On Becoming a Shared Work
And an Invitation for Your Input
Dear Friends,
What began in late 2022 as a weekly letter to twelve loved ones back home was never imagined to reach all of you. These letters arose from a certain fidelity to the inner life while I was on pilgrimage. The writing was an embodied gesture, a practice of iterative presence to what was transpiring within as I entered extended stretches of solitude and silence while traversing the North American landscape.
Over those thirteen months of seeking wild reaches of North America, I began to weave into these letters reflections I had been contemplating for years about the unfolding of consciousness in the human. Some of you began commenting, wondering, offering your own experiences for reflection. Gradually, there was a felt sense that this journey was becoming a shared pilgrimage. By the end of 2023, Beyond the Comfort Zone was reaching readers on six continents, in no small part because many of you encouraged its recognition as a 2023 Featured Substack Publication.
I returned home in December 2023. I would soon learn that pilgrimage does not end when the journey ends. The deeper pilgrimage begins at home. It begins when the old patterned ways of being tug at the tender shoots of what unfolds out there, beyond the comfort zone of the familiar and known. As with each day of the journey, this inner pilgrimage became a lived practice of meeting each moment, each familiar person and place, as a surrendered act of unknowing.
And so came the first offering of this work, Awakening to Wonder, in the winter of 2024, gathering two cohorts for an 8-week experiential exploration. Together, we would discover a twofold nature of wonder: as that which breaches the membrane of ordinary awareness and, by that very fact, draws us closer to it. Wonder revealed itself as an inner movement of intimacy with the world, inspired by the world.
By then, what had begun as a letter was becoming an online grove of shared inner-life inquiry.
In spring 2024, amidst an ever more worrisome world, I began reflecting in these letters on states of being that wisdom traditions, East and West, recognize as essential conditions for self-transformation—silence, solitude, stillness, simplicity, and surrender. I wrote several essays on silence, both as a quieting of inner noise and as a spiritual medium of presence: the Silence.
Some of you began wondering about this sacred Silence, and the thought came to begin gathering once monthly online in Silence. We soon recognized that we had entered into a shared experiment. Would the felt presence of Silence transcend the perceived limitations of intimacy in a virtual setting? If so, what would emerge within each of us, and amongst us as a circle, by our shared presence to the Silence? These gatherings, now held twice monthly, have become a sanctuary of soul presence and a steady ground of deep listening to that which is “always right here and infinitely far away.”1
Indeed, we came to reflect on not only the shared presence of Silence but also an abiding intimacy and profound sense of belonging. Threads from our reflective conversations began to reveal a deepening presence to the relational field and a capacity to remain present with what is unresolved. It was becoming clear that our practices in Silence are not in service to ourselves alone. Our practices in Silence are formative movements of consciousness itself, re-forming our patterns of being.
In December 2024, a small circle gathered at Valle Crucis Retreat Center for a pilgrimage-in-place with the theme, Entering Unknowing: An Inner Pilgrimage for a Time between Worlds. It was during this retreat that I began to sense-feel a subtle albeit unmistakable shift in the arc of this unintended “work.” A living body of work was forming, nurtured by a small circle. What began as a weekly letter written on pilgrimage was becoming a shared work, ushering us into the depths of human becoming in increasingly complex times.
Then came 2025. These Sunday letters, and conversations unfolding with some of you, began reflecting on the theme of living in an unfinished world. We began to willingly bestow our own participation in the evolutionary unfolding of consciousness, what the late visionary cultural historian Thomas Berry referred to as the Great Work of our time.2 To nurture this deep psychic shift, we were beginning to turn toward what twentieth-century paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin intimated as cardiogenesis: the evolutionary becoming of the human heart as an organ of perceptivity and imaginal receptivity, spiritual cave of inner feeling, interstitium of communion, and foyer of divine Love.3 Dear Friend, please know that you need not be familiar with Berry or Teilhard to enter this work.
By late summer 2025, a cohort of fifteen of us embarked on a twelve-week online journey of Awakening to the Heart, culminating in a second in-person gathering at Valle Crucis in December. This work of evolutionary cardiogenesis is transforming each of us and the cohort collectively, in ways indescribable but unmistakably lived and felt and rippling outward. Now members of this circle begin to refer to this as our work.
At the beginning of 2026, two cohorts entered into a living study of Robert Sardello’s Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness, recognizing that Silence is the very ground of cardiogenesis. Our work in Silence may be understood, in esotericist Valentin Tomberg’s terms, as an “essential condition” for the work of cardiogenesis, as itself a foundational work of human becoming.4 For it is through the organ of the heart that Silence is sense-felt, and it is in cultivating these sense-feeling capacities that we begin to serve as stewards of human wholeness on behalf of evolution itself.
Today’s letter is an interlude in the ongoing Phenomenology of Hope series that began with “Toward a Phenomenology of Hope” and “Martin Luther King Jr. on Midnight in Our World.” At this still-young hour of the New Year, already calling us into our deepest work on behalf of the Great Work, it seemed important to take a breath and wonder together: what is being asked for in 2026, and how might this shared work take form? Some possibilities that have come forth include:
– Living in Hope, an online weekend retreat, indwelling hope as a forward-facing force, ever-present and always already here, to which we can turn in the darkest hour, even in the grip of despair (Spring 2026)
– An onsite pilgrimage steeped in listening presence to the Silence in the desert, where Silence is most deep, recognizing that it is in listening through the “ear of the heart” that we hear what cannot be spoken (TBD)
– A longer-form online phenomenological (lived experience) study on the unfolding of consciousness at this epochal threshold, drawing from Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, and culminating in an in-person retreat (TBD)
– A new cohort of Awakening to the Heart, and/or an opportunity for prior participants to revisit and deepen the work (TBD)
I wholeheartedly welcome your reflections in the comments or by replying directly to this email. Even a brief response is helpful.
Before closing, I wish to reflect on an essential dimension of how this work is sustained. Approximately twenty-five percent of participants in Beyond the Comfort Zone offerings receive a full or partial scholarship to participate. In 2025, every request for financial assistance was fully met, made possible entirely through the generosity of paid subscribers to this publication and participants who gave above the baseline donation range. This participant-supported model sustains a shared field of accessibility. As importantly, it serves as a recognition that this work is, indeed, now our work.
And so, I close in echo of the beginning: what began in late 2022 as a weekly letter to twelve loved ones back home has become, with your heartful presence and participation, a collective work of inner pilgrimage on behalf of our human evolution, right on time.
I look forward to hearing from you, dear Friends.
In gratitude and with love,
Renée
All Beyond the Comfort Zone letters and essays will always be free. Paid subscriptions and donations provide financial support for this publication and make it possible to keep all offerings accessible to everyone.
If you have the financial means to support this work, please consider offering a financial contribution today, with my deepest gratitude to you.
Notes & References
Robert Sardello, Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness (Benson, NC: Goldenstone Press, 2008) p. 28.
In a work by the same title: Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999).
One can sense these intimations in the postscript of The Human Phenomenon, written ten years following the first iteration of the manuscript, which was not published until posthumously. He further develops the phenomenology of this unfolding in The Divine Milieu. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper & Row, 1959); The Divine Milieu, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: William Collins Sons & Co, 1960).
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2002).
Experiencing once again the "poverty of language." I'm so often struck mute by the the deftness with which you wield words/sentences/paragraphs that reveal the depths of being-ness.
I'm enlivened by each of the possibilities you've offered for our work together. I have a deep and abiding appreciation for your willingness to answer the call to facilitate gathering--past, present, and future. I stand in Presence, in wonder, as this question reaches into the depths of me:
"At this still-young hour of the New Year, already calling us into our deepest work on behalf of the Great Work, it seemed important to take a breath and wonder together: what is being asked for in 2026, and how might this shared work take form?" In love.
Beautiful arc traced here. The transition from solitary pilgrimage to shared work mirrors something deeper about conciousness itself, how it needs both withdrawal and communion to unfold. I've expereinced similar shifts where what starts as personal practice becomes collaborative without losing its depth. That line about pilgrimage beginning at home when old patterns tug at new shoots really landed.