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What are your feelings about organized groups, whether a group that resonates with you or not? This is an interesting topic that, like with anything, doesn’t have a black or white answer. And for me, in fact, it’s quite gray and something to explore further, as well as be mindful of. However, I would like to share my personal feelings and experiences simply as a dialogue and way to perhaps expand perceptions.

I’ve heard and seen so much, especially recently, that has driven home to me why from as far back as I can remember as a child, I have always been put off by organized group mentality, even when it is in support of things I believe strongly in and that have uplifting and empowering intentions.

I have always been one to cherish my personal free will and ability to be myself, without answering to others, nor feeling the scrutiny of  projected ideas upon me – even when those ideas are deemed as “going to elevate and enlighten me”. And for this reason (not the only), have never wanted to be an active member of a group, although may support their efforts from afar, with my own personal energetic or creative actions, or will dip in and out when I choose to.

That being said, we are by default, all connected. We come from Oneness and so we will always share that unified bond. However, I believe that part of why we incarnate here on Earth is to express our individuation in all of its unique and colorful beauty. I don’t believe we came here to master Oneness, but I do believe we came to experience being Human in such a way as to live out loud that sensual, raw and most vulnerable, authentically true expression, as pure Source of the personal home frequency we each embody. I believe we are here to practice our sovereign free will through the alchemy of our heart and understand that what we imagine, we can manifest masterfully, because we are indeed powerful Source beings.

We share the same Source, but that Source created multi-dimensional possibilities and limitless potentials for a reason, of which free will and experience itself are a driving force.

Yet, I feel it’s important to remember to maintain, cultivate, and express your own unique voice and not to allow yourself to be swayed by popular persuasion. Even if it sounds really good, everyone you know is doing it, and being part of that exhilaration of group mentality that invokes a personal sedative into temporary bliss-numbness, feels really good.

I believe that knowing yourself first, so that when you do actually come together in gatherings of like-mindedness, will provide you the ability to maintain wise discernment and personal integrity, as well as bring to the table your own valuable insights and expressions that can enhance the experience.

We aren’t meant to be drones led by others to follow an ideology or some other form of idealization blindlessly. We each have a heart and a mind and the duty, as a human, to exercise them. And when we each do, we enhance the quality of life for the collective, rather than create a boring existence of monotonous “sameness”.

We CAN choose, however, if a particular ideology aligns with our personal frequency and then make informed decisions, moment to moment, as to how we proceed with that information based on its resonance with our own personal evolvement.

There is so much I could write on this topic and I won’t possibly be able to express it all in this post, nor do I want to belabor this more than I likely will 🙂 ), as I merely am guided to bring up some food for thought. So I will trust that the aspects of most need to be shared, will channel through and that the dialogue it creates will continue long after this share.

Before I delve into the full expression of this topic I’m being guided to address (which may journey through different branches of the same tree while I follow the energy flow), let me first share some precursors to my personal feelings surrounding the messages and beliefs that become known practices or are widely admired.

Where I derive my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs stems from my own personal heart filtering that deciphers what aligns with my personal frequency and what doesn’t. I don’t subscribe to any particular belief system, by name. I don’t follow any particular person or practice, and I am not one to “name drop”, nor do I even really know a lot of what is said to be a certain ideology from public figures. If I share a quote by someone, it is because I resonate with what is shared and since I am citing it in that person’s exact words, I give expressive credit where it is due.

But, even as an artist, while I am acquainted with works of art and styles, I wouldn’t be the person to go to in order to find out who created something. I left that knowledge back in school and developed into my own personal expression of me that desired to be as clear and pure of a channel as possible of the energy that wanted to come through my human vehicle.

Being a Pisces without boundaries, I guess you could say I knew one of my personal missions was to be able to decipher “me” amidst the “we”, since I was very familiar with the “we” to the extreme.

While I’m familiar with what people stand for and there are a lot of things I resonate with from others because it mirrors my own feelings, I have never felt that information “belonged” to any one person.

So although we may connect a certain idea, message, thought, quote, or belief with a person who is “known” for saying it, I see this differently. For me, I acknowledge that these people had the courage to voice their feelings and ideas, as visionary leaders, but I also know that the information does not “belong” to them and that many others, who go unknown and have been unheard, have channeled similar or the same information simultaneously (or perhaps even long before), but they were simply not meant to be known for it.

What each person IS capable of doing, is channeling things in a unique way to them, which may be through a personal style and ability they have for expressing it in a way that the people who are meant to hear or see it in that way would resonate with. This may be as a leader in a very public way vs. a leader among a small group or family.

However, someone living alone on the top of a mountain has the same access to the well of information and energy, as someone born to lead masses. And yet while the person who lives alone in isolation may never physically connect with others, simply their tapping into that well of inspiration and utilizing it in their own life (and through their interaction with the Earth and natural surroundings) will have a domino effect on the collective, helping to spread the light and expand collective awareness nonetheless – just in a “different” way.

This happens a lot, as you will often see how as a collective, we are constantly tapping into the same well of information and energy, since we ultimately are not separate. So I might say something and then others will share that they had been pondering the same exact thing at that moment I share it. The reality is, I simply voiced it in my unique way, but others were experiencing it in their own unique way, nonetheless.

This is one way in which I recognize how we are already so connected, yet honor that individual way we each channel things from a state of equality rather than that guruism that develops, or elevating others to a level we are ourselves uniquely also capable of.

We each have something valuable to contribute and even if it is in a similar vein of thought as others, it will be expressed very differently by you. And the people that need to hear it in the way you express it will only hear it when you do, and not when I do, and vice versa.

We need each and everyone of you to actively “BE” who you came here to be, express, and share with us all.

But what I see happen a lot when people create groups (not always, as there are some proactively aware co-creators out there), is that the unification and strength they originated that group development from (which honored and respected the individual), a lot of times turns into a self-appointed court system of the righteous versus everyone else that is different – and that includes people within the same group!

There is an astounding imbalance of ego, competition, and mis-directed anger and repression from groups you would otherwise think would be thriving and high-vibe living. Again, it’s not in ALL cases, but so much of this has been brought to my attention over and over from others and what I have seen myself recently, that it really felt time to address this.

What’s interesting is that people will consistently express their surprise to me when they share the experiences they, or people they know, have been having in these so-called “enlightened and conscious awareness” groups. It was as if they thought that anyone doing so-called “good” would be immune from unproductive use of ego. And yet, what I far too often find, is that this ego lives and thrives well in any setting, but just gets ingeniously hidden and explained away by the very practices set into motion for positive change.

I have seen the leaders of compassion-teaching, turn on anyone who is not part of their cause, and this also includes anyone within the group that does not live up to their ideals. And I can only say to this, “How can anyone following them, not see the inconsistency in their message?”

My only answer is that perhaps they do not want to also be targeted by speaking out, nor do they truly even know what they may stand for, or they find it easier to stay quiet and not ruffle any feathers, hoping it will go away. Ultimately, I find this to be an effect of not knowing, honoring, and activating what is your own personal frequency and taking on someone else’s tainted and confused understanding of their own, to be yours.

I know that people like to be with like-minded others to provide that supportive alignment that creates a safe space to thrive in. And I am the first to FULLY support and promote co-creation and co-supporting one another, feeling this is the now experience to cultivate. I also have first-hand experience of how this amazing synergy of co-support in the retreats and workshops I facilitate and have been a part of, can provide exponential growth, deeper sense of connection, healing, love and compassion, not to mention inspiration and valuable growth insights not so readily available to everyone when you are alone. And all of the services I provide are always with the intention of co-creation between the person or persons that I collaborate with.

There are many out there that are actively supporting and offering the same, which if you allow your body’s messages to guide you, you will be aligned with the mirror to your natural frequency, reflected in these environments.

Yet, the difference is, there is an honoring of each individual. Everyone has a say. Everyone is heard. Change is a constant based on what people bring to the table and feels aligned with each of us. And the outcome is individually experienced, as to what we each desire to see, feel, and take away from it, while also celebrates the melding of our unique colors to create a work of art together. And at the end of the day, while you feel you always have a family that supports exactly who you are and where you are in life, you can also choose to freely walk your own path and are encouraged to do so because that is why you are here – to share YOUR gifts – not to replicate someone else’s version of theirs.

For me, this co-creative energy doesn’t come with a conditional clause that says, I ONLY co-create from a place of compassion if you do EXACTLY what I say and do and feel and believe. Co-creation is the unconditional heart melding of empowered souls who bring to the partnership their authentic beauty and expressions so that learning, growth, expansion, and incredibly beautiful creations can be made that both celebrate the individual thread and the entire tapestry at once.

If someone has a differing opinion, is going through their own stages of learning, is at a different leg in the journey, well by golly that is THEIR journey and it doesn’t mean that there isn’t any value to the frequency they are sharing that couldn’t have benefit to your own evolution or to the depth of what you potentially could create by embracing and integrating what they bring to the table.

I see some groups that say they stand for and preach compassion, and yet viciously turn on their own members like an old-fashioned witch hunt (making it their duty to dig into their private lives) even though they share the very ideals and beliefs that brought them together. Somewhere along the line, ego gets a hold of people and righteousness based on the idea that they have “arrived” at some ideal and “better than” place than others, deems them the ability to cast judgment, shame, ridicule, or worse, on people similar, but different than them, along with people CLEARLY different than them.

And yet, they forget the principles of why they created these groups, which may be based on more compassionate ways of living, wanting to create more unification and conscious empowerment, and even because of feeling persecuted, judged, ostracized, isolated, and unjustly treated themselves.

Group dynamics are supposed to be at the core of understanding racism, sexism, and other forms of social prejudice and discrimination, and yet group dynamics have also the ability to create these same oppositions within the very framework they were founded upon.

Is it no wonder that even if the message they have to share made sense, and the person targeted may have been inclined to embrace it, for the mere fact that it came at them with confusing, judgmental, uncaring and deaf ears, and often-times aggressive energy, the open doors of their heart and mind quickly shut down to “anything” having to do with what they associate this train of thought with?

I understand the reasoning for groups and yet I always felt that the minute a group was established, it automatically created division between that group and anyone outside of it. This is duality in its finest, demonstrated through choosing one side that simultaneously creates an existing force equal to it, but opposite on the other side of the coin. This will undoubtedly and naturally create tension and the potential for “right and wrong” labeling and aggressive actions. And duality may be fine if you in fact know how to work with the energies and realize the value in what the other side has to share, for your integrative evolution. But ultimately if you truly enact unconditional compassion and love, you will see from a third position, or gray area, which will allow you to observe and understand from your heart and realize the free will we each have – the very will you so cherish for yourself.

Yet, this doesn’t seem to happen in any consistent manner, and people are often just pointing fingers and turning up noses. Yes, even in the spiritual, conscious living, and new age communities.

I see one-upping on Facebook posts where people have the inability to share an expression simply as a perspective from their heart and with gratitude for what others have brought to the table for thought, but instead have an air of “I know better than you”, or berating others and puffing overblown egos with “This isn’t new to me, I’ve been doing this for years”, or nit-picking and finding error in one small facet of what someone shares, just to appease the ego.

I’ve seen vegans fight vegetarians and raw foodists for having different reasons for their lifestyle choices than what they deem “more important”, or even righteousness that one is better than the other. I’ve even seen people bashing the Dalai Lama’s eating choices.

I’ve seen animal rights groups fight and persecute welfarists because they have the “all-or-nothing” attitude, not realizing the steps and journeys people are on (and how that facilitates change with the varying journeys of the masses) and how at one time they were on a journey themselves.

I see protesters of different groups who violently yell, call people names, and can even become destructive or violent, if someone even remotely looks, speaks, and acts differently than their objective – and yet all of this is done under the guise of “compassion”.

Many of these people are self-proclaimed atheists and/or anarchists who will vehemently express their disgust over organized religion and infringing governmental hands in their business, but will in the same breath turn around and force-feed (sometimes violently, but at the least, very aggressively) their beliefs and lifestyles on anyone who doesn’t fully ALSO agree and live as they choose to.

Now I’m all about free speech and free will, but my feeling is that people are taking advantage of this to mean “all systems go” and that they don’t need to be held responsible and accountable for brash and rash “acting out” without first looking within.

I also don’t see a consistent “living by example” being exercised into action or thinking on ways that they might be able to reach more people with their message if in fact they learned to feel as the people they are reaching (feel as the person they once were who felt backed into a wall or even uninformed) and how might they find a more productive way to create wider change that was more compassionate and individually honoring.

Educating and informing is one way. Creative action and expressions of your gifts are another. Living your principles certainly comes up high on the radar. And definitely working out your own shadow aspects indeed might help. Come on…we are boundlessly creative beings. Do you really mean to tell me that “force” is all we can come up with? There are many ways, all of which will be far more effective if coming from an unconditional heart.

And I definitely don’t see acceptance of the fact that if despite your TRULY unconditionally compassionate efforts, someone still consciously chooses differently, that it isn’t your free will to infringe upon theirs. Things always have a way of working themselves out.

Not only is there the opposition of people inside a group to people outside of it, but also to “their own”. Infighting also takes place because some people have different ideas than the leaders or larger bands within the group and someone gets picked on because they aren’t quite their ideal. And let’s face it, some people just really enjoy drama and don’t realize why they create it, as a message to heal their own inner landscape. There’s spiritual egos bashing each other for varying beliefs, one form of spiritual modality thought to be more ideal than another, one-upping each other or striving to be “better than”, rather than naturally “being” your beautiful, “natural” self and honoring the same in others.

We all do the best we can with what we have been taught so far, and honestly, bashing each other isn’t going to help anyone. And that goes for the inner dialogue you have circling in your head as well when you stay silent, but are still actively putting energy into these kinds of thoughts.

The best thing each of us can do is to look at ourselves and ask, “Am I being consistent with every single belief, thought and feeling I hold of value and wish to see more of in the world?” Likely the answer for many will be no, if you are truly honest with yourself. And if this is the case, then while you have free will to do and say and act as you choose to, do you really have any leg to stand on, if you are not walking your own walk?

I think not.

I do understand, from past experience, how when you arrive at a juicy piece of information that completely shifts your life in positive ways, you have this inner desire to go out and shout it to the world. You feel, “If only others knew this, then they too would feel as good as I do.” Believe me, I went through this when I first consciously got on my spiritual journey in my mid to late teens and early twenties. I even cried from sadness often, as I was unknowingly judging from my side of the coin, everyone on the other side. So I do recognize how easily it can be to feel that it is your duty to help change others so they too can experience what you learned.

But in time you discover that everything has its own timing. We are all on different time trajectories and not only can you not make someone else change, but you also have no idea what their journey is about and what they have set up to learn in the way that is unique to them. So you discover, hopefully, that the most profound shift will take place when you live the example of your beliefs and choices and take actions in your own life to manifest the results of that.

Live from wholeness…cultivate wholeness.

Now, I’m not saying that this is happening everywhere and a lot of times it’s behind the scenes and in the recesses of your own mind when you are left to your own thoughts. But because it’s been coming up a lot recently from others sharing with me (and in some really vicious ways unfortunately), it seems to be an important dynamic to explore from all of the different angles involved, to see how perhaps we each might be able to contribute in a more consistently meaningful way.

Like with anything and life itself, if you are going to create and engage in a group, it would be to your benefit, and the group’s benefit, if you bring personal mindfulness to the table. As there are potentials that you can make a difference with by doing so, especially when injustice and inconsistency is being displayed. This could mean standing up for someone else being attacked simply because it is the “right thing to do”.

Do you remember the story about “The teenager that saved a man with an SS tattoo”?

And even if the only downfall is the potential of “losing” yourself to the greater group acceptance, then don’t you think that is still a really important reason for keeping your awareness on high? Your doing so could make all the difference in a split second experience. It could even mean the difference between life and death.

Being yourself isn’t about self-righteousness or separation. It is simply your loving privilege for being gifted a human body, and your service to the greater good, as an example of Source in all of its multitudinous glory.

I don’t identify myself with any group, nor like labels, and don’t even dignify my living in one country with any need for blaring out anything more than what is simply a state of where I happen to have been born and reside.

I find many (not all) organized groups to be like cults – where sameness is celebrated, being different in any little way isn’t accepted, and if not fostered from the true unconditional love and self-empowerment principles it may have been founded upon, has the potentials to create division nonetheless.

I, personally, prefer to wander in and out of where, what, and when calls me, as that feels most aligned with my own personal frequency, but that is just me. I do celebrate us co-creating, working and thriving together by contributing each of our unique gifts and equally listening to each unique voice for the value it has to share.

Everyone has something important to contribute and no one person “owns” energy we all have access to. Yet, we can each be an example of channeling that energy through our unique creative self-expression, so as to do this life we are gifted, the greatest honor.

Unification starts within. It begins by you unifying all parts of you in alignment with your own personal frequency and how that uniquely wants to express itself. When you are in that place, you will create healthy experiences in cohesion with other unified souls living from the authenticity of their own personal frequency. In this way, the unhealthy aspects of groups without clarity of this home source within the members that come together, will not have something to feed on and cultivate into what can be disastrous and even threatening collective experiences.

There is also the tendency for people not empowered in their own personal frequency, that are part of a group or in a crowd, to do things they would never do as an individual because they get swept into the energy of the moment, don’t want to feel different or be persecuted themselves, and are enraptured with fitting in and appeasing their righteous ego that erupts.

It takes knowing yourself and standing in the truth of you, to be able to step out of the pack and say, “This isn’t right. This isn’t consistent with my personal frequency, nor is it aligned with the consistency of my message I embody and align with.” Just like Keshia Thomas, in the article I linked above, demonstrated so courageously.

It takes courage to be you and to say “No”, even to the very people that made you feel perhaps loved and accepted for the first time. However, if you find yourself doing to others exactly the things that make those people feel the way you once did, even if it is under the guise of some new, more conscious, awakened, enlightened, and “elevated” place you feel you have reached, then there is something wrong with the consistency of your message and with what you are about to do, and even perhaps the group you have chosen to align with.

Take a moment, pause and breathe when you are feeling someone else’s energy shift into a place that makes you feel different than your own personal frequency. Ask yourself what they might be feeling right then and whatever it is (despite it being under different circumstances than your own), speak to them in the way you would want to be spoken to and wished to hear all of those times in your life when you felt similar. You will do both you and them a healing favor and shift things in that moment by loving yourself through them.

All of this being said, I recognize the power of many coming together, but it does make a difference when you understand yourself within that collaboration of energy, so that you are always aligning with the truth of you and recognize what is NOT your truth. This in turn will help others do the same themselves, as you walk in the example of your own consistency and convey the practices you are yourself embodying in the integrity of that reflection.   

The beautiful and empowering experiences of collective melding are seen when many people are holding the strength of their own light and heart-full energy to create positive change. Chanting together (although the same words or mantras, will come from the purity of your own musical tone), focusing and sending intentful energy together as channeled through each of you, making aware, conscious, and creative decisions and taking compassionate actions at large to create a wave of change, supplying your individual gifts and strengths together to support others, animals, the Earth, unifying our hearts with unconditional compassion and love…all of these can move mountains.

What is disruptive is when we lose sight of who we are, and fall prey to the judging we once ourselves have done. The need for close human connection is important, but maintaining your own frequency is equally so and will make all of the difference in any union you decide to collaborate and partner with – friendship-wise, romantically, business-wise, religiously or spiritually, or movement-wise.

Oneness is not sameness. Maintaining the integrity of your personal frequency is true empowerment and will create profound and lasting changes that you desire, both individually and when partnered with others also embodying their wholeness.