I guide you through crossings.
integration facilitator. Relationship mentor. Passage guide.
I jumped off a 70-foot cliff in Yosemite in 2014. I couldn't swim. For three minutes I was between life and death. In what I thought were my final moments, I found the peace I’d sought out my whole life.
I didn’t return enlightened. But I did become more honest.
I couldn't keep performing after that.
How I got here
I spent most of my life afraid. Afraid of taking up space. Afraid of what people would think. Afraid of my own desire. That’s what happens when you grow up in a conservative muslim family, living undocumented.
So I became agreeable. Quiet. Meek. I performed the life I was taught to want instead of finding the one I actually wanted. My society called me good. I was as good as gone.
Then I drowned. Down there at the bottom of that pool, I met something I'd spent my whole life pretending didn't exist. I have only one phrase for it. The Divine Light. I experienced a sense of peace and purpose that I never had until then.
Then life continued to break it open. Military. Immigration. Near-death. Divorce. Chronic illness. Each one cracked a piece of the performance until what was left was just me, raw and more alive than I'd ever been. Each experience somehow bringing me to that one moment of near death to remind me what life is really about.
The man I am now is the man who was forged in those three minutes. What I learned down there: fear isn't the enemy. It's the compass.
That's the crossing I guide people through. Not weekend catharsis. Not optimized performance. Not a productivity hack with a campfire. Something slower, harder, and more permanent.
This work is for those who are done managing their lives, ready to actually live them. Not to become someone new. To finally trust who they already are.
How i guide
I don't guide from having arrived (you can read my shadow bio to learn all the things I’m still learning). I guide from having gone in and coming back out. I guide through the lens of experience. Some of what I've been: a military intelligence officer, an actor, a meditation teacher, a tantra practitioner, a yoga teacher, a wilderness guide. A tech bro and a frat bro, too. And some of what's broken me open: a marriage and a divorce, a near-death experience, moving countries, a body that turned on me, a stutter I had to fight to speak through.
There's an old word for that kind of guide: shepherd. The shepherd doesn't point from the shore. He goes into the field with those who wandered off, and stays until the last one's through.
My work is rooted in meditation traditions, ancestral rites of passage, intimacy education, and masculine embodiment.
I've been shaped by Amir Khalighi, John Wineland, S.N. Goenka, School of Lost Borders, The Mankind Project, the Shipibo lineage, and the wild places that keep teaching me whether I'm ready or not.
I split my time between the Salish Sea and the Sacred Valley.
stop performing. start living.
TESTIMONIALS