Welcome to Soulful Impact, a newsletter exploring the territory of remembering our true nature and realizing our full potential.
This is Part 3 of a 5-part series introducing the concept and practice of Soulful Impact:
Step 2: Turn Toward What You Are Running From (Embrace the Darkness)
Step 3: Wake Up to Wholeness
As always, I’d love to hear what resonates and I welcome your comments and feedback. Thanks so much for being here.
Curious about waking up to wholeness?
For the third year in a row, I’ll be guiding groups through a wilderness-based vision fast — my personal favorite experience to support and deepen the journey of waking up — in the Starlight Quest & Power Awakening Program.
If spending a transformative few days here ☝🏼 sounds appealing and you’re curious to learn more about how this program could support your path, please reach out by replying to this email. I’d love to connect and explore together.

Step 3: Wake Up to Wholeness
Now we get to the fun part 😉
Let’s be honest, turning toward what you are running from isn’t very sexy. It’s often the last thing we want to do.
But it pays dividends. When we turn toward what we’re running from with love and an empowered creator mindset — taking responsibility for our own experience and remembering that all of life, including every part of our lived experience, is equally sacred and here for us — we make ourselves available to wake up to wholeness.
Waking up to wholeness means remembering the innate completeness, worthiness and fullness of your true self and all of life.
It means experiencing the entire manifest universe as sacred, sentient, conscious and alive. It means experiencing yourself as an inextricably connected member of the Family of Life and returning to your natural state of fully belonging to yourself and this world.
Waking up means being moved to tears by the profound gift of being alive, resting in profound awe and appreciation for the magnificence of creation. It means realizing that you are completely held by Life and are inherently whole — nothing broken, nothing missing, nothing wrong. Just the fullness of your human experience. There is a greater intelligence guiding you and all beings with more magnificence, wisdom and creativity than you could possibly imagine. It is OK to relax into that, trust it, and surrender to its flow.
In New Age spiritual or self-help circles, people often try to skip to this step without fully attending to steps 1 and 2. That’s called a spiritual bypass, and it is not genuine awakening. It’s actually the ego co-opting the content of awakening, grasping onto the idea of innate wholeness in an effort to escape or control your experience, while keeping you completely asleep.
Another common pitfall is experiencing a genuine awakening, but then making that mean something about you and who you are — as if the fact that you experienced an awakening makes you special, cool, unique or better than. That’s spiritual materialism, and it’s yet another form of the ego hijacking the spiritual process.
Genuine awakening occurs in the delicate, dynamic and delicious balance between agency and surrender.
With too much agency and not enough surrender, we keep ourselves stuck in our efforts to control. There’s likely some darkness we are running from — some possibility or circumstance that calls up an inner experience that feels too threatening for the ego to face and accept. We slip out of trust for life and think we need to do it all by ourselves. It’s lonely and exhausting.
With too much surrender and not enough agency, we’re neglecting the part that’s ours to play in the cosmic dance. We’re at the effect of the outer circumstances of our lives, needing other people or situations to be a certain way in order to get what we want. We experience ourselves as powerless and get blown in the wind, blind to our own ability to shift our experience. It’s terrifying and humiliating.
When we get stuck, we often bounce back and forth between these two extremes so quickly that they seem to blend together. It feels like being trapped in a hall of mirrors. The harder we try to find our way out, the more lost we become. In truth, the only way out is through — through the grounded center of our being, the place from which we can hold both surrender and agency together in balance.
What’s ours to do in these moments is to find the place inside from which we can see that the hall of mirrors is actually a trail map, directing us precisely to the place inside ourselves where our growth edge is — the place where we’re still asleep and have the opportunity to wake up.
To quote the Stoic philosopher Ryan Holiday: “The obstacle is the way.”
Here’s an example from my own life to illustrate my point:
When I’m stuck, I’m often being deeply self-critical and comparing myself to others. I’m believing a story that I am broken, behind, flawed or less than, which feels like an intolerable possibility and kicks my ego into a whirlwind of reactivity.
I bounce back and forth between too much surrender (paralyzed in inaction because I experience anything and everything I could do as wrong or insufficient) and too much agency (channeling my reactivity into compensation and the effort to prove myself). In both directions, I’m in the grips of my threatened ego, thrashing around in a never-ending hall of mirrors.
The way out isn’t fixing or changing my external circumstances, but shifting the lens through which I am viewing them. I can hold my stories lightly and let go of my self-denigrating narratives. I can remember to surrender, trusting that even if I can’t see how, life has got me. I can shift out of my smaller self into the deeper truth of who I am, from where I can see that being broken is not a problem — it’s just a present-moment experience and part of the whole.
The balance between agency and surrender looks like accepting what is and taking ownership over how I’m experiencing it.
Pathways to Waking Up
In my experience, the most direct and reliable pathway to waking up to wholeness is to devotionally attend to the practices outlined in Step 1 and Step 2. When we adopt an empowered creator mindset and turn toward our inner darkness with love, waking up seems to organically happen next.
It’s literally like waking up from a dream, and as we deepen in our practice, we are likely to go to sleep and wake back up multiple times each day. Something happens that triggers our ego and pulls us back into our smaller self. We drift out of awareness, then remember, wake up, and come back into the present.
In this way, waking up isn’t something we “make happen.” Rather, it’s the natural unfolding of our being that occurs when we remember the truth of who we really are, take responsibility for our experience, cultivate wholeness and find the courage to lovingly face and accept our fears. Returning to our soul’s most natural and awakened state, unsurprisingly and poetically, is a process that best happens naturally.
Contraction follows expansion, and expansion follows contraction. Just as the day knows when to surrender to the night and the spring knows when to take over from the winter, our bodies, minds and souls can guide us home to the deep alignment, wholeness and beauty that we already are. Our task is to simply get ourselves out of the way.
When we welcome the fullness of our being and find the dynamic balance between agency and surrender, we unfold just as naturally as nature. Even a deep, dark winter is followed by the magical and euphoric expansion of spring. The same is true in our inner experience, when we allow it.
Waking up occurs when we adopt an empowered creator mindset and embrace the darkness we are running from because this combination lands us in the truth of who we are and returns us to the magic of the present moment.
The Role of Peak Experience
While awakening occurs naturally, it is also deepened and amplified by certain peak experiences that open the aperture of what we are capable of seeing and how we experience ourselves and the world. Just like tending to a garden, intentionally curating our experiential inputs creates the conditions for awakening to thrive.
There are so many peak experiences like this available to us in the modern age. The abundance of options is both a luxury and a challenge. The challenge is that we may need to depend on ourselves to discern what works for us and what meets our standards for quality.
My advice is to explore and experiment, but prioritize three things:
The genuine call of your heart (as opposed to what your friends are doing or what might be seen as “cool”);
The integrity and skill of the people curating the experience; and
The depth of conscious intention and reverence for the divine.
In my opinion, paying close attention to these factors will go a long way in helping you avoid unnecessary pain and confusion, and will support you in finding the most natural path for your awakening.
An Ode to the Vision Fast
I’ll also make a brief but passionate case for my personal favorite experience to support the journey of awakening: the wilderness-based vision fast.
A vision fast is a modern incarnation of a pan-cultural tradition that nature-based peoples have been practicing for millennia. It is a ceremonial rite of passage designed to mark and facilitate the transition from one life phase to the next via extended solitude in nature, fasting from food, community ritual, and seasoned guidance. Throughout human history, there are stories of people going out on the land to seek a vision, and returning with gifts to bring home to their people.
I believe this archetypal human experience is missing for many in the modern western world. In my experience, it has the capability to meet a particular depth of soulful longing that other peak experiences often don’t reach — and certainly not in such a durable and lasting way.
The vision fast opens our hearts and minds to the innate wholeness inside ourselves and around us in the world without any mind-altering substances, which makes the awakening more trustworthy and also easier to integrate. It gives us the opportunity to ceremonially fall apart, descend deep into our darkness, and be exquisitely held and renewed by Mother Nature.
This process creates an embodied sense of belonging and connectedness to the world that is difficult to shake once you’ve found it. It helps us experience the direct and personalized way that Mystery, Spirit and the more-than-human world are conspiring in support of our healing and awakening.
Another thing I love about the vision fast is that we really have to earn it. We can’t rely on an external medicine or facilitator to guide our experience, so we have to dig deep and take ownership. We’re forced to fully face and experience ourselves, because it’s literally just us and the land.
Fasting alone in a wild place is no easy task, and can be very uncomfortable for most people. Because of this, it’s a way of actually showing our souls that we’re not just talking the talk — we are genuinely committed to waking up. When we demonstrate our willingness in this way, our souls seem more likely to respond.
There’s much more I could say here, which perhaps I’ll leave for a future post. In the meantime, if your interest is piqued and you’d like to learn more, I’d love to hear from you and tell you about my Starlight Quest & Power Awakening Program.
Step 4: Give Your Gift
Thank you for reading Soulful Impact. If you’d like to support my work, consider sharing this post with someone you think would appreciate it. You can also hit the ❤️ or 🔄 buttons to help more people discover Soulful Impact on Substack.
Find the complete 5-part series here: