What’s been burning

Somewhere along the way “village” “community” became a sales word and “wellness” became privileged and inaccessible.

You’ll see it everywhere in this space right now, come join my village, community building the village we never had. And I keep sitting with how culturally off that lands for me. Village was never a brand. It was survival. It was the people who showed up when you couldn’t feed yourself, who sat with your grief without a content calendar, who knew your children’s, family’s names because they’d held them. It wasn’t aspirational. It was necessary.

So when I see it packaged, polished, priced, filtered, glamorous I have to ask: are we building community, or are we building empires with community as the aesthetic?

What community actually means

Culturally, across most of the traditions this word is borrowed from, community isn’t a feeling or a vibe. It’s a structure of obligation. It means you are known, not performed to, known - by people who have witnessed you across time, including your worst days. In rites of passage work, this is the whole architecture: you don’t initiate alone. You are held through the threshold by elders who’ve been through it themselves, and you are received back into a community that has agreed, in advance to carry some of the weight of your becoming. The community isn’t the audience for your transformation. It is a participant in it.

That’s the piece I think gets lost. A village has reciprocity built in, you belong to it and it belongs to you, you contribute to the making of it and that means accountability, not just comfort. It means the people less able, less articulate, less online, are not on the margins of it. They’re often the centre of it.

Where I’ve struggled in this industry

Hierarchy doesnt belong in community, idealisation should be deeply discerned and enquired upon as an individual.

The retreat ends, the breathwork session closes, everyone goes home lit up, and then there’s a quiet after that nobody markets. I’ve also struggled with the pressure to look “healed” - as if healing is a finish line you cross and then perform from, rather than something you’re still inside of. And underneath that, a harder question: is there room in this industry for real mental health struggle, for medicine and plant medicine, for things breathwork and nature can’t fix on their own? Or has someone decided that if you’ve found the right practice, you don’t need anything else, and if you still do, that’s a failure of your own healing rather than just being human. Or has someone decided that they only feel safe in healed spaces? There are so many questions that burn within and around me. I know this because often my body has felt off in these spaces, where I need time for my mind to catch up.. to process, takes time it’s not instant for many people and also I have felt this within the health system too…

What I’ve had to do more recently, in practice, is step away from holding space when I’m the one who needs to work through something first. That’s not simple when this work is also your income. There’s real pressure to show up anyway, to keep offering, to keep the calendar full, but I’ve learned I can’t pour from a version of myself I haven’t been honest with. And I’ve felt the glamour this industry preaches, the aesthetic of ease and radiance and having-arrived, and how far that can sit from what’s actually true on a given week. I’m trying to build something that doesn’t require me to perform arrival in order to be trusted.

I’m not writing this from outside it. I’ve felt the pull of the empire model myself, the idealised offer, the “I’ve got it all figured out” tone that sells better than the truth. I understand the appeal, because I’ve needed the income it promises. But I keep coming back to the same question: who is this actually reaching? Not who is it marketed to. Who is it reaching. And when we are trying to solve a problem within society, within connection and violence we have to ask these questions, especially if they are perpetuating.

Sit in rooms where you just belong is our greatest antidote to loneliness and isolation.

The men’s work problem

This is where it gets sharpest for me. There’s a lot of talk right now, men speaking about men’s violence, men’s anger, men’s accountability. Good talk, often. But I keep asking: are these men in the room with marginalised men, or with men in active rage, active loneliness with the ones who are actually causing harm or the ones who actually need support? Or are they on a platform that rewards looking like a good man, which is a very different job to being with an angry one. I can tell you that now, it’s a very different experience and very different challenge to be up against. And while all this content is flooding the internet, sparking reaction so is the closed doors of peoples homes. Have we thought this might be creating more unsafety? Is the target audience even online to bring awareness to.

Because here’s what I’ve learned, in the body and not just the theory: shame lives in isolation. And shame is very often what rage is standing on top of. You cannot heal shame through a feed. Shame needs to be witnessed, face to face, by someone who isn’t going anywhere. Content can start a thought. It cannot hold a nervous system through a rupture. Only people can do that. Only real community can do that even when your disgust and values don’t align, but purely for a greater purpose.

The neat little boxes

And underneath a lot of this is the masculine/feminine content, divine masculine, divine feminine, right ways to relate, wrong ways to relate, all packaged so you can feel safe here as long as you agree with the formula, right? I understand the appeal of a box. Boxes feel like safety when the world feels chaotic and the nervous system hasn’t been raised that way. But toxic relating doesn’t resolve inside a box. It has layers, attachment, culture, family line, nervous system, story, and untangling those layers takes something a formula can’t give you: other people, over time, willing to stay. The preaching “the feminine does this when, the masculine wants to lead’ the little boy etc all has context but not at the same time. It’s more your mask then who you are. It’s more a shield then having no shield, its patriarchal wrapped in control. It’s a construct!

Actual service can teach us a lot

IF you are someone wanting more capacity in your work, more depth, more integrity, more actual understanding of the people you’re claiming to help, the answer isn’t a better funnel. It’s simpler and harder than that: go out into your actual, physical community and be of service, not with your peers with members of the community. Sit with people. Show up without a camera. Let your awareness be built by proximity, not by algorithm. You cannot know what a village needs from a studio or retreat offering.

A note on the sharing itself

I also want to name something gently, because I think it matters here: sharing your deepest wounds online can be a response, not a choice. It can be a trauma response. Clinicians describe this as part of the “fawn” pattern, disclosing painful, personal material early and often, hoping it will build connection or trust, in the same family as people-pleasing and over-apologising. And there’s research behind it: one study found that anxiety, attention-seeking, and social media addiction actually predict how much and how deeply people share online. This isn’t a moral failing, it’s a nervous system doing what it learned to do to stay safe.

But here’s the part worth sitting with: platforms reward this. Vulnerability gets engagement, and that reward loop blurs the line between genuine disclosure and performance, until the two are hard to tell apart, from the outside, and sometimes from the inside too. What reads as “brave vulnerability” can quietly slide into vulnerability worn as identity, a kind of victimhood that gets rewarded with likes and doesn’t actually require the harder work of change. I’m not discouraging sharing. I’m saying: know which one you’re doing, and know that the platform has a financial interest in you not knowing the difference.

I say this without judgement, only with mindfulness, curiosity and what’s been burning inside because I understand the pull, and I’ve felt it myself. But there’s a sad reality underneath it: the likes, the comments, the “me too”s, can feel exactly like connection in the moment. They light up the same part of us that genuine closeness lights up. And so we mistake it for the real thing, when actually it’s a thinner substitute, a hit of being seen, without the slower work of being known. That confusion isn’t a character flaw. It’s just what happens when the only available outlet starts to feel like intimacy. Sharing deep trauma online is now sold in the wellness space as being brave and growth. For moments it is. The grief is that so many people are reaching for real connection and being handed its imitation instead.

So – connection, village, or empire?

The people posting the loudest about our biggest cultural wounds are often the furthest from the ground where those wounds actually get tended. That’s not a condemnation of all online voices, some of this work does need visibility. But visibility isn’t the same as service, and audience isn’t the same as village.

If we want the word back, I think we have to build the thing it actually describes, not another platform to be seen on, but a place, with actual people in it, that includes the ones who are struggling the most, not just the ones who can afford to look like they’ve healed.