Our storyTransformation happens in community.
Universal Awareness Fellowship grew from a small men’s brotherhood into a wider spiritual fellowship built around direct experience, meaningful integration, and relationships that continue long after a retreat ends.
Our Story
AF began with Men of Integrity: a brotherhood created to help men reconnect with themselves, with one another, and with a deeper sense of purpose and spiritual connection.
What began as a single retreat grew because the men kept coming back to the relationships. They wanted more than a powerful experience. They wanted a place to keep practicing honesty, connection, responsibility, and the work of living differently in ordinary life.
The retreat mattered. What happened afterward mattered just as much.
We kept noticing that insight alone was not what people remembered most. What stayed with them were the experiences they had lived through directly, the relationships they built, and the ways those relationships continued afterward.
That shaped the way UAF grew. Preparation became part of the path. Integration became part of the path. Growth Groups, member retreats, Community Chat, and the everyday relationships between members became part of the path too.
Men of Integrity became a brotherhood. Then the fellowship widened.
From that foundation, UAF expanded to serve women through Women of Sovereignty and to create specialized Men of Integrity cohorts for veterans and gay, bisexual, and queer men.
The programs are different because the people and lived experiences are different. The foundation is shared: direct experience, honest relationship, spiritual connection, integration, and a community that continues.
At its core, UAF is a fellowship, not simply a retreat provider.
The retreat is how every member begins, but it is not where UAF ends. Completing the seven-week arc brings someone into a wider fellowship that continues through Growth Groups, Community Chat, member gatherings, retreats, and relationships members build themselves.
UAF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit spiritual fellowship serving men and women through rites of passage, integration, community, and ongoing spiritual practice.
Our purpose is to create conditions for direct spiritual experience, honest relationship, meaningful integration, and a community in which those experiences can continue to shape ordinary life.
Mission
Our mission is to create spaces for direct spiritual experience, honest relationship, meaningful integration, and lasting community, helping people live with greater connection to themselves, to one another, and to something greater.
Vision
A world in which people live with deeper connection, greater responsibility for how they show up, and a lived awareness that none of us exists in isolation.
You can be told about the Cosmic Mind, or you can meet it.
What do we mean by the Cosmic Mind?
In UAF’s spiritual tradition, we understand existence as more than separate matter. We use the name Cosmic Mind for the deeper field of consciousness and connection in which life participates.
Where does the work begin?
Much of our work begins with a simple human experience: feeling separate. Separate from ourselves, from other people, from purpose, from nature, or from anything we experience as sacred.
UAF creates spaces for people to explore what becomes possible when that sense of separation begins to soften.
What do we ask you to believe?
We don’t ask anyone to believe this because we said so.
What do we offer instead?
Our ceremonies are designed to invite direct experience: something encountered personally rather than accepted on authority.
What a person makes of that experience remains their own responsibility.
What can grow from it?
What can grow from direct experience is a lived faith, grounded in something personally encountered rather than simply handed down.
UAF members share a spiritual framework without being required to describe their experiences, beliefs, or understanding in identical terms.
And what is Oneness?
By Oneness, UAF means the experience that separation is not the whole story: that our lives are deeply connected to one another, to the living world, and to something larger than the individual self.
Direct experience, freedom of interpretation, and the responsibility to live what we discover are at the center of UAF’s spiritual life.
Code of Ethics
Our ethics are not decorative. They are the standards we ask leaders, facilitators, and members to practice in how we relate to one another, hold responsibility, and protect trust.
These principles are supported by UAF’s separate confidentiality, screening, crisis-response, and community-practice protocols.
Our team
Meet the full team →
Michael Tierno
Co-Director of Universal Awareness Fellowship and co-founder of Men of Integrity, Michael’s path into this work began with a profound experience in Peru that overturned a lifelong materialist worldview and redirected his life toward spiritual practice, expanded states, and service. His approach is shaped by more than a decade of personal expanded-state experience, five years in a men’s process group, graduate study in social psychology, and formal training in facilitation, preparation, integration, and trauma-informed practice. At UAF, Michael co-leads retreats and works closely with participants to turn powerful experiences into lasting changes in how they live, relate, and show up in the world.
Yoni Havana
Co-Director of Universal Awareness Fellowship and co-founder of Men of Integrity, Yoni’s path into spiritual guidance began with a profound awakening in Peru in 2018, followed by years of mentorship, ceremony, inner work, and integration. Today, Yoni guides retreats and works closely with members as they bring spiritual experience into their relationships, choices, and everyday lives. He helps shape UAF around a simple conviction: the experience matters, but how we live it matters just as much.
Universal Awareness Fellowship is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
EIN: 99-4107112
2261 Market St STE 10758, San Francisco, CA 94114