The beginning of this story goes back to my choice of clinical psychology as the initial and most enduring framework for my work life.

First year university I was in the natural science program at McMaster University with an intended major in Theoretical Physics. To satisfy a requirement for a liberal arts course, I enrolled in a half-year course in Introductory Psychology. It was by far my least interesting course. Only one thing during that term caught my attention: an off-hand, cavalier dismissal of psychoanalysis by my professor. I immediately went to the bookstore and bought a copy of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Right away, I knew I had found my calling in depth psychology and set my path toward a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and post-doctoral training in psychoanalysis.

I understood my calling at this point as a physician of the soul – this being the literal translation of the English word “psychologist.” I did not become a psychologist primarily to relieve suffering. I took the advice of C. G. Jung seriously – to never attempt to relieve suffering before you had helped the person seeking help to understand its meaning. My primary focus was never on symptoms and their relief, but on the meaning of symptoms and their significance to the soul. I saw my clinical practice as the modern expression of the ancient tradition of cura animarum – the care and healing of souls.

To me it has always seemed obvious that the deepest dimension of human existence is a place where psychological and spiritual aspects of life are so intermixed as to be virtually inseparable. Acting on this intuition, I sought to offer psychotherapy that was attentive to both. This marked me as a definite outlier among my fellow psychologists and psychiatrists, who saw no conceivable place in psychotherapy for spirituality or any other pre-modern hocus-pocus.

I described what I offered as spiritually sensitive psychotherapy. In contrast to faith-based approaches such as Christian counselling, I was not interested in bringing a specific religious perspective to the therapy process. Instead I sought to be attentive to things that were already present – to the spiritual significance of existing psychological dynamics and the psychological significance of existing spiritual dynamics. I sought to be attentive to both soul suffering and spirit longings.

Over time, I developed specialized ways of working with psycho-spiritual dynamics. The most important of these was something I called Intensive Soul Care Retreats. I offered these to select individuals in 3 to 4 week blocks, during which time we spent 4–6 hours each day in dialogue, while they spent the rest of their time in solitude, devoid of distractions. Most of these retreats were based in monasteries, although a few were conducted in hotels with disconnected wifi, television and phones. As I say, they were intensive! But the results were quite astounding. Participants and those who knew them well often described their experience as transformational. Because I worked closely with these people both before and after the retreats, I too observed the magnitude of the inner and outer changes they experienced.

Transformational Coach

I cherish the work I was able to do over four decades of clinical practice. There is no question that serious psychopathology arrests or impairs development, and helping people recover freedom to continue moving toward wholeness is one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. But increasingly, I found myself drawn to helping those who had already recovered such freedom to take the next steps of unfolding. I began to decrease my clinical work and supplement it with something I called Transformational Coaching.

For some time I had been concerned that I was approaching the psychological and spiritual journeys in an overly internal and personal way. Due to this, I felt that too many of those who had been working with me remained overly focused on their inner experience. I was convinced that spiritual development should be about more than the cultivation of a personal relationship with God – just as psychological development should be about more than inner peace or freedom. If these journeys did not translate into transformed living, they were not, in my mind, worthy of being called transformational.  

Consequently, I began to attend much more to the outer expressions of the journey and not just its inner dimensions. Although I remained attentive to people’s spiritual and psychological dimensions, the focus of our work became the awakening of the heart and transformation of consciousness. Psychoanalytic psychology was no longer the primary lens through which I viewed the process. That lens became transpersonal psychology.

Having always been oriented toward the big picture, I now began more formal work mapping the trajectory of human unfolding. The framework I developed (presented most fully in my book, Spirituality and the Awakening Self) gave me an extremely helpful lens for understanding the way spiritual and psychological development are interrelated in the higher levels of human unfolding. In the process, I came to view wisdom as the capstone of both dimensions of development. Even more, it helped me recognize wisdom as the capstone and center of my own calling.

Wisdom Teacher and Mentor

While continuing this work of transformational coaching and consulting, in 2011 I began experimenting with the use of social media as a platform for teaching. It became clear to me that the content of what I was teaching was wisdom – not simply psychological or spiritual insights. I knew that wisdom couldn’t simply be taught, yet I noticed that the insights I shared provided helpful nudges toward awakening and transformation for those who were ready to receive them. I wanted to give away what I had to offer – and to give it to many more than those who might read my books or work with me individually. So social media seemed like a good platform to do this.

But it became increasingly clear that wisdom was optimally cultivated and lived within communities. If my calling was to be a wisdom teacher, I needed to offer this within a community, not simply from a consulting room or a social media platform. I felt called to establish a community that would be built around the learning and living of wisdom, one that would support both the inner and outer dimensions of the journey involved.  

The result was the launch in 2016 of Cascadia – initially packaged as a wisdom “school,” but quickly repackaged in its present form as a community.

Wisdom in an Age of Craziness

I can’t imagine anything more important than what we are doing together within Cascadia.

There is an urgent need for wisdom at this point in human history. Recently, more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries signed what they called “A Warning to Humanity” that was published in the Oxford University Press journal, Bioscience (2017, Vol. 67, #12). It focused on the global crisis we are facing related to such things as freshwater availability, marine life depletion, ocean dead zones, forest loss, biodiversity destruction, climate change, and the implications of these things for the sustainability of life on earth.

How can we be so blind to the fact that we are destroying our planetary home? And why is it so hard to rein in things like senseless gun violence, the ever-increasing gap between the richest 1% of the world and the remaining 99%, or the rising tide of hatred, racism, and intolerance of those who differ from us?

Life as we are living it is simply not sustainable, and nothing we are doing to address the problems is working. That’s because no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. What we desperately need is to approach the problems we face with new hearts and minds – with what I would call Christ consciousness.

Facilitating the awakening of hearts and the transformation of consciousness is precisely what Cascadia is all about. And this is why I am so thrilled to be part of it. 

Hoping you will join us here in one way or another soon!