What to expect when working with Byron:
Holistic Practices — You will engage in a variety of practices, and learn ways to sustain them in your life - including prayer, meditation, gratitude exercises and acts of service, designed to cultivate mindfulness, humility, and compassion.
Personal Transformation — You will embark on a journey of self-discovery, breaking free from old patterns and exploring your inner self in ways that lead to groundedness and spiritual growth.
Community Building - Your leadership growth will be focused on creating a supportive environment where individuals and communities can truly share experiences and grow together.
Guidance and Support — Byron collaborates with experienced multidisciplinary mentors, who may be called on to accompany your journey, offering wisdom and encouragement as you navigate your path.
Connection to Nature — You will grow in your understanding that healing the Earth is integral to healing oneself, one’s family, and the close-in and larger community. You will learn to trust and connect with nature, fostering a sense of harmony and reciprocity with the environment – finding a sustained, mutual way of healing.
FUN - Byron will help you embrace joy and laughter no matter what!
Byron’s best clients are:
Disconnecting from organizations, businesses or churches, whose values no longer align with your own. Seeking opportunities to lead a life and grow meaningful relationships that resonate with your foundational convictions.
Building a grounded center from which to live a productive life amidst external chaos and internal turmoil.
Desire Spiritual Growth (within a nonreligious or nonreligious context) on your journey of self-discovery. You might long to explore practices that enhance your understanding of yourself and of the world.
Change Agents, willing to challenge societal norms and explore achieving greater freedom from social conditioning; ready to embrace new perspectives and practices that promote healing and growth for yourself and beyond.
Feel called to Building Communities of Service, organizations and communities that engage in acts of kindness and service, recognizing that helping others is integral to our individual and collective spiritual journeys, fulfillment, and continued survival as the human species.
Byron McMillan is the founder of Elder Fire Collective (EFC), a soul guide practice rooted in the conviction that midlife is not a crisis to manage but a chrysalis to inhabit. Drawing on decades of formation — as a decorated U.S. Army veteran, Fortune 500 operations leader, pastoral minister, community organizer under Dr. John Perkins, and a decade of contemplative practice through Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation — Byron guides people through the deep transitions that reshape identity, purpose, and belonging. EFC’s work is grounded in Black wisdom traditions, Ubuntu philosophy, mythographic practice, and the elemental language of fire and threshold. Byron is currently in formation as a soul guide through Leon Vanderpol’s Center for Transformation and as a griot through Martin Shaw’s School of Myth.
Byron also serves as a coach with Chipmunk Punk Coaching and a consultant with Community Equip’d — both committed to culturally competent leadership development and nonprofit capacity building for visionaries and changemakers driving social change. He brings to this work his lived experience across community organizing, outdoor and environmental education, and contemplative ministry.
Based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Byron and his partner Tamara are co-developing Terra Curativa, an emerging permaculture and desert living community rooted in the Bosque. He holds that the work of transformation — personal and communal — is always a return: Sankofa. What we retrieve from the past is the fire we need for what’s ahead.