2026-MeausreofSpiritualAuthorityBlog-featured

The Measure of Spiritual Authority

September 29 is Michaelmas, the traditional feast of Michael and the archangels in several Western Spiritual traditions.

Michael is often depicted carrying a sword. I find the image useful as a symbol of discernment: the capacity to separate truth from projection and service from self-importance.

That distinction matters whenever spiritual authority is involved.

Many people have good reasons to approach spiritual teachers cautiously. They have seen charisma mistaken for wisdom or watched spiritual language place someone beyond accountability.

Yet communities still need people who are willing to accept responsibility for the work they hold together. The challenge is learning to recognize authority that deserves our trust.

Trust develops through experience

Charisma can be immediate. Trust takes longer.

We learn about a teacher by watching how they respond when a student disagrees, when an answer is not obvious, or when circumstances disrupt the plan.

A title cannot supply that capacity. It becomes visible through conduct.

Consider a moment in a healing setting. A student describes a sensation or experience they cannot yet name. A practitioner who feels pressure to appear certain may rush to explain what it means.

A more grounded practitioner can remain present without taking ownership of the student’s experience. They may offer an observation while leaving room for understanding to emerge.

That restraint is part of spiritual maturity.

Sensitivity may allow us to perceive subtle information, but perception does not automatically make our interpretation accurate. The more influence a person carries, the more carefully they must distinguish between what they sense, what they assume, and what is actually theirs to say.

Power needs an inner structure

We often notice spiritual power when it is expressive. Someone speaks with conviction or creates a palpable shift in a room.

Its quieter dimension is just as important.

Can that person remain centered when attention is no longer on them? Can they serve without needing another person’s dependence? Can they acknowledge uncertainty without losing their grounding?

These are practical measures of authority.

The strongest spiritual leaders I have known do not make themselves the center of every experience. Their presence helps others develop a clearer relationship with their own inner knowing.

They also remain students. Responsibility deepens their commitment to practice because they understand how easily influence can become distorted without reflection and accountability.

A living transition

This month, I introduced Cathy Gabrielsen as my chosen spiritual successor and the incoming spiritual leader of this tradition.

Naming a successor makes the question of authority very real. It cannot be answered by an announcement alone.

I remain actively involved in the school and continue to teach and train Cathy directly. We are working together in the field, allowing students to experience this transition through the life of the school.

If you would like to hear more about Cathy and this next chapter, you can watch the replay of our successor call here:

WATCH THE SUCCESSOR CALL REPLAY >>

When study becomes responsibility

Most people begin spiritual study because they are seeking something for themselves. They want healing, understanding, or a steadier relationship with their inner life.

With time, practice begins to shape the way they affect others.

Their presence changes the quality of a conversation. Their discernment influences the choices they make in a healing room. They discover that being sensitive to another person’s field carries an obligation to remain clear about their own.

This is one of the thresholds of advanced study.

The question becomes less about how much a student knows and more about what they can hold responsibly. Technique still matters, but so do boundaries, humility, and the willingness to keep practicing when no one is watching.

For students considering deeper work in LifeForce Energy Healing®, this is an important part of the path. Advanced training asks us to examine how we carry what we have learned and how our presence affects the people who trust us.

Michael’s sword returns here as a useful image. Discernment protects the integrity of the work. It helps us recognize when to speak, when to wait, and when our own need for certainty has entered the room.

Spiritual authority becomes trustworthy through choices like these, repeated over time.

If you feel called to explore the responsibilities of advanced practice, you can learn more about LifeForce Energy Healing® Level IV here:

EXPLORE LEVEL IV >>

2026-WhenTheLightCrossesBlog-featured-v2

When the Light Crosses

Tonight, at 8:05 Eastern time, the sun will cross the plane of the equator.

For one precise moment, neither hemisphere will lean more fully toward the light. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, autumn begins. The days grow shorter from here.

We often associate the equinox with balance. Yet the astronomical event itself lasts only a moment. The Earth continues along its path, and the relationship between light and dark keeps changing.

There is something honest in that image.

Balance does not require life to stay still. Sometimes it appears in the middle of movement, when we are fully present to what is ending and attentive to what is beginning.

I have been thinking about this because our community is also crossing into a new season.

Earlier this month, I introduced Cathy Gabrielsen as my chosen spiritual successor and the incoming spiritual leader of this tradition. I remain actively involved in the Program and our community, as we work together in the field of energy.

For our Soul Family, succession is a period of direct relationship and shared work. It gives me and Cathy time to teach together. It also gives students the opportunity to experience how the tradition continues through practice, presence, and service.

How something living continues

When we care deeply about something, we naturally want to protect it.

We may try to preserve the structures that have held it, even after those structures have begun to change or even break down. Familiar forms can feel inseparable from the thing itself.

A living body of work has a deeper source.

Its continuity depends on the principles at its center and on the people who have developed the capacity to embody them. Those principles remain recognizable even as new relationships form around them.

This kind of transition requires care. It cannot be reduced to a title or an announcement. Trust develops through what people experience over time.

That is part of why I am continuing to work closely with Cathy. The future of the Soul Family and our LifeForce Energy Healing Program will be shaped through teaching, practice, and the many ordinary moments in which spiritual responsibility becomes visible.

The crossings in our own lives

Most of us eventually encounter a season when a familiar role begins to change.

You may still care deeply about the work, relationship, or responsibility in front of you. At the same time, the way you have carried it may no longer be sustainable or complete.

The mind often responds by asking for certainty. It wants to see the whole path before taking the next step.

A crossing rarely gives us that view.

What it can give us is a clearer sense of what matters enough to carry forward. We begin to recognize which responsibilities are still ours, which ones are ready to be shared, and which habits belong to an earlier version of our lives.

This discernment takes time. It also asks for honesty about the difference between devotion and control.

Devotion serves what is alive. Control tries to keep change from happening.

I have learned that spiritual work continues through our willingness to participate in its unfolding. We listen for the deeper current, tend it carefully, and allow others to meet it with their own gifts.

Remaining present to the transition

The equinox passes quickly, but we live inside its consequences for months. Light shifts gradually. The air changes. Trees begin their release according to rhythms older than our plans.

Human transitions have their own pace.

Some parts become clear at once. Others reveal themselves through continued relationship. We learn what the next season requires by living into it.

For me, this is a time of gratitude and close attention. I am grateful for the years of teaching that brought us here, for the students who have made this work part of their lives, and for the opportunity to guide its next chapter consciously.

I am also grateful that Cathy and I can enter this chapter together.

If you were unable to join our live successor call, the replay is now available here. In it, I share more about Cathy, this transition, and what it means for the future of our school and  our community.

WATCH THE SUCCESSOR CALL REPLAY >>

2026-MindNotMeanttoTakeThisMuch-featured

Your Mind Was Never Meant to Take In This Much

Before breakfast, it is possible to know about an earthquake on another continent, a friend’s divorce, a political argument, someone else’s vacation, a celebrity scandal, and several things we are apparently supposed to be worried about.

Then the day begins.

Most of this arrives without much distinction between what concerns us directly and what simply passed through our field of awareness. We absorb fragments of hundreds of other people’s lives while sitting alone in a room, and our minds somehow have to sort out what matters, what requires a response, and what should be allowed to pass.

That is a very unusual way for a human being to live.

For most of history, the number of people whose fears, triumphs, arguments, losses, and opinions could enter an ordinary morning was relatively small. Now the emotional range of an entire world can reach us before we have finished our coffee.

We know more than ever. The harder question is what all that knowing does inside us.

We Encounter More Human Experience Than We Can Possibly Process

Information is never completely neutral.

A headline may leave us uneasy even after we have forgotten the details. Someone else’s anger can alter the mood we carry into the next hour. A few minutes spent looking at other people’s lives can leave behind a vague sense of inadequacy or urgency that seems to come from nowhere.

Each impression may be small. The accumulation is not.

By the middle of the day, the mind can feel crowded by things that have no natural place to go. We have witnessed a stranger’s grief, absorbed someone’s outrage, seen an image of extraordinary wealth, learned about a crisis thousands of miles away, and moved through all of it within minutes.

In ordinary human relationships, emotion usually comes with context. We know the person. We understand something about the situation. There may be a conversation to have, a practical response to make, or simply time to sit with what has happened.

Much of what reaches us now arrives without any of that.

We receive the emotional impact, then the stream moves on.

For sensitive people, this can be especially taxing because what we encounter often continues working on us after we have moved to something else. The screen changes, but internally we may still be carrying fragments of what came before.

Knowing Something Can Make Us Feel Responsible for It

There is another layer that may be even more exhausting.

Once we know about something, some part of us often feels that we should respond.

We hear about suffering and feel concern. We learn that someone is struggling and wonder whether we should help. We become aware of injustice, conflict, illness, environmental damage, political turmoil, and countless private difficulties that would once have remained far outside our daily awareness.

Our capacity to know has expanded much faster than our capacity to act.

That gap matters.

A person can care deeply and still have only so much time, energy, money, and influence. Yet the mind is now presented with an almost endless number of situations that could reasonably ask for compassion.

Over time, this can create a low-grade sense that we are never doing enough.

There is always another cause, another person, another crisis, another need.

The answer is not indifference. It is discernment.

Compassion becomes more sustainable when we are able to recognize what is truly ours to respond to and what we are being asked simply to witness for a moment before letting it move through.

That is a spiritual skill.

Wisdom Includes Deciding What Gets to Stay

We often think of discernment as deciding what is true.

It is also deciding what deserves continued residence in our inner life.

Some things call for action. Others deserve thought, prayer, conversation, or a practical response. And some things may need only a moment of acknowledgment before we release them.

Without that distinction, everything begins to occupy us equally.

A stranger’s argument can follow us into dinner. A frightening headline can remain in the body long after we have closed the page. Someone else’s urgency can begin shaping our own sense of what matters.

Eventually, the question becomes less about how much information we can absorb and more about what we are willing to carry.

There is no virtue in allowing every passing piece of the world to take up permanent space inside us.

In fact, genuine care may depend on preserving enough inner capacity to respond deeply to the people and responsibilities that are actually ours.

Bringing the Field of Concern Back to Human Size

This is one reason retreat can feel so different from ordinary life.

For a few days, the field becomes smaller.

You are with the people who are actually in front of you. You are doing the work that is actually happening in the room. You are walking through the landscape you are physically standing in.

Your awareness has somewhere to land.

At Asilomar, during the LifeForce Energy Healing Retreat, there will be healing work, spiritual practice, reflection, conversation, and time in a setting that naturally brings attention back to what is immediate and real.

For several days, you do not have to carry the entire world before breakfast.

That shift can reveal how much of our usual mental weight comes from trying to remain emotionally available to everything at once.

And when the field narrows, something important often returns.

We become more capable of listening closely. More capable of feeling what is actually ours. More capable of recognizing where our care can become meaningful action instead of endless absorption.

Perhaps wisdom in this age is partly the ability to remain openhearted without becoming internally occupied by everything we encounter.

The world is very large.

Our lives are still lived one moment, one relationship, and one real act of care at a time.

Learn more about the LifeForce Energy Healing Retreat at Asilomar in Carmel >>

2026-WhenDidWeStopBeingAstonishedBlog-featured

When Did We Stop Being Astonished?

We live with extraordinary things all around us.

In the course of a single day, we can see images from deep space, watch a storm crossing another continent, hear music recorded decades ago, or look at places most people in earlier generations would never have encountered in a lifetime. The spectacular has become part of the ordinary stream.

You might expect that constant access to beauty and wonder would make us more easily amazed.

Instead, many of us have become harder to astonish.

We recognize that something is beautiful. We may even stop for a moment and admire it. But the deeper experience of awe, the kind that changes our sense of scale and quiets everything else for a little while, can be harder to reach.

We Have Become Accustomed to the Extraordinary

Human beings adapt quickly. It is one of the reasons we can live in changing circumstances without being overwhelmed by every new detail.

The same ability that helps us adapt can also flatten our response to things that once would have stopped us in our tracks.

The first time you see a dramatic landscape, you may stand there for a long time. After enough exposure, even something magnificent can become part of the background. We begin to recognize it without really receiving it.

This happens in spiritual life too. A practice that once felt vivid can become familiar. A place that once opened something in us may gradually become ordinary. Even experiences we once considered profound can begin to feel like part of a routine.

The world has not become less remarkable. Our nervous systems have simply become very skilled at deciding what no longer requires our full attention.

That is why seeing more does not always mean feeling more.

Sometimes wonder depends on allowing something to reach us slowly enough that we can actually take it in.

Awe Changes Our Sense of Scale

One of the reasons awe matters is that it changes proportion.

A problem that has occupied your mind all morning may still be there when you stand at the edge of the ocean, but it is suddenly sitting inside a much larger field. The horizon stretches farther than your thoughts. The sky reminds you how much exists beyond whatever has been demanding your attention.

For a little while, your own concerns become part of something larger.

That shift can be deeply relieving.

We spend so much of daily life close to our own thoughts, responsibilities, and decisions that they can begin to fill the whole frame. Awe widens it.

This is why people have always been drawn to mountains, oceans, deserts, forests, night skies, sacred buildings, music, ritual, and art. These experiences can alter the scale at which we are perceiving our own lives.

They do not solve our problems for us. They simply return those problems to their proper size.

And sometimes that is enough to help us see them differently.

Recovering the Capacity for Wonder

The challenge is that wonder does not respond very well to force.

We cannot schedule astonishment for three o’clock and expect it to arrive on command.

But we can become more available to it.

That may mean staying with something longer than usual instead of moving immediately to the next thing. It may mean allowing a familiar place to surprise us again, or noticing when our mind has already decided that it knows what something is before we have really looked.

There is a kind of humility in this.

We do not need every beautiful thing to be new.

Sometimes we need to become new to it.

The ocean you have seen a hundred times is still the ocean. The night sky has not exhausted itself because you have looked at it before. A tree can remain astonishing even after you know its name.

What changes is the quality of our attention.

When we approach the familiar with a little less certainty, there is room for the world to become larger again.

Letting the World Be Bigger Than You

This is part of what I love about places like Asilomar.

The setting does some of the work for you.

The ocean extends beyond what you can take in at once. The cypress trees have been standing there through seasons, storms, generations, and lives far beyond our own. The horizon pulls the eye outward.

That kind of physical scale has a way of changing inner scale too.

During the LifeForce Energy Healing Retreat, we will spend time in healing work, spiritual practice, reflection, and community. But part of what makes the experience powerful is simply being somewhere that makes it easier to remember how much larger life is than the small circle of concerns we usually carry from room to room.

There is something restorative about being reminded that the world is vast, that beauty still exceeds our ability to contain it, and that we are allowed to be amazed by what is already here.

Awe does not require a miracle.

Sometimes it begins when we stop assuming we have already seen everything.

Learn more about the LifeForce Energy Healing Retreat at Asilomar in Carmel >>

2026-DidntTakeThePictureBlog-featured

What If You Didn’t Take the Picture?

There is a moment that happens so quickly now that we barely register it.

Something beautiful appears in front of us, and almost immediately we reach for a phone. We want to save it, share it, or make sure we will remember it later.

Photographs can become precious. They preserve faces, places, and moments we may be grateful to revisit years from now.

What interests me is the split second before we take the picture.

For that brief moment, there is only the experience itself. Then another layer enters. We begin thinking about the frame, the light, whether we want to share it, and how someone else might see it later.

Part of our attention has shifted from living the moment to observing ourselves having it.

The Audience We Carry With Us

Human beings have been taking photographs for generations. What feels different now is that so many experiences arrive with the possibility of an audience attached to them.

Even when we are alone, part of the mind may already be imagining how the moment could be presented later.

A beautiful view becomes something to capture. A meaningful experience begins turning into a story before we have fully understood what it meant to us. We start translating the moment while we are still inside it.

That changes the quality of attention.

Instead of receiving an experience fully, we divide our awareness between what is happening and the version of it we may eventually show someone else.

For sensitive people, this can happen almost invisibly because we are often very aware of how others might respond. We anticipate reactions quickly, sometimes before we have had time to notice our own.

The more interesting question is whether we still give some experiences enough privacy to become ours first.

Some Things Need Time Before They Become Language

Spiritual experiences often need that kind of space.

A healing session may leave you with the sense that something has shifted, even though you cannot yet explain what it is. A moment in nature may quiet you in a way that takes time to understand. Sometimes a conversation stays with you for days before you realize why it mattered.

We often want to name these experiences quickly because naming gives us a sense of clarity.

But meaning can change as an experience settles.

What felt dramatic in the first hour may become simpler and more truthful by the next morning. Something you thought was about another person may turn out to be about you. A feeling that seemed confusing may become perfectly clear once you stop trying to define it immediately.

This is one of the gifts of privacy.

It gives an experience room to mature before the outside world starts helping us decide what it means.

Memory Holds More Than an Image

Some of the moments we remember most vividly were never photographed.

We may have very little visual evidence of them, yet the memory remains alive because of how completely we were there.

Years later, we may remember the atmosphere more than the details. A certain quality of light. The feeling of being understood by someone. The sensation of standing somewhere beautiful and suddenly becoming very quiet inside.

A photograph can preserve what something looked like. Memory often preserves something harder to explain: what it felt like to be there.

That distinction matters because some experiences change us in ways no image could ever record.

The most important thing about a moment may be what happened internally, and that can remain vivid long after the visual details have faded.

Let the Moment Arrive First

There is a very simple practice hidden inside all of this.

The next time something beautiful or meaningful happens, give yourself a little time before reaching for the camera.

Stay with the experience long enough to let it register.

You may still take the photograph, and you may be grateful later that you did. The difference is that the image becomes a record of a moment you have already entered fully.

That small pause creates a different relationship with the experience.

You are receiving first and documenting second.

Over time, that may also change the way we relate to spiritual experiences. We become less hurried to explain them, less concerned with making them understandable to someone else, and more willing to let meaning reveal itself gradually.

A Few Days That Can Belong to You

This is one of the things I hope people experience at Asilomar.

There will be beautiful things to photograph, of course, and I expect many of us will. But there will also be moments that may be worth leaving exactly where they happen.

A quiet realization after healing work. A conversation that opens something unexpected. A few minutes outside when the ocean, the light, and your own inner state seem to come together in a way that is difficult to put into words.

During the LifeForce Energy Healing Retreat, there will be time for practice, reflection, community, and enough spaciousness for those experiences to settle before you decide what they mean or how you want to talk about them.

Some parts of those days may become more meaningful because they are allowed to remain private for a while.

You may come home with photographs.

But perhaps the memories that stay with you most deeply will be the ones that were never really meant for anyone else.

Learn more about the LifeForce Energy Healing Retreat at Asilomar in Carmel >>