Bitten Tongue

On Complicity, Compassion, and Getting on Mission

I.

I was twenty-one years old, a few months into working on one of the biggest albums of that decade, when a man I barely knew started calling me every night at ten o’clock.

He was the nephew of a music mogul. We’d met during Fashion Week. For ten nights straight, he called, and we talked. Or really, he talked. Until four in the morning. I mostly listened.

He told me how the industry worked. The hidden architecture underneath the business. The power structures. The rituals. The Machiavellian worship of control, extraction, and dominance that ran beneath the surface of every deal, every party, every award show, every carefully managed career.

I was a baby. But something in me understood why I was hearing this. Spirit was showing me the game board before I’d even learned the rules. Because where I was going, I would need to know.

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II.

I need to say this clearly, because it matters: there are extraordinary people inside that industry. Genuine lovers of art. People whose creative gifts are real and whose hearts are good. Mentors I cherish. Friends I adore. They are there because there is no other infrastructure. Hollywood, the music industry, the entertainment complex. For a long time, it has been the only game. A monopoly. And within that monopoly, there are layers. Some people are deep inside the inner workings. Some people sense that something is off but can’t name it, and there’s nowhere else to go. You play the game because the game is all there is.

I played it too. I went in with my little revolutionary self, convinced I could shift things from the inside. And I did what I could with the power I had. I became the person the label called the bulldog. I wasn’t aggressive, more like incredulous, because on our very first international promotional tour, they presented a schedule that had the artist I was there to protect booked from 7am to 7pm with no breaks. No food. No water. No time to use the bathroom. She was twenty years old. And I looked at this schedule and said: When does she pee? When does she eat?

And they looked at me like I was the problem.

That moment crystallized something I would spend the next twenty years understanding: the system does not see the body carrying the art. It sees product. It sees content. It sees revenue. The human being inside the machinery is incidental. And anyone who insists on protecting that human being becomes an inconvenience.

They didn’t like me. I could see them, the ones who were truly in it, and they could see that I could see. They started calling me a witch, and in a sense they weren’t wrong. The nephew had already told me that his uncle’s staff considered themselves practitioners of the dark arts. They could see what I carried. They recognized my power. What they couldn’t do was enroll me in their game. I played for a different team, and that made me dangerous to them in a way that no amount of industry politics could solve. And eventually, they wanted me out.

I’ve personally experienced misogyny, grooming, betrayal, racism, sexism, sexual misconduct, manipulation, deceit, and attacks inside the industry. I know this terrain in my body, from lived experience. I’m speaking about it from the inside of my own skin.

And I've had to do tremendous work to heal from the cult that is this industry. Years of it. With a lot of support. That healing is part of what earned me the right to stand here and say what I'm about to say.

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III.

So when the files drop and the names surface and the collective gasp ripples through every timeline, I am not surprised. Heinous? Yes. New? No. What happened is terrible. Terrible shit is happening everywhere. Full stop. This is a moment to lift the veil and liberate ourselves from systems of control designed to keep us small and disconnected.

On some level, the industry knew. The gatekeepers knew. The assistants who booked the flights and the stylists who dressed the bodies and the lawyers who papered the silence. They knew. Everyone existed inside an architecture of complicity so total that it became invisible. The system was designed to make silence comfortable and truth expensive.

And now we get the theater.

The conspiracy crowd doing their vindication dance. The people who chose not to know performing their horror. The people who worshipped these figures now grabbing hammers to tear down the same pedestals they built with their own devotion. Tearing down is just the shadow side of idolizing. Same energy. Different costume.

I watch it, and I feel an ancient exhaustion. And underneath it, a Kali rage that wells up from my belly and wants to burn it all down. And a sword that comes from my heart that wants to cut the head off all of it with my love. Because the spectacle is what we do instead of reckoning. We cycle through seventy-two hours of outrage and then it dissolves, like sugar in water, into the next scandal. And nothing structural changes. Most don’t examine their own participation in the economy that made all of this possible.

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IV.

This is the part that makes people uncomfortable:

At some level, we are all complicit. Every one of us. Consciously or unconsciously.

And I'm not talking about the people who were directly harmed. Victims of abuse, trafficking, assault, those are acts of predation. I'm talking about the rest of us. The ones who watched and consumed and went along for the ride because it was the only ride there was.

Every time we worshipped fame without questioning what it costs a human body to carry it. Every time we consumed the spectacle and called it culture. Every time we outsourced our power to someone on a stage and then got furious when they turned out to be a flawed, wounded, sometimes destructive human being. Just like us.

You pedestalized these people. You decided they were more than human. You outsourced your own creative authority, your own spiritual power, your own capacity for direct experience of the divine. To someone with a microphone and a platform. And now you’re enraged because they didn’t hold it perfectly. Because they couldn’t. Because no one can.

And yes, many of them encouraged it. The gurus claimed divine authority. The leaders cultivated the worship. The manipulation was real. But it landed where it landed because something in us was already searching for someone to fill the void.

I say this as someone who’s been in positions of significant power, hyper proximate to fame, standing at the front of rooms with some of the most powerful names in the world. The amount of people who have projected their unresolved mother/father wound onto me is beyond anything I could have imagined. I’ve had people I poured years of love and devotion into turn on me with a violence that gutted me. I’ve been pedestalized and torn down by the same people.

And a deeper part of me knows we agreed to it before we arrived. That this is the kind of painful love designed to liberate. Both things are true at the same time. That’s part of what it means to be a guide.

And I get it. These figures represent a dream, a hope, a possibility that feels bigger than your own life. But that’s also the trick. The pedestal exists to make you feel inadequate by comparison. The whole economy of fame and worship runs on your conditioned belief that you are less than what’s on that stage. You are not. And this building up and tearing down of leaders is designed to instill fear. We want so badly to step into our power, and we're terrified of ruin. That terror isn't just from this lifetime. It's from lifetimes of persecution. And it's all designed to keep us from stepping up and being bold in our calling.

I’ve been around some of the most powerful artists and leaders on the planet. So many are also hella insecure. They carry shame. They have egos they haven’t fully reckoned with. They’re battling the same demons you are. Because the work of facing yourself is the hardest work there is. It never finishes. I’ve been at it for over 30 years and I’m still in it. I’ll be in it for the rest of my life. I am devoted and I am courageous and I am wildly, spectacularly imperfect.

People can hold genuine mastery and still be imperfect. People can bring extraordinary gifts through and still be working through their own shame, their own shadows, their own conditioning. We came up inside the same patriarchal paradigm we’re trying to dismantle. Every single one of us is still metabolizing that programming. And the work of building something new from inside the old, while you are yourself still partially made of the old, is the most complex, humbling, and necessary work there is.

We have to reconcile this: the capacity for harm that we see out there exists inside us too. And until we can sit with our own failures, our own shame, our own complicity, and integrate our shadows, we will keep performing outrage as a substitute for transformation.

This is where compassion becomes essential. The fierce kind that can hold the full complexity of what it means to be human. The mastery and the mess, the gift and the wound, the brilliance and the harm, without collapsing into simple answers. That kind of compassion is the most demanding spiritual practice there is. It would be easier to look away. To rise above it. To transcend. But we don't get to leave each other behind. We turn back toward the world until all of us are free. And what it takes to embody that is tremendous. Skill. Strength. Clarity. Responsibility. Presence. Love. Remembrance. Accountability. Truth. Courage. Risk. Compassion. That's the work.

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V.

Should the people who’ve done real harm be held accountable? Yes. Will they be? Look around. The system was built to protect them. So the question becomes: what do we do with all this fire?

I’ll tell you what drives me out of my mind: watching us grab our pitchforks and turn on each other. The call-out cancel culture that erupts in moments like this. The lists, the threads, the righteous commentary, the breathless discourse. All that energy poured into the tear-down of each other.

That energy could be redirected. Toward remembering the truth of who you are. Toward building something that will actually outlast the outrage cycle.

There are African traditions where, when someone in the village has lost their way, the community doesn’t cast them out. They sing that person’s song back to them. They remind them who they are. Calling in rather than casting out. That’s a fundamentally different orientation. Instead of punishing, there is restoration, compassion, remembrance. And I believe it’s closer to what actually heals.

And I get that some people are truly waking up to this right now. That to fully accept the depth of the illusion is to be confronted with a much deeper question: then who am I? And what have I built my life on? Our very identity, our beliefs, our dreams are wrapped up in this illusion. This is an existential crisis of our time. We don’t want to believe we’ve been lied to and that we’ve lied to ourselves. It’s too confronting. It destabilizes everything. But it’s high time we accept it, because it’s only going to get louder and harder to ignore. We are going to be called, or forced, into a new way of being. So my sense is it’s time we do like nature and die to what’s ready to die so something new can be born. This is a Fire Horse year. It will burn it all down anyway. So let’s channel this fire. Let it be the fuel to reclaim our power from within, back into our creativity, back into building.

Because when we forget who we are, we become enemies of each other. Women against women. Men against women. Everyone against everyone. And the more time we spend in that exhausting cycle of accusation and defense, the less time we have for what actually changes things.

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VI.

Here’s something I’ve come to understand about the architecture of power on this planet.

The people at the top of these systems, “the elite”, they have very high creativity. Low empathy. And they are 100% on their mission. They have been brilliant at crafting worlds and enrolling us in what they’re building. And us? We’re high in creativity, high in empathy, and almost entirely off mission. We’re not on our mission. We’re on theirs. Because they’ve been masterful at recruiting our energy, our attention, our talent, our devotion, our dollars into serving their vision. And there's a reason for that. Because when we awaken to our true power and come together, united— above, below, within, without, we're unstoppable. And that would disrupt the entire experiment.

I’ve had to sit with this in my own body. Where am I an energetic match for that frequency? Because if it keeps finding me, there’s an affinity somewhere in my system that’s resonant with it. I’m not fully free of it. How can I be, when the western world is built on it? But I’m far more liberated from it than I’ve ever been. I’m outside the system in every way I can be. And every time I attune to that world, even to speak about it, I can feel the cost. So the work has been clearing those affinities, getting myself onto a truer clearer current.

And here’s what I found on the other side: a heart cracked open.

If your heart breaks for the state of the world, that is a good sign. It means you’re not numb. It means something in you is still alive enough to feel the weight of what’s happening. That feeling, that ache, is your power source.

The frequency of love. The courageousness of the open heart. Our ability to heal, to thaw what’s been frozen in us, to open wide enough to hold our own greatness without collapsing or closing down. The emotional intelligence it takes to walk through a world like this with a sensitive, open heart and not be destroyed by it. These are not soft skills. These are the most critical capacities we can develop right now. It’s time to reclaim the power of love. Love that is fierce. Love as the frequency that builds worlds worth living in.

And if we want to see and live in a more just and beautiful world, that heartbreak is the fuel for birthing the alternative.

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VII.

So what do we actually do?

Not about the files. About the conditions that created the files. About the fact that we’ve built entire civilizations on the extraction of creative life force, of talent, beauty, erotic energy, human vitality, and called it entertainment. Called it industry. Called it culture.

The ugly truth is most of us will do nothing. Most of us don’t actually want change. We want the drama of change. The aesthetic of disruption without the metabolic cost of reorganizing our lives around different values. We're comfortable, and we don’t want our comfort disturbed. Even when the comfort is built on someone else’s suffering.

And I understand why. Real transformation disrupts your entire life. You lose the relationships that aren't in alignment. The identity you built. The comfort that was never really yours. Our nervous systems have been habituated for survival, and survival means staying inside the known. For some, that may be the best option. I advise going at the speed of your nervous system, but I also believe in building its capacity to hold more. It is the most confronting journey there is, and it's scary as hell.

But being hopeless sucks, and it asks nothing of you. The systems that ground us down are real. Poverty is real. Racism is real. And claiming your creative power doesn't make those forces disappear. But when we build our identity around the wound, we end up loyal to the very system that inflicted it. And we have become addicted to our victimhood, we bond over it, we build identity around it, we mistake it for depth. Victimhood is not alchemy. The way out of the victim is through the creator. Make beauty of your pain. Transmute your mess into medicine. That's when we start to play the real game.

But for those of us who can’t unknow what we know, who feel it in our bodies, who’ve been inside the machine or close enough to it to understand its architecture, the work is different. The work is not to fight the old system. The work is to create a new one. And that work starts within us. To move from surviving to thriving.

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VIII.

After I left, my body was so broken my brain couldn’t function. I leaned against trees for hours. They held me. They grounded me. They helped me feel safe again. Hands in the dirt. Feet in the dirt. Herbs that became my medicine. And my son. Playing with my son on the floor. That’s what brought the life back. A two-year-old who needed me down there with him.

And this brings me to the most personal and most practical thing I know:

It starts with you. With us. With the fundamentals.

How are you eating? How are you moving? How are you breathing? What are you dreaming about? What are you praying for? Where are you placing your attention, the most powerful currency you have? What is your practice? How are you relating to your neighbors, your family, your community? To your own power, your own eros? What are you cultivating and creating? Are your feet touching the actual earth? Is your heart open enough to sing its song?

I ask because we've been systematically disconnected from all of it. Education, healthcare, media, every system has been designed to make us more easily controlled, more easily distracted, more easily enrolled in someone else's mission. The education system isn't raising brilliant minds. It's raising compliance. And the attention economy has stolen our ability to focus long enough to make anything of real consequence.

So the most revolutionary thing I can tell you isn't abstract. It's this: until your body is nourished, your mind is clear, your spirit is connected, your emotional life is tended, your consciousness has shifted, you cannot build anything that lasts. Get your feet on the ground. Literally. Dance. Reconnect with the elements, because you are made of them. Reconnect with the ancestral wisdom your lineage carries. Reconnect with your erotic aliveness. Deprogram. Decolonize your creative process, your leadership, your body and your mind. Heal what needs healing, but know that healing itself can become another performance, another industry, another way to stay stuck in the wound. Because I've watched people heal their way into inaction. Ceremony after ceremony, retreat after retreat, and nothing in their actual life or contributions moves. Healing that never touches your wallet, your calendar, your relationships, your risk tolerance, what are we actually healing?

The deeper work is remembering. Remembering who you are underneath it all, who you were before you forgot. That remembering is the real medicine, and it takes practice, willingness and discipline. And it takes time and presence, which is exactly what every system designed to control you has worked to steal from you.

And the expectation that we do this alone is unrealistic. We’re not meant to. Indigenous cultures everywhere hold this wisdom. The lone hero journey is another version of the same paradigm we're trying to leave behind. It's time to come into community and collective care and to invest our energy and our resources into spaces that can hold the grief and the joy together. We need each other for this.

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IX.

I struggle with this too.

Spirit is asking me to share my message, and I get on social media, and it is a barrage. Much of it brilliant. And much of it recycled noise, people reworking old shit to go viral because we’ve lost connection to our own unique gift. The gift that’s ours to bring through. And some of that gift may not even be online. Some of it lives in a kitchen, on a piece of land, in a workshop, in a song no one will ever hear on a streaming platform.

Because the spectacle is the trap. And I want to be precise about this: rage itself is not the problem. Rage is honest. If we take that rage and transmute it into love in action, into building, into protecting, into creating something that didn’t exist before, it’s one of the most useful forces we have. But outrage in a comments section isn’t transmutation. Posting on your stories isn’t action. And being mad at other people for not performing outrage on their stories is a complete waste of the life force you were given. Every minute spent performing your position on the collapse is a minute stolen from your craft, your practice, your actual mission.

I’m a hermit at heart. I’ve spent lifetimes, and I mean that how I mean it, in temples and caves. I struggle to be in relationship with many people. I’m a spirit-to-one kind of a person, more comfortable with the unseen than the seen at times. But I know that part of my work is to bring community together. To build ecosystems rooted in ancient wisdom, in earth, in spirit that make birthing a new future possible. Ecosystems that practice health and wholeness and freedom. That create together, heal together and then invite others into that creativity and healing.

Because now we get to learn how to hold our greatness and stand in our full brilliance. To birth this new earth. And we all play different roles in that. We are all leaders. In small ways and big ways, in whatever ways are meant for us. Everyone doesn’t need a personal brand. Everyone doesn’t need a platform. We do need each other. What you need is to know what your keys are, your unique notes, and play them. Master the fundamentals. Find your collaborators. And then make and play and sing your songs with all of your heart.

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X.

This is where I arrive, and it’s where I’ve been arriving for years:

We need new infrastructure for creation. New foundations entirely.

I spent years trying to shift the existing systems from the inside. First in the music industry, then in large institutional spaces. And I did work I’m proud of. But the roots of those systems are filled with trauma, and they are unable to truly reconcile, heal, and evolve. The garden bed needs to be weeded. The foundations have rotted. There is such a deep malware embedded in the architecture that we could spend our entire lives trying to patch it. Or we could build something new.

Celebrity as we've known it is dying. We can see through it now. The pedestal is cracking, and what's emerging underneath is a hunger for something real. Voices rising in coherence with something greater than the cult of personality.

What I know is this: if there were another option, people would go to it. If there were an ecosystem for art and entertainment and media in service to a healing culture, that honored the sacredness of life, that wasn’t built on a mafia model, an extraction model, creators would choose it. The talent would flow toward it. The audience would follow. The culture would shift.

We need the artists and the creatives, the visionaries and the culture-makers, the healers and the stewards well-resourced and funded. Through art, through immersive experience, through localized land-based projects, through creation that carries a different frequency. This is how new worlds are actually built. Through presencing beauty. Through anchoring harmony. Through embodying love. Through the lived experience of something better being possible.

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XI.

So I stopped waiting for someone to build it.

Let me tell you what I’m here to do.

I’m here to have a magical, wild, full-out, gorgeous, imperfect human experience and to greet each part of it with as much compassion as I can. I am here to serve liberation through love. I’m here to integrate my own shadows and move from my wholeness so I can hold a clear channel. I‘m here to hold a torch through this journey of transformation, to be a guide for others on the path, because I’ve been forged by it over and over again. I’m here to be a messenger, a midwife, and an architect of what comes next.

Spaces where artists and creators are supported and resourced to make the art that will define this time. This is the renaissance. Where the sacred and the creative are understood as one thing. Where we can practice being in community without the extraction that has characterized every system we’ve known. Where creation is freed from the conditions that have been distorting it for generations.

This is my mission. This is what I’m building.

I am raising 1 billion dollars over the next ten years to fund Sacred Media in service to a new mythos. A new ecosystem for art, entertainment, and media that honors the sacredness of life.

I know how to create at a global scale. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we do need to evolve it. And I have been called to build that option.

If you're reading this and something in you just lit up, if you have resources, vision, and the courage to invest in something that doesn't look like anything that currently exists, I want to hear from you. The infrastructure for a new creative culture doesn't build itself. It requires investment and strategic architecture at the same scale as the systems that built the old one. The difference is what we build it on.

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XII.

I’ll close with this.

The old world is going up in flames. Loudly. Publicly. With all the spectacle it trained us to crave.

I’m not here to watch it burn. I’ve spent enough of my life inside that fire.

I’m here to build on the other side of it. In the quiet. In community. On the land. In living rooms. With people whose imaginations are still dangerous and whose hearts are still open and whose willingness to do the hard, daily, unglamorous work of becoming fully human has not been extinguished by comfort or cynicism or despair.

We cannot create the new world at the same frequency that created the old one. First we heal. We evolve. We elevate. We remember the truth of who we are and what we’re made of and get on with what we came here to do.

I spent three years hosting artist residencies. Over a hundred artists moved through those rooms. And what emerged was living proof. The first time so many Black and brown bodies were in one room together to build each other up. There was a collective sigh in my nervous system and theirs. We all felt it. We all knew. We were ready. Brought together in service to something new, something greater.

If it’s justice we want, it’s just us who will birth it. No one is coming to save us. No institution. No leader. No system. Just us. One Collective Heart.

The Titanic is sinking. Let’s get on these lifeboats, tie them together and create a new ship.

Let’s dance a new dream awake. Get our shit together. Get on our mission. Stay focused. Join hands. Do the work. The rest is noise.

Meet you there.