How not to start a cult
So over the past few years I have been inspired by eco-communities, sustainable living, and generally curious about alternative approaches to mainstream urban life. I have lived at an ashram for less than a month, and I visited other eco-village type communities. I attended Pearson College which was a tight knit school of 200 students in the forest. I keep coming up against the same conundrum, how can we create small scale, sustainable community living without creating cult like, toxic social dynamics?
I am embarking on 6 months - 2 years of research into sustainable building, regenerative agriculture and positive community building. My dream is to create a sustainable retreat center on the Sunshine Coast and/or Vancouver Island that creates a space of nature reconnection, simplicity, healing, and beauty for others. I want to build structures that are well adapted to a changing climate. I want to grow food, flowers, and herbs, and have on grid and off grid options.
My generation of millennials are struggling to afford housing, so instead we are inspired by tiny home living. My generation faces collapsing societal systems and new approaches to holistic living that have not been built yet. We face an uncertain future for our children, one riddled with earth changes that have been long forecasted, but politicians didn’t care enough to truly address. This is a time of rich, exciting innovation.
So we cannot rely on our governments to save us. No one can save us except our own grassroots initiatives. So I am doing my little bit to create an artsy, cozy, welcoming space for folks to gather and reconnect to their soul.
My family and I purchased 4 acres of land in Sechelt. While this may sound dreamy to you - buying land with my family is not. I have learned first hand how important it is to have a shared ownership agreement and that even though people claim to be on the same page, communication and interpersonal dynamics will inevitably arise. Conflict has created a standstill. I am waiting on 2 members of my family to agree to formal mediation and until then, nothing can break ground.
At first, I felt crushed. I felt hopeless. I started to feel like my heartfelt dreams were dissolving. I declined my Masters degree for this dream! I sacrificed a lot for this dream! My ego had a heyday.
Thankfully, my dreams didn’t die. Instead, I found renewed hope in learning. On the bright side - I had lots of time to travel, work online, and research what I want to build. I have time to get clear, to build a solid foundation of trust within myself and with others.
I traveled to a sustainable community in Sweden and was shocked at what I found. This community advertised themselves as a yoga community with a living master, thinking about sustainability and regeneration. The living master was from India but everyone who attended / lived there was mostly white. Older devotees had written over their life estates to this Indian guru.
Another Indian woman and I came for a week under the guise that we were going on some kind of retreat. Instead, we were put to work. I found a group of people working long days for free, hard labour, building everything from scratch on a huge swath of land and clearly well resourced.
I met the living master and was not impressed. He seemed like a businessman more than anything. Everyone wore the same clothes, and had different colour robes for different reasons. Everyone was weirdly happy and kind, yet there was a niggling feeling of discomfort. The master lived in a mansion with dorms where lots of young women and women of all ages stayed, too. The other young people there lived in tiny wood cabins without a lot of amenities and bathrooms in a separate building.
Apparently the businessman / living master Guru guy loved these young white people as much as his own biological children (who lived on the property with his wife but had nothing to do with the farms and regenerative approach to life). The man said he had some awakening, but I sensed he still had an ego.
It made me deeply uncomfortable.
I left after 2 days, getting on a train back to Copenhagen, I never felt so relieved.
Maybe they were happy there, those young Scandinavian and German people. Some had been there for 10 years and had rejected their own biological family. A woman told me they didn’t care if their living master was a bad person or not, as long as he led them to enlightenment - he was doing his job.
What the heck is enlightenment? Is it rejecting the rest of the world?
Why weren’t these people integrated with a larger community and with their own families? A young couple there was pregnant, having met at the cult and were going to birth a child into this community. The living master told me it would be an incredible experiment to raise a child in this way….he also talked for 4 hours non stop on a Sunday about nothing that interesting. I read his books about awakening, nothing was new for me.
I don’t claim to be enlightened, or a living master, or any kind of weird avatar thing so I am not qualified to make judgements. I can only speak from my very very short experience in this place, but my gut told me to leave. It wasn’t the kind of place for me. However, as a human woman with half a brain I could sense something was awry in this community. Discernment is different than judgement.
A young woman followed the Guru around attending to his every need, it made me cringe. I could see and feel some kind of strange exploitation, a willing kind. The alternative life presented to these young people in rural Sweden, miles away from civilization was deeply tempting.
They wanted to escape something. They longed to belong. Was it spiritual bypassing taken to the next level? Were they truly happy and fulfilled there?
An ache in my heart led me there too - if my parents were not providing what I needed, maybe a community could.
Thankfully life took me down another road - one of ancestral and familial healing. Forgiving my family for the perceived wrong doing they had done to me in the past was the key to my liberation. I embarked on many sessions of therapy and a wonderful modality called Family Constellations. I started to feel more at home with speaking my truth with my parents, even though they come from a different generation, culture, and context. I became more at peace with my true self not needing their approval for every tiny decision.
So I learned a lot by witnessing a cult. It was not easy. I see cults around many talented healers and teachers. I do not strive to ever be part of anything like that or become anything like that.
The sustainable farm and retreat space I am creating will be a business and community first. It will be a place that provides value to others. It will have philanthropic arms, but it will not be an eco-village or have a weird shared ownership structure. I am inspired by the co-housing movement in Denmark and a cool long lasting community of Ithaca in New York that has had transparent finances and sustainable ways of living for a long time….you can learn about them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-uH36w9xg8&t=2433s
I plan to have a circle of elders, mentors, and wise people to guide me as a leader. I get life coaching and counselling regularly. I choose to invest humbly in my own learning and growth, healing is a journey and we don’t need to wait until we are fully perfect to pursue our dreams.
We learn through our dreams. We learn as we create. We learn as we take the time to evaluate, reflect, slow down and relax. We learn through collaborating. We learn through integration. We learn through research and balancing knowledge, wisdom, discernment and awareness.
I strive for the middle way, beyond any extremes, a place of quiet, simple, humble balance.
If you would like to stay in touch about my adventures with sustainability - you can follow along on instagram @heartlightacres
I will also create a substack newsletter focused on my traveling research journeys and a free monthly zoom call named “The Dream Incubator” for anyone else who wants to create a sustainable vision on the planet. Stay posted for more about that!!
