The Foundation
Waking Up In Dark Places
The Work Before the Work
"Let your heart feel for the affliction and distress of everyone."
Grounding to Prevent Spiritual Bypassing And Disorientation
Diving straight into the good stuff is tempting. Crossing the finish line without running the marathon. Owning a beautiful garden without ever tending the weeds. Wanting a strong, healthy body without honoring what it actually requires: nutrition, movement, rest, consistency.
It’s tempting. That’s the point.
Temptation is part of having free will. So is choosing to be stronger than our impulses. Spiritual bypassing can look impressive. It can feel impressive. It can perform well. But it’s not part of the spiritual journey, it’s the temptation that keeps us from taking our first steps into our journey.
The journey is what teaches us how to be strong, honest, and wise.
Not the destination.
The four-foot drop from spiritual bypassing to spiritual awakening, from awakening into journey, and from journey into being follows a clear process: Blind → See / Feel → Choose → Be
And here’s the thing no one tells us, because few have traveled the miles: faking is only possible with those who don’t know any better. Those who’ve traveled the miles can discern the difference between authenticity and a good performance.
The four-foot drop of a spiritual life looks like this, not once or twice, but a million times, in every area of life where we’re still living in false light.
Blind → See / Feel → Choose → Be
Blind (False Light)
Operating from inherited or created narratives and identity protection rather than direct perception. We don’t know what we don’t know.
See / Feel (Holy Darkness)
Reality breaks through story and is registered somatically before it can be explained away or fully articulated. We now know what we once didn’t know.
Choose (First Light)
The conscious decision to stay aligned with reality, the clearer knowing, rather than retreat into comfort. We now choose to do better because we know better.
Be (Living Light)
Living from integrated truth without needing to perform, defend, or explain who we are. We’re no longer the person we once were.
If you’re like me, the desire to reach the finish line as quickly as possible is still there, but you want to do it honestly. You’ve outgrown performing an experience for others, and you’re ready to have an embodied experience regardless of what others think or expect from you. You’re done performing. You’re ready to be.
Here are the foundational and necessary understandings I’ve found that, when explored as a spiritual practice in their own right (Blind → See / Feel → Choose → Be) and integrated as foundational, allow every other area of life where growth is needed to more easily come into view and more smoothly transmute from weakness to strength.
Preparing For The Crossing: Part 1
Blind (False Light) → See / Feel (Holy Darkness)
Most people don’t experience reality as “information.” They experience it as a verdict on who they are. When a fact, pattern, or warning implies “I might be wrong,” “I’m not who I think I am,” “I benefited unfairly,” “I’m responsible,” the nervous system flags it as a threat, not an insight.
At that point, cognition goes offline. What takes over is identity defense.
This is why people will:
- Reject accurate data that could protect them and others
- Attack messengers instead of examining claims
- Prefer creating or engaging in comforting narratives over uncomfortable but survivable truths
- Call clarity “negativity,” “fear,” or “toxicity” (it feels that way to their nervous system)
- Frame avoidance as morality, spirituality, or kindness
They’re not stupid, well most aren’t, they’re protecting a self-structure that doesn’t know how to survive contact with reality.
That’s the core.
Here’s the good news: most, if not all of us, begin with a fragile and self-sabotaging self-image. Wherever we’re at in our lives, we’re not alone.
The other good news. When we recognize familiar behavior patterns in ourselves, those behaviors don’t define who we are. They give us clues to where we are. And where we are only becomes who we are when we know better and still choose to not do better.
Why it’s essential to develop the capacity to discern a fragile, self-sabotaging sense of self from a strong, autonomously interconnected sense of self:
A fragile sense of self can become an anchor into false light, blocking our crossing into holy darkness.
The clean distinction:
False light is identity-based goodness. “I am a good / evolved / loving / aware person, therefore I don’t look at X.”
Holy darkness is reality-based integrity. “I will look at X even if it costs me who I thought I was and the belonging that came with who others expect me to be.”
Love bears all things. A healthy, strong sense of self has the capacity to bear witness, disrupt cycles of harm, and set boundaries with harm.
A fragile sense of self lives in fear, never summoning the courage to simply look, and calls itself strength.
When the sense of self is built on being seen a certain way (good, enlightened, harmless, innocent, special, correct, chosen), truth feels corrosive. It threatens annihilation.
So the self clings, spiritualizes, and rationalizes. It creates narratives that protect and this is the bypass.
In this state, ego is less arrogance and more fragility.
And fragility always seeks light it can pose in, not the darkness it must pass through.
Identifying A Fragile Identity
We identify a fragile identity by bearing witness to what we struggle to tolerate. Here are the tells of a fragile identity:
- Feeling personally attacked by impersonal reality
- Needing disclaimers before engaging hard truths
- Equating discomfort with harm
- Confusing safety with goodness
- Relying on narratives of intention rather than patterns of impact
- Needing to be “right,” “kind,” or “above” more than committed to accuracy
- Avoiding patterns that implicate us or our group
- Requiring others to soften truth in order to receive it
None of this is the self or a true identity. It’s hollow. It’s image maintenance. It’s an internal world governed externally rather than internally.
Identifying a Strong Identity
A strong self is not louder or nicer. It has load-bearing capacity. It can:
- Hold shame without collapsing
- Admit error without self-erasure
- Revise identity without panic
- Witness harm without dissociating
- Take responsibility without self-hatred
- Lose status without losing coherence
- Prioritize patterns of impact over narratives of intent
The shift happens when the center of gravity moves:
- From “Who am I?”
- To “What’s true, and what do I do with that?”
- To “What’s my weighted burden of responsibility, and what’s not?”
Practically:
- We stop defending our self-concept
- We start defending our capacity to respond
- Worth moves from being good to being accountable, breaking cycles of harm and creating patterns of repair
- Identity becomes flexible; integrity becomes fixed
- Approval and validation are sourced internally, not externally
- Curiosity, compassion, communication, safety, accountability, and repair are not requests. They’re requirements for our presence
This is the self becoming fully actualized. A true identity revealed. No longer performative, but durable. A self-governing internal world.
The Question Most Are Terrified to Ask
This is the one question most people avoid because it’s irreversible.
Are you ready? Are you sure? Here it is:
“What parts of my identity require ignorance to survive?”
Not which beliefs are wrong. Not which traumas we’ve endured.
But:
- What stories collapse if I see clearly?
- What relationships depend on my not knowing?
- What moral stance depends on simplification?
- What version of myself disappears if I tell the truth?
Because here’s the quiet, uncomfortable reality:
Some identities are not meant to be healed.
They’re meant to be outgrown.
The crossing from Blind (False Light) into See / Feel (Holy Darkness) is where that outgrowing happens.
It’s frightening, terrifying, and appears insurmountable, yes?
It’s also our door to liberation.
The price of liberation:
- We may not be liked
- We may lose belonging
- We will lose innocence
- We will not be the same person
- We regain our spiritual birthright: sight, and with it an authentic, light-filled consciousness
Most people choose belonging over sight. Comfort over transmutation. Complacency over transcendence and this choice does not make us evil.
But the uncomfortable truth is: it makes us more likely to enable and participate in it.
Because we don’t know what we don’t know.
Preparing For The Crossing: Part 2
See / Feel (Holy Darkness) → Choice (First Light)
Why this matters as a foundational understanding and practice.
This section exists to prevent spiritual narcissism, harm disguised as wisdom, and yet another form of spiritual bypassing.
It will be uncomfortable. Possibly more uncomfortable than the section before it.
If you’re here to feel superior, this path will not work for you. If you’re here to see more clearly through the fog of this world, even when doing so is deeply uncomfortable, you’re in the right place.
What follows is the discomfort. The challenge. The deconstruction of harmful frameworks most of us were conditioned into long before we knew there was another reality, another choice.
Are you ready? Here we go.
Awakening Is Not Moral Superiority
- There are no “good” or “bad” people
- Only varying degrees of healing and harming
- Spiritual language often disguises unhealed wounds, authentic work shines light on them
No One Is Healed or Enlightened
- Healing is ongoing, not a destination
- Awakening doesn’t remove all blind spots
- Anyone claiming arrival is signaling stagnation (or blind spots)
Compassion Without Naivety
- Compassion ≠ denial
- Empathy ≠ weakness
- Understanding harm ≠ excusing harm
- Discernment ≠ judgment
Awakening as Responsibility, Not Status
- No hierarchy, titles, or spiritual rank
- No one holds “the truth”
- Wisdom emerges through humility, not certainty
This Work Is Not Linear
- Progress is recursive, not upward
- Regression is part of integration
- Awakening deepens through honesty, not performance
The Myth of “Everyone Is Good at Heart”
- As covered previously, a strong self prioritizes patterns of impact over narratives of intent
- “Everyone is good at heart” is a narrative that brings comfort, not clarity; a comforting belief that collapses under reality
- It’s often used to bypass accountability and disrupt pattern recognition
- It’s often a sign of underdevelopment. While some may be willing to witness darkness, this stance often signals an unwillingness to look through it
- Mature compassion includes the willingness, the desire, and the developed capacity to see clearly
- When we’re unwilling to witness the darkness in someone’s heart, including our own, it becomes nearly impossible to have compassion for the journey required to claw out of that darkness
- This narrative is born of fear, nothing more and nothing less
Lastly: Radical Compassion, Forgiveness, & Boundaries
Radical Compassion
Radical compassion begins with ourselves. Each of us carries moments we’re not proud of, memories that evoke shame, guilt, or grief. This work is not about bypassing or covering those experiences, nor about rushing toward self-acceptance as a performance. It’s about meeting our inner landscape honestly and bringing compassion into the process of self-exploration, even where it’s uncomfortable, unresolved, or painful.
Radical Forgiveness
Radical forgiveness also begins with ourselves. One of the most misunderstood concepts in spirituality, forgiveness, like boundaries, asks nothing of others.
Boundaries are what we demand of ourselves about how we will act, respond, and remain in integrity, regardless of what others choose.
Forgiveness is the decision to release anger, resentment, and the desire to punish, harm, or watch those who’ve caused harm suffer. It’s the releasing of dark ties that bind. Until we engage this process, no matter what language we use, we remain entangled, sharing in the same darkness through indifference to harm, justification of harm, or even taking pleasure in harm.
Forgiveness is not absolution, denial, or reconciliation. It’s the release of karmic ties.
Not forgiving can be an essential stage of the journey, just as forgiveness is. Learning to forgive ourselves without erasing truth or accountability (personal karmic liberation) builds the capacity to extend that same release to others (collective karmic liberation).
Radical Boundaries
Radical boundaries begin internally. They require an honest understanding of what boundaries actually are and the willingness to apply them to our own patterns of harm, whether that harm is directed inward through self-abandonment or outward toward others.
Before boundaries can be meaningfully held in relationship, they must be practiced within ourselves, where responsibility replaces blame and awareness precedes change.
Radical Responsibility
Radical responsibility is one of the primary tools I’ve used to climb out of darkness again and again. Why? Because I can only change what’s within my realm of responsibility, what actually belongs to me. I cannot change others. But no matter how dark things become, I can always change my circumstances, slowly but surely, by changing how I show up within them.
We are autonomously interconnected. If I want the world to be a better place, the only place I can begin to make that desire a reality is by making my world a better place.
Radical responsibility doesn’t mean choosing happiness or bypassing the darkness we’re in. It doesn’t mean taking on weighted burdens that aren’t ours. It does mean learning to discern where our responsibility begins and ends. And at times, it means getting creative, both in how we transmute our own pain and in how far our accountability can responsibly extend.
Example 1:
An abuser choosing to abuse is responsible for their words and actions.
Me staying silent is my weighted burden of accountability; speaking up is my responsibility.
Who, in this situation, is the target of harm? Where have I, in small or large ways, enabled it? And how will I break that cycle?
Final Thoughts
This foundation is not meant to make us comfortable. It is meant to make us honest. Everything that follows builds on this capacity to see, feel, choose, and be without hiding behind identity, intention, or performance. The work ahead will continue to ask more of us than belief ever could. Not perfection. Not purity. Just the courage to remain in contact with reality, again and again, wherever the four-foot drop appears next.
Notes On Becoming
- All Posts
- Conversations
- Deconstructing Abuse Climates
- Field Notes
- Power & Leadership
- The Spirits In Politics
- What Words Mean
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