Friends!

It’s been a while!

We’re so glad to be back with you after this period of much-needed rest and integration (more thoughts on this below).

After an epic spring walk in April on the Kumano Kodo Ise-ji, we’re getting ready to open up places for our autumn walk.

This walk will begin on October 31 and conclude on November 9. It’s a beautiful time to walk the Kii Peninsula. The trees will be starting to turn and there’s a real sense of a place, one that fairly erupts with life in the spring and summer, slowing down and turning inwards for the winter, much as we are want to do.

This time around, we’re excited to offer a limited number of early bird discounts.

Our Helper rate is USD 3450, rather than the usual USD 3650, and our Benefactor rate is USD 3950, down from USD 4200*.

If you’d like to take advantage of these discounts, they’re available until August 14, or until spots fill up. Head to our website to apply.

We also have one remaining Supported place available at USD 2950. Our Supported places exist to make the walk accessible to people who'd otherwise be priced out. If that's you, or someone you know, reply to this email and we'll send through the application form.

We’ll be back in your inbox soon with more about what we learned on our April walk. But for now, I’ll leave you with this: we discovered that Seinoza is a beautiful act of co-creation — between Kal and I, the people we walk with, the communities we’re a part of, and folk like you, who’ve lent us your support in various ways over the past 12 months. We’re so damn delighted to be walking this path with you.

With love,

Drew & Kal

*you can read more about our different rates under “Pricing” on this page.

On Integration

Slumped in my dining chair, cooling coffee to hand and the announcements from the nearby racetrack as my ambient soundtrack, I know this feeling intimately. My old striving self says I should be feeling lighter now that the first Seinoza pilgrimage is done, now that the weight of my own expectations have lifted. I should be revelling in the good vibes of a job well done but instead, I’ve crashed.

I’ve felt this despondency after every retreat I’ve been on too, I realise. I felt it also after every big corporate project I delivered, the slump often marked by a dead-eyed stare on a red-eye flight home from a client’s HQ.

Cut back a few days and Kal and I were feeling lighter. High as kites in fact. We’d said goodbye to our fellow pilgrims in Kumano City and every now and then over the course of a couple of days, one, slightly wide-eyed, would say to the other ‘We did it!’. Oh how we did it: no one was hurt (psychically or physically, beyond a few blisters), we didn’t get lost despite taking a modified route, and Kal’s logistics were damn near flawless. And there was no small matter of answering a call from the universe to create this experience in the first place, and to share it with the world, with nothing more than gumption and the vaguest idea of what we were doing to get us started.

Our walking companions had had a good time. Not an easy time, mind: those blisters, that elevation, and a heady sense of pace at points. But listening to how the conversation glided effortlessly from babbling brook to deep well as we wove our way from Ise to Hana no Iwaya let me know that the connection we hoped for was working its magic. At our final breakfast, a sense of having created something together — all six of us and in a way Kal and I could never have imagined at the outset — settled over us, our pastries, and our pour-over coffee.

Kal and I knew we’d need some time to integrate, because while we’d lead the walk, it was impossible not to be changed by the walk and the connection with our fellow walkers: we were participants just as much as we were facilitators of their journey. And over the previous six months, we’d been changed in the creation of the walk too, a process that pushed at edges of comfort and capability that had heretofore been hidden from view.

To give ourselves time and space to land, we booked a few extra days in Japan with nothing to do and no one to see at the strangest of Showa-era hotels in Kii-Katsuura. Replete with haunted gaming arcade, live tuna butchery, and the pervasive smell of sulphur from the hot springs buried deep within basalt caves that opened onto the crashing sea, we gave ourselves permission to do nothing, to not even talk to one another if that’s what we needed.

We recommend taking this time to everyone we walk with, because while it might feel like the epiphany or the insight or the catharsis you can experience on a pilgrimage is the thing — that breakthrough you’ve been waiting for — it’s actually what you do with the breakthrough in the days, weeks, and months afterwards that’ll determine how and to what extent your life will be changed by it.

It’s been obvious to me for a while that this is the way to approach the integration of personal development work — giving myself time and space to not just reflect intellectually on what happened, but also to luxuriate in all the things that feel good to a nervous system that’s been working hard in new and curious ways. Long baths. Gentle walks. Hugs with loved ones. Nourishing food. Journaling. Or even just rolling around on the floor. Each of these offerings gives our nervous system the chance to catch up and metabolise a flash of insight that might well have been pretty destabilising and could therefore depart as quickly as it arrived if not lavished with some care and attention. Integration gives our system the chance to settle into a new way of being in the world.

It also occurred to me that we’d need some time to integrate as a business, too, for what is a business but a nervous system of nervous systems? It partly explains why we’ve been so quiet here, and why this email has taken so long to write.

In my prior life as a management consultant, we never properly integrated the completion of a project. There might be a meal with the client if all went well, a night on the piss if it didn’t, and the most cursory of retrospectives or post-mortems with the team, the ghoulish task of picking over the corpse of a project something we did with zero delight and a grim determination. But more often than not, I’d be presenting the findings of one project with a third of my mind dedicated to planning a workshop for the next, and another third working on selling the one after that. There simply wasn’t the time or space to let what we’d learned actually land. Was it any wonder we kept making the same mistakes?

Yes, of course we made mistakes on this walk — keeping the pace artificially high for a misplaced fear of failing light in the evening, for example. And there were ways in which Kal and I could have better supported one another and our participants in the making and holding of the agreements that support our connection to one another. But rather than speed-bumping over these insights in a hot blaze of shame, the past couple of months that we’ve spent in individual and collective rest and reflection have allowed us to take this data and lay the foundations for the next iteration of this enchanting, beautiful journey we’re on.

I’ve written before about our principles, one of them being leave space for magic. That’s how I now think of integration within ourselves and within our business: it’s where the magic really settles after a big experience like this.