FOUNDATIONS
Know Thyself
See the self your life built, and give power to the Self you actually are.
You decided that this time you would handle the situation differently. You had thought it through, and you meant it. Then the conversation started, and a few minutes later you heard your voice doing the exact thing you had promised yourself you would not do, and you watched it happen, and you didn’t stop.
That is not a failure of will. You have plenty of will. You have used it to build a career, to raise children, to finish things other people abandoned. The part of you that runs that pattern is senior to your will and faster than your judgement, and it was operating before you knew the conversation had begun.
Your brain has one job: to keep you alive, reproducing, and stable. Making you happy, peaceful, or fulfilled was never in the job description. So when you set out to change something that sits outside what is normal for you, it works against you skilfully and underhandedly, and it does so below the level where you can catch it working. The life you are living now was given to you by the accidents and decisions of your past, and it stays that way until something intervenes.
Know Thyself is that intervention.
The map you build
This program does not teach you about human psychology in general. It builds a map of your personal identity, from your own history, revealed to you progressively over three days. Nothing in the machinery of your mind arrives as a type or a category you get sorted into. Every entry on the map comes from evidence you supply about your own life, which is why it holds when you get home. Learning some theory would not have that kind of permanence.
By the middle of the program you have a one-page map of the elements that make up the self your past constructed without your awareness. You see the whole apparatus working at once, including the part of it that is operating while you observe it. People describe that hour as the one that changed what was possible for them. A mechanism you can see is a mechanism you are no longer inside.
The first half of the program is the uncovering of the self your past constructed. Once you have seen the mechanism and you are no longer inside it, you go looking for who you were before it started. You gather the moments in your life when you were most alive, the ones that had nothing to do with comfort or achievement, and you read backward from them to what was actually there before any of the conditioning: your Essence, and the Source of your Joy. From that you articulate a Life Purpose, which is a direction rather than a goal, and the Values that follow from it. Then you invent practices that keep it in command when the old machinery reasserts itself, and take on projects that put the new Self into your life.
You leave with both maps: the self your past built, and the one you chose to live from.
What happens in the room
You sit in a chair, at a table with three to five other people, depending on the venue. You change tables at every break, so you meet the whole room over the weekend.
You choose what you say. Every exercise has a floor and no ceiling. You decide how far in you go, nobody is put on the spot, and what is said in the room stays in the room.
There is no lying on the floor, no chanting, no touching, no breathwork, and no personality instrument that sorts you into a type.
What you talk about is your own life instead of case studies or a general account of how people work. This is about what is actually happening in your life, and how it came to be that way. An anatomy of identity and a theory of mind is taught, but the content is yours.
The days are built out of conversations in pairs, inquiries at your table, writing on your own, exercises where you practise communication rather than hear about it, teaching from the front with slides, and open conversation with the whole room.
The guided meditations are short. They are used to mine your own inner experience, which is where the material of the uncovering work comes from, and they reach what direct questioning will not.
Twice a day the room stops and you write. You record your insights in your Insight Journal, read them to your table, and each table gives two to the whole room. This is how the knowledge accumulates. By Sunday you have written down what mattered most, in your own words, which is what makes it yours.
It is taught, not facilitated. Gabriel Sakakeeny has led this kind of work in a live training room since 1988 and is answerable for what you leave with.
Coffee morning and afternoon, an hour for lunch and an hour for dinner, and your own participant materials binder to write in and take home.
Who this is for
Accomplished adults, especially those in a life transition, whose self-defeating patterns have persisted through years of work on themselves.
You have read the books. You have done the therapy, and it was useful. You have hired the coach, did the retreat, kept the journal. Most of your life works, and much of it works well. And yet there is one part that has not shifted, no matter what you have brought to it, and by now you have quietly concluded that it is simply how you are.
It is not how you are. It is what you were assembled to be, by people and circumstances you did not choose, before you were old enough to have a say in it. That is a different problem, and it has a different solution.
This work asks something of you. Three days of full attention, honesty about your own history with the people at your table, and the willingness to try on a way of seeing yourself that you had not considered before. No one is asked to pretend to be something they are not. Nothing you say leaves the room. People who want a weekend of insight without applying it in real life find this program more demanding than they expected.
People who have been repeating the same patterns for thirty years, and have had enough, find that this process is the first thing that has transformed them.
What you leave with
The ability to catch the machinery while it is operating. Not afterwards, in the car, working out what happened. In the moment, while the reaction is still forming, which is the only moment at which anything can be done about it.
The ability to act from what you actually intend. Your Life Purpose and Values, articulated in your own words out of your own evidence, and the practices that keep them in command when the old machinery reasserts itself. Which it will.
Your two maps. The Default Self Map, in your handwriting. The Essential Self Map alongside it. These are the documents you take home and keep.
Your Insight Journal and the program materials, which hold the record of what you distinguished and how you got there.
The people who watched you do it and whom you watched do the same. That is not a bonus. Under pressure, months later, it is often the part that holds.
Testimonials
"The Know Thyself program was an exceptional experience. It deftly combined introspection and philosophy with concrete practices and tools. I can clearly see and measure improved efficiency in multiple parts of my daily life, and I experience less stress and more joy while doing so."
NICK ARTMAN · CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER
"Three patterns are at the source of everything where I was stuck, from my dislike of marketing to my rather empty dating life. Insights from one three-day weekend were like eight years of weekly therapy. I trained as a therapist and research psychologist at the PhD level, and I was in psychodynamic therapy for that long, so I do not say that lightly."
MINDA AGUHOB · RESEARCH PSYCHOLOGIST AND MEDITATION TEACHER
The next program
The Founder's Cohort
Friday 16 to Sunday 18 October 2026
Moonrise on Mill Street, historic downtown Nevada City, California.
Friday and Saturday, 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM.
Sunday, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM. Arrival from 8:30 AM on Friday.
Twelve places, and four reviewer places.
On-site lodging is available for the nights of the program.
This is the first cohort of the redesigned program, taught by Gabriel Sakakeeny.
After the three days
What you build over the weekend has to keep working in your life to make the difference you intended. That is the part people ask about before they enroll, and there is a structure for it.
Graduates of any Foundation program can join the Practice, which meets online every week for ninety minutes. You bring what is actually in front of you that week, and Gabriel Sakakeeny coaches it in front of the room. The Practice is for people who are actively putting the tools and perspectives of the Way to work in their own lives, over months rather than over a weekend.
Once a month the Institute meets for ninety minutes on the first Tuesday, and it is called First Tuesday. Gabriel leads. Some evenings he gives a talk and takes questions. On others, people send a coaching request ahead of time and are coached live. Nothing is prepared in advance. Any Foundation graduate may attend and may bring a guest. There is no charge.
The three Foundation programs stand on their own and can be taken in any order. Together they open the door to the Leadership Curriculum.