The Story Behind the School
From Hell to Heaven on Earth
This Is The Way was not born in a boardroom or a seminary. It was born in the fire. In the places where two people refused to stop believing that love could heal everything.
How It Began
It Started with Hearts
Before there was a school, there was a conviction. That the deepest wounds in the human heart are also the doorway to the deepest healing. Daniel Thorness and those that birthed this move did not come to this work from a place of comfort. They came from the wilderness.
Daniel walked through years of religious performance, identity crisis, and the kind of spiritual exhaustion that comes when a man has been trying to earn what was always freely given. The revelation of Sonship did not come to him in a moment of triumph. It came in the breaking.
Multiple of his closest friends and now partners with this move of God's path ran parallel. Through the body, through movement, through the intelligence of the physical form as a vessel for what the soul is still learning to hold. They discovered that healing is not just spiritual. It is somatic. It lives in the breath, in the tissue, in the places we have been too afraid to feel.
Daniel Thorness
Founder & Lead Teacher
The Founder
A Man Who Walked Through the Fire
Daniel's story is not a highlight reel. It is a testimony. The kind that only comes from someone who has actually been through it. He has walked through the collapse of religion, the silence of the desert, the death of the false self, and the resurrection that follows when a man finally stops performing and starts resting in who he already is. For the few that need earthly credentials, Daniel has an 8 year doctorate degree in theology and a 2 year counseling degree from Montgomery.
He has spent years in the wilderness of Sonship. He spent 4 years participating in and officiating over 300 plant medicine healing ceremonies. The wilderness was not as a concept but as a lived reality. He has sat with the Father in the dark. He has learned what it means to be loved not for what you do but for who you are. And he has come back carrying something rare: a teaching that is not borrowed from a book but forged in the furnace of personal encounter.
His vision is not to build a platform. It is to build a family. A global community of sons and daughters who know who they are, walk in wholeness, and carry the restoration of all things into every corner of the earth.
“I did not find the Way by being strong. I found it by finally being willing to be broken open.”
Retreat Partner & Staff
Those Who Walk With Us
This Is The Way partners with gifted healers and ceremony facilitators who carry the same heart for wholeness and the restoration of the human spirit.
Derrick Carter
Ceremony Officiate
Derrick Carter is a trained ceremony officiate and the founder of Refine N Align. He specializes in 5-MeO-DMT facilitation, working with the sacred medicine derived from the Bufo alvarius toad. Known as the God molecule, 5-MeO-DMT is one of the most powerful consciousness-expanding compounds on earth. In a single ceremony it can dissolve the ego, collapse the illusion of separation, and bring a person into direct contact with the infinite.
Research shows 5-MeO-DMT produces lasting reductions in depression, anxiety, and PTSD. It rewires the nervous system at a deep level and opens the door to a quality of peace and clarity that most people have never experienced. Derrick holds this space with reverence, skill, and a genuine love for the people he serves.
He partners with This Is The Way on retreats and healing intensives, bringing his expertise in plant medicine ceremony alongside our teachings on Sonship, wholeness, and the Kingdom.
“Center your mind. Align your energy. Live on purpose.”
Refine N Align
The Mission
Spirit. Soul. Body. Kingdom.
This Is The Way exists to restore the whole person. Spirit, soul, and body. To the fullness of who they were created to be. Not a version of themselves that has been managed, medicated, or modified by religion. The original. The beloved. The son or daughter.
We believe that healing is not a destination. It is a Way of life. And we believe that the most transformational knowledge on earth should be the most available. Accessible to every person, in every nation, regardless of background or season of life.
Spirit
Sonship, identity, and the revelation of the Father heart of God
Soul
Emotional healing, inner wholeness, and the restoration of the mind
Body
Holistic health, somatic healing, and the body as a sacred vessel
Kingdom
Universal laws, oneness, and the restoration of all things
The Way is Open
If this story resonates and you have been in the wilderness and you are ready to come home, this school was built for you.