An Open Letter To The (Predominantly White Male) Members of the Spirituality/Consciousness Communities Currently Flipping Their Shit About Having To Stay Inside And/Or Wear Masks For Public Health:

If you are finding yourself feeling awash with anxiety at some of the civil liberties you fear you are losing due to the public health concerns of the pandemic, and this anxiety is causing you to experience unprecedented feelings of rage and powerlessness, here are some steps you can take to manage this which will be much more effective than going down a YouTube rabbit hole and programming your vulnerable anxiety-ridden brain with any information it wants to latch onto for a sense of safety regardless of the reliability of the source:

1. Realize that you were never as enlightened as you thought you were. If your years of study, meditation practice, trips to Tibet, etc have not equipped you with the tools needed to deal with this period of uncertainty with calmness and emotional self-mastery, it is quite possible that the limits of your strength have never actually been tested. It isn’t your fault that you’re privileged, but for many of you it is a reality that you have never faced the kind of systemic hardship many of your fellow citizens have. This is an amazing opportunity to see what you’re really made of! If six weeks of quarantine are enough to make your first chakra fall out your ass, then you have some more work ahead of you. Acknowledge that first.

2. Apologize to the women, POC, and sex workers whose concerns about the expansion of governance over civil liberties you ignored the past several years. When we brought up #MeToo, #BLM, SESTA/FOSTA, your outrage was nowhere to be found. You told us that we were stuck in “victim consciousness” and that it was our responsibility to heal our relationship to the reality we were creating. Well, it’s your turn now. If you didn’t care about a little black girl not being able to sell bottled water in a park without having the police called on her, you as a grownass white man do not get to complain about having the police called on you for not wearing a mask. We warned you, and you didn’t pay attention to us. The government you have now is the government that was allowed because you didn’t listen.

3. Stop imagining that your YouTube posts make a difference and start getting involved in actual activism. You told us for years that hashtag activism was useless, but now you believe that somehow your posting a link to a homemade video of a rogue doctor is going to change everyone’s minds? Start getting involved in your local governments. Start voting down-ticket. Start volunteering for the campaigns of leaders who represent your values. Five years ago a collective of young women activists in LA campaigned to unseat Judge Aaron Persky after his lenient sentencing of Brock Turner. They succeeded. You want to create your own reality? It takes work operating within that reality.

4. Ask yourself why the quarantine of all things is what you’ve chosen to get mad about. Ask yourself why you feel rage and fury over having to wear a mask or forego the beach for public health reasons and why you were not concerned when your fellow facilitators were causing harm within their containers. Ask yourself where else you have been concerned only with matters that affect you personally and not the well-being of the entire collective, and examine the egoic structures that allow you to bypass harm as long as it doesn’t affect you. Then set a new intention to practice collective mindfulness and notice harm happening even before it reaches you.

5. Step down from your positions of leadership. Yes, I mean this. If you have been making your living teaching practices such as mindfulness, enlightenment, and transformation, and it is clear now by your demonstration that you have not actually internalized these teachings, step down. If you cannot practice the values you teach at this time, you have built a business entirely on marketing strategy and are not qualified to hold transformational containers. If your response to a public health crisis is to absolutely lose your shit at what you perceive as your loss of liberties and to seek out every conspiracy theory that validates your rage, you are unfit as a teacher of spiritual wellness. Step down and stop using hard-pressure sales tactics in lieu of actual value.

6. Spend this time with your families. Stop being in resistance. Practice surrender. Find your strength in the middle of the storm. Be the change you want to see in the world. Do what you told the rest of us to do when we noticed injustice and wanted change. Work for it from the bottom up. Stop assuming you deserve to be heard just because you’re white. Reassess the situation. Pause. Create your own reality, from scratch.

I am in absolute rage seeing the white men of the “consciousness community” rage about how they are “FURIOUS” at the injustice of their being unable to go to the beach when they refused to listen to the harms that were happening to anyone else. I hope yall use this time of quarantine to sit with yourselves and meditate on your absolute lack of perception and the dearth of integrity beneath the values you claim to purport, and I hope yall stop adding your useless noise to the conversation before you fix this in yourselves.