Surrendering to Through Me Consciousness
Surrendering to Through Me Consciousness
Allowing life to create through us can be both liberating and terrifying.
I’ve been through some big changes recently.
In November, I became a father. It has already been one of the most thrilling, joyful, and transformative experiences of my life!
In the months before crossing that threshold, I completely revolutionized my business. I launched and ran the first cohort of Power Awakening, Starlight Leadership’s flagship group program. (It was a huge success, and we are doing it again this summer!)
As Power Awakening was being born and coming to life, my executive coaching practice — which had provided the vast majority of my business revenue for over 4 years — was undergoing its own transformation. I evolved the flavor of my 1:1 work (now called soul guiding), bringing in some new powerful tools, sharpening my focus, and clarifying my audience. Over about 6 months, I watched myself part ways with every one of my legacy 1:1 executive coaching clients. What began as a seemingly random trend became a noticeable pattern as numerous long-term relationships found their way to a natural close. I gulped, breathed, and chose to accept, not fight, what was happening. I was directing my creative energy to new pursuits, and life was creating the space for me to do so.
Of course, I was terrified. Even as I began attracting beautifully aligned new clients for soul guiding and watched the inaugural Power Awakening cohort achieve a level of transformation in 3 months that some coaching clients hadn’t achieved in 3 years, the dissolution of my legacy practice left me feeling naked and exposed. I had grown accustomed to that safe and reliable feeling of big checks hitting the bank account automatically each month, and hadn’t realized how much that reliable income had emboldened me to take risks and try out new offerings.
I intentionally chose to let go of that comfort because I could see I was hanging onto it from a place of threat and scarcity. I could feel myself growing out of those relationships and being drawn to invest my energy in new horizons. Avoiding facing and dealing with that truth was costing me a lot of energy and aliveness. Still, actually pulling the plug on the lifeblood of my former business shook me.
Choosing to Trust
As I stood on the precipice of the cocoon of new parenthood, I was being asked to walk my talk on a whole new level. In the wake of launching a program that leads participants through a psychospiritual death and rebirth process, I was being initiated into a death and rebirth process of my own.
I’ve learned to recognize this as the nature of the game that I am playing. It’s actually one of the primary reasons why I love what I do: As I guide others through personal growth and transformation, I go through the very same growth and transformation myself. It’s one of the juiciest benefits of the job. I get paid to learn, grow, share, guide, rest, and repeat. I freaking LOVE that. And it still works me over sometimes!
In this case, the first dose of medicine I needed was to REST. I had just become a father. As any parent will tell you, bringing a new human into the world is one of the most exhausting experiences out there. On top of that, it was the depth of winter. The energetic call to hibernate was echoing throughout the natural world. Finally, on the eve of the winter solstice, I heeded the call. I chose to trust that the rebirth of my business in 2023 would happen when it was ready, and I gave myself 3 weeks of deep, delicious rest.
A few weeks after emerging from my cocoon, I feel some air under my new, tremulous wings. I’ve hired my first full-time team member, and she is amazing (we will formally introduce you to her soon 😊). All 7 Power Awakening 2022 alums are continuing their Starlight Leadership journey with a mastery program, and on top of that, will be serving as a volunteer Advisory Council for me as I shepherd my business into this new phase. Power Awakening 2023 enrollments have begun. I am seeing 1:1 clients again, and will be co-leading a new retreat on liminality & transition in the Bay Area in March (more details at the bottom of this post).
At the same time, much uncertainty remains. Hiring a new team member has me feeling more anxious about the bank account. While I feel confident and excited to enroll a new Power Awakening cohort, book up the weekend retreat, and fill my roster of 1:1 clients, I don’t know exactly when and how those things will happen.
As I get acquainted with a new business model and new home life, I scare myself all the time. My new dad anxiety bleeds into work stress, and vice versa. I find myself trying to control processes that are uncontrollable, and attempting to force certainty and clarity when the truth of what wants to emerge is still unfolding.
Per usual, a core element of my practice is to notice that I’m scared. Then I see if I am willing to accept myself for being scared. I practice being the unconditionally loving dad I strive to be for my baby daughter Cora, only with myself — the scared little boy inside. Once that sweet little kid has basked in the light of my loving acceptance, he begins to relax and open, and so do my other personas who got riled up to protect him. Then I see if I am willing, once again, to choose to trust.
There’s another practice that has proven instrumental for me in this wild time — one that combines many intro-level concepts into a more advanced one. I’d like to share it with you and offer some tips for how you might tap into this experience yourself. The practice is called Through Me consciousness.
Through Me Consciousness
My mentors at the Conscious Leadership Group introduced me to the idea that there are four ways of leading (or being) in the world: To Me, By Me, Through Me, and As Me. These are states of consciousness, not stages of development — meaning that we don’t move linearly from one to the next, but rather we jump and cycle between them in an ongoing and irregular way.
The four ways can be briefly summarized as follows:
To Me: Life happens to me. I am the victim at the effect of my circumstances.
By Me: I make life happen. I am the empowered creator of my own experience.
Through Me: I collaborate with life happening. I co-create with the infinite intelligence of life to realize greater possibilities than I could create on my own. I experience deep meaning, non-attachment, flow, wonder, and awe.
As Me: Life is me, and I am life. There is no “me,” only oneness and non-duality. I experience unlimited freedom and peace.
(For a deeper dive, see pp. 25-40 in The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.)
During this time of change and upheaval, I have found great utility in practicing Through Me. When I get scared, I usually slip into either To Me (believing I am at the effect of my circumstances) or By Me (believing it’s all on me to create the solution).
When I open into Through Me, I remember the immense intelligence, resource, and possibility surrounding me all the time. I recall that I’m not the only player in this game — I have an incredibly powerful collaborator called life. She has a vision that is beyond my awareness, and perhaps my role is not to fully understand. I allow myself to exist as an instrument of life’s greater intelligence, and trust that she is guiding me into a greater unfolding. Things start to feel a lot less daunting, lonely, and serious — and a lot more fun, playful, and easy.
From Through Me, I still have agency. I get to choose how I show up, how I respond to what emerges, what I want to call in, where I direct my daily energy and focus, and where I set my navigational north star. Of course, I also get to choose whether I want to collaborate with or resist the ongoing flow of life happening.
What I’ve noticed is that when I’m resisting, it’s because I got scared. That usually means there is something new for me to learn. As I accept myself for being scared and relax into trust, I get curious about what new awareness is beckoning. My shoulders drop, my chest opens, my breath deepens, and my mind clears. I become available, once again, to letting life happen through me.
I find that Through Me is not only easier and less stressful than To Me or By Me — it’s also more creative and more powerful. Power Awakening was a Through Me creation, at least when I allowed it to be. When I gripped too tightly to my expectations of how the program would unfold, I realized I was choking the creative flow of what was emerging — not to mention wearing myself out. This is consistent with my early experience of parenting, too.
My most powerful coaching and guiding sessions are much the same. The magic really happens when I loosen my grip on control, keep myself grounded in the present, trust, and follow the flow of what wants to emerge through the alchemy of presence between me, the client, life, the medicine, and/or wild nature.
Yet as delicious as Through Me can be, achieving and maintaining that state is no simple task for most people. This is especially true when we interpret what is happening through us as a threat to our wanting of security, control or approval (such as the dissolution of my legacy coaching practice). It makes sense that we’d tend to make Through Me difficult, given that the very nature of the thing requires the ego to surrender its illusion of control. Our egos believe we are separate entities in a hazardous world and their job is to keep us safe. Attempting to control our external circumstances is one of the most fundamental strategies they rely on to do that job.
So of course the surrender into Through Me is terrifying! Of course we get contracted. Of course we leave the present and try to control the future. Of course we experience intense emotion and sensations that can seem to validate the story that something is wrong and there is a threat to me out there. It’s the very nature of our basic human programming — which, by the way, we need to survive. A person without an ego would not be remotely functional.
At the same time, to achieve a certain level of psychological and spiritual growth, we need to retrain our egos to operate in service of something larger. We must allow ourselves to think and be bigger than ever before. As important and vital as our egos are, they are only a small piece of the greater truth of who we really are.
Bill Plotkin, founder of the Animas Valley Institute, describes this process as the difference between psychological adolescence (ego operating in service of itself) and psychological adulthood (ego operating in service of soul). He teaches that one of the primary hallmarks of the path of soul is the combination of allurement and terror. This experience occurs as our souls lead us in exactly the direction that brings us most alive while also scaring the living daylight out of our small-minded egos.
If we are willing to trust and follow soul, our egos get to surrender, transform, and expand again and again. This constant, ongoing cycle of ego death and rebirth is, in my experience, what it feels like to reshape one’s ego from operating in service of itself to operating in service of soul. It’s also a wonderful way to describe the experience of adapting to Through Me consciousness.
5 Tips for Through Me
In closing, here are five tips on surrendering to Through Me, for you intrepid and curious explorers out there. I hope these are supportive for you in your own personal practice. I’d love to hear how it goes, where you get stuck, and what you learn.
Stay in the present moment.
One of the easiest ways to slip into threat is to go future tripping (imagining how things could go wrong and trying to analyze, preempt, or fix in advance) or ruminating (getting stuck in the past, blaming yourself or others, feeling resentment or regret). Don’t do it! Practice catching yourself and see if you would be willing to come back to presence. Take some deep breaths, move your body around, and do whatever else helps you be here now. Repeat as necessary.Take responsibility for your own experience.
View yourself as the empowered creator of your experience (By Me is the stepping stone between To Me and Through Me). Notice when you are scared and accept yourself for being scared. Get curious about how you created what’s happening. Check out the stories you are believing, and see if you’d be willing to explore how the opposite of your story is just as true.Feel your emotions all the way through.
Orient to your feelings as energy (e-motion = energy in motion). Stop suppressing them. Welcome and allow the sensations in your body, no matter how intense or uncomfortable. Drop your stories and surrender to the energy, allowing it to move on, in, and through the body. You’ll know you’ve felt a feeling to completion when the original sensation is no longer present, you experience catharsis or peace, and/or a new wave of a different emotion begins. This is an extraordinarily powerful practice for keeping yourself in the present.Follow your Whole Body Yes.
Let your body be your guide — it is an incredible instrument for picking up on the signals and direction that life is offering you. To follow your Whole Body Yes, only say yes to something when you have a clear YES in all three of your centers of intelligence: head, heart and gut. I love this guided meditation from Diana Chapman of the Conscious Leadership Group as a way to understand what Whole Body Yes feels like. You don’t need to know why a no is a no or a yes is a yes. The body has innate intelligence. Trust it!Practice transcending the “separate self.”
Experiencing the truth of who you really are — the being who includes and far surpasses your ego identity — takes practice. It’s a muscle, and just like physical exercise, you can strengthen it with dedicated effort. Daily meditation is one of my favorite tools to build this muscle. I especially like Sam Harris’ Waking Up app for eliciting a direct experience of consciousness beyond the self.
Another very effective way to transcend the small self is to practice sourcing security, control, and approval from within. This may seem daunting or confusing at first, but it’s incredibly liberating and you can achieve it with practice. To learn more, check out Hale Dwoskin and The Sedona Method, and/or read Chapter 11 of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.
Featured Podcast Interview: Wild On Purpose
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Kelly Wilde-Miller (who I guided on a vision quest in May 2021) on her podcast, Wild on Purpose. The episode is titled: Soul Initiations: Claim Your Darkness & Step into Your Light.
I've heard from numerous people close to me, including old friends and even my wife, that listening to this podcast gave them a new and deeper understanding of my story, and/or some meaningful and actionable insights to apply to their life and align more fully with their soul. Please enjoy. And I would love to hear what you think!
Upcoming Starlight Leadership Offerings
We’re excited to be expanding our community and group offerings in 2023. Here are some upcoming opportunities to practice embodying our light together:
Community Conscious Cannabis Circle
By popular demand, our first-ever Starlight Community Conscious Cannabis Circle is here! We will gather virtually as a group to experience the potency of psychedelic cannabis. Whatever your prior experience (or lack thereof) with this medicine, you are invited to come to know cannabis in an entirely new way: as an under-appreciated, crafty and playful spirit who gently but powerfully leads us into our depths, heals and opens our bodies and minds, and connects us to our light.
Ceremony: Wednesday, Feb 15, 5:30-9:30pm MST via Zoom
Optional Integration Call: Thursday, Feb 16, 10-10:50am MST
Donation-based: $50-$100 sliding scale
Email info@starlightleadership.com to learn more and sign up. We will help you assess whether this experience is right for you and if so, make sure you have everything you need to participate. Spots are limited and may sell out quickly.
Liminality & Transition Retreat
Are you experiencing change and transition in your career? Good news - you’re not alone. This weekend retreat is designed for business leaders in the process of examining old structures, patterns and beliefs, who are willing to shake loose of old ways of being and step into their most exquisite lives.
If you are a leader in transition looking to access more of your inner knowing and reconnect to your sense of purpose, this retreat is for you. You’ll learn frameworks and tools, get coached by world class facilitators, and increase self awareness through group and partner exercises. Upon leaving the retreat, you should have an increased sense of clarity and feel more equipped to channel your energy into action.
Dates & Location: Friday, March 24 (3pm check in) - Sunday, March 26 (11am check out) in Napa Valley, CA
Investment: $1500
Includes: 2 nights lodging at a gorgeous Napa farm, farm-to-table cuisine, facilitation and coaching. Participants are responsible for their own travel.
Power Awakening
Are you an entrepreneur or visionary who craves the opportunity to follow your soul’s deepest calling? Does a quiet voice inside urge you to stop settling for good enough, let go of the fear running your life, and step boldly into your true potential?
If this is you, then welcome home, my friend.
Power Awakening is an initiatory rite of passage program that ushers 8-12 participants through a 3-month psychospiritual death and rebirth process. It is designed to enable what author Bill Plotkin calls The Journey of Soul Initiation. It operates through the four key components of weekly group calls, an 8-day vision quest in the mountains of Colorado, two virtual group psychedelic cannabis ceremonies, and four individual coaching calls.
Program Dates: May 31 - Sept 6
Starlight Quest: July 16-23 @ Beyul Retreat (1 hour outside of Aspen, CO)
What Past Participants Are Saying:
“The Power Awakening program changed my life.”
“I would wholeheartedly recommend this program to anyone who is interested in discovering their purpose and how to be in alignment with the flow of life.”
“I was able to cry, be myself, share deeply, be vulnerable and be seen. And that's allowing me to begin a new and powerful chapter in my life.”