This Thursday, I'm going to be moving to a new city. This will be the fourth city that I've moved to in 2025, and I'm experiencing a bit of an ego death around it.
When I moved to Kelowna, British Columbia this past April, it was with the intentions of laying roots and establishing a community that I could raise my future children with. I'd just survived, and was rebuilding from my own 'dark night of the soul' where everything from my business, my relationship, my home, and anything else I'd clung to as a means to define my identity was mercilessly stripped away from me.
This was harrowing, as someone who oriented his self worth around his accomplishments, relationships, and accolades. But an interesting thing happened to me when I had everything external and relational burned to ash:
I was only left with myself and God. When I lost everything I thought made me who I was, I finally met who I actually am.
Bill Plotkin, an eco-depth psychologist who integrates the work of Carl Jung with nature-based wisdom and indigenous traditions, asserts that the soul cannot fully develop or know embodiment without first undergoing what he calls the Descent to Soul.
The Descent to Soul, as Plotkin frames it, is the archetypal journey downward — into the underworld of the psyche, where the ego relinquishes control and the individual encounters the raw, imaginal depths of the soul.
It is not personal development, but rather, personal dismemberment.
The persona — the socially constructed self designed to win approval, safety, and belonging — must die. In that subterranean space, one meets not an idealized self, but the mythic image of the soul: the unique pattern of purpose and participation that one was born to embody within the larger ecology of life. The Descent is a psycho-spiritual initiation that re-roots a person into the sacred web of existence.
In contrast, our modern “ascension culture” worships light without shadow, progress without compost. It is obsessed with up and out — higher vibrations, higher incomes, higher selves. This culture of "endless becoming" avoids the dark, the grief, and the death that make true transformation possible.
It mistakes transcendence for wholeness, and comfort for peace. In the name of healing, it polishes the ego rather than surrenders it, bypassing the deep work of facing one’s own fragmentation, complicity, and mortality. It creates seekers who are perpetually rising yet never rooted — “enlightened” but uninitiated.
Plotkin’s Descent is a corrective myth.
It says: before you ascend, you must descend. Before you embody your light, you must marry your shadow. That if you are to reach towards the heavens, then like a tree, your roots must nestle in and ground into hell. The Descent to Soul is not self-help; it is self-humbling.
It asks the question our age most fears: What must die in me for the world to live? The answer is not found in a seminar or a mantra, but in the wilderness of the soul — the place where one’s personal story is burned away, and what remains is not “me,” but the image of the one God dreamed into being before you were born.
🧱 A Spiritual Brick to the Head
I often joke with my friends about how our souls are in constant communication with us. It will whisper gently at first with that omnipresent inner knowing of what direction we're supposed to go, even (especially) if it scares us.
If we ignore the whisper and keep copping out into the comfortable routines of familiar safety, that whisper will become an aggressive knock on the door.
And finally, if we ignore the banging at the gates, our souls will hit us upside the head with a brick thrown at mach speed. Think personal disaster, tragedy, or the often necessary rock bottom that initiates us into finally getting our shit together and making change.
The rock-bottoms and dark nights of the soul we are assailed by, I believe, are the necessary stand-ins for a culture that has abandoned initiations and rites of passage rituals. Historically, tribes would have painful, ego-stripping coming-of-age rituals that would initiate an individual into adulthood.
Modern culture is desperately lacking that, made worse by the constant access to convenience and instant gratification that makes copping out into comfort all too accessible.
The average person is desperately out of touch with the whisper of their own souls, with its voice being drowned out by the cacophony of limiting beliefs calcified by past traumas, societal conditioning/expectations, and religious guilt.
Most of us will continue to live in the comatose hypnosis of living out the habits of our safe, familiar self without ever taking up the call to adventure that's always gnawing away at us in the background.
The way that I've found to get our line of communication to our soul back online is by undergoing voluntary containers of initiation that trigger and challenge the shit out of us, force us to do scary things, and call us forward before God has to spank us for ignoring the ache of purpose throbbing in the background.
As trite as it might sound, things like "30 day fitness challenges" where people radically and publicly commit to inconvenient and difficult behavior change are great stand-ins to microdose intiation.
Any container of commitment where you aspire to behave in a way that is aligned to who you might be, to sacrifice at the altar of your future self, and courageously confront all the ways that triggers you are a type of ceremony that brings you closer to your own soul, and the potential it knows you have for your life.
For example, my business partner Matthew designed the "100 Days of Discipline", which is 100 consecutive days in a row of challenging calisthenics workouts that you have to publicly post daily that you've completed. If you miss a day, you start over at day 1 (we're on day 77 today).
It's an intentional initiation meant to fortify your mental pillar even more than your physical pillar as you confront your resistance to commitment, the adversity of showing up when things go sideways or you feel crummy, and the shadows that flare up around being seen as you post yourself daily.
I've also recently and publicly committed to doing 1,000 days of at least 30 minutes of meditation, documenting the insights and challenges every day on my Instagram.
These initiations aren't just for the benefits of the discipline, sacrifice, and consistency that they demand... they're also meant to arouse limiting beliefs, traumas, and other juicy parts of your shadow you'd be able to avoid and dissociate from in the normal rhythms and routines of your life.
The question that often comes up for people is: "what behavior do I commit to in my initiation?"
Sometimes, the whisper of your soul has become so muted, that it's hard to know what building to lean your ladder against, what version of yourself you want to commit to moving towards.
If that's you, then I'm going to recommend a minimum 40 day container of a process that my mentor taught me:
- Tell yourself the truth, every day (in the form of stream of consciousness journaling)
- Eat a Death Cookie every day
🍪 Death Cookies
Phil Stutz is a brilliant psychiatrist who wrote a book called The Tools. He gives all of his clients a framework that he calls "Death Cookies". I didn't learn about Death Cookies from Phil Stutz-- I learned about them from Erick Godsey, and it's one of the most useful ideas in confronting your destiny I've ever learned.
The easiest way to break it down is this:
We all know what it's like to know deep down what we ought to do next, but then ignore that call within us.
You know that you need to have that hard, uncomfortable conversation.
You know that you need to sit down and file your taxes.
You know that you need to clean out the garage that keep throwing stuff into to "deal with later".
You know you need to end the relationship you're unhappy in but staying with out of comfort and fear.
You know you need to actually confront the debt you're in and make a plan.
You know the secret you've been keeping is building up walls and hidden resentments between you and your loved ones.
You know that you need to sit down and clean out the 10,163 unread emails in your inbox and unsubscribe to all the newsletters you don't read (the actual number in my Gmail as of the date of writing this).
These are all examples of Death Cookies -- but on another level, so are:
You know that you were born to be a musician, that you want to perform on stage, and that no amount of business success, Instagram followers, or other accolades will make up for that creative longing in you.
You know that your aptitude for engineering could be used to solve an existential problem that you see humanity is facing, and that no amount of safety from the paycheck you're making at your current job will ever be a substitute for the sense of purpose you feel you're missing.
You know that your dream is to start a family and have children, but you haven't confronted your fears of intimacy and need to be hyper-independent to feel safe from being hurt in relationships.
The "knowingness" and sense of "ought" is the core ingredient of a Death Cookie.
Phil Stutz believes that Death Cookies are the voice of your Soul calling you towards becoming the person you were born to be. When we refuse the call, that's when the "death" part of the Death Cookie starts to onset.
The bigger the gap we have between knowing we have to do the thing, and doing the damn thing, the more life force we start to lose. The Death Cookie takes up mental bandwidth, even if it's a subtle discomfort like an omnipresent refrigerator hum in the background. Our trust and respect for ourselves starts to erode, and that begins to manifest in our other behaviors, eroding it further in a weird downward loop. The discomfort gets harder to confront; we get tempted by the Satanic Entertainment System to numb it and make it all go away.
However,
When we confront our fears and eat the Death Cookie, we regain all the vitality that we lost, and then some. You will feel superhuman from the energy that returns to your system when you confess a lie that has been keeping you in a prison of shame, when you finally clean your closet, when you make that call to the cell phone company about your billing, when you hit publish on that first Youtube video that you've avoided making.
The most profound example for me was staying in a relationship that I'd been committed to for too long. I loved this woman, but deep down I knew I wasn't going to be able to spend my life with her. We had been going to counseling, and doing everything we could to make the relationship work, but ultimately, I knew that our vision and values were incompatible. I had a million reasons why I didn't want to end the relationship, and all of them were logistical and fear based. We lived together. We owned many things together. I didn't know where I would live after. I was afraid of her reaction, and how she would behave when she was hurt. Not a single one of them was because "I wanted to be with her".
In the end, I worked up the nerve to break up with her. It was hard, one of the most uncomfortable and uncertain things I've ever done. She moved out and went to another city, and despite needing to process the grief of the transition, I was flooded with creative energy and inspiration that I hadn't felt in years. My business, podcast, and social media all grew faster than they ever had, and I found myself in one of my most prolific periods of creative productivity that I've ever experienced.
It was incredibly hard, but it gave me superpowers, access to all my own energy that I had leaked out by betraying my sense of knowing deep down what had to be done.
This is the power of eating Death Cookies. I recall this experience every time I feel myself avoiding something that I KNOW I have to do.
A diet of Death Cookies is the ultimate way to feed your Capacity for Truth and Capacity for Feeling. The more you eat, the closer you are to your own Soul, the more you are rewarded with the essence of who you authentically are.
Tell Yourself the Truth
Start. Journaling. If you want to go analogue, commit to at least 40 days of 20 minutes of stream-of-consciousness journaling. Two prompts that a previous partner gave me that I still use for myself and clients to this day are:
- If I'm really being honest...
or
- What I'm pretending to not know is...
...and then write for 20 minutes about whatever flows from those trailheads. At the end of every excavation, there will be the seed or knowing of a Death Cookie that you can eat that emerges from your writing. Put it on the calendar, and eat it.
I've also designed a custom Notion Journaling template, complete with a place to write out death cookies, interpret dreams, and reflect deeply on the five pillars of your life: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and financial. It also includes a habit tracker that you can customize to track different behaviors (it's pre-loaded with my own commitments that I've found are the highest ROI in my own life).
Friends and clients that have committed to this have experienced far deeper clarity on who they are, where they are acting in or out of alignment, and start to catch glimpses of what their life's work/purpose is.
Tell yourself the Truth. Eat death cookies. Listen to your soul before it hits you upside the head with a big ol' brick.
A FAIR WARNING: Once you commit to this process and start living by the Truth and your soul, you will have far less leniency when you don't follow the whisper. The consequences will be harder and faster hitting. The psychic dissonance will tear you apart. It will be impossible to lie to yourself and not get sick. But the rewards of a life fully lived into your dharma cannot be understated, and it's worth every painful initiation through fire you'll ever walk through.
An Invitation to Initiation for Coaches and Leaders:
My business partner Matthew and I help coaches build an scale online businesses to $12-25k/month or more. The process is an initiatory container itself, with every step requiring a person to face the ego death of learning new skills, stepping out of their comfort zone, and being radically honest with themselves and about the data of the results of their actions are producing.
This is why, once coaches are inside our community, we confess that we're less "business coaches" and more mentors who guide people through deep behavior and identity change.
In six days, we're going to be hosting a 3-week intentional container in our QX FREE Community, where we'll be helping coaches lean into their edges, and do the things that will lead them to:
- Get their first high ticket sale
- Integrate the discomfort and traumas they have around selling and marketing themselves
- Master their relationship to time, attention, and prioritization
- Learn how to scale their services using ads and Skool communities
It will be much more fiery and deliberate than the courseware and community calls that we host... it's meant to be an initiation that forces the radical action required for growth.
Our first call is on November 15th at 9 am PST, and you can still register by commenting "MEGALAUNCH" on THIS POST
Reply to this email if you have any questions, or you just wanna let me know what landed as you were reading.
Love you,
Anthony
