Staying Committed and Building Soulful Community

Here's the final assignment I gave this year's Power Awakening cohort.

Embody Your Light is a newsletter written by Brooks Barron exploring how to come fully alive and build a more beautiful world from a place of alignment, presence and peace. Join the adventure:

---

The 2023 cohort of Starlight Leadership’s flagship group program, Power Awakening, came to a close last week.

It was a tremendously beautiful and transformative journey, and a bittersweet ending. We felt joy as we celebrated how far we traveled together and the incredible shifts we created. We felt sadness as we said goodbye to a group and set of individuals that we had come to love. We felt fear as we turned to the unknown future, and recognized that things would be different without the regular contact with the supportive and inspiring space of the program we’d grown accustomed to over the prior three months. We felt creative energy and excitement as we imagined what future possibilities may arise from the seeds we had planted together.

To support our participants in making the transition well, I shared some final thoughts and reflection questions on two topics that I find crucially important for anyone who is committed to becoming fully alive and embodying their full potential: 1) Staying Committed and 2) Building Soulful Community.

I believe these perspectives and questions may be supportive to many of you as well, who are traveling this journey in your own way. So I’m pleased to share them with you below.

Enjoy! As always, I’d love to hear what you think.

-Brooks

---

Staying Committed

You’ve come a long way since you decided to enter this program.

The road ahead is full of unknowns, and inevitable ups and downs. It is time to take radical responsibility for where you go from here.

You have developed a robust toolset with which to navigate the terrain ahead. You’ve learned to locate yourself above or below the line, dedicate yourself to the practice of awareness with acceptance, and examine the deeper truth of who you really are. You’ve embraced your darkness, worked with personas, eaten your projections and welcomed home your X’d out parts. You’ve cultivated your wholeness. You’ve developed your emotional intelligence and body intelligence, and opened yourself to being guided by the Mystery. You’ve learned to practice integrity, follow your Whole Body Yes, dance with curiosity, embrace the unknown, and take 100% responsibility. You’ve created reciprocal relationships with nature and the wild world, received guidance from your dreams, and undergone a ceremonial rite-of-passage underworld journey. Perhaps, you even made direct contact with your soul. You’ve begun to define and follow your zone of genius, and you’ve entered courtship with your Muse.

As you may have noticed, there is a singular and consistent result to all of these practices. It’s the embodied feeling that you get when you are exquisitely present, open, curious, available, whole, turned on and fully alive. It’s what it feels like to be above the line in a state of trust, in your wholeness, and connected to your soul. At Starlight Leadership, we call that feeling “embodying your light.”

The most important thing for you to practice after leaving this program is to stay in contact with that feeling. Get extraordinarily clear about what that feeling is and how it shows up in your body. Define the unarguable experience (i.e. body sensations and feeling states – NO STORY) so that you can know for certain when it is here.

There are infinite ways to create this feeling. The clearer you get around the ways that work best for you and the more intentional you get around practicing those pathways regularly, the smoother and more successful you will be in your effort to stay connected with and embody the magic and the power that you have awakened in yourself during this program. As my friend and mentor Jim Fallon once told me, “Your body is a divining rod. Use it!”

Here are some reflection questions to support you in all of that, and in carrying this journey forward into your life.

Reflection Questions for Staying Committed

1. What does it feel like to embody your light? Get super detailed, specific, and unarguable in your description of how this feeling and experience shows up in your awareness.

2. What have you learned about how to create that feeling for yourself?

3. What have you learned about how you tend to disconnect yourself from that feeling?

4. What are one or two specific, one-time actions you are willing to take in the coming weeks to make a change, drop a misaligned commitment, and/or create something new that will meaningfully support you in being more connected to that feeling?

5. What practices (i.e. daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly) do you want to commit to to help you stay in contact with that feeling? (For example: meditation, prayer, deep imagination, dream journaling, drama triangle practice, persona work, solo time in nature, movement, embodiment, medicine work, singing, dancing, conversations with nature, etc.)

6. What is a long-term project that you could devote yourself to in self-love, as a way of investing your time and life force into nurturing this feeling? (Choose something that feels fun and playful, and maybe a bit scary. For example: learning to dance, recording an album, painting a piece, embodying a character or image from nature, dreams or soul, or learning to hunt.)

7. Who do you want to enlist as an ally to help you keep yourself responsible for these commitments?

Building Soulful Community

We humans are social beings. We are deeply influenced by those we spend time with, align ourselves with, and associate with. Therefore, a very important part of continuing your journey in this work is to be conscious of your relationships and your community.

This does NOT mean it’s your job to change or improve other people around you. Be very wary of that common pitfall – it is a sneaky form of victim consciousness. As long as you are needing others to be different for you to be the way you want to be, or needing any of your circumstances to be different for that matter, you’re below the line in a threatened state. When you are taking 100% responsibility for yourself, creating yourself as the being who manifests the reality you desire, and embodying your light, you realize that everyone else is perfect just the way they are and your circumstances are exquisitely designed to support your own learning, empowerment and growth. 

This doesn’t lead to disengagement or apathy – on the contrary. You connect with your vision for a more beautiful future, feeling excited, turned on and alive by that possibility even as you rest in complete acceptance of the way things are now. Then you devote yourself to being the resolution – simply because you can, because it’s fun, and because it brings you fully alive.

The paradoxical essence of this path is to take 100% responsibility for the community you create for yourself and to stop being at the effect of your relationships, which means to recognize how everyone in your life and your field is here FOR YOU. Your primary focus is to do your own work in all of the relationships that trigger you, where you feel unsatisfied, unseen, stuck, taken advantage of, etc… anywhere you are in a state of threat. When you blame that circumstance on the other(s) and/or try to “fix” it by fighting back, changing them, or cutting yourself off from them, you are not only perpetuating the drama, but you are missing out on the opportunity to learn and step into your creator power. 

When you focus on doing your own work and showing up embodying your light, you will be the invitation for others to do the same. Those with whom it is aligned for you to be in conscious relationship will be drawn to your energy, and curious about how you are creating it. One of the most important aspects of building soulful community is to identify and nurture those conscious relationships – other people with whom you feel comfortable being your fully authentic self, and who are committed to the journey of consciousness in their own way (even if it’s a very different way than yours). Seek out, nurture, and invest in those relationships. Ask for help. Make explicit space to be vulnerable and do your work together. Build a robust container of deep trust. Support and challenge each other to embrace your darkness and embody your light.

At the same time, it is equally important to consciously choose with whom you do NOT want to have a relationship – or which relationships you want to limit or contain. At some point, you may realize that a certain relationship is here for you to learn how to assert healthy boundaries and to exercise anger from above the line by saying, with love and without blame, “no.” Sometimes, the most loving and soul-aligned move is to cut and destroy. (For a further exploration of this question, I highly recommend this blog post by Jim Dethmer: You’re Leaving… Are You Quitting Or Completing?)

Here are some reflection questions to support you in your practice of building soulful community.

Reflection Questions for Building Soulful Community

1. What are 1-2 key relationships in your life where you are currently at the effect of the other (i.e. blaming, needing them to be different, or taking more or less than 100% responsibility)? Are you willing to take 100% responsibility for how you are creating your experience of the relationship? If yes, Teach the Class.

2. Who are 2-3 people with whom you feel deeply comfortable being your fully authentic self, and with whom you have a soul connection? Are you willing to further invest in those relationships and nurture them into a space for your shared journey of consciousness? If so, how do you want to do that?

3. Is there a relationship in your life that you sense does not serve you, that wants to be completed or at least contained by healthy boundaries? If so, read the article linked above on quitting vs. completing. Then check in, are you willing to complete? If so, how will you complete?