Fire Horse Press ● Press kit
Everything you need to cover MIND CONTROL.
For podcast hosts, journalists, reviewers and booksellers. The description, bios, images and quotes on this page may be used freely in coverage of the book.
Interview and review requests: info@firehorse.press
Podcast hosts: request a review copy of the complete book →
At a glance
The facts.
Title: MIND CONTROL
Subtitle: A Practical Framework for Awakening and Conscious Creation
Author: Phillip Van Winkle
Publisher: Fire Horse Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Published: September 22, 2026
Category: Transformational nonfiction ● Self-help ● Spirituality ● Psychology
Formats: eBook ● Paperback ● Hardcover
Audiobook: in production, narrated by Rachelle Van Winkle. Expected December 2026.
Pages: 411 ● 6 × 9 in.
ISBN: paperback 979-8-9970368-0-5 ● eBook 979-8-9970368-1-2 ● hardcover 979-8-9970368-2-9 ● audiobook 979-8-9970368-3-6
Trade: distributed via IngramSpark; available through Ingram and Amazon
Online: firehorse.press/mind-control ● askalthea.community
The book
You’ve gathered the pieces. Now see how they fit.
An insight into your childhood. A practice for observing your thoughts. A name for the pattern you keep repeating. Each can matter deeply. The question is how they work together, and why understanding alone doesn’t change what keeps happening.
In MIND CONTROL, Phillip Van Winkle presents a complete, practical framework for awakening and conscious creation: where your patterns come from, who you are beneath them, how to catch them in the moment, how to return to choice, and how to create your life on purpose.
Practices throughout bring the framework into the places it matters: your inner life, your relationships, and the decisions that create your future.
Built to make the relationships visible. Written to be used. Yours to test against your own life.
Six connected elements, each one explaining the others
The Identity Triangle. How experience becomes story, story becomes belief, and belief becomes who you are.
The Orbit Model. Why Identity keeps pulling thoughts, emotions, and behavior back into familiar patterns, and why willpower alone rarely holds.
The Four Circles. A map of consciousness that explains why you can feel divided against yourself.
The Sacred Pause and the Practice of Return. Moment-to-moment doorways out of autopilot, back to an awareness that has never been harmed and never been lost.
Your Parts and the Five Rs. Why the patterns you’ve fought hardest were protecting you, and the step-by-step path that returns them to wholeness under your own leadership.
Conscious Creation. How identity, attention, and intention shape what you live, and how to author your life deliberately instead of repeating it.
From the book
Lines you can quote.
“Willpower is effort, and effort is intermittent. It must be summoned again and again, decision by decision. It sleeps. Gravity doesn’t.” Chapter 6
“The behavior isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom. … Identity-first change doesn’t fight gravity. It changes the source of gravity.” Chapter 6
“Your experience is the starting point. Expertise is a resource. Your choice is the authority.” Orientation
“This book will not ask you to trade one set of intermediaries for another. It will point you back to your own direct experience—the authority you were born with, the knowing you never actually lost.” Orientation
About the author
Phillip Van Winkle
SHORT BIO
Phillip Van Winkle spent years seeing his own patterns and watching them repeat. Wondering if it was just him, he asked 160 people about the belief holding them back. Only two said they had none; most could name theirs, yet still lived by it. He explores that gap in MIND CONTROL: A Practical Framework for Awakening and Conscious Creation. Through Ask Althea, he and his wife, Rachelle, help people stop waiting to fix themselves first and start living the life they already have.
LONG BIO
Phillip Van Winkle spent decades asking the question this book answers: why does real change so often fail—and what actually works? The search led him through psychology, neuroscience, and the world’s contemplative traditions—and finally to the recognition that they were describing the same territory in different languages. MIND CONTROL is the result: one practical system for understanding, and reclaiming, your inner world.
He writes and teaches from that integration, and leads the Ask Althea community, where readers turn the framework into a way of life. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, Rachelle—still practicing what he teaches, still listening, still returning.
Background: former Marine Corps officer ● MBA in finance ● two decades as a business consultant ● founder of Fire Horse Press and, with Rachelle, of the Ask Althea community.
For the conversation
Questions worth asking.
Starting points, not a script. Every one of them opens onto a different part of the book.
1. Why can someone see a pattern in themselves clearly, and still watch it happen again?
2. You asked 160 people about the belief holding them back. What did you learn, and what surprised you?
3. What is the Identity Triangle, and why does willpower so rarely win against it?
4. What is the Sacred Pause? Can you walk us through one, right now?
5. The book says you were never broken. What is self-leadership, as opposed to self-improvement?
6. “Spiritual beings having a human experience.” What does that mean on an ordinary Tuesday?
7. The book calls its own framework a map, not the territory, and warns readers against turning it into a belief system. Why put that warning in your own book?
8. You credit AI as a collaborator in the acknowledgements. Why say so in print?
9. A Marine officer, an MBA, twenty years in business, and then this. How did that happen?
10. What’s next? (The second book in the series, The Waypoint: Psychedelics and the Journey of Integration, with Rachelle Van Winkle, DNP, is coming in June 2027.)
Get the book
Read it before you talk about it.
Podcast hosts
A complimentary review copy of the complete eBook, in the format you prefer.
Reviewers and media
Review copies in print or digital, on request. Tell us the outlet and a mailing address.
Everyone else
The opening through Chapter One is free. No email required.
Images
Download
Cover design by Phillip Van Winkle. Need a print-resolution file or a different crop? Ask: info@firehorse.press.
The community
Ask Althea
Ask Althea, led by Phil and Rachelle Van Winkle, brings the framework into everyday life: a free community, a library of essays, a weekly letter, and a thirteen-week live Course.
Published by
Fire Horse Press
An independent publisher of transformational nonfiction, founded on a simple conviction: we live in one reality, and we come to know it in more than one way. Integration is our work: revealing relationships that go unseen when things are studied separately, then bringing that understanding into the life the reader is already living. We publish books of substance, built to last, that treat readers as their own final authority. Founded 2026 ● Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Interview and review requests
Phil is available for podcasts, print and broadcast interviews, and speaking. Replies come from him.
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