I’m very grateful to Rob Engels for writing about his TAE process from the fall of 2025. He experienced TAE in partnership with one of my apprentices, Nicola Le Breton. Both Rob and Nicola live in Australia. You can reach Rob at https://www.ancientground.org
1. The Question Came Alive as a Living Ontological Presence
The most striking and unexpected gift of the TAE process was the transformation of my crux sentence — Connecting people to the sacred — from an intellectual proposition into something that felt like a living, breathing being with its own interiority and urgency.
Implication: This is a profound testament to what Beatrice’s TAE process achieves at its deepest level. I didn’t just refine an idea — I encountered my question as an ontological structure, a numinous presence wanting to be known and expressed. This is not something that happens in cognitive or even most somatic modalities. It speaks to the unique depth of this work, and to what is lost if the process is reduced to a technical curriculum debate. The question ceased to be something I had and became something that had me — which is precisely what deep soul-work is meant to do.
2. TAE Taught a Radically Different Way of Thinking — Through the Body
I arrived as a practiced somatic facilitator and teacher, and yet TAE revealed something new: a mode of thinking that bypasses the habitual machinery of the mind and comes at questions from the edge of the body’s knowing. And recognizes the body as the locus of a knowing that extends beyond self:
“I’m just thinking about the focusing body and how that extends way beyond my sense of who I am — into the ecological body, and the sacred body.” —Class 4, October 21
Implication: I am a practitioner who has worked with the Diamond Approach, Plotkin’s nature-based depth psychology, and somatic modalities for years. That TAE gave me access to a qualitatively different register of knowing is significant. This wasn’t refinement — it was revelation. The ability to come at a question fresh, at the bodily edge of knowing, rather than being caught in the habitual loops of conceptual thinking, is an epistemic gift with enormous implications for creative, therapeutic, and spiritual work.
3. I Deliberately Chose Not to Engage Gendlin’s detailed Theory — and the Process Worked Anyway
Woven into this theme is something practically significant: I largely chose not to engage with the academic and theoretical videos in the course — particularly Gendlin’s own recorded material — and found this in no way diminished the depth or effectiveness of what unfolded. I chose, consciously and deliberately, to stay embodied: to let the bodily knowing show the way, held by my partner’s expertise rather than by theoretical frameworks
By mid-journey, I had made a settled decision to limit my engagement with the recordings, watching only Beatrice’s introductions and stopping short of the more academically dense material.
Implication: My experience demonstrates that Beatrice’s distilled, facilitated, one-on-one process does not require theoretical literacy to be fully effective. If anything, my sense is that the latter is an obstacle to engaging TAE in an embodied way. The bodily knowing constantly led the way; the framework served only as a scaffold, and even that scaffold can be minimal. I went from first session to a living, ontological encounter with my core question — without ever fully grasping the intellectual architecture of Gendlin’s 14 steps. This is not a limitation of Beatrice’s approach. It is its power. Accessibility is not dilution. It is what makes this work available to the people who most need it, in an age of great need.
4. TAE as a Re-orienting Force — The “Iron Filings and the Magnet”
One of the most practically significant things I found was that the TAE process didn’t just deepen my relationship with my crux — it reorganized the entire landscape of my life’s work around an essential centre.
Quote:
“It’s like someone turned on a magnet, and all these iron filings became orchestrated around the central pattern. Whereas before, they were kind of clusters of iron filings without a real sense of the organizing centre, or the organizing principle at their nucleus.” —Class 4 Prac 2, October 28
And connecting this directly to my life’s work:
“Ancient Ground has, through this work, I think, been reoriented as the sacred central pillar of my work in the world… It’s reopening and reminding me of the sacred dimension and sacred calling, and sacred urgency of the work that I’m here to do — which I think was being backgrounded in my need for safety and survival and income.” — Class 4 Prac 2, October 28
Implication: This is the kind of clarifying, consolidating effect that people spend years and significant resources trying to achieve through therapy, coaching, and retreat. TAE delivered it through sustained, disciplined engagement with a single question. For anyone whose life work is complex, multi-threaded, and partly submerged under the pressures of making a living, this re-orienting quality is of immense practical and existential value.
My fledgling business, Ancient Ground, was born (in Part) Through TAE
This re-orienting did not remain abstract. It gave rise — in part — to Ancient Ground, the organisation I co-founded during this TAE journey.
Ancient Ground is a nature-based mystery school devoted to the art of healing, initiation, ceremony, and embodied prayer. Weaving together ancestral and earth-based lineages, it works at the meeting place of psyche, body, land and spirit — offering pathways that support people to remember their deepest belonging in the web of life. Rooted in breathwork, focusing, ecotherapy, Vision Fast, and shamanic practice, Ancient Ground tends the hearth where ancient ways of knowing are remembered, renewed, and lived in service of times such as these. See www.ancientground.org)
I arrived into the TAE process at what I described as the dawn of Ancient Ground as an organization — and what emerged through the sessions was not simply clarity about my question, but a fundamental recognition that the question was the organization’s soul. TAE helped crystallize the living spine of my mythopoetic place and purpose — not as a strategic framework, but as an ontological presence that wanted to be born in service of all life.
Quote:
“I arrived in this work with you at the dawn of Ancient Ground, and then there was this seemingly separate question of how to empower people to be in listening with the sacred… I didn’t see that… it’s like Ancient Ground is saying, find me. And express me.” —Class 4 Prac 1, October 21
And on the convergence of the felt sense with the ecological and the sacred:
“What we’re doing here through focusing, the felt sense, and TAE — it’s like it’s opening that portal so that this deeper knowing can speak. So, um… it’s a sacred process.” —Class 4 Prac 1, October 21
Implication: Ancient Ground was not simply a project that ran alongside TAE — it was, in a real sense, clarified and given its living spine through it. The organization’s identity as a contemporary mystery school — ecological, somatic, and sacred — crystallized through the repeated act of returning to the body’s knowing around this single question. This is a remarkable testament to what the process makes possible: not just personal insight but the birth of an organization aligned with soul.
5. The Question Was Not Abstract — It Was Incarnational
I repeatedly found myself encountering my crux not as a concept to be analyzed but as something woven into my body, present in imagery, sensation, and archetypal form that continued to work on me between sessions.
Quote:
“The central imagery that’s been emerging in our sessions continues to — for want of a better word — haunt me. Or to work me. And those images are also evolving, so they’re not static; they are shifting. And there’s a narrative emerging.”
And:
“The process is alive. And I can try and summon words around it, or sentences, but it’s also alive. It’s a living process that’s here in my heart right now. And it’s steeped in listening.” —(Class 8, December 11
Implication: This is the distinction between TAE and any other form of inquiry work I’ve encountered: the question becomes incarnational — lived in the body, carried through daily life, dreamed into. My use of the word “haunt” is telling: this is a question that is doing something to me, not one I am doing something to — I’m being worked by an ontological presence that wants to unfold me into a deeper expression of who I am; a deeper way of being of service.
6. TAE as Incantation — Reality Being Reorchestrated
I found a striking metaphor for what TAE felt like at the level of lived experience: not a technique but an incantation, where the act of naming and attending to something from the body’s depths causes reality to reorganize itself.
Implication: This language — incantation, invocation, reorchestration — points to something that belongs not to therapy or coaching but to the ancient domain of initiation and ceremony. That TAE can carry this quality when facilitated with depth is a powerful argument for its value, and for the particular approach Beatrice has developed. It isn’t a simplified version of something — it is a distilled version, one that gets to the essence without the scaffolding becoming an obstacle.
7. The Process Held Me Through the Entire Arc — Between Sessions as Well as Within Them
I was struck by the cumulative, ongoing nature of the work — the way the process didn’t end when the session did, but continued to move in the background of my life.
And:
“It’s really seismic. And also… it’s reopening and reminding me of the sacred dimension and sacred calling, and sacred urgency of the work that I’m here to do.” —Class 4 Prac 2, October 28
Implication: The ongoing generativity of the process — the fact that insight and reorganization continued between sessions, without effort or forcing — is a hallmark of a process that is alive, with its own agency, trajectory, longing. A process that continues to ‘carry forward’ the something in me that was previously unseen, murky, and longing to be known and lived.
8. TAE as a Powerful Post-Vision-Quest Adjunct — An Emerging Collaboration
My TAE journey has opened a wider possibility: that this work could serve as a uniquely powerful adjunct to the Vision Fast and other soul-initiation ceremonies — a way of helping people to crystallize and embody what they encounter in the wilderness, something that standard post-quest mentoring programs are rarely equipped to support.
The core insight is this: Vision Fast and soul-initiation ceremony can open a person to profound encounter with their mythopoetic place and purpose — but the process of bringing that encounter into language, into lived and embodied service, is often left to chance. Post-quest mentoring, while valuable, typically works at the level of narrative and reflection. TAE — working from the felt sense, at the bodily edge of knowing — could provide something qualitatively different: a sustained process of crystallizing the living question that emerges from the quest, and carrying it forward into form, action, and service.
Quote:
“There’s a curiosity here about collaborating in some way with land-based ceremony and Vision Fast as a way of psycho-spiritually entering into terrain where the veils of ordinary minds are stripped away, and opens us into channels of listening… In Plotkin’s lineage, [vision fast] can open us to processes of soul encounter, where we remember our place and purpose — it can emerge as a numinous symbol, and a name, and those kind of old, ancient ways of remembering ourselves. And having gone through that process, recognising that what you’re offering here would be such a beautiful way — that hasn’t yet been combined with the work I’ve been doing — to crystallize and ground and actually bring into embodiment and action and service.”
Implication: This represents a genuinely novel and potentially transformative contribution to the soul-initiation field. No current Vision Fast or Plotkin-lineage program has integrated this kind of sustained, body-based conceptual unfolding into its post-ceremony support. Beatrice’s distilled version of TAE — facilitated one-on-one, as Nicola beautifully and ably did with me — could be exactly the right container. Here’s to ongoing collaboration!
Thank you Nicola, for all you held, so graciously, with heart and silence and tenderness. You’re a gifted TAE facilitator and I am indebted for the riches you helped midwife through TAE, and now Ancient Ground. You arrived at exactly the right time in my work — a messenger from the depths, lamp holder, way-bearer. Thank you. Thank you. And to you, Beatrice, for making this work of magic and wonder so accessible. What a treasure for the world.