The Ground · one to one with Kai
The walking can be shared.
There is still no map, and the land is still pathless. But you can survey the ground you are standing on — the way a piece of land is surveyed before anything is built on it.
That is what this is. Sixteen areas of a life, looked at honestly, with someone who has walked a long way and watched a great many people walk it.
Begin a conversationPortrait — Dana Aleksankina, Marbella
01 — What people actually arrive with
Usually one part of a life that has gone unattended
long enough to start speaking up.
“I’m making almost no money doing the thing I love, and I’m not young.”
“I haven’t slept properly in two years and I’ve stopped mentioning it.”
“I’ve been living out of boxes for three years. It was meant to be temporary.”
“There is never any time for the thing I say matters most.”
“My practice is fine. My marriage isn’t.”
“We stopped touching each other, and neither of us has said so.”
“Everyone in my life is a student or a client. I’m not sure who my friends are.”
“I can be with my mother for two days before something old comes back.”
“I’ve been teaching for years and I’ve lost the thread. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.”
“I want to build a training, and I can’t work out what I’m actually teaching.”
“I can’t say no to anyone who needs me, and I’m running out.”
“It went well. It’s hollow. I don’t understand why.”
“There’s a list of things I do that I’ve never said out loud to anyone.”
“I can’t remember the last time I did something purely because it was fun.”
“Something opened, and now I don’t know what to do with my life.”
“I have to close something down, and I don’t know who I am without it.”
Every one of these is where a spiritual life is actually lived. And any of them, left alone long enough, will quietly take the rest of it down with it.
If one or two of those are close to where you are, this is the right page.
02 — What I bring to it
Forty years of practice, and fifteen of training teachers. What that actually amounts to is this:
I have watched several hundred practitioners over a long stretch of time — who burned out, who inflated, who quietly kept going, and what actually held. When you describe your situation, there is a good chance I have watched it before, and can tell you where it usually goes. Orientation, offered plainly. What you do with it stays yours.
And I have lived the unglamorous side of it. I built a yoga business in Berlin and then had to close it. I travelled between two countries every week for ten years for my children, and it cost my marriage something. I have started companies, run out of money, and begun again in my fifties. I was a seeker for most of my life, and then the seeking collapsed and I had to find out what was left.
So the practical questions belong here — the money, the livelihood, the family that won’t fit around the practice, the thing that has to end. Those are usually where the real material is.
What I am good at is seeing structure. The shape of a situation, what is holding it in place, where the next step actually is. You leave with a clearer picture; the decisions stay with you. My students have said the same thing for years — that I helped them find their own form. That is still the whole of it.
03 — Where the work starts
The first conversation is the survey itself.
The sixteen areas, walked through in one sitting. Out loud, in conversation — nothing to fill in, nothing to score. You will have recognised several of them already, further up this page.
- Body
- Health
- Money
- Home
- Time
- Partnership
- Sex
- Family
- Community
- Livelihood
- Craft
- Contribution
- Habits
- Character
- Learning
- Play
The purpose is to find which of them are actually alive.
Each one gets asked twice. Once plainly — what is true here, as things stand. And once in the way it tends to go wrong for people who practise.
Take money. Underneath it there is usually a quiet belief that charging properly for sacred work would spoil it — and forty years in, I have watched that belief impoverish some of the most gifted teachers I know. Every one of the sixteen has a version of that. Knowing where they are is most of what I have to offer.
You will notice that spirituality isn’t on the list. That is deliberate — it is the ground the other sixteen stand on. It shows up in how you handle money, and sleep, and your mother, or it stays theoretical.
The sixteen areas are yours.
The ground beneath them belongs to everyone.
People are rarely wrong about their situation and very often wrong about which part of it matters. Two things happen almost every time. Something named as the problem turns out to be a symptom of something else. And an area passed over in ten seconds turns out to be the one everything else is resting on. Neither becomes visible until the whole of it has been looked at.
This is a structure for looking at your life as it actually is. Anyone offering you a model of how a life ought to go is selling you something. This finds where the charge is. What we do about it is yours.
From that first hour we choose three or four live edges together. Everything afterwards comes out of them.
And one question at the end that isn’t about any of the sixteen.
04 — How it works
Three ways in.
One conversation, for one thing. A decision you can’t see the shape of because you’re standing inside it, or a question that has been circling for months.
No commitment beyond the ninety minutes. Many people begin here.
Book a conversationSix conversations at your own pace — no fixed schedule, no weekly obligation. Most people land on fortnightly, and six usually spreads across three to six months.
That is the usual rhythm, and it bends: if a fortnight is too fast, take a month.
- Form
- Six conversations, 90 minutes each
- Begins with
- The survey — the whole of it, in one sitting
- Between
- Write whenever something moves. I read and reply.
- Valid
- Twelve months, so nothing is wasted
Some people finish six and are done — that is the point of six. Others want it to become a steady thing in the year, something ongoing.
If that’s you, we simply continue: another six, or something looser. It grows out of the work, and we decide it when we get there.
Talk it through05 — What changes
Slowly at first. Then quite a lot, quietly.
You become harder to impress with your own insights. Less interested in arriving. More able to be where you already are, including on the days that are nothing special.
The near-enemies get easier to spot — the inflation, the bypassing, the collecting of experiences, the quiet pride of progress. You stop being surprised by them, which turns out to be enough.
And what settles in you becomes the ground the people close to you stand on. That may be the whole of it.
Nothing big to expect. Which is exactly what makes it possible to land where you already are.
06 — How it begins
We meet first, for half an hour.
The only purpose of that half hour is to find out whether this is right for you. Nothing to prepare, nothing to fill in beforehand. The survey comes later, inside the work — this is just a conversation. We talk about what’s actually here now, and what brought you to a page like this one.
By the end, one of three things will be true:
- It will be clear we should work together, and we begin.
- It will be clear we shouldn’t — and I’ll say so, and point you somewhere better.
- It will still be unclear, and the decision will be closer than it was.
All three are useful.
Begin a conversationI work by video from Marbella, and occasionally in person.
07 — If this isn’t the right door
There are other doors, and they may be better ones.
If what you’re carrying is trauma, panic, grief with nowhere to go, or a nervous system that won’t settle — the work you need is Lydia’s. She is a trauma counsellor and somatic therapist, and she is better at that than I will ever be.
Her work is here →If something has opened and you have no idea what happened to you, start here. That page exists for exactly that, and it costs nothing.
Find your bearings →If you’re not sure which of these is true, take the Compass first — about twenty minutes, no background needed. Or simply write and ask.
Open the Compass →08 — Practical notes
Small, deliberately. I work with a limited number of people at a time. When it’s full, it’s full.
Stated above. If cost is the only thing in the way, write and say so — occasionally something can be arranged.
Complete. Nothing said in a conversation is repeated, written about, or referred to elsewhere — including in teaching, and including with your permission.
Six is six. Continuing ends when it’s done, or when either of us sees that it has run its course. Saying so is part of the work.
If something here made you stop and read it twice, write to me.Begin a conversation
A real person reads it, and a real person replies.