Home of TIAMAT
An ecology of practices developed by
5ToMidnight International to
awaken playful agency, foster relational depth, and
cultivate existential resilience.
How to Play your way
to Transformational Growth
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The first steps to self-knowledge and a meaningful life
for and with those who matter most.
Transforming your person, relationships and view of reality is no easy task.
There are many different ways, paths, schools, courses and ideas to follow towards self-knowledge.
However, it’s hard to separate fact from opinion, distinguish ideology from truth and balance personal desire with common good. Many people are facing profound inner conflict, and it is oh-so-easy to fall into the trendy nihilism of meaninglessness. #depressionmemes
But once in a while, something shines through.
It can feel like a deep moment of connectedness, or an ‘a-ha’ moment of discovery.
It feels like the world opens up.
It’s incredibly motivating.
So you attend more workshops, listen to endless podcasts or audiobooks, maybe even decide to go to therapy.
Over time, it feels like there’s ground beneath your feet. You know yourself, you can tag yourself with all sorts of good words:
“empath, self-aware, real…”
But deep down, there’s still a quiet feeling that something isn’t quite right… Like there’s still something in you that’s unresolved. A flash of doubt and recognition that you can’t have possibly figured yourself out with nothing left to discover, right? Because that would be…
Oh, right.
Meaningless.
“Spirituality doesn’t mean a blind belief in a spiritual teaching. Spirituality is a practice that brings relief, communication, and transformation."
-Thich Nhat Hanh,
How to Love
When Self-Help Stops Helping
From spending over a decade travelling the world training actors and non-actors alike, I’ve come to know intimately the difficulty of becoming a well-adjusted person. Personally, socially, culturally and existentially. I started to see how my work was impacting everyday people, not just actors.
They shared an increasingly common feeling that the world they lived in was not real, that life was not worth living, and that everything was just an illusion.
Even themselves.
No matter how they tried to fill that void, with
lots of dates, chasing that social media carrot or finding their tribe still came with the caveats of cult dynamics, coercion, manipulation and in some cases, abuse from the people they thought were “their people”.
Even though most of us can pull up a search bar or walk into a bookstore and find all manner of journals, courses, listicles to “Change/Manifest/Improve your life TODAY!”, many still struggle:
- They’ve worked hard to meditate and be aware of their emotions
but still experience loneliness and distance in their relationships
- They’ve solved some major problem, be it addiction or depression
but are still directionlessness around what to do next
- They’ve “done so much work on themselves”
but still feel frustrated around what it’s all for
- They’ve travelled across the world for retreats or spent countless hours in online courses
but still feel stuck in their personal growth
If any of those sound like something you’ve experienced, please know that these are not unique to you and have actually been around for thousands of years.
Why aren’t all the things that you “should be doing” actually connecting you into what matters most?
Personal transformation doesn’t have to be another full-time job.
What if you could play your way to a better you?
“When you are in a state of egocentrism, you are not properly seeing the agent-arena relationship. You are projecting your needs, fears, and biases onto the world, mistaking your salience landscape for reality itself.”
-Prof. John Vervaeke,
Cognitive Scientist & Philosopher
Awakening From The Meaning Crisis
When “Work on the Self”
Becomes Too Self-Involved
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On the surface, it is all about doing the things you want to do, creating positive experiences for yourself and empowering you.
It’s about what you want,
who you are,
battling your inner demons,
finding your inner child,
manifesting your dreams.
But once that’s all said and done, transforming your life is not about you.
The growth and development that opens the world up for connectedness and meaning is more than a self-centered pursuit of perfection.
In order to be able to…
- Navigate the complex challenges of life, adulthood and relationships…
- Resolve conflict to deepen, rather than severe connection…
- Genuinely collaborate with others and deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us
…You need to develop the capacities and constitution to play with others and be an agent that transforms others, not just yourself. No podcast, self-help book, instructional video can do that for you.
Transformation is not a skill to perfect, it’s a process of becoming.
To transform and to be transformational, you have to move past collecting tools, and fundamentally shift your perspective on yourself in relation to the world.
This is similar to becoming a parent, moving to a new country or getting a pet:
You can read every parenting guide or watch every travel vlog and these can offer you useful things to look out for and notice tendencies in yourself that might have been habitual for years. But knowing all those things doesn't mean that when push comes to shove, you’ll recognize what’s needed in the moment and to act on them.
In that same vein, if you want to become someone who lives a good life, full of meaning, purpose and belonging, it isn’t enough to create a checklist of the best things to do in every possible scenario.
Now that you’ve woken up to the ways you might need to grow, you’ll need to enter an ecology of practices in fellowship with others to grow together towards being better persons.
Of course, you’ll need to practice and be fluent with skills. But you also need to be in scenarios which challenge your assumptions, beliefs and identity in order to bring those skills to bear.
The Good News Is...
…by integrating theory and practice, anyone can transform their life and step out of self-destructive loops, no matter where you are in your journey through life.
You can be more present in relationships old, new and yet to be.
You can create the conditions that invite flow into your projects and communities.
And you can become so tuned in to life that you’ll be resilient to conflict; able to stay oriented towards a good life and create actionable steps to realizing that life with those that matter to you.
But in order to walk this path, you will need to understand…
1) Structures such as theory of mind help you track the relationship between your personal experience with those of others
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Real growth takes practice, but most importantly, it requires a structure so you can track that growth so that you’re not just wondering as you’re wandering.
Learning how different aspects of your experience come together to form your unique perspective, and how it interacts with others’ makes connection possible.
For example, once you understand how to track your thoughts, emotions and sensations, you can:
- Practice communicating a fuller picture of your experience to others and reduce misunderstandings from doing too much “guesswork” or mind reading.
- Receive feedback from others about yourself that you can take more seriously because less is being withheld.
- Grow the confidence to be more spontaneous and playful instead of worrying about what others think all the time.
Even though some of it might seem too academic or “intellectual”, that complexity is part and parcel of the path.
You need coherent sense-making.
2) Dynamics between yourself, others and the world to intervene on your cognition, consciousness and character
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Of all the “goals” in personal development, self-knowledge is the common factor.
But it can be incredibly confrontational and intimidating, not to mention vulnerable to face those aspects of ourselves. Especially in front of others. That can be so overwhelming that it’s easy to put it off and maybe never do it at all.
The truth is that doing that level of deep work gets easier by doing it, provided that it is guided and held as the complexity ramps up.
Building on the structures from Tier 1, you can follow a series of steps to trigger insightful changes that empower your capacity to adjust to the neverending changes in life. Whether at work, at home or in your spiritual growth, you’ll be able to sense into deeper levels of reality and adapt more fluently.
You need existential resilience.
3. States of consciousness can be leveraged to orient towards something greater than yourself.
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Many people seek spiritual growth by seeking “gurus” on the internet. They attend a talk, hear a prophecy, chase a magic pill/plan from any brand promising some form of spiritual enlightenment.
And even though they feel a lot of relevance to their own life at the time, ultimately they fall into a lie that separates them from family, friends and the world.
In order to develop and mature as a person, you actually need to be in communion with others in a way that keeps you rational and in touch with reality. This means challenging your beliefs, even the ones you inherit from others that “worked” at the time.
As a result, we risk holding on too tightly to the beliefs and feelings we might actually need to let go of to grow.
So in order to take the next steps in your journey, you need to practice in a group of people who challenge you to meet the standards you will inevitably fall short of at some point. And you need to inhabit a way of being that keeps you sensitive and accountable to the development of yourself and others.
You need to cultivate virtue in fellowship.
Enriching your spiritual life
I hope you are beginning to see how personhood through play is possible for anyone so long as theory and practice are held in dialogue with each other.
With TIAMAT’s ecological approach, you will regain balance in your life and practice to move beyond yourself and the current cultural malaise.
It will require you to be at your growth edge but is well worth the time and effort.
But once you take your first steps, I think you’ll find that:
- Your relationships benefit from deeper presence and connectedness.
- You can hang out with someone at a cafe and explore the depths of each other’s experience, uncovering new insights together.
- Your everyday encounters with your environment feel more colorful with opportunities for joy at every turn.
- You can move past the unpleasantness of a conflict and realign towards reconciliation.
- Your relationship with yourself will be kinder, more inquisitive and less punitive and judgmental.
At this point, words reveal motivations, the world becomes a playground and you become who you are.
Which is pretty meaningful.
How does TIAMAT work?
The Integrative Approach & Methodology of Active Transformation
It weaves together cognitive science, somatic practice and performance training with philosophical rigor to afford insight, transformation, and virtue—on purpose, with others, in the world.
Upcoming Dates & Locations
Hong Kong 2025
Crossroads & Connections
17/6
19/6
24/6
26/6
Nijmegen 2025
Crosstroads & Connections
10/7
11/7
London 2025
Tier 1
25/7 - 27/7
Prague 2025
Crossroads & Connections
31/7
1/8
Intro to... Series
2/8
3/8
Email us at [email protected] to register your interest today!
How We Teach
Tiered Workshops
Our flagship programs walk a path from awakening to alchemy through structured containers of embodied learning, philosophical exploration, and collective practice.
Drop-In Events
Accessible, low-commitment samplers to tune into our ecology of practices.
Come curious, leave surprised.
Facilitator Training
For those called to hold space, lead with integrity, and steward others through transformative play.