• Today marks a threshold for me.

    After a five-year hiatus, a deep journey into business leadership, some life-changing events, and several months of preparation, I’m re-opening my coaching shop.

    I feel so grateful and happy to be here once more.

    But to explain why, I need to tell you a story.

    When you drift off track

    Have you ever noticed that life has this way of helping you out when you drift off track? It throws stuff at you to help you find the way again. The twist is that the help doesn’t always feel helpful at first. It can fuck things up, make it harder.

    And yet help it is, and back onto the path it ushers us, whether gently or forcefully.

    Over the last year, I’ve been given a deep lesson in this principle. Because boy did I drift off track.

    It’s easily done. And in fact (and perhaps infuriatingly) it turns out that drifting off track is also the path too. Because all the detours you take and the circles you spin in, are of course part of the journey. We have to go off track to rediscover the track.

    It was in 2020 when I finished up with my last coaching client. I knew I needed to step back for a while. I loved my clients. They were feeling deeply served. Yet, somehow I couldn’t fit myself into the same box anymore, and didn’t know what the new box was.

    So I stopped coaching. And I stopped writing.

    I always planned to come back to it when things settled down and got easier. Which (spoiler alert) never came!

    This was the same year I stepped in as co-owner and co-leader of Coaches Rising, a company two friends of mine had founded together, and for which I’d run the marketing since 2014.

    Coaches Rising is an amazing company. It was an early pioneer in online programs for coaches, creating advanced coach trainings on transformational topics, led by world-class faculty. Thousands of coaches take its training programs every year

    Growth and divorce in business

    2020 and covid turned out to be a big year for Coaches Rising. As the world sheltered in place and turned to the internet for social connection and deeper experience, our programs exploded.  And my coaching fell firmly out of sight as the workload increased.

    Then in the autumn of 2021, one of my partners (and co-founder of the company) told us he wanted to step out of the company and move onto new things.

    None of us had expected this, and we went on a steep learning curve as we learned how to do “business divorce”.

    One of the things divorce means, is a difficult negotiation of value where the party that’s leaving inevitably thinks the company is worth more than the party that’s staying.

    Alongside this is the emotional letting go, and the gaping hole that this person leaves behind in the work of the company.

    This takes months. And meanwhile, there’s still a company to run. Any business owner who’s been through this experience knows how hard it is.

    We made it. We remained friends on the other side. We all moved on.

    Which for me and Joel (the remaining co-founder) meant the challenge of taking the company into a new phase.

    I should say who Joel is, because he is not simply the founder of Coaches Rising, he’s my soul brother. We moved to Amsterdam together in 2008 in search of “conscious community”, and we’ve long been each other’s first phone call when the shit hits the fan.

    Business leadership and soul pain

    It was a big change for both of us.  We took on new roles and responsibilities, we started to revision the company, we hired new people for our growing team.

    Some people say you should never go into business with your friends. I feel the opposite of this. I only want to do it if I can do it with friends.

    But it does come with its challenges! And Joel and I had them.

    We had wins, we had losses. We navigated challenges. We matured parts of the company that greatly needed it.

    I learned more than I can write here. Things like…

    • How to create and read profit-and-loss statements, so we keep our fingers on the financial pulse of the company.
    • How to lead a team – empowering others to do the work allowing me to direct from higher up (rather than just doing everything myself).
    • That I have a tough and resilient soldier inside who doesn’t stop and will give everything for the cause.
    • How to turn off the worry voice when I get up at 3am for a piss, so I can get back to sleep rather than lying awake stressing.
    • How to take stinging feedback without collapsing or defending (so you can actually hear it and grow from the experience).

    I grew immeasurably, learned deep embodied and practical lessons about the art of business. I discovered strength I never knew I had.

    And then I burned out.

    First I got sick, and couldn’t shift it for weeks, kicking around in bed feeling guilty about all the other people who were running the ship.

    I went deep. I asked for guidance, I had a long hard look at myself. I listened to the answers I received. I hired a new person to run the operations of my marketing team — I started to create more space for myself.

    And then I got even sicker—a reoccurrence of a chronic condition I thought I was over. One evening a year ago, it all came to a head. I still remember it vividly…

    I’m on the floor of my cabin, using all my spiritual and somatic skills to try and surf the extreme pain and fear I’m in.

    I surrender. I let myself fall, all the way to the bottom of the well.

    And there amongst the pain, I hear the truth.

    “Ewan, you have to stop.”

    She said it with deep love and great urgency.

    I heard it in the centre of my heart, and it broke me open. I was burned out. And I had to stop.

    This was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to admit.

    I thought I was immune to it. Too self-aware and self-sovereign to fall foul of such a thing! Right up to the point I realised I already had.

    But admit it I did, which lead to some vulnerable conversations with Joel and the rest of the team. I felt ashamed – like I’d failed. And I felt completely and utterly exhausted.

    So, I took time off.

    The first months took me so deep. Into the core of myself and all the knotted trauma that I was oblivious to. My practice got deep too. I spent many hours on the mat. I faced some of my most hidden and vulnerable parts. I learned how to unwind my clenched and exhausted nervous system. Which involved lots of body practice, lots of baking, and lots of playing around the house with my son.

    Most importantly, I began to see the elephant that had been standing in the room all along.

    Truth that sets you free

    If you’ve followed my work for a while, you might know that I see the entrepreneur as being made up of (at least) 3 core archetypes – the Artist, the Merchant, and the Seeker. This is a map that came out of me, and also one that guides me.

    It was my business mentor Rand who helped me see the elephant.

    We were talking one afternoon. I was messy. Confused.

    “What led you to this?” He asked.

    I fumbled around for a while before he turned my own map upon me.

    “You’ve overdosed on the Merchant, and you’ve suppressed the Artist.”

    The truth. I’d been killing myself for the cause, being a business leader. And I’d left my art behind.

    Our conversation gave me the most powerful of experiences—like I was caught and freed at the same time. I couldn’t escape the truth. And yet it opened the way.

    I knew I couldn’t go back to the same thing– soldiering on, hoping one day to have enough time to get back to “my work”.

    I knew I had to reclaim and recommit to my own art – my writing and coaching.

    Joel and I had some difficult and very honest conversations when we met to talk about the future. It was a process that took us both deep into truth. And at the end of it we agreed to part ways.

    So, we went through another business divorce.

    But this time it was me leaving. It’s challenging enough to go through this with any business partner. It was made so much harder for me when the person I’d normally call to counsel me, is the one sitting on the other side of the negotiation table.

    These things are rarely easy, and it takes time, but we did it with generosity, honesty and grace.

    So indeed, life has this way of helping you out when you drift off track. It’s just that the help doesn’t always feel helpful at first.

    Back on the path

    From burnout to break up. And then back onto the path. But of course, everything is different now. As Heraclitus said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

    I feel different in (seemingly) paradoxical ways. Stronger, and also more sensitive. More driven, yet more relaxed. More confident, and also humbler.

    And as I said earlier, the thing about drifting off the path, is that it’s also part of the path. My detour took me through a deep period of Merchant training. My knowledge of business has tripled during the last 5 years. And I feel blessed to be able to bring all that experience into the work I do helping entrepreneurs.

    The irony is not lost on me. The fact that I repressed the deep call to coach people, by running a company that trained coaches.

    And yet, over the last few months as I’ve re-visioned my work, put pieces together, re-written this website, and started writing and coaching again, a feeling has returned that I feared was lost.

    It’s the feeling of being where I’m supposed to be. “This is why I’m here.”

    Back on the path.

    And so, it’s with great delight and deep gratitude that I can say…

    My shop is open for business again

    What does this mean?

    I’ll be publishing regularly here on this blog (if you want to know when new stuff comes out, make sure you’re signed up on my mailing list below).

    And I’m opening my coaching shop again.

    So if you’re interested in coaching (or know someone who is), I’m taking on new clients.

    If you don’t know what kind of coaching I do, I coach entrepreneurs—freelancers and founders. I work at the intersection of business, spirituality and creativity. I’m part guide, part advisor, and I help you walk your path, growing your work and business in the way that calls you.

    You can read more about coaching here.

    If you made it all the way to the end here, thank you. Your presence means a lot to me.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • For as long as I can remember I’ve had dreams. My mind seems to naturally conjure future visions of how amazing things could be.

    This is a double-edged sword.

    On the one hand, it’s a powerful imaginal capacity. It underpins key parts of my mystical and shamanic work. It allows me to understand and see other people’s visions (great for coaching people). It gives possibility to life.

    On the other hand, it’s easy to conjure the picture of something, and way harder to actually create it here in the 3D. This can lead to a habit of living in my magical imagination, rather than doing the work in the physical world.

    Therefore, I’ve spent many years studying and experimenting with different approaches to “realizing your dreams” or “reaching your goals”.

    One of the most important conclusions I’ve drawn is that this endeavor is best seen as a journey — not just as a nice metaphor, but because it most closely resembles the actual territory.

    So, if like me, you can struggle to bridge the big picture vision, with the small practical steps, this is for you.

    How on earth do I do this?

    The voices start chattering. All the worries and challenges spiral into an imagined nightmare.

    “It’s too hard.”

    “I’m not good enough”.

    This kind of stuff normally comes up when I’m thinking about the thing I always think about. How to step deeper into the arena and dare to boldly show my hand. I’m holding an image of a glorious potential. As I conjure it my soul and heart hum to its tune.

    But today, like other days, the negative voices seem to be winning out.

    We all know that they’re not to be trusted as the authorities they profess to be. We all wish they’d pipe down and get in their place. They feed the doubt.

    “How on earth do I do this?”

    Which is just a stone’s throw from “I can’t do this.”

    So let’s map this out. For as I said, I’ve come to believe that these things are not simply metaphorical journeys. The structure of the journey is embedded in the way our body-mind works with this stuff. I think this is because they both have the same deeper root, the transformational cycle from which they’re both modelled.

    Here’s a way of looking at it.

    Corners you can’t see past

    I see a future vision, of how my life could be. It comes to me in a moment of calm perhaps, or a heightened state of consciousness.

    Insight. Seeing.

    I’m inspired—the vision lights something up and I feel a bubbling excitement.

    Then, perhaps the next day, I sit down to start working on it. And I realize how big or hard it feels. So I stop. From my limited perspective, it looks like it’s a long way off, in fact it’s so far off I can’t even see it. The vision euphoria starts to wane, and the quest seems more difficult and less appealing.

    If I were to zoom out and see like the eagle sees, I would be able to see a winding pathway that leads from my starting location all the way through the landscape to the location of my vision. In fact, I might see an entire root system of pathways, spreading out from here to there.

    Now when I zoom back in again, and view this through the eyes of my human self, I see a forest of trees before me. I remember the route I saw from above, and now I see a pathway running out in front of me. But I can still only see so far. At some point the pathway bends and I can’t see past it.

    I can’t see past the corner.

    Once again, this is a metaphorical truth embedded in the life journey. It’s the way our human mind makes sense of travelling through time and space.

    The corner is the future location that you can’t see past.

    For example, “I know I’ve got to get on a plane and go to this thing. But I truly have no idea what to do when I get there.”

    That’s the point that you can’t see past.

    The only way to navigate the journey is to take the steps along the pathway, until you reach the corner, at which point your view will open up once again and you can work out your new heading.

    The reason the vision you seek can feel so far away and so impossible, is that it lies around 11 corners.

    I can’t see past the 1st corner, let alone the 11th.

    I can’t see it, because the person who walks around that 11th corner is different to the one standing here. He’s the product of having walked around the preceding 10 corners. And been changed by each of them.

    So, the gameplan in its first instance, is to focus on the steps, and not the corners.

    Steps along the path

    Pick the direction (which implies the destination) and see the pathway. See the steps that follow on from one another, and end up at the corner you can’t see past.

    I go in a North-Easterly direction, get across that muddy river, up the bank on the other side to the tree line, then I can see how to tackle the big hill.

    Or, I’ve got to finish the copy drafts, find some new images, get some feedback, work it over again, upload everything to WordPress then I’ll be able to see how to announce this thing.

    I know enough about the direction and path that I can take. I know the steps that get me to the next corner. And then it’s a case of take those steps. The first. Then another. Then another. Taking consistent steps is much more important than the size of them.

    I learned a profound lesson from Jordan Peterson about this. The steps you commit to must be small enough that you can actually do them (over ambition raises the risk you in fact do nothing). The telltale sign of an appropriately small step is that you feel kind of stupid aiming for it.

    “Like really, that’s all I have in me?”

    Jordan describes a man who he worked with many years before whose life was a big mess. His first goal was to tidy his room (which was also a big mess – go figure). That was his corner – having a tidy room. And his first step? All he could manage for the first week, was to take out the vacuum cleaner, put it by his door, and look at it every day.

    That was the first step for him. The one he could take and did take.

    The work of the manifester

    The work is to keep seeing the next step, and taking it even when it seems stupid, and especially when you feel stupid for struggling with it.

    Even one step each day adds up to something bigger than you might think. As the seemingly meagre rhythm stabilizes, you find your groove and start to notice the sensation of momentum.

    This is when you feel like you’re being pulled along (not simply pushing yourself forward). Like a river current that adds its power to your movement.

    And before too long you’ve reached the first corner. And then you’re around the next few corners, and things look quite different.

    So, if the vision feels too big, or the challenge too great, and you don’t know how on earth you’ll ever get there…just head for the first corner. Take the steps, especially when you feel a bit stupid for lowering your targets.

    Trust that the one who keeps taking steps, is the one that makes it to the next corner. And trust that the one who has made it there, will be equipped get to the next.

    Until you realize you’ve reached your destination. And you can enjoy it for those glorious moments, until the next journey calls your attention once again.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • As the events of the world continue to deepen into an unprecedented state, I have been sitting with the question of service.

    What is it to serve in these times of crisis?

    How do we give what we have—if indeed we have space to give—in the midst of these extraordinary times?

    My thoughts crystalized last week as I sat in ritual by the fire outside my home. During my vigil I listened to a question and answer session with futurist Jordan Hall. And it was in one of his answers that things started to come together.

    He provided a mytho-poetic frame that helped me make sense of the strong intuition that I wrote about in my previous article—that this was a time to double down on the change work that so many of us are dedicated to.

    And so it this article, I will extend those ideas, and speak to the question of service, leaning on the scaffolding that Hall provided.

    For I continue to feel a deep conviction that not only is there a great opportunity before us, but that the changes that can be made are considerable.

    But to answer the question of how we are asked to serve in these times, we must first understand the dynamic of change itself.

    The Hero’s Journey

    Mythopoetic maps give us—if we are able to grasp their nature—the blueprints for the deep dynamics of reality.

    The mythopoetic map that charts the nature of change is the Hero’s Journey.

    This journey at its essence, is the consensual adventure through the cycle of Order and Chaos, such that the old is destroyed, and the new can be born.

    The Hero in the myth leaves the Order of their village—stable society and life—because of a call from beyond. When they consent to the call, and step outside of what they know they enter the domain of Chaos—the trials and initiations that stretch them beyond their competency, preparing them for the culminating fight with the mythical dragon.

    The dragon is the symbol of what the adventurer is most afraid of—whether consciously or not. It is Chaos condensed into a great enemy who seeks the Hero’s destruction.

    But it is through the fight with this dragon that the Hero is reborn. The old self, the one that lived in ignorant bliss in the village, is slain. And from the ashes of the old, the new arises. The Hero, is simultaneously destroyed and remade.

    As they come to terms with who they now are, the inner transformation becomes complete. They integrate the unconscious gifts and treasure that they recovered by facing that which they were most afraid of—the dragon— and become a new whole.

    And now, changed, they return to the village—to Order, to society— ready to serve in a whole new way.

    This is the journey of individual transformation.

    It is not a single journey. It is a constant cycling of Order and Chaos. If we are sensitive to invitation, it is the process by which we are constantly re-made.

    This journey occurs on micro-scales—the process of learning a new skill, feeling the pull to try it, coming up against your incompetence, facing the heart of your fear, and coming out the other side more skilled than you were ready to engage anew.

    This journey also operates on existential levels. These are the great times of change, when we must face the very notion of who we are, and have great swathes of our identity destroyed, such that the truer aspects of ourselves have the room to grow and become real.

    For those of us dedicated to the path—to becoming who we are asked to be—this cycle is part of the work. A foundational aspect of our job.

    This is the way we are change, and become agents of change in the larger world.

    But we live in unprecedented times. The territory we live within, and must travel through, has changed fundamentally.

    Chronos and Kairos

    The ancient Greeks had two words for time, Chronos and Kairos.

    Chronos is linear time. It is chronological. It proceeds in an ordered and predictable way from before to after. This is “business as usual”.

    Kairos is the time between time, the pregnant moment. This is the time when Chaos descends, time bends, and what was normal falls apart.

    As I listened to Hall last week by the fire, he said something, which struck me deeply. The more I’ve thought about it since, the more I realized he was absolutely right. His point was this.

    For those of us whose work is dedicated to change, Chronos is a time of limited return-on-investment. The structures of Order are tight, leaving little room for the crow bar of transformation to find purchase. Everything is working. Why would we need to change?

    But when the time of Kairos begins, those structures crack and crumble. The openings are created. The deeper and wider transformational work has the conditions it needs to gain purchase.

    That time is now. For we are living in a time of great Kairos.

    And now, the Hero’s Journey is flipped on its head.

    During times of Kairos, Order and Chaos are reversed. Now, the village from which the hero comes—society at large—is in the domain of Chaos. The Order of society has disintegrated, and the mythical village is in disarray.

    And so the Hero now makes a different journey. This time it is to leave the Chaos of society so as to build new Order out in the hinterlands, at the edge of what is known.

    The old structures have come to the end of their lifetime, and the new order that will replace them must be built. This building will be done by those who did their preparatory work—the myriad individual hero cycles—during the previous time of Chronos.

    Your choice amidst the crisis

    We are in crisis. The time of Kairos has begun, and the world is falling apart.

    How can your serve?

    There are two essential roles. And your fit for each stems from your relationship to the crisis.

    The word for crisis in Chinese contains two separate characters. One of them is the word for threat, the other the word for opportunity. It is this difference that points to the difference in our role.

    How are you relating to this crisis?

    Are you anxious and afraid? Are you struggling to keep your head above water, whether psychologically, economically or otherwise? Are you plugged into the air of fear, struggling to see the end, and hoping that help comes soon?

    If so, then Kairos has thrown you into the individual hero’s journey I outlined above. The one that asks you to face your own inadequacies and fears. The invitation is to face that which you’ve spent peacetime avoiding.

    Now is the time to find help from those who are resourced. Now is the time to get support and help as you venture into the depths of yourself in search of the stability that eludes you. Maybe it’s time to take a good hard look at the way you create money. Maybe it’s time to really face the fact that you’re not doing the work you feel called to. These are the questions that want to be gently encountered, as you do the short-term work of finding Order amongst the Chaos that this crisis has erupted into.

    How best can you serve yourself?  Put your own oxygen mask on first. Always you first, then you build the strength to help those immediately around you—your friends and family.

    And then there is the second role.

    If instead, you are predominantly tuned to the opportunity frequency of the crisis, then your role is different. Are you excited by the chaos that is ensuing? Does your energy rise as you consider all the things that could change as a consequence of this crisis?

    If you’ve done your work during Chronos—if you’ve run through the hero cycles that strengthen and empower you, then now comes the time to jump into the breach.

    If so, then Kairos is inviting you into the breach.

    Now is the time to step in.

    For the underlying cracks in the Order of society have become great gaping fissures. And you have juice to give—power and skill that you’ve diligently developed—how are you called to give it in service?

    I’ve spoken with friends and peers over the last few weeks who have been doing exactly this—stepping into the breach. My friend Mark trained 500 yoga teachers to take their classes online. My business mentor Rand has gathered his community of CEOs each week to explore how they can go on the offense, in service to their customers. My partners and I in my other business are mobilizing to offer our community resources to deepen their own leadership.

    I feel the tremor in my legs as I consider the things that have been slowly percolating over the last year. I feel that unmistakable sense of vulnerability as I too prepare myself to step into the unknown—the places that I have feared to tread.

    How about you?

    What is your role?

    How are you asked to serve during these times of crisis?

    Is your deepest service to bed down, get help, and tool up?

    Or is your deepest to service to stand up, step out and help build the new?

    Ewan Townhead

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  • What extraordinary times.

    How quickly everything has changed. As our governments desperately try to contain the spread of the coronavirus, we are left in the liminal space between spaces. The old world has ceased to function, with all the privileges we have become used to. The world beyond it cannot be seen yet. It will not be the same place. Normal is gone.

    And so we exist here, in a world between worlds.

    We have committed to a strategy of suppression—to lock down society and thus slow the spread of the virus, so our limited health care systems can handle the influx of those in critical condition. This enables us to save as many lives as possible. The cost is economic and social. As our human systems are starved of the interaction they require, they begin to atrophy and disintegrate.

    The scariest part perhaps, is that we have no exit strategy. We do not know how long our isolation will last, nor what state the world will be in when we emerge.

    And yet amidst the deep uncertainty, fear and contraction, I sense a great invitation. It’s one that shows itself to me as I descend beneath the surfaces of the news cycle and the inconvenience of my family being shut up in our little house.

    It’s an invitation that I hear echoed in the gnosis of my friends.

    It’s an invitation that has deep archetypal roots and collective implications.

    The collapse of what we know

    It was late January that I had a session with my astrologer Mark Borax. I asked him to give me a reading on the coming year.

    Astrology was something I had deep suspicion about just a few years ago. But as I have relaxed my New Age allergies, the symbolic truths it is able to draw out have become deeply important to me.

    As I listened, amongst the collection of gold nuggets that were for my personal journey, Mark spoke to the great theme of the year for all of us. This year, 2020, is a hugely significant year astrologically. The significance is created by a planetary pattern has not been seen for 4000 years.

    This is what he said.

    “The old world order is disintegrating. And what needs to replace it is a new dream of what can be. This process—of dismantling the old world structures and replacing them with structures, stories and ideas that are healthy and whole—is going to reach a state of huge intensity this year.”

    Prophetic? It has felt so for me.

    Jordan Hall, in this excellent article speaks to this theme from a meta-systemic perspective.

    We have driven our human systems to fragile extremes—obsessed with short term gains, we have eroded their resilience, exposing them to the possibility of mass collapse in the face of black swan events—things we do not see coming.

    And boy, did we just get ambushed by one hell of a black swan.

    We can look at this as an accidental tragedy with no meaning. Or we can look for the deeper archetypal theme—as Mark showed to me—and see the great invitation.

    This virus is a harbinger of the collapse of the old world. It is speeding the work that has been gathering steam for some years. And now, as we stand before the great unknown, it is inviting those of us who are called, to deepen our work and contribute to the building of the new world. This is the gift amidst the chaos.

    The great collective call

    We have been plunged into a great collective transformational journey. The kind that cycles throughout time, eternally. The kind we each embark upon as we journey from what was, to what could be. But this is of a different ilk. It has been thrust upon us—all of us—simultaneously. All are at risk. Each underlying weakness exposed.

    We are being shoved into the gauntlet of deep change. It cannot be avoided. We cannot bury our head under the duvet and hope it passes. We have no choice—the great collective call is echoing out around the world. We cannot escape the cycle.

    This is the first phase of the great cycle of the hero’s journey. The call to adventure. It is a journey that will change us irrevocably—if we embrace it. We have been given no choice about its arrival in the world. It is here.

    The only choice is whether we consent to the journey and walk into the unknown with conviction and courage, or whether we are dragged kicking and screaming, crying out for the nanny of society to save us from our fear, desperately numbing ourselves to the deeper invitation.

    For there are in fact two viruses in operation. The first is the one featured in every news headline—Corona. It is a highly infection and aggressive virus that overloads our physical immune system and exposes any underlying weakness in our body.

    The second is a psychic virus of fear and panic. It is at least as infectious, and it’s spread is outdistancing corona by degrees of magnitude. It is spread through our communication channels and behaviour. It exposes any underlying weaknesses in our psychology, economy and society.

    The fear that this second virus spreads is not something to be rejected. It is an invitation. It is showing us what my friend Andrew calls “the flinch”—the particular way we recoil from life and brace against that which we are unable to tolerate. This fear can be a gateway, pitilessly highlighting the places we contract, and pull away from life. And yet they are the very same places that we must encounter if we are to accept this great invitation amidst the chaos.

    Together, these viruses are accelerating the disintegration of the old world. It cannot endure. To hold onto it ever harder will increase our suffering, and entrench our incompetence. For the purpose of this cycle is to make us ready for what comes after. We are being offered a future in the new world, but to reach that destination we must journey through the trials and transformations that kill the old, and birth the new.

    It’s time to double down on the deep work

    The severity of what we now face can be met with equal fortitude. As we stare down the barrel of months of social isolation and mass disruption, a space opens up.

    I spoke with my sister last week. Her work as a DJ is reliant on joyful gatherings of large groups of people. She can no longer do this work. Millions are in similar situations, robbed of the life blood of their work.

    And yet as we spoke, she told me that she could feel the invitation within the crisis. Her dissatisfaction for her work, and the yearning for deeper contribution and meaning were being thrust into the spotlight, as she stared at a calendar with nothing on it. What did she really want to do?

    This is the personal quest amidst the great call to adventure.

    What plans, ideas or callings have you been sitting on, that you couldn’t or wouldn’t action? As the old safety is eroded, the path is laid clear for you to take a risk, and follow that which is closer to the soul of what drives you.

    Can you hear the deeper invitation, the higher calling? It’s here, right now, in the centre of you. Feel it in your heart. You are needed. Your work is needed. How can you contribute? What service can you offer to us in the midst of this chaos?

    As I write this, I am caught, in the same spotlight. The plans I have been slowly working myself toward, juggling the sensations of excitement and resistance, announce themselves in my consciousness.

    “It’s time to double down Ewan. Build it.”

    This is the clear message I keep hearing, every time I sense deeply—that this is not simply about enduring the storm, or “getting on with work”. It’s time to double down on the deep work. This is the moment. The great opening.

    And so our task now is to listen to what is asked of us. To hear it with as much presence as we can muster. To tune the dial of our attention to the signal of a deeper calling, letting the noise of fear subside. Not repressed or denied, but felt as the anxious potential for what lies before us.

    And when you find that frequency—or perhaps you already know exactly what is asked—the invitation becomes real.

    The invitation is to embark upon the heroic journey that will rot away the old habits, reliance and assumptions, and create the fertile soil from which the new world can be built.

    This is the start of the journey. The mythical moment that the evil knight enters the castle and lays down the challenge to those gathered.

    You have been asked to embark upon a quest.

    Will you accept?

    If you do, and I do, and all those who can hear the call amidst the cacophony of panic and misinformation do, then perhaps we will be able to look back on this momentous time not simply as the catastrophe is surely is, but also as the time we stood up, and set ourselves upon a new course that led towards a new world.

    Ewan Townhead

    , , ,

  • For the last three Christmases, my family and I have played a wonderful board game called Pandemic Legacy. The “standard” game pits the players—who constitute a collaborative team, rather than opponents—against a lethal virus which is threatening the world with extinction. The objective of the game is to keep the virus from spreading, and find a cure.

    The “legacy” editions of the game are some of the greatest board games ever made. Each time you play the game, a larger meta narrative develops. The entire game is played across 20 or so individual games, each evolving the story, and changing the game. New characters are discovered, rules change, viruses mutate, clues are discovered, conditions get harder. It’s amazing fun.

    It’s a wonderful metaphor for the game of work in this modern age of complexity and unprecedented change.

    And so as I sat on New Year’s Eve outside my house beside the fire, working on my goals for 2020, I realised that I had started to think of my goals, like Pandemic Legacy—as a game that changes as it is played.

    The objective of the game

    The objective of the game of work is to unfold your soul—unwind its potential— into actuality. To create a life forged from the blueprints held deep inside. To become who you were born to be, and contribute what you were designed to create.

    There is no obvious end point to this objective. It cannot be clearly achieved. It is not a measurable goal. It is what James Carse calls an “infinite game”.

    Most of the games we play in life are the opposite—finite games. The goal of these games is to win at the expense of others. Make more money than your neighbour. Get more twitter followers than Stormzy. Commune with more unicorns than other shamans. They are zero-sum. The game is over when you’ve accumulated enough of the limited elements to beat your opponents.

    The most important games are infinite games. The objective of an infinite game is to keep playing the game.

    This is the game of soul-unfolding. You keep playing. It has no ultimate destination. There’s always another layer, another lifetime.

    This is the context for goals. The game objective is soul-unfoldment and embodiment. The game goals are what keeps you moving along the soul path.

    Setting soul goals

    As I sat with my notebook beside the fire, I thought afresh about goals, and what this new year, indeed this new decade, held in store.

    Goals and I used to have a rather fractured relationship. I thought they were constraining prisons that blocked creative emergence. They thought I was a lazy schmuck who was too scared to put my balls on the line.

    We respect each other now. We work together. And as I sat writing beside the fire I once more enquired into their nature.

    A goal is a conceptual stake that you plant in the ground of the future, and aim your life at. It’s something that—as far as you can tell—moves you along the soul path.

    Some people like setting modest goals, targets they’re confident they can hit. The goal of the goal is to achieve it—they fail if they don’t.

    Some people like setting impossible goals, something that looks utterly unattainable. The goal of the goal is to blast apart their conceptions of what is possible. They fail if they attain it (and discover they aimed too low).

    My neurotic insecurity doesn’t do well with impossible goals. I’m still building the muscle of discipline and conscientious work. So I create goals which are attainable. But (and this is the key) in order to attain them I have to change.

    This is a soul-goal.

    The goals constellate into a whole which—if achieved—will be completed by a man more soul embodied than this man now, writing these words.

    Ewan(2019) isn’t capable of pulling them off. I have to become Ewan(2020) to do so.

    And I check—carefully—that Ewan(2020) is someone that is soul-embodied, not ego-inflated. Let me explain this. It’s also key.

    The place from which we source goals determines the path the goals will then lead us down.

    If I create goals that pump my self-esteem and help me feel superior, then the man at the end of that path will be narcissistic. If I set goals that protect my insecurity and maintain safety, then the man at the end of that path will be a coward.

    If I set goals that further the work I know I’m here to do, which put me face to face with that which scares me existentially, which force me to embody those capacities that call out to be integrated, then the man at the end of that path will be more soul-manifest.

    The rules change as you proceed

    The nature of a soul-goal is that it requires transformation. The current self is insufficient to accomplish it. The muscle of the future self must be exercised in order to attain it. The very act of setting the goal, and perusing it launches you along the path toward greater soul manifestation.

    And then? You dynamically steer as you move through the actual territory of life. Reality never measures up to our concept of it before the fact. This is very important. It allows for the possibility that you realise that the goal you set wasn’t in the right place.

    We can set goals with the best of intention—the deepest conscious presence—and then reality can change the game on us half way through.

    This is fact confused me for a long time. I can never know exactly how the reality of the future will play out. Indeed, the deeper the transformation—the more I walk the path of the soul—the less sure I can be of where I can end up.

    A cynic (and I flirted with this for many years) may therefore conclude that goals are both pointless (due to the unpredictable nature of emergent reality) and harmful (for they constrain the “pure” emergence through our mental conceptions of where we “should” be.)

    This issue took me a long time to untangle.

    I remember sitting in a car with a man I was staying with in Dallas some years ago. He was a very successful business man and was grilling me on my business goals.

    I mumbled my way through lofty aspirations that I hoped would satiate his challenge, while actually revealing the fact I didn’t have any clear goals.

    “Well that doesn’t work, you need to have goals.” He replied.

    “But I can’t know what the future holds, what if things change?” I argued back.

    “It’s very simple.” He said. “You plant a stake a ground and you go at it—hard. And if you discover it wasn’t in the right place, you move the stake, and then you go at it—hard.”

    While we indeed cannot expect our conceptions of emergent future to be accurate, the coin has a second face.

    It is the great human gift to be able to manipulate time—to conceive of the future, and sacrifice the present in service of creating that future. This is what separated our hunter-gather ancestor, who lived in the blissful ignorance of the present, to our famer ancestor, who planted his seeds, and suffered in the present for a better future when the crop would be harvested.

    Our predictions of the future may be insufficient, but it is our job to make them nonetheless, and in doing so, discover that we can indeed create the future. And while it may not be what we always expect, if we are able to stay in touch with the soul’s guidance inside—the voices that call out and activate our deep yearning—the path is one that transforms us into something greater.

    The goal is not the point. It is not the win-condition of the game.

    The win-condition is to keep playing, learning, and unfolding the soul.

    This is the infinite game.

    But the goal is what drives you along the path. The goal is how you continually play the infinite game.

    Ewan Townhead

    , ,

  • The goal for many of us now is not what is used to be. It is not simply the attainment of a respectable job. It is not simply a good stable marriage and two kids.

    The goal is now—for a growing community of us— to self-actualize.

    The imperative is nothing short of soul-realisation, that slow and onerous path that leads through all of the things we least want to look at, toward that which we yearn so deeply for. To become who we really are.

    It is relinquishing the mistaken notion of who we should be, and instead devoting ourselves to the authenticity project.

    It is the descent into our original nature—the embodying of our natural heritage. And the accent into our highest self—who we are called to become.

    This is the path that lies before you and I.

    And it is one, whose course I believe we must now follow. This is the responsibility of our privilege—the hero’s journey of our time.

    And yet by nature of seeing this soul-path, and opening up the potential to walk its course, we simultaneously open the way along another path.

    The shadow of privilege

    Every omega has its delta. Every genius has its shadow. Every quest has its challenge. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

    In each way that we make possible a great good, we create the potential for a great ill. At the moment the ship was invented, so was the shipwreck.

    As the height of opportunity reaches high into the heavens of our new world, so the slide down into hell lengthens to balance the polarity.

    We have never been so free to discover the divinity of life, so protected and provided for, so encouraged and enabled. As the straps of conformity have frayed and rotted, we have been released to rise into the heights of self-realization.

    But these rotten straps of conformity were holding us back from more than self-realization. They were holding us back from the fall down into the pits of nihilistic insignificance. That horrible affliction where we do not matter and have no place.

    For the natural opposite of soul-driven self-realisation is a dark reality indeed—the absence of intrinsic meaning, the arbitrary nature of existence. The pointlessness of Being.

    This is the monster at the bottom of every dark mood. The spectre of the possibility that we are in fact insignificant. That it doesn’t matter, that whatever we do, it doesn’t matter. Because there’s no deeper origin, no higher destination.

    It is the germ of darkness that infects us when we turn away from what we know is most important, and fall into the self-doubt that we must supress with doughnuts or Netflix.

    The famous story goes that the world is resting on the back of a turtle, which in turn is resting on the back of a great turtle, ad infinitum. It’s turtles all the way down.

    The story of nihilism is that the world is resting on nothing. Randomness. Arbitrary form based on random context. There is no pattern to things. No great story that we are the protagonist within.

    We are simply the clever ape, who made up a world of language and clever objects to distract us from the horrendous truth that we are an accident of random mutations.

    There is no deeper truth. There is no deeper code.

    And what else can we do in the face of such a story but fall into the depths of apathy? For what is the point of doing anything, when there is no point to anything? What is the point of striving harder for the attainment of this year’s goals, when there is no actual goal to life?

    This is the world when the deeper code and the higher nature are stripped from it. When God and Soul are cleaved from the body of the world, and we are left in the empty expanse of empty cups and Instagram likes.

    The temptation of ignorance

    I’ve long thought about the scene in the Matrix where Cipher betrays Neo because he just doesn’t want to be in the real world any longer. He says “plug me back in to the matrix—take me back”. In other words he’d rather have ignorant contentment, than cold hard reality.

    I can relate.

    Especially in those inevitable moments when expectation presses down on me, I get into unhelpful habits, and things just don’t seem to go my way.

    “Why does this feel so hard? Why do I feel so unsafe?”

    Because the path of self-realization is hard. Is isn’t safe. That’s why we don’t happily choose it, and why so few embody its truths.

    The darkness of nihilism is the opposite of soul-realization. And so by choosing the path of soul-realization, you make the experience of nihilism a reality you must face.

    Nihilism is enacted when you turn away from the truth—from the brightness of your divine nature, and the illumination of your shadow.

    The soul path is choosing the light, including the light in the dark—the sovereign facing of the contents of the dark road.

    Walking the path of soul means facing the dark voluntarily­, and viscerally. For it is in the darkness that you find the treasure that can be offered in the light of the world, and of the marketplace.

    There are two paths

    The sin of nihilism is insidious. It’s right there in your pocket. The never-ending newsfeed. The next click. Then the next. Just one more. OK, one more.

    Until there is no one clicking. There is no awareness. The hard-won consciousness of your twenty first century self has been subsumed in the great collective mirage of ego.

    We are pulled out of this moment—deep time—into the superficiality of the headline, the promise that maybe this time, the click will fill that existential hole.

    This is the sin of superficiality and wilful blindness. Of putting our hands over our ears and pretending we don’t hear the deeper voices. Of numbing our bodies so that we don’t have to feel the pain of something out of alignment.

    It’s the price we pay for having freed ourselves so radically from the material necessities of survival, and opened up the path toward self-realization.

    Let us join hands

    Liberation is not found inside the cheesecake that smothers the feeling of tension. It is not uncovered through the espousal of social ideology or maintaining a glossy Instagram feed.

    It is found in the opposite direction—in becoming quiet enough to hear what is beneath the static of social media. It is in feeling ourselves, perhaps for the first time, and in encountering the urgency that each of us feel.

    The path is right there before us.

    It takes discipline to step out onto it each day. An inch is enough.

    It takes faith to keep stepping out, even though the destination is unclear.

    It takes courage to face the obstacles—the very things we have spent eons avoiding, and which trigger our deepest vulnerabilities.

    But this is what it takes.

    This is what separates those who will help build the new world, from those who will exacerbate the darkness out of which it will emerge.

    But the terrain is poorly mapped. The path unclear upon the ground of the new world.

    Perhaps if we were to join hands, and show each other the way, we might discover the promised land which we cannot help but yearn for.

    Ewan Townhead

    ,

  • Ever since I can remember noticing my feelings and moods, I had “black spots”—hours or even days when I would “disappear” into a dark and unpleasant hole. My life would appear pointless. My happiness but a memory.

    I remember lying wrapped in my duvet at home as a teenager, unable to move, unable to consider doing anything. Even the thought of suicide seemed pointless.

    As I got older I learned about “depression”, this apparent affliction of the mind that plagued unfortunate folk and which modern medicine had little cure for.

    I never liked the word. I never thought of myself of suffering from its disease. I still don’t. Because I think the medical model is the wrong context for its definition.

    But as I’ve grown older I have come to realise that am indeed predisposed to a tendency for “blackness”. It can strike as if from nowhere and lay me out. The duration and regularity has reduced. The understanding of its nature increased. But its presence endures.

    2018 was a dark year for me.  One of the toughest in memory, and yet one where I seemed to remain “awake” in a way I had not in previous dark episodes. And so I sought answers to the question of the nature of this blackness.

    It was during a long and extended depression that the Quaker teacher and author Parker Palmer turned to help from a therapist. These words, uttered to him by that therapist, had a dramatic effect on me when I heard them.

    “Parker, you seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend pressing you down onto ground on which it is safe to stand?”

    Was this a clue as to the nature of depression? It grabbed my attention. I thought about it a great deal. At the very least it gave me an alternative to the “imbalance in brain chemistry” explanation for my plight.

    It is only with the light of retrospect that I see what I went through more clearly—an underworld journey of depression.

    Down into the depths of the dark

    I am being pushed down.

    I go under, into the dark beneath of dreams and demons where I am placed face-to-face with that which I most fear—the great dragon—an initiation from which I must emerge changed.

    It is not a happy place. I am not a happy man within in. It hurts. It dissolves my crutches. It submerges me in everything I have set up my life to avoid.

    The pain is not optional. It is the ground of the underworld journey. The resistance seemingly inevitable—the understandable reaction to such an un-consensual plunge into the dark. My incompetence in the face of it all is the very reason the journey is necessary.

    I am being remoulded.

    7 Strategies to enlighten the dark path

    My challenges last year were such that my old strategies fell woefully short. I had to learn new ways to walk this journey, for that is exactly what it is—an archetypal quest that takes us down into the dark, which asks you to face what most scares you, yet simultaneously gives you what you most need, and then propels you back up through the integration of your experiences, back into the world—changed and remoulded.

    Some of the things I learned were philosophical—changes in frame that enabled me to see my plight in a light that gave me hope and trust.

    But many were practical—behaviours and practices that enabled me to walk the dark road without being crushed by the enemies of the psyche.

    So, here, in no particular order, are seven practical strategies that I learned to use.

    If you too find yourself enveloped by the darkness of depression, I hope they bring light into the darkness, and make it the sacred journey it actually is, rather than the tumbling down into the abyss of despair that it so easily manifests as.

    1.  Smile.

    Literally.

    Make your face smile, then hold it, longer than feels “authentic”. Have your emotions as you do so. It can be quite the trip.

    I remember riding my bike through Amsterdam past the museums. I set my target at the lights, 100 meters ahead. “Smile all the way there” I said to myself.

    By the time I arrived, I’d indeed been on quite a ride. I’d felt like an idiot 3 times. I’d wanted to reach out my hand and smack the tourists as I swept past. I’d giggled at the absurdity of it all. I’d felt like a fraud. And then I arrived. And I was happier.

    This is the trip. You do get happier.

    The nervous system follows the body.

    It’s not necessarily enduring. It’s not necessarily “authentic”. It’s not even necessarily fun.

    But it disrupts the insidious assumption that life is shit, and you don’t know what to do to fix it. Smiling fucks with your default depressive mode.

    And more often than you might think, after clamping on the stupid fucking smile, you look up at the sky, notice the birds are singing, and feel grateful to be alive.

    2.  Set yourself goals (yes, it works).

    Never underestimate the power of doing. Goals align your actions. Actions create results. Results make you feel better.

    At the very least, you occupy yourself and have less time to commiserate with yourself about how fucked life is.

    There’s a secret about the human mind that psychologists discovered last century. It’s not the attainment of your goals that gives you “positive emotion” (makes you feel good), it’s setting meaningful goals, and watching yourself progress toward them.

    We can endure the most miserable pain if we can see progress being made—that there is light at the end of the dark tunnel.

    A word of caution: there can be a danger with the big and audacious goals—the “I’m going to change the world” variety. You say something outrageous, people applaud, you get the initial dopamine hit of “possibility”. And then it’s all followed by the miserable confirmation that you’re definitely incapable of improving your life, when you inevitably fall short of your crazy dream.

    So small is usually the place to start. You’ve got to feel moved by a goal. But it doesn’t have to be hairy and audacious.

    “Go for a walk outside twice a week.”

    “Buy some new slippers.”

    Only set goals that carry meaning for you (when you imagine their completion it feels good), and that you’re fairly confident you can achieve (this is not about ambition, it’s about small degrees of progress.)

    Set 3 goals for the next month. Write them out on a big bit of paper with empty tick boxes next to them and pin them on your notice board.

    Sometimes I cried when I ticked off goals. “I can do this.” I said to myself as I saw that slow and humbling progress toward the light.

    3.  Move—you’re on a journey.

    Your body. In any way. Roll your shoulders. Shake off the stiffness. Dancing to 80s disco can work very well.

    Bodywork. Breathing. Walking in nature.

    You’re on a journey. The descent into the underworld is a journey older than Adam. Even though yours may be metaphoric rather than physical—the archetypal pattern is the same. You are moving from one place in life to another, through the darkness that depression forces you to confront.

    And while it may be more of a symbolic or psychological  journey—your body does not know this. It needs to feel that it is moving—that you are moving—that you are walking the path.

    So walk. Move. Walk around your living room with the curtains drawn. Walk in the woods. Travel to another city and walk its streets.

    You need to give your earthly self the physical journey it is wired to undertake. We are made to walk the land.

    4.  Confess—you’re inadequate.

    You can’t correct the spiritual course of your life—you can’t face that which the journey requires of you—without confessing your inadequacy.

    Your suffering is in part a function of your incompetence. You don’t know how to do this. This is by design. It’s not something to be ashamed of (though you will inevitably feel it is).

    The one that emerges from the underworld is the one that has faced the dragon and been changed as a consequence. That you do not know how to face the dragon is the point. You are incompetent in the face of this new challenge. And the compulsory first step is to confess your failures, your fears, your shame.

    You must speak it out. You must name your pain.

    To a friend.

    To yourself.

    To God.

    This is the vulnerability that underlies the courageous act.

    “I’m scared. I don’t know if I can make it. My whole life feels like a sham.”

    This is part of the dragon you must meet.

    Shame cannot exist with words wrapped around it. Darkness cannot exist within the light.

    You must confess. It is the truth that reveals the path of reconsolidation and re-alignment of what is most important.

    5.  Treasure and guard your insights

    There were long stretches of time, months sometimes, when I could see almost no light—no hope and positivity. The creative visionary capacity that I had come to rely on in my life was “off line” and nothing I did turned it back on.

    And so the moments when the clouds parted, and I had meaningful insights were stark in contrast to the seemingly eternal darkness. The moment, walking in the forest, when the sun shone through the clouds and I saw that my core practice was “being present to the moment”.

    It was in these rare moments of insights that I would fight back against the fog that wanted to swirl back in and block my view. I would turn on the voice recorder on my phone and diligently speak out what I was seeing, knowing that the break in the darkness would be brief.

    I would write down my insight, with as much precision as I could manage, and pin it to the board above my desk. I wrote it down, so it wouldn’t slip away like a forgotten dream.

    It felt like the “conscious me” was leaving clues for the “submerged me”.

    This is the power of words—the treasures of insight. Capture them, so they can lead you along the path that you lose sight of in the darkness that follows.

    6.  Play, play, play.

    I played Pandemic Legacy (the best board game ever made) with my family. I worked my way through a lot of PlayStation games. I goofed around with my step kids.

    My mum (in her infinite wisdom) told me I needed to play more. She sent me an email of 20 things I could do that would be fun. And I (in my infinite rebellion) did none of them, but took the hint, and made sure I had some fun in my own way.

    Without some pleasure—the colour of life—reality becomes grey, and then black.

    I remember sitting in my home office with the blinds down, reading existential poetry and feeling like it was all over. My fiancée Suuske called up to me.

    “Babe. Just come downstairs. I’m making dinner and I’ve put the PlayStation on for you.”

    I cried. And I did go downstairs. And I forgot how black the world was while I killed ghosts and found lost treasure playing The Witcher 3 (which is without doubt one of the best video games ever made).

    7.  Basic love.

    Eat food.

    Have baths and showers.

    Put on clean clothes.

    Tidy the kitchen.

    Go outside.

    Sometimes it was all I could manage to haul myself out of the malaise and get in the shower.

    The crushing weight of life was far too much to bear. I couldn’t handle the thought of what I had to do. I didn’t want today, let alone tomorrow and the rest of my life. But the next 10 minutes? That feels possible.

    “A shower. I can do that.”

    I shrink the future down into the smallest chunk I can manage. I pull off my clothes, step under the stream and wash away the dirt.

    And then as I’m drying myself it’s a little bit easier to go and make some food afterwards. And then it’s a little bit easier to get out my journal. And then it’s a little bit easier to face the rest of the day.

    It’s an underworld journey

    You are being taken down—pushed down—into the underworld.

    It’s not a malfunction to be medicated. It’s an existential initiation to pass through.

    It’s a journey into the darkness you do not know how to face.

    It’s the unknown territory that must be navigated with as much willingness as you can muster.

    Can you hear it? It is the cry of the Great Mother.

    “Come down! I want a word with you.”

    She demands that you face the demons that plague you—enlighten the dark places that terrifies you—so the repressed power they contain is returned to you in enlightened conscious form.

    I’m lying in my bed, gripped by a fear so deep I can’t get out from under it. “Oh fuuuuck. I think I might have gotten it wrong. There is no grand plan. No archetypal meaning.

    Our stories and philosophies are built on air. It’s all just a baseless construct—arbitrary ideas that we humans have woven into a story that distracts us from the truth—we’re just a random biological accident.

    It’s all a mirage—life is pointless. It has no point—no ultimate destination. I have no point.”

    With the light of retrospect, it makes perfect sense. If there is anything that characterises my nature, it’s the belief that we are here for a reason—that we are the conscious unwinding of the divine seed in the great pattern of God.

    In the depths of my despair, I had to content with the exact opposite of this faith. And not just think about it, but feel it, in every cell of my body.

    I had to face the dark truth of that possibility, and slay its treacherous intent. And as a consequence, I can now see the way we do construct baseless and arbitrary ideas to distract us from the anxious feeling of pointlessness and meaninglessness.

    But this behaviour is not the deep truth, it’s the affliction that hides the deep truth.

    The deep truth is that we are here for a reason.

    There is a deep pattern to life.

    We are the children of God.

    And we matter so much more deeply than we dare believe.

    Ewan Townhead

    , , , ,

  • I learned a new skill last year.

    In fact, to call it a skill does perhaps not do it full justice. For it is in actuality, a capacity for a fundamental orientation toward life. One that much to my shame, I had hitherto forsaken.

    In common parlance this capacity would be called “goal setting”.

    I had ridiculed this skill for many years. It was “a function of the old way”, I said. The deeper path is of spontaneous emergence. The one where you “surrender to what happens”.

    I had tried many times to persuade myself, through the words of wise others, of the necessity and utility of “goals”. I read the right books. I bought the best software programs. I listened to the advocacy of the high performers. But none of it stuck.

    It all seemed so shallow.

    I didn’t want to capitulate my revolutionary liberty to the banalities of the mainstream world of achievement.

    And so I didn’t. My intellectual antibodies kept the necessity of goal setting at bay, and I was free to frolic about my life with ignorant abandon.

    The weight of expectation

    I have never lacked ambition. In fact, I would say I have more often suffered from the opposite problem—my aspirations are so large that I stumble under their weight. They press down on me impelling me to bend or, at worst, collapse.

    To combat this affliction, I had developed a functional alternative. I didn’t set goals. I set “intentions”.

    “I have an intention of making €50k this year from my work.”

    And then I would leave it alone, and “see what emerged”. I would abandon it as some implicit background notion—one that I hoped would magically attract the wealth that I so desired. This is where the “deep work” occurs, I told myself.

    If come the end of the year, I have earned this figure. Wow! It happened. The universe really does provide for those who trust in it!

    And if I don’t? No sweat. It wasn’t supposed to happen.

    The convenience of passivity

    My “intention” is not a goal. It is a passive hope. Which is not to say it is not valuable.

    By framing the “intention”—verbalising it—it becomes (somewhat) more likely that the possibility will become actuality. I subconsciously refer to its achievement, and I perhaps behave differently.

    The problem however, is one of responsibility.

    Because whether the “intention” is reached or not, I am not really responsible. The outcome is “the will of the universe” or whatever other pretty dress I want to put over the convenience of my passivity.

    For me, the truth lurking in the dark under this spiritual costume, is fear.

    I’m afraid.

    I’m afraid that I can’t arrive at the destination—the goal. The demoralising conclusions I know I must draw were I to fail in my quest seem too large a price for my fragile pride to bear.

    So I don’t take the risk. I use “intentions” and outsource my responsibility to some mystical other.

    What are you aiming at?

    You’re pointed toward something. Your life, if it continues in this vein, will arrive at a natural conclusion, the consequence of your orientation.

    We are spatial beings. We have a front and a back. It’s built into the very structure of our beings.

    And so, you are pointed at something. Your posture orients you toward something.

    It may or may not be something you have chosen.

    It may or may not be something you actually want.

    The conscious choosing of an aim, and the voluntary acceptance of responsibility for attaining it are cornerstones of the masculine orientation to the world.

    They are not the prevue of men. They are the necessity of any human being who seeks to manifest the dreams they hold.

    They are not optional.

    They cannot be replaced with “intentions”—with “seeing what emerges”.

    However, all of this says nothing of the actual result.

    You cannot control the result

    The larger the goal—the further it lies from the present moment, and your current capability—the more the mystery of life will bend and break your assumptions of what is possible, or indeed, whether the goal was correct in the first place.

    The largest aims are for lands well beyond the horizon of what we can see.

    They are far away across the territory of life, and can be gleaned only in imagination and the tricky articulation of the mysterious whispers that exist under the surface of the psyche.

    Your mission, is to envision that goal—that future life—with as much authentic detail as you are able. And then accept responsibility for its achievement.

    This is the great masculine secret—that the voluntary bearing of the cross, the acceptance of the burden of responsibility, creates the future.

    Its secret is simple in concept, and infinitely challenging in practice.

    It goes like this…

    1. Set your goal in life—a goal that moves your very core.
    2. Accept sacred responsibility for your journey toward it.
    3. Struggle toward it with as much courageous vulnerability as you can muster.

    And then see what emerges.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • When I was seven, I stole the cloak from Damien Kelly’s batman figure. I was jealous. My batman didn’t have a cloak. It was second hand and by the time the previous owner had passed it off, the cloak had disappeared. I remember him crying with the teacher, snot pouring down his face.

    I stole different things as an adult – women’s hearts, men’s dignity. I just took what I wanted and ignored the pain it caused. I justified it to myself, I told myself I deserved what I wanted.

    At some point I had to look at this ugly part of myself – the narcissistic me that would steal or manipulate to get what he wanted. It hurt. Because when I really looked, and named it, I had to admit that I wasn’t who I told myself I was.

    I told myself I was a good man, a conscious man. I had high ethics. Integrity. I meditated for God’s sake. People who meditate are good, they don’t steal.

    I think there’s always some part of you that knows. Something lurking below the surface, that knows you contradict yourself, that knows you’re not who you claim to be.

    But better not to look if you can help it. It’s much easier that way. Then you don’t have to acknowledge that the story you tell about yourself actually doesn’t work. You don’t have to unpick the narratives, include the new data, and find a new story that fits.

    Easier to ignore it all. Let it remain in the dark.

    Just keep facing the other way, don’t look at the shadow you cast.

    The Shadow is the dark that follows you

    The shadow is the darkness that follows you. It is the shape that is made from the places where light cannot go – where you do not want to look.

    Robert Bly likens it to a great bag that you carry around behind you, and inside it are all manner of things that you don’t want to acknowledge.

    Some of the contents may even belong to someone else! Your father perhaps or your great grandmother. But you carry it all around with you nonetheless, and wonder why on earth life feels so very heavy.

    The original benefit of this is that it kept you safe when you were too small to deal with the dark. Children are delicate.

    As an adult the benefit is different.

    You get to remain ignorant.

    You can’t outrun your shadow

    Have you ever watched a small child playing, trying to run away from its shadow? No matter what direction it moves in, no matter how fast it shuffles along, no matter how determinedly it tries to escape, the shadow remains.

    It’s right there, behind you. Always. In the place you don’t want to look.

    You can fool yourself into thinking you no longer possess it. This is achieved by removing the light source.

    The child experiences this when the sun disappears behind a cloud, and its shadow is miraculously removed.

    For you, this deception is achieved by removing the source of light that illuminates your own psyche, that is, the light of conscious awareness.

    This can be achieved in all number of ways. In fact, the world has never contained a greater variety of ways in which to turn off the light of consciousness.

    I am particularly partial to cheesecake and “ultimate fail videos” on YouTube. They work particularly well in combination. If I eat enough of the rich fatty cheesecake, I seem to lose the ability to stop the never-ending, dopamine stimulating cycle of video clips, each showing another way in which someone makes an ass of themselves. And I can watch, smug in the unconscious knowledge that I am in fact not the biggest failure on the planet.

    You will have your own particular tastes. Perhaps you turn off the light of consciousness by working too hard. Or drinking too much. Or fucking too much. Or reading stacks of spiritual philosophy that assures you that you are in fact “perfect just as the universe made you”.

    But you cannot outrun your shadow. Because as the child finds, when the sun reappears, the shadow reappears along with it. It was there all along, waiting for the light to reveal its presence.

    Look where you least want to look

    When you consciously and deliberately turn the light of awareness toward the dark corners and the shadowy recesses of yourself, you walk the path of the hero – you voluntarily face what is most dangerous, and are transformed by the event.

    This is an old idea.

    “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” – Carl Jung

    So where do you look? You look where you least want to look. The shadow is conspicuous by its unwillingness to be seen.

    When I find something I don’t want to look at, I’ve noticed that my mind has this habit of going all cloudy. I try to look and I just see fog. “What did you ask me again?” I say, for it is as if my memory of where I was has been completely wiped.

    Shame is a dead giveaway. Shame is the manhole cover that separates the sewers of your past, from the cleanliness of your present. Going down there is messy as fuck.

    Or you could just send notes to all your ex-lovers and ask them what your most blind to. That will work too.

    Name what you find there

    In Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, Ged the story’s protagonist runs from his shadow. He travels across the entire known world trying to escape its malevolent intent as it seeks to hunt him down and destroy him.

    But it is only when he faces the shadow and he names it that the pursuit and the battle come to an end. And its name?  Ged. His own name.

    As you look far off into the distance, you will see two figures. One is the strong and beautiful form of your higher self. The one that you become when you walk the path of consciousness. The other is harder to see, it’s obscured, vague. This is your shadow self. The one you become when you hide from the light of consciousness.

    To become the first, you must name the dark. You must name what you find when you look into the murky corners of yourself.

    “I’m afraid that my ambitions are made from hubris, and that I am in truth, ordinary.”

    When I name this, and learn to consistently name it when it is present, I am illuminating what was hidden in the dark. I see the little boy who never felt recognized for his abilities. I see the youth, who used hubris to cover his insecurity.

    Now I’ve named them I can choose another route. I take them by the hand.

    “It’s ok. I’ve got you. We’ll do this together.”

    By naming what is hidden, you bring it into the light.

    Reclaim what was hidden to you

    The shadowy corner is illuminated.

    The dirty shame is purified.

    The trapped vitality is released.

    You reclaim what was hidden, and you integrate its power back into yourself. You become more whole. You enable capacities that were held in a karmic trust fund, waiting for you to reach your maturity.

    For this is the archetypal test. Are you courageous enough to look where you least want to look, meet what you find there, and to take it into yourself?

    The journey is what makes you worthy of reclaiming the treasure.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • “Follow your passion, and you’ll discover your purpose.” They say.

    Once you discover it, you can live the dream!

    I first read about the idea of “life purpose” in David Deida’s Way of the Superior Man. An incredible book that showed me, rather uncompromisingly, just how un-superior I actually was at the age of 24.

    Since then, the concept of ‘purpose’ has spread far and wide. You can read about it in a thousand blog posts. I’ve written about it.

    The idea goes something like this…

    You have a life purpose. And you’ve either discovered it (in which case you just execute it and live out the dream) or you haven’t (in which case, keep reading those ‘seven steps to discovering your purpose’ blogs until you do).

    It’s as if purpose is a thing, an object, which can therefore be lost or found, like a magic key.

    I don’t find this characterization helpful, so I want to try a different tack.

    Let’s go back to basics.

    Purpose means aim

    Purpose at its root simply means aim. Like you aim an arrow at a target. Or a horse at a gap in a hedge.

    You can aim at anything, it’s a universal human capacity. You point yourself at something, and then you have aim (purpose).

    You look at the hill over yonder, and decide you’d like to climb it. You turn your body until it’s pointed at the top of the hill. Now you’re aimed at it. And now you have a purpose: to climb the hill.

    We can have more sophisticated aims. But the mechanics are the same each time.

    1. You picture an objective you want to reach.
    2. You orient yourself toward that objective.

    Most of our objectives aren’t physical locations any longer. They’re not hill tops or distant lands beyond the horizon, they’re abstract ideas.

    “Write a book.”

    “Attract 1,000 more people to my mailing list.”

    “Master multiple orgasms.”

    You can’t literally see these objectives. They’re not physical locations you can look at. They are conceptual locations that you see in your mind’s eye – the ‘place’ in the future when you have what you imagined. If you close your eyes, you’ll find you can picture it quite distinctly.

    And once you can see your objective, then you can point your life at it.

    It’s all pointless

    What we often mean when we say “I need to discover my purpose” is that we don’t know what our life is aiming at.

    To be without purpose is to be aimless – you don’t know what your objective is – meandering through repetitive days, with no end in sight.

    This (understandably) leads to nihilism – feelings of existential pointlessness.

    “What am I trying for anyway? Life has no point. Might as well eat another tub of ice-cream, or load up Pornhub.”

    If you have no aim, then by definition, it is pointless. There’s no point – no sharp end – that indicates which direction you’re heading in.

    We’re designed to aim ourselves toward something. It’s why we have a front and a back. The front points forward, toward what we’re aimed at.

    If you feel aimless, then it’s probably because you’re not aimed at anything. This could be true in an immediate sense (I’ve got 3 hours before my meeting, and I don’t know what to do) or in an existential sense (oh god! What am I doing with my life!?).

    The solution either way is to define your objective, and aim yourself at it.

    Writing it down is often best. Make it tight.

    “Write 3 pages on the nature of nihilism.”

    “Start a new career as an orgasm coach – have my first client in no more than 2 months.”

    Aiming yourself at something is what gives you purpose.

    Visualising your objective

    I recently had the distinct pleasure of attending a workshop with Jordan Peterson (if you don’t know who that is – wake up). In fact, several of the ideas he presented during the day have been woven into this piece, but there’s one that really stuck with me.

    When we say we have a “vision for the future” or we want to “visualise our objective”, that’s not poetic licence, that’s how it actually works – technically.

    If you hold up your finger in front of your face, and look directly at it, you’ll be able to see it in great detail. It is “high definition”. You can see wrinkles, hairs, subtle textures.

    But if you keep your eyes on that same point in space, and gradually move your finger to the side, its definition will decrease, until at the periphery of your vision, you can’t see it at all (unless it moves).

    This is how our physical vision functions. This is also how our conceptual vision functions.

    When you focus on something, everything that is not that something gets blurry. The more detail it has, the blurrier everything else becomes.

    The lesson? Focus on your objective. “See” it with as much detail as possible.

    Since it’s not a physical objective you can literally stare at, you’re going to need to use your imagination, and the power of language.

    Picture it. Describe it. Write it down.

    The more significant the objective, the more detail (words) you’ll need.

    A small objective needs a tight sentence.

    A ten-year vision requires pages and pages.

    Both give you purpose.

    Ewan Townhead

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