The Still Flame

When people find out I’m a channeler or how much “spirituality” affects my life, they often make a lot of immediate assumptions. Especially given how trendy spirituality is these days, there are a lot of things that go along with the aesthetic and lifestyle.

I guess a lot of it feels so performative to me. I’ve never been to Burning Man, I’m not a Festie, I pay almost no attention to astrology (though I am happy to hear astrology-based insights from my friends who resonate with that framework). 

I eat what I want. I use fluoridated toothpaste and deodorant.  I felt like dropping the fear (that only hung around when I didn’t really know who I was) actually connected me more deeply to nature herself. Fearing chemicals was exhausting and something I eventually outgrew.

I guess that’s it. “New Age Community” feels to me like… a phase, that when you actually grow up, you move on from. I spent a lot of time in those circles, and there are aspects of that world that will always be a part of me. But if you’re confident and rooted in your spirituality, you don’t need it as an identifier. You just live from that place and don’t fear things that aren’t “of that” because the only reason to fear would be if you can’t tell the difference between helpful or harmful energies. And new age seems to be rife with the latter.

The thing is, I ended up in those New Age hippie towns at my lowest, when I needed the most healing. I lived in Pisac, San Marcos, and Tulúm. The more I healed, the less I resonated with those places. I needed to receive something from this world, and as tends to happen, the integration of those lessons happened when I parted ways with them. 

Where I used to be performative I became more authentic as life taught me about myself, and that’s when the resonance changed.

I think that these yogi community hotspots can give people a feeling that mimics rootedness, belonging, tribe, belongingness, even tradition. In a society where large swathes of the population have never experienced true root chakra rootedness—the energetics of it literally are more grid-shaped—individuals become susceptible to things that meet this need. But how is one who has never experienced true human tribal rootedness to know what the real thing feels like?

My authentic connections have come from places I least expect them, and not from going to a specifically-labeled community expecting to find a specific thing there. This isn’t to say I haven’t had heartfelt connections with new-agers; lord knows I have. But these connections, while deep, were teachers and catalysts. 

I also had to truly become comfortable with being on my own. Teachers come and go, catalyzing relationships come and go. Connections rooted in love endure, no matter the form the relationship takes. But in a society that is restructuring its very relationship with interconnectedness, being autonomous—not wholly isolated, but self-sufficient—is an important foundational step.