Life Lessons Learned the Hard Way

They said I was crazy. And I should kill one off. I would lose my business, if I didn’t. But deep down, I knew this was a path I had to take.

Maybe you’ve considered a name change yourself, but haven’t been sure how you would do it, or even why you wanted to do it. Over these next days, I’ll be sharing my name change journey, culminating in the announcement of what I have discovered as my one true name, and the integration of a decade of personal work around identity.

If you are struggling with any confusion around your own identity and the name(s) that represent you, this series may be one that could help.

IDENTITY: What’s In a Name?

If you’ve been around these parts for any length of time, you know I’ve been in a BIG kerfuffle around my name for quite a long time. Alexis Martin Neely, Alexis Neely, Ali Shanti … which name is truly mine?

Of course, the question was much deeper than that.
“Who am I?”
“Why am I here?”
And, “what’s mine to do?” were my perpetual wonderings.

It wasn’t my name I was conflicted about, it was my entire identity.

Lawyer, hippie, mother, artist, CEO, entrepreneur, multi-dimensional being, human … who am I and how could I be all of it when there seemed to be so much paradox in all of those various parts of me?

Today, identity fluidity seems to be on the verge of becoming a cultural norm.

But ten years ago, when suddenly a new identity began to emerge through me right when I was at the top of my success game, there were no role models.

I would have to figure it out on my own. And, it was confusing, at best. Crazy-making at worst.

When I first “came out” with it on Facebook and my blog, a woman congratulated me for my mad pride and invited me to join her movement. “Oohhh,” I thought, “how nice of her to see me as extraordinarily prideful about the personal work I am doing.”

And, then, I saw the link she posted with her comment and realized she wasn’t congratulating me for my pride, she was inviting me to be a spokesperson for the cause of celebrating pride around mental illness.

CALL TO THE UNKNOWN: Was I Going Insane?

My Alexis Martin Neely part was mortified. I was being seen as literally insane. My Ali Shanti part loved it. But that part didn’t have much standing inside of me, as she was leading me straight into the path of everything that terrified me the most, what I now understand as my shadow.

Shadow work can be terrifying.

As I allowed the parts I was hiding to emerge from where I had hidden them, I had to face all that I had been avoiding. I thought these parts were ugly and shameful, so I hid them away behind a mask of superiority and specialness named Alexis Martin Neely.

And while that superiority and specialness was satisfying to a degree, it was never going to be enough. Alexis Martin Neely was a construct, a facade, a terrified ego who looked good on TV, but was rotting on the inside.

As Alexis Martin Neely, I followed all the rules of the collective game, and was winning. Or, so it seemed. Fame, fortune, a house by the beach, a fancy car and my kids in private school. I should have been able to keep climbing.

But, I couldn’t. Something was off, disconnected, and hurting.

It would take an ayahuasca journey for me to begin to see what it was. Today, journeying with the plant medicine ayahuasca has been fairly well normalized. It’s even advertised on Facebook! But, ten years ago, when I first got the call to ayahuasca, it was still very underground, and I was pretty sure people were just using it to get high. Until I experienced it myself and saw it was anything but that.

That first ayahuasca journey showed me what I had not been able to see myself. Ayahuasca (called the grandmother medicine) showed me a world that works for everyone. Through her guidance, I understood what Charles Eisenstein would write about four years after this journey, in his book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible. But, at the time of that first journey, no one seemed to be speaking or writing what I saw so clearly.

The reason I was so discontent with my success was because I desperately wanted to create and live in a world that worked for everyone, and yet everything that I had been taught to do, every way I had been taught to be, and everything that was creating my success was the exact opposite of that reality.

During that journey, I saw with my own eyes and felt throughout my entire being that my winning was at the expense of others. My success was built on the backs of the people who worked for me, and my pursuit of money and freedom was at their expense.

I wasn’t creating a world that works for everyone. I was creating a world that worked for meeeeee! And I was winning.

My winning was perpetuating the win/lose dynamics that are leading us quickly down the road of extinction. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. But, I had no idea what to do it.

I didn’t know any other way to be. I had been taught to play a game I no longer wanted to win, but I still hated losing. And didn’t yet understand the concept of win/win dynamics.

I began to find myself in a confusing state of depression.

One thing became crystal clear, as I sat on the sound stage of the Nancy Grace show, waiting to gossip about Tiger Woods divorce, I would have to stop doing what I had been taught and figure out what it meant to create the world I wanted to live in.

Step 1: I would have to stop doing television until I could do television that would truly make a difference.

So, I left Los Angeles, the place where my ego was so comfortable and wildly rewarded, and moved to Boulder, CO, where I would begin to find my heart, a new part emerging through me, and a need to give up everything I had created at a far greater level than I would have ever imagined.

Ali Shanti was the soft, feminine, yielding heart of my unknown.

Discovering her, living as her and with her, would be a ten year journey of discovery and confusion and spiraling up and down and all around the wheel, my personal hero(ine)’s journey.

During these years, while I had enough clarity to be able to move projects and ideas and visions and even a company forward, I have also been significantly stymied in many ways.

Books, not written, and even a book deal lost, because which name would be on the cover? Though maybe in some alternate reality the book did get published by Alexis Neely in Spain. Weird.

Podcasts not launched, because which name would I use?

Branding confusion in my companies.

Through it all, I maintained that I needed both names because that’s what was true to me, and nothing more true had presented itself.

So, even though it was HIGHLY uncomfortable and fantastically inconvenient, for nearly ten years, I lived the both/and of Alexis Martin Neely, Alexis Neely and Ali Shanti.

Three Facebook profiles, two different names on my Insta profile and Twitter.

Some people who knew me as Ali Shanti, others as Alexis Neely. Those who knew me as both and just got it were automatically part of my inner circle, a filter I probably needed to some degree, as I had to begin developing a new internal capacity for discernment.

But, most people didn’t get it, and said I just needed to choose one and kill off the other. But, I couldn’t. It wasn’t what was true. And to kill off either would have been like cutting off a body part.

These names represented parts of me that needed to be fully seen, known, felt and heard.

CONFLICT: What Was Wrong With Me?

The Alexis Martin Neely/Ali Shanti split was the external representation of a deep inner conflict that I chose not to hide, from myself or the world.

Conflict between the masculine and feminine parts of myself.

Conflict between the parts that wanted to extract and exclude and separate and those that wanted to include, and transcend and merge.

Conflict between the “Orange” and “Green” values sets that Scott Jeffrey describes in this article on How to Use Spiral Dynamics for Psychological and Leadership Development.

In the midst of all of this conflict, I had to find a way to be all of myself out in the world, and living with two names seemed to be the most aligned and integral way to do it, even if it was confusing to most people.

Choosing to present a dual identity that was confusing to people was not an easy choice.

My “Alexis Martin Neely” part was pretty pissed about it, in fact. The part of me that she represented was mostly driven by image and reputation and achievement (classic “Orange” values).

But, my Ali Shanti part refused to stay hidden any longer.

At the top of my Orange game of success, in the midst of regular TV appearances and on the verge of the fame and fortune I had been questing to create, I had a foreboding feeling that something was wrong and that if I didn’t do something about it, I was going to get sick, or maybe even die.

Thoughts of illness and death and escape permeated my mind, nearly constantly. And, even though I had huge amounts of support on my business teams and in my home, I resented and felt burdened by all of it.

What was wrong with me?

TRANSFORMATION: Awakening Into Meaning

Now, with the benefit of ten years of hindsight and personal growth work, I know what was wrong with me.

I was awakening through a crisis of meaning. For the scientific, cognitive and historical perspective on this collective awakening that tracks at a macro level what it seems was happening for me on the micro individual level of my life, this video series by John Vervaeke lays it all out.

At the time it was happening through and for me, there were no scientific or cognitive explanations.

I thought I was losing my mind.

It turns out though, I wasn’t losing my mind, I was finding my heart.

But, I didn’t know how to hold the ambiguity and tension of the opposites and paradoxes that lived within me — the deep conflicts that seemed to exist between my mind and my heart — so I cut off aspects of my humanity, just as Jeffrey Scott writes in his article.

Back then, I didn’t know anything about spiral dynamics or shadow work or awakening. I only knew that everything I had learned about how to be in the world seemed totally wrong, and I couldn’t seem to see anything that would show me the way toward what felt right.

At one level, I lived with a deep distrust of myself and humanity and judged everyone and everything, especially those closest to me.

At another level, my heart was calling for a level of connection and a trust of Life that seemed to be in direct contradiction to what I had learned would lead to the success I had been bred to create.

I looked for the stories of others who were experiencing what I was and couldn’t find anyone who was transparently talking about what I was experiencing. So I shared as much of it as I could, as it was happening with the intention of hopefully making sense of it all, and also finding others who may have been experiencing what I was too.

There was so much I couldn’t share in the moment though, because it was too confusing to me, but I documented as much of it as possible, and hope to publish the whole story one day.

Maybe as a result of reading my story, you will shortcut your own process to finding wholeness and the integration of your own conflicted parts.

Bits and pieces can be found in my chapters in the books The Path of the Priestess: Discover Your Divine Purpose and Pioneering the Path to Prosperity: Discover the Power of True Wealth and Abundance. Infinite gratitude to publisher @janeashley for these works.

I lived with this internal conflict, dis-integration and fragmentation for years, eventually coming to the belief that I was in the midst of some sort of a multi-year initiation process and that every painful and confusing experience I was experiencing was teaching me something I needed to learn about how to become a human I would appreciate, love and respect.

Because if I couldn’t be someone I appreciated, loved and respected, how could I ever really appreciate, love and respect anyone else? And, if I couldn’t appreciate, love and respect others, how could I ever find the true success, fulfillment and meaning I so deeply desired?

I even named my company “It’s All Happening LLC” so that I would be reminded, each time I forgot, that everything that was happening was happening for me, not to me.

Because when I forgot, I would sink into a despair that seemed difficult to get beyond. In those moments of forgetting, suicide seemed like a rational choice.

But when I re-membered, I was able to move beyond what I can now see as a deeply ingrained inherited legacy of victim consciousness into a seeing and knowing that I was being trained by these experiences for something greater than I could understand through my limited mind’s eye.

I began to see my Life as a microcosm of evolution.

If I longed to see something different outside of me, I would have to make the changes inside of me. I would have to do as John Vervaeke now so rationally and clearly makes the case for at the end of this first of his many videos on Awakening From the Meaning Crisis, and disrupt my framing.

I would have to awaken to the unconscious patterns that were keeping me stuck in a world not worth living in, in order to create a life worth living.

But ten years ago, John Vervaeke wasn’t making videos like this. I felt alone, lost, and deeply troubled by it all.

Awakening into meaning has been my personal journey over these past ten years. It’s been full-on, full range, full spectrum, throwing myself into the fire again and again, so I could experience and learn from it all, until I could find meaning and hope in a world full of terror, horror and despair.

By living as the both/and all of me that was the split between Alexis Martin Neely and Ali Shanti, and allowing Life to continue to guide me, through often hard and painful lessons, I have finally become a woman I believe in and trust.

I am now beginning to know how to see the world not just through the egocentric lens of the “I”, but through the lens of True Love. I continue to be a work in progress, learning, growing and evolving. But finally, it all seems to make sense. And these multiple names and name changes have been a critical part of the process.

By living so fully in the duality of my own inner conflicts, I’ve been able to gain some of the insights necessary to begin to see what it all means, where and how it all resolves. Much more on this to come.

A few years ago, I began to sense that integration was coming.

INTEGRATION: My One True Name

It started when I was at an event called the Roots Gathering in Punta Mona, a permaculture farm on the far south of the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. The way I had gotten to Punta Mona and the Roots Gathering was full of synchronicity and magic.

I wasn’t even supposed to be there.

My life appeared to be falling apart at an entirely greater level than ever before. Even more so than the years earlier when I destroyed everything I had created, moved to the farm, and filed bankruptcy. I had bounced back from that, and figured I’d made it through the worst of times and, yet, here I was at what appeared to be an entirely new level of worst of times.

But this time, I had far more resilience. Whereas moving to the farm was in part a giving up because I didn’t see any other options (and thank God and Goddess I did because I found my humanity there), going to Costa Rica in the midst of what appeared to be a massive crisis in both of my businesses and at home was an act of empowered choice.

My time in Costa Rica showed me how I want to live. And, it also showed me how much I wanted to die. Or at least some part of me did.

While I was there, a new name presented itself to me. Another freaking name! A name I knew was mine. But I could not imagine a reality in which I would take it on, and let go of the others, and I couldn’t imagine a reality in which I took on yet another name.

So I held this name close to my heart. Truth was, I just wasn’t ready. My integration was still incomplete.

And, now it is. I’m ready.

I’m ready to drop all the other names and step into the one name that is mine, and that represents all of me.

I’ll be sharing that name along with a video I’ve been working on with Adam Roa, Ryan Fontana, and Matthew Ayriss, the amazingly talented crew from the show, the Art of Choosing Love, on Father’s Day. Here’s that video.

It all makes so much sense now, and it’s been worth the waiting, and the trust and patience I’ve gotten to cultivate through the process.

Between now and then, I intend to tell you the rest of the story of how I came to discover my one true name, and why that might be important for you and your own process of discovery.

So if you’ve been started to get a sense of wanting to change your name, or perhaps have been in your own confusing journey experimenting with different names and identities, know you are not alone.

It truly is all happening. For me, for you, for us. ❤

Thank you for being here, and continuing to show up for this Eyes Wide Open Life.

If you spend any time at all on the question of your life purpose, be ever so grateful that you are in a time and place where you have the luxury of doing so.

We are the first people in history who have the time, energy, attention and money (TEAM) resources to ask these questions, and also to struggle with the frustration of not knowing.

Prior generations had very limited, if any, choice. The family we were born to and place we were born in dictated our decisions about how we would get educated (or not), who we would marry and have children with, and the work we would do.

For the most part, we lived and died at the effect of custom, or the need to survive.

We didn’t have the luxury of being frustrated about not living purposefully.

Today, though, for many of us there are so few limitations on our ability to choose the form of our education, who we marry (or even if we will marry), whether to have children, and how we will earn a living.

And, yet, even without the limitations, many of us remain frozen in old stories, and ways of being, wondering if we are really doing what we are here to do.

It’s been a question I’ve been asking myself since I realized that the path I had chosen — law school, then clerkship, and then associate at a big law firm — wasn’t going to lead to a life I actually wanted.

I found myself at 28, having met all the metrics and achieved all the goals, looking out over the next 50 years, and not at all excited about life or the future. And maybe even a little depressed.

At the same time, it seemed I was rather trapped. I had over $100,000 in student loans, a husband staying at home with our toddler (and trying for a second baby), a starter home and the mortgage to go with it, and a 6-figure paycheck that felt a lot like golden handcuffs.

How could I possibly do anything other than what I was doing?

But, I found a way out. I started my own law practice, which led me on the most epic personal development and awareness journey I can imagine.

Each time I thought I was “there”, it turned out there was another turn of the wheel, another spiral up or down, another set of lessons to learn.

Almost every step of the way, I found myself asking the question: is this really why I’m here? And am I really doing what’s mine to do?

I first got some inkling of this thing called “purpose” after I had just started my own law practice, and joined a coaching program that brought in an outside speaker who would help us to get to our core purpose crystallized into just two words.

Before then, I never thought about purpose. I was going to become a lawyer because I wanted security, and to do work that could make a difference for some people along the way. At the time, it didn’t really occur to me that maybe I was becoming a lawyer to redeem my dad’s life as a con artist, or to heal from my parent’s divorce.

At the end of the exercise, I was fairly well shocked to find out that my purpose was to “shine light.” What the fuck did that mean, I wondered. Shine light!?! I’m a lawyer for god’s sake. And a mom trying to build a business.

What was I supposed to do with that?

I stuck it in my back pocket, thinking maybe it would make sense at some point in the future.

Fifteen years later, it all makes sense. Of course it’s my purpose to shine light.

I just had to see the light first, and that would take many years of peering into the darkness, blindly.

Shining the Light on Inheritance, Purpose and Legacy

The darkness I was looking into was the darkness of my own inheritance, and the legacy I would leave if I didn’t wake up to see what I was doing and who I was being.

I believe that’s the case for most of us, and if we truly want to know why we are here, inheritance and legacy is the place to look.

Most of us seem to be looking for purpose in fairly surface places.

Maybe one of these sound familiar to you:

“Passion, maybe that’s where I’ll find my purpose. I’ll do what I love and the money will follow, and then I’ll be on purpose.”

“Or my values, maybe I’ll find my purpose there. If I just align with the truth of who I am and what I believe, I’ll be on purpose.”

“Oh, oh, oh, vocation, money and success! I can certainly find my purpose there. If I follow the path of my great work, then I’ll be on purpose.”

Or maybe you’ve read Mark Manson’s article on the 7 Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose (which, by the way, he admits in his members’ only commentary was totally contrived so he could get traffic to his site). The questions Mark poses are actually quite good pointers to a version of purpose, but I don’t believe they get you all the way there.

You Are Here, Right Now, For a Very Specific Purpose

I do believe you are actually here for a purpose, a very specific purpose, and it has nothing to do with your passion, your values, or your vocation, though those can all be enriched by you finding your true purpose.

My theory of life is that we are here, first and foremost, at this very specific moment in time, to heal the ancestral wounds of past generations so we can live into a future thriving reality.

I believe we are here to evolve our souls, learn and grow.

I believe that this is our true inheritance. And it ties deeply into the legacy we’ll leave behind, when we die.

I believe we are each here because we chose this Life, so we could learn through the very specific incarnation we each chose in our life between lives.

When I look at my own purpose in this context, the two-word “purpose” I found years ago to “shine light” begins to make some sense.

My dad was a con artist. His life’s work was to make money by taking from others, lying. He thought that’s what he needed to do in order to survive. Perhaps because of this, I grew up wanting to understand the truth, more than anything else. The question of “what’s real and true?” has ruled my psyche from a young age.

I wanted to shine light into dark places, by understanding more and then sharing what I learned.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, I became a lawyer because I wanted to save my father from his life of crime, and to clear my family karma around lying, cheating, and stealing to survive.

I do believe we all have family karma to heal because our ancestors, wherever we are from, ALL had to engage in win/lose dynamics or survival-strategy behavior in order to survive. We wouldn’t be here right now, if our ancestors hadn’t used their survival strategies to win.

Whether it was powering over others, or sneaking, cheating, lying and stealing, the survival strategies of our ancestors lives within us, mostly unconsciously, deeply hidden in shadow. Very few are willing to look into the shadows to see where these patterns exist, so we can surface and heal them. This is some of the hardest work we can do. But, so worth it.

And, I do believe that willingness to look into the shadows of our inheritance is both the pointer to our unique life purpose and a critical piece of the puzzle if we have any hope of a thriving collective future, beyond the win-lose dynamics that are likely leading us toward extinction.

Healing our family karma requires us to first be willing to see the survival patterns used by our ancestors and where those patterns live within us.

I became an estate planning lawyer because I thought it would be a great way to make a living helping people with my law degree. After I achieved significant success doing so, I spent many years wondering why I actually became an estate planning lawyer.

It didn’t seem to make sense to me that I came here just to earn a great living helping people pass on their money after they died.

I always felt that there was something else.

When I realized that there are many parts of the broken system of estate planning that have hurt my family (and, not just mine, of course, but so many families), I created a New Law Business Model to re-train lawyers on how to serve families and business owners in the right way.

And while that was, and is fulfilling, at one level, I still new there was something else, something more.

It’s taken me a lifetime to understand it all, but I am finally starting to get it. I am seeing how it all comes together. My life purpose. Your life purpose. Our collective life purpose.

We are here to heal.

Your life purpose can be found in your inheritance.

We tend to think about inheritance in terms of money or things, when that’s such a small part of what we actually inherit. And, while it is critical to plan for the passage of money and things, so as not to leave a mess for our loved ones, it’s equally (if not, even more) important to understand the deeper inheritance we are receiving and leaving behind.

We all inherit the wounds of our parents, and we’ll pass on a legacy of those wounds to our children, unless we turn to face them now.

I’ve been facing the wound of my father’s con-artistry for years, mostly finding all the ways I could avoid it, and not be that. I’ve been hiding from it, manifesting people calling me it, proving myself again and again to avoid being it.

What happens when I turn toward it and embrace it? I’m in the discovery of that process, and I feel fairly confident that it’s a big part of why I am here, and what’s mine to do. I’ll keep you posted on my discovery process. And I invite you to share with me as well.

What if your real inheritance was the missing clue to why you are really here, and what’s really yours to do?

❤,
Ali

Alexis Neely is the lawyer name of Ali Shanti, an artist, writer, creator, and human, waking up to the multi-dimensionality of being in a very limited human body.

Follow my Instagram here.

Watch my talk on “money dysmorphia” here. And, if you want to live into a world that works for everyone, watch this meditation, daily. And then, join the Eyes Wide Open Tribe here.

Finally, if you are a lawyer who wants to make the most of your law degree serving people in your community in a whole new way, go here.

How do we find meaning when the world is on the verge of collapse from forces that seem to be beyond our control?

I’m writing this to begin to synthesize my own thoughts, feelings and study regarding the reality of climate change and the impact on our lives and choices, in service to supporting more collective sense-making around a topic that it seems we (or perhaps it’s just me) have mostly wanted to avoid.

First, a small bit of background …

In case you haven’t heard yet, the US Government released a report this holiday weekend that lets us all in on the reality of climate change, and its likely impacts over the next twenty years. It’s not pretty. You can read an accessible summary of the climate change impact report on CNN.com, or at the Guardian, or at the New York Times.

Some have said that the government chose to release this report mid-day on Black Friday, when most people in the United States are focused on shopping, not the news, so as to bury the results as much as possible. Thus, if you are reading this, please spread the word (and ideally outside of your regular bubbles and echo chambers and into communities and places that may not have yet gotten the data).

While I have been aware of and deeply considering this reality for some time, I have not yet written about my considerations or conclusions, mostly because I have been afraid of the implications of doing so and also because I have been unwilling to face the stark reality fully.

Today that changes because I do believe and have concluded that the greater call of this crisis is to turn directly towards our fears and face them, overcome our own insecurities, and come into a collective sense-making that could be the only path toward solution.

We no longer have time to waste on a desire for perfection. I will post this article with awareness of my own limitations, and also a desire to educate, inform and empower all those who read it into a next level of personal awareness and awakening that could actually result in collective change.

Even as I write those words, I am aware of the part of me that says I am crazy to think that anything I write could make any sort of a significant difference, and that I should just keep my head down, stay focused on earning a living and paying the bills, and make my own personal plans for weathering the proverbial and literal storm in as much comfort as possible.

And yet, it is exactly this thinking that we must overcome, both personally and collectively. I surface my own shadow thoughts around it all here in support of perhaps helping you see these thoughts in yourself, and perhaps become willing to make choices that may confront your own sense of meaning.

I am willing to go out on a limb and share my views and the choices I am making because, I believe, as many of us as possible must, if we have any hope for the future of humanity.

Over the past several years, I have had the immense honor to be learning directly from some of the great thinkers and sense-makers of our time:

• Barbara Marx Hubbard (Futurist and Author of MANY books on conscious evolution and the new species we are becoming),
• Daniel Schmachtenberger (find his writings on the blog, Civilization Emerging),
• Jordan Greenhall and Forrest Landry (along with Daniel Schmacthenberger), you can watch or read a transcript of their take on the period of Transition that we are in now here (this is really worth the watch/read!).

• Daniel Pinchbeck (author of How Soon is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation), and
• Charles Eisenstein (author of many books, including The Ascent of Humanity, Sacred Economics, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible and most recently, Climate — a New Story).

What I have learned in relationship with each of these people is that I must not give up hope. And I hope you don’t either.

Instead, we must first face the reality, then feel the despair fully and finally, on the other side, continue to dream and live into a new future.

After a long conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger a few years back about the reality of existential risk and the real possibility of the extinction of the human race, I was feeling pretty hopeless and I said:

“Daniel, maybe I should just give up and live a hedonistic lifestyle that sucks as much marrow out of this short time we have left here.”

Daniel paused for a moment, considered my comment, and then said something like:

“No, Ali, that is exactly the wrong way to think.”

He’s direct like that.

In that moment Daniel reminded me that it is up to me to not give up hope.

What I received from our conversation is that Life is beautiful, and I am here for a purpose, and that purpose is to impact the future of humanity, and not just to live a comfortable (or even beyond comfortable) life.

It is up to me to hold the vision of something greater for all of humanity.

In Daniel’s reflection, I got that if I give up, then there truly is no hope.

How can I possibly expect anyone else to create a new reality, if I am not willing to feel all the feelings, hold a vision of something greater, and then do the work necessary to grow up and show up?

I see this as an invitation for all of us. And I hope what you receive from investing your time, energy and attention in reading what I’ve written here is a transmission similar to what I received from Daniel.

We MUST move forward even though we do not know what to do, or how to do it, with love in our hearts and our best thinking in service to becoming a new humanity that can survive this race to extinction we are all part of right now.

This path is validated by many, many, many examples in nature, including the story of the caterpillar becoming the butterfly (watch the telling of the story of the imaginal cells by Alesha Carlander at Burning Man here), and the Great Flower Radiation.

We are at a moment in time that is just prior to every breakthrough (the moment before the caterpillar emerges from the goo and becomes a butterfly, the moment before the flowers took over the landscape, the moment before the baby emerges from the birth canal) that can feel quite hopeless.

And, yet, of course, as we can see from the butterfly and birth and the explosion of flowers on a prior landscape of only rocks and trees, it’s not hopeless at all.

It’s not the moment to give up.

It’s the moment of greatest possibility and what will emerge from this moment is beyond what we can see, so please keep going.

❤

So, with this background, I’d love to share some of what I am reading right now to support my own sense-making and some of what I am receiving from these readings:

Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism’s Imminent Demise: We do not yet have an economic system to support us in the new era, while at the same time we cannot sustain current levels of economic growth.

My take on this is that we will need to come together to create something new, and it’s happening, and it likely will happen as a result of “force” not “choice” because we are all so addicted to the current capitalistic structures in which we live.

Those of us who are wise will get ahead of the coming “force” by converting our current business and personal structures into “share the wealth” paradigms, which we have not learned or been taught, and which it’s time for us to invent, anew.

This will require us to, first and foremost, learn how to share and collaborate. You may think you already learned how to share, but if you really look at your life and the lives of those around you, you’ll likely see that’s not actually the case.

Maybe you’ve learned to become great at creating your own wealth, but how are you sharing it? And I don’t mean just by paying people to work for you. But, truly, how are you sharing what you are creating?

Or, perhaps you’re just now on the path of learning to create your own self-sufficiency, and you think you don’t have anything to share. And that’s the foundation from which you get to build a new understanding of wealth creation.

In order to “share the wealth” we must begin to recognize that wealth comes in many, many, many forms. And not everyone needs to (or even should) earn money, but everyone does need to (and should) be well-compensated for their contributions to the collective.

Forms of compensation will need to shift from our traditional models just based in money to more belonging based collective models that result in each person’s needs being met through the collective, and as a result of full giving to the collective.

To make this shift, we will need to get a lot better at knowing what we need, and what we have to give, and being able to ask for what we have in exchange for what we have to give, regardless of the medium of exchange.

And, we also have to start to get really clear about our own roles in a world that truly works for everyone. Here’s a guided visualization that will help you begin to envision yourself in a world that works for everyone.

Next, we need to understand where we are generationally and what’s ours to do within the tides of history. In service to that, I am reading …

The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History America’s Next Rendezvous With Destiny by William Strauss and Neil Howe (published in 1997, Strauss and Howe prophecy the current now reality we are facing with both insight and ideas that we must now, finally, heed).

While Strauss and Howe’s predictions of total collapse have not yet occurred, their prediction of financial crisis (2008), a terrorist attack (2001), and federal budget impasses (2013) have happened.

Fortunately, these events did not result in the breakout of state secession, military violence, the end of social security payments, or martial law, yet.

We are in the midst of a natural cycle of the generations that has happened again and again and again throughout the ages. As Strauss and Howe so eloquently say “History is seasonal, and winter is coming.”

How we handle this winter is up to us.

Throughout the book, Strauss and Howe guide us to see that we have weathered such storms time and again, in the not so distant past: the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/World War II, each a Fourth Turning.

So, here we are again.

This time with the reality that the combination of existential risk and our underlying generator functions could very well lead to our collective extinction.

And, so it seems the predictions and prophecies from 1997 are now upon us.

Strauss and Howe wrote that “provoked by real or imagined outside provocations, the society will turn newly martial. America will become more isolationist than today in its unwillingness to coordinate its affairs with other countries but less isolationist in its insistence that vital national interests not be compromised.”

Sounds not unlike Trump’s call for border walls and withdrawal of the US from the 2015 Paris Agreements on climate change.

Building upon the now coming true predictions of Strauss and Howe, what comes next isn’t something I personally want to experience and I’m in deep inquiry around whether now is the time to leave the United States. And, if so, where to go. Costa Rica? New Zealand? Somewhere else?

And what about those who cannot leave? I don’t have answers to these questions. I am sitting in the inquiry, feeling the pain of it all, and also the hope and possibility, and investing my time, energy, attention and money (what I call TEAM resources) in learning the skills I know I will need in order to do my part in creating a world that truly works.

You can read a fictional telling of what we may be able to expect here in the United States in Starhawk’s classic book The Fifth Sacred Thing. Reading this book shaped a large part of my perspective, and the investments I have made over the past many years in growing my own abilities in learning to become adaptable, resourceful, and to resolve conflict in community.

Regardless of where we are, it seems clear that with the climate change that is happening and the prophesied future that is not only coming, but in many ways already knocking at the door, we will need to call on all of our skills of collaboration, co-operation, connection, community, adaptability, resourcefulness, and creativity

I can’t say yet where we will use them, or how. But I know that whatever is coming will require them. And I want to be as ready as possible.

I strongly recommend that if you are not already investing in your own personal sovereignty while at the same time learning how to live in unity, this is where you start.

Sovereign unity seems to me to be the only sustainable possibility for our future.

Sovereignty meaning we CAN stand independently. And, of course, unity meaning that we link up together from the place of our independence.

Food sovereignty, water sovereignty, power sovereignty. These are collective sovereignty systems we can all begin to invest in from a place of unity. And, it will take something for us to get there.

I’m just starting to read this work around Deep Adaptation, requiring Resilience, Relinquishment and ultimately, Restoration. I encourage you to take a look and start considering what that might look like in your own life and for your own family.

All of this will require us to know ourselves more fully, while also understanding how to truly be with others from a place of compassion and care, rather than make wrong. Not an easy path, but the only one (in my book) worth living.

❤

While I hope that solutions such as Drawdown will be the answer for us to turn around the climate change shifts that are very quickly on their way (here’s where you can get a poster that shows you all 100 solutions in one place), I don’t actually believe we get out of here alive.

Of course we don’t.

In the end, we all die.

The planet lives on.

And something else emerges through all of it.

So, what is in the emergent field and what is each of our individual role within it? Or, as I am asking myself, what can I do?

To begin with, I can share what I am doing.

And, much more importantly (I think), I can share how I am being. Ultimately, I believe how we choose to BE through all of this is far more important than the doing itself. It is our choice of being that will make all the difference.

As I’ve come to learn in my own life, every conflict (or challenge) is our greatest opportunity to be more of who we really are. So, in this time of great change and challenge, we each get to choose who we are through how we BE.

❤

So, with all that in heart and mind, what can we actually do about the reality that we’re likely to have 5–20 years (maximum) before the impact of climate change is so significant that our lives will have no choice but to change?

These are the 7 most important things I’ve identified in my own life, so far. If you have any more to add, please share them with me. I’ll come back at a future time and write up a whole article on what I’ve discovered about each of these 7 at a later date, and then link them when done.

1. Find Your Tribe
2. Heal Your Core Wounds and Traumas
3. Learn How to Become Personally (and Collectively) Sovereign
4. Heal Your Relationship With Your Parents and Start Co-Creating With Them Now
5. Get Your Assets (and Your Parents Assets) Out of Investments in Fossil Fuels, Big Pharma, Factory Farming and the Like
6. Learn to Live in Close Quarters and With Less Stuff
7. Listen to Nature and Follow Her Direction and Guidance

❤

More soon … in the meantime, if you’d like to envision yourself in a world that works for everyone and continue to explore these topics with me, please watch this guided visualization to envision yourself in a world that works for everyone and then join the free Eyes Wide Open Tribe group, where we can connect more deeply.

Perhaps somewhere along the path of your journey from a life of obligation and duty to a life based in your own personal desire and freedom and sovereignty, you came across the saying: “stop shoulding on yourself” so you can rediscover what you want.

And, while that is an important stage and phase of your development, it’s not the end game.

Once you’ve moved through the stage of “should” driving you from the motivation of safety, security or fear and discovered who you really are, and what you really want, please do bring “should” back into your life in a healthy way.

There are just some things we “should” do because they are what’s right, they are what’s based in love, they are what’s based in the truth of who and what we need to become in order to live into a civilization that can successfully transition from an old paradigm, win/lose consciousness that is leading us into extinction into a new paradigm consciousness that can thrive.

Watch this video of Jordan Greenhall, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and Forrest Landry about the Transition times we are in now, if you want to learn more about this moment of time and what we need to do to make it beyond extinction.

Our conditioning (the epigentic inheritance we carry through our DNA) tells us to operate in many ways that are simply unsupportive of a thriving future. We are the ancestral and genetic survivors of a paradigm of zero-sum games, and conquering, and survival.

Had our parents (and their’s before them, and so on), not learned to survive in this win/lose paradigm, we would not be here right now. So we can be thankful for the parts of ourselves that got us here — we survived, we won.

And, at the same time that we can hold gratitude that we survived, we can also be aware that if we continue to operate from that paradigm, we will annihilate all of Life on this planet.

We must find the “both/and” of personal sovereignty and collective unity. Knowing what we “should” do, even when we don’t want to do it (because our conditioning directs us otherwise) is a critical path toward evolution, awakening and a thriving future.

As you are in this inquiry around when your own “should” is coming from a healthy or not health place, it’s extremely helpful to know where you are along the scale of your own psychological development and consciousness.

While there are many great models out there (Wilber, Graves, etc.), I found this model of psychological development from Richard Barrett of the Barrett Values Centre to be the most clear and easy to understand.

If you are still in the stages of Surviving, Conforming or Differentiating, your “should” may not actually be trustworthy because it’s coming from a place of trying to meet needs of survival, safety and security that are not necessarily truly in alignment with your higher order values.

Oftentimes, the “should” you are operating from at these stages is very young and very scared.

If you keep operating from these “shoulds”, you will remain stuck in this young, scared, survival based place and your choices, motivations and decisions will reflect fear and scarcity and survival.

Individuation here is critical. During the individuation phase of your life, you will need to reject “should’ing on yourself” to find what’s actually true for you.

This is part of the process of self-actualization and discovering who you really are beyond your DNA and the conditioning you’ve inherited from parents, media and society.

On the other side of this individuation, you will have found your truth, your inherent goodness, and your values.

From this place, please do “should” all over yourself as much as possible because now your should is coming from a place of integrity and contribution that is meaningful and whole and contributing to the world we all want to live into. Your should from a post-individuation reality is trustworthy.

It’s based in your truth. It’s based in your values. It’s based in your own internal knowing of that which is good, true and beautiful.

To get there, it would be extremely valuable for you to consciously map and understand where you are on the stages of your own development as much as possible, and begin to see that which is conditioned into you from a need for security, a place of scarcity and fear and that which is truly your choice from a desire to create more love in the world.

Most people have no idea what motivates them, and are operating on a false quest for what they might call happiness, and never quite getting there. It’s unconscious. It’s habitual. It may even seem as if you have no choice.

If that might be where you are, then, yes, stop “shoulding on yourself” and see what emerges through you.

However, if you have already stopped shoulding on yourself, discovered your truth, feel secure in your values, and know that you are motivated from a place of your own inherent truth, good and beauty, then please do overcome the parts of you that are not in alignment with that and should all over yourself as much as you can.

Once you have begun to self-actualize, and individuated from the young parts of you who are deeply conditioned and wounded and scared, you have realized that these young “parts” are part of you and they have needs, but they are not YOU.

From this place, you are able to hold your parts, in loving, conscious awareness, and self-compassion. And, from there we actually do need you to “should” on yourself and consciously choose to BE who you really are.

Thank you for your commitment to growth, willingness to see what’s true, and to creating a world that works for everyone.

If you’d like to get more connected to what it might look like for you to live into your unique role in a world that works for everyone, here’s a short guided meditation that will help you to remember who you are, why you are here, and what’s really yours to do. ❤

In a world where collaboration is becoming increasingly important, there’s a deeply hidden shadow that keeps us from working together effectively.

I’m at an UNSUMMIT in Boulder, CO with COMMON, a creative accelerator for social businesses and projects. We’re here for 3 days to explore the idea of radical collaboration.

I’ve been working on collaboration in my own life and businesses intensely for many years, and mostly failing.

It’s only in the past 2 years, really, that I think I’ve made any effective headway at all. Before that, I thought I was collaborating, but I can see now that my hidden shadows around power dynamics, fear, false trust, competition, and my inability to ask for what I needed or truly know what I had to give, were almost entirely blocking the way.

And that’s what I want to talk about today … surfacing the hidden shadow parts that keep us from effectively collaborating.

Mark Eckhardt, the CEO of COMMON, surfaced the issue in the room when he shared the reality that he has seen over and over again in which he sees collaboration happen up until a certain point, and then it breaks down.

So what is it that creates the breakdown? And what can we do to move beyond these breakdown points to true radical collaboration?

Through surfacing these issues in myself, I’ve been able to identify some key places, which if we could all get really honest with ourselves and potential collaborators, I think we may be able to break through.

1. Collaboration brings up all my stuff around my fear of not having what I need.
2. Collaboration brings up all my stuff around not knowing what’s actually mine to do.
3. Collaboration brings up all my stuff around not knowing how to ask for what I need in exchange for what I have to give.

That’s a lot of stuff.

And, it challenges every single piece of the equation for enough.

So, of course, collaboration is challenging for most of us. In order to do it well, we’d need to be exceedingly clear about what we need, what we have to give, and what’s truly ours to do.

If we don’t, we’ll destroy the collaboration by trying to take more than we need, and likely not even see we are doing it.

We’ll have a “never able to be filled” need for recognition, oftentimes while giving the things that aren’t even ours to give. And when we are giving what’s not ours to give, we’ll never get the recognition that is so desired, and necessary.

If we truly want to collaborate, we must individually do the deep work of understanding and being able to communicate our needs. We must know what’s ours to give. And, we must know how to communicate what we have to give and ask for what we need in exchange.

Let’s Stop Blaming Suicide On Mental Illness

Suicide is on my mind this morning, as it is for many of us.

First, Avicii, then Kate Spade, now Anthony Bourdain. And, of course, so many others we do not know.

But these three in such a short time, are particular impactful because they were each at the top of the top of their respective fields.

I’ve been there myself, and the still scared part of my mind wants to use these three as examples of why there is no hope.

“How could someone who has ‘made it’ want to die?” my mind wonders. “And, what hope is there, then, for the rest of us who are trying to get “there?”

It would be oh so easy for me to wallow in those beliefs. I’ve been at the place of wanting to die before. Of course, haven’t we all?

It seems to me that the contemplation of suicide is a fairly normal part of being human.

And, honestly, in the full acknowledgement of the pain on our planet and what we are facing, I’d be truly concerned about anyone who doesn’t allow themselves to at least consider the possibility of death as the way out.

I remember the words of Krishnamurti, who says: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

The more we resist the reality of the pervasiveness sickness of our society, the more risk there is of not being able to heal through it.

Maybe, just maybe, I would have gone through with suicide too, if I had been as trapped in my identity and the social structures and projections that Avicii, Kate and Anthony most likely were.

Of course, I don’t know what their experiences were, or the pain or past traumas that they got stuck in and could not move beyond.

But I can relate it to my own experience and make some educated guesses.

From my experience, the more “successful” I was on the outside (and while I didn’t have worldwide fame, I “made it” to all the levels of traditional success one could hope for in this life time — million dollar businesses, TV appearances, house by the beach, Mercedes in the driveway, kids in private school, you know … the whole thing), the harder it was too be with my own internal experience of the deep pain of being human.

And the harder it was to admit I needed help, and ask for it.

There was such a dissonance between how I saw and felt myself, and the projections of the outside world — both the shadow and the light. And I had to hold it altogether, lest it all crumble around me and I let everyone (including myself) down.

If I couldn’t do it, how would anyone else? I couldn’t possibly let go because who would I be, if I did?

Fortunately, I had the support to collapse under the weight of all of it. Yes, you read that right — I had the support to collapse.

And that saved me.

It’s the trying to hold it altogether that makes it seem impossible to keep going.

I imagine Avicii, Kate and Anthony collapsed under that weight and didn’t have the support there, in that darkness, to just let. it. all. go. and rise again, in love.

Because here’s the thing I’ve discovered on the other side of each falling apart, it’s only in the full collapse and descent into the underworld that we can heal. But rarely if we have to go there alone.

Most people, (especially those who are most outwardly “successful”) do not have the support or space to collapse.

They have images and brands to maintain, and people around them who are highly invested in that maintenance, rather than in supporting them to let it all go, and fall fully apart.

Imagine the immense pressure.

As I remember my own version of it, I feel the tears coming. And the tremendous gratitude that I am able to sit here in a coffee shop and let those tears come, no matter how weird I may seem, without fear that my tear-stained, emotion contorted face will end up on the cover of a tabloid with all sorts of judgments projected upon me.

I don’t have to hold it all together. I can descend into the dark, ugly cry right here in public and know that it’s okay. I’m okay. But it wasn’t always that way, of course.

For most of my life, I had to hide too. I had an image to maintain, after all. And there was so much pain beneath my surface that I imagined if I let myself actually feel it, I would never be able to stop feeling it, and then what would I do? I would have to die.

In a way that was true. Something in me did have to die. And, being held in the pain of that dying, and feeling it all the way through, always led back to a deeper field of peace than I had access to prior.

Each time I let myself go there fully, another more resilient piece of me emerged, and lived on and through me.

Today, I have the space and freedom and ability to move the pain through myself quickly, feel it all the way, let it heal and then come back to the light and gratitude hiding right on the other side of the pain.

It took breaking through an idea of myself and an image that had locked me into the pain, and repeatedly brought me to the point of wanting to die because I couldn’t see any other way out.

Most people, certainly I imagine Avicii, Kate, Anthony, and so very many others, don’t have the actual support necessary to break free. And, the weight of that can lead to suicide as the only way out.

It makes sense to me.

Choosing Suicide Isn’t a Result of Mental Illness

I see the articles quoting family members talking about how a past history of mental illness or addiction is the explanation for these deaths, saying things like “s/he suffered with [addiction][mental illness] for years.” As if that explains it all. Because we need some way to make sense of how someone so successful could take their own life.

I imagine these explanations give comfort to those who might share my surface thought process of, “if someone so successful can’t make it, what hope is there for me?” It creates a safe separation between “us” and “them”, ie. “they” were mentally ill, and “we” are not.

Or the family members who may feel guilt that they couldn’t do anything. It’s so much easier to blame it on mental illness than to feel into the helplessness that their death brings up.

When I breathe more deeply into what’s true, I know that there is no real safety in this diagnosis of mental illness as an explanation. It’s simply another way to create separation.

We live in a sick world, and the sooner we all get right with that, and wake up to the mental illness that resides inside each one of us (and the striving for a “success” that traps us there), the sooner we can have some hope of healing and living the lives of freedom that are our true birthright.

No matter how much money or fame you have, if you cannot be supported in the truth of your particular brand of mental illness, it’s all a facade.

So maybe the label of “mental illness” helps the loved one’s of the deceased to alleviate their own guilt about not being able to help.

I wish, though, instead of blaming a suicide on mental illness, friends and family would be willing to take on all of that guilt and feel the pain of a world in which we do not know how to support each other.

From there, we can begin to heal, together.

By making suicide a result of “mental illness” we marginalize the parts of our own selves that want to die, push them into the shadows and create more of exactly what we don’t want — anxiety, depression, shame.

Descent into the pain is a necessary part of a healthy Life.

I’ve seen a few people share that they feel angry about these suicides. And, I get it. I imagine that anger may come from the unacknowledged pain within that gets provoked in the face of choosing suicide.

What if those who feel angry could have the support to feel the pain under that anger all the way through? How might that expand our capacity to be with the pain (and ultimate freedom) of others?

Friends, I welcome your anger. And I invite you to dive deeper into it, and feel what’s below.

Let these deaths be a call to each of us to feel ourselves more fully, to find the support we each need to dive into the pain and let it explode our hearts with the exquisiteness of feeling, and build the resilience that is here for us on the other side.

We are all going to die, one day.

We’re each dying right now.

Heck, many of us are already dead inside because the fear of feeling it all is so terrifying. The walking dead, zombies with massive amounts of pain lurking just below the surface.

Please, have the courage to feel it all, and be fully supported there.

If you are overwhelmed with the pain of life, and you need help in being able to move through to the next moment, tell someone you trust and ask them to not try and fix you, but instead to just hold you while you collapse, and feel it all.

If a friend comes to you in pain, don’t try to fix them. Just be with them in their pain. This usually means no words. Just being with them, and feeling your own pain in the face of theirs, without making it about you.

I know we have not been well-trained in this space of feeling, and it can be tempting to want to fix it or make it better. But the best thing you can do for someone in despair is to just be with them, let them feel what they are feeling and let them know that it’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.

It is not mental illness to feel so much. This is the path to our evolution. This is our work to do.

If you do not have anywhere else to turn, please call the Suicide Prevention Hotline: US # is 1–800–273–8255. Or text 741-741 for help 24/7. If you are outside the US, google Suicide Prevention to get the number to call for your country. And hold on until someone answers. All you have to do is say “help” and the person on the other end of the line will be there to support you. I hope. ❤