ARKADIA FESTIVAL TICKETS ON SALE NOW area 15, nv | nov 2-5, 2023
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IIf there was ever a time where the planet and her people needed us the most, now is that time. While mankind has transcended many different perils, never before have we collectively faced multiple timelines of existential threat. It’s time to show up as our best and truest selves. Together with a community of brothers and sisters by our side.
A mystical text from the lineage wisdom of Solomon called the Song of Songs* provides perhaps the most profound map to being of highest service. The genius lies in the four step progression from 1) service to self, 2) service to community, 3) service to mankind, and 4) service to the Cosmos. It is a map to wholeness, and each step must be included in the next step in order for the map to bring about fruition.
We've been in this container since January, and as we move from the song of the community to the song of all mankind, we want to bring in the ones we've been waiting to meet, you.
You could be doing 1,000 other things this moment. Trust that you've found yourself here for a reason. Come join us for the rest of 2023.
200+ strangers took the leap into the unknown and found themselves at a farm in Lockhart. After five days of intimacy, vulnerability, triggers, workshops, dancing, laughing, and synchronicities, 200+ strangers left as a single living community. We discovered that the parts of us that we had the strongest desire to hide, protect, and exile were what connected us. We found community in our shame and insecurities, but also in our hidden greatness and compassion. We also all didn’t expect the pond to be so… seaweedy.
We gathered again at the foot of Montana’s mountains to explore how the Song Of The Self evolves into the Song Of The Tribe, and how that opens up to encompass all of humanity. We learned the powerful communitas technology Dialogos. We reclaimed the holy spark in fierce competition. We learned new psycho-technology to keep the flame of eros blazing within a primary partnership, which is a core dyad of any family. And we may have witnessed the greatest live performance of all time. Dirtwire, what even happened in there?!
The final step in moving from the Song Of Tribe to the Song Of Humanity is to learn how to welcome others into your community. Because this is a major part of FFS; open sourcing the practices that will help you hold the center of your own community. Our key strategy for this is the oldest and most time tested strategy. Do hard shit together. Our “All-In Summit” is below.
One of our culture's great challenges is learning how to heal the divide between 'us' & 'them.' An answer; initiation. Internally referred to as the 'F*ck You Up' Summit, this bonus summit is intentionally designed to be a challenge. Come ready. We'll be right there praying in the temazcal, breathing, dancing, sweating and crying with you. Located on a private regenerative biodynamic farm in Lockhart, Texas, this event takes place surrounded by a vast landscape, with natural water ponds, and miles of cleared walking paths throughout the ranch.
If you’ve been to Sedona, you know it is a mystical and magical place. The Summit is hosted on private property, with Bear Mountain as our backdrop, and is surrounded by rich desert nature, amidst an energetic vortex.
In the first stage of a relationship, we see people as their function. We ask: What do you mean to me?
The second stage of a relationship is when we look at them, in order to truly see them. We ask, how can I see you as myself living a different life?
The third stage of relationship is when we include the first two stages, and then we grab each other's hands to look toward a shared horizon.
A shared horizon means you are looking at the same world, while celebrating the diversity of your own perspective. Seeing the same world offers you the gift of a shared purpose. And it is only a shared purpose that celebrates our diversity that can bridge us into a more beautiful world.
The truth is that the healing of our culture will be a collective effort. If reality is a series of relationships, then Fit For Service is aimed at transforming the core of reality. Transforms relationship: relationship to self, to family, to lovers, to community, and our relationship to the world.
Our aspiration is that by the end of 2023, you will understand yourself and your purpose so completely that when you think of the 300 Spartans who stood at Thermopylae for all of Greece, you will know them as your ancestors. Because you will know yourself as a person of great purpose, surrounded by brothers and sisters who will stand with you to the end.
When we first started Fit For Service, we thought offering world-class fitness information, powerful initiations, scientifically-supported emotional and psychological tools for healing and thriving, completely unique in-person gatherings, and a year-long mentorship with our coaches would be the catalyst for transforming people’s lives.
All of this helped, but there was something even more powerful that we didn’t anticipate.
The magic of FFS was the community. And if we were to distill what that means, there are four very real possibilities:
We received an Instagram story just a few days ago where a guy who joined our first year shared how hard it was to accept how good his life is now. He credits the men in his life that supported him through his depression and anxiety. He tagged 4 people, and three of them were brothers he met in Fit For Service 3 years ago (the other was his actual biological brother).
He found some of his best friends in this container.
At a recent gathering here in Austin, there were two couples there who had their newborns with them; a little girl and a beautiful boy. Both of these couples met in Fit For Service.
These four people entered Fit For Service single and without children. They found the loves of their lives and started families.
Fit For Service didn’t ‘do this.’ They did. What Fit For Service does is offer a container unlike anything we are otherwise aware of: where people commit to their physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual development. We gather in person. We do the real work together. We say and feel the things we’ve hidden. We move, sing, and sweat together. We challenge each other, and we heal together.
There are two former Fit For Service members who signed up with chronic autoimmune disorders. They graduated the program without any symptoms remaining. Because of the medical paradigm of our time, we cannot say that we heal things like this; and we didn’t. They healed themselves through dedicated effort and belief, but both of them credit Fit For Service as the turning point in their illness .
Again, let us be clear: we do not promise this kind of result, but it would be dishonest to withhold it. If loneliness is one of the top causes of early mortality, community must be a powerful life-affirming force. These are just two examples of many true stories of transformational healing.
We’ve watched hundreds of members, after joining, go out into the world and offer their time and skills to others. Regenerative farms have been started; healing services like breathwork, cold exposure, men’s and women’s circles, ecstatic dances, and addiction support have been created. But what moves us most has been seeing, even years after the initial event, people asking for help in one of the community WhatsApp channels, and alumni responding by offering a place to stay, or to get on a call with them.
The magic of Fit For Service comes from what the community offers to each other.
One of the persistent and alluring stories we’ve accepted is the story of the quick fix or silver bullet.
The transformation Fit For Service offers is not a quick fix or a silver bullet. After serving thousands of people over the past 4 years, we’ve learned that the container and process of Fit For Service is most potent when we commit to a container that spans over several summits.
The incredible results of the survey above are the result of committing to the Core Program.
If you persevere, because at times it will be incredibly challenging, you will walk away from this experience with a depth and breadth of community that will nourish you for years to come.
Each of us at Fit For Service commits to walk 2023 with you.
For the first 25 years of my life, I felt like an outsider. Even with my friends, something gnawed at the edge of my awareness that the life I was living was…the word that comes to me is malnourished. Like eating only processed foods, but not having ever eaten clean for an extended period of time, I didn’t know what it was, but I could feel something was off.
5 years later, I am in awe, and often in tears of gratitude, at how many people I feel deeply understand and see me. I see friends starting conscious businesses and/or families, healing life-long illnesses, and sharing their art - and almost all of them I met in Fit For Service.
I’ve danced, wept, and cheered with them. I’ve shared vulnerable truths with them. I’ve sat in grief with them. I’ve watched them overcome their fears and change their stories. I feel my heart buzz when I see them by chance. I know that if I got sick, or if my family needed help, dozens of hands would open to support me.
But most of all, they’ve changed my stories about people. I’ve met 20 year old ‘bros’ who wanted to learn how to feel their emotions. I’ve seen 60 year old women dancing ecstatically, unencumbered by fear of being too ‘old’, or not being ‘beautiful’ enough. I’ve seen Type-A CEOs cry for the first time, and admit something they’ve been ashamed of since childhood.
I’ve seen again and again how anyone, regardless of age, gender, wealth, orientation, or race, display incredible gifts they could offer the world, and stories of heartbreak, success, and magic that eclipses anything I’ve seen on screens or read in books.
The true magic of Fit For Service is the community. We’ve explored many different ways to cultivate community, and the secret is simple. Make the container a year long. We're going back to our roots. The 2023 Core Summit will be for the year.
There will be live Q&A calls with Caitlyn, Kyle and/or Erick for the rest of the year. All calls from January through June will be available to watch in the Media Center of our FFS App.
Every coach, including Aubrey, will also offer a few masterclasses that are uniquely created for the container.
Here are a few examples of the kinds of Masterclasses we’ve done before.
*Given the amount that organizations and individuals pay our coaches to speak at or consult for, this part alone is worth more than what the entire year-long membership costs.
It’s hard to articulate what happens when 100+ genuine humans who are looking to grow come together for the first time after months of getting to know each other online.
One of our favorite experiences in life is connecting with a few first timers on day one. Some nervously ask for a hug. Others are questioning, and sometimes completely closed off.
And then we see them at the end of the summit; eyes beaming with a quick and full smile. They hold our eye contact, and their hug, which was nervous the first day, is now like the reunion of brother or sister in arms. If we ask, they’ll share a personal story of doubt, confrontation, and transformation that happened during the summit that consistently reminds us of the endurable and tenacious healing intelligence that lives inside us.
We see people transform at these summits in a way we didn’t believe was possible for most of our life.
In no particular order, here are some of what our summits offer:
The Fit For Service app might be our favorite thing we offer.
Most people don’t realize this, but every time you log into Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or Youtube, you are entering a game where the opponent is an artificial intelligence 100x more powerful than the program that beat Grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1996.
Garry Kasparov knew he was playing chess. He trained his entire life at this game. Not only have most of us not trained our attention, we don’t even realize we’re playing this game when we log into our favorite social media platform.
The artificial intelligence algorithms of these platforms are tracking every like, share, and save. They even track what you stop on (meaning you don’t even have to click on anything and they are measuring how long you pause on a beautiful butt or outrageous political meme that makes you so mad you can’t help but read it).
Some, like TikTok, are reported to even track your keystrokes on other apps.
Once we learned this (check out Tristan Harris’s work), we knew we wanted to create an app that wasn’t powered by attention grabbing algorithms.
What you’ll find in the app:
The app is a place of connection rather than data collection.
There are free weekly calls for people that want to connect with others, as well as men’s circles, and women’s circles (these are a favorite among members). Some of our other popular calls that happen regularly are for parents, biohacking, and poetry reading.
Because there aren’t attention-grabbing algorithms, the app is an opportunity to down-regulate your nervous system while you scratch the itch for social connection.
Also, there are no ads. It's hard to appreciate how refreshing it is to scroll through a social media site without any ads.
In the media section of the app, there are dozens of hours of free (often exclusive to the app), lectures, speeches, guided meditations, guided breathwork sessions, and ecstatic dances.
There are masterclasses about the body, the psyche, and the shadow by Kyle, Erick, and Caitlyn.
We’ve got some of the best speeches and workshops we’ve done at previous FFS events in there that don’t exist anywhere else.
We are also always adding to it. Our vision is to one day have more valuable content in there then people get when paying for $30,000 masterminds.
And our favorite part - donate any amount you want and get access to the app for a year.
We started Fit For Service because we saw how disconnected people were from the healing and nourishment of genuine authentic community. Because we invest a lot of money in our physical events, some people who want to join cannot afford to ante the minimum donation. But because the app is digital and digital content can be done well once and continue to help thousands, we offer the app as a gift, accepting any amount of donation in return.
Aubrey interfaces with the great thought leaders and spiritual masters of the world. He brings every bit of wisdom from his experiences and interactions through his Q&As, Masterclasses, and workshops.
If you’ve ever struggled with meaning, purpose, intimate relationships, and self-love like Aubrey has, you might just discover by the end of this year a new story that brings you back into radical passion and awe with life and yourself.
With a brief glance at our political dialogues, it is easy and startling to notice the hate, blame, resentment, and complete lack of compassion many people harbor for ‘The Other.’
We can all feel it… there is a tremendous and rising cultural impulse to scapegoat ‘the other side’ as evil, stupid, crazy, or guilty. And with the next election cycle beginning to ignite and churn, we’re going to see more of this.
Maybe the most important transformation Fit For Service offers is a lived experience that helps our nervous system remember that most people are fundamentally good, kind, sincere, helpful, and trustworthy.
We remember ‘The Other’ is safe.
Over the last 5 years, we’ve watched a community arise between Liberals, Conservatives, Libertarians, heterosexuals, homosexuals, people of all genders, black, white, Indigenous, able-bodied, bodily-impaired, Atheists and Christians, Scientists and Animists.
We’ve witnessed beliefs change. We’ve seen people from all walks of life remember that the stranger is fundamentally good, and everyone leaves with a renewed faith in humanity.
And maybe most important to you; Fit For Service is an opportunity to transform your story about yourself.
The world-renowned psychologist Carl Jung shared: “Until the unconscious is made conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate.”
Our primary drive as infants is to attach our nervous systems to our caretakers. In order to do that, we had to adapt when our needs weren’t met (this is not the parents fault, it happens to all of us).
Fast-forward to adulthood; your unrelenting habit to care for others at the expense of caring for yourself, your belief that you must be useful, or successful, or attractive to be worthy of love, the story that you aren’t smart enough or strong enough to live the life you genuinely desire, the enduring belief that romantic love isn’t safe or that your soulmate will save your life, that you’re clumsy, or genetically determined to be overweight or addicted, that making money is evil, or that you’re a random chance occurrence in a meaningless universe…
These are all stories that have been chosen and can be changed if you so desire.
The beautiful magic of the Fit For Service container is that no one tells you that you have to change. Come as you are and discover yourself accepted totally (because you’ll find everyone secretly believes some of these stories about themselves).
What you’ll discover is that as you participate and show up, something will naturally begin to change in you. As you change, some of these stories will stop resonating, and like a tree naturally casts off branches they no longer need, you too will naturally start to drop old stories that no longer resonate with who you know yourself to be.
Founder of Onnit, NYT Bestselling Author, and host of the Aubrey Marcus Podcast, Aubrey is the creator of Fit For Service.
The host of the Kyle Kingsbury Podcast and a former UFC Fighter, Kyle specializes in physical mastery as the foundation and pathway to spiritual optimization.
A Transformation and Healing Facilitator, she is known as ‘The Poet Queen’, putting the unfathomable into words and touching hearts everywhere she goes.
The host of The Myths That Make Us podcast, Erick specializes in Behavior Change, Internal Family Systems, Depth Psychology, and terrible puns.
A medicine woman through and through, Vylana is a gifted singer, dancer, and sound healer.
