Membership Program

I started my Membership in December 2020. The lockdowns were in full swing all over the world and people were scrambling to take their businesses online in the midst of the mayhem.

The urgent panic of those times is gone but it seems to have been replaced by a slower, steadier, grinding fear and stress. So many entrepreneurs I know are at the breaking point and unsure if their business has any chance of success.

Most of my colleagues, as the coaching and healing market become increasingly saturated, and the price of everything goes up, are seeing their numbers drop. 

Things I’ve heard from clients and colleagues:

• “This year sales have been so flat it's drained all my reserves.”
  

• “People are more reluctant to invest in themselves, not because they don’t want the help, but because they don’t trust the future. It’s caution born from constant uncertainty.”
  

• “I suspect within the next five years, my job in the office will be obsolete, thanks to AI. I won’t be the only one. It’s terrifying and I don’t know how we manage our way thru this.”

• “The platforms most of us depended on for marketing our biz have fucked us over and limited our reaches so much its barely worth posting, and many of my ideal clients are consciously leaving or minimizing time on these platforms for their mental health which is great but bad for business.”

• “It is hard to find the right price structure that honors inflation and our need to make more with other people's lack of spare income.”

• “People seem so overwhelmed that they're struggling to even get through online content... even my membership which is a 60 min ritual, short meditation and inquiry practice a month half the people say they haven't 'had the time!’”

• “It feels hard to even talk about some subjects when there is such a big looming threat and the feeling we aren't doing enough, that other stuff isn't as important comparatively etc.”

• “I see what you're seeing. The bracing, the gritting, over-extended, the burnout, the dreams unrealized, the suffering. Both in corporate spaces and entrepreneurship.”

• “So many people who are finding it incredibly difficult to make big life decisions and move forward with a strong sense of direction because we all have a deep-seated fear of what’s to come.”

• “I'm seeing a big decrease in discretionary spending. A re-focus of resources. I've noticed that service-based businesses (at least those who offer more coaching-esque, or healing services) have struggled the most. My own experience running an online course business showed me the big shift in spending habits.”

• “I'm feeling the same pinch in my work. Seems harder to find new clients, and the ones I have don't seem to "have time" to do the work.”

• “I think there is something real to be said about the wellness/Spiritual/healing industry simply being exhausted at this point. We've been holding the collective through enormous shifts since pre-covid times, and we're still 'in the trenches' so to speak, with no end in sight. We're all tired, even if we are in our heart centered and soul aligned passions.”

And then there’s the money: almost anyone I know my age or younger can’t even imagine owning a home (unless they inherit either it or the money to buy it). 

Most of us are waiting for the other shoe to drop: the next big market crash or disaster. I see so many people bracing, with reasons good and bad, against the threats (known and unknown) of the days to come. As one colleague wrote, “There is a massive nervous system contraction happening collectively, a quiet tightening that comes from years of uncertainty, overstimulation, and global tension.”

And as my dear friend Kakisimow Iskwew wrote, “What I see a lot of is a few things...a) people who are scrambling to survive amidst the collapse b) people who are trying to "get their share, while the going is good (which I would argue has actually passed and now it's fighting for the scraps). I agree...most will never own a home. And...maybe "owning" a home is no longer the priority but knowing how to make a home. I think it's easy to miss sometimes...the shoe dropped. And we were occupied elsewhere. What we are seeing is the full depth of its imprint now. The ripples are becoming waves. But it dropped already. What we are waiting for has in fact happened repeatedly in our waiting.

I see the trepidation amongst the older ones amongst us who feel more vulnerable as they age.

If you’re like me, you also see the increased divisions in society that are tearing apart the fabric of all of our communities (i.e. vaccines, gender, Israel/Palestine). Many people I know have found themselves politically homeless as the old alliances have shifted and changed and found themselves with strange bedfellows and comrades they never imagined aligning with. 

You see the rise in the fears and the fascisms, the collapse and polycrisis that defies an easy, single-cause diagnosis and therefore a single solution. You see the rise of technocracy and transhumanism, the Great Resets, Fourth Industrial Revolutions, the Digital ID’s and digital currencies, and AI has come in with all of its profits and promises and its hidden underbelly as we all grapple with what ‘right relationship’ with it means (if relationship is even the right way to think of this). As a friend put it, “AI was ‘supposed to save us,’ but instead it's giving us psychosis and starting to take all the artist's jobs.”

To save us from this are promises of a Universal Basic Income but many question the wisdom of this. 

Farmers are struggling and farms are shutting down. Rural communities are being hit hard by defundings and the de-populatings that follow. 

Young people are struggling in ways that leave us unsure and undone. 

The way the dying are helped out of this world and the newly born are welcomed in is a compounding of cultural poverties that would take hours to articulate fully. 

Many I know are coming to understand what Wendell Berry meant when he wrote, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

We watch it, and can’t seem to stop watching it and reacting to it, with some mix of horror and hopefulness through those small black mirrors that find their way into our bed, late at night (even though we swore not to turn it on again).  

Many can see this all happening in real time but feel powerless or confused about how exactly we can all come together to stop it. Or if we can. 

The stress of all of this is tearing at the already tattered fabric of our modern lives and pushing even the most promising projects and well resourced relationships to the breaking point.  

So many people I know have quietly confessed to me that these days have an ‘end times’ feeling about them. It’s hard to argue. Has it always been this way? Is it just the omnipresence of the ‘newsfeed’ (much of which isn’t real news and none of which seems to feed anything other than the algorithm)? Are we just more informed and aware now or have things taken a sudden slide for the worse? 

Well, you could ask the village elders but, for most of us, there aren’t any and the breakdown in any shared understanding of who we can trust might be one of the surest signs of the end times there is. 

And so we’re in a different time than when we started because the future we imagine for ourselves today isn’t the same future we imagined for ourselves even five years ago. 

And while there are many who claim that this is all a part of the evolution of human beings from caterpillar to butterfly and that, on the other side of it will be a kind of spiritual Utopia, the words ring hollow. 

But there is something about these times that is also galvanizing something in people.

Maybe it’s got to do with what the good Michael Meade wrote in his book Why The World Doesn’t End: