📢 Today marks the official reveal of the Center for Non‑Religious Spirituality 2026 vision! Because the Center relates to this Deconstructionology Substack newsletter in various ways, I decided to share that vision here.

CNRS is a pioneering initiative dedicated to supporting the growing number of individuals seeking meaning, belonging, and transformation outside traditional religious structures. The Center offers a new model for spiritual life—one that is inclusive, trauma‑informed, ecologically grounded, and rooted in shared human dignity.

As millions navigate spiritual transition, religious disaffiliation, and the search for authentic community, the Center provides a vital cultural resource: a place where people can explore contemplative practice, ritual, symbolism, and communal connection without dogma or doctrine.

We’re creating a spiritual commons for a new era. People deserve spaces where they can heal, reflect, and reconnect with what feels sacred—without needing to return to systems that no longer fit.

CNRS offers healing and support in the form of trauma‑informed programs for individuals recovering from religious harm, spiritual rupture, or existential disorientation. We promote accessible, pluralistic frameworks for contemplative practice, somatic grounding, symbolic rewilding, and community ritual. We are an education and culture-building movement that does research, workshops, and public programming that advance new models of post‑religious spirituality rooted in ecological awareness, mutual care, and collective flourishing.

The Center partners with mental health professionals, educators, artists, community organizers, and spiritual practitioners to create offerings that are culturally sensitive, evidence‑informed, and accessible to diverse communities.

This is not a rejection of spirituality. it’s an invitation to rediscover it—together, with integrity, imagination, and freedom.

Today, the Center for Non‑Religious Spirituality reveals it’s 2026 focus and priorities as a community and as it helps shape this emerging field.

👋🏼Goodbye 2025. 🥳Hello 2026!

As the CNRS community leaps into a new year, a word that keeps surfacing that we have adopted as our 2026 theme is:

The threshold metaphor represents a pivotal point of transition. It’s a space where one leaves an old reality and steps into a new one, symbolizing change, growth, and the unknown. It carries feelings of anticipation, risk, and potential, often involving relinquishing old selves for new possibilities.

A threshold is not only personal. It is also collective—the moment a community decides to become something new. As a metaphor, it becomes:

• A shared inhale before the next chapter

• A communal willingness to risk transformation

• A place where belonging is reimagined

In many ways, the Center for Non-religious Spirituality has always been a threshold - a place where people step out of inherited scripts and into self‑authored, communal, embodied meaning. CNRS has been a commons for meaning‑making—a place where people learn to cross thresholds together.

The Center is designed as a tidal zone - porous, shifting, alive with transition and welcoming those who live between worlds. It is a home for the spiritually displaced, the deconstructing, the curious, the wounded, the mythically attuned. Everything is participatory. Nothing is prescriptive.

We claim the threshold as our spiritual home. Not a sanctuary of certainty, but a living membrane where transformation is possible. We gather here because we know the future of spirituality is not behind a door, but in the space where doors dissolve.

We refuse exclusivity, guru-ism and spiritual hierarchy in the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. Belonging here is not earned. It is practiced. We gather as chosen kin, not to agree, but to witness, hold, and transform one another. Community is our ritual. Relationship is our teacher.

We root our spirituality in the land, the seasons, the waters, the tides. CNRS recognizes that every transformation in us mirrors a transformation in the world. We commit to practices that restore relationship with the earth that holds us and the ecologies that shape us.

We name the harms of patriarchy, dogma, coercion, and spiritual control. In the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality we create spaces where people can unravel inherited scripts and reclaim their agency, voice, and mythic sensitivity. We do not replace one authority with another. We cultivate self‑authored, communal, embodied spirituality that cannot be weaponized.

We do not pretend to know what cannot be known. We do not offer answers where questions are sacred. We honor wonder, awe, and the ungraspable. We practice humility before the vastness of existence. Mystery is not a problem to solve. It is a presence to meet.

CNRS is not anti-religious. By using the term “non-religious spirituality” we hope to convey that this is a space where people’s spiritual interests don’t have to conform to traditional religious mindsets or policed by prescribed belief-systems. The creation and practice of religion is rooted in our evolutionary journey and we are free to build upon this pathway in new and liberating ways.

Our spirituality is inseparable from justice. We work to dismantle systems that diminish life and to build communities where all can flourish. We understand liberation as relational, ecological, and ongoing. No one crosses the threshold alone.

The Center for Non-Religious Spirituality is not a temple, a doctrine, a person or a fixed identity. We are a place of continual becoming. We exist so that people may step out of old worlds, enter the unknown together, and return transformed. We are founded on the belief that spirituality is a communal art, a bodily practice, and a living ecology. This is our beginning. This is our crossing. This is our tide.

2026 is a year of thresholds in the Center of Non-Religious Spirituality that we will traverse together as a community. Though there are countless thresholds that will unfold for each of us individually and collectively, I want to highlight three of them.

🍃 Threshold One: A New Online Ecosystem

The Center for Non-Religious Spirituality was founded in 2019. Since that time, CNRS has grown, expanded, and outgrown its original infrastructure.

We need a more top-tier, state-of-the-art, robust, intuitive and user-friendly digital ecosystem. This wouldn’t be terribly difficult if CNRS was only a content delivery space, but CNRS is committed to community, connection, and relationships. We need a platform with the ability to combine several components in a single, cohesive environment.

The CNRS Advisory Board sought counsel on the matter, and we brought on board an organizational development professional to helps us make this transition. A team of people have been working behind the scenes creating the new CNRS home.

Some features of the new CNRS ecosystem include:

🌿 Enhanced Member Engagement: The platform is designed for meaningful, focused conversations rather than fleeting interactions. Features like customizable “Spaces” (for discussions, chats, events, etc.), direct messaging, and personalized feeds help foster a strong sense of belonging.

🌿 Native Course Hosting: The built-in course builder allows creators to host and deliver rich, multimedia content (video, audio, text, files) with features like progress tracking and gamification, offering a blended learning experience alongside community discussions.

🌿 Live Events & Streaming: Users can schedule and host live events, Q&As, workshops, and coaching sessions directly within the platform, including native live streaming capabilities. This allows for authentic interaction and eliminates the need for external tools like Zoom for basic live sessions.

🌿 AI and Automation: AI-powered agents and automated workflows to streamline tasks such as member onboarding, sending reminders and DMs based on activity, and content moderation.

🌿 Dedicated Mobile Apps: Offering fully native, branded mobile apps for iOS and Android, allowing members to engage with the community, courses, and events on the go.

🌿 Rich Engagement Tools: Features like live streams, events with RSVPs and reminders, direct and group messaging, polls, rich media support, and gamification (points, badges, leaderboards) to foster deep connections and member activity.

🌿 Enhanced Privacy, Safety and Control: Providing a safer and more secure environment than public social media platforms, including space moderators and members having control to customize their experience.

⚙ The Transition Plan

✔ Group 0 (Pioneer Team - Complete)

There has been a small team of CNRS champions who have been helping shape and test the new CNRS community space before we opened it to the wider CNRS members.

👋🏼 Group 1 (Beta Testers - In Progress)

Group 1 is a beta testing group who are participating in the final stage of testing the ecosystem before public release. This group is engaging the ecosystem in a real-world environment to provide feedback and identify any bugs or usability issues.

📢 If you’d like to explore early and help us refine the new home, you’re warmly invited to join Group 1.

What Group 1 will be doing:

✔ Exploring the Circle platform ahead of the main move

✔ Getting used to the new layout and features

✔ Noticing what feels clear, confusing, missing, or promising

✔ Sharing feedback that will help shape the final version of our new home

There’s no pressure to join early — Mighty remains our primary home until the transition. But if you’re someone who likes to get oriented ahead of time, or if you feel drawn to helping us create a smoother welcome for everyone else, we’d love to have you in this group.

The Center is still officially at our current home here for now. You won’t miss any updates or events by staying there. We’ll let everyone know well in advance when it’s time for the main switch. We expect the main switchover to take place in the first quarter of 2026. Group 1 is simply for those who enjoy getting familiar early and helping us see the space through fresh eyes.

🎉 Group 2 (Victory! - January)

It will be a transition, it won’t be perfect, it will take time, there will be a few bumps in the road... but we will have together achieved the creation of CNRS 2.0 & Next Generation!

This will happen naturally and with careful planning, attention, and what is called in the tech world, “hypercare”. We will keep everyone posted an updated on details. There’s nothing you need to do now... except have another cup of coffee or tea.

🍃 Threshold 2: Fine-Tuning Pathways and Resources

Founded in 2019, the Center for Non‑Religious Spirituality is a home for people seeking meaning, belonging, and embodied aliveness beyond the boundaries of religion. We create inclusive spaces for reflection, ritual, and community—places where individuals can reconnect with themselves, each other, and the living world.

We offer practices, gatherings, and educational programs that help people heal from religious harm, cultivate inner resilience, and rediscover the sacred as a lived experience rather than a belief system. Our work is grounded in ecological awareness, trauma‑informed care, and a commitment to collective flourishing.

We exist to nurture a post‑religious spiritual culture rooted in dignity, creativity, and shared humanity.

The Center for Non‑Religious Spirituality is dedicated to advancing inclusive, trauma‑informed, and community‑centered approaches to meaning-making outside traditional religious frameworks. Our mission is to provide accessible pathways for personal and collective healing, foster resilient communities, and develop innovative models of ritual, symbolism, and contemplative practice that support human flourishing.

We address a growing societal need: millions of people are leaving organized religion yet lack supportive structures for belonging, ethical formation, and spiritual development. Through research, public programs, and community partnerships, we create evidence‑informed practices that promote psychological well‑being, ecological awareness, and social connection.

Our goal is to build sustainable, pluralistic, and culturally sensitive frameworks for non‑religious spirituality that strengthen individuals and communities alike.

There are four primary reasons why people join the CNRS community:

1. Exploring and Cultivating Non-Religious Spirituality

Across many countries, people are moving away from organized religion but not away from spiritual belief or practice. This shift is well‑documented and is evidenced by the rise of “nones” as the largest identifiable group in the US. There is a growing trend of spirituality without religion, where people seek meaning, connection, and transcendence outside traditional institutions.

There are several factors driving this shift:

⏹️ Desire for Personalization: People want spiritual paths that feel authentic, flexible, and tailored to their lived experience. Traditional religious structures feel too rigid for many.

⏹️ Distrust of Institutions: Scandals, political entanglement, and perceived dogmatism have pushed many away from organized religion, especially younger generations.

⏹️ Globalization of Wisdom Traditions: Access to global practices—Buddhist meditation, Taoist philosophy, Indigenous ritual, somatic healing, atheist spirituality—allows people to remix their own spiritual frameworks.

⏹️ Nature as a Spiritual Home: There’s a resurgence of earth‑centered, nature‑based spirituality, including forest bathing, eco‑rituals, and symbolic rewilding.

⏹️ Science & Spirituality Converging: Neuroscience, psychedelics, and consciousness studies are reshaping how people understand spiritual experience, making it feel more accessible and less “religious”.

⏹️ Technology as a Spiritual Tool: AI‑guided meditation, VR sacred spaces, and biofeedback tools are becoming part of people’s spiritual lives.

The Center for Non‑Religious Spirituality is a home for people exploring meaning, connection, and spiritual depth beyond religion. A home for anyone seeking spirituality without dogma, hierarchy, or belief requirements. A gathering place for people who want spiritual depth without religious boundaries. A welcoming home for those curious about non‑religious forms of spirituality, ritual, and meaning-making.

2. The Leaving-Religion Deconstruction and Reconstruction Journey

The second reason people join CNRS is because they have left religion, and seeking community, support and resources for rebuilding their lives and spirituality. This is often referred to as “religious deconstruction” and “post-religion reconstruction”.

Religious deconstruction is the process of critically examining, questioning, and often dismantling the beliefs, doctrines, practices, and identity structures a person inherited from their religious tradition. It is not a single event but an open‑ended, deeply personal and often volatile process that impacts every aspect of a person’s life, including beliefs, identity, relationships and lifestyle. Many people have suffered deep harm, development deficits and religious trauma as a result of long-term exposure to high-control religion, which requires a healing and recovery process.

Post-religion reconstruction is the process of rebuilding one’s spiritual worldview, identity, practices, and meaning‑making structures after a period of questioning, deconstruction, or collapse. It is not a return to old beliefs. It is not a simple replacement of doctrines. It is a creative, intentional, developmental, often pluralistic rebuilding of a spiritual life that feels authentic, embodied, and meaningful. Reconstruction is the integration phase after the rupture of deconstruction.

There is an “intersectional” dynamic to the deconstruction and reconstruction process, which means there are significant differences in the impact of toxic religion and the rebuilding process based upon factors such as gender, generation, race, sexual orientation and neurodivergence.

The Center for Non-Religious Spirituality is a safe space for religion-leavers to find community, support, guidance, resources and professional help in recovering from harmful religion and rebuilding their lives.

The Center for Non‑Religious Spirituality is a home for those navigating religious deconstruction. A home for anyone unraveling old beliefs and rebuilding meaning on their own terms. A supportive home for people moving through religious deconstruction and seeking new forms of connection.

3. Spiritual Crisis and Nihilism

People also come to the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality because they are in spiritual crisis. They are experiencing an acute existential and identity crisis involving drastic disruption to their meaning system — their purpose, values, beliefs, and sense of self.

It often includes:

• existential doubt

• loss of meaning

• psychological distress

• disorientation

• intense emotions

• disruption of daily functioning

A spiritual crisis is not primarily about religion. It’s about meaning collapsing at the deepest level. A spiritual crisis is acute, overwhelming, and destabilizing. Meaning collapses faster than the psyche can metabolize. The focus is on containment, grounding and safety.

Nihilism is on the rise. The exodus from religion is often a cause. Especially among young people nihilism has become a trend, shaped by feelings of helplessness about the future. We live in a time often characterized as a “meaning crisis”, which is a deep cultural and psychological rupture where individuals and societies struggle to find purpose, coherence, and belonging in a world where traditional sources of meaning have collapsed or lost credibility. It’s not just about feeling lost, it’s about the breakdown of the systems that once helped us make sense of life.

Spiritual crisis, nihilism and a crisis of meaning is a third reason why people come to the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. The Center for Non‑Religious Spirituality is a home for people navigating spiritual crisis. A supportive home for anyone facing spiritual rupture, disorientation, or transition. A place of grounding and belonging for people moving through spiritual crisis outside religion.

4. Training and Vocational Interest

A fourth reason people come to the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality is an interest in the field of existential health and the professional work of non-religious spiritual direction. This field is growing and CNRS is on the frontlines of pioneering and developing it.

CNRS offers the only training and certification course to become a professional non-religious spiritual director, which is a multidisciplinary training with an emphasis in religious deconstruction, post-religion reconstruction and existential health. There are many career opportunities in non-religious spiritual direction. A certified non‑religious spiritual director can work in:

✔️ Private Practice: Offering one‑on‑one or group spiritual direction sessions.

✔️ Post‑religious or deconstruction communities: Supporting people navigating faith transitions.

✔️ Trauma‑informed spiritual care: Working with those recovering from religious trauma, spiritual abuse, or toxic indoctrination.

✔️ Retreats, workshops, and courses: Designing experiences around meaning-making, embodiment, ritual, and symbolic rewilding.

✔️ Online platforms: Many spiritual directors work entirely online, serving global clients.

✔️ Collaboration with therapists: Especially in cases where clients need both psychological and existential support.

✔️ Writing, teaching, and content creation: Books, courses, podcasts, and educational resources on post‑religious spirituality.

CNRS is in the process of collaborating with partners to create an international governing association for professional non-religious spiritual directors and existential health practitioners - World Existential Health Alliance (WEHA). WEHA will promote best practices and ethics in the NRSD field, comprehensive directory of practitioners, training and continuing education, and regional and national events.

The path begins with earning your NRSD certification through the CNRS training and certification course. The next step is building your own professional NRSD practice. As a graduate and as you build your NRSD practice, there are opportunities to be trainers and offer supervision to trainees in upcoming certification courses. As this space grows and the WEHA develops, that will be continuing opportunities to apply your vocational interests and expertise. To learn more and enroll in the next training, here are two links:

See Course Details, Dates, and Fees

Enroll Today

The Center for Non‑Religious Spirituality is a home for those seeking a career in non‑religious spiritual direction. A home for people preparing for meaningful work in non‑religious spiritual direction and care. A supportive home for those training to become non‑religious spiritual directors, guides, and companions.

The Center for Non‑Religious Spirituality is a home for those seeking a career in existential health. A home for people preparing for meaningful work in existential health, spiritual care, and post‑religious accompaniment. A supportive home for those training to become practitioners, guides, and facilitators in the emerging field of existential health.

So those are the four primary pathways people take into the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality:

1. Exploring and Cultivating Non-Religious Spirituality

2. The Leaving-Religion Deconstruction and Reconstruction Journey

3. Spiritual Crisis and Nihilism

4. Training and Vocational Interest

There is some overlap in these four areas, but there are some distinct dynamics that characterize each of them. This is a significant “threshold” area in 2026 because CNRS will be creating more opportunities and dedicating more resources for each of the four pathways in the form of new groups, courses, workshops, resources and professional services.

🍃 Threshold Three: Existential Health

Existential health refers to a person’s capacity to live with meaning, coherence, purpose, and connection — even in the face of uncertainty, suffering, and change. It’s not about having the “right” beliefs. It’s about having a workable relationship with existence itself.

Existential health matters because it addresses the dimension of human life that no biological, psychological, or social model can fully hold: our relationship to meaning, freedom, suffering, mortality, and belonging. It is the dimension that makes a life livable, not just survivable.

Health is more than the absence of illness. Research shows that traditional models of health miss the subjective, meaning‑laden dimension of being human. Existential health fills that gap by integrating meaning, purpose, and lived experience into the understanding of well‑being. Without meaning, even a physically healthy life can feel hollow. Existential health restores depth.

Suffering is not a pathology, it’s part of being human. Western culture increasingly medicalizes existential suffering, treating it as disorder rather than a natural dimension of life. Existential health reframes suffering as a teacher, not a malfunction. It emphasizes meaning-making as a vital dimension of well-being. Meaning-making is how humans metabolize chaos, trauma, and transition. Without it, people lose direction, coherence, and agency. It is the dimension that turns survival into soulful participation in existence.

People in metamodern society struggle with direction and meaninglessness, which manifests as a wide range of psychological and relational problems. Existential health provides a framework for restoring orientation, purpose, and grounded agency. The four-dimensional model (biological, psychological, social, existential) offers a more complete and person-centered approach to health.

This model of health explicitly includes meaning-making, purpose, and existential coherence as vital components of well-being. It is designed to inspire a more integrative, humane, and person‑centered paradigm in healthcare.

We often live as trees who have forgotten our roots. We tend our branches with great devotion — polish our leaves, strengthen our limbs, compare our heights — yet we feel hollow in storms. Our bark cracks easily. Our sap runs thin. We mistake our fragility for personal failure, not knowing that something essential had been severed.

But if we look deeper through layers of soil, we find our deepest root. It’s older than language. Older than culture. It’s the root of meaning, the root of orientation, the root of being. Health is not merely the tending of branches. Health is the remembering of roots. Existential health centers the human need for meaning, coherence, and orientation, without requiring belief in a deity or religious system.

For the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, the third threshold is becoming a leading global voice for the four-dimensional health model and the need to focus on existential health. CNRS seeks to do this in several ways:

🌱 Normalize Existential Health as a Public Good

CNRS seeks to introduce existential health as a recognized dimension of wellbeing, alongside mental and physical health. We use accessible language such as: “meaning,” “belonging,” “purpose,” “identity,” “connection,” “values,” “awe.” We frame existential health as a human need, not a religious concept. People already feel the ache—loneliness, disorientation, loss of meaning. Naming it gives society permission to address it.

🌱 Integrate Existential Health into Education

CNRS seeks to teach emotional literacy, symbolic thinking, and meaning-making skills. This includes contemplative practices (secular mindfulness, nature connection, silence). It involves offering courses on myth, ritual, ethics, and existential questions without religious framing. We seek to train educators to recognize existential distress (identity crisis, loss of meaning, spiritual rupture). We want to help equip a generation that can navigate inner life with more coherence and less shame.

🌱 Embed Existential Health in Healthcare and Mental Health Systems

CNRS seeks to Integrate the existential dimension into health models, establishing existential health as a fourth dimension alongside biological, psychological, and social factors. This involves teaching health professionals to include meaning, purpose, and lived experience in assessment, treatment and care practices and to use the four‑dimensional model in care planning. We want to train clinicians in existential psychology, narrative therapy, and meaning-centered approaches. This includes adding existential assessment questions to intake forms (e.g., “What gives your life meaning right now?”) and create referral pathways to community-based meaning-making resources (ritual groups, nature programs, peer circles). Too many people seek therapy for existential pain but receive only symptom management.

🌱 Strengthen Community Infrastructure for Meaning and Belonging

CNRS seeks to build secular, pluralistic spaces such as:

• Community ritual centers

• Nature-based gathering spaces

• Intergenerational storytelling circles

• Grief and transition rituals

• Collective creativity hubs (art, music, myth-making)

The principle is that belonging is existential medicine.

🌱 Rewild Ritual and Symbolism in Public Life

CNRS seeks to build existential health dynamics into public life, such as:

• Seasonal festivals rooted in ecology rather than religion

• Civic rituals for grief, transition, and collective healing

• Public art that invites reflection on mortality, purpose, and interdependence

• Shared symbols that are inclusive, nature-based, and non-dogmatic

Why? Ritual is the technology of existential coherence.

🌱 Support People in Spiritual Transition and Deconstruction

CNRS seeks to create society-wide initiatives, including:

• Public education about religious trauma and spiritual rupture

• Peer-led support groups

• Training for facilitators in post-religious care.

• Narrative reconstruction programs that help people rebuild meaning.

The hope is to prevent people from falling into existential freefall when leaving religion.

🌱 Integrate Existential Health into Environmental and Social Justice Movements

CNRS seeks to integrate existential health into environmental and social justice movements by:

• Framing ecological action as a source of meaning and belonging.

• Using ritual, story, and myth to deepen commitment to collective liberation.

• Highlighting interdependence as both ecological and existential truth.

Why? Existential health thrives when people feel part of something larger than themselves.

🌱 Reframe Suffering as a Natural Part of Life

CNRS addresses the universal reality of human suffering. This involves reframing suffering as a natural part of life, not a failure, and supporting people in relating to suffering rather than avoiding it. This includes creating spaces where grief, uncertainty, and mortality can be spoken without shame.

🌱 Offer existential care outside religious settings

CNRS offers existential care outside religious settings as a distinct form of support aimed at strengthening existential health. We develop non-religious spiritual care frameworks. We offer existential conversations, rituals, and meaning-making practices. We teach and promote existential care practices aimed at strengthening existential health.

🌱 Shift Public Discourse

CNRS is developing and launching an existential health campaign and cultural movement that positions existential health as a vital dimension of human wellbeing. The campaign reframes existential health as the missing dimension in modern wellbeing — the root of meaning, orientation, and connection. This involves:

• Media campaigns that highlight meaning, purpose, and connection

• Public conversations about mortality, grief, and existential courage

• Normalize talking about spiritual needs without religious language

The goal is to make existential health part of everyday conversation.

Crossing Thresholds Together

We stand at a threshold.

A moment when old structures are dissolving, when inherited meanings no longer hold, and when countless people are searching for a way to live with depth, dignity, and connection—without returning to the systems that once confined them.

The Center for Non‑Religious Spirituality exists because this moment demands courage, imagination, and collective action.

We call on all who feel the ache for belonging, the hunger for meaning, and the longing for a more humane world to join us in building a new spiritual commons—one rooted not in dogma, but in shared humanity; not in hierarchy, but in mutual care; not in belief, but in lived experience.

🌿 Our Commitment

We commit to cultivating spaces where people can heal from spiritual rupture, reclaim their inner life, and rediscover the sacred as something ecological, relational, and embodied.

We commit to practices that honor the body, nourish the mind, strengthen community, and awaken the spirit.

We commit to building a culture where meaning is made together, where grief is held collectively, and where ritual becomes a tool for liberation rather than control.

🔥 Our Invitation to You

We invite you to step into this work with us—not as spectators, but as co‑creators.

• Show up to the gatherings, rituals, and conversations that shape our shared culture

• Contribute your gifts—your creativity, your story, your presence, your care

• Help build the structures of belonging that so many people need

• Support those navigating spiritual transition, religious trauma, or existential disorientation

• Participate in the creation of new rituals, symbols, and practices that speak to our time

• Join in the collective work of reimagining spirituality for a world in transformation.

Existential health, communal resilience, and spiritual freedom cannot be outsourced. They are built through the choices we make, the relationships we nurture, and the rituals we create together.

Imagine a society where people know how to make meaning, how to hold grief, how to celebrate life, and how to belong without needing to believe the same things. Imagine a culture where spirituality is spacious, creative, ecological, and free. Imagine a community where you are not alone.

This is the future we are building. This is the invitation. This is the call.

Every person who joins this work strengthens the web of belonging. Every act of care becomes part of our shared culture. Every moment of presence becomes a seed for a more connected world. Step in. Show up. Co‑create.

🌿 Founder’s Pledge

I founded the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality in 2019. We have an Advisory Board that helps support the growth of our community. I see my role as one person alongside all of you, offering and investing my own contributions to the vision of our community and movement. My commitments to this community could be summarized as follows:

🌿 Collective Member Pledge

I invite all of us together to embrace this community pledge:

The 7 Thresholds of Non-Religious Spirituality

Yes, 2026 is a year of thresholds! Below is a threshold map for those leaving inherited religion and entering embodied, communal, nature‑rooted meaning.

1. The Threshold of Unlearning 🌅

What dissolves: inherited beliefs, patriarchal cosmologies, fear‑based narratives

What emerges: epistemic agency, curiosity, mythic sensitivity

This is the moment someone realizes: “I don’t have to believe the story I was given.”

It’s destabilizing and liberating at once.

2. The Threshold of Disenchantment 🌅

What dissolves: magical thinking, certainty, divine surveillance

What emerges: sober clarity, existential honesty, groundedness

This is the “nothing feels sacred anymore” phase.

It’s not a failure—it’s the composting stage.

3. The Threshold of Rewilding 🌅

What dissolves: domesticated spirituality, moralistic purity codes

What emerges: nature as teacher, body as oracle, intuition as compass

This is where spirituality becomes ecological, somatic, and relational rather than doctrinal.

4. The Threshold of Embodiment

What dissolves: dissociation, shame, inherited body‑negativity

What emerges: interoception, sensual presence, trauma‑informed self‑trust

This is where the body becomes the sacred text.

5. The Threshold of Communal Reconstitution 🌅

What dissolves: hyper‑individualism, isolation after deconstruction

What emerges: chosen kinship, ritual co‑creation, shared meaning

This is the moment someone realizes: “I can’t do this alone. Spirituality is relational.”

It’s the heart of post‑religious community building.

6. The Threshold of Mythic Sensitivity 🌅

What dissolves: literalism, cynicism, symbolic illiteracy

What emerges: archetypal awareness, poetic perception, mythic imagination

This is where people rediscover that symbols aren’t lies—they’re tools for transformation.

7. The Threshold of Agency & Becoming 🌅

What dissolves: external authority, inherited identity scripts

What emerges: self-authored meaning, ritual sovereignty, existential courage

This is the final crossing: “I am responsible for the story I live.”

It’s not the end—it’s the beginning of cyclical, ongoing transformation.

As a token of my appreciation for those who support my work as a paid Substack subscriber ($5 monthly or $50 annually) I offer a free full membership to the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, which includes copies of two of my books on religious deconstruction and post-religion reconstruction.