Course Overview

An eight-week, live, immersive journey with Keith Martin-Smith and David Arrell.

Across eight weeks, you will develop a grounded capacity to:

• stay with discomfort rather than escape it,
• respond rather than react,
• grow comfortable being uncomfortable,
• feel your values in your body rather than only on a vision board,
• name a six-month direction that matters,
• close the gap between what you say you want and how you actually life

This is not mindset work. This is system work.

Each week, we’ll track what you actually did versus what you said you would. Not to shame — but to see. And in the seeing, uncover the deeper patterns that quietly run your life: conflicting values, inherited beliefs, unspoken stories, and the shadows you’ve never looked at directly.

This is practical, embodied, incremental work.

Not inspiration. Not theory. Real change.

Structure of Program

Core Practices

We build from the body up. This course introduces a living ecosystem of practices — simple, powerful, and designed to reshape you from the inside out.

You’ll work with:

• Breath and grounding techniques to regulate your nervous system.
• Meditation that actually fits a modern life.
• Embodied inquiries to interrupt reactivity in real time.
• Relational practices to deepen presence and attunement with others.
• Weekly integrity check-ins that track the truth of what you’re doing — and not doing.
• The Life Audit — a brutally honest, deeply compassionate inventory of how your values, vision, and actions align (or don’t).

Each week adds complexity without overwhelm. This is layered change: small, deliberate shifts that build emotional steadiness, sharpen self-trust, and increase your coherence. Slowly, your system learns to hold more. To stay with more. To fragment less.

We’ll also tackle that device in your hand. You’ll learn to reclaim your attention by redesigning how you use your phone — creating deliberate micro-gaps in screen time that restore awareness, calm the system, and return your attention to you.

These aren’t hacks. They’re thresholds.

Cross enough of them, and your presence begins to return. And presence — not performance — is the foundation of all real transformation.

We Will…

We’ll confront, directly and compassionately, where you drift from your own potential.

You’ll learn to feel (not just see) the gap between what you say matters and how you actually live.

Together, we’ll build the capacity to:

• Stay emotionally steady in the face of discomfort.
• Be honest about what’s not working — without collapse or self-judgment.
• Name what’s in the way: stories, shadow patterns, conditioning, conflicting commitments.
• Create the emotional resilience to live inside tension — without numbing, fixing, or fleeing.

And you’ll be held — gently, consistently, honestly — by a community doing this work alongside you.

Emotional regulation is today’s luxury good. You can’t buy it no matter how rich you are. You can only become it.

What emerges through this practice will be more clarity, patience, self-trust, and agency to live a life that’s congruent, present, joyful, and wholly your own.

What You'll Learn

1. The Past → HEALTH

What still shapes you?

We all carry stories — inherited, absorbed, or self-created.
We all carry wounds — personal, ancestral, cultural.
Unless they’re seen, they continue to shape us from the shadows.

This module is about turning toward those stories with clarity and compassion — not to relive them, but to release their grip.

You’ll learn to recognize outdated roles, unspoken contracts, and the subtle emotional weight that lives beneath your reactions.
Drawing on tools from developmental psychology, shadow work, and somatic awareness, you’ll start to reclaim energy that’s been locked away in the past.

Healing is not about erasing what happened.
It’s about including it wisely — recovering the energy bound up in old identities and reactive tendencies, and re-integrating it into the present.

2. The Present → DEPTH

Where are you, really?

Not geographically, but existentially.
Are you living in the now, or in the echo chamber of your own reactivity?

Attainment Culture rewards performance.
Attunement Culture requires presence.

Here we cultivate the muscle of being — through breath, integrity, and embodied awareness.
You’ll learn to recognize when you’re posturing, performing, or people-pleasing, and to replace those habits with grounded authenticity.

Practices include:

• Breathwork and body grounding
• Integrity check-ins
• Relational attunement
• Meditation for real life, not retreat life

This is where character and virtue become lived practices — the place where the fruits of inner work ripen into the visible qualities of patience, steadiness, and care.

Wisdom is impossible without developing the capacity to focus your attention.
This is at the heart of every wisdom tradition. Attention is what steadies the mind, deepens perception, and allows insight to ripen into understanding.

Presence isn’t passive.
It’s the foundation of everything that endures.

3. The Future → GROWTH

This section explores how to orient your goals, values, and commitments from a place of coherence — so that your vision of “better” serves life, not just your ego.

We’ll work with questions like:

• What kind of human am I becoming?
• What kind of legacy am I creating in the people around me?
• What am I in service to?

Through the lens of adult developmental theory, we’ll see how motivation evolves — and how to harness that evolution consciously.

Ultimately, this work leads to alignment: linking your inner development to a larger field of value and culture, so that your growth supports not only your life, but the lives around you.

What You’ll Receive

• Eight live sessions — 75 minutes each, with real-time teaching, Q&A, and practice.
• Two seasoned guides — live each week, not hidden behind pre-recorded content.
• A framework for real transformation — integrating trauma-aware tools, developmental maps, and embodied practice.
• A private community — small, off-social-media, and designed for real dialogue.
• Session recordings for flexible access.
• Experiential practices every week: reflective prompts, breathwork, developmental exercises, and relational tools.

The Fruits of the Spirit

Transformation isn’t measured in milestones — it’s revealed through fruits.

As the ancient traditions teach, “You will know them by their fruits.”
When the conditions are right, the deeper self expresses naturally as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

These are the fruits of the Spirit — the natural outgrowth of a life lived in attunement.
They’re not given to you, and they’re not imposed. They emerge when alignment becomes your way of being.

This course gives you the soil, the light, and the structure to let those qualities take root.

This is not a lecture series. It’s a living lab.

Who This Is For

This course is for you if:

• You’re done chasing what doesn’t fulfill you.
• You sense that growth now means depth, not speed.
• You’re ready to meet yourself with honesty and curiosity.
• You want to integrate wisdom, not just collect insights.

It is not for you if:

• You want a quick fix or a passive download.
• You’re not ready to do your own work.
• You prefer identity over evolution.

This course won’t save you.
It will help you save yourself — by remembering who you are beneath the noise.

Your Guides

Keith Martin-Smith is an award-winning author, Zen priest, and Northern Kung Fu lineage holder who has trained and taught for more than 30 years. A master of Qi Gong and Integral coach, he brings literary precision, deep embodiment, and hard-won insight to the path of transformation. Keith’s work integrates shadow, development, and stillness — helping people grow without armoring their hearts or losing their depth.

David Arrell is a Leadership Coach, author, and cultural translator who bridges the practical with the philosophical. He works at the intersection of personal development, cultural evolution, and lived wisdom — translating complexity into coherence and care. With humor, clarity, and rigor, David helps people move from the quest for conquest to the quest for meaning.

Together, Keith and David offer a rare synthesis of clarity and embodiment — not to lead from a pedestal, but to walk beside you as you do the work.

Final Word

You’ve done the reading. You’ve listened to the podcasts.
You’ve performed presence. Now it’s time to live it.

This is your invitation to step into a different kind of growth — one rooted in dignity, coherence, and care.

You don’t need to change the world.
You need to become the kind of person who can.

Starts January 13, 2026.
Live on Zoom • Eight sessions • $550 USD
Enrollment limited.

Enroll now

Frequently Asked Questions

For more information, please visit our support page.