As our belief in objectivity erodes, what can we create from the surreality of 2020?

Somewhere in the dissonance between the lull of quarantine and the hyperactive news cycle, the sheer farce of vitriolic politics set against the serenity of so many neighbors planting gardens and engaging in mutual aid, the smoke from the fires, the rain from the storms, dates and times meaning less, the hologram of digital communication, and the chronic nausea of watching our governing institutions corrode, this year has been feeling pretty damn surreal.

I say surreal not only in the sense of weird or dreamlike, but in the rising feeling that I’m walking through a Salvador Dali painting: dripping clocks as time and reality melt around me, and less and less ability to take “reality” at face-value. …

Step One: Focus on manifesting

Many of us on spiritual paths have had that moment when we bury our heads in our hands and just wish our damn Egos away. All that tension and anxiety, pain and control, disconnection and isolation, resistance and resentment, we want it gone. We believe, or have faith, that an existence of radiant love, happiness, abundance and connection is possible, if only we could do away with this pesky little Ego and its inalienable thirst for its desires.

Like so many spiritual lessons teach us, we cannot begin from resistance. We can’t dissolve resistance by resisting it, and we can’t dissolve desire by desiring to do so. …

To the Universe, the “what” of your experience doesn’t matter.

When we find ourselves getting repeatedly frustrated by the lack in our lives, feeling trapped by seeing none of our manifestations come to fruition, none of our desires satisfied, none of our wishes granted, it may be helpful to take a big step back out of the mind and remember: Source does not speak in form.

By form, I mean the way things appear in this material plane of existence. Individuals, locations, events, actions — these are forms. They are how energies (read: relationships) appear on the material plane. To Source (/the Universe/God/what have you), the forms are meaningless. …

12 ways my life has transformed as I feel myself detaching from Ego-identification

First, this has been a process. Four years ago, I had one of those Big Spiritual Awakening kinda moments. I’m always quick to talk about it with a degree of flippancy, but it was genuinely deep. I could tell you How the moment happened, but not Why, and I don’t think the How would work as any kind of recipe for concocting such a moment of your own. Across the spiritual seekers and teachers I’ve encountered, there seems to be but one common thread tying together each individual’s lightbulb-awakening moment: they’re always pretty damn random.

What happened in that moment was subtle and powerful. I can’t tell you how long it lasted, if it was only an instant or a gradual rise and fall. I can’t be specific about where and when it started and if it ever stopped. What I can say as an attempt to describe it is this: what before I’d tried to grasp intellectually as a concept, I suddenly just knew. I got it. I groked it. It (Life, the Universe and Everything) made sense in a visceral, intuitive kind of way, like a new lens through which to look at the world and watch what had before seemed chaotic realign into cohesive and recognizable patterns. For more on what that all looked like to me, you can read just about anything else I’ve written on this Medium account. …

It’s about realizing subjectivity.

Sometimes I find myself asking, “Why don’t I see more Black women New Age spiritual gurus?”

Looking at the spiritual teachers who sell out weekend workshops and rack up millions of hits on YouTube, I see primarily white men. Sure, there are some white women in the mix, some men of color (whose wisdom somehow always seems to get Orientalized), but looking around the world of capital-S Spirituality, transcendence into divine Oneness seems the purview of the Alan Wattses and Eckhart Tolles of the world. I just don’t see a lot of Black women. …

You do not exist to supply a lack.

When seeking to understand the purpose of our lives, we have a tendency to focus on the roles we want to inhabit. Are we to be doctors, lawyers, mechanics, masseuses? Parents, teachers, lovers, partners, friends? Are we intended to write the Next Great American Novel, or lead a social movement, or plant a world-changing permaculture garden?

From these understandings, we are eventually left asking: What is the purpose of our lives if we don’t achieve these goals, or fill these roles? And perhaps the more terrifying question — what would be the purpose of our lives once we do?

I had one of those lightbulb moments last night reading A Course in Miracles that fundamentally shifted my understanding of purpose. For me, and I think for many others, my drive to find and accomplish my destiny and do my sacred work has been caught up in a kind of category mistake about purpose. I’ve been misunderstanding what purpose actually is. The Course beautifully sums up that mistake as the confusion of Creation with Making. …

what it is

The real thing doesn’t work like that. It happens to you, and it’s a choice — all at the same time. It’s a choice you can’t not make. An option you choose freely, knowing you choose it and that you’d never choose otherwise, utterly effortless. You choose it and it chooses you, and they are no different.

Because the real thing, you don’t even notice yourself when you’re in it. It’s so innate that it’s not even felt against you. There is no pull or scrape of one thing against another. You notice it only by its absence once it’s felt, and once you’ve felt how it is without it, you know.

Come to know both, intimately. Vulnerably. Powerfully.

Be it all. Be all of it and none.

It is always there, waiting. It’s impossible not to find.

[JOURNAL] Let’s talk about authenticity and consent.

^ Cue John Oliver saying, “Cool.”

Any movement, be it personal or political, that is founded on freedom will invariably miss the mark. It will fall short of its goals because it fixates on the wrong ideal. Freedom is a means to an end, but not the end itself. It is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for creating actions that are consensual. The other necessary condition is authenticity.

To begin: Every action we take is a choice. This is not to say that everything that happens to us is a choice; it isn’t. The actions we take, however, are choices, whether or not they feel like choices. When we act, we choose a particular option from a possible set of multiple options. …