🫂 For the Unbearable Loneliness of Collective Awakening

As systems and containers break down, you are becoming Singular, not alone.

I deeply value community.

I grew up in a loving family, but in a hellacious suburban plastic environment — it left me isolated, unpopular, and without any real friends.

I didn’t find real community until my late 30s, here in Denver Colorado. And I am fiercely dedicated to the real friends and true spaces I have found here.

Yet even in the most well-meaning collectives, everything is present: shadow, distortion, trauma, performance, trauma-bonded attachment styles and power dynamics.

My own community has fragmented this summer due to discovering a predator in our midst we had trusted… and somehow missed… until after he’d groomed and harmed over a dozen women of all ages — some barely over 18.

It had me raging.

And it also got me thinking…

We need community. We thrive off connection.

And in a world that plasters every face to a phone and every hand to a keyboard, most of us are starved for physical touch.

For physical eye contact.
Physical laughter in our ears…
… or the brush of a sigh against our neck because our hug hit the spot.

So why does participating in community still so often backfire?

I hear these stories constantly.

• Toxic positivity and light-washing in spiritual communities.

• Trauma-bonding and abusive facilitation in psychedelic containers.

• Criticism, shaming and power-dynamics in religious spaces.

And of course it’s all interchangeable.
Every space offers something beautiful.

But also every space exposes us to the grotesque. The dark. The underbelly of the beasts we try to slay in our attempt to awaken or belong.

And so here we are.
Perhaps here YOU are.

More aware than ever.
More exiled than ever.

Not from the world, but from yourself.

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This strengthens the field and helps me live what I teach, so you and I both can source more balance, more joy and more aliveness. 🙏

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In collective awakening containers, you end up not only navigating your own trauma and ways you’ve fragmented… the ways you’ve not been met… the parts of you that have never been seen or loved or accepted — even by you…

You’re also contending with that in every other person.

And most awakening containers center around a leader, a method, a teaching or spiritual / religious belief.

You joined the collective to be supported and to belong, on your way back to yourself.

Yet, you may have found the path that was meant to return you to you began to displace you instead—gently, subtly, sweetly—into everyone else’s energy, someone else’s truth, toward someone else with the answers or method or access.

I don’t think the containers are wrong.
I think we, as a humanity, have outgrown them.

Yes, we need community.

But not in order to belong, or heal, or awaken.

Not to be in endless process or inner excavation or attempt to transcend.

And definitely not to earn acceptance, salvation or love from some authority or council or group outside of ourselves.

And so the communities we have and the patterns they operate from are speaking to a phase of evolution we’ve already surpassed as a humanity.

We’ve all grown too big for the templates that once held us, and yet everyone is still trying to fit into the old molds, and enforce everyone else to stay in those molds too.

And so no one is able to reflect your fullness without flinching.
Your increasing sovereignty and singularity become a threat instead of the point.

So, it’s not that awakening or spirituality or healing or community have failed you.

It’s that the models they were built on were never designed for sovereign self-sourcing.

They were built to cycle you through someone else’s method of becoming. Someone else’s rules. Someone else’s hierarchy that isn’t built to lead you to the top.

Luckily, we aren’t trying to climb to some top.
We’re not here to ascend to some higher place or transcend out of what is.

The collective awakening happening right now is an awakening into. A journey to center. A reclamation of Source and singularity of being.

And the ache beneath it all—the one no one wants to name—is that in order to get here, we gave our becoming to everyone else but ourselves.

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