My friends, our coffee shop meeting known as The Commitment Club was graced with four first-time guests this weekend, and with that influx of new energy came some fresh perspectives on what these meetings could actually be about.
For me, it was an opportunity to notice that, for many people, understanding why I have made a commitment to show up every Saturday morning is not immediately evident, and that is well as it should be. I think that building a group that will grow in light and coherence takes a fair amount of discussion and reflection. The felt experience of safety and mutual acceptance on the part of participants is essential. One of my aims is to model the lost art of listening with curiosity rather than judgment, and I believe it is only when the group has become fully enrobed in this particular garment that people will feel safe enough to disclose thoughts and feelings about things they usually keep hidden—from their darkest fears to their highest hopes.
And so yes, this group may not be for everyone. And it may take some time for the conversation to reach a powerful level of intimacy. So be it. As I have told people already, I am happy to show up and sit by myself for two hours, as long as I am bringing my best self to that moment. As long as I am building my internal coherence of thought, word, and action. When I am in this place in consciousness, anyone who shows up is a gift to me, a spark of the divine who desires to play their part in the awakening of humanity. As a coherent group, we will only be stronger. This brings to mind the wonderful and oft-quoted sentiment of Margaret Mead:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Kind of like Seinfeld was ‘a show about nothing,’ The Commitment Club is a group that does not have a particular agenda or necessary action, other than to help each other gain access to their highest passion and vision, and support participants in bringing this vision into reality. The Commitment Club thus can serve as a springboard for individuals of like mind and mission to come together and form a separate group with a particular mandate that invariably makes their lives—and the lives of others—better.
Bringing Light to Darkness
We are in a time when the hidden darkness of our world is rising to the surface, and what has been concealed for the longest of times is slowly being revealed. For decades I have held a belief in this awakening; my transformational coaching website daocoaching.com has had the tagline ‘fostering the awakening of humanity’ since 2003. However, I have never seen as much evidence of this awakening, across so many spheres of life, as I do now.
When I was a journalist in 2018, I went to New York to interview an extraordinary woman named Anneke Lucas. Her story of survival and redemption, after having been a child sex slave in a Belgian pedophile network, was spellbinding. She too believed that humanity was going through a great awakening, and that her story could be a catalyst for it. I full-heartedly agreed with her on this, not only because she had the courage to reveal the dark practices that had been going on in the hidden chambers of the world’s ruling class, but because she has emerged from her ordeal with a free and open heart, after having gone through decades of intense personal and therapeutic work.
Her testimony not only reveals what happened to her, it uncovers a deep understanding of WHY these people do what they do. And that is so valuable for all of us, to go beyond the reflexive tendencies to distance ourselves immediately from these acts and respond with abject rebuke and disgust. It is time for us to ask ourselves how human beings could possibly engage in these kinds of behaviors, and try to take an objective look at how a psychopath actually experiences the world.
Her understanding of the emotional and psychological distortions of these people, themselves rooted in their own systematic childhood trauma, as well as what she has learned about human power dynamics, has allowed her to actually forgive her perpetrators, and show the world that past traumas, no matter how severe, can actually be healed. In broader terms, she believes the way we remedy the imbalance of power in the world is for each individual to heal themselves and in the process stop consenting to give our power away to these people.
While she is now quite well-known, having written a book and been on many podcasts, I was blessed to have been the first person to conduct a full-length interview with her, a 4-hour, 4-part series that has been uploaded to YouTube several times, often garnering several hundreds of thousands of views before being censored and taken down. Fortunately, it has recently been re-uploaded by Collective Evolution, the company I used to work for, and you can watch Part 1 here. Be warned that there is some difficult testimony to sit through, especially in parts 1 and 2. That being said, I feel this interview serves to provide a most profound understanding of the way humanity can move out of the darkness and into the light.
I distinctly remember, in speaking with Anneke off-camera, the hopes we both had that testimonies like hers were going to help foster the awakening of humanity. At that time, though, there was not a lot of support for those hopes. The few short videos that she had done previously were met with much doubt, skepticism and even condemnation. She was still concerned about speaking out and addressing cries from commenters to “name names.” But eight years later, she seems to be ever gaining confidence in her message, and I firmly believe we are now in the midst of the collective awakening we were hoping for. In truth, The Commitment Club owes some of its foundational tenets to what I learned in this life-changing interview.
