Two Years of the Integral Guide

🎊 🎊

Year two was a real heck of a thing.

I’ve not put any large-scale effort into growing the Guide’s readership, and that may be a mistake on my part, but I’d rather it grow through word-of-mouth because that tells me it actually helps people. I also just don’t have as much time to hand-deliver it to people as I used to.

I rarely ever look at the numbers anymore, but the last time I did there were enough people reading it that I didn’t know how to imagine that many people in a physical space. To my mind, you're still early. The Guide is still an experiment. And I don't know what exactly, but I feel like it’s emerging into…something.

I still feel like I’m talking to myself here. Knowing that other people will read this stays an abstraction until I actually talk to someone about it — like when I meet a new client, or read emails, or get tagged somewhere online. And then it slingshots over feeling real and lands directly into the surreal. I’ve (thankfully) gotten a little bit used to it, but when someone tells me about what the Guide’s done for them it still evokes lots of different, even conflicting feelings that I sometimes struggle to put words to.

Some of them manifest as this omni-directional hearth-like warmth of gratitude that sometimes radiates from my chest when I let the reality sink in. Gratitude for the Obsidian team for the work they do and the kind, generous, even gracious community they and the moderation team have supported. For the generous donors who have been and continue to be a tremendous help, and for those who share the Guide all over the world. And then, of course, for the incredible people who’ve come into my life and continue to stick around.

It’s all been pretty amazing. And at the same time a bit strange. Because I do all of this alone in a room, staring at a screen. And then, with about as much effort as it takes to send an email, it’s suddenly accessible to pretty much anybody with an internet connection. I never know what’s getting read, or when, or who’s reading it. And then I meet somebody who tells me about the adventures through the Guide they've been on, which very often adds another log to the hearth. It’s lovely-strange and sweet, and the fact that very few internet people have been unkind to me feels like a small miracle.

Thank you.

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The friendships I have now are some of the strongest and closest I’ve ever had. They're also nurtured almost exclusively through screens and I tend to wilt if I’m not hugged and snugged on a regular basis — that’s just basic Levi upkeep.

The time I spend with clients is nurturing and fulfilling, and it’s a real blessing to get to do something that helps people without exploiting anyone else. Though I lament that it’s prohibitively expensive for most and that it’s difficult to make this viable without marketing — especially as someone who shamelessly puts ad-blockers on everything.

An inconsistent and sporadic schedule makes it difficult to get into a flow state, which is a problem I did not at all anticipate. And being the only person I answer to means having to set my own due-dates, work hours, rules, boundaries, and (sigh) do all the tax things. There's also no one else to look out for me day-to-day so that I don’t become mentally, emotionally, or energetically depleted, and my self-care muscles took a while to grow big enough to hold that responsibility. They’re still growing, I’ve recently had to take longer breaks from writing because I was noticing pain in my arms and hands.

There have also been significant hardships and losses, and new layers of trauma were uncovered that sent me spinning. I learned a lot about myself in a very short time and am lucky to have had friends to catch me.

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With every new connection, or every new wave of connections, someone inevitably (and understandably) asks why there’s so little about me in the Guide. Some people know this already, but it was originally published anonymously. Even now that I’m something short of anonym-ish, there’s still a part of me who doesn’t want to put my full name, my photo, or a bio in it, or to give a detailed story of what catalyzed the Guide’s creation. I’ve had lots of reasons for this, and many have come and gone, but several are still relevant.

• The Guide isn’t a product and it isn’t about me, it's a conversation I have with myself that started as an attempt to save my own life and to integrate a 9-ish month-long enlightenment experience I went through without anyone to guide me or help me stabilize it. And I think many of the details of that are better kept private as a part of having an intimate relationship with myself.

• Publicly sharing my story sometimes feels a bit like self-exploitation, or flaunting my younger self’s suffering for “street cred.” If I’m going to tell the story, it’s important that I’m able to do so from an authentic and sincere place and that’s often hard to do when I know lots of people are reading it.

• Part of me likes the Guide being a little rough around the edges. Other parts want people to like my writing and to like me. They can be perfectionistic and performative and they want to polish everything, to control how people see, feel, and think about me. I knew they might be even more active if my name were attached to it.

• In the nine months prior to publishing what would eventually become the Integral Guide, I’d been working to recognize that I was valuable independently of anything that I might (or might not) do or achieve. And then, immediately after publishing it, I was suddenly being treated very differently because of something I had done. That was and, to a lesser extent, still is a real challenge. Being commented on, even positively, is hard for me.

• As I took on clients, it got even more complicated. Part of me has something of a vendetta against the corporate and professional worlds and I-Have-My-Stuff-Together-ism. They see it as dishonest, even harmful. Meanwhile there’s a lot of cultural conditioning around how to present yourself or what is or isn’t appropriate to share — especially in “the helping professions.”

• I didn’t want the Guide to take over my life. I was afraid it might if I were to tell people who knew the Guide about me or people who knew me about the Guide.

• I didn’t want parasocial relationships.

For these and other reasons, anonymity, or semi-anonymity, or just not sharing much of myself felt like the comfortable, safe, right choice. Maybe it was, but a lot of that stuff happened anyway and, eventually, it actually caused more problems than it was intended to solve.

The Guide, IFS, and Aletheia towered over a very small Levi. This initially felt like a good thing, because I was part of something bigger than myself. But it eventually turned into a case of mistaken and distorted identity, which taught me the subtle but important distinction between being a part of something bigger than yourself and something bigger than yourself taking over the whole of you.

• Taking on an identity of no (or minimal) identity became its own kind of self-exploitation by not giving myself much of any credit.

• Not allowing myself to be seen is a way of controlling how people see me. Perfectionistic parts of me have a long-standing tendency to do something flawlessly or not at all, both hide imperfections.

• I don’t think of myself as a professional or expert on anything. I enjoy being a non-professional forever-student — expertise and certainty are red flags to me, there’s something about it that lacks an essential humility. But hiding myself altogether makes me as un-relatable and un-human as the corporate professionals who make my insides feel all ickity-mickity (technical term). And some (lovely) people call me an expert anyway! I can’t control that.

• Putting a hard boundary between the Guide and other facets of my life, while spending enormous amounts of time on the Guide and related things, allowed the Guide to take over my life. Because of course it did.

• Hiding myself doesn’t actually prevent parasocial relationships.

I was spending almost every waking moment thinking, researching, or working on something related to the Guide, IFS, or Aletheia. Much of that came from authentic joy and interest, though it was also in part driven by an underlying belief that my doings are the only reason I’m worthy of connection, safety, and care. Publishing the Guide before my foundation of self-worth had solidified meant I was vulnerable to losing that foundation bit-by-bit. It’s one of the reasons having a strong sense of self is sometimes so important.

It was fragmenting. I was leading a double life, and that made it exceedingly difficult to share the Guide publicly or with people I know, unless I wanted either to complicate both of our lives by asking them to keep my secret or to lie to them by not telling them I made it.

I had essentially blended with a part of my life. I identified myself as “the author of the Integral Guide,” or sometimes literally “IntegralGuideAuthor” as if that were all I am, and then spent most of my waking hours this way.

Oops.

To be fair to myself, I expected this might happen. I just also wasn’t sure what to do about it. So I told some of the people in my life about those fears, and they all told me some variation of the same (actually kind of sweet) thing:

"Even if all of that does happen, you'd find your way back."

I actually kind of agreed with them. So I went slowly and met with the panic and kept in touch with people who were ready to help me when asked, and now here we are.

Year two taught me that if I don't take at least some ownership of or umbrella over what I make or what I do, the things that I make and do might end up owning or umbrella-ing over me. The Guide, IFS, and Aletheia are both bigger than me and just small parts of me.

And in a deeper way I'm none of those things. I’ve been writing since I was a kid but, even before I published the Guide, the experience that catalyzed its creation had me questioning whether I wanted to label myself even as “writer,” even as “Levi.” Every label, title, and name felt cage-like — not because I think myself so much bigger than anyone else, but because I had learned experientially that every label is a reduction. Maybe I don’t have to play into the umbrella dynamic at all.

I have very few huggable people in my life who understand or have interest in what I do, and that can be isolating. But occasionally it reminds me that I am more than what I do here and that I was already worth knowing and caring for.

I don’t mean to imply that these fears, concerns, dilemmas, and complications have all been fully resolved — because they haven’t been. But I do feel progress has been made. And I’m going to be making some changes.

Thus far, this newsletter has served the exclusive purpose of giving you Guide updates and letting you know when I’m going to be involved in a thing. I've been wanting to do, explore, and write about other stuff, but I didn’t feel like I had the space here and I didn’t want to put you in the position of having to choose between not staying up-to-date and unwanted inbox-clutter.

I recently discovered that Substack allows me to have more than one mailing list. So I can use it for all kinds of things and you can pick-and-choose what you want to keep up with. So, this is not the Guide’s newsletter anymore, it’s mine and it’s going to be ✨ a thing ✨. I’ve got some interesting stuff brewing, both in and out of the Guide, and I’d like you to be part of it. But if you’re not interested in the other stuff, you’ll be able to opt-out without missing out on Guide updates.

More details soon, I think it’ll be fun.

Thank you for reading, friends.

Love to you all. <3