The Signal Flare

Everyone in the spiritual community is talking about the purge right now. Collective pain moving through. Waves of emotion that don’t seem to belong to any single moment in your personal life. The advice is always some version of the same thing — feel it, honor it, be gentle with yourself, let it move through.

That’s not wrong. But it stops too soon.

Nobody’s following the thread back to where it’s anchored. Nobody’s asking why the pain has no end. Why you can process and integrate and do the work and still wake up the next morning carrying the same weight. Why the collective storm keeps intensifying no matter how much inner work the awakening community collectively logs.

I walked around in constant struggle for years before I understood why. The pain wasn’t mine to process. It was a signal. And I was treating the flare gun like it was the fire.

Here’s what I mean. When an emotion hits you — grief, rage, shame, the low-grade dread that hums underneath modern life — it isn’t the problem. It’s a locator. It’s pointing at something. Specifically, it’s pointing at a story. A story you’ve accepted as true about how the world works, what you’re worth, what’s possible for you, what you owe and to whom. The feeling is the invitation to look at that story. To follow it back to where it lives inside you. To find its anchor point.

That’s the shamanic move. I’ve been practicing shamanic journeying for more than twenty-five years. One of the core skills that practice builds — in the body, not as a concept — is learning to track energy underneath the story the psyche constructs around it. You follow the thread. You stay with the current. You don’t collapse into the narrative and you don’t run from the feeling. You find out where it’s rooted.

And when you follow these threads back far enough, you find something that should make you furious before it sets you free.

The story isn’t yours. It was handed to you already running.

Your work ethic came from your parents. Theirs came from their parents. Follow that line back far enough and you arrive at a system that needed compliant, productive, grateful laborers who believed that their worth was measured by their output. That belief didn’t emerge organically from human wisdom. It was engineered. It was installed across generations through economic pressure, religious doctrine, educational systems, and cultural mythology — all of it built and maintained by the colonizing powers that have run this civilization’s operating system for centuries.

Think about where you learned that rest is laziness. That wanting more is greed. That the responsible thing is to keep your head down and pay your bills. Ask yourself honestly — does that belief feel like your own deepest knowing? Or does it feel like something you inherited from someone who was also just trying to survive inside a system designed to extract from them?

That’s where the collective story lives. Not in the news cycle. In you. In the unexamined instructions you’re still running on.

And the system that installed those instructions was not accidental and it was not benevolent. The bars on the prison cell are made of mortgages and credit cards and student loans. They’re made of an economy built on manufactured scarcity. They’re made of fake holidays engineered by marketing departments to convert your love and your guilt into quarterly revenue. Valentine’s Day is not a celebration of love. It’s an egregore — a collective thought form built and energized by corporate interests — that most of us accepted as real before we were old enough to question it. So is the forty-hour work week. So is the belief that you need to earn your place in the world.

These are the agreements we made without knowing we were making them. Collectively. Across generations. The colonizing elite didn’t just take land and resources. They took the interior. They built their power structures inside human consciousness, in the stories we tell about who we are and what life is for.

That’s what’s collapsing right now. Not just institutions. Not just political structures. The narrative infrastructure that held all of it in place.

And that’s why the purge feels endless if you’re only treating it as personal. You’re trying to process the weight of a control system that’s been running for longer than any living memory. You will not feel your way through that. You have to see it. You have to find where it lives inside you specifically — which agreements you’re still honoring, which stories you’re still treating as truth — and you have to look at them clearly enough to stop mistaking them for your own.

This is what I call the Between. The crack. The place that opens up when you stop being loyal to either pole — the dying old world or the newness that’s trying to be born — and instead find the thread that runs through the middle of all of it. The Northwest Passage. It’s not comfortable territory. But it’s navigable once you stop being tethered to what the wind is pulling on.

When you’ve found the anchor points of the collective story inside yourself and you can see them for what they are — installed, inherited, not yours — something shifts. The emotional weather doesn’t stop. The collapse doesn’t pause. The hurricane is still a hurricane. But you’re standing on its outer edge now, outside the gravitational pull, watching the old world’s stories tear themselves apart without being dragged in with them.

That’s not detachment. I feel everything. That’s the practice — everything is included, nothing is avoided. But feeling the emotion and believing the story the emotion is wearing are two completely different things. One is being alive. The other is being managed.

The new age community will hold your hand through the pain. Some of them will tell you it’s collective, that you’re not alone, that waves of light are coming. I don’t disagree with any of that. But they will not tell you that the pain has a architect. They will not follow the thread back to the Valentine’s Day egregore, back to the scarcity economy, back to the colonizing interests that built a civilization on extracted labor and extracted consciousness.

I’m telling you.

The signal flare is going off. It’s not asking you to feel it and release it. It’s asking you to look at what it’s pointing at. Find the story. Find where it lives in you. See who built it and why.

Then you can stand in the hurricane. Then you can walk the Between.

That’s what twenty-five years in non-ordinary states gave me. Not the ability to rise above the chaos. The ability to move through it without being claimed by it. To track the energy underneath the story. To find the thread and follow it all the way back to where it doesn’t belong to me.

Your real life — the one built on your actual values, your deepest knowing, the person you are when nothing is extracting from you — that’s your ground right now. Stand there. Let the old stories finish their collapse.

The crack is open. Walk through it.