Blog

Dear friends and clients,

As we move toward the new year, I’m excited to share an important update about the next chapter of my clinic.

Beginning January 1st, I will be practicing in a new location:
13377 Pond Springs Road, Suite 102, Austin, TX 78729.

This move comes at a moment of natural transition. The office where I’ve been working is changing hands, creating an unexpected opening to re-envision the space where I offer sessions. Rather than seeing it as a disruption, I’ve chosen to treat it as an invitation—an opportunity to create an environment that better supports the depth of work we do together.

The new clinic space offers several real benefits:

• Easier to find with straightforward access and ample parking
• Ground-floor entry—simple, comfortable arrival for every body
• A healing-centered building shared with other practitioners devoted to wellness, presence, and transformation
• A more supportive atmosphere that supports the depth of manual therapy, somatic work, and BCST

My intention is that this move strengthens the container for your healing and growth. 

Over the coming weeks, you’ll receive appointment reminders with the updated address, and nothing will change in terms of scheduling, pricing, or services offered. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

Thank you for continuing to walk this path of healing, embodiment, and renewal with me. I look forward to welcoming you into the new space in the new year.

Warmly,
Devon

Devon Hornby LMT, ABT

In the Awakened Warrior Program, warriorship is not about aggression or conquest. It is a way of inhabiting the world with clarity, dignity, and heart. This understanding draws deeply from several lineages that speak to human bravery: the Shambhala teachings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the warrior training articulated by Juan Matus through Carlos Castaneda, and the broader Native American traditions that emphasize responsibility, perception, and the reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world.

Despite their cultural differences, these streams converge around one essential insight: a warrior is someone who shows up fully to reality—not through force, but through presence.

The Discipline of Showing Up

In Trungpa’s vision of Shambhala warriorship, discipline begins with the most fundamental act: sitting with oneself. Through learning to rest in one’s seat and breathe into the present moment, the heart gradually reveals its inherent steadiness. Juan Matus describes discipline as the gathering and directing of one’s energy—refusing to waste strength on internal drama or habitual reactions. Many Indigenous teachings speak of discipline as attuning oneself to the rhythm of the natural world and fulfilling one’s responsibilities with clarity.

Although expressed differently, all point toward the same quality: a stable, grounded presence that allows us to meet life directly.

Virtue as Alignment, Not Moralism

Both Trungpa and Juan Matus insist that warriorship rests on virtue—not the imposed morality of rigid codes, but the natural alignment that emerges when we stop betraying our own wisdom. Honesty, courage, responsibility, and kindness arise when we act from our deeper integrity rather than from defensiveness or self-deception.

This alignment creates a sense of trustworthiness within ourselves. We know where we stand. We know how to meet others without pretense. We begin to embody a kind of inner coherence that radiates outward without effort.

Selflessness and the Birth of Space

Selflessness lies at the heart of warriorship. Trungpa describes it as the ability to let go of self-importance and relax into the basic openness of being. Juan Matus points to the same principle: the warrior must drop personal history—those stories that tighten us into narrow identities—so that true perception can emerge.

Selflessness is not about erasing ourselves. It is about releasing the tight grip of ego so that space can open inside us.

And when space opens, presence becomes natural. Suddenly there is room for breath, room for others, room for the unfiltered moment to reveal itself. In this spaciousness, we find relief from the pressure of performing, defending, or controlling. We become more available—emotionally, relationally, energetically. People feel welcomed in our presence because we’re not preoccupied with ourselves.

Perception and the Living World

As discipline, virtue, and selflessness stabilize, the world begins to change—not because it has changed, but because our perception becomes clearer. Trungpa describes this as experiencing the “freshness” of reality. Juan Matus teaches that awareness sharpens when the inner noise quiets. Many Native American traditions speak of the natural energies—earth rising, sky descending—supporting a more attuned relationship with place, body, and spirit.

A warrior encounters the world as teacher. Every moment becomes an invitation to wake up a little more.

Embodied Training

In the Awakened Warrior Program, these teachings are grounded in somatic practice. Through qigong, meditative presence, elemental alignment, and body-centered inquiry, we learn what warriorship feels like in the tissues and breath. The body becomes a vessel of stability rather than a site of struggle. We practice standing upright in ourselves so that spaciousness, clarity, and compassion arise without force.

Warriorship becomes something lived, not conceptual—expressed in how we breathe, move, listen, and meet the world.

A Warrior in Everyday Life

The world does not need more heroes. It needs people who are steady, present, and willing to inhabit their lives with honesty and heart. Warriorship, in this sense, is the art of being a full human being—disciplined, selfless, spacious, and genuinely available to others.

This is the path the Awakened Warrior Program cultivates: a grounded, embodied presence that makes life more vivid, relationships more meaningful, and the world itself more workable.

Devon Hornby LMT, ABT

When we finally step beyond the walls of comfort and the sanctuary of inner work, we meet the world again — not as a battlefield or distraction, but as a mirror and a guide.

Everything begins to teach us.

The wind across the face, the conversation that stirs emotion, the suffering we witness in others — all become invitations to deepen our awareness. The Awakened Warrior understands that awakening does not happen apart from life, but through it. The world is not an obstacle to our practice; it is the practice itself.

The more we engage, the more the line between “self” and “other” begins to soften. Every encounter shows us something about our own conditioning — where we grasp, where we close, where love still hesitates to flow. And every moment of recognition expands the heart’s capacity to include more of the human story.

This is where the path ripens.

We discover that the real teacher is not a distant guru or secret doctrine, but the immediacy of experience — the challenge, the joy, the heartbreak, the vast intelligence shimmering through it all.

“The warrior’s journey is based on discovering what is already there—our own innate intelligence, our natural warmth, and the openness of our heart.”
Chögyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

In this way, the world becomes our endless field of practice and inspiration. The difficult person, the broken system, the beauty of an ordinary morning — all become portals into greater awareness.

The Awakened Warrior learns to bow to it all.

By living fully engaged, we embody our realization. By allowing the world to move us, we stay humble, porous, and alive.

Service then ceases to be a duty and becomes an act of reverence — a way of walking in rhythm with the greater intelligence that sustains all beings.

This is the final turning:
Not from ignorance to knowledge, but from separation to belonging.
Not from fear to power, but from isolation to participation.

The Awakened Warrior knows: the world is both the mirror and the mirror-breaker — our greatest teacher, and our endless invitation to love.

Devon Hornby LMT, ABT

Once we have returned to our body — once we have learned to dwell in presence rather than in protection — a new movement begins to arise. Life calls us outward.

The embodied person no longer needs to make comfort their refuge. Having met themselves deeply, they are ready to engage the world as it is. Vision widens. The heart begins to sense its larger purpose.

This is the turning point in the Awakened Warrior’s path: moving from self-regulation to world-participation. Our embodiment is not meant to end in personal serenity; it is the foundation for meaningful action.

“The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything.” Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

When we step into the world with presence, we become part of its healing. The same awareness that once held our pain now becomes the ground for compassionate engagement — in our families, our communities, our planet. We no longer ask, “How can I feel better?” but rather, “How can I be of benefit?”

This is not a call to grandiosity but to authenticity. To act from the stillness of being, not from the restlessness of ambition. The true warrior serves not to fix the world but to meet it — with an open heart, clear perception, and the willingness to be changed by what we encounter.

As we expand into this wider field of purpose, discomfort returns — but now it’s a sign of growth, not threat. The claustrophobia of comfort gives way to the spaciousness of service.

The Awakened Warrior understands: embodiment is not the end of the journey. It is the doorway into life itself.

Devon Hornby LMT, ABT

We are taught to seek comfort — to organize our lives around safety, convenience, and control. On the surface, this sounds reasonable. But beneath it lies a subtle prison. Comfort can be claustrophobic.

When we build our world around what feels pleasant, we unconsciously shrink the field of our experience. The unknown becomes threatening, challenge becomes avoidance, and even small discomforts can feel unbearable. We begin to live in a smaller and smaller room, where the air grows stale and the walls of “what I can handle” close in around us.

“In the cocoon, there is no idea of light at all, until we experience some longing for openness, some longing for something other than the smell of our own sweat. When we examine that comfortable darkness – look at it, smell it, feel it – we find it is claustrophobic.”  Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

This is how suffering grows in a life that looks peaceful from the outside. When our world becomes small, every ripple becomes a wave. A sore muscle, a tense conversation, an unexpected loss — all loom large because there is no spaciousness around them.

The paradox is that our attempts to feel good often make us fragile. We lose the resilience that comes from contact with life in its rawness — the weather, the body, the breath, the pulse of uncertainty that is the rhythm of existence itself.

In body-centered work, we see that health is not the absence of discomfort but the capacity to stay present within it. When we inhabit our body — not as an object to manage, but as a living field of intelligence — we rediscover the vastness that has never been lost.

The Awakened Warrior begins here: by recognizing that comfort, when clung to, becomes a cage. True peace does not come from avoiding difficulty but from resting in the boundless space that holds it all.