Forget doomsday prepping, get renaissance ready

Audio version is 🔥

In the first renaissance, artists and mystics rediscovered the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome, drawing on classical texts and ideas that had been buried deep beneath the rubble of the Middle Ages.

They revived forgotten knowledge about art, science, and philosophy, which sparked THE era of transformation in Europe we now call the enlightenment period. The Middle Age was marred by social unrest, consolidated power and political chaos.

(Sound familiar?)

This perfect storm of moral decay and desire for a just world became fertile ground for the enlightenment - a period that up until today is known as one of the greatest spiritual leaps mankind has ever made.

As we enter a new Renaissance, and Collective Enlightenment 2.0, we need to delve even further back, not just to recover lost wisdom but to reconnect with deeper, more primal truths about our existence and relationship with the universe.

It’s no surprise we are seeing a resurgence of breath-work, tantra, yoga, plant medicine - even tattoos, as these mythically imprinted practices offer pathways back to our ancestral roots and serve as conduits for integrating deeper truths into our modern lives.

These ritual practices help bridge the gap between our ancestral heritage and our contemporary existence, guiding us towards a more holistic and soulful way of being and away from the restrictive straitjacket that is Empire consciousness.

Tomorrows fortune’s belong to those who awaken to this reality and as Ken Wilber says, all we need to do is clean up, grow up, and show up. The AI-driven revolution will transform the world even more profoundly than the internet has.

If you continue on the same path without change, where will you be five years from now?

If you're content with the vision, there's no need to read further.

But if you are curious to see how you can tether yourself to the rhythms of life, live a life guided by soul and surf the first drops on the wave of the revolution.. let’s do this.

Octavia Butler with a timeless reminder

The Ritual Revival

Homosapiens in the modern world need rituals and institutions that stabilise life for us. They make us human in a world that is driven by market gains and mindless consumption.

I use the word homosapiens intentionally as we, despite Elon Musks best brain-chipping efforts, still have brains hardwired to collect nuts in a forest. Without having regular rituals that tend to our spiritual needs, our growth is stunted.

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques to make yourself at home in the world.

They take us from people that are walking ON the land to people that are OF the land. Rituals are to time what home is to place. You cannot take divorce yourself from the insatiable libido of your ego and into your souls purpose without rituals.

Nowadays, everything gets called a ritual - a foot bath, a manicure, Uber Eats on a Sunday. These are not rituals. These are lollygags.

A ritual has three distinct features:

• Separation: taking space from our usual environment either physically or psychically

• Challenge: creating liminality and disrupting our holding patterns

• Integration: embodying the shifts internally outside of the ritual space

We ALL have holding patterns that keep us in repetitive cycles and distractions. Rituals help us to interrupt these patterns, providing space to challenge our sacred cows and status quos.

If it is simply a continuation business as usual, you do not have a ritual, you have a lollygag.

Not to judge a lollygag, I love fooling around more than the next person. But it is important to draw the line somewhere so we can start to make sense of this re-emerging social technology as we re-assert ourselves as sovereign beings.

Below I have outlined a 4 step map for how you can use rituals that follow the traditional process of separation, challenge and integration for personal and collective transformation.

The Daily Personal Ritual

If you want to change the world around you, change yourself first. Meditation, yoga, journalling are great places to start if you don’t already have a daily ritual. They are a great way to separate yourself from your day to day, disrupt your holding patterns and create a new you to step in to.

I have a few that I lean on depending on where I am at but I will never miss my morning ritual of putting my bare feet on the earth and taking time to pray. My prayers are my vision for a world ensouled.

Not just for the people that I care about, but the world that I live in.

I pray that even the zombies find their soul too. The gormless soldiers blindly following orders, the property developers building condos on sacred lands, the politicians making deals with the devil.

I pray that my words connect to those that need it. I often go through life wondering if any body out there is picking up what I am throwing down, or if I am just pissing in the wind. My prayers give me the faith that the work I’m doing matters.

We all have a prayer. I pray that you find yours and commit to it with unwavering faith.

It starts with one.

The Weekly Relational Ritual

I used to believe one of our core drivers was to heal.

But 'heal' felt too nebulous and didn’t fully capture the essence of what truly motivates us. In the four ways of knowing I took a deeper look at what are core drivers us: the need to connect, grow, and express. Everything we do boils down to these needs.

And after sitting with it, I landed on a word that defines the drive to transmute external toxicity that can ring true at a cellular level as well as collective level.

That word is: “process”.

Without processing we risk stagnation as we carry the weight of unresolved experiences.

A weekly space to process, (I like to check-in with my partner or as a household), is a cathartic way to move through our personal struggles, to grieve, to connect and even to celebrate our wins.

This social technology was used by many of our ancestors, First Nations mobs call this the yarn and is it the basis of the modern therapeutic models we have today.

The Monthly Collaborative Ritual

Have you spotted the trend yet?

At each stage we are building out the collective spirit. And the collaborative stage continues to follow the same steps that define a ritual - separate, challenge and integrate.

We separate ourselves from our day to day to commune with others for a common purpose.

We disrupt the holding patterns of the ego and conditioned individualism in order to build something. This could be as part of an activism campaign, a creative project or a community initiative.

And we integrate the experience by solidifying our tribal bonds and weaving our new found insights into our day-to-day.

We are social beings, we are not meant to do it alone. And when we find the tribe that aligns with the fullest expression of who we are, we become unstoppable.

(P.s - if you are in the Northern Rivers join us for a creative community gathering, “Magic Words” hosted by Adam Axford - a night of storytelling fused with jaw dropping magic tricks)

The Seasonal Community Ritual

Every sunrise, every full moon and every season is an opportunity to align with natures cycles and away from synthetic systems and digital distractions.

And at our seasonal village ritual; the other artisans of the cultural revolution that have been tending to their own garden, as well as the communal garden, come together to feast on the bounty of the collective harvest.

Can you imagine this gathering?

A convergence of all the different artistic, visionary, entrepreneurial, activist and regenerative tribes coming together.

Filled with people who are deeply devoted to their personal prayer, to cleaning out the closet with their inner circle, supporting their local community and serving something greater then themselves.

Sharing their wins, losses, learnings and most importantly celebrating the blessing that is being alive in a time of radical transformation. Not simply hanging out and passing the time but a collective affirmation, a communal initiation into radiance.

Conscious communities are the drumbeat of culture, and it is here we provide the radical template of the world we wish to sing, dance and drum into existence.

The Great Turning

Just as our personal breakdowns lead to our greatest breakthroughs, the polycrises we are facing combine to create a necessary juncture as we make way for the emergence of new insights and possibilities.

Joanna Macy explains our current time as The Great Turning: an awakening of a higher level of human consciousness, and a turn from an era of violence against people and nature, to a new era of peace, justice and environmental restoration.

The Great Turning has three arms so you can choose your own adventure:

• Holding Actions - activism and direct actions like blockades and civil disobedience that put bodies in the way of destructive systems, buying time and preserving what can be saved for a sustainable future

• Building systems - creating new societal models and forms that make the old ones obsolete. This is important as some issues cannot be solved they can only be transcended and new systems such as open source tech and permaculture can replace the old

• Shift in Consciousness - inner spiritual and psychological transformation that expands our identity beyond ego to embrace the earth, cosmos, and humanity, facilitated by ritual traditions and new forms of thought.

Each and every single one of you has a role to play in shattering the illusions of our previous paradigms. There has never been a better time to bring your medicine to a sick world - and it all starts with how you meet yourself.

From your soul, to your soul family, to the soul tribe and beyond.

These are apocalyptic times. But the apocalypse as we traditionally know it does not mean the end of the world.

“Apocalypse" derives from the Greek word apokalypsis, which means "revelation" or "unveiling." What apocalypse actually means is a time of uncovering of hidden truths and a shedding of illusory veils that reveal deeper layers of our conditioned reality.

Looks like my teenage sci-fi fantasies of fighting zombies are finally coming to fruition.

What an exciting time to be alive!

I was hoping they would be wrapped up in bandages and emerging from tombs with arms folded across their chest, as opposed to cheap polyester suits emerging from poorly lit office cubicles but when you think about it they’re kinda the same thing right?

This is the final teaching for the Soul Accelerator training! Over the past 3 months I’ve been immersing a group of fellow truth seekers in to the Ritual Arts so they can align deeper with destiny.

I’ll be running a retreat over the Solstice period where we will revisit all things Ritual, Soul and purpose at the end of the year. If you are interested in joining, please reach out for more info. If not feel free to share with someone who will appreciate this piece!