Phil T. Mistlberger is an author, transpersonal therapist, and personal growth facilitator based in Vancouver, Canada. His work examines the relationship between psychological development and spiritual awakening, with particular attention to the ways insight is tested in ordinary life.
About Phil
A life devoted to understanding the human experience
The Path
Early life and exploration
Born in Montreal in 1959, Phil was educated at Champlain College, John Abbott College, and Concordia University. In his early twenties he began an exhaustive investigation of metaphysical, esoteric, and transformational schools of thought, followed by a thorough exploration of the therapies born out of the human potential movement.
Martial arts came first, in his adolescent years. He trained in shito-ryu karate and wing chun kung fu, and in later years tai chi and qi gong, alongside study of Buddhism and raja yoga. He describes this discipline as the ground from which a wider interest in wisdom and transcendence grew.
In his mid-twenties he first travelled to Asia, wandering for months through India, Nepal, and the Tibetan plateau and staying variously in Buddhist monasteries and Indian ashrams. He returned to Canada, graduated from a transpersonal facilitator training program in 1988, and has worked as a personal growth facilitator since then.
Traditions that shaped his work
Phil’s transpersonal influences are many: the Gurdjieff Work, the Western esoteric tradition, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, A Course in Miracles, a decade as a disciple of the Indian mystic Osho, numerous forms of depth psychology and therapy, and most of the major Eastern pathways, among them Tantra, Zen, Tibetan and Theravadin Buddhism, and Advaita Vedanta. He has practised in all three major schools of Buddhism and received guidance from Tibetan, Theravadin, and Zen teachers, as well as teachers from the Advaita traditions.
These influences appear throughout his work as subjects of both practice and critical reflection. His approach gives room to meditation and self-inquiry while also examining the emotional patterns, projections, and attachments that can remain hidden within spiritual life.
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Teaching, travel and community
His teaching has taken him across North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Through his published books, group work, and private sessions, he explores how people come to understand themselves more fully and take responsibility for the lives they lead.
Since the 1990s he has given talks and workshops in London, New York, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Stuttgart, Vienna, Klagenfurt, Palma de Mallorca, Toronto, Seattle, Calgary, Ottawa, Vancouver, and the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, variously teaching A Course in Miracles, the Gurdjieff Work, Tantra, the Enneagram, meditation, the Western esoteric tradition, and men’s groups.
In 1993 he co-founded Clearmind Institute with Duane O’Kane and served as co-director for its first two years. In 1995 he founded Shamballa Trainings, a personal growth school built on an eclectic blend of inner work, which he ran for seven years and through which he worked intensively with several hundred students. Between 2002 and 2004 he held formal satsang meetings in the Advaita tradition in Vancouver and at three locations in Washington state. In 1996 he started a men’s growth group that over three decades developed and ultimately flourished into its current form as the Arka Brotherhood, a community of over 700 men (as of 2026) with groups operating out of dozens of cities, mainly in North America. Since the 1990s he has also run Conscious Relationship Trainings (CRT), intensive programs and seminars based primarily on applied shadow work for facing into relationship dilemmas. Since 2002 he has also run the Temple of Anubis, a mystery school based mainly on the Western esoteric tradition, meditation, and group ceremony.
Community has remained central to Phil’s work. Shared practice is where ideas about awareness meet the realities of vulnerability, responsibility, connection, and transformation.
Influences
The traditions behind the work
Certain wisdom traditions stood out along the way, drawn on at different points during the intensive seeking years of the 1970s and 1980s and revisited many times since. What follows is not chronological; the paths overlapped too thoroughly for that.
Martial arts
The earliest influence, and the one that led to everything else. Shito-ryu karate and wing chun kung fu in his teens, tai chi and qi gong later. Reading Zen Combat in his mid-teens opened the first door onto a different kind of mastery.
Buddhism
A persistent pull since reading Hesse’s Siddhartha around 1975. Retreats and guidance in the Tibetan, Zen, and Theravadin schools, with Tibetan and Zen remaining primary.
The Gurdjieff Work
Discovered through Colin Wilson’s The Occult, then Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous. A year in a Work group in the Bennett lineage in 1982, and decades of study since. Gurdjieffian methods still appear in his trainings.
Osho
Formal initiation in 1983, followed by years in the Oregon ashram and Vancouver communal houses, a month in Osho’s company in Kathmandu in 1986, and several months in Poona in 1991. A relationship he later examined at length in print.
A Course in Miracles
Encountered in 1986, and the basis of two years of training at New World Network, where he was certified as a personal growth consultant and breathwork practitioner. ACIM principles ran through his teaching for years afterwards.
Aleister Crowley
An early-years influence, first through the tarot deck. Phil reads him as a bridge between the Renaissance magus and the twentieth-century tantric mage, and relates most of all to the breadth of his appetite for life.
Advaita Vedanta
Studied from the early 1980s and taken up more deeply in the late 1990s, leading to his own satsang meetings from 2002 to 2004. His first book, A Natural Awakening, drew largely on Advaita and psychology.
The Western esoteric tradition
His oldest calling, dating to the mid-1970s: Egyptian mysticism, Hermeticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, ceremonial magic, subtle body work, tarot, astrology, and sacred geometry. The Inner Light represents three decades of this study.
Altered states of consciousness
Lucid dreaming and out-of-body practice from his late teens, influenced by Castaneda’s dream methods and Robert Monroe’s techniques. Experiences he now regards with the same interest he might give a fine meal or a beautiful cloud formation.
The Enneagram
A week-long training in India in 1991, followed by years of teaching it himself. Of all personality systems he considers it the finest.
Castaneda and shamanism
The launching pad for a lifelong interest in sages, mystics, and magicians, extended into the study of shamanism as a universal discipline and years of West Coast sweat lodge ceremony.
Alternative therapies
The psycho-spiritual methods that grew out of the Esalen years: Primal Therapy, Rebirthing, bodywork and Rolfing, Reichian therapy, acupuncture and shiatsu. He trained and was certified as a bodyworker and Rebirther in the mid-1980s.
Western philosophy
Nietzsche in his late teens, then Socrates, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, and above all Plotinus.
Teaching & community
Three expressions of the work
Men’s work and ARKA Brotherhood
In 1996, Phil initiated the community that became known as Samurai Brotherhood, beginning with a small circle of men. The organization adopted the name ARKA Brotherhood in 2022.
As its founder and senior guide, he has helped shape an approach to men’s development centred on accountability and conscious action. He also authored the community’s fourteen-point Code of the Conscious Warrior. These themes are developed further in his book The Way of the Conscious Warrior.
Conscious Relationship Training
Phil founded Conscious Relationship Trainings as a setting for exploring the unconscious patterns that influence human connection. CRT welcomes singles and couples, with attention to relationships with oneself and with others.
The work uses applied shadow work to bring recurring habits and blind spots into awareness. Its influences include psychospiritual alchemy, Jungian approaches to the shadow, Tantra, A Course in Miracles, and family systems work.
The Temple of Anubis
The Temple of Anubis began meeting in Vancouver in 2002. Founded by Phil, it is a contemporary mystery school whose teachings include spiritual alchemy, ceremonial and elemental magic, dream work, Kabbalah, and related disciplines.
This work reflects his long-standing interest in Western esotericism and the symbolic language of ancient Egypt. His books The Inner Light and The Dancing Sorcerer explore related territory, connecting esoteric study with questions of consciousness and inner transformation.
The written work
Writing and the wider body of work
Phil’s books address spiritual awakening, the difficulties of the spiritual path, men’s development, and Western esoteric traditions. His more recent work, A Ruby Bright as Fire, turns to William Blake and the relationship between visionary art and esoteric teaching.
His online archive extends this inquiry through essays, reviews, memoir, and satire. Together, these writings reveal an interest in both the depth and the peculiarities of human experience.