A Winter of Becoming
On winter’s quiet transformations and the next evolution of Downshift.
Where the Road Bends has always been about navigating transitions with awareness and intention, drawing from my own journey and the wisdom of those I’m privileged to support through Downshift.
Lately, I find myself in a season of deep learning and expansion. Winter, after all, invites us inward—to reflect, to settle, to uncover the quiet seeds of growth beneath the surface. And yet, even in its stillness, nature reminds us of resilience.
Here in upstate New York, the ground is frozen, blanketed in snow and ice. Yet, the Blue Jays, Woodpeckers, and other songbirds carry on, unfazed by the cold—a quiet testament to life’s persistence, even in the harshest conditions. There’s something humbling about winter’s pause, how it holds both dormancy and the quiet promise of what’s to come.
Beneath the cold and darkness, renewal is already in motion. The seeds, though hidden, are quietly awakening—just as we are, nudged by something unseen yet undeniable.
Below are the seeds in my life that are beginning to take root—and a few that are already breaking through the surface.
Spring 2025 Downshift Decelerator: Applications Now Open
I’m thrilled to announce that applications are now open for our Spring 2025 Downshift Decelerator cohort! Over the past year, we’ve had the honor of guiding 24 ambitious professionals through this program, witnessing profound and inspiring changes in their lives. They’ve moved countries, extended sabbaticals, finalized divorces, grieved serious illness, discovered their second calling, recovered from addiction, and more.
Downshift helps ambitious professionals recalibrate their inner compass, and create a relationship with work that feels intentional, authentic, and energizing. Our hope is to create a space where participants can slow down, reconnect with themselves, and explore what’s truly meaningful—especially in the face of uncertainty, change, or transition.
Our seven-week program begins with a transformational four-day retreat on March 18th at Menla Mountain Retreat in the Catskills, just two hours north of New York City. This retreat is where our community takes root, and together, we’ll explore how to cultivate embodied presence while exploring powerful themes such as endings, death, uncertainty, and the experience of lostness.
Following the retreat, participants will engage in six weeks of virtual programming designed to integrate and deepen the experience. This includes:
Weekly workshops
Peer partner groups
Live AMA sessions with the guides
An online group for connection and support
Each week, we’ll explore key topics designed to shift how you navigate work and life, including:
Productivity and Busyness: Examining our cultural obsession with doing and how to redefine a healthier pace of life.
Ambition and Achievement: Unpacking the drivers of success and ambition, and aligning them with what truly matters to you.
Money and Security: Exploring your relationship with money and how it influences your decisions, freedom, and sense of safety.
Core Values: Identifying the principles that ground you and using them as a compass for your choices.
Zone of Genius: Understanding where your unique strengths lie and how to work in alignment with them.
Possible Selves and Experimentation: Imagining new versions of yourself and testing possibilities to find what feels most alive and true.
Over the past year, we’ve guided two cohorts through this journey, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, with NPS scores consistently between 8 and 10. This spring, we’re excited to bring you our most refined and intentional offering yet, with deeper community connections, enhanced virtual workshops, and so much more.
We’re hosting three informational sessions in February, where you’ll have the chance to meet our team and hear directly from two alumni panels. These sessions are a wonderful opportunity to explore whether this journey resonates with you. I hope you’ll consider applying—or sharing this with friends or loved ones navigating a transition.
Stepping into Leadership at Downshift
This year marks a profound turning point—not just in my career, but in my sense of who I’m becoming.
For the past five years, I’ve been a solo practitioner, moving with autonomy and flow, shaping my work around my own rhythms and desires. But now, I feel an undeniable pull toward something bigger: stepping fully into leadership, not just as a coach, but as a founder, as a steward of a growing team, and as a guide for the evolution of Downshift itself. We are now a team of five. What was once just an idea, a vision I held close, is now a living, breathing entity with a mission and momentum of its own.
Stepping into this kind of leadership requires letting go. There’s a part of me that still clings to that freedom I had as a solopreneur, that feels the weight of responsibility as a loss of something precious. But I also know this: true service often asks us to surrender parts of ourselves we’ve held tightly, so that something even greater can emerge.
I’ve wanted this transition for a long time, and now that I’m in it, I feel the full spectrum the human experience—the excitement, the fear, the resistance, the deep sense of purpose. I’m learning to hold it all, to trust the unfolding, and to allow myself to be supported by the incredible team around me.
I don’t have it all figured out. I’m still feeling into what it means to lead in a way that feels fully aligned, to hold responsibility without losing presence, to serve without self-sacrifice. But I do know this: I’m all in.
And that feels like a beginning.
Rooted in What Matters: My Core Values for 2025
In December, I completed the Downshift Annual Review. It was a grounding and illuminating process—both a pause to take stock of a truly incredible 2024 and a doorway into what energizes me and brings me alive. Through this practice, I identified five core values that feel deeply aligned with who I am and how I aspire to show up in the world:
Spacious Presence: To be deeply attuned to both my inner experience and the external environment, fully inhabiting the present moment.
Holistic Health: To lovingly nurture and care for my body, mind, and spirit with intention and reverence.
Devotional Service: To serve life, family, and Downshift with love, presence, and a commitment to spreading growth and consciousness.
Creative Expression: To channel and express the creative force that flows through and around me, bringing ideas and visions to life.
Deep Learning: To explore new domains and depths of knowledge and embody that understanding in daily life.
There’s an undeniable energy and rightness to these values—they’re not aspirational or distant ideals, but rather principles that are already alive and expressing themselves in my life every day. Recognizing them has felt like coming home to myself.
Hakomi: The Next Evolution of My Coaching
Three years ago, I discovered Hakomi—a mindfulness-based somatic psychotherapy that uses deep awareness to uncover the unconscious beliefs shaping our lived experience. Guided by five core principles—mind-body holism, nonviolence, organicity, unity, and mindfulness—Hakomi invites clients to slow down, sense their inner world, and observe how deeply held patterns influence their reality. In this space of gentle observation, insight naturally arises, creating the conditions for healing and transformation.
Ron Kurtz, Hakomi’s founder, described it as “assisted self-study.” Using mindfulness and the wisdom of the body, the practitioner and client explore how unconscious beliefs organize experience, including our thoughts, perceptions, and emotions. Through experiments—subtle, evocative explorations that reveal the inner structure of a client’s reality—we uncover the core messages that have shaped their sense of self. From there, we don’t analyze or try to fix—we offer the nourishment needed to heal, integrate, and become whole.
For years, I explored somatic therapy and coaching in a more informal way, but last year, I felt an undeniable pull to go deeper. I began with a five-day intensive training and was immediately struck by the method’s gentleness and elegance, yet profound transformative power. Shortly after, I started working with a master Hakomi therapist, and each session has left me more resourced, integrated, and deeply healed.
Last weekend, I took a big step forward, beginning the Level I Comprehensive Training—the first milestone on the multi-year path to Hakomi certification. The bar for certification is high, requiring years of study, practice, and embodiment, but I’m fully committed to the journey ahead.
Hakomi represents a significant evolution in my journey of healing, presence, and transformation. I’m energized to be a student again, humbled by the depth of this path, and already noticing how it’s reshaping the way I show up in both my work and life.
Turning Towards Elders
For most of my life, I’ve kept older men at a distance. More recently, that distance extended to master coaches, teachers, and practitioners—those 10, 20, even 30 years ahead of me. I admired them, but I couldn’t let them in. There was fear in it. Fear of being judged, of not measuring up, of being exposed in ways I couldn’t fully name. But beneath that fear lay something deeper: an old wound.
I’ve had a complicated relationship with my father—at times deeply close, at times painfully strained. And in high school, I was traumatized and assaulted by my football coach who led with control and domination rather than care and wisdom. Somewhere along the way, I learned to be wary of authority, of older men in positions of power. I told myself I didn’t need mentors, that I could find my own way. And for a long time, I did.
But this year, I turned toward what I had been avoiding. I started building real relationships with master coaches, therapists, and seasoned practitioners—elders, in the truest sense. Not just as colleagues, but as guides. And something in me is softening. There’s a different kind of strength in allowing myself to be mentored and taught, to be shaped by those who have walked further down the path.
I’m finally embracing that I don’t have to navigate this work alone—that I don’t have to uncover every insight in isolation or rely solely on my own experience to deepen as a coach and healer. And for the first time, I don’t want to. I want to be taught, challenged, and refined by those who have spent decades mastering this craft. I’m here for it. I’m ready to listen, to absorb, to allow mentorship to shape me in ways I once resisted.
A Journey Into Oneness: Exploring Non-Duality
For the past 45 days, I’ve been on an immersive exploration into the world of non-dual meditation and Dzogchen philosophy. At its heart, non-duality points to the recognition that the boundaries we perceive—between self and other, subject and object—are constructs, and that beneath these appearances lies an indivisible oneness. It’s not just a concept to grasp intellectually (and I’ve struggled with it in the past), but a way of directly experiencing reality as it truly is—free from the filters of separation.
My close friend Alex Olshonsky introduced me to Michael Taft, a gifted non-dual meditation teacher who has posted dozens of guided meditations on his generous YouTube channel. Each session is 90 minutes long, featuring a 60-minute meditation followed by a 30-minute dharma talk. Every morning, I’ve been sitting with Michael’s brilliant and relatable guidance, and this practice has become a foundational part of my day.
This practice has also led me to explore the writings and teachings of Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, James Lowe, and others—each offering their own unique lens on non-duality. I’ve been particularly moved by The Imaginary Me by Adyashanti, Rupert Spira’s two-and-a-half-hour masterclass on the Know Thyself Podcast, and The Illusion of Solidity by James Lowe. These voices have served as signposts along the path, helping me deepen both my understanding and my practice.
Through this daily practice, I’ve found myself seeing reality through a completely fresh lens. There’s a lightness to how I move through the world, a spaciousness in my perspective, and a deepened sense of presence I haven’t felt before. It’s subtle, but it’s reshaping how I experience everything—from the mundane to the profound.
Soulcraft: A Deeper Calling
Last summer, I attended a week-long Soulcraft retreat with the Animus Valley Institute, an experience that profoundly reshaped my relationship with nature and deepened my sense of connection to something vast and mysterious. While wandering in the wilderness, I had a mystical experience and a soul encounter—one that left me with an unshakable belief that when we slow down and listen, we can attune to and access an intelligence far greater than ourselves.
Since then, I’ve been immersing myself in Bill Plotkin’s work, particularly The Journey to Soul Initiation and Nature and the Human Soul. These books explore his Soul Development Wheel, a nature-based model of human development that maps the stages of life—not just psychologically, but also ecologically and spiritually. Unlike conventional developmental models, which often emphasize social adaptation, Plotkin’s framework guides individuals beyond ego-centered adulthood toward true soul initiation—an identity rooted in nature, purpose, and deep belonging.
I was so captivated by these ideas that I’m currently enrolled in a ten-week intensive to study this model in depth.
While I haven’t yet integrated Soulcraft—Plotkin’s approach to soul initiation—into Downshift, I sense this path holds deep potential for our work. Soul work invites us to step beyond personal growth and into mythopoetic discovery—the uncovering of one’s unique ecological niche in the greater web of life. As I continue deepening my understanding of Animus’ teachings and Plotkin’s framework, I’m exploring how these profound inquiries might eventually weave into my coaching practice.
Trusting What’s Beneath the Surface
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. Truly.
If anything in this update resonated with you—if something sparked a thought, a feeling, or a curiosity—I’d love to hear from you. Don’t hesitate to reach out.
I don’t know exactly how all these seeds will take root or what will emerge from them. And, honestly, I’m okay with that. This season of my life feels like one of unfolding rather than controlling, of stepping forward with openness rather than certainty. What I do know is that I’m here for it—holding my experience with curiosity, embracing the unknown, and, more than anything, enjoying the ride.
So many rich links to explore in this one! I'm excited to learn more about Hakomi.