You have a decent job, a family, and a house with a nice lawn and a few weekends away every year. Your résumé reads like stability. Your Instagram looks like joy. On paper, you’re living the dream.

So why does it feel like something’s rotting just beneath the surface? Why do you wake up with that dull pressure in your chest, that quiet, nameless ache that says you were meant for something more?

It’s because you’ve been sold a lie.

They told you peace and happiness would come if you followed the script. If you just got safe, stayed stable, and kept your head down, life would start to feel full. But “full” never came. Stability became sedation. Comfort became decay.

Most people think they’ve plateaued. The truth? They’re already decomposing.

Growth isn’t a lifestyle upgrade. It’s not a productivity tweak or a new affirmation routine. It’s disintegration. It’s ripping out what no longer serves. It’s the slow, brutal, beautiful work of becoming someone who can hold real meaning.

This isn’t optional. Not if you want to be alive.

That’s what this post is about.. the real kind of growth. The kind mapped by Scott Barry Kaufman’s Sailboat Model from his phenomenal book “Transcend.” The kind that changes everything. The kind that saved my life.

Comfort is Stagnation with Good PR

We live in a culture that sells comfort like it’s salvation. It whispers that if you just settle down, get stable, and stop wanting so much, you’ll finally feel okay. But “okay” is a coffin with nice sheets. The truth is, every living thing is either growing or decaying. There is no third state. And most people who think they’ve plateaued are already in quiet decay.

Growth isn’t about optimizing your life hacks or writing affirmations on your mirror. It’s not a productivity fetish. It’s not self-help porn. Growth is disintegration. It’s shedding skins that no longer fit. It’s letting go of identities that kept you safe but made you small. It’s burying the person you had to be, so the person you were born to become can breathe.

This shift, from performing the life I thought I was supposed to live to becoming a man worth following, changed everything for me. For the first half of my life, I played the role I was handed: husband, worker, achiever. And I was good at it. But I was also quietly dying inside. When I finally stopped trying to impress a system that didn’t see me and started forging myself from the inside out, life became terrifying… but real. And real is better than safe. 

Always.

Now I’ve spent about as much time in my second life as I did my first This second life is the one I chose, not inherited. And I can tell you with absolute clarity: this life is better. Harder, sharper, and more complicated at times, but filled with meaning, fire, and purpose. 

That’s why growth is central to the Tribe. Because we don’t want men and women who are simply “better.” We want people who have faced their own unraveling and come back with deeper roots and wilder wings.

Scott Barry Kaufman gets this. His Sailboat Model of Transcendence isn’t just clever, t’s clinical. It’s a psychological map from survival to significance, built for people who are sick of drifting. It doesn’t start with dreams. It starts with the leaks. You patch the hull. You raise the sail. And you choose a direction worth bleeding for.

That’s growth.

And it’s not optional.

What Is Growth? (According to Kaufman)

When I found Kaufman’s model, it hit like a lightning strike. Not just a metaphor. A mirror. This was the path I’d been hacking through in the dark for over twenty years, without realizing someone had already drawn the map. If I’d found this back in 2004, I’d have bled a hell of a lot less.

It works. And that’s why it sits at the heart of how we structure growth in the Tribe.

This framework took Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, the pyramid everyone’s seen in some PowerPoint somewhere, and reshaped it into something alive, accurate, and human. The popular (but incorrect) interpretation of Maslow’s original model stacked human needs in levels: first food and safety, then belonging, then esteem, and finally self-actualization perched precariously at the top like a luxury item. It was tidy, linear, and wrong.

Life doesn’t work like that.

Kaufman reframed it: not a pyramid, but a sailboat.

In his model, the boat represents your foundational needs, the part that keeps you afloat. This includes safety and security (physical, financial, emotional), connection and belonging, and self-esteem rooted in competence and autonomy. If your boat is cracked or leaking, you spend all your energy bailing water just to stay alive.

The sail, on the other hand, represents freedom. It’s the part that catches the wind and moves you forward. The sail includes growth drivers like purpose, exploration, creativity, love, and transcendence. This is where meaning lives, not on the dock, not in the hull, but in the forward motion of a soul catching wind.

Growth, then, means becoming seaworthy. Not flawless, not unbreakable, but functional enough to raise your sail and choose a direction. If you’re constantly scrambling to survive, patching holes in your relationships, your self-worth, your sense of identity, you’ll never catch that wind. You’ll stay floating in the same spot, watching other people chase horizons you never reach.

That’s the brilliance of the sailboat analogy; it doesn’t lie to you. It doesn’t pretend life is linear or that growth comes with a syllabus. It understands that some days you’re just trying to keep the boat from sinking. Other days, the wind hits just right and you remember why you started sailing at all.

That’s the kind of growth we’re after. It isn’t performance dressed up as purpose, or healing turned into a side project. It’s the kind that builds just enough wholeness in the hull to hoist the sail and move toward something real.

Why Growth Is the Path to Meaning

I bought the lie, wholesale. The American Dream, version 1.0: Go to college. Land the job. Lock in the mortgage. Accumulate. Retire. Die.

That was my first life.

And I was quietly, utterly, miserable.

It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t theatrical. Just a steady, silent rot. Like acid leaking under the floorboards of my life. I was playing a game I never chose, chasing a prize I didn’t want, in shoes that blistered with every step. The smiles were real enough to fool most people. Even me, for a while. But underneath? A constant throb of “this can’t be it.” Eventually, the dissonance stopped whispering. It screamed. Not with panic, but with precision. Suicide didn’t feel like a cry for help. It felt like a way to stop lying.

But I didn’t need a revolution. I didn’t need to join a commune in the woods or shave my head and chant Sanskrit in the Himalayas. All I did was shift one thing:

I stopped asking, “What should I be doing?” and started asking, “Who am I becoming?”

At first, I framed it as a hunger for adventure. That made sense. It sounded masculine. Noble. Romantic. But the deeper I went, the more I realized it wasn’t thrill I was chasing. It was growth. That spark I felt on the trail, on the mat, in the classroom, on the page… that wasn’t escapism. That was resonance. It was my soul recognizing its own expansion.

And that’s the key. Growth isn’t an optional luxury. It’s the only real way out of survival mode.

According to this model, when we’ve stabilized the hull, when our basic needs are intact, the question we ask ourselves changes. It’s no longer “What do I get?” It becomes, “What can I become?”

Meaning doesn’t fall into your lap. It doesn’t show up in some grand epiphany or checklist of accomplishments. It emerges. Slowly. Organically. As a byproduct of growth.

You don’t find meaning. You grow into it.

The more you stretch your capacity, the more life stops feeling like performance and starts feeling like presence. Not because you’ve “arrived,” but because you’ve re-entered the stream. You’re moving. Aligned. Tapped into something real. You stop surviving. You start becoming.

That’s why growth isn’t optional in the Tribe. Because I’ve lived what happens when you don’t. I played the good soldier. I checked every box. I built the life I was told would make me happy. And what I found was a slow, soul-level suffocation. The kind you don’t notice until it’s almost too late. I’ve buried that version of me. And I will never, ever dig him up again.

Now, we build forward, with fire in our lungs and purpose in our blood.

The Six Realms of Growth (And Why They All Matter)

Growth isn’t a vibe. It’s a system. And when one part of the system rots, the whole structure warps. You can’t meditate your way out of chronic illness. You can’t lift your way out of abandonment wounds. You can’t fuck your way to God when shame is welded to your nervous system. The self is a single instrument. And when one string snaps, the whole song shifts.

This model didn’t just help me identify what matters. It helped me make sense of the shape my life had already taken. When I looked back, I saw it clearly: real growth always followed the same pattern. First, I had to stabilize, build the hull. Then, and only then, I could unfurl the sail. That’s how I rebuilt my life, across six distinct realms. That’s how I woke up.

I didn’t plan it this way. I didn’t sit down with a model and map out my healing. I was just clawing toward aliveness. But looking back, the pattern is undeniable. Growth never came all at once. It came in waves… different domains, different seasons. Each one required the same thing: stabilize first, then stretch. Secure the hull, then raise the sail. And every time I skipped that first step, I paid for it. That’s why this next part matters. Because if even one of these six realms is fractured, it will sabotage everything else. Every breakthrough starts with repair.

So what are these six realms where growth has to occur?

Physical

The body is the first and last place growth happens. It’s the vessel. It’s the proof of effort. It’s the foundation for everything else.

When I started my second life, I was borderline obese, living on garbage food, and barely moved unless I had to. My first act of self-respect wasn’t writing a book or finding religion; it was cleaning up my diet and committing to movement. That simple act stabilized everything. I didn’t have to be ripped. I just had to stop the decline.

Once the ship stopped sinking, I started testing my limits. Barefoot running turned into ultramarathons. The body became not just a tool, but a canvas for transformation. Pain, resilience, effort… it all played out in the physical. This wasn’t about aesthetics. It was primal. It was about proving to myself that I could do hard things.

Mental

This one was brutal. For years, seasonal affective disorder hijacked my clarity and sabotaged any sense of progress. Winters in West Michigan, where I lived at the time, were mental death caused by perpetually-overcast sky. No clarity, no hope. Just fog.

I stabilized with movement, light therapy, eventually a relocation to sunnier climates. But it wasn’t just biology. I had to dig into my beliefs, too, in therapy. I had to plumb the depths of my subconscious patterns I had inherited and never questioned. Mental growth isn’t about being “smart.” It’s about being clear. I had to recognize narratives. I had to unlearn lies. I had to rewire scripts. I had to start protecting my focus like it’s sacred.

That’s how I started down the path to psychological health.

Emotional

I grew up in a house where emotions were minefield territory. My job was to regulate others by suppressing myself. I got good at it. Too good. Emotional suppression became a default. You don’t show pain. You don’t express joy. You perform calm, even as you boil inside.

My journey here started with therapy. Real, uncomfortable therapy. I had to learn emotional literacy from scratch. I had to turn suppression into compartmentalization, then alchemize that into healthy expression. This is still a work in progress, but it’s the most essential work I’ve done.

In law enforcement, this became a Hell of a super power. Detachment on scene, emotional processing afterward. It’s not trauma dumping, and it’s not avoidance. It’s integration.

Social

We are mirrors. Who you surround yourself with reflects and shapes who you are.

In my first life, my social circle was proximity-based. Whoever was around, that was the “friend group.” The result? I had a lot of shallow relationships. There was a lot of misalignment. Sometimes, there was outright toxicity.

But in my second life, I changed, not because I chased new people, but because I became more myself. And like a beacon, that authenticity drew the right ones in. People with depth. Curiosity. Fire. The more I grew, the more I resonated with those on a similar path. And something clicked.

We helped each other grow. We challenged, sharpened, and saw each other. This was the seed of the Tribe, not a group of perfect people, but a network of aligned ones.

Spiritual

My first spiritual operating system was Catholicism. I didn’t leave it so much as I suffocated under its hypocrisy. The rituals felt hollow. The dogma rang false. I couldn’t stomach the dissonance between what was preached and what was practiced, from the historical horrors to the modern coverups.

So I walked away. For a long time, I lived in spiritual rejection. But eventually, the pull came back… not to religion, but to reverence, to wonder, to mystery. I started seeing how behavioral science echoed Buddhism, which led to the epiphany how all world religions shared common psychological truths. Slowly, I built something personal. I developed my own flavor of spirituality. It’s weird, but works it for me. 

I found a faith that fit. It’s a practice rooted in consciousness, contribution, and sacred presence. Spirituality, I realized, is the sail itself. It’s what catches the wind when you’ve done the hard work below the deck.

Sexual

Let’s not sugarcoat it. Sex drives everything. And when it’s repressed, shamed, or fragmented, it creates chaos in every other domain.

My fascination started early. Not out of abundance, but lack. Yes, my fascination with human sexual behavior started as a misguided attempt to get laid. But over time, I turned curiosity into study. I dove deep into the psychology of sex, gender, and relationships. I made it my academic focus. Then, eventually, one of my most enjoyable creative focuses.

In adulthood, this realm became central to my writing, my philosophy, and my personal evolution. Not because sex is the end goal. But because integrating our sexual identity is often the missing link in human development. Sacred polarity. Erotic play. Vulnerable embodiment. These are not luxuries. They’re rocket fuel for identity, for love, for creation.

If your sexual self is buried or distorted, you’re walking around with a fractured core. Reintegrate it, and everything changes. Let’s not sugarcoat it. Sex drives everything. Not just pleasure or attraction. Sex fuels our identity, our confidence, our creativity, our intimacy, our sense of power, our capacity to connect, and our ability to be fully seen. When it’s repressed, shamed, or fragmented, the consequences ripple into every other domain. Relationships dull. Energy drains. Purpose blurs. We become strangers to our own bodies, and to the people closest to us.

My fascination didn’t begin from abundance. It came from lack. I was like most men, no roadmap, no role models, just porn and performance pressure. At first, my curiosity was immature, even selfish. But something deeper pulled me in. Over time, I turned that curiosity into study. I devoured everything I could on the psychology of sex, polarity, gender, and attraction. I studied it academically, then creatively, then personally.

And the deeper I went, the more I realized: this isn’t just about technique or compatibility. This is about becoming whole. Because sexual growth is human growth. It’s reclaiming the parts of ourselves we were taught to hide. It’s excavating the guilt, confronting the shame, and choosing to explore, not as a hedonist, but as an integrated adult.

In adulthood, this became a cornerstone of my writing, my philosophy, and my healing. Not because sex is the end goal, but because our relationship to sex reflects everything else. Sacred polarity. Erotic play. Dominance and surrender. Creative fire. Honest arousal. These aren’t dirty secrets. They’re doorways into the most electric version of ourselves.

And yet, for most people, this is the final frontier. The realm we were told not to talk about. The part of ourselves we never fully unpack. The Tribe breaks that silence.

Because here, sexual growth isn’t taboo. It’s required. Not in a performative, orgiastic caricature. But in a real, raw, adult way. We explore how we express it. How we withhold it. How we connect through it. We talk about seduction, restraint, kink, monogamy, open dynamics, sacred eros, embodied pleasure, and relational truth. Not to push any one path—but to stop pretending this doesn’t matter.

If your sexual self is buried or distorted, you’re walking around with a fractured core. Reintegrate it, and everything changes. Your presence deepens. Your relationships sharpen. Your power returns. Your fire comes home.

This is the realm most neglected in modern growth work. And that’s why we make it sacred terrain.

Each realm matters. Miss one, and the system starts to wobble. Master them all, and you feel powerful… until you realize you’re still alone. You’ve done the internal work. You’ve cleaned the vessel, raised the sail, even caught some wind. But without meaningful connection, you just drift. Strong, but aimless. Whole, but isolated.

The reason? Because growth doesn’t end with you. It’s tested, refined, and amplified through relationships. Real relationships. Not proximity, cohabitation, or digital echo chambers. Real relationships that feature intimacy, alignment, and co-creation.

That’s where most growth models break down. They stop at the self. But in the Tribe, we don’t.

How Relationships Must Grow

If individual growth is the sailboat, our needs met, our sails unfurled, then relationships aren’t another boat sailing beside us. That’s where Kaufman’s model starts to fray. It gives us a map of the self, but not a blueprint for intimacy.

Real relationships aren’t just parallel journeys. They’re not two vessels moving in tandem. And they’re definitely not one fused ship where individuality dissolves into co-dependence. That kind of thinking creates exactly what so many people are trapped inside: either toxic enmeshment or lonely proximity. Two people sharing a bed, a mortgage, and a schedule… but not a life.

We needed a better metaphor.

That’s where the garden comes in.

I’ve written before that our life is a garden, not something we survive or optimize, but something we intentionally cultivate. We don’t control the weather. We don’t control the seasons. But we are responsible for how we tend the soil, what we plant, and what we’re willing to prune or protect.

Relationships work the same way. They are not fixed entities. They are living ecosystems. Each person brings their own soil, their own seeds, their own weather patterns. And when we decide to grow something together, we’re not merging into one garden. We’re building a third plot. A shared bed between us. The garden of us.

That shared space requires just as much care as your own. Neglect it, and it withers. Overwater it, and it drowns. Expect it to grow without weeding, pruning, or protecting, and it turns into a tangled mess of resentment and regret.

And that’s the problem most people face: they assume love will self-sustain. They treat intimacy like a permanent state, rather than a living system. They stop tending it. They forget that gardens evolve. And if they’re not evolving together, they’re decaying apart.

This is why the Tribe doesn’t just train for individual growth. We train for relational stewardship. We build the muscles to cultivate shared meaning, shared direction, and shared responsibility. We teach people how to choose partners who are also tending their own soil. We create rituals for pruning dead growth and fertilizing new possibilities. We normalize the truth that not every relationship is meant to last forever, but every relationship deserves intention while it’s alive.

The Tribe offers not just connection, but calibration. A chance to co-create relational containers that are alive, reciprocal, and deeply rooted in mutual growth. We don’t settle for relationships of convenience. We build gardens of contribution.

Because intimacy, like growth, isn’t guaranteed. It’s cultivated, or it dies.

And we weren’t meant to grow alone.

In this model, each of us tends our own soil, our history, our habits, our values, our boundaries. But together, we co-create a third space. The garden of us.

And that third space only thrives when we’re are willing to tend to it.

From Proximity to Intention

In my first life, relationships happened by accident. Family, coworkers, neighbors, old friends from my youth. I didn’t choose them intentionally. I inherited them, adapted to them, tolerated them. Some were really good. Some were quietly suffocating. Some were landmines in disguise.

I stayed in many of them far too long. Why? 

Obligation. Guilt. Nostalgia. Hope.

But you can’t grow inside a garden full of neglect, overgrowth, and salted earth.

So I started pruning, setting hard boundaries, and letting certain plants die. And as I got healthier, I started attracting a different kind of person, the kind of person who was also tending their own plot. The kind of person growing food, not just pretty flowers. This was the real beginning of the Tribe.

It’s wasn’t just a new social circle. It was a shift in gravity. The more I grew, the more I met people who wanted to grow. The more we aligned, the more we built together. Of course, some of the folks from that first life carried over into the second because, despite my conditioning to living my life on other people’s terms, parts of my authentic self have always shined through.

What Real Relationship Growth Looks Like

In Tribe language, we don’t just “have” relationships. We garden them. That means:

• We don’t just stay out of loyalty. We stay out of resonance. If the soil is dead, we either replenish it together or walk away with respect.
  
• We don’t expect one person to be the whole garden. That’s codependence dressed up as romance. The best relationships are about complement, not completion.
  
• We don’t fear pruning. Honest feedback, rupture and repair, clarifying boundaries… these are gardening tools. They don’t destroy the relationship. They keep it alive.
  
• We don’t chase permanence. Gardens are seasonal. So are people. The real test of love is not “forever.” It’s: Are we both still showing up with our hands in the soil?
  

The Tribe as the Container for Relationship Growth

In the Tribe, we normalize two things most people fear: evolution and separation.

We believe in depth, not duration. We believe in tending, not owning.

And we build the kind of community that feeds this mindset. Tribe members grow together, work side by side, and form intimate bonds, but no one is shackled. If a relationship stops serving the garden, we don’t cling. We bless. We honor what it was, and we release it.

Because clinging to a withering connection is one of the surest ways to kill your own growth.

The Tribe is not a cage. It’s a greenhouse.

A place where the right relationships thrive under the right conditions. A place where each person tends their own bed, but we build the irrigation together. We share tools. We ward off pests. We help each other through droughts and floods. We trade what we have in surplus.

When someone’s joy is wilting, we don’t offer advice from across the fence. We step into their row and help pull the weeds.

That’s what real relational growth looks like.

It’s not perfect. Gardens never are. But it’s honest. It’s alive.

And it gives you a reason to get out of bed on a Tuesday morning.

The Role of Tribe in Personal Growth

You can grow alone, for a while. You can push yourself, challenge your assumptions, read the books, and chase the edge of discomfort.

But eventually, you will plateau. Or you’ll burn out. Or worse, you’ll become so convinced of your own story that no one can reach you. Left alone, most people either stall or implode. We need others to validate our reality. 

That’s where Tribe comes in.

The Tribe isn’t a rescue. It’s not a fan club. It’s a crucible.

A pressure chamber, not for conformity, but for individuation. The real kind. The kind that only happens when the people around you won’t let you lie to yourself.

Because in a Tribe like this, everyone is growing. Everyone is pruning, planting, and harvesting. And that kind of collective momentum has gravity. You can’t stay small when you’re surrounded by people playing bigger. You can’t keep pretending when someone who loves you just handed you your blind spot with grace and precision.

What the Collective Actually Does

The Tribe isn’t just a group of friends. It’s not a network, a club, or a social circle. It’s a living system. And inside that system, the collective does three things for you that you cannot do for yourself:

• It reflects your blind spots. People who see you, really see you, will notice when you shrink. They will notice when you lie. They will notice when you forget who you are. In a healthy Tribe, reflection isn’t shame. It’s the sacred mirror.
  
• It witnesses your breakthroughs. Most people experience their biggest wins in silence. No one sees the moment you finally said no. Or said yes. Or didn’t reach for the drink. Or showed up even though everything in you wanted to hide. In the Tribe, those moments get witnessed, honored, and anchored.
  
• It demands your earned wisdom. You’re not just here to receive. You’re here to give. That thing you’ve been through? That skill you’ve honed? That pain you’ve turned into perspective? Someone else needs it. The Tribe calls it forward. Because in the economy of the Tribe, contribution is currency.
  

Individual Growth Multiplied

When one person grows in their six domains, it creates ripples. But when everyone is growing? The Tribe evolves.

It gets deeper, wiser, more resilient, and more mythic.

It becomes an ecosystem of lived excellence, where the healed become healers, the tested become teachers, and the broken become architects of something more whole.

This is not a performance or a polished TED Talk. This is life, sharpened by proximity.

A Tribe like this will break you open and hold you while you rebuild. It will stretch your limits and laugh with you on the other side. It will celebrate your victories and demand your integrity. It will call you up, not out.

Because when the people around you are on Fire with growth, you don’t need motivation. You just need to show up.

And that’s the point.

Conclusion: Why This Model Works

The sailboat model isn’t just a theory. It’s a map. And it maps onto exactly what I’ve spent the last twenty years stumbling toward, refining, testing, failing at, and starting again.

First, you patch the hull. You stabilize. You meet your basic needs – safety, connection, self-worth, just enough to float.

Then, you raise the sail. You seek purpose, freedom, transcendence. You aim for something more than survival.

And then, you steer into the unknown. Together.

Because that’s what The Tribe really is.

It’s not some ideology or a lifestyle brand. It’s not a club for self-improvement junkies.

It’s a container; a pressure chamber for shared growth. A sanctuary for real relationships. A forge for wisdom, connection, erotic polarity, personal responsibility, spiritual alignment, and sacred work. A place to share what you’ve learned and learn from people who are smarter, wiser, braver than you.

It’s how I want to live. But more than that, it’s how I have lived, imperfectly, but relentlessly, for the last two decades. And I want to take everything that made my second life worth living and refine it into something others can use.

Growth isn’t about “being better.” That was the lie of the first life, the polished life, the performative life.

Growth is about being more human, more resilient, and more honest. It’s more attuned to your needs and the needs of the people you love. It’s life, except more alive.

The future doesn’t need polished influencers or flawless gurus. It doesn’t need hustle bros or spiritual bypassers or people chasing hacks like life is just a series of upgrades.

The future needs integrated humans.

The future needs people who’ve fallen apart and stitched themselves back together with clarity. People who’ve looked at their shadow and didn’t flinch. People who’ve learned how to love, how to build, how to offer something sacred to the world without losing themselves in the process.

That’s what The Tribe is here to grow.

One Fire. Many flames.

If this vision speaks to something ancient in you, if you’re done pretending, coasting, or drifting, then the next step isn’t more reading. It’s showing up.

You don’t join a Tribe. You reveal yourself to one.

Let’s see who you really are.

We’re not looking for followers. We’re looking for builders. If you want a Tribe that entertains you, scroll on. If you want a Tribe that demands your soul’s best work, this is your Tribe. Interested? Join our Facebook group and help us build something special. 

~Jason

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