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REMEMBER YOURSELF
Somewhere you probably touched something real. In nature, in a ceremony, in a moment of love or loss, the veil thinned and you knew who you are beneath everything you learned to be. Then life closed over it again.
METAMORPHOSIS is a week of sacred ground and simple, powerful tools, so that what you touched there becomes the ground you live from. Held among peers. In your own hands.
Who am I? Every spiritual tradition asks this question. Metamorphosis reminds you to live it.
Beneath the personality, beneath the patterns we built to survive, lives an essence that was never wounded and never separate: the soul note that carries the deeper purpose of your life. You came into this world whole and holy. Then you forgot, as we all forget, among people who had forgotten too.
This work is not about becoming someone better. It is about taking the power out of old survival patterns, finding the gold hidden in your freeze, and remembering the divinity at the center of your own life. Not a god above you. The source within you.
THE PATHWAY
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You remember your wholeness. Nothing to fix. Nothing to earn. You learn to return to it, again and again, in daily life.
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You meet as equals. No gurus. You give and receive in turn, and discover how much power lives between people when no one stands above anyone.
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You stay in charge. You choose how deep, how far, how wide. Your own guidance becomes your teacher.
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You leave with tools in your bones. Simple, precise practices to release the past and create what comes next, alone or with others, for the rest of your life.
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You come alive. Play, embodiment, eros and the creative life force, moving freely through a lighter heart.
VOICES FROM PAST PARTICIPANTS
"Groundbreaking. Important. Life-changing. Made ISTA practical. I can use this." — Mark
"This program helped me feel my heart and body again after long numbness. I am able to open my heart to grieve for my father." — Dee
"I remember my inner guidance. A reflection of the cosmos inside my human body." — Jolin
"Since she came back we're endlessly talking and sharing, and I started feeling things towards her that I had long forgotten. Nothing makes me happier than seeing her lighter, happier, in her power, in her center." — a partner, after Metamorphosis Berlin
RETURN TO THE SACRED
For a long time, we have handed the sacred away. Our connection with the divine to religion. Our authority to those in power. Our love to whoever could come close.
METAMORPHOSIS makes a radical shift. We take it back. Not alone, and not against anyone, but as what we truly are: electric, ecstatic, inspired, creative beings, each carrying the source within.
We make a choice. We step out of the old triangle of powerlessness that grips us, personally and politically. Instead we choose the role of creator.
No one is the healer. No one is the healed. In every session you shape-shift between two roles: creator of your own journey, and companion to another's. Your inner witness, amplified by theirs, lets old patterns release instead of looping again through the nervous system.
There is no guru. Divinity is found not only alone at the altar, but in the I and Thou between us. Eye meets eye. Power is shared, not held over anyone. And you are always in charge of your own process.
WHAT IT FEELS LIKE
This work is a celebration!
Two currents move through the week. One is receptive: the heart unfolding, the soul learning to trust that it can be human among humans, seen deeply, with softness and no rush. The other is active: the clear Will to let go of what holds you back, and to direct your life force toward what you are creating. Where your attention goes, your life follows.
As creators, we invite the mind to open and let the heart fill like a chalice until we become love. The body is woven back into the human and more-than-human world. We meet each other with compassion and positive regard.
Then something original returns. When we make space for the innocent part of us, the part never deformed or distorted, the deep mistrust of life and of each other begins to dissolve. Laughter comes easily. We fall back into communion with one another, with the living earth, with the creativity moving through everything.
Sacred play, archetypal embodiment, life-force and eros, the reclaiming of innocence: they make us light. Rituals and ceremonies, emergent temples and artistic expressions are ways to anchor the souls becoming in the presence of peers. They show that we each have our own direct connection to source and once liberated can allow this life force to stream freely through us.
HOW IT WORKS
Think of Metamorphosis as transformational ground where many rivers meet. Currents from initiatory and therapeutic traditions flow into one crucible of self-directed, companion-supported session work, in solo, paired and group sessions and temple experiences.
The tools are simple. Their power lies in precision: learning to play your body, heart and imagination as a finely tuned sacred instrument. You learn to weave between:
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Clearing the emotional body through regression, discharge, down-regulation and emergence, finding the gold in the frozen places where you once felt overpowered.
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Shadow and soul work, entering shamanically into anything you experience, intense or subtle, and emerging with what was waiting for you. Trauma is reframed as soul-making.
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Restructuring beliefs, so you stop reliving the burden of the past.
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Journeying into other dimensions: transpersonal, archetypal, shamanic and imaginal.
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Creating chosen futures, feeling them in the body before they arrive, guided by your connection to source.
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Creativity and art as an outpouring of soul, vision and purpose.
Body-work · Psychodrama · Expressive therapies · Shamanic journeying · Active imagination · Breathwork · Regression and emergence · The beauty of needs · Attachment repair · Co regulation · Mythic remembering · Archetypal streaming · Cognitive restructuring
Together they bring attunement into every layer of a life, reaching back into what has shaped us and forward toward what is still becoming.
All of it rests on one fundamental power: witnessing with caring, aware presence.
After ISTA
If you have experienced an ISTA training or similar work, you know what opened there: love, life force, connection with your own agency. And you may know the question that follows you home: how do I keep this alive?
ISTA catalyses an awakening, Metamorphosis helps it land. Many graduates say it gave them the missing piece: the tools to keep remembering source in a sustainable way, and to bring the temple arts into everyday life, relationships and community. If you found you overstepped yourself in transformational spaces this can be a place to attune to your core needs so you are safeguarded from the risk of hurting yourself and others.
What you will find here:
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The practices to integrate, on your own and with others, long after the week ends.
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A peer structure in place of a facilitator-centered one, so your power stays with you.
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Emergent spaces open to the whole of life: eros as one sacred aspect among many, alongside grief, joy, creativity and stillness.
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A field to repair, and support healthy attachment.
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The skills of tribe: contracting and consent, empowered relating, working through core issues together, and holding each other's emergence and accountability.
You could call it a decentralised integration of the ISTA journey: not a transmission from the front of the room, but a community of people skilled in supporting each other's awakening.
Even though we long for it, until we have tasted the co creation of such a field our body doesn’t know it exists.
POWER, COMMUNITY AND EROS
Power. The training is a living laboratory for power beyond hierarchy. It interrupts deep conditioning around power and offers templates for sharing it: simple contracts, dimensions of consent, relatonal spirituality, and radical self-direction.
Community. We practice a horizontal path of spirituality, tasting group soul and the divinity of the space between. You learn to track projection to its source and release it, so the past stops shaping how you relate now, along with maps for shared decision-making in communities and new-paradigm work.
Eros. How do we create erotically alive communities in a field of love and shared power? We welcome the medicine of eros as part of life. You learn to navigate asymetry and negotiate attraction with awareness, and to understand the hidden motivations that fuel it.
WHO
IS
IT
FOR?
METAMORPHOSIS is for everyone who wants to land in their body and live from their soul. For change agents, renegades and torchbearers. For those who hold space for others such as facilitators, leaders, teachers, therapists and community builders, who want a model where no one stands above anyone. For all who carry a piece of the puzzle that joins us to the great life.
This journey is for those no longer waiting for an outside authority to define them: ready to authorise their own life, and to pass that capacity on.
These are the tools spanning transformation and relational therapy that we see are needed in the movements and communities emerging from transformational programs, the western ‘Tantra’ phenomena and related spiritual communities.
LINEAGE
METAMORPHOSIS grows from two roots. The deeper one is older than any school: the knowing, held by animist cultures and carried through many spiritual traditions, that we are an interwoven community of beings, already sacred, needing only to remember.
The traceable lineage of peer work runs through John Heron, pioneer of co-operative inquiry, co-counselling international and co-creation, who replaced the authority of the expert with peers who take equal time and remain in charge of their own process. Rex Rafiq was a student, friend, and colleage of John. Around it stand Alfred Adler, Moreno's psychodrama, Jung's active imagination, and shamanic journeying. Today the work folds into the temple culture of ISTA and is informed by Soul Initiation such as the Temple Initiation held in Samothraki.
It brings templates of relational spirituality and shared power, with approaches to initiation that complement the verticality of many spiritual paths and teachings. And interrupts the pitfalls of guru and cultic dynamics that can activate where people find a path that feels like home and surrender their authority to it.
YOUR GUIDE
REX RAFIQ
Rex Rafiq has stopped trying to improve himself. Instead, he turned to loving the life force that is living him, and the wisdom of nature that informs his body. A New Zealander with a global and Sufi heart, he has led transformational programmes for over thirty years. He founded Essentially Men, the men's initiation work of Aotearoa, co-founded the Heart Politics Gatherings, and wrote Fatherless Sons. He is trained in group work, psychodrama, expressive therapies and peer counselling, and holds a master's in Social Ecology. From the wilderness to corporations, prisons to ashrams, and ISTA programs he is known for his wise and playful style, and for holding people with love while they shed their skin.
He is supported in holding this training by Ashisha Arparna.
TESTIMONIALS
"I did not expect this workshop to be so profound. It gave me so much more than expected. Metamorphosis gave me a missing piece of understanding the ISTA tools and a way to keep remembering the cosmic source in a sustaninable way. The expansion I experienced through this week is undescribable with words. I received a valuable tool that I will use to claim rememberance, presence." Klemen
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"Must-have initiatory tools for the how to be a human tool-kit. Powerful work that helps us to be self-directing in our life, integrating and expanding on what we learned at ISTA. The work brought me greater intimacy with myself and experience of myself as divine in human body." Ananda
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"A journey into accesing the deeper part of my third dimensional incarnated self. And learning tools as to how to process these deeper parts of myself. And learn how to act upon these when appropriate. This would greatly support the work of soul level, higher consciousness into third dimensional reality. Instead of it being top down (embodying soul level consciousness) this is bottom up (embodiment in order to obtain soul level conscuousness) To me both approaches support one another and have helped me create greater alignment and create greater fluidity and abundance.
To friends and family I would add: the program helped me process and work through present life trauma by increasing consciousness about this trauma throughout my body and dimensions. And help integrate healing. For me this is perfect confirmation of the process I began in ISTA. Most particularly integrating into my body, becoming aware and listening to my body. Particularly active and receptive presence and regression, discharge and emotional release tools. Communicating what I am feeling in a respectful and authentic manner. Being present to the moment. The gift of the co-created space. The cocreating space was particularly valuable and something that would have benefitted my ISTA experience. " Ariane
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"Groundbreaking. Important. Life-changing. Potential. I feel blessed to have had the opportunity. Made ISTA practical - I can use this." Mark
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"Remembering my body as part of the cosmos. Feeling vibration of the group. Trusting to follow the flow instead of my head. Let vibrations in my body be my guidance. Magic and mystery of time. How easy it is to open a space for process work on an eye-to-eye Level. Value of group work. " I feel peace. Deep silence within. Trust. I remember my inner guidance. A reflection of the cosmos inside my human body. I learned how to reveal and release blockages to remember the pureness of my being. Expressing hidden feelings, fear anger or grief in such a loving co-created space has been deeply healing. I feel the love of the collective. Feel their vibrations within me and my vibrations within them. In deep gratitude "" Jolin
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""A very firm, intense, intelligent, transformative program for those who want to reconnect with source more in their lifes. Very well structured and broad spectrum of tools and entrances to conscious work. An amazing new vision on cosmic and conscious living. Creates a clear(er) frame to apply the teachings and tools of ISTA. Opens possiblities to bring it into life and action to vibrate it deeper and to land it into being. Brings ISTA teachings to life and life to ISTA teachings." Monique
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"An amazing set of tools for self-inquiry and gaining insight as well as freeing from beliefs." Ohad
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""I am so very grateful to have found this very powerful container and able to participate. It is very safe. I found all the tools incredibly useful and the rituals and temples have for the first time in my life fulfilled a deep longing for spontaneously emergent sacredness in ritual. I wholeheartedly recommend this training to anyone who is commited to inner growth, creating a life that is aligned with their highest truth and being and co-creating the world that we all feel a desire for in the depth of our being." Sabah
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"This program helped me feel again my heart and body after long numbness. I am being able to open my heart for grieving for my father. This program is like a push for me to start a new life I want to create." Dee
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"A deep synchronistic transmission -achieving deeper in my being the codes of (co)creation and sovereignty. It felt important on my path. A new dimension added to my already existing cocreation paradigm of love and community. Trusting the resonant inspiration towards soul-path-manifestation. Temple collective, effortless emergence. Streaming into life, becoming. A map of different dimensions, streaming, receiving, following, dissolving, restructuring. Coming into being in every moment. Trusting inner guidance, influx of inspiration. Opening the channel to let transmission come through. Listening to it and taking inspired action. Felt like deepening tools for self-initiation. Stepping into self-responsibility and social hygiene - community." Devie
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"The intense therapy program I was looking for - shadow hunting, trauma release, acting with my
new self. Very impressed by Rex wisdom, experience and leadership." Lion
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"Incredibly valuably seeds have been planted and insights uncovered from the mud of restricting beliefs. I dropped into the sacredness and emergence of life in the temple spaces in a whole different way in this container. During the ISTA the focus was so much on sexuality that I was not yet able to see the openness of temple spaces for pure life, divinity, manifestation of source into matter, obviously including eros and sensuality but simply as one aspect of everyting. Also helped me generally to bring the ISTA tools into my everyday life and everyday challenges." Maren
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"Amazing work to all that want to work more on a real connection to herself. Having tools to rewrite our nervous system and face the inner wounds." Anonymous
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""A call to all fellow cosmonauts. There is something in this work for everyone because it is life itself. I am grounding the call in my body looking up to the stars, I am listening and hearing everything. I am remembering there is so much joy in being born. Power of self-directed processing. collapsing hierarchies, and finding new ways to empower each other. Remembering that we all have everything in each of us all the time. Sometimes it is helpful to have the presence and attention to move with whats alive and give the presence and attention to myself. Cosmopolitan. A deeper understanding of my core wounds and underlying patterns." Bridget
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"Enabled me to dig deeper and connect to my source, as well as tools to continue the digging on a day to day." Luis
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"A container to work with any challenges at all and transform it in a self-authored / self-responsible / self-initiating way. It provides powerful tools and nurturing context to enable very deep transformation or giving each individual all the space to address precisely their very individual challenge. I see a lot of value in that openness paired with very practical tools that you can take into your everyday life to nurtue continuous unfolding of yourself and your surrounding." Maren
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"A retreat where we came together to work as powerful beings to share and dedicate time and attention in order to explore a deeper embodiment, feeling and remembering of our own resources and cosmic being. An exploration of non-hierarchical self-directed, self-empowered healing potential of community ." Anonymous
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"I'd love to thank Rex and Ashisha for what you guys have done in Metamorphosis. 2 days before going to Berlin, Bridget and I had our first ever permanent separation talk, my heart was bleeding during that… Since she came back we're endlessly talking & sharing and I started feeling things towards her that I have long forgotten. What a beautiful transformation!!! Nothing makes me happier than seeing her lighter, happier, in her power, in her center. She's blossoming and I believe there's even more that's still waiting to open up. I really hope you repeat this program again so I can join this time if it calls me. Thank you again." message from Bridgets husband after her participation in Metamorphosis