In this interview, Arjuna Ardagh describes the Awakening Coach training program, which combines an intensive five‑day in‑person course in Nevada City with ten follow‑up teleseminars and optional advanced modules on client interaction and group facilitation. The program is designed for professionals—coaches, therapists, doctors, consultants—to integrate awakening skills into their existing work and eventually adopt Awakening Coaching as a primary modality. Ardagh emphasizes the global, multi‑time‑zone nature of the cohort. The conversation then shifts to the unprecedented global crises—war, terrorism, economic collapse, environmental degradation, and widening wealth inequality. Ardagh argues that these problems stem from a collective state of consciousness and cites Einstein’s insight that a problem cannot be solved in the same consciousness that created it. The solution, he says, is a shift in consciousness, not merely changing beliefs. This shift is embodied in "awakening leadership," where leaders move from a self‑centered identity to a spacious, servant orientation. He cites Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration speech, which famously avoided first‑person pronouns, as an illustration of this new style. Ardagh introduces the Awakening Leadership Network, a decentralized, internet‑like community that blends mysticism and leadership. He argues that true leadership now requires mystic insight, and authentic mysticism must engage the world rather than retreat from it. The discussion invokes the Eastern metaphor of Indra’s Net to illustrate the inter‑connectedness of all beings and ideas. Finally, Ardagh connects these themes to technology, noting that while the current internet provides massive information, it lacks coherent patterns. He points to the emerging Web 3.0 semantic web as a next step that will filter information through personalized parameters, aligning with the broader shift toward holistic, interconnected consciousness. Overall, the interview presents awakening coaching and leadership as tools for navigating and transforming the current global upheaval, framed within a vision of an interconnected, conscious future supported by emerging technologies.
Chapters
You attend 5 days right here in beautiful Nevada City, and then you attend 10 teleseminars afterwards, and that gives you the basic skills. So if, for example, you are already a coach or a consultant or a therapist or a doctor, or if you already work with people, you can integrate these skills immediately into the work that you already do. We also have more extensive training where you can come back. There's a second course called Client Interaction and a third course called Group Facilitation. You can come back and take these more additional courses so you learn not just to integrate the skills into what you already do, but you learn to actually become an Awakening Coach. So that becomes your primary modality. And we're training people right now from all over the world. The last course we did was last week. We had people from 7 different time zones attending. So we had multiple different kinds of jet lag going on. Some people thought it was the middle of the night. Some people were just waking up. So we had— so we have a very international group of students who are learning to do this.
Fascinating. At this particular point in time, there are huge— there are huge changes taking place globally. You know, perhaps some of the most visible ones are the wars, terrorism, and the economic collapse that we seem to be still at the brink of. How do these trainings— how might they help a person be able to deal with what we're all being confronted with now?
Right. I think, you know, everybody in one way or another is aware that we are facing a crisis as a race of unprecedented proportions. So you can see it environmentally, global warming, the pollution of just about every media that we have contact with, water, air, etc. As you said, economic, not only being on the brink of economic collapse, but —huge economic imbalance. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is greater now than it's ever been before. So more and more wealth is in the hands of fewer and fewer people than has ever happened before globally. Whenever that's happened in a local environment, like in Russia or France, it has almost invariably led to revolution. A society will not tolerate that kind of extreme imbalance of wealth. For more than a certain amount of time. You could name it in just about every arena. As you said, there's, you know, there's wars, which I really see as the polarization of fundamentalisms, you see? When one fundamentalism goes at loggerheads with another, you end up with war. It's really the war is between two fundamentalist viewpoints. So, all of these situations—warfare, economic imbalance, environmental challenge— all of these things appear to be different, all separate. The only thing they have in common is we don't know what to do. But in another way, everything we see which— everything we see which is out of balance has all been generated from a certain state of human consciousness. About 40 years ago, Albert Einstein said, "You cannot solve any problem in the same state of consciousness in which it was created." You can't solve a problem in the same state of consciousness in which it was created. You have to shift consciousness in order to find the solution. That's what awakening is all about. It's not shifting the content of consciousness. We're not changing negative beliefs into positive beliefs or whatever. We're not understanding more things. We're shifting the state of consciousness in which belief occurs. And our clients, the people who coaches work with, are mostly people in positions of leadership. So we are training— our coaches are training leaders to lead from a different state of consciousness, where there is less of an emphasis on me and more of an emphasis on what is. And actually, you know, Barack Obama, our— currently our president, is a wonderful example of this new style of leadership. At his inauguration address in January 2009, He gave, I think it was a 30-minute address, and somebody who was paying attention noticed that he never used the first-person pronoun during the address. He never said "I" or "me" during that address. And that is a kind of an icon of a new style of leadership where the leader is really washed clean of themselves. The leader is not all about me anymore and my beliefs and my agenda, you know. The leader becomes a servant. To what is, to what is trying to emerge from within the ecosystem. But in order for a leader to really effectively lead in this way, they have to shift their own focus of identification from me and my stories to this spaciousness, this mystery, this openness which is available to all of us.
Hmm. So that leads us to the Awakening Leadership Network. Mm-hmm. Say a little bit about that.
Yeah, so this is actually something that is just— I'm really allowing this to happen. It's not so much something I'm creating, but a number of people I work with have great confidence and experience in working with leadership. So we are developing a network, really, which means a network is like the internet, you know, it has no center, it has no governing Body, but we're developing a network of people interested in leadership from this awakening perspective. So the two apparently disconnected fields, mysticism and leadership, which appear to be so disparate and which for thousands of years it's been seen either you become a mystic and you know yourself deeply or you're in the world and you do that well, but you can't have both. Well, that's not true anymore. Now, to be a great leader, you must also be a mystic. And to really be a true mystic, you must be able to deal with the world and face the world. And mysticism doesn't allow for escapism anymore. So awakening leadership, I would say, is the signature of the emerging human being.
You know what keeps coming to mind is Indra's net. I remember Indra's Net was, which is a concept from the East in terms of the structure of what reality is. The way it was described to me originally was like going out early in the morning while there's still dew and you find a spider web. And at every place where two of the strands of the web crossed, there's a droplet of dew. Except it's not just in two dimensions, but this really is spreading out in every dimension. And if you come close enough to one of those dewdrops and look in it, you can see the image of every other dewdrop in the net. And in every one of those other dewdrops, you can see every one of the other ones.
Absolutely. You know, we're seeing the convergence of so many things right now, and I was just speaking about business leadership and mysticism, but another piece which is coming all into one holographic oneness is technology, where so far, you know, the development of the internet has really allowed for more and more people to have access to more and more information. Because the emphasis to this point with the development of the internet has been on connection speed and the volume of information available. Not much emphasis has been given to the patterns in which that information is appearing. Mm-hmm. So right now, you go to Google and type in some keywords Whoever types in the keywords anywhere in the world is going to come up with the same infinitely long list of results. So you're getting information, massive amounts of information available, but no coherence to it. So now the next generation of the web, Web 3.0, is the semantic web, the web where your experience is filtered to you through parameters which
