So You Want to Play The Sacred Game
The New Game in Town.
This post presents The Sacred Game, a coherent, non-linear framework for self-actualisation that aligns personal growth with universal principles, AND an invitation for those who feel the call to step into a deeper alignment with meaning, agency, and becoming.
This will all be updated and refined over time.
Three Truths
There are three things a life of earnest seeking has taught me that you would benefit from hearing.
To be clear, by seeking, I mean that hard-to-define project of reaching for an answer, a path, an often undefinable ‘something’ that we can never feel settled or at true peace without. The unrequited longing we cannot satisfy through the normal doors of relationship or work, the absence of which can rob even a life considered good by ordinary standards of its peace and render it a troubled exile.
There are three candles I would light and place on the altar of your understanding.
The first truth is that such seeking is not something everyone feels as deeply, but it is something that everyone, if they are lucky, will feel at times. The dauntedness, the stuckness, the profound and unrequited longing are their own vitalising initiations we all endure in the course of a rich and deeply lived life. It is this very necessary experience by which we are brought into an inescapable and intimate encounter with the great questions of life. Questions about fate and destiny, about free will and determinism, and thereby the biggest questions about the meaning of it all and how this might be decided, and by whom, and then, of course, again, why. How small would a life be without at least once, being humbled by such questions?
The second truth is that our phases or long journeys of struggle and seeking are always intended to be reformulated as gifts, we can pass on to others. Part of the purpose and meaning of life, it turns out, is that we are here to walk each other home as Ram Dass so beautifully framed. The human project is like a tripod; one leg stands by how we pick ourselves up and simply get on with our own lives. Another leg is the mark we make in the world. And the third, then, is how we make known our lessons learned in how we tried to stand firmly on the other two legs, and through this, how we light the way for others to follow. Our experiences and the way they educate us can have profound meaning to others. This is the second truth I learned from a life of seeking. Our struggles can be gifts if we can learn to share these lessons. By walking the way, we open the way, and if we cotton on to this secret, we can perhaps worry less about the resistance we encounter and give more thought to how we widen the way for others to follow.
Which brings me to the third such truth, which is that we were never meant to do this on our own. We are supposed to have help. We are supposed to be initiated into cultural containers and frameworks to follow. In an ideal society, we would be buoyed along in a cultural peristalsis. Think of the way a child never needs to worry about the wider progression of their school career. They are ushered and stewarded through a system their society has created and maintains for them, until they are made ready for adult life. As it happens, and to land the point, everyone except perhaps school teachers can begin to appreciate that this institution itself is now flawed on the simple grounds of acknowledging how poorly we were each prepared for life.
We cannot pursue our journeys of seeking fulfilment and meaning, what we call ‘becoming’, we simply cannot do this without help. We were never meant to. That is not how the tripod works.
We need guides and teachings, core principles and useful practices, and we need the combination of goodwill, experience and capability in our guides so that we can trust their guidance. Without that base assumption of goodwill, experience and capability, we cannot trust the guidance. If we cannot trust the guidance, we cannot invest the full budgets of our energy and attention to the adoption and implementation of said guidance and practices. If we cannot assume that we are being guided by well-wishers, with requisite experience and capability, we are forced to do what we are doing now: Trying to figure it all out, individually, by ourselves, and pull it all together. To do so, we are driven to invest ever more of our budgets of energy and attention into determining who to trust, what to believe and how to make sense of the disparate answers we are forced to source for ourselves.
Self-Initiation for Serious Players
Before we begin, please note that you can listen to this post like a podcast episode by downloading the iOS app. In fact, would regarding this as a podcast episode change the way you engage with it?
In Summary
Stuckness and Seeking is Necessary. The deep, existential longing that drives us beyond conventional fulfilment is a vital initiation. It confronts us with life's deepest questions and transforms ordinary living into a meaningful encounter with the Mystery.
Struggle Becomes Service. Our personal seeking and hardship are meant to be transmuted into wisdom we can share. By walking the path with courage and honesty, we help light the way for others.
We Were Never Meant to Do This Alone. True becoming in life requires guidance, community, and cultural containers that hold and steward our growth. Without trustworthy frameworks, we waste our energy navigating alone what was always intended to be a shared journey.
This is where I can help. A lifetime of leaning against the grain, of paddling against the current, of going the wrong way, taught me a lot of invaluable lessons. All my years of seeking wisdom and knowledge, ancient and new, testing, formulating and refining have merged together in a truly remarkable offering, a gift I want to share.
I have distilled all these into a game, and to say the results are non-trivial is an egregious understatement.
The Sacred Game
How to Product Manage Your Own Becoming
The Sacred Game is a proven framework I have developed that treats life and personal growth as an iterative, emergent process. It emphasises alignment with meaningful engagement, drawing parallels to the iterative improvement found in practices like Agile and Jiu-Jitsu.
Even if we aren’t conscious of it, we are all already playing the Sacred Game. We are either living life by default or by design. Day by day, we are becoming ‘something’. If we are not product managing our own becoming, our inherited default is doing that for us. If you are not making your choices from presence, discernment and intentionality, something or someone else is making that choice for you. Today we have systems of ideology, influence and control and even ones now that are non-human. What the masses have accepted has become the norm we live by. This is what our children are initiated into by default. This is why the world seems so wrong.
There are ways to steer that evolution with more presence, discernment and intentionality. There are better and worse ways of doing that.
Widening the Doors of Perception
The principles of The Sacred Game I teach, called Autoeia (aw-toe-aye-uh), are not self-help techniques or pedestrian mindset tools. They are structural and epistemic. This means they engage directly with the way attention, meaning, and agency are patterned in your consciousness and your psyche. This is superior to and unlike cognitive behaviour therapy in that it does not simply modify unconscious behaviours; it facilitates the arrival and integration of true self-knowledge and lasting understanding.
Playing the Sacred Game does not just improve your behaviour or change outcomes; it alters the underlying paradigms that you consciously inhabit. It shifts the interpretive frame through which reality is mapped.
These paradigm shifts are not conceptual; they become embodied at a level that is visceral, somatic and experiential. They allow for the remapping of predictive models; not only how you anticipate the world to behave, but how you understand cause and effect, what you believe about human nature, and what you believe is possible in your own life, your relationships, and in the world.
This remapping affects every layer of experience: how conflict is understood, how uncertainty is navigated, how trust is extended, and how meaning is generated. It moves us out of inherited assumptions and into direct relationship with what is true, what is emergent, and what is structurally coherent. That kind of shift is not cosmetic. It changes you.
The Three Games
The Sacred Game aims to provide a structured yet adaptive approach to living a life of purpose and coherence, incorporating a core ethical framework intended to promote and honour agency in yourself and others.
The Sacred Game around three core project fronts: Self, Container & Work.
It is a structured way of organising life in alignment with universal principles, that assumes growth is not automatic and that meaning emerges when one engages with the tension between these three fronts deliberately and repeatedly.
Self
The Self front focuses on personal development, inner congruence, and psychological foundations, using archetypal personas along with their shadow expressions. This front emphasises establishing and integrating language, durable axiomatic principles that are perennially relevant, forming the only stable foundation for agency and self-permission that can underwrite your wider projects of self-actualisation.
True self-actualisation, by definition, is about defining fulfilment and meaning in ways that transcend your inherited models of permission and control.
The archetypal framework provides a relatable, universal way to engage with one's inner life, while the axiomatic principles operate alongside this framework, offering a universal foundation that can be personalised and integrated into that context.
Once integrated, these become the foundation for legitimate self-trust and the unshakable architecture of one’s authenticity and self-knowledge. Without this, people outsource authority or remain incoherent, regardless of how much knowledge or insight they accumulate.
This is the essential foundational bedrock that supports and informs the other two fronts—Container & Work—ensuring coherence and alignment across all aspects of life.
Container (Home & Relationship(s))
The Container front is concerned with the spaces we hold and are held by. Relationships, families, partnerships, communities, and teams are not just incidental features of life.
Relationships and their related containers serve as vessels for mutual actualisation.
The craft of these relationships is something that can be taught and involves intentional skill and practice in co-creating a space where both parties can thrive and grow. I guide participants in structuring and practising this relational craft to support their shared intentionality and growth.
My sharing provides tools and frameworks that help individuals or partners articulate and structure their relational dynamics, emphasising mutual awareness of needs, desires, and boundaries. This approach supports personal responsibility for one’s own healing and growth while holding space for the other, and it seeks to elevate the maturity and intentionality of these relationships.
Work
The Work front focuses on your work in the world, our careers and intentions of professional ‘becoming’. The specific focus is how you apprentice yourself to your unique callings and crafts, which are never defined by mundane or conventional expressions of ambition and success.
The Sacred Game becomes how you foster self-expression, leadership in the context of profession and occupation, including mapping a journey toward mastery.
Walking Your Own Path
We have to make room for the fact that for some, or even all of the ways that we are called to actualise and pursue calling, there isn’t necessarily a well-worn path for, because true actualisation is always, by definition, the walking of one’s own path, tracking one’s own star in the sky.
The process I teach acknowledges the necessity of navigating tension and making difficult choices between the three fronts—Self, Container & Work. These choices, driven by real self-knowledge and thereby contribute to emergent meaning, making the journey about authentic self-actualisation rather than an idealised or common path.
Disclaimer
There are magic answers. The Sacred Game is something we are all already playing unconsciously. All I am offering is a chance to play it better—much better.
Playing this Game seriously is not for everyone. It takes souls of a certain stripe, a hunger for self-knowledge and a sense of calling that cannot be served by the normal models of learning and practice, and a commitment to self-ownership that most people lack the appetite for.
The Game is non-linear and non-reductionist, but it is coherent and perfectly congruent with both scientific rigour and the perennial truths of ancient wisdom traditions.
This will all be updated and refined over time.
If that works for you, the doors are open,
Let’s Play The Game.
If you are interested in learning more subscribe here, or find out how I am structuring the work over on the A Better Way Substack.
I run containers for 1-on-1 introduction to this education and application to one’s own projects of Personal Development, Relationships and Work (or Calling). If this is something that speaks to you book an introductory session with me.