October 2025: Entering the Arena
Notes on claiming dharma, embodying devotion, and making contact with reality.
This month has been a deep practice in devotion—of meeting life as it is, not waiting to feel ready, and letting every sensation become part of the creative act. From stepping into couples work to feeling nervousness as aliveness, I’m learning what it means to trust the soul’s design and stay open in the reach. Here’s what’s alive.
I’m fully embracing my dharma and stepping into the arena of couples work.
Somewhere around my third date with Kiki, I told her that I wanted us to teach intimacy workshops together. That was six years ago. That’s how long some part of me has known this to be my calling—and how long it’s taken to initiate myself into it.
My own partnership has been the richest source of expansion in my life, and I know I’m here to guide couples into deeper contact with themselves and each other. To breathe space into the places where fear and love intertwine. To shepherd the transformation that becomes possible when rupture is met as sacred—not avoided, fixed, or managed.
And now, I’m finally stepping into it.
At the end of October, I carved out space in our home for a private 2½-day retreat—an intimate, high-touch experience for one couple ready to walk through a portal together. A sacred container where everything and every part gets to be seen and met with love, where the partnership itself becomes a vessel for awakening.
I haven’t found the right couple yet—and I might not. And that feels important to name. Because this isn’t about having it all figured out. It’s about saying yes before the form appears. It’s about entering the arena and letting the work find its shape through contact with reality.
Alongside that, I led a public workshop at my home in Boulder—called The Sacred Art of Rupture—where I shared the very transmission that has changed everything in my own relationship. It’s not about tools or communication scripts. It’s about staying in the fire when every part of your body wants to escape. And it’s about letting rupture become the sacred intelligence that shows you exactly where love wants to go next.
Because that’s what Kiki and I lived through. Not just once, but over and over again. For years, rupture felt like threat — something to manage, fix, survive — until it didn’t. Until it became the very force that deepened our safety, that anchored our truth, that made our love more real.
And that’s what I want to share with others. Not from a place of mastery, but from lived devotion. From the part of me that keeps learning how to stay open when I don’t yet know what’s next.
These past weeks, I’ve been actively reaching out to couples—friends, peers, people I admire for the retreat. I haven’t yet received a yes. But something deeper has arrived: a quiet knowing that I’m in the right place, doing the right thing, in the right time. I can feel myself staying open and in devotion to what I’m here to create—without attachment to outcome.
There’s something sobering and exhilarating about it. There’s no more hiding. And also, nothing to prove.
I’m just making deeper and deeper contact with reality—with the truth of what I’ve lived and with the dharma that’s always been here, waiting for me to claim it.
I’m remembering that the only way to create is to keep moving to the art table.
Last month, I attended a powerful medicine retreat oriented around how we relate to the creator inside ourselves. In between the journeys, there was an art table—covered in paint brushes, markers, and colored pencils—for us to explore whatever wanted to come through.
I remember sitting a few feet away, leaning back in a chair. I wasn’t tired exactly—but there was a kind of inertia. I didn’t yet know what I wanted to create, and so I lingered and waited.
Eventually, I got up. I walked to the table and sat down.
The first piece I made, I didn’t like it. The second one… same. But somewhere in that second piece, there was a small element that sparked something—a line, a gesture, a feeling. I followed it. And that became a third piece—one that I actually enjoyed. One that felt like mine.
And I realized: this is the whole thing.
The thing that’s been holding me back has been waiting until I’m clear. It’s hovering in the not-knowing, hoping for direction before I move.
But the clarity I’m waiting for doesn’t come first. It comes through the doing. It’s in the act of creating that I discover the art I actually want to make—not before.
That’s what I’ve been integrating since the retreat—the invitation to move before I’m clear: to walk to the table, to touch the paper, to begin. Not to figure it out from afar—but to be in motion, to let the work itself reveal me to myself.
And that’s the posture I’m bringing now to my couples work. I don’t have all the answers. I don’t yet know exactly what shape this work will take over time. But I know that I need to be in contact. I need to be talking to couples, gathering them, serving them, sitting in the relational field I want to serve—not someday, but now.
Because it’s only by being in the field that I’ll discover the offering. It’s only by showing up that I’ll see what’s needed. It’s only by creating that I’ll know what I’m here to create.
And so the practice is simple: move toward the art table. And just trust that the act of doing is the path.
I’m seeing life more and more as a labyrinth my soul has built for me.
If you had told me this a few years ago, I would have found it absurd. But these days, it feels like the only frame that makes sense.
When I really slow down and feel into it, I can sense it: life isn’t happening to me—it’s happening for me. Every moment, every twist, every obstacle is being placed with precision—not to block me but to guide me.
The soul doesn’t build a labyrinth to test us. It builds a labyrinth to awaken us. And the so-called “obstacles” are not things to be fixed or bypassed. They’re the point. They’re not the detour—they’re the design.
Because what the obstacle brings up in me—the contraction, the grief, the fear, the desire—is exactly the place where love wants to go next. That’s the part of me my soul is trying to reach.
The more I orient to life this way, the more everything softens. I stop trying to get out of the moment. I stop seeing friction as a failure or something to fix. Instead, I meet it. I let it work me. I begin to trust that my soul is in collaboration with life—not in conflict with it.
And in that orientation, I can feel the larger intelligence moving. I can feel how precisely this moment was built. I can feel how even the uncomfortable parts are sacred.
When I remember this, I stop trying to make life better. I start to feel life as it is. And that subtle shift—from avoidance to embrace—is what brings me back into alignment with the path my soul is actually walking.
Because love doesn’t flow around the obstacle. It flows through it.
And that’s the whole point.
I’m orienting my life around the posture of the Reach.
Last week, I wrote about Ember’s open-handed reaching—the way she extends her whole body toward what she wants without shame, without collapse. I’ve felt it living in me as a kind of imprint, a posture for how I want to meet life.
These past weeks, as I’ve stepped more fully into couples work, I’ve had many moments of contraction—personally inviting couples for the retreat, reaching out to collaborators, imagining how it will all flow, wondering how people will respond. I could feel the habitual pattern in me wanting to hunker down until it was over.
But this time, I didn’t.
Instead, I sat with the impulse to go into the pattern and let myself feel the sensations until they revealed themselves as pure aliveness.
On days I felt nervous, I noticed the tingling in my skin—almost as if Life were barraging me. I let it all be here, and I stayed. I kept my hand metaphorically outstretched—the way Ember does—open, upright, surrendered, willing to feel.
On days I felt avoidant, I met the part of me that wanted to curl up and give up on the idea entirely—and felt through the fear of failure. Other days, I could sense the contraction that comes when I try to figure out my way into safety—and instead, I rested in the not-knowing.
Every time I remembered the posture of the Reach, something in me softened. The contraction became less something to overcome and more a current of life force wanting to move through me.
And I realized: this is the practice.
It’s not about getting to the destination. Yes, I want to host the retreat, to serve couples, to see this work come alive—but that’s just the North Star. The real journey is learning to stay open through the process. To trust and rest in the not-knowing. To meet the sensations that arise without needing to fix them.
Because when I live from the posture of the Reach, I’m no longer creating to get somewhere. I’m creating to be here.
And maybe that’s the deeper purpose that’s revealing itself through all of this—to stay open to life, to let the soul’s reach become the shape of my days. To keep extending toward what I love, hand outstretched, heart open, no matter what comes.
Each of these threads—stepping into the arena, moving to the art table, walking the soul’s labyrinth, and remembering the posture of the Reach—feels like one teaching told four ways. They all point to the same movement: contact with reality.
Whether it’s a couple in rupture, a blank canvas, a twist in the labyrinth, or the nervous quickening of a new threshold—life keeps inviting me closer. And the more I let myself be moved by those invitations, the more I see that the path of service and the path of awakening are not two paths. They’re the same one.
Here’s to staying open.
To creating from presence.
To reaching, again and again.