If you’ve ever coached an Odyssey of the Mind team, you know the tension. You want to help. You see the answer, the shortcut, the perfect phrase, the stronger structure. And yet — you can’t touch it. You can’t say it. You can’t even raise an eyebrow in the wrong direction. Welcome to coaching without […]
I started my writing life as a proud pantser. Total discovery writer. I didn’t want to know what was going to happen in the story — that would have ruined the whole damn point. Writing was my way of finding out. The thrill was in the surprise, in chasing the glimmer of a moment or
I’ve read over 1,200 books on spirituality and mysticism. That’s not a flex (though it is a little bit). It’s a confession. A lifetime of searching, questioning, and tracking patterns across traditions, cultures, and centuries has brought me to a conclusion I didn’t expect when I first cracked open the Tao Te Ching or the
A practical survival guide for the wide-eyed, slightly overwhelmed, brave soul who said “sure, I’ll coach” and then immediately wondered what they just signed up for. So, you volunteered to coach an Odyssey of the Mind team. Or maybe you were “voluntold” by your kid, your school, or the mysterious gravitational pull of glitter-covered chaos.
If you’ve ever sat in a dark room after an intense conversation, completely absorbed in a flurry of connections your brain refuses to shut down, you might’ve experienced something close to what Stanislav Grof calls a “non-ordinary state of consciousness.” These states—often induced through psychedelics, deep meditation, or practices like holotropic breathwork—are known for their
Coaching an Odyssey of the Mind team is a little like trying to direct a play, run a startup, and referee a glitter fight all at once. Now add in six or seven intensely imaginative, impulsive, distractible kids—some of whom may be neurodivergent—and it starts to feel more like herding cats on roller skates. But
There’s a quiet fantasy many writers carry—maybe you’ve felt it too. That one day you’ll sit down, pour brilliance onto the page, revise it with monk-like precision, and send it out into the world… only for readers to instantly see what you see, feel what you feel, and love what you love. The reality is
First off, I am totally geeking out over John Vervaeke and Shawn Coyne’s collaboration, Mentoring the Machines. I’ve been a huge fan of Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and After Socrates lecture series and of course, Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid process. When they got together to look at the impact of artificial intelligence, I
In an age saturated with fragmented knowledge and shallow self-help, ancient Gnosticism offers an unusually cohesive path — not as a religious throwback, but as a framework for human development that integrates intellect, intuition, creativity, and transformation. The Four Pillars of Gnostic Practice provide a map not just for spiritual awakening, but for a richly
In the contemporary philosophical landscape, few voices have challenged the dominance of materialist metaphysics as effectively as Bernardo Kastrup. Through a unique blend of rigorous logic, scientific literacy, and metaphysical clarity, Kastrup has reintroduced idealism—not as a romantic or mystical counterpoint to science, but as a coherent, scientifically compatible worldview that places consciousness at the
