The Process
What Second Summit is, how it unfolds, and two ways of working.
What is Second Summit?
Second Summit is a structured depth-facilitation program that helps you identify and move toward your true calling in life. It isn’t general life coaching, therapy or religion. It’s a serious, guided process for people ready to journey within and reorient themselves to their own “inner genius.” Working one-on-one or in a small group, you learn the different landscapes of the inner journey, along with practical techniques for navigating each stage.
The six stages
Reflect & Re-orient
Understand how your life took the shape it did, and begin to see the story from the outside.
Descend
Separate the mask you built to succeed from the Self it was built to protect.
Traverse
Discover what’s been hidden, the discomfort and the buried gifts alike, and start to make peace with both.
Explore
Walk your inner landscape and meet the inner characters who hold wisdom and the keys to your true destiny.
Ascend
Discover the gifts your wounds cultivated, and the calling, the Vocational Path, they’ve pointed toward all along.
Summit
Bring the inner and outer life into one working partnership, and start living it.
What will I get out of it?
- An honest account of how your life took shape, and what that cost.
- The ability to tell the masks of the ego from the true self.
- A dialogue with your inner genius, using dreams to reveal hidden truths.
- The gifts hidden in your oldest wounds, named and claimed as your own.
- Daily practices that give you access to the wisdom in the depths of your psyche.
- A clearer sense of your vocational path: perhaps a new career, but also a unique way of being in the world.
- A more fulfilling way to live, one that balances the inner and outer worlds.
Grounded in depth and wisdom traditions
Second Summit draws on Jungian individuation techniques, the Enneagram of Personality, Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way, and the literature of vocation and inner genius from the mytho-poets, including Robert Bly, James Hillman, Michael Meade, William Everson, Stephen Herrmann and others.
Who this is for
- People who sense the first-half strategy has run its course and are looking for a way forward.
- Anyone interested in expanding their consciousness and awareness.
- People genuinely interested in cultivating a deeper and wiser way to live in the world.
Who this isn’t for
- Anyone in acute mental crisis. Second Summit can work alongside therapy when needed, but isn’t a substitute for it. Read more.
- Anyone looking for a quick fix, a weekend retreat, or the promise of fast transformation.
Two ways of working
The Accompanied Journey
One traveler, one guide, either in person or online. You move through the six stages at the pace of your own inner process, not a calendar, crossing to the next stage when the work of the one you’re in is done. This is the deeper, open-ended path, closer to traditional depth work but one that takes a long time as the pace is dictated by the psyche of the Traveler.
The Group Journey
A small company of Travelers meets every other week for a year. Together they work through a 26-session curriculum covering the landscape of each stage, its inhabitants and its landmarks. The guide trains them in the practices and skills each stage requires, and they begin the passage side by side. By the end they understand the whole map and carry the tools to finish the crossing at their own pace.
Your Guide
Todd Vincent Crosby is the founder of Second Summit. After ten years in Jungian analysis and a long midlife passage of his own, he created Second Summit to give others the map he lacked. His work remains supervised and mentored by the senior analyst who conducted his analysis.
He began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali in 1995, where he founded the first Culture Bank, a museum-bank model that has since grown into a cultural heritage movement across five West African countries. In 2014, the Culture Banks were awarded the Prize for Culture for Peace from the former President of France. For five years he worked as a cultural guide in Dogon country, and in 2002 he was one of the few outsiders to document a summer long initiation of boys into the Djo, the men’s society of the Bamana village of Degnekoro.
He has studied traditional rites of passage ever since: at the University of Chicago, where he earned a Masters in the Social Sciences, and through Jung, the Jungians, the mythologists and the mytho-poets. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune and many other global media outlets and his writing on cultural heritage has been published by Stanford University Press and Routledge. He speaks four languages and lives in Burlington, Vermont with his little rat terrier Django.
What does it cost?
The Accompanied Journey: $80–125 per session on a sliding scale depending on ability to pay. Sessions are 60 minutes, usually weekly or, at a minimum, every other week.
The Group Journey: $60 per session, 26 one hour sessions over twelve months, meeting every other week. Groups are limited to five Travelers. Either online or in person depending on the group’s preference.
The first conversation is free. It’s for both of us to see whether the fit is right.