Welcome to our wisdom school

Our Method

At Robes of Light, the year is the syllabus and the subject is your own life.

Think of it as graduate school for the soul, where the university of life sets the curriculum. You learn to bring your inner life together with your outer world.

The Living Lab

We think of ourselves as fellow travelers on a consciousness experiment.

Here we ask: what becomes possible when you align with the Highest Power*, synchronize with nature-based time, and apply narrative intelligence to everyday life? (We have been doing it ourselves, keeping our own records since 2022.)

We both came to this work through rigorous graduate programs and found ourselves longing for more (curiosity, intuition, imagination, play, soul, embodiment). We created the school we wanted to attend, keeping the rigor and changing the object and method of study. The subject here is your own life; the method is creative, contemplative, and communal. You learn by living, season after season, year after year: true lifelong learning.

Maria Montessori designed cosmic education to give children from six to twelve the story of the universe and a sense of their place within the whole. Robes of Light carries the spirit of cosmic education into adulthood, where you take up the search for your place in the whole again, with decades of lived experience to draw on.

A graduate seminar reads about synchronicity.

Here you experience it: pull cards each season, watch for them in your life, and share what turns up in the Synchronicity Thread.
A retreat changes you drastically for a week, then sends you home, unmoored.

Here the change happens in your ordinary life, slowly, season by season, the way nature moves.
Therapy* works one-on-one on healing what hurts.

Here you work in company, on what healing makes room for: purpose, joy, creativity.
A tarot reader or dream analyst reads your cards and dreams for you.

Here you learn to read your own, in Lunar Praxis and Dream Study — where we read ours on camera too.
A coach builds your confidence toward your goals.

Here you refine the ego and bring your will into line with Higher Will, following where your story is leading you.

* No belief or behavior is a condition of membership. Whatever your word for the Highest Power (God, Source, Spirit), your path is welcome here. The work sits alongside your therapy, your religious tradition (or none), and whatever your last retreat opened up, and gives them a place in the story of your year.

Where It Leads

We can’t tell you where the year will take you, but we can tell you what we’ve seen:

We’ve experienced more synchronicity, more creativity, and a clearer sense of who we are and which way to go next. The work has added another dimension to everyday life: a magical quality reminiscent of the wonder of childhood, with the wisdom of initiated adulthood.

For many of us, the first change is in how time feels. The calendar stops being an endless line of deadlines and becomes a year with a story, and you always know where you are in it. On days when the outer world leaves you feeling lost, you can look within and ask where you are in the story of the year. The Solar Story Compass marks it for you: We are here.

Your creative voice

Writing again after years away, making art, saying yes to an improv class you would never have tried.

Context for the trials

Becoming a mother, a falling-out with family, the death of a beloved animal, a Saturn return. The story of the year gives these passages a context.

New directions

A new career after decades in another, volunteering at a horse rescue ranch, a turn in the road you couldn’t have planned.

Friends for the road

People who want to talk about the questions you care about most, and who keep walking the year with you.

The heroic journey isn’t about personal glory. It’s about healing the Wasteland, the psychological, social, and ecological wounding of a world out of balance, and we believe the small acts of everyday courage this work asks of you are part of that healing, and of what Montessori called your cosmic task.

How We Work

Self-directed

No grades, no completion requirements, no attendance rules. Gatherings are recorded (minus personal sharing), so you can come live or catch up in your own time. You choose your way through the year, and we walk it with you.

Learned by doing

A card reading for the season ahead, a dream brought to circle, a poem read at open mic. Each stage’s Waymaker guide comes with reflection prompts and practices to try in your own life.

Play as pedagogy

If you’ve spent years being the most rigorous person in the room, play can be the hardest assignment. At Play ’n Pray we’ve tried shadow charades, hydromancy, and meditation with intuitive drawing, and that is often where the discoveries happen.

Where We Gather

Everything happens online, through the Heartbeat app and Zoom. We’re both trained facilitators — in the circle way, and in designing and running engaging virtual experiences, both live (not your average Zoom call) and self-paced.

Members join from different places and very different working lives, drawn together by a shared love of the Mystery.

At home, people will dance, scry in a bowl of water, or share personal insights in a way they may not in person, which is one reason Play ’n Pray, our Sunday morning gathering, is a favorite.

What We Draw On

Our work draws on the cyclical wisdom of earth-based traditions, the heroic journey, depth psychology, ecopsychology, yogic tradition, and consciousness research. The territory we explore is what Evelyn Underhill called mysticism: the direct experience of the Divine. Mysticism is like an underground river running beneath every major wisdom tradition. We provide a framework to live a devotional life, season by season, in an ordinary contemporary context.

Our own training, from exercise physiology to curriculum and pedagogy, is on Our story.

Find your way in

Members arrive versed in traditions of their own, and find that the work here complements what they already practice. Here you might find…

In everyday language: More inner peace, more freedom to respond, renewed creativity, and a deeper sense of meaning, showing up in how you care for yourself, how you treat the people around you, and what you give your life to.
In the language of the heroic journey: The call answered, the threshold crossed, the ordeal survived — and then the road back, the stage most of us skip, where the elixir won in the depths is carried home and spent on the ordinary world.
In the language of consciousness research: Observable effects of calibrating to higher attractor patterns in the unified field: coherence rising, and synchronicity and nonlocal connection turning up together when a group holds its attention the same way at the same time.
In Jungian language: Individuation: withdrawing projections, making terms with the shadow, following symbols and your own dreams until the ego stands in relationship with the Self — a work the numinous keeps interrupting with synchronicity.
In transpersonal psychology: Peak and plateau experiences given context and integration support, so that what exceeds the personal self informs grounded relationships, work, and care rather than remaining a story about one extraordinary event.
In somatic and embodied language: Interoception sharpening, the felt sense tracked as it moves; breath as the lever that reaches the nervous system directly; and co-regulation doing what solitary practice cannot, a body settling because it is in company.
In the language of ecopsychology: The ecological self, widened past the skin; a year kept by the sun and the seasons rather than by the calendar of work; and the turn Bill Plotkin calls soulcentric, out of a culture stalled in patho-adolescence and toward an adulthood that serves something larger than itself. His wheel of life shows stages of development around the four directions and turns once in a lifetime; our model turns once a year.
In the language of yoga: A quieter mind, clearer discernment, and less identification with passing thoughts and reactions, cultivated through practice, breath, self-study, and nonattachment; and a deepening relationship with the sacred, expressed in wholehearted action with increasing freedom from the need to control the outcome.
In Buddhist language: Greater mindfulness, discernment, compassion, and equanimity, as we loosen attachment to fixed expectations and learn to meet changing conditions with less grasping and greater care.
In Abrahamic language (Christian, Jewish, Islamic): A deepening relationship with God, as prayer, study, and faithful practice cultivate wisdom, humility, and love, finding expression in compassion, justice, care for others, and responsibility for how we live.
In humanistic psychology: Congruence between what you feel and how you live, met with unconditional positive regard rather than correction, and the drift toward self-actualization that follows once the two stop contradicting each other.
In developmental psychology: What was subject becomes object: the assumptions shaping your experience, which you were had by, become assumptions you can hold and look at. More than one perspective fits in the room, and complexity gets met with flexibility, care, and responsibility rather than a quick answer.

Robes of Light programming is for adults 21+. It is spiritual education, not a substitute for therapy or medical care. We are not affiliated with any single wisdom tradition, therapeutic modality, or religious institution. Our philosophy is inspired by Montessori education; we are not Montessori-trained teachers.

✦ Start here

The Library

Everything we make, gathered on one shelf: free letters and episodes, recorded workshops, the live show, Membership and the Luminaries.

Step inside

or begin free with the Solar Story Post