by a recent Boot Camp participant

For many people, the word “Boot Camp” evokes images of some military officer barking orders to a military recruit, forcing him or her to submit to grueling and even demeaning demonstrations of strength and submission to authority. This is NOT what the Vision Force Boot Camp is about. The Vision Force Boot Camp is a committed journey through the jungle that surrounds and has overgrown our inner light and direction, so that we may recover true, impassioned and powerful inner authority, and reawaken and recognize it in others.

The 4-day Vision Force Boot Camp is a demanding and transformative experience that brings us back into realignment with our inner vision and re-establishes the Visionary Core at the center of our being, energizing bold, inspired action. With an exercise program starting at 5:20 a.m., an hour-long yoga session, superlative food, and day-long transformative sessions, the Boot Camp experience is one that brings participants into profound and physical recognition of what it feels like to live in honor of one’s vision. Evenings and/or mornings spent in silence allow us to integrate each day’s learning and transformation profoundly,

Entrepreneur, Visionary, Social Activist, Healer, Parent, Spouse, Sibling, Son and Daughter–How many roles do we engage in and how many do we live out wholeheartedly? Many of us, as we approach our thirties, and then advance into our forties, fifties, and onwards, feel so compromised that our connection to the passion, vision, and connection that drove us during our younger years seems all but lost. We attribute this to “age” and fail to recognize that it is this very compromise that ages us. We forget those elders whom we have known, seen or heard who stayed vital and inspiring to the end. We indulge the fantasy and justification that they somehow were made of “different stuff” than that which we are made of. We slowly, but surely, begin compromising our vision, our passion, and our honor. Our culture does not simply justify this compromise, so do many of our families. The very nature of our institutions of education, governance, and employment require it of us. Parents, teachers, and mentors encourage us to “be realistic,” “to grow up,” and welcome us into the fellowship of those who have turned their backs on exceptional excellence, to settle for life in a milling, mumbling, grumbling herd of those who decided to fit in, find their place (without that place ever really being theirs), adapt – and who eventually find themselves leading familiar, comfortable but-not-quite-cozy lives in that “quiet desperation” that Henry David Thoreau so pointedly spoke of from the shores of Walden Pond. Our lives become enfolded in a narrative that justifies our compromise. We disconnect us from the passion and vision which resides at our core.

Participants in the Vision Force Boot Camp repeatedly describe this event and the subsequent unfolding as “the most powerful event in their life.” What happens in Vision Force that changes people’s lives?

One does not just pay for Boot Camp and show up. There is an application process which screens applicants to see if they are suitable candidates for the experience – and to determine whether the Boot Camp experience can truly benefit them. The commitment and excellence of the candidates is as crucial as the high-level tools and transformative trainings that the Vision Force staff provide. Once accepted, there are teleconference calls where introductory concepts and their influence in our day-to-day lives are introduced. As I participated in the preparatory calls, I was impressed by the level of insight and compassion that was communicated by Michael Skye, Vision Force founder.

Eventually the day comes and we travel to Boot Camp, an experience whose richness defies description. Rather than one of those workshops where you join hundreds or thousands of other people in a huge room and then “partner off” to work on some abstract concepts, the Boot Camp is a direct, personal paradigm for growth. First of all, the group is comprised of up to 30 people and support staff. Every single application has been reviewed by the Boot Camp leader and an assigned Boot Camp ambassador. Every participant is embraced in his or her present circumstances, as well as in the vision and contribution that that person is standing for in the world. I remember my first evening at Boot Camp: the manner in which support staff welcomed me, alone, let me know that this was an extraordinary event.

The Boot Camp is a sacred space. There is safety, mutual respect, compassion, and confidentiality. There is also a call to excellence and being ready to step forward, at our choosing, to face how we hinder our own progress in wholehearted living and the feelings, thoughts and compromises that surround that. With awareness we discover and implement a new way of moving forward. Although the concepts presented are brilliant and profound, Boot Camp is not about learning brilliant theory. It is a step within, not only for the purpose of realization, but leading promptly to bold action. We learn about honor, not as some external criteria or conformity to an external moral code. We rediscover honor as a relationship to self, to this “I Am” that indwells beyond all of our self-descriptions and imagery. We experience honor as the essence of our nature and vitality, as that inner beingness which calls us to stand and step into our true nature and vision. We learn to recognize honor bodily, as the clear, physical sensation of vision embodied, literally, and through the senses. We learn about how the breakdown with this inner essence occurs, through compromise, through inner conflict, and the layers of narrative webs that the mind spins to protect itself from the truth of our compromise.

We embark on a transformative journey together, and deepen it day-by-day. We nurture our bodies through exercise, excellent nourishment and rest. We nurture our minds and our hearts through learning, through openness, through realization, readiness and courage, along with periods of silence. With every day of Boot Camp, we reconnect more fully with that inner luminosity that many of us left behind years and decades ago. Our vitality comes back into fullness. There are no doctrines to subscribe to, no leaders to follow – there is a knowing that reawakens as we realign with our true nature and rejoin Being.

On the fourth day, after the Boot Camp portion of our journey is completed, we integrate our learning in anticipation of reconnecting with loved ones, coworkers and the projects which we left behind just a few days before our amazing journey together. We realize the depths and heights to which we have journeyed together with the thirty-some other people in the room. Incredible, open-hearted and full friendships have been started. We recognize the amazing gift within that has been ours all along and which we have rediscovered – and learned to keep vital. It now lives fully within us, and shines as a bright beacon, guiding our steps forward in the face of any and all circumstances, towards our most brilliant and generous living adventure. As I step back into the world and a life of inspired engagement, I now know full well that I am the one that I have been waiting for my entire life – and that there is no other.

Following Boot Camp, there is support for integrating the work, for taking bold action to healing relationships and seeing our loved ones in honor of their unique adventures. Day by day the work unfolds, impediments are faced, vision grows from within and empowers that generative Will which is our key to transforming a culture of denial and compromise. Friendships grow with our fellow travelers. Lifelong relationships are restored, liberated and brought into fullness again.

We look back at the Vision Force Boot Camp experience with profound gratitude, not only to the Vision Force leaders, but to ourselves – for finally finding and then using the key which unlocks all of our gifts from the core of our being. What more can we wish, but to desire this same gift for others?