Just like you . . .

Suffering of any kind can make us feel cut off from others (sometimes our inspirations can do this too). But our suffering and our success, our confusion and our relative clarity, connect us with others. They remind us that other beings are more like us than we sometimes acknowledge.

After teaching, coaching, and offering consultation to hundreds of people just like you, I have a pretty good idea why you’re here. I won’t list all the reasons, but common impulses include the following:

Φ Something is missing . . . despite your relative success, or as part of a feeling of ongoing failure to realize your fullest potential, you just feel something is missing—and that might give rise to anxiety, depression, loneliness, burnout, and more

Φ You seek a life turnaround, a reset, a big shift

Φ You got stunned by a sudden illness—your own or someone close to you

Φ You really want to help the world, and that may feel daunting

Φ You sometimes feel like an imposter

Φ You sometimes feel you have no truly wise allies to turn to for honest, insightful support

Φ You’ve lost someone or something significant

Φ You feel a disconnection—maybe between your head and your heart, maybe between yourself and your ideals, maybe between yourself and the larger world—and you seek attunement (well, you might not think that’s possible, but you’ve had enough with the feelings of disconnection)

Φ (A few more listed below, if you didn’t recognize yourself right away)

You’ve come to a good place. Nothing is more effective than wisdom, and no medicine surpasses the medicine of insight. Wisdom is the path of excellence, true success, and the holistic well-being of self and world. It’s how we revitalize ourselves, our culture, and the whole community of life.

As Epicurus put it: “Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old. For no one is either too young or too old for the health of the soul. He who says either that the time for philosophy has not yet come or that it has passed is like someone who says that the time for happiness has not yet come or that it has passed.”

Epicurus means our true happiness, and to get a sense of the more holistic promise of the wisdom traditions, we could replace “happiness” with “excellence,” “wisdom,” “their fullest potential,” “unleashing their superpowers,” “understanding their own life,” and more.

In the last 12 weeks, working with Nikos has initiated a profound shift. I turned to Nikos because I was feeling blocked to happiness and feeling very dismal about the future despite many good things going for me. I was hoping to return to the self I knew that was usually quite energetic and inspired. 

It turns out I will not be returning to the self I knew. Working with Nikos helped me uncover so much more possibility for this life than that previous self was aware of. I now have a framework and set of practices based in long-standing wisdom traditions that can support me in genuine transformation and connecting beautifully with the cosmos. The teachings I've received allow me to recognize more clearly what is actually unfolding in each moment, and have provided me with a pathway to liberate my own resistance, attachments, reactivity, and emotions.

I'm so glad that I was feeling unhappy enough that I decided to work with Nikos. If I'd never gotten to that point, I would have remained content in my old habits of mind, and never known the expansive possibilities for wisdom and beauty in my life. This is still very much a learning process, but I know that things will never be the same. Today, I look out at my garden, make an offering, and am overcome with wonder at the beauty of the flowers. And so, a new path unfolds before me.

Sara

The Wound Is Where the Light Enters You

                            ~ by Rumi

Trust your wound

to a skilled healer

 

Your wound is

your heart’s state

unilluminated

 

The healer

puts a bandage on your wound

 

The pain

is gone

 

The healing

was from the light

The wound

is where the light

enters you

Insight and Inspiration Through the Dangerous Wisdom Experience

The Dangerous Wisdom Experience involves an educational approach rather than a medical one. You will learn how to tap into your own inner knowing, while also learning from the greatest untapped cultural resource we have: the wisdom traditions.

Wisdom offers us the most effective and well-tested approach to excellence, success, insight, inspiration, creativity, love, liberation, and the mutual healing of self and world. And yet, our culture keeps us radically under-resourced when it comes to wisdom. Correcting that imbalance brings a vitalizing breath of fresh air to those already succeeding, while offering lifelines to anyone struggling. It provides a path to new horizons of insight and opportunity. And it’s life-changing.

I can't believe I have a coach, I have someone who speaks to me about all the things I seem to have spent my life kind of more on my own with. I'm feeling immense gratitude right now. After our dialogue together and listening to your podcast, I feel very profoundly affected. I feel like a little invertebrate creature who's just swum into a much bigger pond. Not sure what to make of it, but it feels great, curious, new. How wonderful . . .

A person can get more out of an hour of this work than they can in three years of weekly psychotherapy . . .

Carole Nelson, Jazz Musician

A friend put me in touch with Nikos a year ago, believing his approach might be helpful to me. I run a nonprofit organization in Africa, which I’d immersed myself in totally to help cope with grief following the death of my partner. I was feeling overwhelmed, wounded and unbalanced. While I was initially skeptical that philosophy was the answer, I was open to new possibilities. Working with Nikos has opened my mind to deeper, kinder ways of thinking and understanding that are helping me regain a sense of peace and balance. It’s an overwhelmingly positive journey he’s set me on and already the changes are profound.

Nonprofit Director

Does this sound like you (or your group/organization)? 

Φ You care deeply—about the whole community of life—and you want to help the world. 

Φ People see you as competent, perhaps even visionary.

Φ You feel passionate. 

Φ You may have already achieved key successes. 

But . . . you feel there is something more—and there is. There is still a mystery inside you and inside the world at the same time. The great mystery calls, and . . .

The Dangerous Wisdom Experience Awaits You.

The single biggest challenge you face is that your culture set you up with a style of consciousness that carries inherent limitations. It’s not something any of us can wish away. 

Just like Joni Mitchell sang it, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” But, more importantly: If you never had it, you have no idea it’s missing. 

That ends up creating two major problems: 1) Even you don’t know how much you are holding back from what is possible; and, 2) The world desperately needs solutions we still haven’t found a way to offer.

Thankfully, every exceptional person I have met or worked with has put deliberate energy into learning and evolving. They constantly seek to transcend whatever they have so far achieved.  

That’s crucial, because, generally speaking, even exceptional leaders, achievers, and visionaries in our culture—let alone those who feel less than exceptional, because they haven’t gotten in touch with their latent superpowers—even the most exceptional people suffer in various ways, often from the following: 

Φ They struggle with personal demons, which might include anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and more 

Φ They can experience burnout of various kinds, including empathy burnout 

Φ Success in some areas of life seems hard to translate to others, and they sometimes feel like a failure in things that matter a lot to them 

Φ They can’t give a clear definition of mind—even though they rely on their mind for their work 

Φ They don’t know how to think the way Nature works—even though they depend totally on Nature and its ecologies of mind 

Φ They often behave as if they can do it all themselves, but inwardly they long for unconditional support 

Φ They sometimes wrestle with inner conflicts and competing commitments 

Φ They can experience crises of meaning and purpose 

The best medicine for these and other challenges is wisdom. Wisdom is not only a medicine for our suffering, but a superfood for the soul, a tonic that opens up hidden potentials in ourselves and in the world. 

We live in a complex and partially mysterious world, and our failure to act with real wisdom has revealed itself in countless ways. We need wise, creative solutions to tough personal, professional, institutional, cultural, global challenges. 

We also need performance enhancement that comes with insight into how to use that enhanced performance to help the world. 

We need holistic well-being—and reduced stress, strain, anxiousness, and other negative states. 

And we need skillful answers to questions about meaning, value, purpose, and ethics. 

All of this is the dangerous stuff no one teaches us in school.  

If you’re ready for the dangerous stuff, get in touch for a Dangerous Wisdom Coaching/Consulting call. We’ll work together in a direct, unconventional approach that will bring clarity and insight to anything you want to focus on—even the question of what you most need to focus on.