Dan’s Mission for YourTurn

I came to my own path because I was not thriving. I got involved in lots of things that were supposed to help me thrive– religions, lifestyles, diets, hobbies. I kept trying to thrive, and I just wasn’t. One aspect of life would suck, and I would apply a solution to fix that aspect of life, but the solution or practice just wasn’t robust enough to bring my whole life into sustainable alignment.

As a seeker, I was constantly faced with the challenge of my personal needs not being met fully within any one traditional path. Part of my awakening has involved realizing that it is this way for everybody. It is fundamental to exist as individual human beings without having aspects of our identity or personal power cut off, or put into a box, because of some automatic/dogmatic position a collective establishment takes. One of my main goals for YTML is to invite people to see that different practices serve different needs, and that we’re stronger both as individuals and as a collective society when we let these different practices exist and work syncretically.

Earlier in my career, I worked in higher education and international business, and had numerous experiences of being the salaried employee working for the bigger system. I realized how broken traditional business systems are, how they create a false sense of prosperity. I asked myself how I could live an authentic spiritual life and still participate in systems that treat others so poorly and chronically undervalue the worth of individual human beings. I finally committed to a life-long dream to teach martial arts, and this led me to seeing how the blend of spiritual pathwork and personal secular action produced an eclectic practice. A practice that is more personal and more powerful than a life motivated socio-economic or religious pressure. Even while students remained in their relationships, jobs and religious perspectives, they experienced remarkable changes in their well-being.

I have a family, and we all inescapably live in a materialistic monetarily-driven society– making some kind of money is required for survival. YTML represents my commitment to building a healthier and more collaborative business structure, which subverts systems of economic injustice and exploitative business models, allowing myself and other spiritual seekers to support one another through mutual aid and encouragement of each other’s livelihood. When you choose to purchase membership and training content, you are directly supporting my own pathwork, my family, and the community that I am working to build and steward.

Above all, what I want to offer is a path to spiritual and personal growth that is self-driven and community-supported. Religious systems often focus on authority and social mores. Mystery traditions are about making the struggle for access and knowledge part of the refinement process. And while I believe these approaches have merit, I also believe they are largely inappropriate for millennials and younger generations of seekers because of the changing models of student/mentor relationships, how we access information and understand authority, and a saturation of information on the internet. YTML is about having the door open, allowing space to feel how powerful those traditional teachings are, find what resonates, and build a path for ourselves intentionally with discernment, autonomy, and peer support.