The End of the “Lunatic Circus”: An explosion of possibilities

Photo from Campout Festival in Wales, the week prior to the TC Festival which rocked my world

In my prior post, Monetizing Authentic Relating, I shared my recent AR leadership journey and the real ”aha” insight that I can (and should) bring AR into my personal and professional networking, using an idea I call “Authentic Relating in the wild”. In this article I go one deeper, and talk about the miracle that is currently occurring to me. This includes what’s happening inside our AR peer group, our Intentional Community (IC) project, my marriage, and overall explosion of opportunities in the AR space which followed Sophie’s and my time at the Transformational Connection Festival.

About five years ago, my life really hit the skids

About the time that Covid hit (2020), I started feeling that I was living inside what I call “a lunatic circus”. Also known as “the mega-epic shit-show”. Here is that story.

The year before, I had lost all my passive income in the catastrophic failure of my web hosting business. I had moved to Asheville NC, attempting unsuccessfully (and for the third time) to build community there. Then Covid hit and the whole world lost its mind. Somehow I was able to pull in enough money to finance a pickup and camper shell which I called “the micro-RV”, and imagined that I would live in it. This lasted 3 weeks. I ended up wintering at my sister's place in Boston for 3 months, followed by about 2 years of community adventures which landed me in a very relationally dysfunctional political commune in Wyoming. I wrote about that in the introduction to Relational Power, because despite all challenges, Wyoming was an extraordinary experience. I learned a lot and the natural beauty of the place deeply affected me. But the loneliness I felt there was profound.

In late 2022 I left the commune (which by then had shut-down anyway) and started another round of adventures. Just as I was writing Relational Power – a very high experience – I discovered I had lost a large amount of money in a crypto fraud. I lost not just all my savings, but my credit as well. To make matters worse, I led a social media campaign whose successful outcome was to end the career of this particular scammer. But our group fell apart and one of my colleagues turned against me.

And then, right in the middle of this action (and maybe the cause of it), I had a small embolic stroke which caused me several months of partial memory loss and killed my tennis game. This turned into quite a profound experience, as I was wondering for a while whether my career was over. I had some times of profound inner peace as I accepted that possibility; but overall it scared the shit out of me.

But I kept on trucking…

I call myself a “crazy fuck” because I am quite far out on the neuro-diversity spectrum. But paradoxically, my neuro-diversity makes me quite resilient, from the fact that my autism makes it so that I don’t care that much what other people think of me. After I recovered from my stroke I moved to Mexico and then spent a year in an unsuccessful (but glorious) attempt to create an AR-inspired Intentional Community (IC) in a residential hotel in Mexico. But the “lunatic circus” amplified.

What I call “the lunatic circus” is when people around me get heavily triggered and behave in incomprehensible ways, appearing to me to have lost their minds. Typically, they then do one of two things which are guaranteed to put me into a tail-spin: they terminate the relationship in anger and blame, or (almost as bad) they terminate the relationship with no communication at all. This is a direct hit on my core wound: that I am too far outside the mainstream to get any attention or have any real friends, and am doomed to die alone, sick and broke in the gutter. It’s essentially the belief that I am crazy or fundamentally delusional. Most of my birth family appear to hold this belief, by the way. This belief (let’s be generous to me and call it a projection) would not hurt so much if I did not suspect that it was true. I am, of course, one of the inmates of the lunatic circus. Maybe it’s me who is the real crazy one.

What I eventually realized is that this phenomenon of receiving negative projections and people distancing is predictable once you hit the deeper levels of relational awareness and start upping your game. I wrote about this in Trauma is good for you: Authentic Relating and "karma acceleration". Fundamentally, the purpose of relationship is to mirror you in both your greatness and your dysfunction. Nowadays, when people mirror my dysfunction, I try and take it as a gift. An opportunity for self-reflection and deepening presence. I have also learned that “karma acceleration” happens even more when there is a lot at stake – as in an Intentional Community, business venture, or any important relationship, especially sexual relationship. Yay for me, for being in the game.

So here is the upside to “karma acceleration”: MANIFESTATION

If you are reading this and feel, as I do sometimes, “beaten down by the world”, that nobody understands you, that your friends don’t get you (let alone your family), that nothing you do works out or generates any kind of impact: – I am here (hopefully) to give you some inspiration: This too shall pass.

Note here: your inner critic is your friend. My inner critic sometimes speaks very articulately. He recognizes that my fundamental problem is that the world has not yet hailed me for the genius which I think I am and rolled out the red carpet for me. He tells me I have to work to be successful (like all the rest) and get with business reality.

Bottom-line: nobody cares about my feelings. That’s business and relational reality.

The good news is that I hit the low point 2 ½ years ago

It turns out the low point was January 2013. Since then there have been multiple, incremental miracles.

The first miracle was having immediate outrageous success in AR leadership in Mexico. I also started leading professional (paid) online programs which I filled from my newsletter and were quite impactful. I led AR programs on the ground in Mexico as well that were fantastic. I felt like I was firing on all cylinders, for the first time in years. Then I met Sophie, partnered with her, and convinced the Global Eco-Village Network to produce AR programs for us. We are soon starting the 5th ARC cohort. Also over the last year, I fell in love and got married, in a very turbulent relationship which I wrote about in Couples in the trenches. We stuck with it and are now in a very sweet space together. I seem to be now in powerful manifestation, which I will fill you in on in my next post relating to our AR peer group, our search for an IC, my idea to form a membership association for the AR community, our opening an event space in Berlin, and Sophie’s new website.

The Authentic Relating journey is edgy. It can be lonely, scary, dangerous. But it is still, hands-down, the best game I know to play

I only recently realized the deep loneliness, the trauma and the fear, of these last 5 years, of which the last 2 ⅓ years really “took the prize”. COVID really hit me where it hurts. The world is a very troubled place right now, with right-wing movements taking over everywhere and a certifiable lunatic taking the presidency of the nation I love, the nation which originated democracy in the gathering of some of the most extraordinary men who were ever born.

I do believe, however: this too shall pass. I look to the future, “eyes on the prize”.

Jesus said it well: “the meek shall inherit the earth”. “Meek” does not mean “depressed”. It means humble. It speaks to those of us who are playing a different game. A game of heartfulness, rather than a game of power-over and control.