painful ordeal… a coming to terms with limits… and for some, a life-initiated rite to catalyze the next vital stage of development: soul.

In the cloudy void of that coma, I felt my spirit leave my body, with the option to not return. Waking from this, I knew my life had almost slipped through my fingers. I was shaken to the core and it called me to question if there was anything higher than me, anything after death. What was I using my precious time for? Was I just wasting my little island of powers selfishly chasing money and fame? I took a long hard look at my deepest motivations and beliefs. I never believed in much in life. Growing up, I endured the rare obligational visits to our local Episcopalian church, but I wasn’t compelled to think about it hard enough. There’s more than an ounce of truth in the saying, ‘there are no atheists in foxholes.’ I was in my foxhole, and now I needed an answer to my most pivotal question: Is there a God or some greater interconnected web of energy?

REBORN IN SPIRIT

Shortly after my coma, one July night in my hometown at 1am, I couldn’t sleep. In an ocean of sounding crickets, I walked to the railroad tracks and made an agreement with myself: ‘I won’t stop walking down these tracks until I get an answer to my biggest question: is there anything greater in this world?’ Dawn broke, and I was tired and wanting to give in, wanting to find a nice bed to curl up in.

I kept going and then... It was like the moment before a car crash. Time and space slowed down to an infinite crawl. That specific unique moment in time in that place with the pine trees, the breeze, the lady bug walking across the tracks toward a patch of moss…that moment came with an indescribable feeling that descended! I was shocked out of the pre-ordained logic and into such liberating dimensions, aware of existence itself stripped of prejudices. Without any teacher aside from Life itself, I received my first direct solicited satori experience, seeing into our true nature: the divine essence & love. This was the beginning of what I could only call a ‘spiritual awakening.’ My lifelong Connecticut small-town materialist paradigm crumbled overnight.

Over a period of months, I was visited & guided by several subtly embodied High Beings who delivered light activations, and answered my intuitive questions. I had never believed such things were possible. The world was shifting beneath my feet. A divine wind of electric inspiration and limitless possibility fired up my soul, estranged all my friends and most of my family, and opened up new energies inside me. My intuitive knowing came online.

A new world was opening up. I was receiving guidance, and it proved deeply trustworthy. It felt like my own voice but much stronger and higher. So when the guidance came to give away everything I owned, it felt right: My car, all my belongings, and my entire life savings. A small price to pay for what was opening. Looking back on it, it was a reset, a shedding of old skin, a second birth. In light of all the changes, I naturally reprioritized my life, did an inventory of all my habits, selfish orientations, and extractive motivations… and centered my life around a direct relationship with spirit and goodness. The Golden Rule took on a sort obvious rubber-meets-the-road meaning, as well as the yamas and niyamas of yoga.

I then followed direct guidance to Virginia City, Montana where I lived in a tent on a stream and integrated a profound series of paradigm shifts. Maybe it was my accrued spiritual development from previous lifetimes? Whatever the case, it came as a samadhi state that largely consumed my waking state for the next 8 months and was accompanied by a lifestyle of synchronicities. I still now look back on that time with a sort of nostalgia for the all encompassing feeling of being in the lap of God.

FINDING IT + LOSING IT

After this multi-month peak experience at 21, I came back home and through little conflicts with family and my own inner choices…I gradually lost that exalted feeling that had lasted for 8 months. I slowly descended into the valley of my base waking state. Looking back, I know that we descend to integrate… The peaks and valleys are part of the journey. At the time, coming down from the grace of this samadhic mountaintop was one of the biggest heartbreaks of my life.

My longing called me to find again what I had ‘lost.’ I wanted to integrate this higher energetic standard into all areas of my life. I transitioned my work as a film director into serviceful waters, traveling & filming with a grassroots non-profit in the poorest rural villages of Argentina and Nigeria. In my hometown, I worked with some colleagues to start a grassroots arts collective to inspire & support the abandoned youth. During this whole time, I felt myself struggling to follow the scent of spirit alive within me. It was a challenging multi-year period of ‘finding it and losing it.’ Sometimes the voice of Spirit was strong. Often, my inner energies felt at odds with my relationships and my work. Sometimes I felt imprisoned by the resistances in my family, friendships, and my world. In search of greater wisdom, I wanted to ‘break free.’

TRACKING THE SIGNS + WHISPERS OF SPIRIT:

In 2007, I left home with a prayer to dive into Grace: no money, no tent, a backpack, toothbrush & one extra pair of clothes. I walked south down the Appalachian trail, hitchhiking between towns and worlds, journeying thousands of miles as a modern renunciant. The journey was inspired by a wise woman named Peace Pilgrim who walked ‘as a prayer’ over 25,000 miles and 28 years. Every day was a testament to miracles. But this was also a training for me. This way of walking in the unknown forced me to attune to the subtle domains of intuition & grace and depend on it in rubber-meets-the-road ways. My daily survival and nourishment depended on it.

Navigating with my prayers & sometimes blunt conversations with spirit, I walked the Appalachian trail, slept along the trail, slept at Rusty’s Hard Time Hollow, slept on park benches in downtown Greensboro, spent 5 days at the Roanoke Rescue Mission, met deep souls in monthly-rate hotel rooms, and was led to the divine abode at Meher Baba center in Myrtle Beach. Some times reflected my pains to me, others reflected my grace to me. I found that, in the form of all beings & situations, the vast intelligence of Life responded generously in signs, guidance, answers to my questions, and opportune meetings everyday: meals, synchronicities, and chances to serve. I learned to track, listen to, and navigate the subtle. I embraced Peace Pilgrim’s dictum: "I own only what I wear and carry. I just walk until given shelter, fast until given food," she said at the time. "I don't even ask; it's given without asking. I tell you, people are good. There's a spark of good in everybody." I took the opportunity to serve those who had a point in destiny with me to feed the karmic laws and listened to the signs & lessons along the way. Finally, under an awning in the rainy streets of Miami beach, a homeless man asked me, “Does this journey have a purpose?” I said, “Yes, a spiritual purpose.” As I said that, i realized that my causal questions had been answered. He replied with a final sureness in his voice, “Oh good, because everything with a purpose has an end.” I knew my journey was over.

TESTING FIRES OF LOVE

Until this point, I had bought into some of the relationship prescriptions of traditions such as Buddhism. I assumed that the cost of fully following my heart + spirit was to sacrifice intimate relationships + attachments. Returning from my walk south at 23, I was called to shed these beliefs and dive deeply in. I discovered that the same grace + divinity I had already found in ‘the world’ could be experienced deeply in another being: God in a body to love and worship and serve! Her name was Tarynn. She and I met when I was 24. And she too found the infinite in me. We committed to our vehicle. And with that, a rocketship of soul took off. We left the atmosphere, far out of the orbit of any of our previous experiences, and into the heights of a divine devoted love. It was thrilling, terrifying at times. Great gains come with the potential of great loss. It was intoxicating, heart-bursting, and liberating. Far from being a form of bondage, I discovered the yoga of relationship to be the most sobering + real training grounds for love, care, devotion, wisdom, inner growth + spirit.

Relationship provided me with utterly honest reflections, unhindered by the polite conceits of a world who doesn’t have a daily stake in my growth. I knew she cared with every fiber of her being. Sometimes it was scary. Sometimes I was grateful. I was continuously humbled by my own resistances, fears, blind spots, miscommunications, and how little I knew about how to serve our relationship’s daily cycles and growth: spiritual development, deep trauma + emotional healing, sharing commitments, agreements, insights, finances + purposes in the world, and all means of practical. My spiritual tools were being put to a profound outer-orbit test.

They carried weight but when it came to the relational sphere of the deep fires of committed love (where traumas and huge shadows burn daily), my tools were rickety at best, dissociative at worst. At 28, 4 years after it started, the relation-’ship’ broke, along with my heart, and left me with deep reflections to account for.

FROM ME TO WE

In 2010 and 2011, I travelled to global gatherings with hundreds of awakened beings, hired to film and studying as a close student of spiritual teacher Panache Desai. Surrounded by a huge group of others with deep gifts, sharing in deep currents of divine love, I realized that on this spiritual journey, “I am not alone” and “from now on, I will always have awakened community.” Panache was blessed with the power of kundalini shaktipat, an initiation that activates an inner unfolding of awareness that leads to progressively higher states of consciousness. He initiated me and others into the pathways + capacity to bestow this energetic transmission.

At this time, I directed a 10-minute short film called ‘Awakening’ that shared some of the profound insights of this journey. Almost overnight, the film was seen by over 1 million people. Many sent me messages testifying to its role in changing their life.

Over the years, I made deep meticulous studies of the great traditions of enlightenment and Liberation, diving deeply into non-duality and Advaita Vedanta with Rupert Spira, Francis Lucille, Greg Goode, Vipassana, my own intuitive practice, and other guidance. I dug into a regular journaling practice, getting ‘under the hood’ of my emotional architecture: exploring, tracking, and releasing the core wound and casting light on the shadow material of the inner child. My meditation practice evolved. The experience of resting in consciousness, sometimes more or less pure, became very familiar and enjoyable to me. I integrated the teachings of the Gita and an array of devotional Hindu practices, Ramakrishna Parmahansa, Parmahansa Yogananda, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, the Tao te ching, tantric traditions of Kashmir shaivism, + others, testing these practices & principles on myself daily.

I moved to live and work from an intentional community in Shutesbury, Massachusetts called Sirius, a spirit-centered ecovillage. The quality of my inner circle evolved, layers of relational armor got to shed, and my intimate relationship life continued to deepen. As they say, “we are brought together for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” These next relationships were ‘reasons’ and ‘seasons.’ I continued to bring my highest intentions, my fullest heart, and to bump into + clarify the limitations of my emotional & relational inheritance. I learned deeply about boundaries, meeting needs, deeper communication, apologies, forgiveness, and most importantly, more of the karmic underpinnings behind growth: beginning to discover core wounds, familial roots, rhythms of growth + resistance, and all the deep obstacles that can get in the way of even the most earnest sincere love.

I spent 2012 traveling with a team to film with the Zulu Sangomas and wisdom keepers in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Among many others, I met Paul Myburgh, who trained for 8 years as a Bushmen shaman living and hunting among them. He guided me into the use of deep penetrative thought to track and read the most subtle of energies in people and situations. Later upon my return, I began intuitively practicing and diving deep into interacting at profound psychic levels with hundreds of people over a 2 month period. This time period gave me a wealth of further confirmation and trust in my intuitive discernment & the complexities at the core of the human experience. In direct experiences, I discovered the shapes of the human conditionings, even sometimes the multi-lifetime causal points that drive a person’s mission & purpose now on Earth. These insights sparked my creativity.

In 2014, I began to produce more short films and launched the ‘Ring Channel,’ a universal short film series with 1 million+ views, It’s a series on the joy of awakening: spiritual cinema, visual poems, vibrational vid-amins. I felt called to step into leadership and began offering a series of conscious events at Sirius: energetic activations, group breathwork sessions, and wisdom teachings on the nature of rewriting beliefs, purifying conditioning, and accessing awareness. Sharing my gifts was bringing more joy and the rewards of new reflections in my daily life.

SICKNESS + MEDICINE

In 2016 I moved to Ananda Ashram in upstate New York and arranged a personal 8-month retreat to deepen my realization with 5-16 hours a day of disciplined sadhana, meditation, mantra, study, and embodied practice. Anchoring regularity around my comtemplative practices, I began to purify my intent and clarity. The regularity of practice made obvious some of the deep limitations + blind spots of many meditative ‘enlightenment’ traditions, vibrational new age teachings, devotional Hindu architectures, and other paths that I was embodying.

Over the months, a deeper lesson began to emerge. I began to encounter kinks in my system, suppressions in the practices, opportunities for bypass, and domains where many of the great masters and teachings of the past + present lacked discernment and holistic pedagogy. I began to bump into, in my own imbalances, the dissociative nature of many meditative paths and traditions. The expanded consciousness was real, profound + potent, but the integration was missing. I could see these spiritual bypasses reflected in the corresponding spiritual communities + histories of different teachers. These imbalances needed to be addressed.

In 2017, grace visited me in a devastating form, as an unseen tick bite on my left ankle. Two months later, my jaw locked up and my shoulders couldn't move. Then I got my tests back: Lyme positive on the Western Blot. Despite my efforts of full antibiotics and on-boarding the most Lyme-experienced naturopath in the tristate area and throwing every herb and modality at it, the Lyme persisted. Thus began a one and a half year journey. Chronic disease brought me humbly onto the entheogenic medicine path: Ayahuasca, San Pedro, Peyote, and Kambo. These sacred plant medicines + ceremonies facilitated a much deeper encounter with my ancestral core wounding, shadow material, and the root of the sense of separation. I had to face these core pains much more directly + comprehensively if I wanted to bring down, anchor, and ensoul my accrued light into my body + life. With pains throughout my body and threats of extreme disability, it took over a year to fully be symptom-free and earn a humbling compassion-inducing diploma in chronic disease. One key take-away among many: I invited many expert views but ultimately I had to learn to TRULY trust my own body's voice & inner knowing ABOVE all else, even above highly intuitive experts, doctors, and practitioners. Our body knows. I learned that each healing journey is unique. Chronic Lyme disease came to me to catalyze my integration.

THE POWER OF INTEGRATION

By 2018, through chronic disease, I came to the utter importance + humble wisdom of deep integration. There are many one-size-fits-all paradigms on how to approach this vast mystery of embodied life. I had often, in my eagerness to proceed quickly towards higher truths, ignored some paths and emphasized what were held as the ‘highest.’ Many historic masters developed premature diseases, faced relationship debacles, or even left legacies of trauma in their wake. The history of spirituality can be seen as an experimental struggle of how to bring daily life and the world around us up to speed with the vast peace, light, and love of consciousness realized by masters in deep states or in seated samadhis.

My friendships grew richer. My relationship life dropped in much deeper. I took on a greater ease around communication, humility, vulnerability and trust. The capacity to track lessons across many arenas of integrative development allowed me to extract learnings out of a much vaster array of situations in daily life. I needed less armor. As situations arose, I discovered entire continents of ignored development to integrate.

I studied and worked deeply with archetype work for men and women including the archetypes of rites of passage, commitment, and tribe. I dove into Enneagram, Human Design, David Deida polarity stages, and Ken Wilber’s spiral dynamics and Integral theory. I opened my life to coaching and receiving support in many domains, as well as offering breathwork sessions to others professionally. I spent 5 weeks in India with the Advaitic sage, Mooji, deepening my self-realization. I was then hired to edit 300 hours of footage of Mooji into a feature film about him called “The Way Home: Meetings with Mooji.”

Living with and raising my partner’s child for over a year, I gained deep embodied practices on guiding and raising children, and balancing the lines between discipline and affection. I had the opportunity to care for family members and elders in dementia and death. The royal integral path opened in front of me.

I expanded a 5th quadrant into Ken Wilber’s model for development:

• Wake Up (meditative, consciousness, liberative, emptiness, enlightenment, radical freedom)

• Grow up (full accountability & responsibility for our lives & decisions, moral, virtue, values, integrity, rites of passage, archetypes, understanding many perspectives)

• Clean Up (shadow integration, trauma, unconscious repressed material, emotional work, body, breathwork)

• Show Up (purpose, expression, leadership, creativity, service, work/vocation/calling)

• Connect Up (relational, connection, listening, communication, secure attachment, authenticity, boundaries, needs, polarity, intimacy, family, tribe)

The integral path felt inside of me like all the mouths of the rivers flowing into the ocean of embodiment. I began to discover new intuitive systems for navigating my purpose and passions, balancing structure and flow to keep the rivers of inspiration in flux. A profound teacher of mine, Patrick Connor of Sharmada came back around at this time to meet me with new deep teachings expanding on the powers of intention work as well as means of truly facing the core wound from the fullness of the divine light.

I discovered that if I humbly opened my heart + intention to learn whatever my next most vital step is (in any domain), my daily embodiment + world began to shine more rapidly with the light of my higher experiences. A new maturity arose in what I have to offer the world.

Now I offer my guidance and support in one-on-one sessions for those who feel called and are walking their own unique path. The psychotherapeutic sessions are a safe and sacred container where we somatically explore together the causal layers of the inner landscape and resolve obstacles around your path forward. Through this intuitive assisted self-discovery, you have an opportunity to make leaps in your life and transform in profound ways. With compassion and skill, I prepare the sacred ground of each session with a field of intention, grace, and awake presence. Together, we uncover pathways of wisdom, joy and ease towards your next highest steps, decisions, and embodiments.

The journey is one of continuing and deepening, ever learning and integrating new pathways, embodying in deeper clarities. I like to say, ‘still learning in the still light’ or ‘God is the greatest striptease.’ Say whatever you like, this journey of life is a sacred and humbling one. I am humbled to meet each being along the way.

I continue to intend and pray to embody in this unique flesh the fullness of divine light, love and wisdom. I pray for embodying the full purpose of my incarnation, for reuniting the threads of tribe, land, nature, community, rites of passage, family, and all the generations. I pray for humility, for remembering and healing our relationship with the land, and for the next most vital step to be revealed with unmistakable clarity. I pray for the courage, strength, inner power, and light to be a part of ushering in a much more embodied and integral wisdom in our culture to make the path easier for younger generations to come.

I now live and work out of the Berkshires with my wife, Antonia Talayeh and our dog Quest.

CREDENTIALS: TRAININGS, INITIATIONS & STUDIES:

In this evolving field of study of deepening consciousness in an embodied way (that brings us to life!), my credentials are unique and represent the destined new angles we’re coming to pioneer with Ontodelic Inquiry. The more I embody, the more I leave room open for the endless horizons.

• Co-developer of Ontodelic Inquiry, a somatic therapeutic modality that incorporates a much broader view of what we work with in our being.

• Rainbow Bridges Somatic Psychotherapy & Advanced Facilitation, 2021
  Yearlong immersive. Founder & Guide: Antonia Talayeh

• Sharmada Core Wound & Intention Framework, 2018 + 2021
  Teacher: Patrick Connor

• Guiding Group Breathwork and one-on-one sessions, 2013-2023

• Teaching ‘Belief Re-writing’ workshops in 2014-2015 derived from my inner work.

• Influences from studying Diamond Approach body of work & online courses, 2022

• Excavating Consciousness:
  Mooji - Zmar, Portugal 2018 + 5-weeks in India, 2019
  Personal 8-month inspired retreat 5-16 hours daily of sadhana, 2016 Ananda Ashram
  Eternity Now - Francis Lucille, 2011
  Greg Goode, 2009
  Teachers: Swami Purna, Rob Burbea

• Divine Energetics + Shaktipat Training and Transmissions, 2010
  Teacher: Panache Desai

• Transformational Breathwork, 2012
  Founder & Breathwork Pioneer: Judith Kravitz

• EFT - Emotional Freedom Technique, working with pain and trauma 2009
  Trainer: Steven Munn

• Awakening Initiation + Core Commitment:
  Light being Activations & visitations, 2005
  Awakening in Virginia City, Montana, 2005