At twenty-eight I was underweight, smoking weed daily, codependent, and quietly relying on my parents to keep the lights on.

No vision. No direction. A bitterness I couldn't name and a confusion I couldn't shake.

From the outside it probably looked fine.

From the inside I knew something was deeply, fundamentally wrong.

Then one June evening, as my 29th birthday approached, I asked myself a question I had been avoiding for years:

If I keep living this way — will I be satisfied with my life when I die?

The answer was a resounding NO.

So I did something I'd never done before. I got still. I envisioned my last breath — not with dread, but with intention. I asked myself how I most wanted to feel in that final moment.

The answer?

Complete.

Like my song had been sung and my work passed forward into worthy hands.

Like I had made a difference with the gift that is my life.

And then I asked:

what is the very next thing I can do to move toward that?

The answer cost me everything I was holding onto.

I quit my job. Left my home. Ended my relationship. Moved alone to Mexico.

And on the exact day of my Saturn Return conjunction — the precise moment Saturn, the Archetypal Father & Lord of Karma, completed its first full orbit since my birth — I published my first book.

I didn't stumble into that. I studied it, claimed it, and still had to pay the full price to earn it.

That journey cracked something open in me that has never closed.

It sent me deep into the work of Carl Jung, into myth, into the wisdom traditions of multiple cultures, into the realization that the cosmos itself is a map — and that the details of every man's birth contains a precise record of the specific initiation he is here to walk.

I am formally trained in Philosophy and World Religious Traditions at the University of Calgary.

I have spent the last decade in autodidactic study of psychology, personal development, mythology, evolutionary biology, and global wisdom traditions.

But what I bring to this work is not primarily academic.

It is the memory of the man I was in that June darkness — and the road I walked out of it.

I work with men at thresholds.

Men who have achieved what they were supposed to achieve and found it hollow.

Men whose relationships are fracturing and don't know why. Men who feel fate pulling them toward something they cannot yet name or see.

I use your natal chart as a precise map of your specific initiation.

I use myth as a lantern.

I use everything I have studied and everything I have lived to walk alongside you — not ahead of you, not behind you — until you find the throne of your own soul and choose to sit in it.

That is the work.

That is what Beyond The Hero means.

The hero conquers.

He strives, achieves, and becomes King.

But there is a country beyond conquest.

Beyond the mask of capability and the armor of achievement.

That is where the real man lives.

And that is where we are going.

Oak Mountain — philosopher, mythic men's coach, author, and founder of Beyond The Hero