• Exemplification is the embodiment of transformation with the power to change insight into influence. During the final “Elixir Shared” step of the “Return Phase” of the Hero’s Journey, your life, not your words becomes the message.

• When you live what you’ve discovered with courage, compassion, and authenticity - you create a spark to ignite and multiply other journey’s. Creating this spark requires living in harmony with the following five core truths.

  • You must wake up to your true nature and highest version of yourself.

  • Waking up is not enough. You must live in alignment with your true nature. This requires discovering your signature strengths, defining your highest values and life goals, and implementing a framework of atomic habits that exemplifies your highest values.

  • Peace comes from aligning your perspective with the three universal characteristics of human experience (uncertainty, imperfection, and impermanence).

  • We live in a universe of deeply interdependent opposites (suffering/Joy, love/hate, life/death, etc.). No mud, no lotus. No suffering, no joy. It’s not enough to learn how to be joyful. You must also learn how to suffer well and transform.

  • Five mind states will prevent you from living your best life (Sensual desire, ill will, sloth-torpor, restlessness-worry, & doubt.” Practicing the following five catalysts to awakening and exemplification will transform your life into a message with influence.

Gratitude is the spiritual compass required for the “Freedom to Live” portion of the “Return” phase of the Hero’s Journey. Gratitude creates inner peace connected with the present moment and eliminates the fear of death and failure. With gratitude, every hardship and emotional scar becomes sacred, part of the story that led to awakening.

Sharing insights motivated by gratitude, love, and service instead of ego are essential to healing and inspiration.

Actualization is the realization that the journey was never about escaping the cave, but about returning through it transformed to learn, love, live, lead, lift, and leave a lifeline. This transformation occurs when insight, courage, and compassion merge into embodied truth and being.

Perspective, love, gratitude, and spirituality are key strengths required for actualization in the return phase of the hero’s journey. Perspective helps recognize the unity of opposites (suffering-joy, life-death) and transforms pain into pattern and purpose. Love is the true measure of enlightenment, bridges the sacred and the human, and translates insight into compassion. Gratitude is the emotional signature of maturity turning realization into reverence, hardship into learning, and joy into generosity and grace. Spirituality is the compass that guides the awakened heart and integrates the inner and outer worlds.