A sentiment I often hear is that we are “living in strange times.” It’s a throwaway phrase in some ways, but one that’s actually quite important to remember. Because in truth, these are gripping times — gripping in the sense that this societal pace seems to have a hold on us like never before!

In an era marked by rapid technological expansion, virtualism and endless consumption, the essential human struggles — for connection, creativity, for purpose, and the spiritual — have only intensified. Finding genuine autonomy and empowerment has become frighteningly difficult for many:

One in four people worldwide are affected by mental or neurological disorders. Only 14% of Americans report feeling very happy, while 50% report feeling lonely. 75% believe they are not living up to their creative potential.

Beneath it all runs a core feeling: I am not enough. I am not doing enough.

We inherit narratives, shaped by personal and collective pain, and we act them out through deeply ingrained protective patterns. Our social and economic systems run on conditional worth — proving ourselves, earning our place, climbing higher, attaining more — all in hopes of filling an invisible void. It’s a linear and transactional paradigm: go somewhere, get something, become someone. Build the tower higher, distract from what we’re unwilling to face or too unconscious to recognize.

This isn’t about blaming or diagnosing what's "wrong" with us. It’s about noticing the medium we're all painting with — the content of our lives. I don’t mean it in the instagram sense, but internally, though it goes both ways. We are so often caught in the grip of thoughts, sensations, emotional waves, beliefs. New content arises, and we act on it, rarely stepping back to ask where we are responding from.

It's a closed loop. Action feeds reaction. Suffering, as the Buddhists would put it, is the absence of space — a necessary gap. Without that space, we live trapped inside the paintings of our own mind, forgetting the painter entirely.

The cost of this is profound — on our hearts, our minds, our nervous systems.

So how do we reclaim our lives? How do we unburden our spirits? How do we return to the fullness of who we are, and access our powerful capacities un-limited by the stories we’ve inherited or constructed?

This work explores those questions and the experiential discovery of their answers.

It’s an invitation to step back — to embody the space in which things unfold. To reconnect with the context of our lives, not just the content. To turn the light inward, as Zen Master Dōgen spoke of — to discover what was never missing and just waiting to be developed. To remember what cannot be earned, only realized — as Adyashanti reminds us.

I call this journey Origin-ality: Discoveries in Wholeness and Self-Expression on the Backwards Path.

As we turn "backwards" — meaning inward — or turning unhelpful lessons around, we reconsider what it means to grow, to heal, to create. We uncover:

What does it mean to be origin-al?

What are the psychological, spiritual, and creative implications of living from that place?

This is the ground of the work we’ll walk together. I’m grateful you’re here.

See the pillars (the four p’s) below.