When I was a child, I lived on a ranch several miles outside of town. One early summer day, I was outside where cows were grazing in the field, the cats were lazing in the sun, the dog was sniffing things, butterflies flitted around the crabapple tree under a clear blue sky.

 

My mother, uncle, and aunt stood at the other end of the dirt driveway, talking together in a small circle, like they were in a bubble of their own.

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Suddenly it hit me, with startling clarity, that they were not in reality with the rest of us. The cows, cats, dog, butterflies, me, blue sky, crabapple tree — all of us.

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There was what Life was doing.

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And there was what the humans were doing.

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Something in me clicked. A feeling I had carried in my body for as long as I could remember suddenly had shape. I could feel the difference between the living world, with all of us in it, and the separate reality that humans create and inhabit.

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I took a vow then and there to understand why humans were so disconnected from the rest of Life, and how they could return to belonging.

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I devoted my life to answering those two questions. What grew from that lifelong devotion is at the heart of Temple of Awe.

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Dominant modern culture denies what Life actually is. It seeks to control, flatten, demean, ignore, or extract from the living world it depends on. This creates a reality where so many of us become exhausted, pressured, under-supported, harmed, distracted, and surrounded by distortion.

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We're trying to survive, work, care for others, heal, make meaning, and belong inside a world that obscures and obstructs the very things that would enable deeper participation in Life.

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And when so many of us turn toward healing, spirituality, and personal growth, we discover distortion exists here as well: systems that ask us to believe instead of perceive, perform instead of participate, pathologize variance instead of questioning the authority of “normal,” consume instead of practice, obey instead of discover, and measure wellness by the degree to which we can align with dominant cultural norms.

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If you have found your way here, you probably already feel like you’d rather chew gravel than do another round of self-improvement. You may also be feeling, or hoping, that there is another way.

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Temple of Awe is another way.

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This work is not about telling you what to believe. It is about helping restore the foundations that make direct relationship possible: perception, discernment, agency, love, awe, devotion, practice, right relationship, and embodied belonging.

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For more than 50 years, I’ve devoted my life to understanding what actually helps humans return to belonging. Not as an idea, but as something that can be lived, practiced, and embodied inside a world that enforces disconnection.

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That has meant studying, practicing, listening, researching, experimenting, surviving, questioning, teaching, creating, writing, and working closely with thousands of people. It has meant following the question through the body, the psyche, the sacred, the ordinary, the relational, the ancestral, the ecological, and the unseen.

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The Temple is for people who deeply love Life and have always known, somewhere in their soul, that the world is sacred.

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The movement is to restore innocence, tenderness, love, reciprocity, and awe to their rightful place as legitimate modes of perception and being. And to learn the tools, skills, and capacities necessary to live that restoration inside the reality of modern life.