How to be an Alchemist

Lawrence and Austin high-jacked the podcast this month! They wanted you to hear more about my vision. And how I think about my work. We talked about my life-shaping moments. About what it means to be an Alchemist (and NOT a Guru). Along with everything that’s been on my mind these days, from Tony Robbins to the evolution of consciousness to burning man and movement fundamentalism.

Take a listen. Let me know what you think.

More on Austin and Lawrence:

Austin Badger is a phenomenal musician and songstress. She also happens to be my business partner. And it has been amazing to grow together over the last five years. She has served as my operations director and has done everything from creating my content schedule to forming my LLC to designing my website. Austin has designed all of our business systems, she holds logistical and marketing support for all of my workshops and is my thought partner in everything I do. She also has the self proclaimed job of making sure I don’t start a cult. (You can hear more about that in the podcast!) She has a gift for breaking down my big ideas into actionable next steps and I am blessed to have her supporting this work. You can find out more about her work on her website austinjade.com

Lawrence Barriner II is a storyteller, facilitator, circle holder and friend. We worked together at the Interaction Institute for Social Change and he is a part of the Evolutionary Leadership Workshop Cohort of 2017. He has supported our vision and strategy work. And has been an integral partner to the Better Men Project. I recently interviewed him as part of that effort. Check out his brilliance here. I am blessed to be in community with him and learn with him. You can find out more about him through his website lawrencebarrinerii.com

Highlights:

LIFE SHAPING MOMENTS 3:45-9:32

3:45-4:34 I was born in Puerto Rico. To the best of my memory it was an idyllic childhood. It was perfect. It was rural. In the middle of a sugarcane field. And I grew up in a household, in a community, that was full of love. We moved from Puerto Rico to us when I was 12 years old. And we moved to western Massachusetts - and that’s important because that is the age in which I became a minority. I became a person of color and I did not like it. It was not a pleasant experience, it was a hard experience. And it’s an experience that has defined the rest of my life. I have defined my life trying to make sense out of what it means to be looked at and treated as less than”

7:09-7:52 I had to surrender. I had to say yes to God as God was showing herself to me at that point. God had come to me in the gentlest most beautiful, unrequested way, so she came to me with fierce grace and she took away things I would not have been able to give up on my own. And it was after that I went from activist organizer, hyper political, most of the time oppositional, into the world of facilitation.

GURU VS ALCHEMIST 9:34-15:26

13:55 I think that my work in the world is strengthened by my understanding of transmission. However, what I'm intending to do with transmitting a certain cultivated energy is to unlock the potential in each individual and support the unlocking of a collective field. So that what you’re awakening to is not just what is possible within yourself, but what is alive between us. And what is happening between us. That is the medicine that I am intentionally trying to bring to every space that I’m in. Including, by the way, and most of the time, in highly strategic contexts. In contexts where leaders are coming together to contend with some of the deepest and biggest challenges of our time. My goal then becomes how do I support the opening in this field strongly enough that I can go away. I don’t have to stay around. 

THE TONY ROBBIN’S OF CONNECTION 15:27-22:30

21:34 Every single one of us, like it or not, is suffering from post modern narcissism.

22:04 what I’m interested in doing is kind of spreading the gospel of the collective, making this medicine of when we turn to each other these things we want to achieve as individuals either become less important or can actually be achieved because we’ve reclaimed what is central to being human, which is to be together. 

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO EVOLVE CONSCIOUSNESS? 22:30-29:33

27:07-28:19 It’s very easy to speak about ancestral practices and get caught in a romantic idea of returning to the tribe as if everything we’ve done up to this time was a mistake. And I don’t think it’s true. I actually like being an individual. I think it’s a good thing. I like having a hyper developed inner world. I like the development of the western individual. What i'm talking about is an evolution that integrates and includes the best of what came before and the best of what we’re leaving behind and my thought is - and it’s not just my thought, I’m part of a broad community of thinkers that believe and understand that- that is in the direction of a different sense of “We”. It de-centers the hyper individualist self and opens it up so that when I think “I am” I'm also thinking “we are.” 

28:25 Those of us that grew up in the middle of the cold war, we were taught a modernist story. of its either “the collective” - the soviet collective where the individual desire and need is sacrificed for the sake of equality - or its a hyper individualistic world that the American empire is pushing forward. Where the only way to attain freedom is by upholding the individual as the apex of humanity. The “We Space” I’m talking about is the evolution. I’m talking about one in which each one of us is greater. Is more free. More fully expressed within a space of connection. That gives us more life. 

MOVEMENT FUNDAMENTALISM 29:33-40:20

32:10-33:28 I actually believe that movement fundamentalism and “wokeness” come out of deep yearning for connection. We have a crisis of connection and we have a beautiful authentic longing for justice. But because we are not practiced in the ancestral ways of being together in community we actually build these communities on abstraction, on belief in dogma, that brings us together, but that togetherness is quite brittle. It can break at any time. People are scared when they are in it. They are scared of saying the wrong thing. People perform when they are in it. And send flares say the worlds, “white supremacy”, “heteronormativity”, “capitalism”. You throw those flares up into the sky to signal to people “Im in, I belong here,  please don’t kick me out, seriously!” So that energy, even though the analysis is often correct, that energy takes away its power. It makes for miserable and scared spaces that are high in anxiety.

34:21 I’m constantly afraid that somebody’s gonna throw this out into this room and kill the possibility that we have of coming together. Now thankfully this happens way less than I fear it happening. But I'm constantly grappling with it. If someone shows me a little sign of it I put them into a little woke corner, and I have to facilitate this, but I actually don't like you that much because you’re too woke for me, and it limits what I can bring with my heart. It limits my work. And it has felt like a trap. I've been grappling with it for years. And over the past couple of months I've had a couple of beautiful, sometimes difficult, spiritual experiences in which I have been in community and I’ve been able to see how my own reaction to this is two things. First, it is an exact mirror of the thing I'm critiquing. So I've been “self righteous, judgmental and wanting to exile” the people who I have deemed to be “self righteous, judgmental and wanting to exile.” So it's kind of meta and kind of ridiculous. So I've been able to see that. And I've been able to see it with my eyes but not with my body. And the second one is to really understand that, that's my own trauma.”

40:20 BURNING MAN

Burning Man Principles

43:54-44:27 One of the most glaring problems with burning man - and I wanted to start by saying how glorious it was and how committed I am to it - is that radical inclusion is one of it’s 10 principles and it’s about 2% black. And it’s infuriating that any subset of humans can pretend to build Utopia and not include people of color. Like, how is that possible?

52:25 BETTER MEN PROJECT

58:42: I am aware that in my life, in my first effort to address patriarchy within myself - after failing as a man in the most terrible ways - that meant turning down my masculinity. So I made masculinity and patriarchy the same thing. So to me, those two things were one and the same. So what I tried to do was, to be “good” to be “conscious” to be “righteous” I needed to be less masculine. And I see it happen all the time. I see men just try to turn it off in order to be “good guys” and what I’ve learned over the years is that patriarchy and masculinity are not the same thing. There is toxic masculinity and conscious masculinity. I'm not saying that every masculine identifying person has it. But many of us do. There is something masculine that can be harnessed for the good. That in fact, when it is not harnessed, it can be damaging and dangerous. 

SHIFTING THE WAY I WORK

1:10:41 The work that we need to do if we are to truly transform ourselves. If we are going to push ourselves to evolve. Is work that is going to make us supremely uncomfortable. And it’s work that is really good to consent into and sign up for… Right now, if a participant says to me well “I'm uncomfortable with ...” - and then they use woke language to couch that - then it becomes a little bit of a weapon. Because if I go against it I am going against some central tenant of justice. I actually have a bit of constraint in terms of what I can do as a facilitator in that situation.