I was a former cult member of Daniel Barron’s, now Stace Barron. For those of you who point to the Mea Culpa on his new website as evidence of his healing… You may want to look into it again. All I see is the exact manipulation he always perpetrated. Remember how he preempted the whole cult questioning by actively talking about why this wasn’t a cult? He knows this forum exists and people will see it, and this is thus preempting the cult questioning so he can proceed with his work, not out of care for anyone.

Why is the "Mea Culpa" by Stace Barron BS?

1) He claims he was enlightened from a young age and because no one else was enlightened this caused him to not feel his impact on others. Narcissistic claims of grandiosity and having special abilities that no one else has. Textbook cult leader. Oh, and don’t forgot, he’s the next incarnation of both Jesus and Buddha.

2) He can't be enlightened because enlightened people are pure Love. They live as Love. They are unconditionally loving, kind, and compassionate. They don’t try to point out people’s inherent flawed natures, they lift people up so they can see themselves as the pure Light that they are. Stace Barron possesses none of these qualities. All he did was cause pain, confusion, and destruction, therefore he is not enlightened and never was.

3) He calls the deep emotional and energetic abuse he perpetrated, “tough Love?” Abuse is NOT tough love. He was a soul rapist. He destroyed people’s entire lives. They lost everything. He caused significant trauma deep to the soul level. Emotional, energetic, and soul abuse can often be worse than only physical abuse. The abuse was twisted up with working on our childhood wounding and our spiritual lives... it doesn’t go deeper than this. His claiming that what he did wasn’t that bad because he didn’t physically abuse anyone (which we know he did), is preposterous and offensive.

4) The pure fact that he calls it tough love still, rather than abuse - alone proves he hasn’t changed or healed.

5) He praises the brainwashed souls who stayed with him after the collapse and he blames the victims for trolling him online and the “judgmental rage” that they hold against him because they don’t believe he can change. Yet another classic tactic of a Narcissist Sociopath Cult Leader. Gaslighting all of the people who you abused because they woke up and left and praising the ones who stayed loyal to you.

6) He calls himself an ex-guru vs ex-cult leader... that again proves he hasn’t changed. Mind control is not a vague, mystical process but, instead, is the result of a concrete and specific and systematic set of methods and techniques. Cult leaders are cunning masters of manipulation, employing an arsenal of these techniques to render their followers dependent and obedient.  What are those techniques? Grandiose claims, sowing confusion, demand for absolute loyalty, tendency to lie and create alternative “facts” and realities, shunning and belittling of critics and ex-believers, and cultivating of an “us versus them”  mindset.

You also may want to view Rick Ross’ article defining a cult if there's still confusion about Theohumanity and Stace Barron being a cult: [www.google.com]


Stace Barron is a sociopath. People with this very severe mental illness and inability to feel other people or feel true remorse, unfortunately do not change. He does not teach for Love, he teaches for power and to take power from all those around him. Blessings to all of the victims he harmed and is currently harming. 

I pray Stace Barron discovers who and what he really is
I forgive you, Stace Barron, for forsaking the light of my presence
I forgive you for forsaking your light in my presence.
May you wake up to and be blessed by (True) Love.

I asked that my previous posts be removed, which the site does not allow, but in a way I am glad as it gives me an opportunity to write something new.

This is going to be a long one, but I feel strongly it must be said.

As I said before, I worked closely with Daniel for over a decade. I grew in ways I never thought possible, and was hurt deeply as well. I spent about 6 years or so licking my wounds and sorting out what was true and useful and what wasn’t.

Toward the end of 2020, I accidentally discovered a profound secret about my family of origin. Within a day, nearly all of the remaining hurt and anger I had at Daniel (and there was still plenty) disappeared because I saw so clearly my contribution to what played out.

This does not excuse his side of it, of course, but what I didn’t see before that moment was the depth of my side. It wasn’t even really a “seeing” thing. Something shifted deeply in me. I suddenly just knew I’d been playing victim and made up that he was a sociopath. I immediately felt I had to tell him, but it took me about a month to be sure and to work up the courage to reach out.

I doubt just coincidentally, during that month, an old friend who had also worked with Daniel and Brie back in the day reached out to me. He told me D and B did the arduous work to get to the bottom of what went wrong, did the excruciating work of healing it over years, and that things were different now. Of course, I still would judge for myself, but it leant me courage.

I was terrified, but reconnecting with Stace and Brie exceeded my expectations. The fears and wounds of the past gave way to the new experience that the errors in the paradigm, and the wounds in Daniel that caused them, have been rectified.

I share this here for a few reasons:

1) To right my own wrong of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and vilifying Stace with the arrogant assumption that he couldn’t heal, and not looking at my own wounded contribution that was underneath that assumption.

2) To help repair Stace and Brie’s unduly damaged reputation. The price they paid for their mistakes was profound, and everyone deserves the chance to change and not be held as past versions of themselves. I deeply regret falling prey to “cancel-culture” the way that I did.

3) To invite past EBE’rs like myself to have their own new experience if they are so moved. I was given a gift having my contribution (the family secret) handed to me on a plate. For others, it may not be so simple. But I imagine many people feel incomplete and confused about being exposed to such profound work that was tainted in a way that made its fruition tortuously impossible. Again, it’s my experience that this has now changed.

4) To invite new people interested in Brie and Stace’s work who’ve found this page to have their own experience, unsullied by mistakes of the past. Is it dangerous to put yourself in the hands of someone who hurt people before and might hurt you? Sure it is, but that’s a risk we take every day with everyone in one way or another, and the more powerful the person, the greater the risk. When I’ve let myself get hurt, I have always learned some important lessons that make it worth it. That appears to be how life works.

I imagine some ex-EBE’rs reading this will think that I’ve fallen under the “spell” again, and I’ve certainly wondered that myself many times. But was there ever a spell, or was it only unconscious wounds collaborating in ways to work themselves out? I started out thinking the former, but arrived at the latter.

Those that think Daniel purposefully manipulated them give him far too much power, and themselves not enough. This is a mistake I think many students in the world make. This is where conspiracy theories come from.

I doubt I will ever give away my self-authority like I did to Daniel before. That was my lesson to learn, coming from my wounds, and it wasn’t all his fault that I did it, as I’d held before. Again, he took my power, sure, but I gave it to him.

When anything truly new comes into our world, a mess is almost always made. People get hurt. Curie gave herself and many others cancer in her passionate pursuit of discovering a new element, and millions have died since from the misuse of that discovery. Miracle drugs bring addiction. Food science brought obesity.

The same was true in the founding of every spirituality and religion we have, which justified torture, holy wars, oppression, etc. Anywhere you look at truly new things, you see messes before you see successes, and the more powerful the thing, the bigger the mess.

Daniel brought something truly new and powerful into our world, and yes, it made a serious mess. We all knew it was an experiment. We all knew tough love and demedications were a part of it...in advance. Those and some other features, however misguided, were not hidden in any fine print. I couldn’t forgive that until I saw my part in it.

Tough love seems to me a will-based, win-the-battle, lose-the-war justification for Daniel’s understandable control issues related to trying to bring a paradigm in its pure form. So much trouble is caused by misinterpretations of spiritual paradigms in our world. He didn’t want that to happen and erred to the other side, fueled by his own wound-based frustration about how people weren’t getting it, that was actually about how he himself didn’t get his own teaching yet in some significant ways. He was wrong, but I understand how and why.

What are we to do with a new, powerful thing that makes a mess? Throw it out entirely? I tried, but I couldn’t. Maybe because that isn’t how I live my life when I make messes, and that’s not how it seems the evolution of life, consciousness, and humanity works. What you do is, of course, up to you. It always was, and it always will be. That’s how it is for adults.

This brings me to my last point: victimhood. This entire website implicitly presupposes that adults can be taken advantage of without the “prey” having a contribution and something to learn. I’m not saying Daniel didn’t have plenty of his own responsibility. I thought I was curious, but I’d say that if someone still has anger, they haven’t gone far enough. That was me.

It’s also now clear to me that attacking who is now Stace, a very different person from Daniel and not merely a name change, in this venue or any other is not only an expression of victimhood, (again, which I did), but also doing the very thing that we didn’t like: tough love, verbal/emotional abuse, life-ruining, whatever you want to call it.

What else is the justification? To warn others and steer them away from “predators?” We’re all going to be drawn to whomever we’re going to be drawn to. We befriend, we marry, we hire, etc. we make these choices as a function of our own conscious and unconscious terrain, and then we learn our lessons, sometimes the easy way, and sometimes the hard way.

But to say to someone, “Absolutely stay away from this person because of what they did in their past.” Well, first it defies critical thinking, because people can change. Second, you have to think you can absolutely know what’s good for people, which is arrogant. But most importantly, you have played victim to your experience with that person in the first place as if they “happened” to you and you had nothing to do with choosing them, thus giving them the power to hurt you.

And it’s very tricky, because this very idea was used to justify abuse. It’s not okay for a mugger to mug someone and then say their “victim” is playing victim. And that kind of stuff went on. However, it doesn’t mean that the mugging “victim” didn’t have a contribution to look at.

In today’s era, this is dismissed as “blaming the victim” which is an oversimplification. But yes, that happened in Theohumanity. “Abuse” is a very tricky term because it implies that the receiver is a victim. With children they are, but we don’t really have a word to describe an unjust act done to someone who draws it. Of course, we don’t, for reasons I’ll explain.

I’ll put a fine point on it: apparently I _needed_ to be abused by Daniel because it woke me up to how I attracted (and perpetrated) betrayal elsewhere in my life, because of how I betrayed myself, which went all the way back to the betrayal from my parents I recently discovered.

This requires a big “and” and nearly paradoxical thinking. An unjust thing can be done to someone AND they can not be a victim. Some EBE people did get this, sooner than I did.

So it doesn’t make what he did okay, but I have no grudge because I’ve forgiven myself for needing the lesson, and he’s owned plenty with me of his side of it. That’s what, I’ve learned, is what healthy adults do. I regret it took me this long to get anywhere near that, but that’s the journey I’m on. I’m getting to complete the path I began with Stace and Brie’s help a long time ago. I never thought that would happen, and I’m so glad I did. My work with them ove the last 6 months has never been this positive and powerful.

As Daniel taught, a cult is not a noun, it’s a type of codependent relating where an authority figure’s issues match up with the student’s issues in a specific way leading to a predictable set of outcomes. He didn’t think he was contributing to cultic relationships. He was wrong, paid some serious prices, and learned deeply from the experience. I was wrong in that I didn’t see my side nearly as well as I thought I saw his. What do you know? Each party blamed the other. That’s what we do on the way to self-awareness, right?

The authority figure has slightly more responsibility for this, but not all of it, which is what you have to think to play victim to the choice to become the student. I should say, too, that this was a very difficult thing for me to come to grips with because we were all taught this, and then accused of playing victim when Daniel was not looking at his issues. That’s true. That idea was, in fact, misused. He didn’t embody sufficiently what he taught, yes, but that doesn’t make him a sociopath, as I had thought, it makes him human. And it makes him as imperfect as the greatest spiritual teachers in our history who also made huge messes.

Then in the collapse, all the brilliant and heartful babies were thrown out with the dirty bathwater, as if we all forgot that almost anyone who did even a year of EBE was immeasurably changed for the better.

Like any other codependent relationship, a cultic relationship can heal. The purpose of it is to set the stage for that healing, just like we marry versions of our parents to heal that.

To see any differently is to play victim to one’s own artificial sense of powerlessness, making the “cult leader” bigger than you in a way they never were, because a teacher only has the power a student gives them, which is the very contribution that caused the cultic relationship in the first place.

Another ex-EBE person said to me a couple of years after the collapse, “I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world.” It took me until years later to agree. May we all treasure our self-drawn experiences and learning so much that we can arrive at that place.

I don’t expect agreement on this from most people. It’s an extremely high bar for responsibility that most can’t swallow. The fundamental question is this: can an adult be traumatized, victimized, etc. or is it the case that because an adult is always at choice, they are at least in part responsible for whatever they get themselves into? If they have some responsibility, then they’re not a victim, they’re a co-contributor.

Our entire society, however, is structured around the first assumption rather than the second. The legal system is an easy place to see it. For those who are living inside the paradigm that adults can be victims, I wish you well. We’ll not agree. That’s not how it looks to me, and the second idea was one of the documented 9 premises of EBE that everyone knew before getting involved.

The tragedy of course, is that when we don’t sufficiently learn from our mistakes, we’re destined to repeat them. I directly experienced this by repeated betrayals and betrayings until I finally got to the bottom of it. That lesson was the hardest of my life and a painful process I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Because our society is organized around and so validates victimhood, it’s absurd to expect this idea to be accepted: that we have a contribution, conscious or not, to everything that “happens” to us as adults. Indeed, even a group of people who subscribed to this idea, including myself, forgot it quickly and perpetrated on Daniel the very emotional violence they protested being recipients of. Again, I did that too.

Because of unhealed victimhood, any group of people attempting to live according to a set of values with a leader capable of making mistakes, which is all of them, is prone to being labeled a cult. The ones that are not are simply the less powerful and/or more widely accepted ones: the big five world religions, for example, which are especially suspect because they target children through families.

These contain cultic dynamics as much as Jehovah’s Witnesses or Koureshians or Theohumanity 1.0, but the in-groups are large enough to disqualify them: that’s the nature of consensus reality. If you get enough people similarly deluded, it becomes relative enough truth.

Said another way, if you accept that all human relationships have unhealthy codependence to some degree, and all paradigms involve human relationships, then they all have cultic dynamics. The question is just how it’s addressed and healed in the process.

A paradigm that says “follow this teaching or else!” (e.g. or you’ll go to hell) offers a sticky helping hand that promotes a cultic codependence. Sometimes Daniel came from this place, it’s true, mostly he didn’t. He doesn’t anymore. Toward the end of Theohumanity 1.0, he saw the authority dynamics that were creating cultic dynamics and tried to address them, but tragically he didn’t see his contribution at that time.

But that sticky helping hand only sticks to people with the opposite side of the Velcro. For me, it was my own lostness and lack of self-authority. So when an adult chooses any worldview, they are not a victim to a cult but rather someone on a journey of self-discovery about their unconscious motives for choosing that model for living life that may or may not create a codependent teacher-student relationship. The closer the relationship, the more inevitable the codependency is, as with all relationships.

The only true victims are children raised into them, who don’t have choice. This leads to the stark conclusion that the only real cult is the family and as such, all accusations of cult-status are victim cries that hearken back to that individual's childhood, when they truly were a victim. This, of course, was part of the teaching of Theohumanity that many of us forgot.

I forgot because I never really got it like I do now. I had to truly experience how I made Theohumanity a cult to match up with how Daniel did. I had to find the wound in me. I probably never would have if the family secret hadn’t leaked, so I really can’t take any credit for it.

My previous posts, along with many others’, returned the same kind of abuse I’d received, but predictably didn’t resolve anything. As Daniel himself said, “you always become the thing you fight against.”

There was a significant compassion gap in Ebe 1.0 and the teaching about no victimhood was misused because of that. Just because people aren’t victims doesn’t mean they don’t deserve compassion. It’s my experience that has changed in ebe 2.0. In fact, the three core emotions of joy, sorrow, and passion have been revised to joy, sorrow, and compassion. There are many differences that I’m still learning. The work now far more meets people where they are. It does what it says it did before, but didn’t yet.

There’s one more thing I want to say related to something I experienced recently with Stace. He gave me a frame for what was happening with me and it didn’t quite fit for me. It wasn’t a big deal, and we kept talking. Then, a few days later, some emotional content emerged in me that made me see the frame was exactly right.

I had the thought, “So was Stace seeing the future, or did he implant that into me?” I considered it for a minute and realized the writing was already on the wall, but I did get a bit scared for a moment. I talked with him about this and he was glad I did. We revisited something that I remembered from EBE 1.0.

The metaphysics of seeing the future isn’t about seeing the future: it’s about accessing the domain of consciousness that doesn’t have a past or a future, but only an eternal now. The more one spiritually develops, the bigger that now becomes.

You’ve probably had this experience a least a little bit before. You see exactly where something is going as if it’s already happening and the other person doesn’t. It’s a difference in context size and quality. Stace’s now is big. Is he always right? No. But he’s right often enough for it to be helpful as hell.

But you can imagine the problems with this. When what happens isn’t desirable to the person, it easily can elicit feelings of victimhood, or evoke fear of manipulation. It’s also very tricky to know what to share about what you see with someone that’s happening in your now, but is in their future, especially if you don’t realize it hasn’t happened yet. The more wisdom you have, the more challenging this is. Parents have to navigate this every day as they see where their children are headed and have to weigh whether it’s best to let them make their own mistakes or not.

So is this a clever justification for messing with people’s realities, or deep spiritual insight? As with everything, decide for yourself! In the past, Stace would agree that Daniel was far to involved in people’s lives and often said too much about what he saw happening, but that wasn’t from a desire to manipulate, it was from a desire to help. Did it have negatives consequences? Of course: as we all know good intentions can lead to negative outcomes when unhealthily motivated.

In the end, I have to admit I don’t know...anything. I can only go with my most recent experience and the next moment. I admit that I often say to myself, “Jeez, am I really doing this again?” It’s still very hard work, just without the undue hardness, but to me it’s worth it.

I have to stop writing or else I’ll never finish this. Thanks for reading and best wishes on your journey, wherever it takes you.

Hello to Everyone that reads this thread,

My name is Eric Frank McDonough Grace. I was one of the first people that started this conversation thread with Jos and Nagesh in 2008 as well as one on Gaia in 2007.

I got in touch with Stace and Brie in August of 2017 when a friend of mine shared a post Stace had made on their new website (which is mentioned above in an earlier thread). As I read the website page, I felt Stace was articulating and beginning to own the issues that were the foundations of what his contributions were that lead to the separation we had back in 2006.  Back in 2015 Stace had written an email to the current community members speaking to his early recognitions of his tyrannical or Mafia-like acts with people out of his own pain and delusions. This note was directed to all the people he had impacted in most recent years, however nothing was sent out personally to anyone, which left me, and I assume many others feeling skeptical that real change was happening. I was waiting for direct contact from him to engage with me in hopes of the opportunity to unravel the places in me that still were unresolved about our relationship and what had happened. I had not been included in that email, and I felt it was impersonal as well not having been sent to me directly. In the meantime, I was continuing to work with my own healing regardless if we ever connected again.

This forum thread in my opinion has been a holding reservoir of the collective issues that were present in the shadow of the teacher and to many of us the friend and beloved, Daniel, and the community that developed with and around him. This forum has reflected the pain, suffering, and confusion that came from the impacts of the untruth and unlove that were mixed in with the love and wisdom of Daniel and his teachings. I have been sitting with the impulse to write here for a while, as a way to come full circle from that time 15 years ago when I was shunned from Daniel’s life and the community. I recognize that this writing may impact you - the reader, as well as Stace and Brie. I welcome your feedback and input. My wish is that this conversation brings another wave of healing and honoring to this larger Love story.

I first want to say how much pain I went through in being cut-off from Daniel and the community back in 2006. It was a tremendously difficult time for me, my wife at the time - Hannah, and our son Savar. The loss of our community support, our close friends, and Daniel was earth-shattering, to say the least. I found myself in shock and another layer of trauma mixed with the past traumas I had endured as a child and teenager. I spinned with a Daniel in my head that was tyrant-like matching his shadow and my father's version and then bouncing back and forth between Hannah and I in our relationship troubles and not knowing where to turn. I was very lost and stuck in cycles of self-hatred, grief, and confusion.

The image bubble that we were living in within the community was also collapsing, and this was a good thing but also hard to undergo. My mother had just passed from breast cancer, and she and I had a complicated relationship. She had also been a part of the community for a long time but was distanced from by many in the community towards the end of her life, including myself, making the grieving process difficult.

My postings on this thread over the years were my attempt to sort out what my own truth was about what had happened for me and what I was sensing in the community and Daniel. I kept on exploring what was real, and how to heal and be my truest and fullest self. I struggled with sifting out what I experienced as very valuable both in the practices and processes of ESH/EBE/Theohumanity and my very personal relationship with Daniel and what were patterns of delusion, grandiosity, unnecessary suffering, and unhelpful methodologies for healing.

I was not always clear in my posts looking back on them, but the essence of what I was trying to communicate was my grief, hurt, anger, confusion, longing for reconciliation and wisdom, and how much my heart ached. At certain points, I made extreme comments about Daniel and other members of the community. I regret how I communicated around those situations out of my pain and confusion.

I came into ESH in 97' a very broken person. A series of childhood traumas, loss, and soul baggage weighed heavily on me. I was desperate for healing and assistance.

When I first meet Daniel in 2000, I intuitively felt cautious with some of the ways he came across. However, my mom encouraged me to work with him as she was finding healing occurring for her working with him. My brother had died a few years earlier and I knew I really needed support to work through a lot of problems I was struggling with. I overrode my initial impression of Daniel and in later meetings took him up on his offer to relate with me in a unique way, as a father surrogate. He sensed my deep brokenness, lack of embodiment, and immaturity. He could see a lot of the reasons why, with compassion, and offered a clear path of how I could begin to heal.

This was a deeply relieving context to be given.

I felt truly seen and understood in ways I never had before. I was excited and anxious to start to explore with the means of the process he shared with me. I was also palpably aware of love and care that came from him in multiple ways, over and over again. I saw this same love also shared with others that were spending time with him or working with him. This was part of why I was so crazy after the separation as I could not deny all the goodness that I received from him over the years leading up to 2006.

Over time I became more involved with Daniel and the emergence of Theohumanity, becoming his protégé in many regards. And while there were certainly ways that I related to that position unhealthily, there was a core sense that it was my dharma lineage, my destiny. I felt deeply aligned with the teachings, the DNA of it.

I also struggled with Daniel's abusive actions with me and with others. After meeting Diane, his mother, at one point I had sensed how some of Daniels actions around cutting people down, humiliating them, and being abusive was his own defenses and how they learned from his mother and what lived in her mafia-like lineage. I tried my best to help create protocols to keep it in check. I lacked the ability and maturity to be firmer around this necessity. I was too afraid and merged with my own inner patriarch to stand up to his. I found myself acting out my own patriarch that would have flavors of his shadow (and my father's) at times towards others, my partners and clients, and myself.

When the separation between Daniel and I happened in 2006, what I didn't know was how much of him was inside of me and I needed to find my own ground of who I was without him and without the paradigm which I felt so deeply aligned with. The last 15 years have provided me with much needed time to mature, heal, and find that ground of myself.

During that time I have explored and trained in many other spiritual and healing paths, built a successful business, worked with other teachers and therapists, as well as engaged in various healing groups.

When I reconnected with Daniel in August of 2017, who I learned now goes by Stace, I was very aware of my love for and from this man who had so deeply impacted my life both in hurtful and helpful ways. I knew and felt he deeply loved me on some level. I was also aware of my cautiousness to not engage in the same patterns of the past with him - my own idealizing/admiring and then pushing away and aggression out of fear and defensiveness and his own narcissism, self-aggrandizement, absolutism, and tactics with power and submission.

As I felt into all of that, the call of my being was to reconnect with him and lean into the possibility of repair and making amends, reclaiming and recovering what was possible in that reconciliation, potentially for us both, but for sure for me. I knew how much of an impact he had had on my life. I wanted to embrace that. It was risky. Would I be judged, castigated, and undergo the same abuse? Would I be ignored as I had at other times I had reached out? Would I see new parts of myself in the process emerge and heal? Some people cautioned me in making contact. Others thought it foolish.

What I want to share with you is that this reconciliation process has proceeded in so many good ways for me. I'm reminded of the films 'How I created a cult' on Conscious2 network about Andrew Cohen's mistakes and abuses and 'Wild Wild Country', the film about Osho and the cult that formed in his community. And more recently ‘The Vow’. These films were healing in the stories told. There was great value for those involved with those communities and there was a lot of abuse and confusion. Andrew is undergoing his own recovery process and he has started to teach again. Osho did not, it is unclear if Keith Reniere will.

I studied with Robert Masters over the last 15 years. Robert was a former cult leader of a community that underwent a community collapse and then a subsequent healing process and now he is a wonderful and effective author and integral psychotherapist. He eventually did the work to address the cult leader inside and to heal and re-enter his teaching, writing, and working with people.

There are many teachers that have failings and weaknesses as you and I do, with the gifts they possess and with the positions of authority they step into around helping others comes great responsibility.

And those of us that enter these relationships are called to inhabit own form of responsibility. We must be responsible for our unconsciousness, asking ourselves what drew us to these situations that were abusive? How did we respond? Why? And how do we undergo healing from it? How do we hold them accountable? Is reconciliation possible? If so, how do we go about it? Do we villainize the teacher? Do we villainize a part of our selves in the process? Is a healthier form of relationship possible with that teacher now? Is keeping distant the most healing path to take or is it still locked into a form of freedom from rather than freedom with?

If these teachers take the steps necessary to be responsible for what mistakes have been made that created their side of the cultic and abusive dynamics within communities and the practices that sustain them and if they truly do have the gifts to give, then it is a disservice for them and to those that could benefit from the subsequent healing work shared with them to not to have those teachers teach. Again this is only after they have done the work of healing the roots of why they were abusive, neglectful, narcissistic, etc.

I see Stace and Brie doing this work, living in this inquiry, and in the process of recovery.

I studied the roots of cultism for many years. There are not many stories of the students reconnecting with the teacher to reconcile after the collapse. I am endeavoring to that very thing as I feel there is gold in doing so. I understand that may not fit for others to undertake as a healing path. It takes courage and choosing to not may be another form of courage.  Willingness to engage in one’s own inner work let’s us know the choices we must make.

For a long time I was waiting for Daniel to contact me to get the sense he really was ready to be humble and acknowledge his impacts on me. However, that's not how it worked out in my case. In 2017, I was moved to reach out to him after reading the website page. After our initial interactions, he has made amends in spades.

I did not have so much unresolved issues with Brie other than I felt she had not stood up to the abusive tendencies while I was involved, nor for me when he cutoff from me. However, she was still newly engaged with it all, we were just getting to know each other, so I can understand that it takes time to recognize what was happening and to speak to it. I'm now aware that over time she was calling for a new form of the process to emerge and that this more yin form was the new expression of the work that seemingly could not emerge without the collapse. I think there is an opportunity for people to consider her in a different light now, that it was her stepping away from Daniel that supported the shift and eventual collapse. I'm aware that some individuals perceive in her choosing to be in relationship with Stace now, she must not be in her own sovereignty. I don't see that when I have been around them both recently. I see her speaking truthfully, being honored by Stace, and from her own ground of what happened and a willingness to grow, to be open to new ways, and say no to what doesn't fit for her. I also see Stace very much partnered and open to that as the living love-wisdom of their bond. 

I do feel a growing trust with Stace and Brie again. I found it risky to reconnect, to see how I could honor my own truths and be open to his and her realities and our recovery. I found this much more difficult to do than to hold them at a distance, maintaining my resentment and hurt on some level, while feeling this lineage was deeply resonant with me. I know there is still a lot of damage and impact for people involved in the past around all this and I leave that to you all and Stace and Brie to sort that out in the ways that is best suited to your unique relationships and evolution with one another.

For now, I will say, I feel a growing resolution around that time being cut off back in 2006. I see the roots of the abusiveness articulated so well in this thread in different ways by many different people as well as the wounds that lived in me that fit with submitting to it. I am reminded of the restorative justice process where there is an option for teachers/offenders to claim what happened and to see and recognize their impacts, and make amends, and so too for those students/offended to have an opportunity to heal within that process. The students/offended can stand in integrity, compassion, truth, honor their hurt/trauma with sincerity while not recapitulating the same mistake with the teachers/offenders, requiring them to be jail for forever or villainizing them as evil. True healing is not possible in that reality, rather it’s a relational cul-de-sac.

Time will tell how the recovery process and this Love story continues to unfold. I understand that many people still hold anger, resentment and hurt, among other things with what happened. I welcome those stories and healing.

I can also say that what I was drawn to so long ago in the initial pamphlet I read about ESH in 1997 promising healing has come to fruition in my subsequent work with Brie. In her resounding the work along with her gifts of lovingness with me, I’ve discovered the me I was longing for as well as coming more in alignment with my soul/essence expressing into my life. Thank goodness! It was worth the journey.

Stace is my teacher and I will continue learning and growing from my relationship with him and Brie. After exploring many teachers, some of who I still work with and learn from, I feel deeply aligned with and interested in the DNA of this particular teaching that will continue to unfold in my heart and life. I see my reforming relationship with Stace and Brie to be an essential component to the unique embodiment of that teaching as my life.

So with that, I will pause this conversation here, welcoming you and your stories, healing, and feedback.

With love,
Eric