Thank you evan silverman, Zoë Bode, and the other folks for holding space for this transmission! Join me for my next live video in the app.
This series of talks is aimed at The Urban Mystic: You are a person who feels the pull toward depth, meaning, coherence, and inner transformation, longing for something that cannot be encountered in the bounds of the world, but who also feels profoundly called to show up in their life. You have responsibilities, relationships, work, and callings that you derive profound meaning from. As such, you cannot retreat to monasteries or mountains. You are raising children, paying bills, navigating systems, carrying wounds, and still sensing that something essential is asking to be lived.
I have been straddling those two projects my whole life and have spent the seven years deepening my craft and I feel called to share what I know so you can apply it in your journey.
Today’s conversation begins with an image: The Whole Tree. This is then not just the branches reaching upward towards the sky and the light, possibility, achievement, or transcendence, but also the roots extending downward into soil, memory, grief, belonging, and integration. As James Hillman said, growing down deeper into Life.
Most modern spiritual or personal growth narratives fixate on ascent: becoming more, reaching higher, actualising potential. The Whole Tree reframes that instinct to remind us that nothing rises without rooting. Every form of becoming depends on an equally deep capacity for holding, metabolising, forgiving, and integrating lived experience. The visible tree is spirit, direction, and emergence. The invisible tree is soul, depth, and connection. To inhabit only one half is to live fragmented.
This talk explores what it means to become the whole thing: to consciously prune old branches of regret and unfinished business, to grow roots into family, place, fate, and embodied life, and to allow both ascent and descent to inform one another. The Whole Tree becomes a working model for vitality, connection, maturity, self-leadership, and sovereignty, showing how our future possibilities are inseparable from our willingness to integrate our past, and how true actualisation can only occur in tandem with integration.
