The Gap
You've meditated, done therapy, read the books, sat with teachers. You've glimpsed something real, but it hasn't satisfied your deepest spiritual longings.
There's a particular pain in not tasting the fruits the path promised: patterns you can see but cannot change, experiences that were real but didn't last, the sense that the truest spiritual truths still live beyond your reach.
This isn't your failure. It's the cost of incomplete maps, ones lacking the depth, nuance, and splendor of the model I offer.
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The Traps
The Spiritual Trap
Spiritual Bypassing
Using Transcendence to skip the psychological healing work. While deep insight into emptiness is profoundly liberating, that insight must be balanced & integrated with trauma work in order to bring the deepest, fullest, widest liberation possible.
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The Solidification Trap
Reification
By reifying our experience through the unnecessary solidification of mental constructs (even spiritual ones) we set ourselves up for limitation, confusion, and suffering. This path offers something much more freeing and much more profound.
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The Modern Trap
Isolation
Engaging in deep spiritual work alone can be fruitful, yet it’s often painfully slow when compared to spiritual practice done within a community of like-minded individuals who are walking the same path.
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The Container
The Integrated Path is a contemplative community organized around a comprehensive curriculum. Three contemplative traditions, held inside one coherent architecture. Each tradition building and synergizing the others as insight & practice deepens.
The psychological healing work of Internal Family Systems, somatic practice, & narrative based inquiry. The existential liberation work, based on the Buddhist insight of the emptiness of all phenomena. The soulful-making work of leading depth psychology and imaginal practice.
Each tradition is essential, each tradition has a different goal & bears different fruit, each tradition. The path of healing moves focuses on constructing a whole & healthy ego. The path of existential liberation moves us towards traditional buddhist enlightenment (the end of suffering/delusion). While the path of liberated reconstruction moves us towards the active cultivation of a more beautiful, meaningful, & poetic existence. Held together, they form a coherent path into our deepest potential as creators of our own experience.
You move through this path alongside other like-minded people, driven to explore, grow, and expand our notion of what is possible in this life.
An Invitation
Most who try this work in isolation may get stuck, confused, or lose inspiration. The path is meant to be walked in good company. What may seem forever out of reach whilst alone is catalyzed and cultivated within the community.
The Architecture
Each path has deeply transformative potential. When integrated their value skyrockets to something of unparalleled brilliance.
The Groundwork
The Healing Path
What hurts & how does it heal
Psychological wholeness is the groundwork. Healing trauma, core wounds, and limiting beliefs through Internal Family Systems, somatic awareness, and narrative inquiry. Contracted parts release; frozen parts thaw and come home. No spiritual orientation required.
Lineage
Richard Schwartz (IFS), Peter Levine, Tara
Brach, Byron Katie, somatic and parts-work
streams.
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The Opening
The Liberation Path
Why do I suffer? & do I need to?
This path leans on contemplative insight to find the roots of suffering, and how to truly end it. Understanding the inner coding of experience illuminates the freedom inherent in our being. Moving beyond solidified mental constructs, we break our chains and step into a wondrous new reality.
Lineage
Rob Burbea, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, the Mahāyāna emptiness tradition, Advaita.
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The Re-enchantment
The Soulmaking Path
Once the chains have been broken, what should we build?
After the earth-shattering insight into the groundless nature of experience, our full creative potential awakens. We reclaim our latent power for Cosmopoesis, the creation of new worlds. Breaking the mold of the world we were conditioned into, we consciously create and discover our own personal heaven, right here on Earth.
Lineage
Rob Burbea's Soulmaking Dharma, James Hillman, Bill Plotkin, Carl Jung, Catherine McGee.
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The Offering
The full curriculum, intimate community, and a transformative container. Spiritual Evolution is what you came for. Spiritual Evolution is what you will receive.
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Three-Path Curriculum
Healing, Liberation, and Soulmaking. Each with essays, practices, workshops, slideshows, videos, and dharma talks. Original material, sequenced for depth.
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Live Group Sessions With Ben
Weekly live sessions. Teachings, group practice, inquiry, and direct engagement with questions designed to stimulate insight & freedom
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A Small, Intimate Community
The community is part of the curriculum. Peer practice partnerships, organized discussion, and connection to others walking the same path.
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A Guided Practice Library
Audio and written practices for every section, solo and partnered, sequenced so each builds on the last. A curriculum where you practice & apply the work, not only watch lessons.
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A Curated Library of Dharma Talks
Curated long-form contemplative teachings, primarily from the teachings of Rob Burbea, who inspired this work, organized by topic and placed in the curriculum where each lands most fully.
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A Real Transformative Container, Not a Content Library
This isn't just a Netflix of dharma & teachings, it's a crucible. A container for questioning normative experience and cultivating radically different ways of sensing ourselves, the cosmos, and existence itself.
Inside Each Topic
Every section of the curriculum carries the same six-fold structure. Each medium meets you at a different layer. Together they form a complete pedagogical toolbox
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Original written work that forms the conceptual ground for each topic & teaching. The intellectual scaffolding that supports direct insight and embodied transformation.
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Every section closes with a guided practice. This is non-negotiable. Embodied practice is essential if we are to cultivate profound and lasting changes in experience.
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Weekly live workshops that explore a single topic within the community. Group practice, inquiry, & real-time teachings held by Ben.
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Visual presentations that clearly lay out the conceptual architecture for deep healing, liberation, and soulmaking. Laid out in a manner that is easily digestible for practitioners of all levels.
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Curated short form video content, relevant to the topics presented, serving as another medium through which many of the teachings can be transmitted.
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Carefully selected long-form contemplative teachings, primarily from the Burbea and Hermes Amara archive, organized by topic and sequenced into the curriculum where each one lands most fully.
The Shift
No hollow hype, no anti-climactic promises, no sugar-coated spirituality. Just heart-warming healing, ice-cold enlightenment, and the jaw-dropping reclamation of our full power as creators of reality.
Illuminate conditioning, trace its origin, dissolve its solidity, replace unskillful patterns with skillful.
Right relationship with the full spectrum of our inner experience will transform your world from the inside out
A fluid, multi-dimensional, liberated experience of self, arising from the recognition of the constructed nature of all selves.
A healed, integrated self that understands the mechanisms of trauma and liberates the psyche through penetrating insight.
An existentially liberated psyche organically co-creating an experience abundant in meaning, beauty and depth.
Your growth, held in a like-minded community exploring the limits of what's real, possible, and true
Direct insight into the nature of experience. A felt, embodied sense of existential liberation. The end of illusion, our entry into the great mystery.
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What this work asks
These shifts are not aspirational. They are what sustained engagement with this material reliably opens. The work is real, The map is real, The next step is yours.
Honest Discretion
We must each determine what path we desire to walk through understanding what teachings resonate most deeply with us at this point in our lives. The teachings I present and the community that surrounds it may not be for everyone. But for those ready for radical, existential shifts in perception, you have come to the right place.
This community is for you if
You are ready for the real work.
You have done the surface-level work, and it hasn’t been enough
You are drawn to spiritual truth more than spiritual entertainment
You can hold intellectual rigor with embodied practice simultaneously
You suspect that there is much more to this life than what we currently have access to
You are ready to invest yourself into a deeply transformative path
You desire to understand the inner mechanisms of mind & how they build experience
You crave the deepest, richest, most meaningful experience of life possible
You are ready to see through the illusory world and connect to something real
This community may not be for you if
You are seeking something else
You are seeking a quick fix or symptom relief
You crave the security of a guru, a fixed spiritual identity, or spiritual dogma
You are in acute psychiatric crisis and are in need of direct clinical care
You are not ready to question your perceived reality & experience of self
You expect transformation without investment and engagement
You are looking for spiritual entertainment or intellectual escapes
You seek ultimate certainty more than ultimate truth
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The Middle Way
Both traps undermine this path's full potential. Easily correctable, but only once we recognize them and free ourselves from them.
Trap One
Spiritual Bypassing
Using emptiness to collapse into dismissal: "it's all illusion, I don't need love or healing." Insight without integration, freedom without warmth. It’s the meditator who can sit for hours but hasn't healed their wounds.
Trap Two
Spiritual Materialism
"I am enlightened, I am the chosen one, I am clearly superior." Spiritual progress, while real, can easily solidify into a cage, limiting freedom & strangling joy. The work hardens into the very thing it was meant to move beyond.
The Resolution
The Imaginal Middle Way
Is my experience real or is it made up in mind? This path teaches the imaginal middle way, between extremes such as objectively real or unreal. Acknowledging the constructed nature of experience without disregarding the felt reality of our suffering, our sense of self, love, beauty…etc
The Lineage
The curriculum is a synthesis, not an invention. The names below are some of the teachers & traditions that this work draws from.
Buddhist Tradition
Rob Burbea, Thich Nhat Hanh, Shakyamuni Buddha, the Dalai Lama, Nagarjuna, the Mahayana school of Buddhism
Soulmaking Lineage
Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking Dharma, Dr. James Hillman, Dr. Bill Plotkin, Cather McGee, the Hermes Amara Foundation
Depth Psychology
Carl Jung, Dr. James Hillman, Dr. Bill Plotkin, archetypal exploration, narrative therapy
Trauma & Parts Work
Richard Schwartz (IFS), Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, Somatic Experiencing psychotherapeutic modality
Contemplative Inquiry
Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, Adyashanti, Ramana Maharshi, Advaita Vedanta school of Non-Duality
Adjacent Currents
Bernardo Kastrup, Alan Watts, indigenous & earth based traditions
A Living Lineage
You are stepping into a thousands-year-old conversation, brought into a small contemporary container for modern times. There is no better company for the work.
I hold a master's degree in contemplative psychotherapy and Buddhist psychology, and have spent the last decade at the intersection of the three streams this community is built on: healing, liberation, and soulmaking. Extended retreat practice in Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist lineages. Training in Internal Family Systems and Depth Psychology. Tenacious study and practice of Rob Burbea's Soulmaking Dharma until it became a foundation of what I teach and live by.
The curriculum is the product of years of practice, refinement, and synthesis, what I wish I'd had access to years ago while exploring numerous spiritual and psychological traditions.
I consider myself a guide, not a guru. This path is designed to bring the being back to themselves, again and again, until they learn to trust and develop intimacy with their direct experience, the quickest route to authentic insight and spiritual maturation. Leading to the fruition of the core goals of this work: radical healing, existential liberation, and the conscious construction of the most soulful, beautiful life possible.
I’ve tried communities before and they never stuck.
Most communities are built around a single teacher or modality, limiting their range & depth. This community is built around the integration of the most pragmatic aspects of established, time tested traditions. Dramatic results arises through honest and penetrating inquiry into our experience, revealing a direct experience of truth, freedom, and the great mystery.
I’m already in therapy. Do I need this?
This path compliments therapy beautifully. Therapy works on the psychological layer. While this path includes the healing of the psyche it also integrates the Buddhist path of enlightenment, through the gradual recognition of the empty nature of all phenomena we become liberated at the deepest level possible. Seeing through the very roots of our suffering & delusion. From the ground of emptiness we then incorporate the path of soulmaking, consciously constructing new views of self and cosmos meant to elicit deeper experiences of beauty, meaningfulness, and wonder. Hopefully you can intuit that this integrated path goes far beyond the limits of traditional western psychotherapy. That being said, therapy can also be an extremely fruitful practice, especially when done in parallel to the teachings in this system.
I’m not sure I’m “spiritual enough” for this.
This system is designed to meet people where they are. The healing path requires no spiritual orientation at all. The Liberation path is philosophical rather than religious, and highlights the cultivation of awareness not spiritual dogma. The Soulmaking path opens when the practitioner is ready for it. There is no required belief system, no need to take anything at face value, what is useful however is an attitude of experimentation and curiosity. I encourage practitioners to engage with this material critically while keeping an open mind to what is illuminated.
It sounds intellectually heavy.
Yes, it is. However, intellectual study is necessary if we are to break through our deeply intellectual conditioned experience. The conceptual work in this system is paired with embodied practices to apply these teachings in a way that shifts our experience in the most beautiful, embodied, ways possible.
I don’t have enough time.
This is a long-term path, designed to be engaged with at whatever pace works for the practitioner. Twenty minutes of genuine engagement a week moves you along, while two hours moves things much faster. There is no syllabus to fall behind on. The curriculum stays available.
Is this a cult? Will I be expected to follow one teacher?
The curriculum deliberately draws from dozens of teachers, traditions, and modalities. There is no single guru. I consider myself to be a guide, bringing practitioners back to themselves and the wellspring of wisdom hidden within their own direct experience. The work is yours, the insights are yours, and the freedom is yours, the teacher is only a light to illuminate the way.
The Invitation
Our experience is more malleable than it appears, and our agency to co-create runs deeper than most realize. Through direct insight into the mechanisms that construct experience, we discover the depth of our power as creators. It becomes our responsibility to break the chains that bind us, evolve beyond inherited beliefs, and recognize the nature of reality through intimacy with our direct experience. A new reality, grounded in practice, rooted in insight, shining only as bright as we can imagine.
A small cohort. A held community. A real curriculum.
The Integrated Path