2024 in Review: The Year Everything Changed

A journey in awakening consciousness and hitting escape velocity.

2024 shattered every scale of personal transformation I'd known before.

Each year, for the past seven years, I've been able to say, "This was the most transformative year of my life." Not only that, but the growth has always had an exponential quality, where I’d look back and feel surprise at how far I’ve come.

But 2024 was different — the magnitude of change was beyond anything I'd experienced.

The external milestones tell one story: I bought my first home and became a father. But the internal transformation tells an even bigger one: I crossed a threshold from surviving to thriving that I hadn’t known was possible.

The shift reminds me of how when Paul Graham talks about superlinear returns and exponential growth in tech startups, he points out something crucial. These concepts feel unnatural to us:

Neither our DNA nor our customs prepare us for it. No one finds exponential growth natural; every child is surprised, the first time they hear it, by the story of the man who asks the king for a single grain of rice the first day and double the amount each successive day.

Because exponential growth feels so foreign and yet is so powerful, when we’re finding situations to invest energy for superlinear returns, he emphasizes the importance of ensuring “the game is worth playing.”

For the past seven years, I’ve been playing what I call the game of awakening consciousness. And four years ago, after training in Emotional Resolution, I made a bold bet: that the most direct path to healing trauma — and creating a life of deep love, joy, and fulfillment — runs through the body's sensations.

That bet has paid off consistently — each year feeling more transformative than the last. But 2024 paid off in a massive way with a texture that was markedly different. It’s like I hit the moment in that story of the rice grains when we realize something surprising and seemingly magical is happening. This year, I broke free of the gravitational pull of my trauma and hit escape velocity. It’s as if I never knew space existed and now I’m exploring it for the first time, marveling at what lies ahead.

I’m seeing through the illusion of how my inherited beliefs and projections shape my experience of reality, and the experience of my awareness seeing through my own thought loops and stories seems to be happening at an exponentially faster pace.

I've come to understand that awakening consciousness is the most worthwhile game of all. It shapes everything: our experience of life, our perception of the world, and even the thoughts that run through our minds. I didn’t know it was possible before to stop the voices in the head — most conventional meditation practices just teach you to be with them and watch them. But the critical voices and fear-based thoughts that once dominated my inner landscape have grown dramatically quieter, replaced by a deepening sense of peace and joy in everyday moments.

This wasn’t just another step forward — it was a quantum leap into a new way of being. I can’t imagine something more valuable than fundamentally shifting the fabric through which we experience reality.

I want to capture the magnitude of this transformation, though I know words may fall short. I’d have a hard time describing to my past self how my consciousness would shift this year. How do you describe the experience of flight to someone who has only walked? Yet each area of my life tells its own story of breakthrough — each a facet of this larger awakening that, together, paint the picture of a consciousness transformed.

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This was the year Kiki and I “made it” in our relationship. From the moment we met, our love has been cosmic in scale — at times so powerful I could feel the same force that birthed the universe itself. Yet alongside this epic love, we weathered storms that matched its intensity.

Our trauma patterns interlocked in ways that both challenged and transformed us. My wife’s fierce passion awakened a fire in me that had laid dormant for years — one I initially didn't know how to channel. At our lowest points, our fights triggered deep trauma responses in each other, and more than once, one of us was ready to end the relationship entirely.

But our devotion to love ran deeper than our wounds. We knew that conventional therapy couldn’t hold the magnitude of the energy moving through us. In Ethan, we found a spiritual teacher who could meet the intensity of our journey and point to the deeper meaning behind everything we were moving through.

After multiple silver bullets that broke through us out of our relational patterns, this was the year everything changed. We’ve finally connected with a ground of being that holds us through any rupture. In our sacred practice room in the basement, we’ve developed a powerful dyad practice that lets us consciously move through stuck energy when we rupture. We might enter the practice wanting to murder each other, and within an hour, we almost always return to a place of wanting to make love.

Even when one of us loses our center, there’s now an unshakeable okayness that runs through us both and through our relationship.

I can now see the divine perfection in all the triggers and intensity that moved through my body — they were all for me. The relationship has been a crucible for transformation, bringing to light wounds that might have stayed buried forever. I know now that I'm here to teach and share big things, and that standing in devotion to love and truth requires the capacity to stand in the fire of intensity.

The love we share has expanded beyond what I thought possible. Friends tell us they wish they'd had parents who loved them the way we love our daughter. We’re co-creating a world and a home of profound love, and I feel deep gratitude for every trigger and challenge that brought us here. Our relationship has been the perfect vessel for transformation, healing wounds I never knew I carried.

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This was the year that “I made it.” My medicine journeys, culminating in my bufo experiences this year, carried me across the threshold from survival to safety.

Before these journeys, my consciousness used worry and problem-solving as attempts to manufacture safety. This year, I finally saw through that illusion and discovered a deeper ground of safety within.

True safety lies in feeling the impulse to do a behavior that my mind thinks would create safety, staying with the discomfort of not doing it, and trusting that I am still okay. I can see now how my consciousness used to wait for problems to arise that I could fix, creating a crutch of control and safety in my life.

My new inquiry has become: “If I couldn't create safety for myself, what would I actually do?” This question weaves through every aspect of my life — from how I create, to how I spend time at home, to how I cook.

It’s birthing a freedom I’ve never known, building my capacity to dance with the mystery and uncertainty of the present moment rather than using future planning as an escape.

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This was the year that I crossed into the experience of “we have enough.” What's fascinating is that our actual financial situation hasn't changed dramatically from previous years. If anything, as new homeowners and parents, we're spending more than ever before. But my felt sense relationship with wealth has transformed completely.

The survival-driven impulses around money have nearly vanished. Thoughts like “we don’t have enough” or “we're overspending” have faded to whispers, and when they do surface from time to time, I can see them for what they are — thoughts that I no longer need to believe in.

This breakthrough came partly from breaking free of the identity of scarcity, partly from that deep sense of "I made it," and partly from an unexpected place — a 4-day conscious kink retreat where I finally owned the sugar daddy in me.

I’d been bankrolling our family's life with my tech savings since the early days of Kiki and my relationship, but I carried shadow projections around money and power that prevented me from fully owning this truth. Money conversations with my wife would trigger intense reactions in both of us. I couldn’t even say “my money” without stirring up emotional storms. A part of me was afraid of losing love if I stopped using the frame of “our money.”

Once I owned my truth as not only a provider but a true sugar daddy, everything transformed. I could be with the intensity of all the emotional reactions. I could buy our family a home because I wanted to, she could fully appreciate me because she wanted to, and I could fully receive the appreciation. Money could flow as an expression of love, and love could flow cleanly in both directions without any of the distortions that used to mangle up the energetic flow.

This shift toward having enough has created a beautiful space where I can fully cherish my paternity leave — not needing to leave it for survival, waiting instead for the organic impulse to create, which I can feel brewing beneath the surface.

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This is the year we created a home that we not only love, but a sacred sanctuary where everything within radiates the love we’ve poured into it.

I feel our home and family becoming a pillar within our Boulder community. The amount of love and support that we’ve received, both in moving into the home and as new parents, has overwhelmed me to tears multiple times.

The energy here is palpable. When friends gather for tea or meals, transformation happens naturally. Tears flow easily. Guests experience breakthroughs. Family and friends who've stayed with us have ended relationships or found lifelong partners — always moving toward greater alignment and love.

The intention we've woven into this space makes it impossible to enter without being moved by it. I feel our home opening hearts — and becoming part of the gift we’re offering to the world.

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This is the year my meditation practice revealed new states of awareness.

Post-birth, my morning tea ceremony has evolved into my most profound spiritual practice. For an hour each morning, I sit for my tea practice in our garden room, with Kiki and the baby joining most days as they’re ready. And this family ritual has become the heart of our connection.

I’ve developed a badass detective-like ability to catch my thought patterns at their source. Every escape into thought, I’ve discovered, masks an intensity in the present moment I’m avoiding feeling. Tea has become my practice of breathing into that intensity. Tears often flow as I lean into the full weight of each moment.

Life and reality have become more beautiful everyday in tea. I feel a depth of love for my daughter, my wife, our home, and our community that I never knew was possible.

This awakening has sparked a deep yearning to share this path with others — to show that this level of beauty and presence is available to everyone.

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This is the year I embraced fatherhood as part of my sacred purpose. I used to believe children would pull me away from my creative work and my purpose. How beautifully wrong I was.

The truth is that my love for my two-month-old daughter and my desire to create a better world for her have become rocket fuel for my dreams, making them bigger and bolder than before. When I look into her eyes, I feel the mountains that my wife and I had to move through to bring her into the world, and the devotion to love that underlies that journey. And I tap into the deeper desire to spread that devotion to love in the world.

Sometimes the love I feel for my daughter is so overwhelming that I catch myself speeding up, putting her down, trying to escape its intensity. But each time I slow back down and lean into that resistance, tears follow, and my heart expands into new depths of love and devotion I never knew were possible. Fatherhood hasn't diminished my purpose — it has revealed its true magnitude.

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This was the year I found a new level of belonging and home. I feel more at home than I've ever felt — not just in Boulder or in our physical home, but in my own existence.

There's a bone-deep settling, a sense of rightness that permeates everything. I belong here on this earth, in this community, in this skin. The restlessness that used to drive me to constantly seek the next thing has transformed into a peaceful certainty of being exactly where I need to be.

Looking back, I can see how my focus on the digital world and building on the internet was partly an escape from not feeling at home in the physical world. The virtual realms offered a place to hide from the discomfort of not feeling fully landed in my body, in my place, in my community. Now, having found this ground of belonging, I’m eager to include the bodily sense of home as something I’m here to spread and teach in the world.

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And the wild thing about all this? I know that as massively transformational as this year was, next year can only be more so. That’s the nature of consciousness evolution and of exponential growth.

Just as technological breakthroughs like the internet, mobile phones, and AI have arrived in increasingly rapid waves, the growth and technology of consciousness follows a similar exponential trajectory.

I’m filled with gratitude for everything this year has brought, and my body tingles with anticipation for what's to come.