I was at a point in my life where I was filled with so much rage, terror, and grief that I saw no other outlet but to enact it through the legal system.

My Therapist at the time was worried about me. I had a full scholarship to one of the best law schools in the country, but I was investing nearly all of my energy into revenge. She had warned me, as cautiously as she could, not to lose myself in my pain.

But the pain felt insurmountable, like a summit no human could climb. I would’ve done anything to offload it onto someone else, anything else.

For years, I had continuously tried to prove that I was enough, that I mattered, that I wasn’t inherently bad. And now I was beginning to understand that the very people I had spent my life trying to prove my worth to were the people whose abuse had created those psychic impressions within me in the first place.

It was too much for my psychology to comprehend.

I was swirling in a pool of darkness when, one night, something suddenly began to pull me out.

After a lifetime of being an atheist and rejecting almost any conceptualization of a higher power, I suddenly felt an energy begin to swirl around the crown of my head. Alongside it came lighter thoughts:

Let go. Trust. Don’t lose yourself in revenge. Believe in something beyond yourself.

I felt crazy… but the thoughts didn’t necessarily feel like they were coming from me.

So I immediately went to Google and typed:

“How do I know if spirit is talking to me or if I am schizophrenic?!”

I wish I could give language to what happened next, or offer some scientific explanation that could validate that what I experienced was truly real. But those who know, will know.

I found GOD. Or GOD found me.

Somehow, everything that was unraveling within me began to make sense. The need for revenge released its grip. I began to feel the deep interconnectedness of everything. I understood that the deepest purpose of this human life was to truly love one another and to see ourselves in everything around us.

The most complex questions that theorists and philosophers had struggled with suddenly seemed so simple to me.

How did we not understand?

I gave up the lawsuit. Hell, I even began contemplating whether I wanted to help people who had victimized children get the assistance and support they needed.

People around me noticed the shift. They wondered whether I was still psychologically coherent, for sure, but they also watched the weight upon my face begin to lift. The darkness that had consumed my being began to recede.

I was coming back to life.

I thought I had it figured out. I thought the deepest tragedy of my life had been resolved through my surrender and acknowledgment of something higher.

But that’s not how life works. I truly wish it did.

After a lifetime of denying that ghosts were even real, something in my psyche had pierced through the veil, and now even dead people were trying to speak to me.

Everything that could go wrong during my time in law school truly did. It felt like some invisible force was doing everything possible to push me out.

And slowly, I was losing my grip on coherent reality.

Suddenly, there were beings called the “Pleiadians.” There were orbs appearing on my balcony. There was my fiancée witnessing her partner rant and mumble about quantum reality, different timelines, and realities beyond our own.

The trauma hadn’t simply gone away. It was asking to be met through a different mechanism, and I had absolutely no idea how.

Soon, I reached out to another woman in law school who I felt saw me, and who I believed I could see in a way others couldn’t.

Was this what people called “Twin Flames”? What the fuck was that?

And before I knew it, I was betraying my own relationship through a mixture of spiritual jargon, unresolved trauma, and toxicity. I was abandoning the moral principles that had once kept me centered in a Self that had always sought to take the higher road, even when doing so was difficult.

I soon gave up my full scholarship at one of the top law schools in the country to train with different energetic healers and spiritual teachers, desperate for guidance and mentorship. I needed to understand what was happening to me and gain some kind of grip on how to work with it.

But the application of these tools was only pulling me more deeply into insanity.

Concepts like Past Lives, Creating Your Own Reality, and There Is Nothing But the Now were being applied in ways that fractured my psychology further, while encouraging me to idolize the very people helping me dissociate from the pain and shame that were so desperately asking to be met.

I began integrating into spiritual and conscious communities and spaces, searching for people who understood.

But, without being too judgmental, something felt off.

It didn’t seem like many of the people around me had actually encountered the kinds of experiences I was having. Sometimes spirituality seemed almost like a fad to them, something interesting or “cool” to participate in.

Meanwhile, my entire life was being consumed by an experience I was desperately trying to make sense of.

Surely, over time, my spiritual practice began to turn me into the very Monster I had once been looking to defeat.

The misuse and misappropriation of Indigenous modalities and medicines through a Western consumerist lens had turned me into an incredibly egotistical and self-absorbed person. By continually trying to transcend the Ego, I was only inflating a different one in its place.

Before I knew it, I felt severed from my humanity, and those I was once close with began to take their space from me as well.

I had begun this process a couple of years earlier at rock bottom, yet somehow I had found an even deeper well and pit of darkness that I was now spiraling into, one I couldn’t even have imagined before.

But I also knew that I was responsible.

I had taken the bait. I had bitten into the fruit from the forbidden tree of knowledge as a way to escape myself, and now I was bearing its poisonous fruit.

So I renounced all the bullshit. I cut out the false mentors and teachers and found my way toward those who had already met their own pain and grief. And finally, I allowed myself to collapse into their arms.

For the first time in a long time, I felt human again.

When we are desperate, we’re looking for anything that offers us an escape. And New Age spirituality offered one hell of an exit ramp that was incredibly easy to get sidetracked within.

But eventually, I began to understand that this process was never about escaping myself.

It was about meeting myself more deeply.

It was about embracing the parts of myself I had always felt shame within. It wasn’t about rising out of this world, but meeting it at the deepest elements of its roots.

I traded the Eckhart Tolle and even Ram Dass books for a mixture of old hip-hop and The Hunger Games novels, while beginning to understand trauma and spirituality through a more grounded and coherent lens within our Western world.

I didn’t abandon my spiritual practice, but it had to make sense within the context of who I was as a unique and complex person.

And slowly, the personas I had unknowingly adopted began to fade away.

As I embraced my own heritage and ancestry as well, I found something I had been searching for my entire life:

Psychological Coherence.

No, the spiritual and psychic gifts didn’t fade away. In fact, I still experience them as very much real. But my over-identification with them, and the need to constantly extract something from them, faded into the background.

I learned how to allow insights in when they felt beneficial to me and those around me, and how to turn the dial down when they weren’t necessary.

I also just allowed myself to become a person again.

Without the dire need to feel special. Without the need to feel “called upon.” Without turning every strange experience into evidence that something greater was happening.

I could just exist. I could just be Zack. And I could truly love again, for all that I was and for all that those around me were as well.

It has now been over eight years since I walked into that law firm looking to press charges against my own family.

Some days are filled with compassion and forgiveness, while others bring out a fiery rage and, yes, even hatred.

I don’t shame that anymore, instead I just let it be what is.

There are days when I want to throw every abuser and perpetrator into a confined cell. And there are others when I mourn for them, and for the abused child who may have once existed within them before becoming the Monster that even I had the potential to become in my own way.

And yes, I feel more connected to GOD than at any other point in my life.

But that relationship only continues to deepen in a way that raises more questions rather than solving most of them.

I’m okay with myself now and I’m okay with just being a Spiritual Weirdo.

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Spiritual Weirdos

Yet, throughout most of your life you never wanted kids, never truly liked them, in fact you often considered them needy and boring.

However, you’re at a point now where Motherhood naturally seemed like the next step.

Your parents tell you how much they want a grandchild in a hidden attempt to correct their own parental failures and most of your friends and colleagues have also moved on to raising their own families.

In essence, you start to feel like an outcast, a loser, as you descend into a perpetual pit of ‘shame’ for not keeping up with the Jones’.

And over the course of the Pregnancy, something strange happened.. you convinced yourself that this child would be the answer to all your problems. Whether it be in the discordance in your own marriage, the pit of emptiness you feel inside yourself, and the lack of love and connection that you’ve been severed from within your heart.

But when your child is born.. you don’t feel much of anything. This maternal instinct that was supposed to come online never activates. You look down at your first-born and you feel annoyed at him for not giving you what you had hoped for.

But your family still surrounds you along the hospital bed, gushing over your newborn son while proudly taking pictures, and so you play the ‘part’, you act out the ‘loving mother’ the best you can.

But in essence, you’re still empty on the inside, and have now entered into a part of a theatrical play you must carry out for the next 18 years.. you are the ‘Devouring Mother’.

You grew up in a generation where Therapy and Mental-Health weren’t the ‘norm’ and certainly not for someone like you who could at least ‘perform’ stability.

You were ‘strong’, you had to be as a Woman in that World.

You still have flashes of your Father returning from the ‘Vietnam War’ as a different man. One who no longer emanated warmth of care from his being, but now suddenly tossed your mother down the stairs when she dared to speak back to him.

But it didn’t impact you, you’re not an overly-sensitive person who can’t handle things. You still went on to get good grades throughout school, graduated college with honors and landed a nice cushy career as an Office Manager.

When your parents complained about you not having a husband, you quickly went and found one.

You don’t ever remember feeling that much infatuation with the Man who'd become your life-partner. But he was ‘soft’, he didn’t challenge you, he was rather nice and often just did what you told him to do.

In essence, there was a sense of ‘safety’ you felt with this Man that you never had experienced before and confused it with ‘Love’.

Because the moment he vocalized any frustration towards you, you’d emasculate and cut him down, making sure he fell back in line to the position he belonged.

He didn’t want to be a Father or have a child either, but is merely going along with this play because it’s what you want now and have demanded it of him.

From the outside-looking in you begin to appear like the perfect family and mother to your surrounding community.

You’ve become terrific at acting and modeling the loving and nurturing mother when the time called for it in public settings.

When people were around your family, it was as if the cameras turned on and you began one of the greatest theatrical performances imaginable.

The validation, the admiration, it almost becomes a drug that’s intoxicating which you need in all moments.

But behind closed doors, it’s a very different story.

You didn’t stop at the first child, you soon had a second, a ‘daughter’ to further aid the ‘perfect family image’ but this child doesn’t like to comply.

While your first-born mirrors back to you everything you demand to see from him like clockwork, your second-child continues to act out and misbehave.. she seems like the one person who sees through the ‘charade’ and knows you for exactly who you are, though you refuse to admit this to yourself.

From a young age she challenged every boundary, every rule, and felt an ease in expressing every emotion and feeling which arose within her.. she was her own person and this drove you ‘mad’.

You recruit your husband and son to continuously shame and mock her for the ways she’s being ‘different’ and they once again comply as they remain desperate for your own love and approval which you’re incapable of meeting.

Your children exist to be ‘extensions of you’ and yet your daughter refuses to recognize this.

As a young adult, she finally severs the cord with you and refuses to be in-contact.

Immediately, you place yourself as the ‘victim’ for the World to see. Your daughter struggled with addiction, she was always misbehaving, and you relay to everyone else all that you sacrificed on her behalf and how ‘ungrateful’ she truly was for everything you did for her.

But in the background, the daughter was flourishing in her adult-life. The black sheep of the family had rebelled and somehow developed a sense-of-self on her own and only continued to grow in beauty and power as she maintained boundaries with those who meant only harm to her, especially her own Mother.

While your husband has lost every ounce of masculinity and self-dignity through the marriage, he at least plays nice in front of others which is all you care about.

However, your perfect ‘son’, the one you felt not an ounce of true care and love for upon being born, now shows the first ‘chink’ in his armor. Struggling with ‘depression’ through most of his life despite being the ‘model citizen’, he commits his first ‘suicide attempt’.

You’ve worked tirelessly to hide his mental health issues from the World and he now just put it on display in the most grotesque way possible, you can’t understand why he would betray you like this.

Your son is now in the most vulnerable and difficult experience of his life but you can’t reconcile why he chose to hurt you like this with his ‘suicide attempt’.

He sits at a hospital bed desperate for your affection and empathy, but all you can give him is a scathing lecture about how ungrateful and selfish he is. A side of you is being exposed that you’ve longed kept hidden and others are now seeing it.

Eventually, the defining knife comes for your heart as your son reaches out several months later also requesting distance and limited contact with you.

The image of the Perfect Mother and Perfect Family-System is gone, there’s no where to hide.

You monitor your children’s social media accounts, not looking to see if they’re well and healthy, but dissecting if they may be collapsing so they could ‘need’ you once again.

However, that day never comes.

And somewhere along the way, your two children become close with each other in adulthood, despite you spending the entirety of their childhood pitting them against one another.

As old age hits, you feel the repressed feelings of grief, terror and shame arise in your system but you can’t confront it, you don’t know how.

Instead, you spend your last days finding any stranger who will listen to your story of how your children took you for granted and how you are in fact the ‘victim’.

Yet, on your last days, your son chooses to visit you by your bedside with his beautiful family in tow.

In one last moment, you suddenly feel warmth and love arise within you for the Man he has become as this deep knowingness can finally be acknowledged, ‘My children have truly ended this curse that has devoured me my entire life’.

Her response wasn’t what I thought it’d be.. in fact, I almost watched her eyes begin to glow with excitement when I told her.

She was fresh out of Grad School and I was the academic superstar who was currently applying to Harvard and Yale Law and recently received a near-full scholarship to one of the top Legal Institutions in the Country.

In that moment, it didn’t feel as if I was a person, but rather a big fish she was about to catch and parade around for her superiors.

With enthusiasm, she immediately replied back, ‘Well… what are the voices telling you?!’

I had only told her there was ‘one voice’ but I responded back, “Honestly, it was a calm feminine voice and it told me to let go of the need for revenge, that anger was corrupting my heart, and that I needed to clean my apartment more often because it was disrespectful to my fiance.”

Suddenly, the excitement oozed away off her face and a mixture of confusion and disappointment began to settle in as she stated, “Well thats not what voices would say!”

I was taken aback.. and in this moment it hit me, she wasn’t here to ‘help me’ in any way but to categorize me and define me immediately through this experience.. I was a statistic for her.

My last words to her in this exchange were, “Listen.. I know this sounds crazy, I’m not even into the spiritual shit.. but this is whats going on and it doesn’t feel discalibrating right now.. if something were to ever tell me to harm myself, I’ll let you know”.

But before I knew it the strong suggestions for medication came flying out along with a host of other diagnostic labels saying these were the signs of ‘schizo-affective disorder’ and ‘schizophrenia’, amongst others.

And in that moment.. I knew I was on my own.

But here’s the thing.. over the ensuing years, I definitely struggled with Mental-Illness that even became severe at times.

There were so many moments where my nervous-systems was locked into such a deep state of perpetual fear, that my mind could only interpret everything around me as being ‘bad’ or ‘dangerous’.

But I had also recovered significant repressed traumas too, and was now experiencing the fractures in my psychology that had always been buried away through a mixture of adderall, alcohol, and an addiction to achievement.

In releasing these coping mechanisms, I was now exposed to the parts of my mind I thought I could always hide away from.

And yet in that space as well, I also discovered something deeper and greater, as if the dimensions of our reality that existed beyond the physical space somehow became available to me.

And there were confirmations that I wasn’t making this up or completely out of my mind, and there was also tons of evidence that I wasn't ok either, and beginning to lose contact with myself and larger aspects of coherent reality too.

That this wasn’t merely a ‘black-and-white’ situation. I was going through a deep ‘Awakening’ and my Mind was also caving in on itself as well.

And we live in a World that has no concept of how to hold the balance that exists for an individual struggling within this terrain.

Let’s get this out of the way, both the Mental-Health and Spiritual/Wellness Worlds are fucked up and deeply harmful in diametrically opposing directions.

The former wanted to immediately discard me into the dark realms of institutional systems and life-long psychotropics for ‘one experience’ that was hard to delineate, while the latter is ready to prop you up with messianic complexes and disconnect you from any greater relationship with your external world and community.

One tells you you’re broken, the other tells you ‘you’re above all’.

And in the midst of this, I was just a young-man struggling to make sense of what my World meant now that I had gone no-contact with my family and I recognized being some Corporatist Lawyer wasn’t my life-path either.

I was also beginning to understand that as a life-long atheist, I didn’t have it figured out, and there was something more to this World that I hadn’t remotely grasped yet.

In Indigenous cultures, they understood this experience very well and was something Elders and the general community was deeply attuned to.

Rather than diagnosing this as Illness or Prophethood, they understood there was a breaking-down in someone’s reality and relationship to Self that needed to be cared for.

While also holding an awareness that they may be going through an initiatory process to hold Eldership themselves down the line and to be a bridge between Worlds.

Yet, that was far from a guarantee, and the most important thing was to bring someone back to a sense of community and recognition that nothing is inherently wrong with them.

In our Modern Western World, we’ve unfortunately lost that nuance, and because of this we lose so many people along the way.

We have to redefine our awareness and relationship to ‘Mental Illness’ and even our orientation to Psychosis too.

The Spiritual Spheres will encourage states that are actually delirious and delusional and cause someone to fracture their psychology to a point they may never be able to come back from.

While the Mental Health Field does not give room for someone’s psychology to appropriately interpret and integrate language and archetypal visions that lay outside of liner-processing models.

When one also uncovers heavy trauma or there’s a ‘shattering-of-self’, the Nervous System and Mind lose its ability to orient to the World and Self correctly.

That’s not necessarily ‘illness’ but it is disfunction and an individual may rely on a greater ‘intuitive complex’ to adapt. Yet, it gets incredibly messy as someone is essentially functioning on a new operating system they don’t know how to properly utilize yet while the old one remains broken.

What people in these states need isn’t more labels and prophecy.. but compassion along with genuine resources and tools.

Spirituality and mental illness often do arise together. But what matters most is our capacity to guide people through that tangled terrain.. back toward an integrated relationship with Self, one that can hold the complexity of the multidimensional reality we inhabit without fracturing beneath it.

You Can Read Part 1 Here → Click Here

In a moment of clarity we take out our phones and begin speaking,
‘Hi, the Wellness Industry is fucked and this is what needs to change…’

Suddenly, we feel a stream of consciousness take over that’s mixed with rage, grief, and a passion that feels new.

We begin naming all the dissociation and bypassing disguised as Enlightenment, the predatory sales and business practices clothed as ‘Abundance’, and finally the distortion and desecration of our sexuality and boundaries framed as ‘Feminine Empowerment’.

We become deeply aware of how we’ve been conned, manipulated, and violated through the weaponization of therapy and spiritual language, gaslit out of our truth through some bullshit application of Moral Relativism.

We post the video not in an attempt to go viral or gain engagement, but as a release valve for everything that had been building and as a warning to others.

We’re certain others will push back, and they do, but to our surprise thousands of people reach out and thank us for validating what they’ve been feeling for awhile but didn’t know how to articulate.

We used to post snapshots of our meals at an Airbnb in Bali or photos of us doing yoga poses over a sunset in Tulum.. while our friends did the same.

However, our social media feeds now continued to be filled with horrific images of innocent children being murdered in the most evil of circumstances, with none of the spiritual ‘gurus’ we once looked up to even willing to name it or speak on it without taking a ‘Both Sides’ approach.

So we do our best to fill in that gap, screaming into the void of the internet for others to notice what’s happening in our World and to please collectively do something about it!

Instead, we’re quickly met with comments like,
‘Their souls chose this.’
‘You’re stuck in a state of Duality and not Oneness.’
‘World News is incredibly low vibe and everything in the World is working out Perfectly.’

We’re aghast, and we continue to feel ourselves working out of some type of Spell we’ve been under these last several years.

We see a coffee mug just sitting on the table beside our laptop and without thinking we grab it and fling it across the room as it shatters onto the floor.

All this rage and sadness continues to well up in our system, which had been suppressed for years through an overuse of plant medicine ceremonies and spiritual jargon, as we slowly hear an inner-voice emerge and ask,
‘Where have we been!?’

Suddenly, our internet following is growing. People are listening, and we watch them commit the same sins of idolizing and worshipping us as we once did with the White Spiritual Influencers of TikTok and YouTube.

We shout at them,
‘Stop worshipping me! I’m just a regular bitch from Jersey.’
It’s the first time we’ve used the word bitch out loud since we ‘awakened’, but fuck it, it feels right for the moment.

We’re invited to give speeches about the horror of Genocide at Yoga Studios and Meditation Retreats. When we arrive, it quickly becomes clear we’re being used as a prop for performative activism and Instagram engagement.

The focus is supposed to be on raising money for children losing limbs and being bombed abroad, yet all we see are Men wearing spiritual capes with glazed-over eyes and Women with barely a shred of clothing leading exercises on opening sexual pleasure centers.

We feel like we’re living out our own personal Truman Show. The World feels insane, and the most unhinged behavior seems to be coming from the very Wellness and Spiritual Spaces we once gave our Soul to in innocent hope that they would be a solution to our suffering.

The Wellness Influencers we once idolized also now seem to be crashing out more than ever, as if they’re no different than someone in a straitjacket ramming against the walls of a padded room.

The Big Podcaster we used to listen to on repeat now claims God told him to impregnate another woman besides his wife and calls it ‘Radical Monogamy’ as a means to avoid any type of personal accountability.

The Spiritual Comedian we once adored has become one of Donald Trump’s loudest supporters while mocking and humiliating the LGBTQ+ Community and any other marginalized groups.. groups we are also a part of.

The Relationship Guru we once looked to for guidance in our romantic confusion can’t shut up about ‘Jesus’, and not from a place of genuine devotion but as a means of demonizing anyone and everything different from himself. We still follow him for some slight sense of amusement and for the weekly post flashing the words ‘We Are Charlie Kirk’.

We’ve lost nearly all the friends we once shared Cacao Ceremonies and Downward Dog poses with in spaces that were far too hot for the true health and wellbeing of our Nervous System.

We feel utterly alone, despite the fact our internet following continues to grow. We thought we had like minded people all around us, but when we began speaking our truth we were instead met with judgement and passive aggressive anger that we once thought was reserved only for Midwest Church Folk.

Then one day our former closest friend, who distanced herself after we politely declined her free ‘Light Language Solstice Moon Activation’ workshop, reaches out in a fury of chaotic emotion.

Once a temple of inner serene and high vibes, she tells us she attended a Tantra Workshop where the lead facilitator mocked her questions about whether the space was Trauma-Informed and then placed his hand over her sacral chakra until an alarm bell of personal violation rang as loud as it possibly could.

We hold space, not in the performative manner of our Reiki credentialed Masters in Costa Rica, but in a way that validates someone no longer excusing Sexual Assault.

She breaks down into tears. We cry with her. And for the first time in as long as we can remember, we feel something real with someone else.. true connection.

More and more old friends begin calling.. people who once belittled our anger as evidence of low consciousness, now seeking support and validation for all the ways they had completely disconnected themselves.

Slowly, people begin waking up out of a trance that once consumed our lives and turned us into someone we could barely recognize.

We exchange our linen robes, open toed sandals, and flat brimmed hats for old slacks, a favorite Wu-Tang t shirt, and a normal ponytail, and we begin to watch many of our old friends do the same.

Free from credit card debt and obscene spending on online workshops and Yoga Retreats in Tulum and Bali, we purchase a townhouse near our hometown in New Jersey and spend our free time at the local Youth Community Center helping kids and running for a seat in our small local City-Council.

No longer living a nomadic lifestyle of waking people out of the Matrix, we redirect our online work towards consulting businesses on ethical marketing practices and treating their employees with dignity.

Once desperate to escape Corporate America at any cost, we now re-enter that World on our own terms and as people consciously making a difference where we can.

The euphoric highs of singing our lungs out, blissed out on cocktails of MDMA and Psilocybin, are now replaced with walks through the park and catching up with old friends over coffee, friends we once abandoned for not being ‘awakened enough’.

Somewhere through the clearing of the New Age fog we return to a body that feels regulated, grounded, and alive. A home inside ourselves we had never fully accessed, even before all the Warrior II poses.

Somewhere along the way we built a platform capable of speaking honestly to the harm and fractures in the World that all need to be named and for the first time we feel ready to use it responsibly.

We chuckle quietly to ourselves in one final moment of clarity,
‘So I guess this is what comes after the Guru….’

Let’s get this out of the way, Maduro was a ‘bad man’, to the extent that his past and his behaviors almost render him similar to a Cartoon Villain.

He was an Authoritarian Dictator who refused to relinquish power and sought to control and harm any form of opposition against him.

He was a continuation of the regime and mentalities that had begun under Hugo Chavez, who not unlike Donald Trump, had once been seen as his Nation’s savior, dripping in false-promises and artificial charisma.. only to betray the very people he promised to represent.

There are many lessons to be learned here through what just happened on a multitude of levels.

I’m not sitting here, writing this to get lost in the echo-chambers of online noise arguing the same points to nauseating degrees.. which in this moment, don’t even feel that important.

Yes, what Trump did by kidnapping a Foreign Dictator without Congressional Approval or International cooperation sets a dangerous precedent.

Yes, America’s imperialism rarely, if ever, liberates the populations it invades, and most often tends to make things much worse in the long-run.

And yes, Venezuelans deserve to celebrate right now, and should be ecstatic that the Man who had his foot on their collective necks, abusing his power and authority in often the most horrific ways, is now gone.

I’m not here to argue any of this.

What I am here to explore is this:
As we collectively confront the failure and collapse of Venezuela, a collapse that unfolded in just a few short decades, and as we now watch Nicolás Maduro captured by the hands of an overreaching foreign empire…
Are we also not looking at the echoes of a future that America itself is headed towards if we’re not careful?
Is Venezuela not an omen of what may be to come for us as well?

In the Early 90’s, Venezuela was considered by many to be the crown-jewel of South America in terms of quality-of-life and national prosperity.

It was a Liberal Democracy that had strong institutional-systems, a comprehensive welfare-state, and a plethora of Natural Resources (including being a hotbed for Oil) which fueled and upheld a thriving Economy.

It also had a dark and dense history of racism, slavery, and an unspoken economic caste-system it refused to acknowledge or deal with, sweeping it under the rug, and pretending as if the effects still didn’t reverberate throughout the Country.

Sound familiar?

Many poor Venezuelans still felt left behind, especially those of darker complexion, as those of European Ancestry and families who had hoarded generations of wealth dictated life for everyone else despite the Wealth-Gap continuing to widen.

And along came a Charismatic man who spoke to the ills and pains of those who felt left behind in a Nation who continued to focus on everything else but them.

He did not look or speak like your typical Venezuelan Politician, he did not feign airs of superiority over the Working-Class, and he was a Military-Man, a Warrior, someone who promised to viscerally take down the ‘Evil-Elite’.

And in that, as the aristocratic class refused to take him seriously, ‘Hugo Chavez’ pounced and became the Nation’s elected leader.

As President, he soon dissolved many of the checks and balances that existed within Venezuela’s Institutions, eviscerated their Constitution, extended his own personal-power far beyond a President ever had, and became a cult-like figure as Venezuelans even got tattoos of Chavez’s eyes on them.. pledging their undying loyalty and allegiance.

He quickly captured Media, installing his own network show, and strongly chastised any journalism that dared to call him out, until they were no more.

Those who had felt unseen and left behind, finally had a voice and Man that represented them.

However, Venezuela quickly fractured even more deeply along ethnic and political lines, until a deep polarization took hold in which even families had a difficult time co-existing on Holidays if there existed a slightly differing political opinion.

Chavez was a magnet, many Venezuelans articulate that his leadership had almost put them under a trance, until they looked around and the amenities and government services they once took for granted were all but gone.

And when Chavez passed, his second-in-command was ready to take over but in a more devious and sadistic manner. He was there to unleash even the shadows that Chavez had tried to contain within himself.

Before we knew it, a country that was once rich in resources and strength could no longer feed its own citizens.

And yes, there is always an argument to be made on how forces like Exxon and American sanctions deeply impacted Venezuela and did not afford them full autonomy and rights in their own country.

But even Venezuelans themselves will tell you how it was their own corruption and unhealed collective wounds that allowed something dark to fester until it had taken over the Soul of their Nation.

And so now, entering 2026, as Venezuela watched on as their own former international oppressor kidnapped their authoritarian leader.. they cheered and celebrated, exhaling a sigh of relief that the Nightmare of the last 27 years may slowly begin to fade.

That does not mean they’re not aware of the horrors of American interventionism and its own nefarious goals.. but rather see it as a reminder of how bad things had gotten to the point that their own foreign adversary stepping in actually rendered ‘hope’.

And for us Americans, let the story and descent of Venezuela move through your bones and tissues until it deepens into the core of your being as you may potentially recognize how similar these stories feel to the trajectory we may have now begun.

Recognize that in many ways, Venezuela shares so many parallels in its own history as a young nation, and it has created a roadmap upon how one can get lost.

That no, we should not downplay the gross corruption and ignorance that has pervaded our government since its inception. But that we may now have turned to a person and force to save us, and along the way disempowered our own very ‘Beingness’.. that we, as Americans, have also made a deal with the ‘Devil’ we are now being called to rescind.

That somewhere in here, there is a pathway of balance. A pathway of acknowledging the corruption without disposing of our own discernment and intellect as a consequence.

That charisma and boastful promises to protect a working-class that has been forgotten is not enough to hand ourselves over to an individual who works tirelessly to erode the principles and values our own Nation was founded upon.. even if they’ve never been fully realized.

Let Venezuela be a lesson of what potentially awaits around the corner for us unless we’re willing to awaken ourselves out of the ‘Spell’.

Are we headed towards an all-out anarchistic collapse in which all forms of institutional structure and governance fall away?

Is the climate on the verge of bleeding out so deeply that the world becomes uninhabitable for us, as hurricanes and tsunamis sweep over our coastlines?

No, not necessarily, because we are in control and in power here.
But not in the way you think, and not in the way taught throughout media and academia.

Every so often, we as a society collectively go through a jump or evolution in consciousness. However, it is our directive and decision how we go about this.

Fight and resist it, and prolonged suffering occurs.
Fail to learn the lessons (both the shadows and the light) of the times that just preceded us, and we will continue to repeat what we haven’t learned in very visceral and uncomfortable ways until we get it.

Thousands of years ago, humans mostly lived in tribal and indigenous settings, praying to the elements of nature, with their lives completely dictated by the chaos of a force unseen.

Illness, famine, and natural disasters could occur at any moment, and there was little to nothing to be done to protect oneself or the community, outside of prayer to the deities they had made contact with.

Yet, it was also a time of deep community, relationship with the environment, and a yielding respect and reverence toward the forces they couldn’t control.

Then came the Renaissance and the European Enlightenment.

An over-reliance on the logical and analytic self took over, and society headed in a direction that sought to overpower and control the environment at all costs.

The scientific method, medicine, and a deep understanding of the physics and nature of our third-dimensional reality emerged from this time.

But it was also a time rooted in conquest.
The ethos of dominate and conquer became its fundamental principle and value.

Respect and reverence for life that did not meet its arbitrary intellectual standard was non-existent. Such life was either squashed out completely or exploited and extracted by the pre-dominant empire of the time.

During this era, the world lost connection to its magic.

The shadows of colonialism entrenched themselves everywhere in the collective psyche. Even a reverence for the heart seemed to disappear, as the messianic figure of this time ‘Jesus’ had his teachings distorted and lost in translation over time.

We traded symbolism and mythology for rationalism, and replaced meaning with the machinery of never-ending growth and exploitation.

As a result, the ethos and mentality of modern-day society is now dying out.

The world itself will spin us off if we cannot learn to exist in relationship with it.

We have overcorrected and gone overboard in our desire to manipulate and dictate every element of the Earth at all costs, for the inflation and gratification of the self.

In essence, we are collectively stuck in the sin of Gluttony.

This is why you are beginning to see a more intentional shift from many people and communities toward a more holistic way of living and embodiment.

Not only did we colonize and dominate our environments during these times, we colonized the self and our psyches as well.

We lost the capacity to listen within. We forgot how to understand who we are and the part we are meant to play in the greater whole.

It became all about ‘ME’.

And now, we are being asked to let that go.

We are being asked to shed the hierarchical structures of power, the gross wealth inequality, and the incessant need to control all outcomes.

We are being asked to stop punishing ourselves for not exploiting the world around us enough in pursuit of our ego’s goals and desires.

We are being called back into right-relationship.

That doesn’t mean returning to huts and villages.
But it does mean no longer absconding from or abandoning indigenous wisdom, and instead learning how to integrate all the wisdom that was once lost into our modern times.

We must truly learn what it means to have a soul again, while collectively pushing back against parasitic agendas from governments and institutions that seek to further extract from and disconnect us from our own being
(cough, Transhumanism agenda, cough, Digital ID, cough).

We must slowly allow our heavy capitalistic and profit-over-people paradigms to die out in a nurturing way. While then ushering in newer models that allow for technological progression and human evolution to continue without our wellbeing or mass-murder being the cost.

This is the world we are stepping into now.
And I hope we are wise enough to allow it,
and slowly grieve what needs to be let go.

However, throughout most of your life, that last part didn’t matter, in fact it helped you. The Systems and World were built for you, many of our most powerful leaders, including most of our modern-day Presidents were represented by you!

You’re currently 32 and you still wake up every morning with this deep longing to return to your days as Pledge Master of Sigma Epsilon at Florida State University

You’ll never forget all the awesome Frat Parties preying upon young women with father issues, desperate for male approval.

You say the N* Word, often, but only in private, because you still have that one black friend Jeremiah who you carry around like a Christmas ornament.

You’ve never accomplished anything in your life, never crafted anything of meaning or impact, but it doesn’t matter.. because you’re Rich, White, and Mediocre!

Your hands have never met calluses, your body has never ached from a hard day’s work, and your nervous system has never known the fear of paying your bills week to week.

Most of your early-adulthood was spent on Wall Street as a financial analyst in a position your family got for you despite having a 2.3 GPA, no real work experience, and a Business Communications Degree.

It’s your only credential, one that you hold dearly and derived all your value from! You earned it through all the nights of VIP Bottle Service, coke binges, and snorting adderall which never seemed to stop.

You do like working with numbers, figuring out how to continue to game the system, so you can become Richer, Wealthier, and modre Mediocre.

But something happened a few years, ago, a recession hit, and the Financial-Firm you worked at had to let you go. In fact, many of your friends were now without jobs and the never-ending VIP Bottle Service Tables didn’t look kindly upon the unemployed.

Status, Wealth, Prestige, it's your entire identity, and you actually lack the skillset to meaningfully uphold the titles which were freely given to you.

So you’re in a panic, you don’t know what to do, the truth and reality of who you actually are and the emptiness with which lives inside you is closing in as if you’re stuck in an escape hatch in Indiana Jones.

But there’s a way to avoid facing yourself.. and it’s called the Business/Marketing Coaching World of the Spiritual & Self-Development Sphere!

So you trade the Hair-Gel and Suit for a Hair-Bun and Linen-Robe with a plane ticket to Bali in one hand and mala-beads in the other.

You know nothing of respecting the sacred, connecting into a relationship that didn’t immediately serve you, or forming any set of values and principles that you’re willing to uphold.

But you do learn all the self-development buzzwords and how to take the lifestyle which Mom and Dad’s trust-fund can still afford you and paint a hell of a picture of it online.

You’ve now exchanged reading index-fund graphs for studying Instagram algorithm trends.

In Bali, you team up with your old fraternity brothers Lyle, Kyle, and Bradley.. together you look to identify gifted healers and practitioners who don’t know their real worth and don’t fully trust themselves with their businesses.

You create insanely expensive online workshops, with empty promises of immediate success and a stunningly beautiful and care-free nomadic lifestyle with which you continue to show-off online.

Women who sign-up for the workshops continue to oogle and blush as you use the words ‘Integration’ and ‘Nervous-System’.

But something happens.. a young woman comes in who is deeply gifted and skilled in working with Trauma and she has rectified her wounds with Men like you and isn’t willing to play out the games you’re engaged in.. she stands up to you one day and for that.. you mock her in front of everyone.

However, others start to slowly see through the facade as well, they see the lack of integrity, they see the lack of any true business or marketing guidance that isn’t filled with gimmicks and Chat-GPT prompts.. and so they begin to opt-out.

You’ve gained 500k followers online merely by exploiting TikTok trends and cool buzzwords, but you’re suddenly confronted with the fact that no one actually respects you.

You’re confronted with the fact that you have indeed been living a lie and misrepresenting yourself while exploiting everyone around you.. and it’s a deep sinking feeling you can no longer escape from.

Lyle, Kyle, and Bradley continue to get lost in Ketamine Ecstatic Dance Sessions, but you can’t stomach the non-sense anymore.. every thing you identified yourself through was a facade, a persona, and a scared little boy is all that’s left behind.

And you don’t know what to do.

And slowly, somewhere deep in the inner-recesses of your psyche and stomach, a pebble of vulnerability begins to arise out of you. Not the type that’s the wailing crying screams that Lyle, Kyle, and Bradley do during Cacao ceremonies to impress the woman next to them.. but a visceral and raw sensation urgling in your gut that speaks ‘I’m not enough’.

You came to Bali to live out a white-washed wellness version of your Sigma Epsilon Days and suddenly you’re being thrown into the Dark Night of the Soul and you don’t truly know what it even means to be a ‘Man’.

You become aware that you lashed out at that young woman because she was the first person who told you ‘No’ in a World that rewarded your unearned self-inflation.

You realize no one actually ever cared about the real ‘you’.. because you don’t even know who that is.

The World has always allowed you to get away with whatever you want except holding space for the deep pain that barreled through every part of your ‘being’.

Suddenly, you’re human and you have to figure out what life looks like without the ‘masks’.

A life of privilege and artificial success can no longer uphold the false egoic-self.. and you are now aware that the systems with which you thought built you up were actually a cage to keep you contained in archetype which was devoid of ‘Soul’.

And yet, for you, in this moment, Todd.. or Taylor, or was it Tyler.. you finally feel ‘ALIVE’.

Hell, when October 7th came around, there were individuals far more qualified and knowledgable on the history, theology, and geo-political dynamics of what had gone on in that region to speak on it.

But maybe that was the point, that I didn’t really know ‘anything’, that years and decades of religious propaganda, group-think, family pressure and an identity so deeply fused with a ‘connection’ to a belief system and ‘land’.. had never penetrated into every crevice of my Psyche and Nervous-System.

That I could sit there as ‘Curious George’, speaking to both Palestinians and Israelis individually and form my own opinion and perspectives without the collective echo chambers of online spaces as well.

Here’s what I do know, a horrific ‘Genocide’ occurred to the likes we have not seen in centuries and millennia relative to the dimension of the all-out ruthless murder of innocent children, while being televised for the World to see through an I-Phone as we watched on helplessly. And for many of us, it was our own ‘labor’ financing it through our ‘Tax Dollars’.

I know now the mentalities, the disassociation, and the events that got us here.

To invade a land, put its inhabitants behind walls, fences, check-points, rip them from their ancestral homes, and then collectively scream at them for nearly a century labeling them as ‘vermin’, ‘less than human’ and painting them as if they’re native savages that must be ‘contained’.

I do know the anger, rage, and grief that filtrates every bone in your body as your humiliated and discarded in front of your communities and the World at large.. for merely ‘existing’ and desperately fighting for a sense of ‘identity’ and ‘sovereignty’ (any victim of childhood abuse knows this all too well).

Palestinians deserve ‘Freedom’, the ability to not be a ‘punching bag’ for Jewish Trauma, or a chess piece for Geo-Political scheming amongst World-Powers for resources and control of land.

And I also know that us as ‘Jewish People’ finally have to look in the mirror and discard the victim-mentalities, the persecution complexes, and the ‘arrogance’ we can be guilty of, even as cases of genuine Anti-Semitism and hate rises all around us.

If you’re Jewish and you want to be coddled, validated, and enabled.. you will never get it from me and should likely unfollow me from here.

If you also want a Self-Hating Jew (whatever that means) that is only here to spew other non-sensical propaganda points and crucify those I share a blood-line with for ‘grifting’ dollars.. you won’t get that either.

I believe in Judaism, I believe in the wisdom and depth that still lives within us, I believe in our collective hearts and a unique connection to a force that extends outside this universe which is beyond human-comprehension.

I believe it is something the ‘World’ will need from us one day, and I also know that it’s buried under millennia of unprocessed generational trauma and has calcified into a ‘Monster’ we just unleashed upon the World for all to see.

I can’t say this enough, but when you do not ‘heal’ the generational trauma which lives within your bones and nervous-systems you will continue to carry it out and act it upon others as a means to normalize it for the ‘psyche’ to avoid pain and grief the nervous-system doesn’t believe it can contain.

We keep thinking that ‘safety’ exists in a land, exists in a ‘book’, exists in a ‘temple’, but safety must start from within.. and then everything else will come from there.

It means teaching our bodies how to process and alchemize the fear and terror that has lived within our tissues for generations without projecting it onto the World around us.

It means witnessing the ‘thoughts’ that tell us ‘were forever the victim’ and all our aches and pains lie with everyone else and we’re devoid of any culpability and accountability for our parts in this play.

It means deeply confronting the belief that if we somehow face our pain and collective trauma-adaptations it only means giving true Neo-Nazis and anti-semites further ammunition to attack us (when it’s actually the exact opposite which is true).

I know the ‘Bondi’ shooting was horrifying for the Jewish population. I know it reactivated that deep wound of once again having to ‘defend’ ourselves or this belief that the world is unsafe unless we fortify ourselves behind a fortress of iron domes, US funded weapons, and ethno-supremacy.

But it’s not the way, and it has only lead to the deep unsafety we continue to find ourselves in again and again.

The World would absolutely love to put us in the role of ‘collective scape-goat’ once again and fling all their shit at us.. but the ways we’re collectively behaving and interacting with our reality and communities only digs us deeper into there.

For once, I beg of us, to recapture the love that is centered in our hearts, which carries forth to everything and everyone around us. A love that pierces through hatred and fear, a love that only a true connection with ‘divinity’ can be birthed through. A love that will force you to think and be ‘different’ than the Jewish Communities you have existed within for a long time.

Israel was an idea, it was a dimension of ‘consciousness’ that laid in the trust and surrender to a higher-force, it was never meant to be merely localized to a plot of land in which children could be satanically sacrificed to maintain control over.

It was merely a covenant with ‘GOD’ to continue to hold oneself in a way that was morally and ethically beyond the times we had lived in.

This is why ‘GOD’ has always abandoned Modern-Day Israel, because it was always an authoritarian hellhole that never represented what the spiritual dimension of ‘Israel’ had actually encompassed.

Remember, every biblical ‘Prophet’ for which Judaism is embedded within as a foundation, always spoke out against the people and leadership of ‘Israel’ (in often the most fierce and directive ways) when it drifted away from this state-of-being.

Yet now, we don’t even allow that dialogue without immediately exiling that individual and labeling them as ‘Self-Hating’ or ‘Anti-Semitic’.

This is how we continue to lose our way again and again.. we are never above criticism, and in fact must now make amends with the horrors of our deeds and actions more than ever before.

I hope we can move past this ego-scaffolding and return to the ‘Israel’ of David and Moses, which exists within us if we’re willing to confront ‘truth’ and not ‘religious cultic beliefs’.

Thanks for reading.

The hundreds of blood tests, CT Scans, a Spinal Tap and even a Bone Marrow Biopsy had all turned up with results that left little to no relief, answers, or guidance.

My organs were failing and the Medical System had no solutions, I was being left for Dead, I was on my own.

However, in a way it was the beginning of a journey that would be the most important and impactful period of my life.

In a way, an illness that kept me bedridden for over four years, in the most excruciating forms of pain and suffering I could ever imagine is what ultimately saved my life and brought my Soul back to peace and empowerment.

To quote a ‘Tale of Two Cities’: It was the best of times and the worst of times.

In Western Society there are certain engrained mindsets and belief-systems through which we view Human Health and Wellbeing that are deeply flawed and desperately need to be deconstructed.

One of the main ones is around Illness and that it is always there to be eliminated and removed at all costs.

However, Indigenous and Tribal cultures always understood illness as merely a sign, a guidepost that alerts us as to what needs to be looked at and given more attention.

It can also serve as a pathway to connect more deeply with oneself than we ever would’ve otherwise, if not faced with the nature of our own mortality.

Symptoms and pain are not something to ‘mask’ or ‘push away’ but rather a signpost to tune in and listen to, to develop a relationship with and cultivate an understanding to.

In fact, within Indigenous cultures, a long-form mysterious illness was often considered a necessary pre-requisite before someone stepped into the role of the Village Medicine Person and Healer.

It was through learning how to heal oneself that the primary education tool, delivered to us through a higher power, was given.

It was what granted someone the necessary skillset and wisdom to tend to another person's health and well-being on all levels.

It was an experience that transcended what could ever be taught in a lecture hall or textbook.

In Western Society, we look at human physiology through a mechanistic lens, as if we’re nothing more than a machine that needs to be broken apart and put back together.

Emotions, Feelings, Unprocessed Traumas, Unhealthy Belief-Systems, and a multitude of other contributing factors are completely tossed aside as non-sense and quackery.

Yet we know from the ACES Study, that the more childhood trauma one incurs, the more likely they are to experience chronic-illness later on as adults.

That emotions, feelings, and unprocessed survival responses don’t merely go away. They become locked in our tissues, in our fascia, until the body begins to attack itself in confusion as to why this won’t move when its presence is creating so much disruption and contraction.

And this is what our Medical Community has termed Auto-Immune Illness.

This is not to say that Western Medical Intervention can’t be helpful on that level.. but they’re also missing such a deeper aspect of the picture that warrants real attention.

Until someone addresses the underlying contributing factors to what creates conditions that allow illness to fester, they will always be struggling with their health, even if the specific symptom they’re currently struggling with goes away for a time.

It also must be stated, that when an individual is on a path of Growth or Expansion, we can no longer hold many of the things we once defined as normal.

Yet, our Inner-Self may have a difficult time alerting the rest of us to the nature and terrain we’re shifting into. Illness may be one of the only mechanisms at play that can grab our attention appropriately.

We may have defined ourselves and value/worth by our career success, physical aptitudes, and positions within social stratas.

Illness may be our best mechanism available to rip the external identity markers that are no longer needed and to pull us into the spaces within ourselves that have been desperate for our awareness.

In essence, illness becomes a journey to a level of self-love and acceptance we could’ve never come into contact with otherwise.

For those struggling with mysterious and chronic illness that has delayed your life or caused you immense pain, just know you have my love and support even from afar.

But please remember that this part of your journey may be part of something so much bigger than you can see right now, no matter how helpless it feels.

It’s a search that on the surface seems completely harmless, in fact even endearing to an outsider.. but what the young Man doesn’t realize is the vulnerable position he is currently at within his life and the Manosphere World he is about to get swallowed up by.

This young Man is the perfect victim.

He’s not a bad kid at all, in fact he’s spent most of his life merely lacking healthy male guidance and a true understanding of who he is and what makes him happy.

He’s not an athlete, he suffers from social anxiety, and severely lacks interpersonal skills. He’s a Virgin (in fact his only Kiss was a ‘spin the bottle game’ gone wrong at 14) and sometimes looks off in amazement as well as a mixture of bitterness and resentment at the success some of his Male peers have with the opposite-gender.

His Father is not a ‘strong man’, and he doesn’t even recall seeing him express an emotion outside of Anger or Jealousy. His Mother consistently emasculates his Father and is highly controlling and neurotic relative to their family-environment.

His Parents tell him they love him but he isn’t quite sure what that means as he’s never felt any warmth or true care off either of them and seems to only be their punching-bag when they can no longer rip into each other.

All he wants in this moment of his life is a Girlfriend and is desperate to figure out how to attract one.

The first Man he comes across in his internet search is Jordan Peterson. Initially, he’s taken away by this older man, a successful Professor, a Philosopher, someone who is able to speak to this young Man’s experience with empathy and concern.

He just wanted to know how to get a Girlfriend, but suddenly through a YouTube Video, his pain and angst is validated and seen for the first time he could ever recall.

Peterson also starts successfully naming the anger and rage that had been buried in this Young Man for some time and gives him a vehicle through which its honored.

All this talk of ‘White Privilege’ or ‘Men having all the advantages’, yet our young friend was struggling immensely with depression, insecurities, and battling a school-system that had cast him aside socially because he couldn’t throw a ‘Football’.. where were all these ‘privileges’ everyone else kept naming for him, because he didn’t see it and Peterson didn’t either.

Jordan’s videos and lectures begin to improve the young man’s life. Addicted to Pornography from the age of 11, he begins to ween off, play less video games, starts cleaning his room, and begins to journal and write down his own thoughts and opinions for the first time ever.

He even begins to find camaraderie and connection in online forms and video comment sections with other young disenfranchised Men like himself.. he’s not alone!

But even with Peterson’s knowledge and insights, his success and appeal with Women has not changed. He’s tried to court a few more classmates and lean into his voice, but instead was often met with looks of disgust, cruelty, laughter and complete dismissal.

Senior Prom is coming up at the end of the year and he’s terrified that no one will want to go with him.. that he is in fact all alone.

So he once again goes back to his computer and types the same search in, “How to make Women more attracted to you?”

This time a new video pops up on his Feed, one with a strong bald man who has a piercing if not even seductive stare into the camera.

So he begins watching Andrew Tate and then clicks on all the recommended videos through the side-bar, ‘Myron Gaines/Fresh & Fit’, ‘Sneako', ‘How to Become a Pick-Up Artist’, ‘Andrew Wilson’ and more.

He watches the video-clips of Podcasts with roundtables of attractive Only Fans and Instagram Models, the older versions of women who have rejected him and looked upon him with disgust.

However, now the tables have turned. These Men leading these discussions are able to ridicule and humiliate these Women and their perspectives on life and dating, just like he had always been discarded by them.

Suddenly, the Young-Man is told that he was never the problem.. and that Women Women are actually the problem with their modern-day superficial principles and value systems.. and that yes, this young Man is actually the Victim.. someone is finally saying it!

The Anger and Shame that his Parents made him internalize finally has a true container to go and that is on Women themselves.

He is no longer seeking a Girlfriend or Romantic Partner, but is now highly encouraged to build himself into a Man that Women want to sleep with and that he can manipulate and discard as he pleases.

He begins going to the Gym, ditches the fantasy novels and boardgames he once enjoyed, and merely focuses on building an aesthetic that Women will apparently crave.

Suddenly this once innocent Young-Man no longer seems endearing or even kind. He’s become something else entirely, embedded in a Persona of false Male Bravado and Pick-Up lines meant to derail the confidence of the young Woman he’s speaking with so that the Power-Dynamics between them flip.

Our friend can no longer even access his insecurities or self-doubt, not because they’ve gone away, but rather because they’ve been buried in a place within himself so deep that it no longer has room to breathe which makes him all the more dangerous.

He goes to Prom without a date still but is drinking heavily, trying to seem ‘hard’ or ‘mysterious’ to his female classmates that once derided him for being a ‘Geek’.

He goes to an after-prom Party that he snuck his way into and begins talking to the ‘New Girl’ who transferred over last semester and doesn't know him that well. He uses a mixture of superficial charm and bravado he’s mimicking from the Online Male Influencer he idolizes.

The young woman falls for it, it works on her, as she takes his hand and guides him into the bedroom.

However, when she gets there she makes it clear she only wants to make-out, but the Young-Man has been taught that the Woman’s boundaries are negotiable, blurry, that this first resistance is merely just a ‘playful test’ he needs to move through and her attire says something completely different than her spoken boundary.

So he pushes himself on her, manipulates her. The rage and anger he’s held for years now channeled into a performance of sexual domination over his female classmate.

Tears begin to slowly roll down this young woman’s face as she now questions if she’s even wrong for initially saying ‘No’ as the mental gymnastics which were employed on her have pushed her Nervous-System into a complete shut-down state where she can’t discern her own truth from someone else’s.

And this is how the Young Man loses his Virginity.. and learns to relate to Women.

And this Young Man is no different than many, many other Young Men who merely were in their parent’s baseman and simply were sad and wanted a Girlfriend.. and this is where they’re being led instead.

That may be a tough truth to take in, especially for those who’ve been caught in Mainstream ‘Manifestation Spaces’ for quite some time.

Here’s an unfortunate truth, in our Capitalistic System and the way it’s currently constructed, our ‘Wealth’ will always impact others around us positively or negatively.

Those who hoard ‘Wealth’ always do a lot of damage and those who choose to ‘invest’ in themselves and their communities around them can uplift the World in profound ways we don’t fully understand.

Yet, it’s not all of our journeys to Steward and hold massive amounts of Wealth.

There’s nothing wrong with choosing to be a School Teacher, a Fire Fighter, or a Social Worker who puts the wellbeing of their students or town over amassing large quantities of Money.

Hell, I believe it’s important more people fulfill these roles (even though it’s also up to us on a societal level to make sure they can live more comfortably than they do now).

But here’s the thing, those of us who’ve ‘chosen’ to hold ‘Wealth’ in this life have quite a journey ahead of us and lessons to learn that are rarely taught in Financial, Self-Development or Wellness Spaces.

Because amassing ‘Wealth’ is only part of the journey.

What matters most is working with your internal world on a multi-faceted level so that you can hold ‘Resources’ appropriately and facilitate their movement in a way that generates life-force energy correctly for everyone around us.

Here’s another tough truth

Capitalism isn’t going away anytime soon, and it’s our denial of that fact that creates a lot of unnecessary suffering in our lives and even our loved ones (especially for those who consider themselves ‘highly conscious or spiritual’).

Of course we must not also blindly turn away from the myriad of ways it does harm to ourselves and communities.

But much of the Health and Wellbeing of our World and Society in the future is heavily predicated on our ability to healthily integrate into the Financial Paradigms we exist within while remaining dedicated to improving upon them incrementally rather than trying to all-out destroy them.

The energetic foundations are shifting

We’ve lived in a World for some time that rewarded Psychopathy and Highly-Parasitic Individuals with massive amounts of Wealth and I do believe that is about to change.

Consumers are becoming much more conscious and intentional on where they ‘spend’ and as a result, those who look to gain Resources through overpowering, manipulating and controlling others will no longer have the energetic foundation that rewards such behaviors.

If you are called to become ‘Wealthy’...

So if you are someone that feels aligned and called to become ‘Wealthy’, you must also become clear as to the objective and meaning through which you will utilize this ‘Gift’ for.

If you’ve always felt ‘Unsafe’, ‘Unworthy’, or just even flat-out ‘Bored’ and accruing Money is your solution to solving these issues... you’re in for a ‘rocky’ ride ahead of you.

Holding ‘Wealth’ is as much about cultivating ‘Internal Safe’, having a healthy ‘Concept-of-Self’, as well as a ‘Deeply Fulfilling Life’ as it is to just having a good awareness and understanding of different ‘Investment Strategies’ and ‘Business Frameworks’.

If we’re not working towards an internal and external World that can hold all of that correctly, we will become the very thing this World has always despised and is deeply trying to move on from.

We need healthy stewards of wealth

Let’s not get it twisted, the World is in desperate need of Healthy Individuals who can hold and distribute resources wisely.

And if you are called into that it’s of the upmost importance that you begin creating a Healthy Inner-Terrain as well as shedding your old Trauma and Scarcity Programming.

You also must get clear on your own values, principles and what truly matters to you.

Maybe you are deeply invested into the health and wellbeing of our natural eco-systems... then make sure you’re working to create Wealth with the intention of investing into sustainable options for our Environment.

Maybe you understand our Childcare and Education Systems are broken beyond belief and the Wealth you’ve been amassing is meant to be redirected into the hands of those who can create alternative systems that truly look after and protect our kids.

These are the things we must become clear on and not just making money for ‘money’s sake’.

This is the next Manifestation Paradigm

This is the next ‘Manifestation Paradigm’ and it truly centers on placing resources into the hands of those who can hold the Energetic Responsibility of ‘Aligned Wealth’.

Have you ever considered that you don’t need to experience the heart-break of this current break-up, because if you do this ceremonial intention setting around your Ex, they’ll be back in your arms before you know it!

Oh.. I also forgot, this existential ache and nausea you’re experiencing.. completely unnecessary! We can distill down your astrological profile and human design so you can understand everything that’s going on with no anxiety or worry.

‘Isn’t this GREAT!?’… said the Serpent!

As we’re enticed with the modern-day version of the forbidden fruit (as told in the story of Adam & Eve), something deep inside ourselves demands we step back before biting in — despite the external pressure coming in from all directions to ‘eat’ what’s in front of us.

But it’s difficult, as the Wealth, Love, and Wisdom we deeply yearn for is right in front of our faces.. perfectly curated in the most aesthetically pleasing sales pitches you could find from attractive influencers online.

Yet, there’s a gnawing feeling in our gut that something isn’t quite right.

What if.. we’re not wired to be able to hold Wealth like that in our nervous system, what if someone else would know how to steward that million dollars much more effectively than us?

What if.. our ex doesn’t actually want to get back with us and in using these techniques we’re manipulating their very free-will!? What if this relationship isn’t even best for us and we’re not even allowing ourselves the time to process this correctly?

What if.. we need to be in the ‘unknown’ right now, we need to trust in the surrender and submission to a force beyond ourselves? We need not try and calculate or predict everything — which only enables us to avoid the very discomfort within ourselves we’re actually being asked to confront??

What if we’re being presented with a treasure-chest of wisdom and knowledge that were held secret because many of us weren’t ready to use it appropriately.

What if the whole Spiritual-Wellness Industrial Complex is operating in a way that is no different than giving a small child a machine gun.. and we’re allowing it if not encouraging it.

It is true that the veil is lifting between the unseen forces that dictate our reality and ourselves.

However, many of us are trying to jump in the car and speed onto the etheric highway before we ever even took Driver’s Ed.

We must understand that there is a right and left-handed path, which has even been conveyed to us through multimedia for decades, if not centuries (Think of Star Wars and the use of ‘The Force’)

The harsh truth is, many of us are not psychologically, emotionally and ethically mature enough to correctly wield the power that comes with many of these awarenesses given to us freely online.

And if you do start to wield that power, especially upon others, a ‘Force’ will come through and drag you through the mud until you have the necessary innate wisdom and maturity to hold it appropriately.

If you ignore that ‘Force’ or believe yourself to be ‘Above it’ you begin to walk a path that is devoid of soul, where you have now ‘sold yourself’ to something you don’t quite understand, but you feel it as the emptiness and hollowness within you only seems to grow until there’s nothing left except that need to feed on everything and everyone else around you.

Welcome to some of ‘The Gurus’ you’ve been purchasing and learning from the last several years.

Some of us have been gifted into awarenesses and wisdom that aren’t always meant to be shared freely, especially in a package that’s highly monetized and extractive.

Sometimes there are things that we have which are merely ours to hold and there’s an extensive process we undergo to make sure we’re in correct and right relationship with it.

It truly is a gift we must hold responsibly and not misuse.. and we must recognize there’s a lot of noise out there convincing us to bite into it in a way we were never meant to.

Our greatest Religious and Spiritual Figures throughout time have all yielded these various warning to us.. and they were there for a reason.

Make sure to walk through this next passage carefully!

I wake up to a clock flashing 9:08am as I grab my Vape off the nightstand and ingest every type of plastic chemical into my lungs.

I get up, layer myself in every sweatshirt and jacket I can find to survive the cold winter air as I prepare to shovel my car out of the snow right outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I have a shift waiting tables at a Steakhouse five minutes from the home I grew up in and I need to grab some caffeine and ingest it into my veins so I can withstand the line-chefs cursing at me throughout the day that I’m not moving fast enough.

From the outside looking in, you would have never guessed that six months before this I was being lauded as some type of profound Spiritual/Wellness Personality, potentially being prepared to sit atop of some weird Self-Development & Spiritual Coaching Pyramid.

I was being invited to appear on your favorite Wellness Podcasts, your favorite Spiritual Personalities were sharing my content with you, and comments flooded Tik-Tok videos of mine that had reached over a million views continuously claiming I was the next ‘Male Teal Swan’ (Back when that was considered a ‘good thing’).

And yet in the background.. did I even have friends anymore?? Better yet.. was I even a fucking person??

Or was I just now a product, an ‘inspirational life-story’ that was to now be packaged and sold no different than a box of Oreos..

I’m desperate for true and real mentorship, eldership, guidance.. I’m navigating a ‘Spiritual Opening’ that hasn’t fully integrated yet.

Information and wisdom flooding in that I’m doing my best to integrate, embody, share and make digestible to others.. but somehow I’m getting lost in it all.. I’m guiding people through their own difficult journeys yet I’m now beginning to losing contact with who I even fucking am in this process.

The only advice I’m constantly receiving is how ‘I need to keep growing’, ‘I need to post content more consistently’, ‘I need to share more about my relationships’, ‘Have I ever considered teaching a Workshop about this or that thing!?!’….

It’s just all so fucking weird.. a few years before this I used to simply be a goofball who wanted to be a Lawyer and help protect children’s rights while spending time with my loved-ones on the weekend.

Now, every part of my life is encouraged to be monetized as ‘Content to Consume’, every aspect of my healing journey packaged in a way others can find comfort and permission, so they too can ‘feel’ what they’ve buried.

Friendships have been exchanged for para-social relationships where boundaries are blurry and people feel they are entitled to your space at all times.

I’m living the ‘Dream’ the Wellness and Coaching Sphere are selling to us.. but my God, it feels like an absolute chilling nightmare.

So I split.. I pack a suitcase and cancel that trip to 'Tulum’ and get in my car and move back to Philadelphia.. desperate for some sense of normalcy and familiarity again.

I am ready to let go of everything I’ve built, the Healing Practice, the Public Influence, the Money, and the moderate amounts of Internet fame that came with it. Somewhere along the way it feels as if I unconsciously made a deal with the Devil and I’m cancelling it.

Amidst all of this is the sad realization that I am actually really good at my Career and have truly helped a lot of people.

I got into this work because Talk-Therapy just simply wasn't enough to reconcile the heavy trauma I was carrying.. I spent years learning every type of alternative modality I could find as well studying deeply the mentalities of different indigenous cultures when it came to Psychological and Emotional Health and why they had less incidences of Mental-Health issues.

Someone with my background wasn’t even supposed to be alive, let alone thriving in healthy relationships and doing well, and yet somehow over the years I had overcome all those odds through this self-exploration and healing journey of mine.

However, here I was.. drowning in a way I had never experienced before, confused as to what has even happened despite having a thriving career and public presence.

And.. This is the Life of being a ‘Personal Wellness Brand’.

It’s been nearly four years since the events of this period of my life.

I did everything in my power at the time to burn my business and practice to the ground in some sort of desperate rebellion to recapture a ‘Life’ that I had before the Awakening and Coaching Sphere grabbed me and turned me into something that didn’t even feel fully ‘real’.

Now here’s the thing, there’s definitely a way to be a ‘Personal Brand’ or a ‘Thought-Leader’ in the Spiritual and Wellness Space from a healthy lens while acting in deep integrity.

The problem is that there is very little to no information and guidance on how to deconstruct the shadows of these paradigms and roles and how we can potentially become lost in them.

Oftentimes, it’s not ‘Wise Elders’ with the big followings online, but younger attractive adults who are still figuring their own shit out but are good with technology, communication, and know how to connect with the ethos of what our younger generations are enduring.

As I said, that’s not a ‘bad’ thing, but when there’s a pressure for us to always be ‘on’ or crafting ‘content’, we lose our personhood and even the capacity to connect to our own humanity.. we become a product rather than a ‘Self’.

And unfortunately.. this is why you’re seeing so many of your favorite Wellness personalities burning out and losing their shit.

And the sad truth is.. a lot of them are genuinely good people who are tying to help others while existing inside an online ecosystem that is genuinely not there to uplift their wellbeing but rather extract from them as well as feed others around them too.

Now, there definitely is a massive amount of Con-Artists and Swindlers too, but they’re not reconciling with the emotional and psychological complexities of this role, in fact they’re merely thriving off the surface-level validation and admiration they get from occupying these spaces.

But for the rest of us.. we’re figuring out how to display our gifts and wisdom effectively, encourage others in their journeys, while also keeping appropriate distance between the ‘Brand’ and the ‘Person’ healthily.

I know for myself, I had to go back to Social Media purely just to share legitimate evidence-based practices and resources relative to Mental-Health and Spirituality. I made the information digestible and easy to apply and kept nearly all of my personal life out of it.

I had deep frameworks that I had developed relative to the integration of Somatics, Psychology and Spirituality and invested my energy into sharing them freely.

The focus became less about how ‘me’ and just about the actual wisdom and guidance I was offering.

From there I quit Bartending, got back to my career, and existed in a space that didn’t feel overly taxing, and I just allowed myself to become a fully-fledged person again, flaws and all.

I’m grateful for the lessons of that earlier time when the ‘Healer Influencer’ economy was booming, but I’m also happy that we’re also settling into a space that seems much more stable and relatable.

In the West, we’ve been fed a lot of distorted Media that to Awaken involves changing our name to something like ‘Buka Rashami’ (given to us by an ‘Osho’ like Guru from India), lighting Sage every few minutes to cleanse our Energy, and dancing with our friends in the Forest with some potential LSD and Ketamine mixed in for good measure!

But for those who’ve truly been on this path and didn’t engage with it as some Fad or to impress a Woman we met in Yoga.. we know that this thing ‘brings us to our knees’ and typically is NOT something we ever consciously asked for while it rips us to shreds and brings to awareness all the ways we’ve been betraying ourselves to ‘fit in’.

Now, many of us who’ve been in traditional career paths, whether that be Law, Business, Medicine, Engineering, Education, etc. have likely been operating on some form of auto-pilot for some time.

And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing either, in fact, the structure, discipline, resourcefulness and communication skills that develop from such roles are important for our every-day lives.

But at the same time, many of us in those fields soon recognize how outdated the structure and rules we’re operating within actually are and how much it leads to not only an extractive relationship with those ‘we’re serving’, but how much it dims and cuts out pieces of our own Soul and Well-Being.

It also doesn’t help that we are typically given long work hours, filled with tasks that are often meaningless and full of busywork to justify keeping us in the building and the operations running.

In regards to an Awakening, there is a true deep psychological and physiological shift that occurs when we’re shedding out old layers of Trauma and expanding into different states of awareness that allows us to perceive ourselves and our environments from healthier vantage points.

It isn’t blowing our ‘Third-Eye Chakra’ open, but rather giving ourselves the space and capacity to develop a new relationship with ourselves that is more cohesive, nurturing, and coherent, while also deconstructing a lot of propagandized media that had us disconnect from our true values and principles.

In the midst of that, our Nervous-Systems begin adapting to this new framework, moving in and out of deep unprocessed survival states, our Brains begin to form new neural pathways while reconciling unhealthy thought-patterns, we become much more Energetically Sensitive to our Environments, and even our Organs and Skin begin to work overtime to shed out old toxins we can no longer hang onto.

In that state we often need to rest and just ‘be’ a lot more, as it can almost feel like were running an anti-virus software through our psyches and somatic terrain, while then installing a new operating system which we need to learn to use as well.

Yet, if we have a career in traditional paths, especially Corporate America, it asks us to function like a machine, which has little to no space for feelings or unpredictable pathways of experience.

Essentially, the Corporate Machine needs us to operate in highly familiarized predictable patterns, otherwise.. we’re fired. This process is the antithesis of what an Awakening truly is.. and this is where you can see the dilemma.

This is why, a lot of us who undergo this experience are often asked to step out of Corporate Careers or at the very least deeply shift our relationship to it and move into a space within it which still promotes a focus on our own psychological and emotional well-being and health.

Now, does that mean we’re all destined to fully step away from Traditional Career Paths if we’re on this inner-work journey..?

My answer is.. No, in fact I believe it’s important for many of us to reinsert ourselves back into those fields, while still holding the new states of ‘awareness’ we’ve come into appropriately.

For all the talk about ‘Escaping the Matrix’ or ‘Building the New-Earth’ that consume New-Age Spaces to an almost nauseating extent, we must realize that Corporate America truly runs the World and creates a lot of the difficult living conditions we’re either trying to ‘escape’ or ‘overcome’.

Now, if Corporate is merely the shadow-construct playing out on this Earth.. we don’t move through it by ‘avoiding it’ or ‘destroying it’ but rather engaging in a new relationship with it that is centered, grounded and healthy.

So for many of us who’ve been on this journey for awhile, and have stepped away from ‘traditional spheres’.. you may start to feel you’re being guided back, which may at first feel confusing and disorienting, but in the grand scheme of things makes sense.

Because stepping back to allow yourself to essentially ‘expand in consciousness’ or at the very least form a healthier relationship with yourself is what will keep you from letting a toxic boss or workplace rip at the pieces of your soul you hold closest to you.

Instead, you will now be the ‘Wayshower’ and ‘Torch-bearer’ who advises and guides varying Leadership on the practices that must be implemented for them to co-exist healthily in this ever-shifting terrain our World is engaged while no longer existing in parasitism with its environment.

This is where we can begin to anchor in that Profit does not need to exist over the welfare of People and instead these two actually coexist well together.. and this is how we start to bring about the change we’ve been seeking deeply in this World from an integrated space.

But it doesn’t matter, because now the energy will shift and swoop hair-cut man-child must now let the party know how much women love to be with him, how easy it is for him to pick up any female at the party. This all occurs as he also makes glances and crude remarks at any woman that walks by.. needing to keep all the energy on himself now that his reign at the beer-pong table is over.

Maybe while reading this, you feel a sense of nausea rumble in your stomach, a moment of disgust settle under your skin, there may even be a fiery feeling that moves from your abdomen to your chest as you suddenly feel the urge to want to punch swoop haircut guy!

Welcome to America!

In the Wellness Spaces, the term ‘Narcissism’ often gets thrown around way too loosely. We hear it often after a friend breaks-up with their partner, describing the Boss/Supervisor they deal with at work, or maybe your own Mother is claiming you’re the Narcissist after she read some pop-psychology and you tried to set a boundary with her around the Holidays.

Hell.. it’s a quick accusation we can fling out there, one that allows us to put ourselves in the role of the Victim and immediately squash how we may have potentially created this unhealthy dynamic as well and the grief and pain that sits underneath.

Yet, Narcissistic Personality Disorder is very much real (even if it's much less common than Instagram pages tell us).

When one is embodied in the totality of this archetypal force it becomes its own delusional hell for all those that exist around this person as they consume the energy of their environment and nothing else in this World matters except to inflate their false sense-of-self.

Personally, if I ever use my public platforms to speak on specific political issues.. it’s because I’m really trying to sound an alarm on something.

By trade, I work with clients on a Trauma-Healing level while also guiding others through the nuances of ‘Spiritual Awakenings’ or categories of transcendental experiences that leave those who wrote the DSM-V quite miffed.. so speaking politically doesn't necessarily help my business or relate to my current line of work.

Yet, last year, our man Donald J. Trump consumed a lot of what I invested my platforms and public pages to speaking about.

Immediately, I was met with a lot of pushback and resistance.. I was also accused of being a Libtard, Femboy, and a host of other names that were in essence there to question and cut at my Masculinity because I didn’t support a Political Figure who spray-tanned his face Orange, had never done a day of manual labor in his life, and was the quintessential opposite of the very person he claimed to speak for and represent.

Yes, despite years on my part spent as a Men’s Coach and even guiding Veterans through post-service integration, my Masculinity was now being called into question (for the first time since grade school) because I did not support a Political Con-Man who was clearly creating a Cult-of-Personality.

To me, Donald J. Trump is America’s collective Father-Wound on display.

However, now that we’re a year into the insanity of his second-term, I’ve actually been surprised at those who used to deride me for my views on Trump and even accused me of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) reach out to apologize and even remark that it feels like they’re waking out of some weird distorted Dream/Nightmare.

Because when I’ve spoken on Trump, it’s never really been a Left versus Right issue for me. It’s about calling attention and awareness to a harmful archetype I have watched burn away at the wellbeing of myself and others throughout my life (Hell, I used to spend a lot of time doing the same with Hillary Clinton and her own representation around the distorted feminine aspect of Narcissisus).

To me, Narcissism is an energy that wraps itself around the Soul and Essence of a human and feeds on others. It often occurs when an individual feels such a deep lack of safety and sense of internal worthiness that they can no longer access who they even are.

It’s as if they are trying to breathe and can’t grasp for air.. so in those moments they will reach for everyone else’s oxygen mask instead.

In a way it is its own hell.. it’s sad. Yet, when a Man feels unloved and jilted by his Father, he will spend his entire life trying to gain that approval back through the admiration of others and constantly inflating himself to be what his ‘Father’ told him he wasn’t.

If he lives in a World where there is no space for his pain or grief to be seen and witnessed.. the energy stagnates and becomes something else, something that could even be deemed ‘evil’.

This is how we get the Sports Coaches that choke their players by the neck, the frat douchebags who haze pledges to death or a President that sends messages out like this after another Man’s murder who merely had the gall to speak out against his leadership.

Donald J. Trump in a way has become his own force of Collective Awakening. But we must now be clear that it isn’t one that exposes or overthrows the corruption of Government, but rather the Narcissistic Con-Man that’s so boisterous, loud, and incompetent that even the most corrupt were worried if they could contain his own shadows (Jeffrey Epstein is on record saying Trump is one of the worst men he’s met).

He is awakening us to how we are so desperate and devoid of a feeling being in power and control over our lives, that we can worship a Man who is so clearly against everything else that is not in service to his own applause because he is feeding us breadcrumbs that he’s the answer to our problems.

He is awakening us that there is no savior, and that if we want there to be real political and institutional change it will come from all of us, over time, and with a sense of grit, true humility, and self-awareness.

He is awakening us, that if you spray paint yourself at 80 fucking years old.. it’s likely because you are desperately trying to hide what’s underneath, because what’s there ain’t pretty and this Man doesn’t know how to actually control the monster that wishes to consume the energies of the American Public through Chaos, Drama, and Self-inflaggalation.

There are some big lessons we are taking in here.. and I hope we all continue to wake up from this Dream we may have found ourselves in.

A life of carefree abundance, ease, polyamorous sex orgies (with our twin flames and soul-mates of course), and never-ending vacations on indigenous lands were right there as long as we listened to this intuitive nudge (facilitated by a Sales Coach) and purchased the next $15,000 retreat from our favorite Wellness Influencer online.

We had already been through their online Manifestation Activation Course, Light-Language Seminar, and Soul-Mate Union workshop. Our attire had changed, we had traded out our t-shirt and slacks for linen robes, open-toed sandals and a very large flat-brimmed hat.

Our problems no longer seemed to overwhelm us like they once did. A life consumed with never-ending deadlines for meaningless work assignments in Corporate America had now been replaced with a nomadic coaching lifestyle.. everything was now on our time, we had escaped the Matrix, and spent our days evolving the collective consciousness though a computer screen.

Our Brother dying of an overdose when we were younger was merely his ‘Soul’s journey’, our Father’s domestic violence was easily met with forgiveness and understanding as ‘Past-Life Karma’ and the discordance we continued to experience in our own romantic relationships could easily be dwindled down into choosing partners who did not understand our love language was ‘acts of service’ and they merely needed to heal their ‘avoidant attachment style’.

No longer gripped by the pain of grief, loss, and betrayal, we were free to experience the euphoria of never-ending Ketamine and Psilocybin ceremonies with some ecstatic dance thrown in for good measure.

But yet.. despite the unconditional love we had accessed in that Bufo Ceremony in Costa Rica, the Oneness that settled into our ‘Beingness’ at the Breath-Work Facilitator Training in Tulum, something was still missing.. an emptiness, a void inside our soul that nothing seemed to fill… except this Retreat that our favorite Spiritual Influencer was about to lead!

It was clear that our vibration wasn’t ‘high enough’, we weren’t yet able to ‘magnetize’ the life that would allow us to feel ‘complete’ and it’s only because we had not fully worked through the resistance of attending this Retreat from the Online Personality we had spent years idolizing.

We had gone to Columbia University for Engineering on a large Scholarship, gotten a Master’s Degree in International Relations, but yet we were smitten with this young White Man we had found on YouTube who used to be a Shoes Salesman at Men’s Warehouse.

He was attractive, had over a million subscribers, and dazzled us with buzzwords and surface-level understandings of Eastern Spiritual Traditions. He was charismatic, funny and always seemed to say the ‘right thing’.

So despite ourselves being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, we take out that extra credit card and purchase ourselves a seat at the next Wellness Retreat of his!

And when we get there.. we can’t seem to shake the feeling that something isn’t right, that we’re somehow under a spell, that this Man we had idolized is no different than the intern that used to fill our coffee cup when we worked at Boeing.

While others at the Retreat look at him with undying admiration and awe, we see a scared little boy who never got his way. In a sense, we feel a mixture of compassion, concern, rage, and a deep knowingness that we had been ‘conned’.

The retreat didn’t work.. well it did, but not in the way we expected. All the ways we had been masked from our pain and internal knowingness had now been dissolved and we were confronted with everything we had spent years in denial of through New-Age jargon and the over-use of Plant Medicine and Spiritual Tik-Tok Teachings.

And then.. a Genocide starts, on our tax dollars. We rush online to see what our other favorite Wellness Personalities have to say! We’re curious as to how these deep esoteric teachings apply to innocent Children being ruthlessly murdered and what we can do to help.. and instead we’re met with silence and New-Age gaslighting.

We begin to realize there’s no money to be made from talking about something that makes other feel uncomfortable, no followers to be gained when ‘choosing a side’, and at the core that’s what mostly matters to the Influencers we spent years idolizing and spending money on.

So.. we’re stuck, and not in a way that another Wellness Program or Course can solve. We contemplate returning to our old Corporate job. In fact, we even update our Resume trying to figure out how these last few years can neatly fit into some category of ‘Work Experience’.

But we know that isn’t right either..

We think back to the ‘Awakening’ that we went through which truly shook us to our core. How pain-points that had kept us stuck in harmful loops had suddenly been exposed and dissolved.. we remember the expansiveness that opened up in our ‘Being’ before all the Retreats and Workshops in Bali and Central America were sold to us through Facebook ‘ads’.

We know something ‘Real’ is going on but it’s just not being shown by the out-of-touch influencers with large followings.

We know deeply in our core that the World has to change, but not through a commodified colonialist white-washed wellness lens.

Our parents were first-generation immigrants, we spent some nights hungry as a child, and we can no longer run from how that affects us and others we grew up with in similar circumstances as well.

Somewhere along the way through our healing journey, we did reclaim our truth, our inner-authority, and our personalized power.. we did reconnect to the parts of ourselves that Corporate America had spent years trying to kill.

And so in a moment of clarity we take out our phone and say, ‘Hi the Wellness Industry is fucked but this is what needs to change..’