Facilitators of the Return

I.

An old, new story — and why it reads like a map of our practice

Lakritz's thesis can be held in one image. The Kabbalists drew two movements through the Tree of Life: a descending path, the lightning flash by which unity differentiates itself into an individual, embodied life; and an ascending path, the serpent that winds back up, consciously reintegrating everything that was separated on the way down. Neumann called these the two halves of the conscious journey; Jung called the second one individuation; the alchemists called the whole of it solve et coagula.

His contribution is to insist that these are not metaphors decorating clinical work but the master map of it — and that psychology has spent a century teaching only the first half, the building of egos, while neglecting the second, the return.

Then he does something that should matter enormously to everyone in our community. He reads the history of depth psychology itself as a retracing of the return path: Freud sounded the personal unconscious, Jung opened the collective layer beneath it, Grof mapped the transpersonal dimension beyond the individual lifespan — and Michael Newton, through thousands of deep hypnotic regressions, reached the deepest stratum of all, the life-between-lives dimension of the soul's existence. In that account, our founder's work is not an outlier at the edge of the field. It is the furthest sounding of the field's own trajectory.

He holds the ontology open, as a careful clinician should, and reports what those of us in this work witness constantly: whatever the ultimate nature of these journeys, their fruits are consistent, durable and clinically real. The fear of death loses its grip. The difficulties of the present life reorganise themselves as curriculum — chosen, meaningful, survivable.

“Our founder's work is not an outlier at the edge of the field. It is the furthest sounding of the field's own trajectory.”

II.

What we actually do: the craft of facilitation

It is worth saying plainly what our work as facilitators consists of — because from the outside it can look exotic, and from the inside it is a craft as disciplined as any in the healing professions.

We begin where the clinical protocol begins: with the vessel. Not everyone is ready for a journey that softens the boundaries of ordinary identity, and part of our training is precisely that discernment — distinguishing a sound ego seeking integration from a fragile one seeking escape, distinguishing emergence from emergency, honouring the sequence: vessel, contents, axis.

Then comes the long single session, three to four hours held in unbroken attention: the deepening, the corridors of childhood and the womb, the passage through a prior death, and the threshold beyond it — the light, the guides, the soul group, the council whose review is conducted not as judgement but as searching compassion. And then, no less important, the return trip: the slow coagulation of what was touched into body, relationship and ordinary conduct, without which even the most luminous session evaporates.

Through it all runs an ethic I would engrave above every training room: the non-local therapies are transmitted, not administered. We can accompany no one further than we ourselves have gone. Our credential is not the certificate; it is the state of our own inner work — our steadiness in the dark, the soundness of our own vessel when someone else's fire needs holding. This is why our community gathers, why we sit in council with one another, why the conference opens each day not with a lecture but with a meditation. The instrument of this profession is the practitioner.

“The non-local therapies are transmitted, not administered. The instrument of this profession is the practitioner.”

III.

Naming what our clients touch: Fundamental Peace

For years I have been trying to give a rigorous name to what people contact across that threshold — because it is not bliss exactly, not anaesthesia, not the mere absence of distress. In my research I have called it Fundamental Peace: a foundational state of consciousness, with identifiable neurobiological components, that persists beneath and within experience rather than depending on circumstances. We have begun to validate it empirically, to measure it, to study how contemplative and hypnotic practice stabilises it.

What strikes me, reading Lakritz, is that Fundamental Peace and his "unitary reality field" are two vocabularies for one territory. When a client returns from a life-between-lives session with the terror of death dissolved, they have not acquired a belief. They have remembered a ground.

My own formulation has always been that Fundamental Peace is not the absence of pain but the transmutation of its energy into love and compassion — and here Isaac Luria completes the thought. Luria taught that creation shattered, that sparks of holy light lie trapped in the broken places, and that the human task — tikkun — is to gather them home, one liberated spark at a time. Every session we facilitate is tikkun in miniature: a descent into the broken places of a single biography and beyond it, and the raising of what was trapped there into conscious light. The facilitator's chair, understood this way, is not a technique's operating station. It is a station of repair.

“Fundamental Peace is not the absence of pain — it is the transmutation of its energy into love and compassion.”

IV.

The alchemy we carry in our pockets

Lakritz calls alchemy the operating manual of the return arc, and I confess this chapter felt like coming home, because alchemy has been the grammar of my own frameworks for years. The Emotional Alchemy Mandala I work with organises eleven families of emotion, and each family runs the same trajectory the alchemists mapped: Shadow, the lead — the emotion in its compulsive, exiled, projected form; Gift, the transmutation — the same energy owned and matured into capacity; and Essence, the gold — the quality of being that was hiding inside the wound all along.

Owned anger matures into fierce clarity; owned fear into discernment; owned grief into depth of love. This is Shadow → Gift → Essence, and it is solve et coagula rendered as a five-step protocol anyone can carry.

The deeper convergence is architectural. My Integral Transpersonal Model rests on three pillars — Jungian individuation, the Shadow–Gift–Essence grammar of transmutation, and the evolution of consciousness itself — and Lakritz's book is built, chapter by chapter, on precisely that triad: individuation as the lived path, alchemy as its operating manual, and the Second Axial Age as its evolutionary context. When independent lines of work converge like this, drawn from different lineages and different decades of practice, I take it the way Lakritz takes the convergence of the mystics: as evidence that we are all tracing one territory.

V.

The deepest wound and the world's midlife

And then the book widens, as our work must widen. Lakritz's boldest claim is that what midlife is to the individual, the present historical moment is to humanity as a whole: the long collective descent — differentiation, separation, the sovereign modern ego with its dead machine of a cosmos — has bottomed out, and civilisation itself stands at the turn of the arcs, with all the turbulence a turning implies.

In my own cartography of the world's suffering I have named six archetypal wounds — Repression, Denial, Shame, Rejection, Guilt and, deepest of all, Separation — each with a healing virtue, and Separation's virtue is Care, is Love. Lakritz's diagnosis of modernity is, in my language, the Sixth Wound at planetary scale: human beings more cut off from the ground of being than ever before, and a civilisation whose institutions encode the cutoff. The Second Axial Age, then, is nothing less than the collective healing of Separation — re-linking, which is what the word religion originally meant, undertaken this time consciously.

This is why I have argued, at the World Happiness Foundation and in the UN's Beyond GDP process, that our era needs two maps, not one: a compass toward flourishing and a shadow map of suffering. The Global Pain and Trauma Map reads the world's anguish across seven domains not as noise to be managed but as the collective nigredo — the blackening that precedes every transmutation — and the Fundamental Peace Index is simply its inversion: what remains, and what rises, as the pain is met and transmuted.

Happytalism, the paradigm I have spent years articulating, is in this light the political economy of the ascending arc: the recognition that a civilisation measuring itself by accumulation alone is a midlife executive flogging the morning's programme long past noon, and that the afternoon's question — what is all of this for? — has moved into humanity's house and will not leave. Our mission of ten billion human beings free, conscious and happy by 2050 is not utopian decoration. It is a Second-Axial commitment, stated as policy.

VI.

It takes a village — and the village speaks many languages

Our conference programme embodies the book more literally than its designers may have realised. Lakritz writes of his hope that practitioners of the emerging paradigm and practitioners of the established ones might integrate their work into a collaborative village — and our second segment convenes exactly that village: energy healing beside depth work, clinicians beside facilitators, showing us what collaborative therapeutic relationships look and feel like from both sides of the chair.

No single modality restores the whole axis. The physical field needs its stabilisers, the archetypal field its depth workers and regressionists, the unitary field its contemplatives and facilitators; the skill of our age is matching the instrument to the field, and the humility of our age is knowing that we hold one instrument among many. What I have long called ecosystems of happiness — cities, schools, enterprises, hospitals designed as environments of flourishing — is this same village principle scaled to civilisation.

And the village must speak many languages. A Legacy Without Borders is, for me, the most personal hour of the conference. The soul, as every facilitator learns, is multilingual — but the healing happens in the mother tongue. Watching our Spanish-speaking facilitators carry Michael's legacy from Argentina across the Latin world, I see tikkun operating at the level of language itself: sparks that could only be gathered in Spanish, being gathered. As a facilitator working from Spain, building bilingual bridges in everything I do, I take that hour not as a report but as an assignment. The Second Axial Age will not unfold in English alone, and the two arcs are drawn in every alphabet.

“The soul is multilingual — but the healing happens in the mother tongue.”

VII.

Toward San Damiano

We will close this conference already turned toward the next one: 2027, at San Damiano. The name is its own teaching. It was in the ruined chapel of San Damiano that Francis of Assisi heard the instruction that changed his life — rebuild my house, which is falling into ruin — and understood, only later, that the house was not made of stones. Every facilitator at this Institute has received some version of that instruction. The house is the psyche; the house is the world; the rebuilding is one liberated spark at a time, one session at a time, one client returning home to a ground that was never actually lost.

Ken Lakritz ends his manuscript with a letter to the next generation of clinicians, and its closing counsel deserves to travel with all of us into the breakout rooms and beyond: "Keep the room. Tend the fire. Answer the dreams." That is our work as facilitators, said in nine words. We keep rooms in which the return can happen. We tend fires we did not light and do not own. And we answer — with our training, our presence and our own unending inner work — the dreams of a humanity that is, at last, beginning to remember the way home.

The descent built the instrument. The return plays it. May our conference be a rehearsal of exactly that.

“Keep the room. Tend the fire. Answer the dreams.”

How it connects

Part of the same body of work

The return arc Lakritz describes is the arc FP20 measures, the path the Wound → Essence Compass walks, and the movement we hold in every Life Between Lives session.

External links: Michael Newton Institute · World Happiness Foundation · Global Pain & Trauma Map · Mindful Diving Institute