How to Live a Story Worth Telling (Part 2)
The 4 Paths of Soul Rewilding
A reminder about tomorrow . . .
I’m hosting a free live class tomorrow (Thursday, May 1) at 10:00am Pacific Time on how to live a story worth telling.
(BTW, today’s piece is Part 2/2. Here’s Part 1 in case you missed it.)
Tomorrow I’ll be sharing a simple framework that blends “first principles” found in both ancient wisdom traditions and modern science—something I’ve come to call The 4 Paths of Soul Rewilding (more on that below).
This might be for you if . . .
Other peoples’ maps for navigating life no long work for you
You sense an inner call to deeper living, but don’t know What’s Next
You feel stuck, lost, or unsure of what you want anymore
As I write this, I realize the title might smell like the typical promise of self-improvement or self-help advice to some. What I intend and where I’m headed, however, is the exact opposite.
What I’m interested in, and always have been, is Self-realization (capital-S), which has nothing to do with self-improvement (small-s) or self-help. One is a pilgrimage toward the horizon, while the other is a relay race round and round and round a suburban cul-de-sac.
Over the course of three decades of exploration, study, and wandering I’ve sketched out a map of what I think the journey of Self-realization looks like. It’s not the only map, and I would never tell someone it’s even right. What I will tell you is it’s based on my own direct experiences and how I’ve made sense of it through principles, traditions, and teachings that have been around longer than any of us.
I call this “map” the Way of the Rewilded Soul, and it marks out 4 Paths, which one must experience on the way to Self-realization. I consider myself an “essentialist” who is interested in the simplest, most direct truth of a thing. The Way is how I’ve distilled down what I see to be the essential truths into a field guide for myself.
Over the past couple years I’ve shared it with my coaching clients, and now I want to share it here with you in case you find it helpful on your own journey.
What is “soul rewilding”?
Over the years I’ve often quoted Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who said we are spiritual beings having a human experience, not the other way around.
The word translated as spirit in many languages means essence, breath, or wind. It is that unseen intelligent energy or aware Being, which is what we really are. Said another way, we are Being being human. Both parts are essential, the Being and the Human. For simplicity, I call that expression of Being being Human, soul.
Soul rewilding is how I describe what is commonly called Self-realization. I use the word rewilding because we’re all born into a kind of cultural captivity that domesticates us from the inside out.
Rewilding is what it looks like when your soul infuses your human life and you begin to express and actualize your deepest potential in, as, and through your 3-D existence.
Rewilding isn’t a process exactly, nor is it just an act of will you decide to make on a Tuesday afternoon. It moves more like a dance between grace and choice, which isn’t initiated by us anymore than a seed “decides” to sprout. In the fullness of time awakening happens, and when the dance begins we can agree to join in or not. But the divine is always the first mover, not us.
Of course, words are blunt tools for describing the truth I’m trying to convey, so don’t get too hung up on pinning anything down. You can’t. No one can. But we can say what it is like, so from here out we’ll stick to metaphors.
The metaphor I will use is the 4 Paths.
The 4 Paths of Soul Rewilding
Soul rewilding isn’t a rigid process, however it does unfold in rhythms and movements just as seasons and tides do. There is an archetypal way in which it happens, though there is literally infinite diversity in the happening itself.
There are also an infinite number of ways to describe it. Ultimately, none of them are True. They’re all fingers pointing at the moon or, in my case, paths running through your unique, infinite inner landscape. The map is not the territory, you are.
These “paths” carry you along a kind of Hero’s Journey that I summarize like this:
To know Who you truly are, you must get out of your mind (The Path of Recognition) and into your Knowing (The Direct Path).
From a place of clear Knowing, you can take inspired, aligned action (The Pathless Path), which is a true expression of your unique gifts and way of being in the world.
Your inspired actions naturally serve not just you, but the entire world because you cannot Know who you are without Knowing who everyone and everything else is, too (The Mirror Path).
After decades of study, exploration, and coaching hundreds of people from all walks of life, I’m convinced this is how Self-realization, the discovery of Who you are and why you’re alive, emerges.
Let’s examine the first path: The Path of Recognition.
I. The Path of Recognition
For millennia, sages have said the human condition can be summed up in three words: lost in thought.
We’re hypnotized by our conditioning. We’re born into it. Psychology and spiritual traditions both say that all of our psychological suffering is rooted in who we think we are and who we think others think we are.
The only problem is the belief that you have one, and your identity bends and distorts itself into the shape of that belief. In that sense, your identity is an idea-entity, an unstable chimera of thoughts, feelings, and memories wrapped in stories you fight to hang onto because without them who are you?
That’s why you can never think your way to freedom, enlightenment, or self-realization. Freedom begins with recognition, or re-cognition, which is changing your mind about your conditioned, habitual way of thinking and feeling. As some have said you have to break the habit of being your self.
My current opinion is that the initial recognition, what people call awakening, happens spontaneously. It is a gift and cannot be scheduled or earned. Often it comes in a jarring way: a profound loss or tragedy, a dramatic shift in your life circumstances, a transcendent or mystical experience, or a crisis of faith.
After the initial recognition, we can join in the dance and, as the apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, “be transformed through the renewing of our minds.”There is no one way to renew your mind or recondition it on an ongoing basis. What works for one doesn’t work for another. For some it’s meditation, for others it’s somatic practices or breathwork, or doing psychedelics in a sweat lodge.
Regardless of which direction the path takes you, it’s always initially out of the mind and into your Knowing, which is the next path.
II. The Direct Path
Beyond the mind is presence. Open awareness. If the Path of Recognition is about seeing, the Direct Path is about Knowing.
Knowing (capital-K) is not the same as knowing about something or having an intellectual grasp of concepts. It is a clear, direct experience with existence itself, beyond words.
This is the domain of what is traditionally called non-duality, presencing or unity awareness. Where the mind is always seeking to define and categorize the world (knowing about), Knowing simply is. It is the felt-sense experience that I Am even before the words I Am are thought or spoken.
For anyone who has experienced the clarity that comes from observing the silence between thoughts, or the sensations in your body or thoughts that you recognize are not “you”, you have experienced the Direct Path. It is an open, spacious perception of what you really are that feels like your true identity because it is.
The Direct Path is often labeled “woo” but I think that word is a cop out many people use so they don’t sound like a lunatic to others.
Science is spirituality understood, and our evolving understanding of consciousness and the unraveling of materialism as the default worldview is validating what mystics have known (and died for) in the past. Today’s “woo” is tomorrow’s mainstream idea.
Many people are encountering the Direct Path today through non-duality teachers. The resulting clear Knowing creates the “space” for the next movement, which is the receiving of intuitive Guidance that leads to inspired action—the Pathless Path.
III. The Pathless Path
From a practical standpoint, the Pathless Path is what everyone is who is asking, “Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose?” is actually seeking. It’s the What’s Next, the real-life expression of your soul as you.
You won’t find the Pathless Path on any map. No one can tell you which direction to go or what your gift to the world is. You must discover these yourself, and to do so requires creating the path with each step.
Like the mythologist Joseph Campbell once wrote:
If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.
That’s why so many people feel confused right now in our society. All of the paths we’ve been told to take, and the maps we’ve used to navigate our lives, no longer work. We’ve reached the edges of the maps. Not only that, our compasses are spinning wildly, unable to pinpoint True North anymore. The magnetic poles have flipped.
How do you navigate such a world?
By learning to hear, trust, and act on your intuition, which I call The Voice. Your intuition is the signal in the noise, the Guide whose wisdom is the key to everything you’ve been seeking.
You can only walk the Pathless Path under the guidance of The Voice.
Think about all The Inner Work you’ve done, all of the searching and seeking, all of the exploration that has led you here. Hasn’t it all been in search of the trustworthy Voice who will say, “This is the Way, walk here”?
This, I’m convinced, is the greatest and most profound discovery of all. Everything else—exploration of past lives, kundalini awakenings, etc.—feels like extra credit. Learn to hear, trust, and act on The Voice. That is a lifetime’s worth of adventure in and of itself.
Can you see now how the first two paths lead here, and why you must first get out of your mind and into that clear spacious Knowing? Only from there can you hear The Voice clearly and live on purpose.
IV. The Mirror Path
As I mentioned above, walking the Pathless Path leads to a fundamental shift in your perception of Purpose in general, and your Purpose specifically:
Your inspired—literally “in-spirited”—actions naturally serve not just you, but the entire world because you cannot Know who you are without Knowing who everyone and everything else is, too (The Mirror Path).
I call it the Mirror Path because you start to see your Self everywhere you look. You begin to recognize your shared Being with everyone and everything. You know yourself as connected with All Things.
This is a shift that will ruin you at first. It leads to confusion for most and a reordering of your ambitions, desires, and ideas about what a life is for.
Most people who reach this path don’t think too much of themselves. If anything, they think too little of themselves because we’ve been taught to believe we’re disconnected from life, that we are insignificant, that life is about surviving a zero-sum game.
The Mirror Path reflects the light of the truth, which is the exact opposite of what we’ve been taught. Your purpose isn’t just about you, it’s about Us. Everyone. All That Is. It’s about something grander, more like a symphony than a solo performance.
You’ve probably caught glimpses of this perspective in your own life. It’s like a remembering, isn’t it? This is a crucial point and seismic shift, which will happen in humanity eventually. That is, the knowing that we aren’t competing against each other for scarce resources, and in order for some to win others must lose. We aren’t disconnected at all, and never were.
On Seasons & Cycles
Even though I’ve explained this as a linear set of “paths” it’s not. That’s where the metaphor breaks down, as all metaphors must. They aren’t paths at all, really, but imperfect ways of describing the nature of being, experiencing, and moving through the Moment.
I could just as easily draw a comparison between the 4 Paths and individual notes in a musical chord. Each note when played alone is one-dimensional. Played together, however, they resonate as a harmonic that is altogether new and more. That harmonic is the song of your life.
The paths (or notes) are, I believe, the “first principles” beneath all self-realization. Of course, I could be wrong. I probably am, but take what is helpful and leave the rest. You won’t offend me.
Whichever metaphor resonates more with you, know that the principles overlap and blend. They are entangled. In one moment you’ll find yourself at ease and centered in your Knowing. In the next, you might forget Who you are and get lost in the thought patterns and habits that keep you stuck. As we develop self-mastery, development comes in seasons and cycles.
Such is the nature of life. It is dynamic, ever-flowing, and always an adventure beyond what you would have chosen for yourself. This is the beauty and the sacred terror (the good kind) of living on planet earth.
There is so much more to talk about, but not enough space here to do so. Soon, I’m hosting a 5-week study for those who want to explore applying these principles to their own life. If you’re into that kind of thing, you’ll have the opportunity to step on the trail with me.
Until then, may you travel well on your path.
Ever exploring,
Kevin
Want to support my work? The best way is to share it with others hitting the ❤️ or 🔄 buttons. And if you’re up for it, drop me a comment. It’s nice to know there are real humans out there. You are real, aren’t you?
I have been on the pathless path for over a year now. Still relearning to trust my intuition again and the way forward is still unclear but I guess I just have to keep doing the work.
I am real. Looking forward to tuning in tomorrow. Glad my pathless path led me to your Substack!