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Perspective Shift:
- Returning to your faith isn’t regression — it can be integration. Reengaging your childhood religion isn’t necessarily a step backward. It can be the result of a long arc of development, where the mystical heart of the tradition is finally visible, not through naive belief, but through hard-won insight and practice.
- The mystic heart of all traditions is available to all. Integral spirituality reveals how the contemplative core of every spiritual tradition pulses with the same sacred heartbeat. What once seemed like entirely separate paths begin to feel like different languages for the same living reality — one that already lives within each of us.
- Practice isn’t just about awakening — it’s about reintegrating. Spiritual practice isn’t only about accessing higher states, but about healing early splits in the self. Thomas’s Integral Polarity Practice helps us return agency and communion to Source, reintegrating foundational polarities that shape how we show up in the world.
- Being enlightened is sometimes easier than being human. As Thomas notes, “It’s easier to be enlightened than to help someone move on a Saturday.” Real realization is not just cosmic awareness, but grounded compassion. Awakening means very little if it doesn’t show up in how we love, serve, and participate in everyday life.
- Mormonism and Tantra may share more than you think. Though worlds apart on the surface, both traditions point toward embodied divinization, sacred union, and human evolution as a divine unfolding. When viewed integrally, even conservative traditions like Mormonism reveal hidden tantric currents at their core.
Many young adults are rediscovering traditional religion. After decades of religious decline in the West, recent studies show a quiet reversal, at least within certain groups: church attendance among 18–24-year-olds in the UK has increased by 50% in the last six years (Guardian, 2025), and in the U.S., Gen Z affiliation with Christianity rose from 45% to 51% between 2023 and 2024 (Vox, 2025). Why do so many young people seem to be returning to the traditions of their childhood?
In many ways, this is a natural response to what John Vervaeke calls the “meaning crisis” — a deep need for rooted meaning, structure, and belonging, amid the wider failures of modernity and postmodernity to solve the many epistemological crises they’ve inflicted upon our world. Young people were born into this epistemic meltdown, it is the water they have been swimming in their entire lives — so it’s no surprise they would choose to return to a prior source of meaning, stability, and moral clarity.
So how can we return to the traditions with open minds and hearts, without succumbing to the baggage of absolutistic thinking, anti-intellectualism, regressive worldviews, and group-centric “us vs. them” mentality that so often accompanies the traditional (Amber) stage of psychological and cultural development?
In this extraordinary episode of Evolving Spirit, Kimberley Theresa Lafferty welcomes Thomas McConkie — author, teacher, and founder of Lower Lights School of Wisdom — for a deeply personal and spiritually expansive conversation about reclaiming the roots of our traditions while enacting them in profoundly new ways.
Thomas shares the arc of his own journey — from a devout Latter-day Saint upbringing, to decades immersed in Zen, Sufi, and contemplative Christian practices, to a surprising return to his Mormon lineage with eyes newly attuned to its esoteric and evolutionary dimensions. His story reflects a common spiritual circuit: from the exoteric beliefs of our childhood tradition, to an exploration of exotic practices and lineages, to the shared esoteric heart at the core of all major spiritual traditions, to a profound “coming home” to the tradition we were born into, its mystical depths now revealed and available to us in a wholly new way.
This episode offers essential guidance for those navigating a similar path. It shows how one can remain within a religious tradition, while engaging it through a post-traditional, post-secular, post-postmodern lens. In doing so, Thomas models a somewhat different kind of religious affiliation — one that avoids the regressive trappings of conformity, absolutism, or anti-rational dogmas, while reigniting the living soul of the lineage itself.
In short, Thomas and Kimberley are pointing to a trans-rational return to traditions that are often entangled with pre-rational beliefs and mythic narratives.
This is precisely where Integral Spirituality becomes such a powerful framework for these younger generations. It provides a common language and shared grammar that make conversations like these possible — conversations that invite us to fully commit to a particular tradition or lineage, while still remaining open to the wisdoms, practices, and spiritual technologies of other spiritual traditions. This integral framework helps to reveal the hidden scaffolding behind all spiritual lineages, as well as the shared mystical heart that is beating at their very center, allowing us to push our roots deeper into the soil of our chosen tradition while also feeling how those roots intertwine, nourish, and connect with the roots of every other lineage.
“You know, our roots are touching—I feel my tree roots touching your tree roots, Thomas. Underneath the ground, we’re playing footsie. We’re playing footsie with our tree roots.”Kimberley Lafferty
This approach offers a deeper and wider frame for genuine interfaith exchange, such as the unexpected resonance between tantric philosophy and Mormon cosmology — two traditions that, on the surface, appear worlds apart, yet both pointing to a shared vision of embodied divinization, sacred partnership, and human evolution as a divine process. This is the kind of subtle but powerful interfaith intimacy made possible by an integral view of spirituality. Beneath the surface forms of doctrine, ritual, and mythology, we begin to recognize the same sacred realities expressed through different languages and lineages. And when we speak from that place, our roots know each other — even when our doctrines do not.
The conversation also includes a powerful guided practice in Integral Polarity Practice (IPP) — Thomas’s synthesis of developmental theory, contemplative psychology, and embodied mysticism. The practice guides us through the foundational polarity of agency and communion, offering a pathway from early developmental wounding to a nondual realization in Source.
Whether you are returning to the faith of your childhood, seeking a spiritual path that honors both roots and wings, or longing for a practice that can hold the fullness of your life and your world, this episode opens a doorway into a sacred life that is both ancient, timeless, and ever-emerging.
Key Questions
Here are some questions you can contemplate while listening to this discussion. We suggest you take some time to use these as journaling prompts.
- Am I willing to revisit the tradition I came from with fresh eyes and an open heart? What parts still resonate — and which parts ask for conscious reinterpretation?
- Do I reject religion because of its surface forms, or have I taken the time to explore its esoteric depths?
- Can I hold gratitude for the gifts of my lineage, even while questioning or reframing parts of it?
- Can I remain faithful to a lineage without becoming trapped in its dogmas? Can I stay open to other lineages without becoming unrooted?
- Where do I confuse transrational spirituality with irrational spirituality? Am I willing to discern the difference?
- Do I treat spiritual evolution as something abstract, or do I actively engage it in my relationships, habits, and everyday choices?
- Am I cultivating divinity through practice, ethics, and loving presence — or am I waiting for someone else to confer it upon me?
- Where in my life is it easier to be enlightened than to be useful?
- Can I feel where my roots touch the roots of other lineages — even those I’ve never studied or practiced?
Previous Episodes of Evolving Spirit
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About Kimberley Lafferty
Kimberley Theresa Lafferty is a seasoned teacher-practitioner specializing in constructive developmental psychology and Indo-Tibetan Vajrayana. She leads multi-year, private spiritual education cohorts with the Confluence Experience. Kimberley co-leads, with Terri O’Fallon, the penultimate Minds I year-long developmental course of Stages International. She is an active Board member for the Association for Spiritual Integrity. Kimberley is also a wife and mother to a young son, living in a remote valley of the North Cascades of North America which deeply impacts her worldview and practice.
About Thomas McConkie
Thomas McConkie was born in Salt Lake City, in the heart of Mormon faith. At a young age, he unexpectedly refused the very religion that his ancestors had dedicated themselves to building and strengthening in generations past. Working as a translator in Spain and human rights activist in Mainland China, he deepened his Buddhist meditation practice along the way only to hear a deep call back to his native tradition after a 20-year absence. In his debut book, Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis, he sounds a cry for universal spiritual growth and articulates a Faith grounded in a reality beyond mere belief or unbelief.