STRUGGLE: A Radically Honest Letter

What's Really Real?

Dear Family,

As of today, I am starting a campaign to generate financial support for my writing, art, and music.

More on that below. First, a radically honest story:

As many of you are aware, and as I’ve alluded to in some of my posts…

I've been struggling a lot the past few months.

I don't exactly know what's going on. 

It feels like being in a washing machine.

It's disorienting, upheaving, rug-pulling, ground-shattering.

It's definitely connected to some financial difficulties I've been going through.

The financial difficulties have acted as a consistent catalyst, triggering some of my deepest trauma, wounding, and limiting stories about myself.

I have often felt like a failure, an imposter, unworthy, not enough, as if I'm disappointing the people closest to me.

When I zoom out, I actually feel grateful for all this, as it feels like a deep rebirth and reset that's giving me a humbling initiatory opportunity to accept, love, and heal some truly fundamental, primordial stuff in my system—feels like early-childhood and ancestral trauma.

And when I really zoom out, I can still

Zooming out is hard though. Often seemingly impossible, due to the incessant looping stories in my mind:

"Need to make something happen."

"Need to launch something."

"Need to make money."

"Can't let my family down."

"Need to figure it out."

"What service can I provide to people?"

"I don't want to promote anything right now but I have to."

"I have no choice but to make something happen."

The financial stress seems to have ruptured some dam within me that was keeping a tremendous amount of old energy and anxiety at bay.

It's often debilitating.

It's frustrating to have spent the past 12 years undertaking a profound and sincere journey of awakening and healing...

Only to be blindsided by the raw and undeniable fact of a nervous system in a state of severe distress. 

Blindsided by my own inability to "rapidly shift state" or "enlighten myself out of it."

Life has me nailed. Nowhere to hide.

No way to escape myself.

My messy, fragile, broken, wounded human self…

The tiny child in me who is still sobbing after all these years, rocking back and forth, in a fetal position, feeling ugly and undeserving.

Try as I might, I have not been able to "snap out of it," whatever ‘it’ is.

I reach for alcohol and internet stimulation to numb the pain.

But that doesn't heal the root, of course…

And then the anger, anxiety, dread, depression, and self-loathing come rushing back.

It seems Life has decided that now is the time for me to heal on a deeper level than I knew I needed.

And Life is adamant that there is no "quick fix" for this.

I have to go through it.

All of it.

Often feeling like slogging through a long, sticky swamp.

A Mini-Rant About ‘My Industry’

In my "industry," the transformational space, it's not okay to be broken.

In this space, everyone puts on a smile and claims to have it all together.

Sure, people tell stories of pain, but it's almost always *past* pain—and a heroic story (complete with a gorgeously sentimental IG-worthy self-photograph) about how they healed it, became whole, and can now guide you to do the same.

In 99% of cases, this is bullshit. Beneath the photoshopped facades, there resides a gargantuan quantity of unhealed trauma, self-loathing, and desperation. You can see it in the forced smiles and contrived charisma. Everyone is trying so hard to look like they have it all together.

Yet virtually no one actually does. Everybody is broken, damaged, and trying desperately to piece something together in this Dark Age, in this profoundly traumatized and traumatizing civilization.

This goes beyond the transformation industry—it's everywhere—though it takes on one of its most ironic and tragic forms in those who claim to be healed leaders who can sell you your own healing for the oh-so-humanitarian price of $1k/hr.

I'm not trying to judge or cast myself as a victim, though maybe I do feel some resentment.

It's me, too, though. I've been part of all this. Consciously and unconsciously, I’ve been a hypocrite. I've been part of the charade. 

It's damn hard to actually be *radically* transparent in this space. You feel like people won't want to buy your stuff anymore if they know you're not a fully enlightened, fully healed superhero (or damn close).

And you feel like you *do* have great gifts to offer—and probably you do. You've come a long ways. You've learned and embodied a lot. You *are* probably meant to do this work.

But in order to do it, you start to feel like you have to emulate the norms of the industry. You have to post all the time, tell your perfect story, drop perfectly-timed truth-bombs to demonstrate your endless wisdom.

Ironically, you feel like you can’t share yourself as a full, messy, in-process human...

And so you become a facsimile—a caricature of the supposedly illuminated and transformed human being.

The shitty thing is that in many ways you *have* been illuminated and transformed. You really went there. You dug deep. You did the thing. Maybe you even dissolved into pure God-Mystery a few times. In many ways you *are* what you say you are.

But in many ways you're not. In many ways you're still that same old broken, needy, addicted, numb, immature, narcissistic, truly human being who often doesn't really give a fuck and can't be bothered. 

And that's fucking okay. FUCK. It's really fucking OKAY to be a God Damn HUMAN BEING.

FUCK. FUCK. FUCK.

When did we decide that everyone has to pose as an Enlightened Overman all the time?

I SEE YOU!!! I SEE YOUR DEEPLY SAD INNER CHILD WHO FEELS UGLY AND SCARED!! YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ME!!! YOU'RE FUCKING **HUMAN**!! STOP HIDING FROM IT!!

Those ALL CAPS words are directed at my own self as much or more than anyone else.

I'm tired of the bullshit, the falsity, the contrivance.

I can't do it anymore.

I have to be real.

I don't know where this will lead me.

But it's what I have to do.

I came to this Earth to be Jordan Clark Bates.

Nothing more and nothing less. 

That's who I am. That's who I want to be.

ALL OF ME. 

ALL. OF. ME.

I want all of you, JB.

You don't have to hide and edit yourself anymore.

I want all of you.

Me, today.

---

[Phew, that was a lot. Bit of a purge. Deep breath. Gratitude to God for the immense *opportunity* of incarnation in this ‘Dark Age,’ this ‘Kali Yuga.’ Onward.]

Honesty

One gift that’s come out of this process, is a deeper level of honesty with myself.

One dimension of that, is in admitting to myself just how deeply I am an Artist.

No matter what is happening to me, no matter what I am going through…

I channel it into Art.

Writing, poetry, beat-making, rapping, drawing, painting.

I have created art from a very young age.

It came very naturally to me.

It comes so naturally that it is not something I can stop doing.

I fucking love it so fucking much.

I broke down in tears writing those last two sentences…

Writing, music, rapping, poetry, and performing for people, especially, mean the world to me.

In my estimation, these are the gifts that flow most purely from my soul.

Even more so than space-holding, teaching, or creating healing and awakening containers.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the latter too.

I often ask myself what I would do if I had unlimited money, and when I ask myself this, it’s clear to me that I would continue writing, rapping, making art, performing, and also creating healing and awakening spaces for people.

However, when I’m radically honest, if I had the money, I think my work of creating healing and awakening spaces would move largely offline, into the physical.

I’d probably still host some stuff online, because I do love the internet, I love what is possible on it, and I love how it dissolves spatial boundaries and lets me hang out with friends from all over the world.

But over time I also tire of living so much of my life through a screen.

I absolutely fucking love in-person events. I love retreats. I love festivals. I love dance parties.

There is something about embodied experience that the internet can never recapture. I feel this more and more poignantly over time, as I drop more and more into my heart and body.

If I had unlimited money, I would definitely be rapidly buying a bunch of land and creating some kind of quasi-utopian ongoing healing and awakening community, where the homies could all come live together and be in their Heart’s Joy.

I mean, with unlimited money I’d actually probably retire the entire human race and help everyone build utopian spaces all over the planet, wherein everyone could live their Heart’s Joy. I’d definitely need a lot of help with that one though.

Anyway, I went on a bit of a tangent there, but hopefully this gives a sense of where my soul truly lies.

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Asking For Your Support for My Writing, Art, and Music

The overall point I’m getting at, is that it seems like Life is asking me to move into a deeper level of alignment.

It’s showing me that my soul truly wants to place greater emphasis on my radically honest writing, art, and music, and to gradually move my work more and more into the physical.

In order to do that, it would be incredibly supportive and relieving to receive some kind of stable ongoing income as a writer and artist.

The natural way to start making this happen, I feel, is via this newsletter you’re now reading.

To be transparent, about 7,100 people subscribe to this newsletter, and currently only 4 of those people are paying supporters.

If only ~5% of my readership (~350 people) were to support my writing for $7/month, this would provide about ~$2,000/month to my family and I (after Substack/Stripe fees).

This level of ongoing stable income would be a game-changer in a lot of ways.

It would show me that people truly value my work and want me to focus on writing, art, and music.

It would relieve my nervous system and give me room to breathe.

It would be a great help to my family at this juncture.

It would free up a lot of my bandwidth and capacity, and encourage me to focus more wholly on writing, art, and music.

For the past 10 years, I have given the world several hundred articles, a couple books, tens of thousands of posts on various (social) sites, ~11 rap albums, and probably ~1,000,000+ words. The vast majority of this work is freely, publicly available.

If you have appreciated, valued, and been inspired by my writing, art, and music over the years, and continue to receive value from it…

I invite you to support my work for $7/month.

One request: Please do not support me out of pity. I do not see myself as a victim, and I know I will figure things out, one way or another.

Rather, please support me if you feel inspired by my work, want to see more of it in the world, and believe that JB deserves to be compensated as a writer, artist, and rapper.

To reward and thank those who become paying supporters, I’m going to try out the following system:

1. Paying supporters get access to all my content, as soon as its published. I am going to start limiting the visibility of some of my upcoming writings / posts here. The full posts will only be available to paying supporters, at least for a while. I may make some or all posts public later on, as I prefer to give my work freely to everyone. Yet I believe that rewarding paying supporters in this way will encourage more people to take the leap and become paying supporters.

2. Paying supporters will also get access to the Ouroboros community on Telegram—a community I created for artists, mystics, and New Earth creators—for as long as it happens to exist.

3. I’ll likely give some Mystery Gifts to paying supporters intermittently. This might include unreleased / especially-raw writing, art, or music; reduced prices on events or other creations of mine; or other odd thangs I dream up.

4. ‘Founding Members’ (for a higher annual contribution) will also get full access to Ouroboros School of Liberation, for as long as it exists. This includes ~70 hours of courses I’ve created, including Escaping the Rat Race, New Earth Entrepreneurship, Loving What Is, Radical Shadow Integration, The Kumankaya Revelations, and more.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you to those of you who love my work enough to pay for it. This means the world to me and will certainly inspire me to keep creating from my soul (though again, I doubt I could stop even if I wanted to, hah).

A deep bow of gratitude from my family and I

[Note: If you love my writing and truly can’t afford $7/month, just reply and let me know and I’ll gift you a paid subscription.]

Endnotes

I wanted to touch on a couple more things here.

First of all… What happens if I don’t start generating a decent amount of financial support for my writing, music, and art?

Well, if that happens, so it goes, I will figure something out.

Perhaps I’ll have to find a ‘job.’ : )

As someone who hasn’t worked a job in 7 years—who created the ‘Escaping the Rat Race’ course and made the song, ‘Fuck a Day Job’—it’s definitely been a humbling challenge to my identity to consider the prospect of getting a job.

On another hand, the idea of doing some bartending or something like that, actually sounds pretty fun—a bit like a humbling rite of passage. It would be a good chance to embody my belief that how you do something is far more important than what you’re doing—a chance to bring Love, Presence, and Playfulness into whatever role I’m filling.

At the same time, it’s hard to imagine myself having a job for too long, as I know in my Heart that Life wants me to be focusing on Fatherhood and on creating writing, music, art, and healing / awakening spaces & experiences for people. I doubt I could stray away from those callings for long before finding my way back to immersing myself in them as fully as I am called, moment to moment.

So… Let’s see. : )

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Second of all, yes, I am still intending to birth Brothers of the Ever Innocent Heart, as I announced the other day.

Above all, Brothers of the Ever Innocent Heart will be a space for men to be Radically Honest with each other about where they’re at, and to hold one another in Loving Presence. This is genuinely something that’s flowing forth from the depths of my Heart, and I look forward to holding the space—and also letting the space hold me, in the Honesty and Fullness of what I am at this stage of my life.

I strongly considered waiting till after the birth of the Brotherhood to launch this campaign to generate financial support for my writing, music, and art—out of a belief that it’s a ‘bad idea’ to mix together too many ‘calls to action’ at the same time—but fuck it, today I felt a strong calling that overrode that belief.

Talk Soon

All right, that’s all from me for now.

I’m curious to see where this campaign goes in the next weeks and months.

I’m also excited to become even more raw, unfiltered, radically honest, and fully myself in what I create and share. It is my belief that this is what True Art is—a space for uncompromising honesty about the full spectrum of human experience.

Let’s see where this spaceship flies.

Cheers to wild roads ahead.

Love,
JB