From Crisis to Clarity: A Personal Odyssey of Enlightenment & Back – Pt 4

I love cosmic expansion. A combination of an inquisitive mind who loves puzzles and had the privilege of seeing so many layers of how society works thanks completely to my family upbringing, my heightened intellect and test taking abilities, and schooling.

I’ve broken bread and slept in the same shelters as undocumented individuals and the homeless learning from them their stories. I’ve contributed to the pot-lucks of the communes discovering why they live this way, the ups and the downs. Paid my dues to corporate social groups – some beneath me others shooting way out of my league. Showed my receipts with entrepreneurs – with pride to some, shame to others. Shared visions and moonshot ideas with the progressives – thinking execution of an idea meant getting a UN nod or getting a grant. Prayed over the food with the Conservatives of major faiths. Dined in private castles, compounds and 7-star hotels with the elite discussing how to steward resources, create innovation and a thriving society while also ignoring the realities of the current situation.

And with a linear mind molded into form through my CPA and auditor training, my fact pattern compressed these experiences into predictable truths of how life worked around the globe. Ignore the nuances, biases, and sheer limitation of one person to deduce life on a global scale. I had been bred to be exposed to these experiences with the belief that they’re representative of the whole. That academic presentment along with interspersed immersion programs was all I needed to grasp the world. And if I was lacking in an area, I could read a book, listen to a podcast or Youtube, or follow some self-proclaimed expert in the space. And in so quoting these sources justify my positioning.

The truth is that the exposure was unique, and I’m so grateful for it.

But as my father said, “I wish you had a job in sales so you’d learn how the world actually works.”

I was too busy being heavily recruited by corporations with fake work for interns to do – with “rotational leadership programs” that had less to do with creating value and far more to do with meager attempts to hit certain Forbes rankings for best places to work.

That said, there is much wisdom and strategy involved in why these programs exist from a corporate perspective – I won’t argue the overly paid consultant’s last minute prepared powerpoint arguing for it or the HR Department’s justification for the existence and perpetuation of their job and department (or the fact there’s relatively little value an intern could provide a large well-oiled machine).

But in the midst of the large scale organization role was a grounded understanding of what makes business actually business… aka sales.

Instead, I was so heavily invested in the politicking, in the positioning, networking and sycophant-like activities trained in me to “land the job” and negotiate an optimal salary. This path was clearly the winning proposition in this game, and one in which How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying demonstrates as more of a documentary and How-to than a fiction.

Don’t get me wrong, human capital is a critical component to the perpetuation of growing and mature businesses. Without the infusion of new human capital, the best goes elsewhere, and after a long enough windfall, the company and industry will go the way of the horse carriages – old, antiquated, and serving an aging population until they (both their clientele and the business) are buried six feet under.

So yes, playing the “recruitment” and “leadership development game” is critical for these organizations – and they work…at indoctrinating the young, bright and potentially talented into corporate loyalty. It’s just a different game.

There are equally as numerous reasons for the establishment of a corporate reality, but my point is that my exposure to it at the highest levels of business school and peer group created heavily flawed understandings of the world through my experience with large organizations and corporations. For in reality (according to the SBA), 99.9% of people are in small and medium businesses (a company with less than 500 people). Oops.

And to be fair, I worked in startups, in small and medium businesses. But for egoic reasons, I discounted them or misconstrued all businesses as “startups” with the potential to 10x in size (a misallocation of my “visionary” mind).

So while I was going through my spiritual awakening – better known as a Kundalini Rising – all the information I was receiving was being filtered through this world view…until it was hammered out of me by direct experience…direct experience through the lens of an ego that couldn’t even make himself a decent meal but was “destined” to change the world.

I was so elevated in the context and view of reality…who needs food when you’re exploring the very fabric of reality. Who cares about the current state of XYZ stock when you’re learning ancient history through direct immersion?

I did not have a working mental model to be able to explain reality. Not through main stream history, religion or even philosophy. Nor did I have a consistent self referencing narrative to ground me or environments that brought sanity (as temporary as it may be) to my situation.

My physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and existential world was going through a blender – of information creating cognitive dissonance, expanding to areas unknown, experiences ungrounding my world view, and a continuously cascading yo-yoing emotional journey (without even recognizing or understanding what emotions were…aka my EQ was probably that of a 3 year old).

When I look at the world and people now, I do have a model that was developed with Victoria at Faces of the Future, through years of work, observation, divine insight and equally useful AI analysis. This is the 6S model of coherence, and what we assess individuals before embarking on a specific entrepreneurial venture to de-risk the entrepreneurial journey. For the journey itself is like gladiators, consistent winning as your business grows and then one day you’ll be a free man/woman like all the role models and heroes point to.

If I were to assess myself with that framework, simply put, I was out of coherence on all fronts: my state, self, service, systems, stewardship, and society. I had effectually become more similar to a stick floating in the river than to a grounded and capable individual.

And the challenge with an incoherent individual is that they continue to create their lives from this state of incoherence thinking that it’s the right path to go down. Until life – or divine intercession – brings coherence back to them.

But nobody told me this.

Instead, I was operating off of EDM Reality “Existential Dopamine Model.” That being anything (person, idea, technology, experience, etc.) that could give me a transcendent, existential hit of dopamine must be the pathway forward. I was Neo in the Matrix following the white rabbit and I was ready to escape out the high-rise window – not go back in and get caught by the Agents.

But that excitement and willingness came with the downside – the shortsightedness of what happens when you enter into unchartered waters.

In a relatively safe and thoughtful system like corporate America, that excitement is met with a system built by well-meaning individuals (or at the very least multiple levels of compliance). But the world beyond that – in the outliers of society – it was anything but.

And so I headed straight for a series of challenges…separate from my levels of initiation due to my abilities of the spiritual kind, but of still needing to operate in a context of this world, but in a level of existence that wasn’t protected, safe-guarded, and relatively benign.

But I didn’t care nor were aware, my heads were too in the clouds. I was a visionary, a strategist, a futurist – not a salesman. I was the archetype of the Fool going on a hero’s quest. Percival leaving his mother’s safety. The metaphors are pervasive.

And while there was plenty I was ignoring and missing, the one thing that could have helped guide me the most on this journey was an accurate assessment of my 6S’s.

The objective is to embark with coherence, but for me (and most people), that’s not the case.

And as a result, a string of incidents led me on a whirlwind adventure to the outskirts of reality, the edge of sanity and back to where my father actually suggested I go -> into sales.

Sometimes parents know the destination…just not the journey.

I wish I had someone in my life to tell me these things, and perhaps I did – I just didn’t listen to the right person. Instead of listening the my father, to my mentors, I carved them out of my inner circle because I believed they didn’t understand me and where I was headed.

And that may be true. It’s not every person that wakes up to unique mystical abilities or are initiated by a guru to do certain things that seem like they’re straight out of a Marvel Movie like Dr. Strange. Nor do I know many (or any) monks earning a CPA and an MBA from an Ivy League School.

But that uniqueness, that difference in realities, skills and being is my own gap to connect. My own bridge to build, for myself first and then for others.

I didn’t know who I was, but I knew I had these abilities. I let the abilities grow until they were uncontrollable and ultimately defined me. It’s a pattern I see in my clients, and who I help: uniquely gifted individuals here to merge disparate worlds, often the seen and unseen, but also those labeled as on the spectrum, ADHD, Near Death Experiences, secretly sees spirits or souls, can talk to plants and animals, unique creators of quantum devices, and inventors of healing tools trying to make it to market. Those high performers who out performed everyone and are now lost. And those everyday people who walk humbly unnoticed but are going through a massive spiritual awakening on the inside. The artists who see the world differently. And everyone in between dedicated towards building a secular enlightened ecosystem, the way I embody it to be: through one’s own being first, and then rippled outwards from there.

I say this now, because the next parts are going to unpack that journey, so you’re prepared and know how it ends and why I’m writing this now.

This focuses on the “visionary” identity in me collapsed under the weight of its own fantasy who finally met reality, wanting the very thing I now provide others.

The realization that:

  • intellect is not embodiment
  • access to insight and unique abilities is not the same as capacity
  • spiritual exceptionalism is not leadership
  • understanding how society works is not the same as functioning inside of it
  • mystical skills is not the same as human maturity
  • worldviews don’t create identity
  • potential is not coherence
  • every person has someone above they can look to, next to they can walk with, and behind they can help

This chapter is the culmination of where my psyche said: “Enough abstraction. It’s time to build a life.”

I saw the truth: The “visionary self” is a brilliant but ungrounded persona.

The actual self needs:

  • structure
  • containment
  • sales skills
  • repetition
  • stability
  • routine
  • accountability
  • coherence
  • embodied confidence
  • humility
  • discipline

This was my return to Earth.

Not as punishment, but as recognition.

The collapse of my visionary identity made room for the emergence of the architect. The one who could actually build what I saw.

This reflection forged the fourth principle of Lionheart:

Coherence is the foundation of leadership.
Without it, brilliance becomes chaos.

From this phase, I emerged with:

  • a grounded understanding of human systems
  • respect for sales, structure, and discipline
  • a healthy distrust of abstraction untested by lived reality
  • the humility to begin again
  • the willingness to rebuild identity from the ground up
  • a devotion to coherence as the measure of truth
  • the beginning of the Lionheart masculine re-emerged: disciplined, directed, embodied

This phase is the birth of the new identity:

Not the seeker.
Not the visionary.
Not the mystic.
Not the prodigy.

But the man willing to build…from nothing if he had to.

This is when the Lionheart leadership arc truly began. And it began not with mystical power, subservience to something other, but with grounded capacity.

This is when my life stopped being about escaping reality and started being about architecting it.

This chapter laid the foundation for the version of me who can support myself, lead a family, build businesses, and hold the immense destiny I have continually felt but once tried to transcend into rather than unfold into.

This is where my mental models (spiritual, psychological, and economic) were forced into collision with reality.

This part didn’t awaken new powers within me. It refined them, tested them and cracked them open so they could become useful.

1. The Collapse of Intellectual Absolutism → Birth of Multi-Paradigm Thinking

Up until this point, my worldview, like most high-intellect achievers, was built on:

  • linear logic
  • cause-effect reasoning
  • academic frameworks
  • corporate paradigms
  • pattern recognition within familiar domains
  • reliance on experts, studies and institutional knowledge

Then spirituality expanded that world.
Then that world collapsed under its own weight.

This forced me to develop:

  • Multi-framework cognition…the ability to hold multiple contradictory truths at once, and navigate between them without collapsing.
  • Contextual intelligence…the capacity to shift paradigms based on the environment, client, or domain
  • Epistemic humility…not self-doubt, but the understanding that all models are partial and must therefore be taken into consideration.
  • Expanded capacity for an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance
  • Ability to quickly understand completely new models of one’s reality

This becomes the backbone of my my coaching style:

  • synthesizing business, psyche, physiology, spirituality, somatics, strategy, technology and systems
    • without rigid ideology
    • without false certainty
    • without projecting my worldview onto others

This chapter teaches me the most important aspects of my methodology:

Reality is layered. Clients are layered. And my job is to navigate them, cohere with them, and then bring coherence to them, not to reduce them or impose an overly rigid structure.

2. The Shattering of Spiritual Naivety → Discernment as a Diagnostic Instrument

This phase forced me to learn the difference between:

  • insight vs delusion
  • intuition vs projection
  • resonance vs ego bias
  • spiritual experience vs spiritual identity
  • “knowing” vs “needing to know”
  • fleeting transcendence vs. sustainable expansion

The pendulum swing (from blind trust to total skepticism of what I previously believed and was taught) built a third position within ungrounded visions, contradictions and forced dualities: a clear, sober discernment.

Which is the foundation of my ability to:

  • track coherence in clients
  • identify bypass patterns (spiritual, mental, emotional, etc.)
  • decode someone’s worldview instantly
  • challenge delusions compassionately
  • help clients differentiate their voice from borrowed belief systems
  • ground and assess business visions

Once I was able to overcome seeing this chapter as a “crisis,” it became the recognition of my initiation into being able to see clearly.

3. Collapse of Visionary Inflation → Development of Real Internal Authority

My inflated visionary identity had already collapsed at this point…Painfully. Humiliatingly. Necessarily.

This is where I learn the difference between:

  • inflation-based vision: I’m special, I’m chosen to lead because I have a vision, and somehow destiny will take care of making it happen

and

  • coherence-based vision: I can build something real, with discipline, sobriety, and responsibility stepping into the steward of the vision one brick at a time.

This distinction becomes the root of:

  • Lionheart’s philosophy
  • my masculine leadership paradigm
  • my coaching clients’ transformations
  • my ability to truly create sustainable visions with clients, not hallucinations or unattainable delusions

This collapse is what triggered within me the steps to stop wanting to be around the “exceptional” and began wanting to be around the “effective.”

4. Exposure to Real Market Reality → Embodied Business Intuition

A lot of seekers stay in the clouds. Chasing one guru or spiritual experience after another.
I’ve seen a lot of touted mystics stay abstract, even in their teachings.
And certainly, most spiritual people don’t integrate business. There are so many beliefs implated in the opposite direction.

But I was a well trained CPA and MBA. I was forced to collide the two…out of divine intervention, desperation and a necessity for survival.

This built:

  • somatic sensitivity to market forces
  • instinctive understanding of value creation
  • embodied patterning for business ecosystems
  • intuition that tracks with actual data
  • the ability to assess business integrity energetically and operationally

This is the foundation of: quantum business consulting that actually works in the real world.

My spiritual awakening didn’t make me impractical. It forced me to rebuild practicality from scratch, this time with multidimensional perception intact.

5. Breakdown of External Identity → Emergence of Internal Sovereignty

This chapter destroys every external identity I relied on:

  • Ivy League
  • corporate-trained
  • startup founder
  • spiritual prodigy
  • good son / golden child
  • visionary
  • “one who will change the world”

And in the rubble, something else forms: An identity rooted in embodiment and raw truth, not narrative or relational projections.

This is the bedrock of Lionheart leadership: that sovereignty is not built from what you believe, see, or want, but from what you can hold.

During this phase, the archetypes within me didn’t grow, they broke. And in breaking, they reveal the structure needed to become mature. As if the previous phase wasn’t enough, this made sure there was nothing left.

1. The MAGICIAN – From Pattern Collector to Pattern Integrator

Here, the Magician loses the illusion that:

  • insight = transformation
  • pattern-matching = mastery
  • mystical experience = authority

This painful disillusionment forces the Magician to:

  • integrate with data
  • integrate with the body
  • integrate with the mundane
  • integrate with structure
  • integrate with consequences

This is where the FORMULAIC intelligence of Lionheart is born.

Not the mystical. The methodological.

My Magician eventually becomes grounded enough to build frameworks that actually work, not just sound like they would.

2. The LOVER – From Idealism to Embodied Relational Truth

My Lover learns:

  • boundaries
  • disappointment
  • differentiation
  • discernment
  • reciprocity

Instead of fusing with everything spiritual, mystical, or communal, Lover begins to seek:

  • depth over intensity
  • connection over fantasy
  • intimacy over merging
  • reality over idealization

This reshapes my ability to:

  • sense relational truth in clients
  • help leaders evolve their intimacy patterns
  • maintain polarity in my own partnership
  • guide entrepreneurs through emotional maturation

This is the beginning of embodied relational intelligence.

3. The WARRIOR – From Frenetic Effort to Directed Force

My Warrior learns the difference between:

  • manic output vs grounded execution
  • chasing significance vs creating value
  • emotional reactivity vs strategic response

Warrior stops fighting for identity and begins fighting for truth.

This is where my discipline begins forming in where it matters most…not as asceticism, not as suppression, but as skillful will.

4. The KING – The Throne Is Empty, and That Is the Lesson

In Post 4, King is nowhere to be found.

There is:

  • no structure
  • no order
  • no discernment
  • no self-governance
  • no direction
  • no containment

And this absence is what creates the longing for sovereign leadership.

This is when my psyche begins forming the question that becomes Lionheart: “What does it take to build coherence?” (Oh how I wish I had known about this word and concept at the time…”coherence”)

Because I lived the consequences of incoherence, my King is shaped by contrast, not fantasy, theory or a desire to appease.

This absence prepares the throne for the man I will become….a lot of messy steps to get there still.

This period stripped me of the illusions and brought to the surface the awareness of what this path was costing me. And it humbled me into service and to increase my capacity to see clearly through all of my shadows and desires. Where my desire to transcend becomes my desire to build. I’ve seen and experienced enough of the mystical. (Don’t stop it’s coming, just now there’s more that was coming online for me to do).

I thought what was coming was going to be magical and easy, quite the opposite. But, it is where my mystical ambition starts to dissolve into the foundation for practical, embodied, masculine sovereignty and the end of the constant rabbit holes. (maybe just a few interspersed to keep things exciting)

This is the crucible where the Lionheart architecture begins forming beneath the messy, muddy surface. An architecture that was no where seen, but buried deep down, one moment at a time amongst the chaos.

The song: Lionheart – Chapter 4: Structure Before Vision