Beyond The Veil

Navigating Truth, Gender, and Spirituality in the Search for Authentic Connection

There are moments when truth arrives not as a gentle breeze, but as a stark wind stripping leaves from branches… leaving us exposed and trembling, yet somehow clearer.

My last encounter with Christiane felt exactly like this. She has been a guide, an elder, and a respected voice in my life for years, offering teachings deeply rooted in feminine and ancestral wisdom. She has lived her work, for a long time. Her presence is deeply felt, and her voice has long carried weight and clarity for me. I respect her dearly. She’s a very meaningful person in my life. And for reasons I still explore, I’ve held her words as powerful medicine… sometimes even more potent than my own instincts.

Our recent session together began from a familiar place; my heart raw, seeking guidance through ancestral pain, tangled relationships, and the shadows that whisper about endings.

But this time, her response caught me off guard. If you know me, you know I deeply appreciate and respond positively to real, raw, even blunt - Truths. My soul craves Truth.

Rather than a soft landing or gentle word, she offered fierceness, rawness, and clarity: urging me toward solitude and service, away from relationship and heartbreak.

She believes my pain indicates an unhealthy dynamic, suggesting I flee rather than face the mirror held by intimacy (which believe me; I’ve been doing here for almost a decade now).

And, she’s right.

While I can understand and agree with her perspective, it felt incomplete to me… as if she overlooked the depth and complexity inherent in real, transformative love. I don’t see the surfacing of our dark, shadowy, or hard parts in relationship as a red flag. I see it as Sacred. I see it as an opportunity to heal the deepest, most wounded parts of our Selves.

Some of the deepest work we can do emerges when those buried parts of us… our wounds, our fear, our grief… are brought into the light. These are the aspects of ourselves that are dying to be seen, held, acknowledged, and loved: Our wounds.

And just because they arise within a dynamic doesn’t mean the relationship is broken.

To me, it means the relationship is real. Alive.

Capable of holding what we’ve been carrying for a lifetime.

It doesn’t mean a person or a dynamic is inherently bad or wrong to me. And it’s certainly no reason to avoid it.

So this is where I perhaps disagree with Christiane. I believe those moments are portals for healing. And, what an opportunity… to love and heal deeper than possible outside of the dynamic present with you.

In my experience, our deepest wounding doesn’t even get activated in us until we fall in to devoted love and relationship.

For these dark parts of us to even surface in a dynamic with someone… To even reveal those parts of us filled with shame, anger, rage, jealousy, envy, hurt, heartbreak

Surely, we have to deeply trust our partner in the first place.

I really believe this as some of the most meaningful, challenging, deepest, important, soul-level healing we can do together.

And the most amazing part is…

All it takes, is two willing people.

I’m reminded of a story I once heard between two men in physical training. After hours of grueling effort, one man collapsed, exhausted and ready to quit. The other stood beside him, calm, strong, steady. And he said,

“Where your world ends, mine begins.”

That line has always stayed with me. It really depends on how willing we are to be with all of it.

That’s what I believe love can look like. That’s the kind of sacred devotion I still believe in. A love that meets us where we fall… and chooses to keep going.

In Christiane’s directness, I sensed something deeper: a guardedness born of years spent in a protected spiritual enclave. Boulder can be such a place; a serene, insulated bubble, often disconnected from the grit and rawness of lived experience. It creates blind spots. It shelters. It forgets how hard it can be to stay with what’s difficult.

I once told Christiane, “If I took you out with me one evening, it’d blow your mind.”

She smiled and said she knew how crazy it is out there.

But I wonder… does she?

Has she walked down any inner-city back alleyways lately? Perhaps alone in the city at 4 a.m., phone out, locking eyes with masked thieves in the middle of stealing a car?

Would she know how to move in that situation?

I wondered, when was the last time she had no way of getting food for weeks at a time?

Has she truly felt the pulse of the world’s danger up close lately… not as a concept, but as an encounter?

There’s a difference between proximity and immersion. Between hearing about the rawness of life and living it.

And sometimes I wonder how many of our “guides” are offering truths from a distance they’ve never had to cross.

I know you’re sheltered and protected when it’s been a year and a half of genocide… and you’re still not attuned to what’s happening on the ground in Palestine. Christiane didn’t even know they are being starved to death as I write this. And I don’t mention this to shame her.

Just that level of detachment, of disconnection from the pain of the world, speaks volumes.

How can we talk about healing, about belonging, about spirit, about community, about love, about Earth, about Ancestors… about anything… while ignoring the cries of those who are being erased in real time?

Shouldn’t those guiding us in Ancestral Wisdom also be doing the work of decolonizing their own practices?

I couldn’t help but wonder about the shadow of her work. And by extension, the quiet shadow woven through so many of our "spiritual leaders" and their carefully curated agendas.

What is the point of all this inner work, all this ceremony and visioning and ancestral invocation… if not to rise up together when our sisters’ and brothers’ children are not just dying, they’re being bombed?

One thing I know deeply is myself… my body, and the signals it gives when something’s off. And for the first time in her presence, my body was on high alert.

Something had shifted in myself. I no longer experienced her as a wise elder… but as a wounded, guarded woman, resolved to protect herself and her small circle, rather than engage with the wider world, and by extension.. me.

During our conversation, I found myself questioning her motives. Was she offering guidance, or simply retreating in fear?

And I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe that this would be the last time I ever saw Christiane. Not out of anger or discontent or ill-will. Just a quiet, irreversible shift in the river. Something closing. Something ending. Something changing.

It’s all changing.

Always.

And maybe that’s the point, too. I don’t really know what Christiane is thinking. Every. I don’t actually know what’s in her heart.

I’m making up stories!

Some of which might be true, and some of which may just be projections of my own pain.

And maybe that’s the deeper invitation: to let the stories die.

But I also wonder… how useful is it, really, to let all tales and stories go?

Stories are human. They’re how we make sense of grief, love, loss, meaning.

And if a story ends up being true, was it ever just a story in the first place?

Or was it a truth waiting to be lived?

Or are all stories, even imagined ones, true in their own way?

Maybe it’s all a story.

Maybe it’s all true.

Maybe that’s the paradox of being human.

To let what happened simply be what it was.

I've done numerous ancestor-focused sessions with her… each essentially a sober, guided meditation. Recently, I shared how, after struggling with ketamine addiction and now five months sober, I was feeling disoriented.

I told her I wasn’t sure what was real anymore.

I said I needed help grounding myself again.

She offered no comfort… she didn’t even respond. Just a smirk.

And in that silence, I wondered: does she question the validity of this work too?

Her words echo in my mind…

“Leave here. I can't help you. Nobody can.”

If that’s true, Christiane, why do this work at all?

“Nurturing vibrant, intelligent human community. Tending our primary relationship with, and belonging to, the world. Fostering intimate engagement with the wild within and around us.”

Yet during my last session with her, this didn’t feel present.

“Our single task is that we remember that we belong—to each other, to the Earth, to Life and to our ancestors; that we live knowing our individual wellbeing is inextricably woven with our collective wellbeing.”

Is it really? When care disappears the moment I can no longer pay for it?

“Part practical guidance, part grandmothering, part soul-guiding and ancestral honoring and repair.”

Was that what I received? Perhaps.

Still… I appreciated her telling me to leave. Her words landed powerfully for me. I needed to hear them:

“Get out of here.
Step out of the pain story and find a place that needs your heart, and strong body, and sense of determination and devotion…
and devote yourself to it.
So vastly more noble and needed than devoting yourself to a woman.”

Yes.

This is the place I need… somewhere real.

And so I will go.

I will hold babies in places of suffering.

I will step more fully into the real world, and out of this bubble.

I will never again devote myself to a woman the way I have my entire life.

Instead, I will surrender all of my ideas about what my life is… or could be.

I will simply go, be with people, give my gifts, and find the place that welcomes, loves, and honors my heart and how I show up.

Because the truth is: I don’t think Christiane is wrong.

I do need to leave.

This place is too sheltered, too fake, too performative, too disconnected from the reality of the world for me.

What has happened to this place is tragic.

What has happened to me here is tragic.

This community in Colorado isn’t for me. It’s not real… not in the way I hoped. It feels elusive. Avoidant. Disconnected. Sheltered. A bubble protected from the world… and too often, a breeding ground for harm.

And that’s not to say, I’ve made some of the most meaningful connections of my entire life here. My entire existence has been forever changed from my time here.

I came here to heal, and that’s exactly what happened.

What a beautiful mess.

I also find it so curious… how many of my life-long guides and elders are falling away from me lately. Some through old age and death, others through distance or quiet endings. And some, like Christiane, through the turning tides of my own evolution.

Many of the elders I’ve sat with over the years… those who’ve held space for my questions, my grief, my fire… Many are on the edge of their next life. Seemingly all at a similar time.

And maybe that, too, is a sign.

A sign that I no longer need to seek truth outside myself.

That the last remaining answers live within me now.

In Spirit.

In silence.

In trust.

Perhaps it’s time I stop searching for guidance… and embody what a means to be a guide.

Maybe life is saying: you’ve been shaped enough. Now, help shape others.

The answers I’ve been seeking are in me now.

They always have been!

Maybe I am to walk an ancestral way… not one handed to me by others, but one already alive in my bones.

A way of seeing and moving through the world that remembers who I am, who I’ve always been, and who I came here to be.

Christiane herself admitted she wouldn’t live here if not for her family roots. That stuck with me.

I’ve spent years trying to plant something here. Trying to create family. But the soil never welcomed me.

Yes, I need to keep wandering.

To place myself back in the world.

To hold and love babies in Africa.

To help children.

To offer my gifts and love to people who need them… and want them.

Where my heart, my devotion, my art, and my love are received.

Where I’m met with warmth.

I’m learning that’s my home:

Mother Earth.

So I will save. I will build a cushion… not just to leave, but to begin a sacred migration.

I’ll rig out my car, make it livable, and travel the entire western hemisphere first.

I’ll serve, listen, offer my gifts wherever I’m called. And then, when it’s time, I’ll leave the car behind and go overseas.

This journey will take years.

It will come with many sacrifices: the idea of a stable home, of having a family, of setting down roots.

I have to let go of comfort.

Of safety.

Of the version of adulthood I once imagined for myself.

But this? This is the life that feels true.

A path guided by Spirit, not fear.

A life of presence, not performance.

And maybe that’s the only home I’ve ever truly needed: the long road. The giving. The becoming.

As I step away from this chapter, I also reflect on the contradictions I’ve witnessed in these healing circles.

The spiritual industry is so entangled with capitalism, and capitalism doesn’t honor human messiness.

It rewards distance. It penalizes need. It sells presence at a premium.

Many women in these circles remain single while selling relationship guidance. I’ve dated more than one. I’ve seen how they shift under this system. I’ve heard the behind-the-scenes stories. I’ve watched practices like Sexological Bodywork… intended for healing… become little more than sex.

Christiane once told me: women don’t really want men to give them what they say they want.

Even when they voice their dreams, they don’t want them fulfilled.

What a paradox. How can you love someone through a moving target?

By being willing.

It made me wonder how many of us actually know the kind of love we truly want… or need.

And it revealed what I now see as one of the great illusions of our time: that men only harm women, and women never harm men.

That when a woman causes pain, it’s justified.

That a man’s wound is not worth naming.

But it is.

And we are bleeding.

This is a war… not of weapons, but of absence. Of distortion. Of silence.

And in all this talk of healing, I don’t see us growing closer. I see us growing apart.

And yet… my life has been shaped in service to women.

In devotion.

In reverence.

In love.

More than 13 years of deep relational work. And still, I believe in the sacred power of connection.

But I also see what happens when the systems that promise healing reward performance.

When care is conditional.

When elders close their hearts.

When truth becomes too risky to hold.

I wonder if Christiane ever thinks about how she may be contributing to the very pain she claims to stand against.

Maybe this is the real work now:

to stop pretending it’s all working.

To be honest about what’s broken.

To tell the Truth.

Because sometimes, the deepest wisdom isn’t found in agreement… but in the friction between two people trying to stay human together.

And for me, I will keep choosing connection.

Not because it’s easy, but because it’s Sacred.

Because it’s real.

Because it’s what we are here to do.

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