12. Starting Over Wasn’t the Same as Going Backward

When I left the Sangha and packed up and decided to California, I was back at what we call "State". When Self and Service are lost, you are back at state. I thought I had circled back to State and regressed. What I did not know then that I know now, is that growth is not linear, and it's a spiral. I had spiraled back to State, but at a higher octave.

Years prior, I had stabilized my state transitioning from the chaotic dysregulated hospital environment to a steadier, more intentional job after a car accident opened up a self-discovery journey for me. And I uncovered a service I wanted to offer with aromatherapy, Reiki. And then went through more work on "Self" expanding my identity, had not locked in my new upgraded Service offering, nor created any structure or Systems around it, so I wobbled back into State. That's the journey we see in many conscious entrepreneurs.

It's Summer 2020 and I was living in California. For what felt like first time in a long time, I had minimal amounts of responsibility. I was subletting a place. As a subtenant, nothing was in my name. My cat was with my neighbors. And I was receiving pandemic related assistance. That period didn't last long.

Again I was working on a societal level project with Clifton and several others. With unclear boundaries, roles, compensation, start and end dates with the pipedream of we'll just build a pitch deck and get funded. We weren't living together, but we were spending most of our time together. And even though I had a sublet, I spent all my time in Topanga and wanted to live there. It was more my vibe.

Before I knew it, I was looking for a house to share with others. I was fixated on moving there ASAP, but was also hesitant to be the one on the lease because I had just spent 2 months without that kind of responsibility. I ended up going on the lease with a less than responsible new friend, and two others house who did not have steady employment we could count on. Except one of us, everyone was on pandemic assistance, but it was hard to find tenants during this time so the landlords accepted us.

That was a less than responsible choice, as I was overextended again. In covering additional missed rent from poor housemate choices and having to deal with the landlords about it as Clifton and I had to stabilize the house and create some financial structure and accountability. Clifton and I ended up taking over the lease together.

In many ways, it seemed like the same patterns from Brooklyn had resurfaced.

There were so many lessons I learned about different flavors of conscious community in LA, and especially Topanga, where many free spirits come and go, some of which could barely afford to live in this hippie haven, yet choose to anyway. Many of them were mirrors of where I was then and where I was a few years prior with my lack of financial structure.

I found out there's a lot of interesting things the conscious community thinks is valuable as energy exchange that would never pass "go" in NY — like I'll gift home-cooked dinners and facilitate yoga classes for us as a house in exchange for lower rent. Home-cooked dinners and yoga do not pay the bills. It was a complete culture shock for me.

Being the master leaser holder, I got accustomed to having hard conversations about responsibility, boundaries and standards pretty quickly.

It taught me about the importance of putting everything in plain writing in contracts in roommate agreements. And with each roommate and new lesson learned, Clifton and I debrief and would update the roommate agreements and what we called our "Co-Manifestation Agreement" or house codes of conduct accordingly. It would also provide great insight to inform our 6S methodology later on.

Around this time, we also got introduced to a Quantum Doctor, Dr. Bryan Mallindine. We both started working with him as clients, which was very helpful for moving through attachment style conflicts Clifton and I both had in relationship that would flare when stressed and create chaos. I also worked on family origin healing work, where a lot of the subconscious patterns seeded from.

I grew up in an enmeshed household, where everyone was in each other's business and there was no privacy or boundaries. Painful as it was, in order to heal this pattern within me, I had to take space and time from talking to my family back on the east coast, physical distance wasn't enough. And it was too much prying into my life decisions during this time period, so it was necessary temporarily.

From Dr. Bryan, I also learned about the Levels of Consciousness from Dr. David Hawkins. And was able to process many trapped emotions I had from spiritual bypassing for years prior. I saw that I was living in fear, especially around the time of the pandemic, and there so much chaos I was recreating because of my chaotic post-divorce household in this current co-living house environment in order for me to heal it.

I also understood that various fearful channeled messages were coming to us in the past because we were vibrating at the level of consciousness of fear. As we changed our vibration, so too did the messages.

As I did the healing work, I was able to sit down and focus more. Before that I was in fight or flight mode. And through his quantum processing + supplement clearing protocols, I was able to raise my vibration. I am very grateful to Dr. Bryan for how much he helped both Clifton and I through this challenging time period. It was a worthwhile investment and stopped me from re-creating many patterns all over again.

At this time, Clifton was hired for a project and he brought me on to help facilitate a group's business creation using his signature Foundry Process methodology. I felt purposeful and service oriented again.

And while working on that project, we got another client! We were off to a great start as teammates. At this time, I started contributing "my codes" to the methodology. It was already very strong in vision, inspiration and team co-creation. What was missing though, was my piece, which was the personal development component.

I got tired of facilitating groups through the journey to not see the project take off because there was a personal responsibility and capacity thing missing from the execution part of building the business, once the idea has been co-created and incubated. And so, we birthed the idea of "HeartWork", the personal piece of what you're actually stepping into and doing the self-reflection and identity work necessary.

We also each facilitated one another through our individual Foundry Processes, where you tap into a business vision in the future and bring it into the present moment. At the time I thought what he and I were tapping into was outlandish and it felt decades ahead.

What I didn't know back then that I see now is how quickly the world would advanced with AI in only a few short years, and it wasn't outlandish at all, and it's interesting to see how the exact vision we'd tapped into has been coming into fruition.

Now we'd begun channeling our business entity called Faces of the Future. Clifton's ability to channel had evolved into channeling business entities. And it was giving us specific instructions for how to orchestrate different components of this futuristic business. Again, I would ask questions and it would give answers through Clifton.

What I didn't understand then that I know now is that channeled guidance comes from a non-physical form, and as a non-physical form, it cannot appreciate the linear experience of time in a body moving through space.

In other words, the message is given and you're not sure in how many hours, days, months or years it will be relevant because you're tapping into all knowingness and it can see everything already happening.

From here, you still have to apply a roadmap, milestones and project management timeline to the execution. And the things that don't make sense in the now, you just organize and file for later. So we did that. I kept transcribing all the recordings and started sorting sections of transcripts by topic on a massive digital whiteboard.

It was a whole ecosystem vision we were tapping into for entrepreneurship, complete with a Venture Studio, a Wellness Studio, an Academy with our unique methodology, a Research Studio that further researched topics in consciousness and business creation for the New Earth, and its own cryptocurrency that you earn through validation of alignment/embodiment.

At the time I had no clue how we were going to authenticate alignment, nor embodiment, or how we would have the funding, time, energy, attention, or bandwidth to build all of it as two people. I thought there's gotta be a team of 10 of us working on it. At the time of writing this 6 years later, there's still just 2 of us doing the work with the help of AI tools.

The HeartWork piece of the program started out as a small parallel complementary part of the Foundry Process, and then piloted off into its own foundational piece when the opportunity arose.

And so we created the Foundry Fundamentals. A fellow USC alum of Clifton's and 2 of my friends from Brooklyn, who were subletting from us at the time, became the pilot client case studies for this new program.

This new program was a fusion of both Clifton and my journeys through personal development over the past 8 years of our lives, heavily influenced by our spiritual awakening insights. It was a pre-cursor program to building a business in the Foundry. Or what we now call a Beingness Based Business. In our 6S Methodology, it comes in at the levels of State and Self.

It was funny how organically it happened. Clifton had invited his USC alum friend over to reconnect and go for a walk. He stayed for dinner to connect further. Clifton filled me in, afterwards that he was looking to connect with his heart because he was in a burnt out space of having built several businesses and questioning which projects still mattered to him. Clifton said he would connect him with our housemate who did kundalini yoga to help. I said, "no way, Clifton, I think we can really help him. Let's do this."