I have been creating spaces of transformation my entire life: in performance through music and acting; as a designer in theatre, opera, film and television, receiving a Masters in Design for Stage and Film from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU; and as a creative director of experiential events for brands such as Nike, Samsung, Cadillac and Audi, and entertainment franchises for HBO, Disney, AMC, NBC, Netflix and Prime Video.

This afforded a lifestyle of traveling all over the world, money, status, things … outside, everything looked amazing. While inside, depression and negativity kept tainting it all — none of it was ultimately satisfying. Like many people, sex, drugs, alcohol and cultural consumption kept me going. In the background of my mind “if this is all life is, it isn’t worth it,” kept playing on repeat while at the same time a deep involuntary surrender was happening (call it suffering).

That involuntary surrender blossomed into a full breakdown of my life. Yet in that moment of loss-of-control my defenses cracked wide open, I woke up to how deeply trapped I was in wrong understanding ...

In the wake of the grief, a great joy emerged  — and also confusion! I had no words or concepts to describe the truth I was experiencing. With the shift in consciousness, I clearly saw that nothing was as it appeared on the surface level of “my life story”, but was, in fact, a metaphysical process of shedding and evolving to express the truth within more perfectly.

An encounter with a group of spiritual seekers led me to plant medicine and my journey of embodying the Wisdom that was now freely channeling through me. I didn’t have a teacher, a guru, a formal spiritual practice or community, but somehow, just what I needed kept showing up and guiding me on: people, plants, meditation, spiritual teachings, mystical practices.

Life became my truest guru — as it is to this day. I have called this practice “Life Yoga”, using everything that shows up from moment-to-moment as guide and personal spiritual work. Classically, I later found out, this is called Karma Yoga in the Gita and the Eightfold Path of the Buddhists.

I consumed everything about spirituality, religion and esoteric teaching and practices that I could. Amazingly, as I dove into each of these paths, they all led me to the same inner place of Wisdom. All the signposts point to the same destination within; each just using the language of the particular time, place, and culture they are a product of. The more I integrated these spiritual lessons into liveable wisdom, old habits began to melt away on their own.

During this time I kept trying to take a full exit from society to find hermitage in spiritual isolation. I ran out of money with no job potentials and nowhere in particular to go. I didn’t care as I wanted to be free of it all anyway. However, the inner Wisdom clearly had different designs as it kept dropping people and professional situations into my path that brought me right back into the thick of it.

At the same time, people from all walks of life were coming to me for spiritual guidance as I found myself opening and holding sacred spaces of Wisdom for everyone around me. But it was different now. Everything, not just my personal spiritual practice, was taking me into deeper surrender. Each situation required an inner death in order to allow the space to accept what was happening; a letting go of who I thought I was and what I thought it should be in order to give rise to what was being born through me.

This process continues as distinctions to life begin to collapse in on each other: spiritual and everyday; inner and outer; not mine and mine. Now, this isn’t to say circumstances in life are not challenging, but the suffering has left. I find so much beauty in the unfolding of challenges into growth. In fact, the experience of challenge has evolved into simply, change.

I offer this so that it might be of benefit for the happiness and freedom of all beings. I honor my role to witness others in their perfection, mirroring it back to them in support of their own realization of that same perfection within us all.

- Sean