Facilitators of the Return

Life Between Lives, Fundamental Peace, and the Second Axial Age — reflections for the 2026 MNI World Conference.

By Luis Miguel Gallardo — Life Between Lives® facilitator, Michael Newton Institute; Founder & President, World Happiness Foundation.

Every so often a book arrives that does not tell you something new so much as it tells you, with sudden clarity, what you have been doing all along. Dr. Ken Lakritz has given the attendees of our 2026 World Conference such a book. An Old, New Story of Psychology, forty years in the making, is his summa: a single continuous account of where the psyche comes from, where it is going, and how to help it get there. Reading it in preparation for his keynote, I kept experiencing the feeling T. S. Eliot promised — arriving where I started, and knowing the place for the first time. This is a letter about that recognition: about what we actually do when we facilitate at the Michael Newton Institute, and why that work belongs, I believe, at the center of the great turning our era is living through.

An Old, New Story — and Why It Reads Like a Map of Our Practice

Lakritz's thesis can be held in one image. The Kabbalists drew two movements through the Tree of Life: a descending path, the lightning flash by which unity differentiates itself into an individual, embodied life, and an ascending path, the serpent that winds back up, consciously reintegrating everything that was separated on the way down. Neumann called these the two halves of the conscious journey; Jung called the second one individuation; the alchemists called the whole of it solve et coagula. Lakritz's contribution is to insist that these are not metaphors decorating clinical work but the master map of it — and that psychology has spent a century teaching only the first half, the building of egos, while neglecting the second, the return.

Then he does something that should matter enormously to everyone in our community. He reads the history of depth psychology itself as a retracing of the return path: Freud sounded the personal unconscious, Jung opened the collective layer beneath it, Grof mapped the transpersonal dimension beyond the individual lifespan — and Michael Newton, through thousands of deep hypnotic regressions, reached the deepest stratum of all, the life-between-lives dimension of the soul's existence. In Lakritz's account, our founder's work is not an outlier at the edge of the field. It is the furthest sounding of the field's own trajectory, the place the discipline was always heading. He holds the ontology open, as a careful clinician should, and he reports what those of us in this work witness constantly: that whatever the ultimate nature of these journeys, their fruits are consistent, durable, and clinically real. The fear of death loses its grip. The difficulties of the present life reorganize themselves as curriculum — chosen, meaningful, survivable.

What We Actually Do: The Craft of Facilitation

It is worth saying plainly, in this frame, what our work as facilitators consists of — because from the outside it can look exotic, and from the inside it is a craft as disciplined as any in the healing professions.

We begin where Lakritz's clinical protocol begins: with the vessel. Not everyone is ready for a journey that softens the boundaries of ordinary identity, and part of our training is precisely the discernment his book formalizes — distinguishing a sound ego seeking integration from a fragile one seeking escape, distinguishing emergence from emergency, honoring the sequence he names so memorably: vessel, contents, axis. Then comes the long single session, three to four hours held in unbroken attention: the deepening, the corridors of childhood and the womb, the passage through a prior death, and the threshold beyond it — the light, the guides, the soul group, the council whose review is conducted not as judgment but as searching compassion. And then, no less important, the return trip: the slow coagulation of what was touched into body, relationship, and ordinary conduct, without which even the most luminous session evaporates.

Through it all runs the ethic Lakritz states in a sentence I would engrave above every training room: the non-local therapies are transmitted, not administered. We can accompany no one further than we ourselves have gone. Our credential is not the certificate; it is the state of our own inner work — our steadiness in the dark, the soundness of our own vessel when someone else's fire needs holding. This is why our community gathers, why we sit in council with one another, why the conference opens each day not with a lecture but with a meditation. The instrument of this profession is the practitioner. It is the same conviction behind every training we run at the World Happiness Academy.

Naming What Our Clients Touch: Fundamental Peace

For years I have been trying to give a rigorous name to what people contact across that threshold — because it is not bliss exactly, not anesthesia, not the mere absence of distress. In my research I have called it Fundamental Peace: a foundational state of consciousness, with identifiable neurobiological components, that persists beneath and within experience rather than depending on circumstances. We have begun to validate it empirically, to measure it, to study how contemplative and hypnotic practice stabilizes it — the work now carried by the Chair of Contemplative Sciences. And what strikes me, reading Lakritz, is that Fundamental Peace and his "unitary reality field" are two vocabularies for one territory. When a client returns from a life-between-lives session with the terror of death dissolved, they have not acquired a belief. They have remembered a ground.

My own formulation has always been that Fundamental Peace is not the absence of pain but the transmutation of its energy into love and compassion — and here Lakritz's beloved Isaac Luria completes the thought. Luria taught that creation shattered, that sparks of holy light lie trapped in the broken places, and that the human task — tikkun — is to gather them home, one liberated spark at a time. Every session we facilitate is tikkun in miniature: a descent into the broken places of a single biography and beyond it, and the raising of what was trapped there into conscious light. The facilitator's chair, understood this way, is not a technique's operating station. It is a station of repair.

The Alchemy We Carry in Our Pockets

The deeper convergence is architectural. My Integral Transpersonal Model rests on three pillars — Jungian individuation, the Shadow–Gift–Essence grammar of transmutation, and the evolution of consciousness itself — and Lakritz's book is built, chapter by chapter, on precisely that triad: individuation as the lived path, alchemy as its operating manual, and the Second Axial Age as its evolutionary context. When independent lines of work converge like this, drawn from different lineages and different decades of practice, I take it the way Lakritz takes the convergence of the mystics: as evidence that we are all tracing one territory. Readers who want the longer arc of this argument will find it gathered in our reader on consciousness and inner work.

The Deepest Wound and the World's Midlife

And then the book widens, as our work must widen. Lakritz's boldest claim is that what midlife is to the individual, the present historical moment is to humanity as a whole: the long collective descent — differentiation, separation, the sovereign modern ego with its dead machine of a cosmos — has bottomed out, and civilization itself stands at the turn of the arcs, with all the turbulence a turning implies.

In my own cartography of the world's suffering, I have named six archetypal wounds — Repression, Denial, Shame, Rejection, Guilt, and, deepest of all, Separation — each with a healing virtue, and Separation's virtue is Care, is Love. Lakritz's diagnosis of modernity is, in my language, the Sixth Wound at planetary scale: human beings more cut off from the ground of being than ever before, and a civilization whose institutions encode the cutoff. The Second Axial Age, then, is nothing less than the collective healing of Separation — re-linking, which is what the word religion originally meant, undertaken this time consciously.

This is why I have argued, at the World Happiness Foundation and in the UN's Beyond GDP process, that our era needs two maps, not one: a compass toward flourishing and a shadow map of suffering. The Global Pain and Trauma Map reads the world's anguish across seven domains not as noise to be managed but as the collective nigredo — the blackening that precedes every transmutation — and the Fundamental Peace Index is simply its inversion: what remains, and what rises, as the pain is met and transmuted. Happytalism, the paradigm I have spent years articulating, is in this light the political economy of the ascending arc: the recognition that a civilization measuring itself by accumulation alone is a midlife executive flogging the morning's program long past noon, and that the afternoon's question — what is all of this for? — has moved into humanity's house and will not leave. Our mission of ten billion human beings free, conscious, and happy by 2050 is not utopian decoration. It is a Second-Axial commitment, stated as policy.

It Takes a Village — and the Village Speaks Many Languages

Our conference program embodies the book more literally than its designers may have realized. Lakritz writes in his preface of his hope that practitioners of the emerging paradigm and practitioners of the established ones might integrate their work into a collaborative village — and Segment 2 convenes exactly that village, with Ken himself alongside Rajashree Maa, whose Kali-Ki Reiki appears in the book's survey of energy healing, and Dr. Diana Paque, Laurie Goldman, and Brooke Oxtal showing us what collaborative therapeutic relationships look and feel like from both sides of the chair. Segment 4 hands the future to Pete Smith — whose Quantum Consciousness work likewise stands in the book's fifth family — and to the road toward 2027. No single modality restores the whole axis. The physical field needs its stabilizers, the archetypal field its depth workers and regressionists, the unitary field its contemplatives and facilitators; the skill of our age is matching the instrument to the field, and the humility of our age is knowing that we hold one instrument among many. What I have long called ecosystems of happiness — cities, schools, enterprises, hospitals designed as environments of flourishing — is this same village principle scaled to civilization.

And the village must speak many languages. Segment 3, A Legacy Without Borders, is for me the most personal hour of the conference. The soul, as every facilitator learns, is multilingual — but the healing happens in the mother tongue. Watching Lia López and our Spanish-speaking facilitators and career partners carry Michael's legacy from Argentina across the Latin world, I see tikkun operating at the level of language itself: sparks that could only be gathered in Spanish, being gathered. As a facilitator working from Spain, building bilingual bridges in everything I do, I take Segment 3 not as a report but as an assignment. The Second Axial Age will not unfold in English alone, and the two arcs are drawn in every alphabet.

Toward San Damiano

We will close this conference already turned toward the next one: 2027, at San Damiano. The name is its own teaching. It was in the ruined chapel of San Damiano that Francis of Assisi heard the instruction that changed his life — rebuild my house, which is falling into ruin — and understood, only later, that the house was not made of stones. Every facilitator at this Institute has received some version of that instruction. The house is the psyche; the house is the world; the rebuilding is one liberated spark at a time, one session at a time, one client returning home to a ground that was never actually lost.

Ken Lakritz ends his manuscript with a letter to the next generation of clinicians, and its closing counsel deserves to travel with all of us into the breakout rooms and beyond: "Keep the room. Tend the fire. Answer the dreams." That is our work as facilitators, said in nine words. We keep rooms in which the return can happen. We tend fires we did not light and do not own. And we answer — with our training, our presence, and our own unending inner work — the dreams of a humanity that is, at last, beginning to remember the way home.

The descent built the instrument. The return plays it. And Fundamental Peace, as I have written elsewhere, is not the absence of pain — it is the transmutation of its energy into love and compassion. May our conference be a rehearsal of exactly that.

Luis Miguel Gallardo is the Founder and President of the World Happiness Foundation, a certified Life Between Lives® facilitator of the Michael Newton Institute, Co-CEO of the Institute of Interpersonal Hypnotherapy, and author of the Transpersonal Trilogy and Happytalism. He writes from Murcia, Spain.