Spiritual Transmission And Leadership

Occasionally I receive a very specific piece of negative feedback about my spiritual awakening story; not feedback about the story itself, necessarily, but about the personalities and actions involved. Often, this feedback comes from long-term spiritual practitioners who read the story closely.

Before I talk about their negative feedback, allow me to set the stage:

In the story, I explain that I had a “spiritual awakening experience” kicked off by a specific dude, someone I literally met at a business “coffee meeting” in 2016. (I used to have a lot of business coffee meetings with random people. Those meetings were mostly normal get-to-know-you chats. Only occasionally were those meetings extraordinary, bizarre, and/or life-changing, notwithstanding the examples I’ve blogged about since then.)

I called the dude “Jason” when I shared the story, years later. Perhaps the simplest way to describe Jason’s actions is this: He used words and gestures to shift me into a state where I felt like I had direct experience of God.

To say that this was “profoundly affecting” feels inadequate, and obvious. It’s a bit like saying that water is “wet, very wet.” I was changed. My life was changed.

Was this a good thing or a bad thing? Some readers raise the question of whether Jason should have done it or not. What does it mean to non-consensually shift a person into a spiritual state, or towards a religious belief? Should we assume that Jason non-consensually hypnotized me, or is there another frame of reference that works better? The frame Jason himself offered me, later, when I asked him, was one more like a spontaneous improvised artistic experience — as if we’d played jazz together.

In the decade since I met Jason, I’ve done much research on spirituality, and I’ve talked to many different people with many different types of experience. Jason’s actions towards me were not unique — there are stories of him doing similar things with others, with various outcomes, sometimes outcomes that seem bad and sometimes outcomes that seem good. Jason also is not unique in having this ability — there are many stories of others with the ability to impart sudden spiritual awakening experiences.

I’ve heard that there are warnings in various sacred texts against doing this to people. This makes sense to me, because sudden spiritual experiences can be highly disruptive to a person’s life, and sometimes even to their biology.

On the other hand, I now believe that some people end up in a state where they’re poised to have such an experience, and if you’re already in a place where such an experience can happen, multiple things can catalyze the awakening. (Prior to my awakening experience, I had an intuition that “something big” was about to happen and that my life would change, though it was an imprecise intuition; before it happened, I interpreted the intuitive feeling to mean that I was about to change jobs.) For an onlooker with Jason’s capability, then, it is arguably kind to catalyze such awakenings, because then you can be there to help someone contextualize it while it’s happening.

My own take on the incident, from my perspective today, is that it had a mixed impact on my life, mostly positive.

With that said, I have not chosen to develop my spiritual knowledge or energetic skills in a direction that would enable me to give others the same sudden awakening experience. I seek to hold intention and focus around helping others, but more and more, I have not chosen to practice affecting people in this way, and have instead sought to do something much gentler. So, in the end, that’s part of how I evaluated the experience.

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There’s another way of evaluating my spiritual awakening story: Maybe I had mixed, ambiguous boundaries? Maybe those boundaries were pushed?

This process around spirituality resembled another emotional/cognitive process that occurred in my early twenties, when I got into alternative sexuality. My entry into BDSM happened with non-verbal consent: A guy started doing BDSM with me, uninvited, at a party, which startled me, but also showed me something that felt like a transcendent gateway. (Those familiar with my old writing about BDSM may recall the story, from my 2010 essay “Love Bites,” which was later reprinted in my book The S&M Feminist. I gave the man in question the pseudonym “Richard.”)

Similarly, my spiritual awakening experience occurred with non-verbal consent, during a meeting wherein a guy I barely knew managed to invoke an intense state. So — both of these experiences involved men I didn’t know very well, and non-verbal consent, and apparent gates towards transcendence. Afterwards, in both cases, I became determined to understand what good practices existed around these things, sexuality and spirituality — and of course, these also overlap. In both cases, I had a hard time talking to my existing community about what I was feeling, and I had to go on a journey around that, finding resources and different ways of relating to others.

Was my consent ambiguous? Sometimes, people read both these accounts, and say that my consent was ambiguous. (Rarely do they seem to reflect on the fact that they’re telling me about my own consent.) In a sense, maybe it’s true that my consent was ambiguous, especially given that I didn’t know what I was getting into, in either case. However, I would not say my consent was violated.

I think there’s a very important distinction between violating someone’s consent, and engaging in a risky energetic escalation while reading the other person’s non-verbal feedback. I think what happened in these cases was the second thing, not the first.

In retrospect, it feels significant that these experiences were so similar, even though they occurred in extremely different contexts. Maybe these experiences indicate something about me having blurred boundaries, or being receptive in a specific way, at a deep energetic level. I’ve meditated on this question quite a bit, since then. I’ve considered the ways I form relationships, the ways I energetically sync with people, the ways I signal and counter-signal, and whether there are healthier ways I can do these things.

I think that both of these men had patterns of pushing boundaries in a certain way, to which I had patterns of being receptive in a certain way — for better and for worse.

But something I want to be clear about is that I have, separately, had experiences that were clearly abusive and/or non-consensual. Abusive experiences are actually different from the experiences I had with both Jason and Richard. I wouldn’t choose to do what they did, during those encounters, but I also don’t resent them for it.

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For years after my spiritual awakening, I referred to my experience as “Spiritual Awakening Funtimes,” in a chipper and ironic tone. I used that tone because I was trying to not be weird and pretentious about it. I had trouble contextualizing it: The experience felt important, but eventually I began to wonder why it felt meaningful, and indeed whether it “really mattered.”

I asked myself: Was there something I was “supposed” to do with “Spiritual Awakening Funtimes?” If so, what? Was the meaning I’d felt around the experience something I’d invented rather than perceived? What even is spirituality?

In 2016, many of my materialist friends were disdainful and contemptuous of my desire to talk about spirituality — including people I loved. That was hard. So I wanted to talk to spiritual people. Yet, after reviewing many options, I didn’t feel called to join any local church or group. Therefore, I decided to convene my own group.

I’ve gained a local reputation in the Bay Area for convening gatherings, but what most people don’t know is that I originally developed my playbook back in my twenties, when I lived in Chicago. One of my Chicago projects was a sex-positive documentary film series. The film series was a huge hit. Along with a popular blog, it helped establish me as a well-known commentator on sexuality. And so, over a decade later, when I wanted to explore spirituality, I ran a similar playbook: I did a film series. I called the project Spirituality X.

The way I structured Spirituality X was like this: On film nights, we watched a documentary together — always a documentary — and then I led a discussion group about the film. I typically began the post-film conversation by mentioning “Spiritual Awakening Funtimes,” but I tried not to take up too much time talking about it because I didn’t want to make the project about myself. I tried to invite conversation about attendees’ experiences, beliefs, and observations.

One evening in 2017, my community was wrapping up after a Spirituality X film screening. I was leading a group of volunteers, and we were working together to clean up the space and take down the big screen where the film was projected during the event. A woman who’d attended the screening came up to me. She seemed agitated.

The agitated woman demanded to know why I was not more aggressive in talking about “Spiritual Awakening Funtimes.” She seemed really upset, so I stepped away from the screen, and I tried to listen.

She demanded: “Why do you think you were given that experience of God, if not to tell people about it?”

I forget what I said in response; whatever I said, it did not mollify her. The woman became more upset. She threw words at me like darts, or stones. She suggested that I was failing at a moral task because I refused to take a strong stance about the existence of God. She demanded to know why I bothered convening this community, given that I was unwilling to say things like that. She wanted to know why I thought we were here at all. I said something like: I think the purpose of us being here is to support each other in the ways available to us, and that it’s not for me to impose my perspective on others. She wasn’t happy with that answer either.

Finally, I invited her out to coffee so that I could learn more about her perspective, and I was able to get back to the post-film cleanup crew. Later, when she and I had coffee, I learned more about her personal story. I don’t want to share her story without her consent, but it helped me understand why she was upset at me that evening: She felt invalidated because, in other contexts, she’d been told that her spiritual experiences were not real. She wanted to see leaders take a strong stance about that reality.

The conversation stayed with me for a long time, especially the part where she seemed sure I was behaving badly by not taking a more aggressive framing role. Her words gave me a lot to think about. At the same time, I did not feel confident that I had “The Answer” that would work for other people. What felt helpful was creating a space where people could talk about their own experiences and learn about others’. I didn’t want to aggressively impose my frame on the audience. I still don’t.

Last year, a friend gave me a surprise gift, a book called Pagan Leadership Anthology edited by Shauna Aura Knight and Taylor Ellwood.1 My friend said: “I saw this and thought of you.” I don’t identify as a pagan, though I have nothing against pagans — similarly to how I feel about Christianity, a faith I both resonate with and also don’t identify with. Maybe my history has shaped me in such a way that I’ll always feel like an outsider. Maybe that explains what’s going on with me, here, and why these questions feel so difficult and confusing for me.

There’s an antique political cartoon I used to read, Pogo, which has a running joke about how the only person you can reasonably trust in an elected position is someone who refuses to run for that position.

What does it mean to impose a frame? Where does that start or end? And, a question I think about endlessly — who is helped by which types of framing? Do people who have trouble speaking for themselves need more aggressive framing? Is there such a thing as problematic abdication of responsibility, here? But still, it feels like there is something deeply right about offering, rather than imposing.

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My explorations of BDSM, and sexuality in general, changed me. My explorations of spirituality also changed me. Politics, too, and passing through the gateway of motherhood, both of which are related to spirituality and sexuality in their way, as I suspect everything is.

Writing about these things is, perhaps, in a way, imposing a frame. But I hope to write and speak of these things in a way that offers, without imposing. In a way, it feels similar to offering food; you can’t make someone like food, or accept it, but maybe you can offer it, and it can help.

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