Incisive. Bold.
Soulful.

We live in an uncertain world that demands certain outcomes. Our life paths are to be predictable, vertical, and logical.

So what happens when everything falls apart? Menopause, empty nesting, divorce, job loss, relocation — events like these shift our lives in such a way that it is no longer possible to continue on like normal.

From the Western perspective, these liminal spaces are wrinkles to be smoothed out. We are taught to manage the disruption, to downplay it, to keep it from touching us.

But these events are designed to not only touch us — they are meant to undo us. They are, in fact, initiations into a whole new way of being.

In this talk, Keri invites audiences to stop managing their threshold moments and start inhabiting them — using life's most disorienting passages as rites of passage. Drawing on mythology, depth psychology, and the wisdom of indigenous cultures, she offers a new framework for navigating change: not putting the pieces back together, but remaking ourselves entirely.

Every human life is built with both shadow and light. And yet culturally, we are encouraged to chase only the light. We learn to seek higher consciousness through brightness, clarity, the dawning of a new day. As a result, we learn to fear the dark.

But light does not exist without dark. They are a natural yin/yang pairing. And darkness carries an illumination all of its own. Avoiding this truth is what leads to toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing.

Descent is a passage. And a sacred threshold.

St. John of the Cross called this experience the Dark Night of the Soul. We might call it a spiritual crisis, an existential crisis, a breaking open.

Keri calls it the Endarkenment.

Drawing on Jungian depth psychology, shadow work, and the wisdom of the mystics, this talk reveals what waits on the other side — a reclamation of the power we traded for acceptance, the love and belonging we learned to seek outside ourselves.

A Dark Night of the Soul will, over time, melt away all that is no longer useful while stoking what has yet to be made conscious. That greater consciousness—found not in the light, but through the dark—is what wholeness is all about.

You are not who you think you are. You are so much more.

From our earliest years, we are shaped by the process of identity development — learning to become someone, to build a reputation, to be knowable to others and to ourselves. Personality tests, social roles, and the expectations of those around us all participate in forming a self that functions in the world.

But the self we build is not the self we are.

Over time, the very structures that once helped us find our voice become confining. The roles fit tighter. The personality type we identified with in our thirties tells us who we cannot be in our fifties. What began as self-discovery hardens into self-limitation.

Authenticity has become a buzzword — but real authenticity is not simply saying what's on your mind. It is a process of unbecoming: shedding the obligations, pressures, and identities we have accumulated until we reach something beneath the roles. Not a smaller self, but a freer one.

This talk is both conceptual and experiential. Keri guides audiences through a meditation drawn from the ancient kosha framework — moving through the layers of self one by one until something quieter and more spacious is reached. Audiences leave not only with a new framework for identity, but with a direct experience of what lies beneath it.

"Age gracefully," they tell us.

The image that phrase conjures is one of docility. Quietness. Meekness. Moving out of the way. Not causing trouble.

No wonder women increasingly speak of feeling invisible after fifty. No wonder we continue to underestimate the gifts of age while overselling those of youth. No wonder we have a society starving for wisdom—losing generational knowledge, ancestral memory, and the kind of guidance that only comes from a life fully lived and integrated.

In many Indigenous cultures, those who have crossed through the life stages of youth and adulthood are bestowed the title of Elder. These are not people who have aged gracefully. They are people who have claimed their power.

Sought out for counsel, story, and ceremony, elders pass down wisdom from their ancestors — ensuring a culture continues to evolve. The title is not granted by age alone, but by life lessons integrated. By rites of passage honored. By a willingness to become the keeper of threshold crossings for those who come after.

But Western culture replaced the Elder with the Hero. In doing so, we traded inner strength for outer, and quiet dignity for overt bravado. We lost the archetype that holds the ceremonies. We lost the ones who know how to witness a life in transformation.

If our society feels like it is missing a true North Star — scrambling to make meaning, find connection, and break free from the same harmful cycles — could it be because we have no Elders to lead us through?

In our modern world, elderhood is not something we are given. This talk explores what it means to claim it anyway — and why a culture that recovers its elders might just recover itself.

Cultural myths are the dominant stories a society tells about itself — its living mythology. Whether or not we ever studied them, we have all inherited these narratives.

The myth of self-reliance. The illusion of control. The myth of perpetual growth. These aren't neutral ideas. Their narrative power is embedded in how we see, relate, and operate in the world. They sound like truth because they've been whispered to us since we were children.

But these stories were not written for all of us equally. Many were written for one kind of journey — and one kind of hero. And they have kept the rest of us obedient, small, and suspicious of one another.

Following in the lineage of teachers like Michael Meade and Sharon Blackie, this talk examines the cultural myths we have inherited and asks what becomes possible when we finally see them clearly— not as truth, but as stories. Stories we can question, rewrite, and choose to build from differently.

Until we see our mythology clearly, we will keep building the same world from it. This talk is an invitation to build a different one.

Political unrest and polarization. Disregard for norms and precedent. Unnecessary wars and conflict, at home and abroad.

The diagnosis: our world is not healthy.

Issues of good versus evil pervade as the question becomes: who's to blame?

But what if that's the wrong question? What if the world is simply doing what it has always done — reflect the health of its people? What if what is happening is not a planetary crisis, but a crisis of consciousness that begins and ends with us?

In Jungian thought and practice, what we don't heal within takes shape without. It is termed the "psychic epidemic."

Or, more simply: our cultural shadow.

When individuals repress, ignore, or deny parts of themselves, those parts don't disappear. They accumulate. And eventually, they find expression. Individual trauma becomes collective.

Like a mirror, a society reflects its people. What we see "out there" does not originate there — it emerges from what has been building, quietly, over time.

None of us are to blame. And all of us are responsible.

Healing the whole starts with recognizing our common humanity — understanding that we share a consciousness, and that each of us, in devoting ourselves to integrating our own shadow, makes a contribution to the whole.