Be More Like You.

Most practitioners selling something on the internet- coaching, energy work, healing and personal development- use the following formula:

I went through XYZ things [some series of initiatory events]

What I went through turned my life upside down, and I thought I was losing everything [dark night of the soul]

Then, I had XYZ realization! [insert revolutionizing insight]

So I created this system, map, theory, process, protocol

Now I Have It Figured It Out™

Now look at me, I'm on a jet plane, I'm at a café in Paris, I'm at a medicine ceremony, I am having 6 figure months, I am having more sex, I am hotter, I am better than ever, conditions in society no longer affect me...

Come be more like me! I'm going to show you how.

...why is this marketing highly effective?

Because it pulls at the surface level desires of 99% of people in the Western world. Almost everyone wants more money, more sex (or at least the trappings of sexual attention), safety, security and comfort. Many people (although not all) would love to be in control of their own time and only do exactly what they feel like doing. Many people (although not all) want to be able to travel with abandon.

I was talking with a mentor about this a few months ago, about how this doesn't work for me because my own life doesn't fit any kind of story arc that "makes sense" in this type of marketing narrative. I hate the question "how are you doing?" or "what have you been doing?" because I never know how to answer it. I do not organize my self conception around doings and accomplishments, and anytime I have done this in the past, it's performative. It makes me feel like an undercover journalist coming up with a plausible cover story.

She laughed and said "seriously- please DON'T try to be more like me. Not recommended!"

In addition to seeing deeply into the other, which is why I am talented at supporting people one-to-one, I am also a writer. I tend to record my experiences through autobiographical poetic prose. I don't do that out of Main Character Syndrome. To me they are objective field notes. I am an artist, and if I don't let my creativity flow, it comes out sideways or makes me sick.

I often write about spirituality and issues in society autobiographically because it is how it really feels. It's not a grand theory. It is my direct experiencing of the phenomena.

That is what I wish for others and what I support others with- cutting directly to their actual experience, below the programming, below the narrative overlays, below all of the concepts about what their life is supposed to look like or what they are supposed to want and what choices they have been told are the right choices.

Your direct experience is honest and it is only by getting honest that we can start to feel into what is true. Not true like a totalizing truth, but true in terms of what you can feel is true for you, in this moment, deep in the quiet place.

We start there, and then life has a way of growing wild around it.

I don't want anyone to be more like me. I want you to be more like you.