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Perspective Shift:
- Suffering doesn’t block awakening, it catalyzes it. Most people don’t begin their spiritual path because everything is fine. It’s suffering that cracks the surface of the self, but only when we turn toward it with open-heartedness and support does it become the doorway to transcendence. Trauma and revelation aren’t opposites—they are two sides of the same sacred spiral.
- The collective has parts too, and they need integration. Just as individuals carry disowned shadow, groups unconsciously assign roles and project unmet energies onto their members. Healing and awakening happen faster when the collective sees itself clearly. The leader isn’t always the source of wisdom; when the group owns its wholeness, everyone can transform.
- The relative self doesn’t awaken, but awakening includes the relative self. Spiritual realization isn’t the annihilation of personality, but the integration of it into a larger field of awareness. The ego doesn’t become enlightened, it becomes transparent. Awakening doesn’t replace the self — it recontextualizes it. We are not erasing our stories, we are remembering who we are through them.
- The most powerful spiritual container is not a solo practice. It’s real relationship. Transformation doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in the heat of shared vulnerability, feedback, rupture, and repair. Not WeSpace idealism — but grounded, intimate, often messy human connection. If you want to evolve, step into a living field where others mirror you, challenge you, and walk with you. Relationship is the dojo of the soul.
- The transition into meta-awareness is not a new layer of identity, it’s the unraveling of identity as a fixed point. At this stage, the self no longer feels like a thing, but a process: a constellation of perspectives, roles, patterns, and awareness itself. What once felt stable — beliefs, personality, even spiritual constructs — begins to dissolve. This can feel like dying or losing ground, but it’s actually a shift from being someone to being with everything. The mind becomes an object of awareness, and so does the self. From here, you don’t just have perspectives — you see through them. And with that, a new kind of freedom, compassion, and collective responsibility emerges.
What does it mean to awaken in community, not in isolation? How do we support the transition into meta-aware consciousness — the fifth-person, post-integral view — without bypassing the messy terrain of our humanity? In this luminous and deeply honest conversation, host Kimberley Theresa Lafferty is joined by long-time spiritual educators and developmental practitioners Geoff Fitch and Abigail Lynam, co-leaders of the Generating Transformative Change (GTC) program at Pacific Integral.
Together, they explore the invisible architecture of transformation: from trauma to transcendence, from individual awakening to collective emergence. Geoff shares powerful stories of two major “dark nights”—including the loss of self and a later loss of God—that became doorways into boundless awareness. Abigail reflects on her spiritual unfolding from an agnostic upbringing to a deep recognition of timeless awareness, unveiling how her story was never “less spiritual,” just uniquely her own.
This episode offers one of the most articulate portraits yet of the meta-aware transition—a developmental shift that rewires identity, perception, and one’s relationship to meaning itself. Kimberley and her guests illuminate how this transition is not just about “growing up” or “waking up,” but about dying into a deeper self, often accompanied by disorientation, vulnerability, and the shedding of lifelong patterns.
But what makes this episode truly rare is its emphasis on the collective dimension of spiritual development. The GTC model foregrounds real relationship as both the vehicle and the teacher. Geoff and Abigail reveal how cohorts engage in elevated collective shadow work—where not only individuals have “parts,” but groups do too. Roles, projections, and unconscious dynamics are brought into the light, not as pathology, but as sacred curriculum. They describe how feedback becomes a liberation practice, how group fields become alive and self-teaching, and how leaders become gradually redundant as the collective awakens to itself.
In a time of global disorientation, information distortion, and fractured belonging, this conversation is a profound call to sacred relationality. Whether you’re navigating your own dark night, sensing a shift into more fluid identity structures, or seeking to ground your spirituality in community and compassion, this dialogue will resonate deeply.
The episode closes with a hauntingly beautiful reading of Rilke, a tribute to the great Joanna Macy, and a reminder: this dark night we’re in — culturally and personally — may just be the bell tower through which we learn to ring.
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.
- Where has suffering been a threshold in my life? When I look back, what moments of pain or disorientation cracked something open in me? How did those experiences shape my spiritual journey or identity?
- Am I navigating a metamorphosis of identity — or resisting one? Do I sense that the operating system of “who I’ve been” is dissolving? Am I making space for what wants to emerge—or trying to hold onto the old scaffolding?
- Am I trying to awaken by escaping myself — or by including all of myself? Do I reject parts of my personality, history, or habits as “unspiritual”? What would it mean to let awakening include my full humanity, not bypass it?
- What is my current experience of ‘ultimate reality’? Is it personal, impersonal, mystical, or mundane? How do I sense the sacred in the ordinary—and how has that shifted over time?
- How do I hold both urgency and equanimity in this cultural moment? Am I able to stay awake to what’s happening in the world without being consumed by it? Where do I need to act—and where can I trust?
- Can I let this moment in history ring me like a bell? As the world accelerates and fragments, can I stay soft and open? Can I let what batters me become my strength, as Rilke invites?
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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 Geoff Fitch
Geoff Fitch is a teacher, coach, and facilitator of development in individuals and collectives. He is a founder of Pacific Integral and developer of the Generating Transformative Change program, which has been delivered on three continents and in its 34th cohort. He has been exploring, researching and developing diverse approaches to cultivating higher human potentials for over 30 years, including meditation and spirituality, somatic and transpersonal psychology, transformative change, emergence, and collective intelligence. Geoff holds degrees in Transpersonal Psychology and Computer Science and has additional studies jazz music, philosophy, and business.
About Abigail Lynam
Abigail Lynam is a coach with Pacific Integral and faculty for Emergent Leadership: Engaging the Future from Awakened Wholeness and Generating Transformative Change, a 9 month retreat based program. She is faculty for Fielding Graduate University’s PhD in Human and Organizational Development. Abigail is also a scorer and developmental coach with Stages International, and a qualified administrator and coach with the Intercultural Development Index. Her scholarship and practice integrate interior dimensions of human knowledge and experience (culture, worldviews, psychology, wisdom traditions, embodiment, and awareness practices) with interpersonal and collective change innovations. Her passion and prayer is supporting humanity’s unfolding and awakening for the sake of all of life.