FOUNDATIONS
The Stages of Life
The map, the path, and the promise ahead.
You have been solving your life one stretch at a time, without a picture of the whole thing, and you have been doing it since you were old enough to try. The school, then the work, then the person, then the house, then whatever came after that. Each decision made sense when you made it. Everything you have built and everything you regret got decided that way.
You have probably concluded that some of those decisions were mistakes. A few of them were. That is not what accounts for where you are. You were navigating a life that has an order to it, and no one ever showed you the order. It arrives whether you are ready or not, it makes different demands at every point, and the things that worked in the last stretch stop working in the next one, usually before you notice.
That is why the same person can be capable at work and lost at home, or successful for twenty years and then suddenly uncertain what any of it was for. It is not a failure. It is a stage doing what a stage does, and it has a function, a duration, and an end.
The Stages of Life is where you get the whole picture.
Where you are and where you can go
This program gives you two things you can use, and both of them are about you rather than about human development in general.
The first is the model of the stages themselves, and your own position in it. You learn where a life goes, in what order, and why. Then you locate yourself, the experience of which people describe as the one that reorganised everything. Much of what you have taken as evidence about your character turns out to be a description of where you were standing at the time. That is a considerable amount of self-criticism retired in an afternoon.
The second is the list of Attainments. Every stage develops particular abilities, and they are specific rather than abstract: to recover from a setback quickly; to speak from inside another person's point of view; to be at closure with your parents; to tell the truth when it costs something; to manage your finances so that your needs are reliably met. You go through the list and you find the ones you never picked up, most of them from stages you passed through decades ago. Nobody arrives at midlife with a complete set. What people find is that the gaps explain far more than they expected, and that an Attainment missed at twenty can still be developed at fifty. You become a fully evolved adult, for real.
You also see what is coming. This is where people report the most relief, because the thing they had been bracing for turns out to be a stage with a function and an end rather than the beginning of the decline.
And you see why people who are nothing like you are the way they are, which changes what is possible with your family, your colleagues, and the people you had written off.
You leave with your position on the map, the Attainments you still have to develop, and a basis for the decisions of the next decade.
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 work with most of the room before the end.
What you bring is your own life, in the plainest sense. What happened, in what order, and what you made of it. You are not asked to relive anything. You are asked to look at the sequence.
Each stage is given its own space in the room. Music, images, and film are used to bring back what a period of life actually felt like, which is a faster and more accurate way in than description. You recognise a stage before you are told what it is, and often you recognise the people who were in it with you.
The days are built out of lecture and demonstration, inquiries at your table, conversations in pairs, writing on your own, and open conversation with the whole room. Sometimes, you’ll do a short guided meditation that will allow you to remember the feelings, sights and sounds of an earlier stage of life.
Twice a day the room stops and you write. Your insights go into your Insight Journal, you read them to your table, and each table brings two to the whole room. That is how the material accumulates over three days, and by Sunday you have it in your own words rather than in ours.
What is said in the room stays in the room.
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
Adults who want to be free of their past, effective in the present, and deliberate about what comes next.
Prior development work is an advantage, and so is having found it insufficient. If you have done the reading and the therapy and the retreats and still cannot account for how you arrived here, that is the condition this program addresses. The material you have been working with was probably about your psychology. This is about the natural shape of a human life, which is a different subject.
It is especially valuable for people at a turning point. A career changing or ending, children leaving, a parent failing, a marriage in its second or third form, or the plain arrival of an age you did not expect to reach. It also suits people who are nowhere near a reckoning and would rather see what’s ahead on the road they are traveling before they get there.
What the program requires is three days of attention,, openness to new ways of thinking, and a willingness to look at your own history without defending it.
People who have been carrying a private verdict about how their life turned out find that the verdict does not survive the weekend.
What you leave with
Your position on the map. Where you are in the arc of a life, what your current stage requires to evolve and transcend, and what the next one will ask that this one does not.
Closure on a set of conclusions about yourself. You see why you turned out the way you did, which retires a body of self-criticism you have been carrying for decades and treating as fact.
The Attainments you have yet to develop. Specific abilities, identified against your own history, most of them from stages you passed through long ago, all of them still available to you now.
Foresight. What is coming, in what order, and what it is for. Foresight is what makes the difference between growing into a stage and being ambushed by one. This includes the most evolved states of being that humans have occupied.
An empathically humble way to understand the people around you. Why people who are nothing like you are the way they are, and what becomes possible with your family, your colleagues, and the people you had written off.
Your Insight Journal and the program materials, which hold what you distinguished over the three days and how you got there, in your own words.
The people who did it alongside you. There is value in sharing the experiences and inquiries with the people in your cohort. You will find that you see yourself in the experience of others.
Testimonials
"Until having recently completed The Stages of Life, I never in a million years would have even considered the possibility of living an integrated life. Yet seemingly without effort, and regardless of how I feel in the moment, I am discovering that I can put myself in social situations with any assortment of people and reliably have the evening be light, fun, and moving for all, without any attention on myself."
J. MICHAEL KEMMY
"The most profound transformational course I have done in forty years. It is still illuminating and reverberating."
JIM O'BRIEN
The next program
Friday 15 to Sunday 17 January 2027
Northern California. Venue to be confirmed.
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.
Sixteen places, and four reviewer places.
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.